The First Amendment also prohibits violation of the freedom of the press--which when written, referred to the technology of publishing, and not just to the profession of journalism.
A computer is a press in the sense meant by the First Amendment.
How could you expect journalists (newspapers, TV, magazines,..) to understand how the internet works, when they lack any substantive understanding of how just about anything works?
1) Scientific/technical research in general, and the exploration of space in particular, not only aren't the core responsibility (or competence, for that matter) of government, they aren't a legitimate government function. Government has only one purpose, one motivation for its existence, and one moral justification for its operation: Defending the rights of individuals against those who would violate them, whether foreign or domestic. So, unless such activities can be justified on that basis (and that can be done in some cases!) it is morally evil to use money extracted from taxpayers by force of law for any such purpose.
2) At this point in time, it would be a far better use of available funds to do research and development work in the domains of nanotechnology and biotechnology. With a mature nanotechnology, space exploration can be accomplished far more effectively, and at far less cost (relative to world income/wealth.) And there are many fundamental issues affecting manned space travel that await advances in biotechnology for acceptable solutions.
Sorry, but you're quite wrong. The main purpose of a jury is to decide whether the law is just. Deciding whether the law has been broken is only a secondary responsibility:
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." --Thomas Jefferson
You say: "Ad Hominem is about using unrelated aspects to discredit the messanger rather than looking at the message dispassionately. Once it is known that the messanger's unterior motives cause him to dissemble, one is simply clearing the air by disregarding him."
appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or special interests rather than to one's intellect or reason.
attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument.
Should we say, then, that you "lied" about the definition of "ad hominem"? And that therefore whatever you say should be "disregarded"? Do you think that would be fair? Or would it be more fair to simply dispute with you on the facts actually relevant to the subject under discussion, using well-accepted principles of reason and logic? Don't be hypocritcal in your response. Apply the same principles to both yourself and Milloy.
You say: "Note that you have engaged in a strawman: you generalize that this treatment is general while it is not. There is one particular instance of a liar under discussion. And, he is not a researcher since he is not after truth. You are rationalizing rather than participating in reason."
Your assertion that Milloy is the only issue would be more credible if you deigned to address the other references. Perhaps Milloy isn't after the truth. I don't know the man. However, the evidence he cites is publicly-verifiable information, and/or is information/evidence/reasoning actually originally produced by others (who presumably are not also being charged with dishonesty.) Just because someone has lied in the past (and who hasn't?) is not sufficient reason to "disregard" what he says, provided his assertions are independently verifiable.
But forget Milloy and whatever he says. He's not the issue. What about the other references?
And if it's dishonesty you want to focus on, focus on this: The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science. That article makes it quite clear there is plenty of irrational, emotional, politically-motivated and....dishonest decisions being made about Anthropogenic Global Warming by many of those who accept the hypothesis. Should we throw out the hypothesis for this reason alone? If not, then the same applies to the "deniers" (a term which should clue you in that there is way too much emotion, and not enough reason, in this debate.)
"paid liar" is ad-hominem. It attacks the person, not the facts, not the reasoning.
"Re-check your sources. You'll find that they are based of attempts to deceive." is also ad-hominem. Again, it attacks the sources. Not the facts, not the reasoning. You offer no other evidence as to why one should believe that the information is deceptive. One might as well decide to ignore any and all documents from those known to be Global Warming True Believers.
"notorious corporate shill" is also ad-hominem. Again, it attacks the sources. Not the facts, not the reasoning. Worse, it assumes (without proof, by the way) that corporations are bad, or that being paid by a corporation is prima-facie evidence of fraud or untrustworthines. That's an emotional argument designed to resonate with a particular political philosophy, and not a scientific argument based on facts, evidence and rational argument. So it's undeniably ad-hominem.
"corrupt enough to deny the link between tobacco smoke and lung cancer on behalf of big tobacco" is also ad-hominem. The term "corrupt" is an attack on the person, not a reasoned argument based on objectively verifiable facts. The charge also dishonestly alleges that Milloy asserts that cigarrette smoke is proven to be safe, when his actual position is that the theory that second-hand smoke causes harm to others is unproven. And he may be right [Note: I don't smoke, and am rarely in a situation where I have to deal with second-hand smoke, and so have not bothered to research the second-hand smoke theory well enough to have a well-founded opinion. That smoking ("first-hand smoke," if you will) causes cancer is well established.] In any case, Milloy's position on second-hand smoke is not factually or rationally relevant to the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It's an ad-hominem attack designed to appeal emotionally to those who dislike second-hand smoke (which I also detest.)
Bottom line: To cry "shill" at anyone who is in any way funded by corporations, whenever they argue for something you don't like, would be no different than discounting any and all research funded in any way by Environmentalists, based on the assumption that their religious beliefs apotheosizing nature, and denigrating all things human as unnatural, makes their positions, views and research invalid.
