The President is the Chief Executive, meaning he is responsible for the enforcement of the law, not the creation of it. The legslature handles that.
That's right, our President does more than a bad enough job with his own responsibilities without having to worry about screwing up everybody else's job responsibilities too. No, we elect legislators to screw up our laws, and a President to screw up our country.
Yes, it helps but no, it doesn't help much. There were apparently a bunch of studies done back in the late 90s, since it is a known fact that marijuana, specifically THC, the psychoactive substance therein, does reduce intraocular pressure, which is the primary symptom of glaucoma.
However, the relief is apparently short-lived and comes only with sufficiently high dosage to get fairly high, so you can't just have a few toots twice a day to treat your glaucoma effectively. Furthermore, there are more effective eye-drop based treatments that have no side effects.
Also (according to some sources) marijuana reduces blood flow to the optic nerve, which is not good for glaucoma patients. Not sure how substantial this effect is. Anyway, Googling for "marijuana glaucoma" turns up tons of stuff, some of it from fairly reputable sources and studies.
Certainly, I don't think tooting some marijuana will hurt your glaucoma, but it doesn't seem like it will cure it either.
This is legislation by exhaustion. It is clear that there is zero popular support for any of this copyright fascism legislation, and every time a new bill comes around, the various grass roots organizations stir up a frenzy about it, because we all learned our lesson when we let the DMCA get passed.
I have decided they are just trying to tire us out. If they keep trying to push the same kinds of insane measures through by repackaging them with new insane measures, they hope we will be caught offguard and forget to protest one. Once it's passed, it's going to be damned near impossible to get it revoked, barring years of painful jurisprudence to limit its powers (witness the DMCA which only now is starting to be limited in scope by judicial precendent).
How can we make it crystal clear that we don't want more copyright restrictions and that we want our fair use rights encoded in law and guaranteed to us? We need more, well funded groups to stand up for our rights against the fascist copyright regime (and I mean that literally, as the government and big media are essentially working in lockstep on this issue, which is the definition of fascism).
The BT client itself is legally resilient, yes. I was referring to the BT system, including the web-based torrent directories as they are used in practice for sharing of music, movies, etc.
But I agree with your conclusions that the legal users of BT are in a legally sound position, since BT is just a P2P file transfer protocol, not a copyrighted material search engine.
With Bit Torrent creating 35% of the Net's traffic, is it really time to declare it dying, and in need of a successor?
Yes, that would be about the right time. Remember Napster? Remember Kazaa? As soon as one of these P2P networks hits sufficiently mainstream use that large number of non-geek, non-early adopter people are using it, is about the time that it gets serious attention from the RIAA shutdown squad.
Now BT is a bit different because it's just a protocol for P2P file transfer, not a directory or lookup mechanism itself, and BT is used by a large number of software companies as a cost effective way to distribute large, legitimate files - I've downloaded Mandrake and MEPIS ISOs, and several multi-hundred megabyte game patches and mods using BT.
But suprnova.org, torrentreactor, and all the top directory sites of warez, movies and music are big, easy targets. The torrents and torrent directories give nice centralized locations to smack down with lawsuits. BT just isn't a legally resilient P2P technology in its current form.
OSS is strategic, and small companies cannot afford these strategies in many cases. Works great for the big folks though.
Yes, that was generally my point. Some companies have found successful niche strategies built around Open Source, like TrollTech, which can do their dual GPL/commercial licensing model only because their product is a runtime library for use in other software (and one which is apparently hard to implement). And then there are Red Hat and other smaller companies that do successfully sell support. I wish I had more examples of companies doing well from this approach, but I don't.
But you're precisely correct, for the vast majority of small software companies, Open Source is not a viable model, at least as the primary value proposition of the company.
Or giving away the software and selling the hardware to go with it like Digium does with Asterisk. There are several reasonable ways to make money from Open Source software.
But the problem is that all of them basically devalue the software and the work put into developing it in the first place. And it basically makes it impossible to make money as a small software company - you are making money as a support company, or a hardware company, and just using the software as a hook to get people interested in buying. This is a problem because these small software companies have long been where the best jobs for real software developers have been. If everybody is using Open Source software, then the jobs move to being basically plumbing/IT jobs at larger companies, where you are treated like a cog, a commodity.
