Out of sight, out of mind. That's human nature, to take the shortest, most direct, most effective route in dismissing a problem. The same short-sighted thinking is prevalent in every aspect of modern western society, every level of education, every class of wealth.
People would rather try to hammer the square peg into the round hole rather than find the square hole that it fits into.
These are service subscriptions, i.e. subscriptions that provide a service.
GP is talking about content subscriptions, i.e. subscriptions that provide an actual product.
Service subscriptions work, because anyone can provide a service, and the need for a service varies over time.
Product subscriptions are rentals. And rentals work only when the need varies over time. Which, for music, that need does not. In fact, musical tastes rarely change. Instead, they grow.
That's the difference between continuous and discrete. Bits, by nature, function in a discrete manner. Thus, functional groups must be discrete as well, e.g. based on the power of the states of a bit. However, continuous groups can be arbitrary.
And hence, bits can be grouped using base-10 when the frame of reference is a continuous entity (space and/or time), while they cannot when referenced functionally, i.e. described by other bits.
Oh, and by the way, as you no doubt know, bits uses the lowercase 'b' while bytes uses the uppercase 'B'.
Why do they have to remove linux to get windows installed? Couldn't they dual boot? In fact, couldn't the computers be set up to have a second partition for the windows install?
Yeah, where are those mod points, 'cause then I could mod up the AC that replied to GP.
Along comes someone wanting to create an entry on Wikipedia about a comic, but they haven't a clue how to cite references - or where the media has failed - actually know that you should source everything in an encyclopedia.
Just because someone doesn't know how to cite sources doesn't merit their article for deletion. It's partly the job of an editor to go out and find those sources and perform other forms of clean up. Besides, the sourcing criteria is ridiculous. Primary sources are sources, and yet wikipedia forbids anything but secondary sources, and on physical no less. Where do you think secondary sources get their information from? Primary sources. Duh. And anyone who knows anything about knowledge will know that the most accurate representation of the truth (without actually being involved) is created through the use of multiple primary sources, not through one or many secondary sources.
Oh, and *please* do donate.
I'm not going to donate a cent to wikipedia. The current ideology of limiting wikipedia to the definition of a print encyclopedia is not the wikipedia I want. If that's the kind of website the admins want, then I'm going let them support it. I, on the other hand, will not even so much as contribute until things start turning around--zealous admins start getting dismissed, articles start getting restored, etc.
And for the record, notability to me means that a particular topic contains or can potentially (based on sister topics) contain too much information to put into a parent (more general) page without impractically lengthening the parent page. That is, notability should be a standard by which information is organized.
As well, sourcing should be used to validate unsourced information, hence improve the quality of existing information, not be a standard by which articles are judged to be relevant.
There's also the matter of karma points, wherein the positive gets no karma points, while the negative loses karma points. So unless someone has karma to burn, posting something funny typically is a lose-lose situation.
With a corresponding negative modifier, there'll be a lot less AC jokes, I'm sure.
On the downside, it might introduce mod wars where a comment constantly jumps between 3 and 5 every few seconds because mods keep trying to add to or subtract from it. Unfortunately, what's funny and not is highly subjective and varies far more than the other modifiers, despite/.'s readers largely falling into one demographic.
The building is 18 stories, 16-24 feet every two stories. If we use the high number, and say 24 feet every two stories, cut off the top story for the garage-less penthouse, that's 204 feet, which is about 62 meters.
Which makes it about 602kJ, or 0.169kWh. Or about (169 / 100 * 60) = 101 minutes, in the time it takes to go up. Considering we're dealing only with 1000kg and not the full 3630kg limit, I think that's a fair number to use for both up and down. So it's 202 minutes of a 100W light bulb for a round trip from bottom to top back to bottom.
There are 14 units with garages, 7 per elevator. Assuming that all 7 units use their garage once and only once, that's 1 unit where the elevator must go the maximum distance, and another 6 units with only a fraction of that distance. Essentially, it figures to about 4 round trips per elevator per day, or 808 minutes of a 100W light bulb.
Now, I have about 6 energy-saving light bulbs at home that use about 24W, but spit out the equivalent of 100W bulbs (dining room, 2x living room, kitchen, study/bedroom/bathroom). They're on for about 6 hours in the evening, and 2 in the morning on average, using the equinox to measure (typically from about 7pm-1am, and then from about 6am to 8am).