Rationalism requires objective argument based on facts, evidence and logic that is relevant to the issue to be decided. Neither of you have provided any.
If you want to argue semantics, you said "current system time zone"; changing TZ in a process doesn't change it for the whole system.
I just knew that would be your rejoinder:-)
The UNIX process model virtualizes the "system" for each user process, so that each user can have his own "system" time zone (as far as that user can tell, his time zone is "the system time zone." It's in that sense that I meant "current system time zone."
This isn't strictly true. You can do it by manipulating the TZ environment variable before you do your computations and then change it back when you're done. It's messy, but it does work.
Note: I said "current system time zone." So what I said is in fact strictly true.
The possible adverse side-effects of one thread/process temporarily changing the value of the TZ environment variable is a whole 'nother issue. And the problems will only get worse as ever more hardware-level parallelism comes into play.
Which raises the question: WTF don't JVMs get their timezone info from the OS? What were the developers thinking?
Not all OSs have time zone information. The model of time zone rules differs greatly between Windows, BSD-based Unix and non-BSD-based Unix. HP has their own, proprietary time zone repository. Some Unices only have support for POSIX time zone rule literals (e.g., "PST8PDT") and don't support Olson-based binary tzfiles at all.
Then there's the fact that the standard C time library does NOT support doing time zone computations with any time zone other than the current system time zone.
If you want to have the exact, same time zone behavior on all platforms, and want to be able to have timestamps whose timezones can differ from each other, you have no choice but to implement your own time zone repository (although leveraging the Olson Time Zone Database would be highly recommended.) THIS IS A FACT OF LIFE. DEAL WITH IT.
...The DST dates have already changed a couple of times within my lifetime, so I would never hard-code such a thing. This upcoming change has been scheduled for almost two years now, so every OS should have had this update in place long ago. Every app should be querying the OS for timezone info instead of hard coding it. How can so many people do such sloppy work so that there are still problems looming at this late date?
You're right that hard-coding time zone rules is an unforgiveable sin. But you're wrong to think that updating Windows, and older versions of Java, could have been done a year and a half ago. The reason is simple: Neither Windows, nor versions of Java prior to 1.4, could handle more than one set of annually-recurring time zone rules. To update Windows in 2005 or 2006 with the rules for 2007 would have caused the 2007 rules to be applied immediately, in the then-current year. Same with versions of Java prior to JDK 1.4. Same with any other systems or applications that can't handle different time zone rules for different years (which is most of them!)
If you rely on the host OS for your time zone behavior, then you are limited to whatever functionality that OS happens to provide for time zones. For most, the provided functionality is not that great.
1. They can't provide hi-def, multi-channel audio (e.g., the sound quality of DVD-Audio or SACD.) It would also be nice if the format wasn't fixed, but could be extended and improved over time.
2. You have to purchase an entire album to the get the one song you actually want.
Whether music comes on a disc or is downloaed over the internet is a matter of secondary importance, as far as I'm concerned.
You forgot to mention the forthcoming suits against Sun for NFS and Microsoft for Windows File Sharing (both of which work just fine over the public internet, if your firewall permits it.)
Oh, and I almost forget the forthcoming suits against the makers of FTP software!
The government (DARPA) invented the internet--using public funds.
Federal law protects common carriers. In exchange for that legal protection, the public has every right to require "net neutrality." If the communications companies want to run their networks their own way, then they must give up all the legal protections they currently enjoy. They must become directly and fully responsible for the content of every message sent accross their networks. The RIAA is drooling.
All that's needed is a DNS-like system specifically designed to handle a) DHCP-assigned IP addresses, and b) dynamically-assigned protocol-to-port mappings that vary between hosts. Call it DDNS (Dynamic DNS.) DDNS would be legally impervious, since it would have nothing to do with copying files, nor would it be associated with any particular p2p client, nor specific to p2p in general.
DDNS would have lots of uses outside of p2p, such as enabling individuals to host web sites from computers whose IP addresses are assigned dynamically, and/or enabling services to be reliably published over any random port.
Totally wrong. There is one (but only one) absolute value: a person cannot be opposed to his own free will. From this one fact, it is possible to derive the the right to Liberty by making use of the principle of reciprocity.
Rights exist solely to resolve the contradictions between one person's (free) will and another's. Such contradictions are inherent to a world where multiple free agents operate in a universe of things that are not subject to non-rivalrous consumption.
Liberty is the right to do whatever does not violate the rights of others. To deny the right to Liberty is to deny one's own right to have an opinion or present a counter argument. One earns the right to Liberty by respecting others' right to Liberty (that's the principle of reciprocity.)