I do worry sometimes that the overzealousness to make everything Open Source hurts the very programmers who generously contribute their time.
I'm a big fan of Open Source software, and I think there are a lot of exceedingly common problems that ought to have solutions provided by the Open Source community for the benefit of all, and I'm glad they are there. But there is no reason to think that every niche in the software world should or will be filled by Open Source.
Bullshit. I see them almost everyday on the upper east side of all places, and I see them EVERYDAY at Penn station. You are totally full of shit and anyone who is in NYC regularly knows it.
Did you read the rest of my sentence? I can't be bothered to respond to people who reply to partial setences. Compared to 15 or 20 years ago, there are far fewer homeless people on the streets of New York. Don't tell me I'm full of shit, I first moved to New York in 1992 (though I visited before that), but my friends who've lived here their whole lives confirm this to me. If you weren't here in the 80s, or even the early 90s, then you don't know what you are talking about.
I ride the E, the 6, sometimes the A and the 7. They all suck. Seriously, the subways look like were made in the 30's, and they smell like assjuice.
Did you ride the subways back in the 80s? Have you been shot at on the subway? No? Then it's gorgeous compared to what it used to be. And the cars on many lines have been updated and replaced in the last 5 or 6 years.
There is probably less poverty in Iraq. It probably smells better in a monkey cage at the zoo
You think the poverty rate is lower in New York than in Iraq? Where the fuck are you hanging out, the South Bronx? Hell, even Harlem is nothing like it used to be, I find myself up in the 160s and 170s frequently, and I often go out for food in that area, and it's relatively safe even for a whitey like myself.
Almost every neighborhood in Manhattan (south of 100th St.) that used to be shitty and poor has been gentrified immensely in the last 10 years, from the meatpacking district to Hell's Kitchen to the Lower East Side. Places rapidly become trendy and cool and get expensive and the fancy boutiques and so on follow. And the neighborhoods that used to be nice now start at a million bucks to live in. Yeah, all those stupid squalid poor fucks in their million dollar apartments.
Get real, asswipe. You are letting your personal dislike for the city make you spew pure factual falsehoods.
Oh come on, there are TONS of tech opportunities outside of New York City. Almost everybody who does tech related stuff here in NYC is here because they want to be.
In fact, outside of finance, there's a lot more tech stuff going up in Boston, down in DC, then there's RTP in N. Carolina, and places like Austin, TX. Many of these places have much lower cost of living options than Manhattan, though perhaps none are as cheap as really living out in the middle of bumfuck.
The more of you haters leave, the more of NYC for me to enjoy.
Also - your complaints illustrate that you aren't a true New Yorker. If you were, you'd know that we barely have any bums and we have gorgeous subways compared to the way things were 15 or 20 years ago. And the air isn't so terrible outside of midtown - I go for a stroll in Central Park several times a week, and it's a truly beautiful place with plenty of fresh air. No, not the same as going out into the middle of nowhere, but I try to get out of the city for real countryside as often as possible anyway.
Okay, so there are TWO scientists with some modicum of credibility, and it's quite a modicum indeed, out there who argue for one form of intelligent design (I looked at the list on the other site you pointed me to, and the rest of the folks listed there didn't seem to be credible scientists to my cursory glance).
And Dembski doesn't appear to be a scientist per se, he's a philosopher, mathematician and theologian by training, and a professor in the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning.
So if I were being a stickler, that brings the list down to one. One scientist, at Lehigh University. I'm overwhelmed with awe.
why would you want your employees installing new browsers when theres already one?
I would suspect it's cheaper to rollout Firefox to an organization than it is to deal with IE-related support issues all the time. Spyware and other malware crap that infiltrates through IE is a huge timesink for many IT departments.
How are there no merits here? You think the government should have the right to seize property without due process, without judicial oversight, and without disclosing the nature of why they are seizing the property?
The "justness" of the cause is measured by the fact that our government is abusing its power systematically. Sneak-and-peek warrants, requiring no judicial approval - and now seizing of servers "at the request of another nation", claiming protection under treaty and revoking the property rights of somebody to their leased servers under the guise that the warrants weren't served to them, therefore they have no right to information on said warrants. This all adds up to flagrant abuse, and it makes me disgusted to be an American.