A "Patent Reciprocity" clause would be far superior. Example language: "Your license to use any and all software licensed under the GPL is contingent upon your agreeing to permit any and all software patents you ever own to be used free of any charge in the implementation of any software licensed under the GPL (so that usage of such software obligates no one to pay any royalties, fees or other compensation to you for the usage of any of your patents.)"
Slashdot Mirror
The First Amendment also prohibits violation of the freedom of the press--which when written, referred to the technology of publishing, and not just to the profession of journalism.
A computer is a press in the sense meant by the First Amendment.
Instead of the solar time he created (which varies continuously with longitude)?
And why wouldn't it happen at the same absolute time everywhere?
How could you expect journalists (newspapers, TV, magazines,..) to understand how the internet works, when they lack any substantive understanding of how just about anything works?
Agreed:
1) Scientific/technical research in general, and the exploration of space in particular, not only aren't the core responsibility (or competence, for that matter) of government, they aren't a legitimate government function. Government has only one purpose, one motivation for its existence, and one moral justification for its operation: Defending the rights of individuals against those who would violate them, whether foreign or domestic. So, unless such activities can be justified on that basis (and that can be done in some cases!) it is morally evil to use money extracted from taxpayers by force of law for any such purpose.
2) At this point in time, it would be a far better use of available funds to do research and development work in the domains of nanotechnology and biotechnology. With a mature nanotechnology, space exploration can be accomplished far more effectively, and at far less cost (relative to world income/wealth.) And there are many fundamental issues affecting manned space travel that await advances in biotechnology for acceptable solutions.
Will they be in town all week? Can we still get tickets?
We already know it was multi-threaded.
You say: "Ad Hominem is about using unrelated aspects to discredit the messanger rather than looking at the message dispassionately. Once it is known that the messanger's unterior motives cause him to dissemble, one is simply clearing the air by disregarding him."
The dictionary says:
Should we say, then, that you "lied" about the definition of "ad hominem"? And that therefore whatever you say should be "disregarded"? Do you think that would be fair? Or would it be more fair to simply dispute with you on the facts actually relevant to the subject under discussion, using well-accepted principles of reason and logic? Don't be hypocritcal in your response. Apply the same principles to both yourself and Milloy.
You say: "Note that you have engaged in a strawman: you generalize that this treatment is general while it is not. There is one particular instance of a liar under discussion. And, he is not a researcher since he is not after truth. You are rationalizing rather than participating in reason."
Your assertion that Milloy is the only issue would be more credible if you deigned to address the other references. Perhaps Milloy isn't after the truth. I don't know the man. However, the evidence he cites is publicly-verifiable information, and/or is information/evidence/reasoning actually originally produced by others (who presumably are not also being charged with dishonesty.) Just because someone has lied in the past (and who hasn't?) is not sufficient reason to "disregard" what he says, provided his assertions are independently verifiable.
But forget Milloy and whatever he says. He's not the issue. What about the other references?
And if it's dishonesty you want to focus on, focus on this: The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science. That article makes it quite clear there is plenty of irrational, emotional, politically-motivated and....dishonest decisions being made about Anthropogenic Global Warming by many of those who accept the hypothesis. Should we throw out the hypothesis for this reason alone? If not, then the same applies to the "deniers" (a term which should clue you in that there is way too much emotion, and not enough reason, in this debate.)
"paid liar" is ad-hominem. It attacks the person, not the facts, not the reasoning.
"Re-check your sources. You'll find that they are based of attempts to deceive." is also ad-hominem. Again, it attacks the sources. Not the facts, not the reasoning. You offer no other evidence as to why one should believe that the information is deceptive. One might as well decide to ignore any and all documents from those known to be Global Warming True Believers.
"notorious corporate shill" is also ad-hominem. Again, it attacks the sources. Not the facts, not the reasoning. Worse, it assumes (without proof, by the way) that corporations are bad, or that being paid by a corporation is prima-facie evidence of fraud or untrustworthines. That's an emotional argument designed to resonate with a particular political philosophy, and not a scientific argument based on facts, evidence and rational argument. So it's undeniably ad-hominem.
"corrupt enough to deny the link between tobacco smoke and lung cancer on behalf of big tobacco" is also ad-hominem. The term "corrupt" is an attack on the person, not a reasoned argument based on objectively verifiable facts. The charge also dishonestly alleges that Milloy asserts that cigarrette smoke is proven to be safe, when his actual position is that the theory that second-hand smoke causes harm to others is unproven. And he may be right [Note: I don't smoke, and am rarely in a situation where I have to deal with second-hand smoke, and so have not bothered to research the second-hand smoke theory well enough to have a well-founded opinion. That smoking ("first-hand smoke," if you will) causes cancer is well established.] In any case, Milloy's position on second-hand smoke is not factually or rationally relevant to the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It's an ad-hominem attack designed to appeal emotionally to those who dislike second-hand smoke (which I also detest.)
Bottom line: To cry "shill" at anyone who is in any way funded by corporations, whenever they argue for something you don't like, would be no different than discounting any and all research funded in any way by Environmentalists, based on the assumption that their religious beliefs apotheosizing nature, and denigrating all things human as unnatural, makes their positions, views and research invalid.
Rationalism requires objective argument based on facts, evidence and logic that is relevant to the issue to be decided. Neither of you have provided any.
If you can't argue the issue on its merits, it's time to resort to ad-hominem attacks. Put up or shut up.
If you want to argue semantics, you said "current system time zone"; changing TZ in a process doesn't change it for the whole system.
I just knew that would be your rejoinder :-)
The UNIX process model virtualizes the "system" for each user process, so that each user can have his own "system" time zone (as far as that user can tell, his time zone is "the system time zone." It's in that sense that I meant "current system time zone."
Note: I said "current system time zone." So what I said is in fact strictly true.
The possible adverse side-effects of one thread/process temporarily changing the value of the TZ environment variable is a whole 'nother issue. And the problems will only get worse as ever more hardware-level parallelism comes into play.
Not all OSs have time zone information. The model of time zone rules differs greatly between Windows, BSD-based Unix and non-BSD-based Unix. HP has their own, proprietary time zone repository. Some Unices only have support for POSIX time zone rule literals (e.g., "PST8PDT") and don't support Olson-based binary tzfiles at all.
Then there's the fact that the standard C time library does NOT support doing time zone computations with any time zone other than the current system time zone.
If you want to have the exact, same time zone behavior on all platforms, and want to be able to have timestamps whose timezones can differ from each other, you have no choice but to implement your own time zone repository (although leveraging the Olson Time Zone Database would be highly recommended.) THIS IS A FACT OF LIFE. DEAL WITH IT.
You're right that hard-coding time zone rules is an unforgiveable sin. But you're wrong to think that updating Windows, and older versions of Java, could have been done a year and a half ago. The reason is simple: Neither Windows, nor versions of Java prior to 1.4, could handle more than one set of annually-recurring time zone rules. To update Windows in 2005 or 2006 with the rules for 2007 would have caused the 2007 rules to be applied immediately, in the then-current year. Same with versions of Java prior to JDK 1.4. Same with any other systems or applications that can't handle different time zone rules for different years (which is most of them!)
If you rely on the host OS for your time zone behavior, then you are limited to whatever functionality that OS happens to provide for time zones. For most, the provided functionality is not that great.
For me, CDs have to two fatal flaws:
1. They can't provide hi-def, multi-channel audio (e.g., the sound quality of DVD-Audio or SACD.) It would also be nice if the format wasn't fixed, but could be extended and improved over time.
2. You have to purchase an entire album to the get the one song you actually want.
Whether music comes on a disc or is downloaed over the internet is a matter of secondary importance, as far as I'm concerned.
Will we still be allowed conjugal visits?
And just what did you think a "core dump" was?
You forgot to mention the forthcoming suits against Sun for NFS and Microsoft for Windows File Sharing (both of which work just fine over the public internet, if your firewall permits it.)
Oh, and I almost forget the forthcoming suits against the makers of FTP software!
Which effectively outlaws the internet itself, since all IP protocol transations are "peer to peer."
The government (DARPA) invented the internet--using public funds.
Federal law protects common carriers. In exchange for that legal protection, the public has every right to require "net neutrality." If the communications companies want to run their networks their own way, then they must give up all the legal protections they currently enjoy. They must become directly and fully responsible for the content of every message sent accross their networks. The RIAA is drooling.
Moral of the story: It takes balls to go cave exploring on alien worlds.
DDNS would have lots of uses outside of p2p, such as enabling individuals to host web sites from computers whose IP addresses are assigned dynamically, and/or enabling services to be reliably published over any random port.
Totally wrong. There is one (but only one) absolute value: a person cannot be opposed to his own free will. From this one fact, it is possible to derive the the right to Liberty by making use of the principle of reciprocity.
Rights exist solely to resolve the contradictions between one person's (free) will and another's. Such contradictions are inherent to a world where multiple free agents operate in a universe of things that are not subject to non-rivalrous consumption.
Liberty is the right to do whatever does not violate the rights of others. To deny the right to Liberty is to deny one's own right to have an opinion or present a counter argument. One earns the right to Liberty by respecting others' right to Liberty (that's the principle of reciprocity.)
...where men are men, women are men, and little girls and boys are FBI agents.
A "Patent Reciprocity" clause would be far superior. Example language: "Your license to use any and all software licensed under the GPL is contingent upon your agreeing to permit any and all software patents you ever own to be used free of any charge in the implementation of any software licensed under the GPL (so that usage of such software obligates no one to pay any royalties, fees or other compensation to you for the usage of any of your patents.)"