Sometimes, as in the this case, the EFF is standing up for an organization, IndyMedia, that I find incredibly distasteful. I'm a liberal (which is a good thing - I won't allow that word to be perverted to mean something bad as your ilk keep trying to do), and I share almost no beliefs in common with the radicals at IndyMedia. Nonetheless, I will stand up for their right to express themselves and be free from persecution.
And THAT my friend is the difference between you and me. I don't think you are trolling, but I really wish you were. The worst part is that you aren't even embarrassed to hold such disgusting views. Now go wash your mouth out with soap and think about how horrible it is that you think that defending civil liberties has "negative connotations", because you don't agree with some people and don't think they ought to have the same civil liberties that you have.
Well, both. There is lag, but the lasers _are_ annoyingly slow. I guess this is partially to stay true to the movies, where blaster beams don't exactly uhh move at the speed of light. But they shouldn't be so slow that a guy in front of you can outrun the beam.
Funny, I just checked and the 1.1 patch came out last week that looks like it addresses a lot of the issues I brought up - supposedly much improved AI on Hard level, multiplayer code less laggy, and improved server browsing tools.
I'll have to try the game with the patch before I make further comments.
Agreed, the Battlefront maps are too small. And the AI stinks. And the multiplayer is a bit laggy, and the server finding tools and code built into the game just suck.
But the game is great in terms of immersiveness, the graphics and sound generally make you feel like you're really in the movies. I really fail to see why this justifies spending another 50 dollars - this is one of those games that should be fixed with a freaking patch. Maybe a 20 dollar add-on for additional maps.
I call myself liberal and I don't support any of those things, and neither do the vast majority of liberals. Higher taxes are ALWAYS unpopular, and quotas have no support from any mainstream part of the political spectrum in the US. So stop the straw man bullshit. The "liberals" and "conservatives" in this country are amazingly close to each other on economic issues.
And no liberal thinker could ever support such a fundamental injustice as racial quotas. A liberal thinker would see racial inequity of opportunity and try to address it at its source, not try to make up for one injustice by layering on others.
Several people in this thread have suggested things like this, and it's really not true. The founders weren't libertarian in the Ayn Rand sense of the word. They didn't believe in complete economic and social freedom - they realized that government is a necessary force in a well organized society. Furthermore, most of modern economics didn't exist - hell, Adam Smith was a contemporary of our founders, so they hadn't even read his work, so ascribing an economic leaning to these men that maps into the modern spectrum doesn't work terribly well.
If they believed in "complete economic and social freedom", then it's hard to see why they provided for several branches to a federal government, and a strong state government system, and gave Congress so much power to regulate commerce. As to the states, they naturally played a greater role back then - but it's a radically different world we live in with respect to economics, technology and so forth. Hard to imagine that some things shouldn't be more centralized than they were 230 years ago.
That's just silly. Just because the US has a lot of authoritarian politicians doesn't mean that the words conservative and liberal both imply authoritarianism as an essential part of their nature. As to whether the founders were liberals or libertarians - I would argue they were liberals. They were mostly theists who believed in an abstract concept of God, but believers in the goodness of mankind. I certainly don't believe that the founders of our country would read Ayn Rand and say "oh yes, that's the way society should work".
You also have to keep in mind that economics wasn't really developed enough yet for our founders to have a meaningful position on it that we can map into the modern spectrum.
You just threw out your defense of the classical interpretation of the word "liberal" with that remark.
No, I've actually lived in other parts of the country and seen them first hand - in fact, I spent most of my childhood in these places. So unlike some people who talk through their ass, I speak from personal experience. I have a thoroughly open mind, and I have no problem with the people from these parts of the country per se, as long as they recognize the deficient culture they grew up in.
That sounds a lot like the redistribution of wealth to me, which is inherently socialist. I also happen to believe that socialism is a liberal form of economic theory.
Senator Kerry supports raising the taxes of the wealthy to where they were 4 years ago. If that's socialist, then I guess we were socialist 4 years ago, and even more socialist 20 years ago, and downright communist before that. Excellent quality reasoning, my friend, Kerry must be a socialist. QED, motherfucker, I guess I've just been schooled. LOL.
That should read "aware", not "away". Too tired to keep arguing, obviously, especially with somebody who just wants to fight even though I don't disagree with him.
You do realize that there are computability issues that would prevent such automatic programming?
No, I'm not away. Please elucidate. You can write invalid programs in any language, or metalanguage, and it's impossible to validate that the program that your code generator generates will halt or not, obviously.
I am not saying it is a practical application, all I'm saying is you can in theory go from an XML-ish algorithmic description to a functional piece of software, so you can clearly do the same with RDF, just more awkwardly (see XUL, for an example of an XML system that has a straightforward mapping to GUI code in several programming languages).
You'd have to be crazy to actually want to program like this using RDF, as I said, and I'm not defending the semantic web, just explaining it since I interpreted your original questions to be genuine. If you're looking for a semantic web fanboy to bash, you're looking in the wrong place.
This is a common claim used by proponents of AI.
No, not at all. I wasn't suggesting that the system becomes self-aware or does anything magical at all. I said there are some theoretical benefits, which seem modest, but there is a massive upfront cost, and it doesn't seem like the benefits are worth the effort (which is presumably why nobody has really adopted the semantic web stuff outside of academia).
As for your skepticism about AI in general, I think it's a bit misplaced. Much of what the previous generation considered AI becomes part of the standard repertoire of computer algorithms. I've used several algorithms dredged out of old AI papers for real-world problems (such as Charles Forgy's Rete nets). The thing is it's laughable to think that these algorithms have anything to do with real "artificial intelligence".
AI is merely a discipline withing computer science devoted to solving problems with computers that are usually solved by humans, and that aren't naturally suited to the computational regime of computers. To say that somebody is a "proponent" of AI presumably implies something about their belief in the possibility of strong AI in the near-term future, and I never said anything of the sort.
Well, you would certainly know, ease of use is critical to winning developer mindshare and promoting adoption of technologies - and I would point to SAX as a great example of this for promoting use of XML in the Java community.
It does seem to me that the key thing is to promote ad-hoc use of a relatively standardized mechanism for relating XML document structures to other XML document structures. Forget about waiting for somebody else to build relevant ontologies, reconstructing the entirety of human knowledge from the ground up, or any of that stuff. What people could reasonably do today is relate XML schema one to XML schema two because they need to connect widget A with widget B. Make the adoption of this technology as low cost as possible.
Just like adding a few anchor tags to a basic HTML document is an easy way to relate some human readable information to other human readable information, relating XML document types to other XML document types should be "easy".
Then the only big problem is to find a few applications that would actually demonstrate the benefits of doing this clearly. Yes, it is effectively a distributed XML database of sorts, but what is it good for? RSS has real applications for end users, so it has caught on. Without some software to demonstrate the benefits of linking up your XML data structures, people just won't bother with it. It seems specific, realistic use cases are what's needed here (and what seems terribly lacking from all the W3C RDF documentation as well). How does the distributed, semi-structured database that results provide use to me beyond what I have now with lots of disparate XML documents out there, when you cut out the truly grandiose notions behind RDF and the full-fledged semantic web?
I'm too tired to come up with convincing arguments right now, so hopefully somebody else will fill in the blanks here.
Only that it's hard to structurally relate concepts in a flat text file dump. A flat text file dump + a little bit of structure is XML. From that structure you gain easier, more consistent machine parseability. Can you exchange data without XML? Of course. Now, take the structure of XML and add relationships - in other words, we have a "person" element in document one and a "name" element in document two - if both documents have a relationship back to a common ontology, then the elements can be programmatically associated with or mapped to each other.
And theoretically (very theoretically), our algorithm in a generic RDF description could be used by a sufficiently sophisticated RDF parser to autogenerate source code in a real programming language that it "understood", like C++.
Whether the benefits you get from being able to do this stuff in theory are worth the massive up front effort involved in RDF-izing enough knowledge to be useful is the real question.
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The President is the Chief Executive, meaning he is responsible for the enforcement of the law, not the creation of it. The legslature handles that.
That's right, our President does more than a bad enough job with his own responsibilities without having to worry about screwing up everybody else's job responsibilities too. No, we elect legislators to screw up our laws, and a President to screw up our country.
Yes, it helps but no, it doesn't help much. There were apparently a bunch of studies done back in the late 90s, since it is a known fact that marijuana, specifically THC, the psychoactive substance therein, does reduce intraocular pressure, which is the primary symptom of glaucoma.
However, the relief is apparently short-lived and comes only with sufficiently high dosage to get fairly high, so you can't just have a few toots twice a day to treat your glaucoma effectively. Furthermore, there are more effective eye-drop based treatments that have no side effects.
Also (according to some sources) marijuana reduces blood flow to the optic nerve, which is not good for glaucoma patients. Not sure how substantial this effect is. Anyway, Googling for "marijuana glaucoma" turns up tons of stuff, some of it from fairly reputable sources and studies.
Certainly, I don't think tooting some marijuana will hurt your glaucoma, but it doesn't seem like it will cure it either.
This is legislation by exhaustion. It is clear that there is zero popular support for any of this copyright fascism legislation, and every time a new bill comes around, the various grass roots organizations stir up a frenzy about it, because we all learned our lesson when we let the DMCA get passed.
I have decided they are just trying to tire us out. If they keep trying to push the same kinds of insane measures through by repackaging them with new insane measures, they hope we will be caught offguard and forget to protest one. Once it's passed, it's going to be damned near impossible to get it revoked, barring years of painful jurisprudence to limit its powers (witness the DMCA which only now is starting to be limited in scope by judicial precendent).
How can we make it crystal clear that we don't want more copyright restrictions and that we want our fair use rights encoded in law and guaranteed to us? We need more, well funded groups to stand up for our rights against the fascist copyright regime (and I mean that literally, as the government and big media are essentially working in lockstep on this issue, which is the definition of fascism).
The BT client itself is legally resilient, yes. I was referring to the BT system, including the web-based torrent directories as they are used in practice for sharing of music, movies, etc.
But I agree with your conclusions that the legal users of BT are in a legally sound position, since BT is just a P2P file transfer protocol, not a copyrighted material search engine.
With Bit Torrent creating 35% of the Net's traffic, is it really time to declare it dying, and in need of a successor?
Yes, that would be about the right time. Remember Napster? Remember Kazaa? As soon as one of these P2P networks hits sufficiently mainstream use that large number of non-geek, non-early adopter people are using it, is about the time that it gets serious attention from the RIAA shutdown squad.
Now BT is a bit different because it's just a protocol for P2P file transfer, not a directory or lookup mechanism itself, and BT is used by a large number of software companies as a cost effective way to distribute large, legitimate files - I've downloaded Mandrake and MEPIS ISOs, and several multi-hundred megabyte game patches and mods using BT.
But suprnova.org, torrentreactor, and all the top directory sites of warez, movies and music are big, easy targets. The torrents and torrent directories give nice centralized locations to smack down with lawsuits. BT just isn't a legally resilient P2P technology in its current form.
OSS is strategic, and small companies cannot afford these strategies in many cases. Works great for the big folks though.
Yes, that was generally my point. Some companies have found successful niche strategies built around Open Source, like TrollTech, which can do their dual GPL/commercial licensing model only because their product is a runtime library for use in other software (and one which is apparently hard to implement). And then there are Red Hat and other smaller companies that do successfully sell support. I wish I had more examples of companies doing well from this approach, but I don't.
But you're precisely correct, for the vast majority of small software companies, Open Source is not a viable model, at least as the primary value proposition of the company.
Hi-ho the derry-o, the farmer's got a Dell?
Or giving away the software and selling the hardware to go with it like Digium does with Asterisk. There are several reasonable ways to make money from Open Source software.
But the problem is that all of them basically devalue the software and the work put into developing it in the first place. And it basically makes it impossible to make money as a small software company - you are making money as a support company, or a hardware company, and just using the software as a hook to get people interested in buying. This is a problem because these small software companies have long been where the best jobs for real software developers have been. If everybody is using Open Source software, then the jobs move to being basically plumbing/IT jobs at larger companies, where you are treated like a cog, a commodity.
I do worry sometimes that the overzealousness to make everything Open Source hurts the very programmers who generously contribute their time.
I'm a big fan of Open Source software, and I think there are a lot of exceedingly common problems that ought to have solutions provided by the Open Source community for the benefit of all, and I'm glad they are there. But there is no reason to think that every niche in the software world should or will be filled by Open Source.
Bullshit. I see them almost everyday on the upper east side of all places, and I see them EVERYDAY at Penn station. You are totally full of shit and anyone who is in NYC regularly knows it.
Did you read the rest of my sentence? I can't be bothered to respond to people who reply to partial setences. Compared to 15 or 20 years ago, there are far fewer homeless people on the streets of New York. Don't tell me I'm full of shit, I first moved to New York in 1992 (though I visited before that), but my friends who've lived here their whole lives confirm this to me. If you weren't here in the 80s, or even the early 90s, then you don't know what you are talking about.
I ride the E, the 6, sometimes the A and the 7. They all suck. Seriously, the subways look like were made in the 30's, and they smell like assjuice.
Did you ride the subways back in the 80s? Have you been shot at on the subway? No? Then it's gorgeous compared to what it used to be. And the cars on many lines have been updated and replaced in the last 5 or 6 years.
There is probably less poverty in Iraq. It probably smells better in a monkey cage at the zoo
You think the poverty rate is lower in New York than in Iraq? Where the fuck are you hanging out, the South Bronx? Hell, even Harlem is nothing like it used to be, I find myself up in the 160s and 170s frequently, and I often go out for food in that area, and it's relatively safe even for a whitey like myself.
Almost every neighborhood in Manhattan (south of 100th St.) that used to be shitty and poor has been gentrified immensely in the last 10 years, from the meatpacking district to Hell's Kitchen to the Lower East Side. Places rapidly become trendy and cool and get expensive and the fancy boutiques and so on follow. And the neighborhoods that used to be nice now start at a million bucks to live in. Yeah, all those stupid squalid poor fucks in their million dollar apartments.
Get real, asswipe. You are letting your personal dislike for the city make you spew pure factual falsehoods.
Oh come on, there are TONS of tech opportunities outside of New York City. Almost everybody who does tech related stuff here in NYC is here because they want to be.
In fact, outside of finance, there's a lot more tech stuff going up in Boston, down in DC, then there's RTP in N. Carolina, and places like Austin, TX. Many of these places have much lower cost of living options than Manhattan, though perhaps none are as cheap as really living out in the middle of bumfuck.
The more of you haters leave, the more of NYC for me to enjoy.
Also - your complaints illustrate that you aren't a true New Yorker. If you were, you'd know that we barely have any bums and we have gorgeous subways compared to the way things were 15 or 20 years ago. And the air isn't so terrible outside of midtown - I go for a stroll in Central Park several times a week, and it's a truly beautiful place with plenty of fresh air. No, not the same as going out into the middle of nowhere, but I try to get out of the city for real countryside as often as possible anyway.
Okay, so there are TWO scientists with some modicum of credibility, and it's quite a modicum indeed, out there who argue for one form of intelligent design (I looked at the list on the other site you pointed me to, and the rest of the folks listed there didn't seem to be credible scientists to my cursory glance).
And Dembski doesn't appear to be a scientist per se, he's a philosopher, mathematician and theologian by training, and a professor in the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning.
So if I were being a stickler, that brings the list down to one. One scientist, at Lehigh University. I'm overwhelmed with awe.
why would you want your employees installing new browsers when theres already one?
I would suspect it's cheaper to rollout Firefox to an organization than it is to deal with IE-related support issues all the time. Spyware and other malware crap that infiltrates through IE is a huge timesink for many IT departments.
Please cite your sources - I'd like a list of those respected scientists and where they are on the record statind this.
How are there no merits here? You think the government should have the right to seize property without due process, without judicial oversight, and without disclosing the nature of why they are seizing the property?
The "justness" of the cause is measured by the fact that our government is abusing its power systematically. Sneak-and-peek warrants, requiring no judicial approval - and now seizing of servers "at the request of another nation", claiming protection under treaty and revoking the property rights of somebody to their leased servers under the guise that the warrants weren't served to them, therefore they have no right to information on said warrants. This all adds up to flagrant abuse, and it makes me disgusted to be an American.
Sometimes, as in the this case, the EFF is standing up for an organization, IndyMedia, that I find incredibly distasteful. I'm a liberal (which is a good thing - I won't allow that word to be perverted to mean something bad as your ilk keep trying to do), and I share almost no beliefs in common with the radicals at IndyMedia. Nonetheless, I will stand up for their right to express themselves and be free from persecution.
And THAT my friend is the difference between you and me. I don't think you are trolling, but I really wish you were. The worst part is that you aren't even embarrassed to hold such disgusting views. Now go wash your mouth out with soap and think about how horrible it is that you think that defending civil liberties has "negative connotations", because you don't agree with some people and don't think they ought to have the same civil liberties that you have.
Well, both. There is lag, but the lasers _are_ annoyingly slow. I guess this is partially to stay true to the movies, where blaster beams don't exactly uhh move at the speed of light. But they shouldn't be so slow that a guy in front of you can outrun the beam.
Funny, I just checked and the 1.1 patch came out last week that looks like it addresses a lot of the issues I brought up - supposedly much improved AI on Hard level, multiplayer code less laggy, and improved server browsing tools.
I'll have to try the game with the patch before I make further comments.
Agreed, the Battlefront maps are too small. And the AI stinks. And the multiplayer is a bit laggy, and the server finding tools and code built into the game just suck.
But the game is great in terms of immersiveness, the graphics and sound generally make you feel like you're really in the movies. I really fail to see why this justifies spending another 50 dollars - this is one of those games that should be fixed with a freaking patch. Maybe a 20 dollar add-on for additional maps.
I call myself liberal and I don't support any of those things, and neither do the vast majority of liberals. Higher taxes are ALWAYS unpopular, and quotas have no support from any mainstream part of the political spectrum in the US. So stop the straw man bullshit. The "liberals" and "conservatives" in this country are amazingly close to each other on economic issues.
And no liberal thinker could ever support such a fundamental injustice as racial quotas. A liberal thinker would see racial inequity of opportunity and try to address it at its source, not try to make up for one injustice by layering on others.
Several people in this thread have suggested things like this, and it's really not true. The founders weren't libertarian in the Ayn Rand sense of the word. They didn't believe in complete economic and social freedom - they realized that government is a necessary force in a well organized society. Furthermore, most of modern economics didn't exist - hell, Adam Smith was a contemporary of our founders, so they hadn't even read his work, so ascribing an economic leaning to these men that maps into the modern spectrum doesn't work terribly well.
If they believed in "complete economic and social freedom", then it's hard to see why they provided for several branches to a federal government, and a strong state government system, and gave Congress so much power to regulate commerce. As to the states, they naturally played a greater role back then - but it's a radically different world we live in with respect to economics, technology and so forth. Hard to imagine that some things shouldn't be more centralized than they were 230 years ago.
That's just silly. Just because the US has a lot of authoritarian politicians doesn't mean that the words conservative and liberal both imply authoritarianism as an essential part of their nature. As to whether the founders were liberals or libertarians - I would argue they were liberals. They were mostly theists who believed in an abstract concept of God, but believers in the goodness of mankind. I certainly don't believe that the founders of our country would read Ayn Rand and say "oh yes, that's the way society should work".
You also have to keep in mind that economics wasn't really developed enough yet for our founders to have a meaningful position on it that we can map into the modern spectrum.
You just threw out your defense of the classical interpretation of the word "liberal" with that remark.
No, I've actually lived in other parts of the country and seen them first hand - in fact, I spent most of my childhood in these places. So unlike some people who talk through their ass, I speak from personal experience. I have a thoroughly open mind, and I have no problem with the people from these parts of the country per se, as long as they recognize the deficient culture they grew up in.
That sounds a lot like the redistribution of wealth to me, which is inherently socialist. I also happen to believe that socialism is a liberal form of economic theory.
Senator Kerry supports raising the taxes of the wealthy to where they were 4 years ago. If that's socialist, then I guess we were socialist 4 years ago, and even more socialist 20 years ago, and downright communist before that. Excellent quality reasoning, my friend, Kerry must be a socialist. QED, motherfucker, I guess I've just been schooled. LOL.
I'm not away
That should read "aware", not "away". Too tired to keep arguing, obviously, especially with somebody who just wants to fight even though I don't disagree with him.
You do realize that there are computability issues that would prevent such automatic programming?
No, I'm not away. Please elucidate. You can write invalid programs in any language, or metalanguage, and it's impossible to validate that the program that your code generator generates will halt or not, obviously.
I am not saying it is a practical application, all I'm saying is you can in theory go from an XML-ish algorithmic description to a functional piece of software, so you can clearly do the same with RDF, just more awkwardly (see XUL, for an example of an XML system that has a straightforward mapping to GUI code in several programming languages).
You'd have to be crazy to actually want to program like this using RDF, as I said, and I'm not defending the semantic web, just explaining it since I interpreted your original questions to be genuine. If you're looking for a semantic web fanboy to bash, you're looking in the wrong place.
This is a common claim used by proponents of AI.
No, not at all. I wasn't suggesting that the system becomes self-aware or does anything magical at all. I said there are some theoretical benefits, which seem modest, but there is a massive upfront cost, and it doesn't seem like the benefits are worth the effort (which is presumably why nobody has really adopted the semantic web stuff outside of academia).
As for your skepticism about AI in general, I think it's a bit misplaced. Much of what the previous generation considered AI becomes part of the standard repertoire of computer algorithms. I've used several algorithms dredged out of old AI papers for real-world problems (such as Charles Forgy's Rete nets). The thing is it's laughable to think that these algorithms have anything to do with real "artificial intelligence".
AI is merely a discipline withing computer science devoted to solving problems with computers that are usually solved by humans, and that aren't naturally suited to the computational regime of computers. To say that somebody is a "proponent" of AI presumably implies something about their belief in the possibility of strong AI in the near-term future, and I never said anything of the sort.
Well, you would certainly know, ease of use is critical to winning developer mindshare and promoting adoption of technologies - and I would point to SAX as a great example of this for promoting use of XML in the Java community.
It does seem to me that the key thing is to promote ad-hoc use of a relatively standardized mechanism for relating XML document structures to other XML document structures. Forget about waiting for somebody else to build relevant ontologies, reconstructing the entirety of human knowledge from the ground up, or any of that stuff. What people could reasonably do today is relate XML schema one to XML schema two because they need to connect widget A with widget B. Make the adoption of this technology as low cost as possible.
Just like adding a few anchor tags to a basic HTML document is an easy way to relate some human readable information to other human readable information, relating XML document types to other XML document types should be "easy".
Then the only big problem is to find a few applications that would actually demonstrate the benefits of doing this clearly. Yes, it is effectively a distributed XML database of sorts, but what is it good for? RSS has real applications for end users, so it has caught on. Without some software to demonstrate the benefits of linking up your XML data structures, people just won't bother with it. It seems specific, realistic use cases are what's needed here (and what seems terribly lacking from all the W3C RDF documentation as well). How does the distributed, semi-structured database that results provide use to me beyond what I have now with lots of disparate XML documents out there, when you cut out the truly grandiose notions behind RDF and the full-fledged semantic web?
I'm too tired to come up with convincing arguments right now, so hopefully somebody else will fill in the blanks here.
Only that it's hard to structurally relate concepts in a flat text file dump. A flat text file dump + a little bit of structure is XML. From that structure you gain easier, more consistent machine parseability. Can you exchange data without XML? Of course. Now, take the structure of XML and add relationships - in other words, we have a "person" element in document one and a "name" element in document two - if both documents have a relationship back to a common ontology, then the elements can be programmatically associated with or mapped to each other.
And theoretically (very theoretically), our algorithm in a generic RDF description could be used by a sufficiently sophisticated RDF parser to autogenerate source code in a real programming language that it "understood", like C++.
Whether the benefits you get from being able to do this stuff in theory are worth the massive up front effort involved in RDF-izing enough knowledge to be useful is the real question.