Assuming that i didn't have energy-saving light bulbs, the energy consumption for a day's elevator would be about 808 / 6 or 2.25 hours of lighting.
However, if I had energy-saving light bulbs, that's about 9 hours. So in essence, the operation of this elevator would consume the equivalent of lighting an extra apartment unit for a day.
Note, I made a lot of assumptions, didn't stick to those rules about significant digits, etc. so take it with a grain of salt. But the power requirements of this is minor, given the assumption that it'll only make 4 round trips a day.
On the other hand, say a round trip requires about 5 minutes, not including the loading/unloading. Every 20 minutes of elevator use would be 8-9 hours of an apartment's lighting consumption.
Now, these are all ideal numbers (energy required, in light bulbs, to lift a car 17 stories and then back down, or something like that). The actual power consumption is going to be much higher.
Oh boy are you wrong (as are so many other people)...
For a large project with multiple major players, if Microsoft buys up Novell, then any contribution to the Linux kenerl that Novell developers made in the capacity of a Novell employee and representing Novell, can be removed from the project. In fact, while it's good form to notify everyone that licenses are being changed some time before the actual change occurs, I don't believe there's anything preventing them from outright changing their code contributions from GPL to private.
And it would be quite illegal to possess or distribute those pieces of code from that point on.
Now, if developers contributed under their own name and what's technically considered their own time, that's a different story.
As for buying up a small company, Microsoft could still change the license immediately, and it would again be illegal to possess or distribute the code. Which means: no forking!
especially if you do not remove that content when the copyright holder alerts you to it.
I thnk you're confusing things. The site doesn't own the content; it just links to it. There's no law that states site operators have to remove links when requested. The laws only apply to the sites hosting the content itself.
I'm not particularly against this action, however foolish and pointless it might seem. But I am against using law enforcement resources for such a trivial thing when there are rape and murder cases that remain unsolved. What this shows is that the priorities of said law enforcement agency and hence the government that runs the agency are not where they ought to be.
Yeah, but with torture in Gitmo, warrentless wiretapping, etc. that argument doesn't fly either.
Preaching one thing and then turning around and doing the opposite is called hypocricy. Preaching one thing and ignoring it when your friend is doing the opposite is just as bad, if not worse.
If AT&T can get immunity for the same violations committed within the US on US citizens, why not Yahoo?
I'm not saying you're wrong; all I'm saying is, the public and hence the ruling class in the United States needs to clean up their own house before they start pointing out how dirty everyone else's is.
BT is an interesting case, and untested in court. If "making available" is copyright infringement, then anything goes. Just putting a file on a network share is making available. Heck leaving a CD out while a friend visits is making available. So it could be that making the.01% of a song (or however big the piece is relative to the song size) available for others to download can be considered copyright infringement. (Fair use doesn't cover this, simply because the intention is not covered under fair use.)
However, if making available is insufficient to show copyright infringement (intention perhaps, but no actual act), then BT might be the best option. It can be argued then that possessing and seeding only a certain percentage of a song (and only possess non-sequential, random, pieces of a preferrably compressed and password-protected file) is not copyright infringement because the data that was copied from that one person cannot be recombined into a reproduction fo a copyrighted work. Yes, if combined with several people, the data might be coherent. But then all of those people would have to be named. And if, say, 25% was in Sweden, and %10 was in China, and %15 came from South Africa, then it'd be impossible collaborated infringement. It might be breaking international laws, but last I recall, Interpol wasn't in the business of tracking down filesharers, and neither is the FBI.
Downloading isn't copyright infringement. Only uploading is. The downloaders aren't making or distributing the copy; the uploader does that. But how long that's going to remain legal (but nonetheless considered inethical) will depend on the results of the next election.
Sure. The judge changed instruction #14. I think challenging this one little detail, in and of itself, can go really far, and truly be the precedent-setter...
That's a great idea and all, but making music requires time and effort. You have to learn how to play an instrument, and play it well. You have to learn how to read music, and even interpret. You have to learn how to sing.
And in this day and age of the fast-paced, ever-changing, convenience-oriented popular culture, there is neither time nor motivation to go off acquiring new skills. Why spend three hours a day sweating over a guitar or piano when we could sit in front of the television and finish our prime-time lineup?
It's a consumer culture, because that's what everyone does: consume. Lap oup everything that's out there, even if it's trash, because we don't know what to do with ourselves when we're not consuming.
How do we change this? As an individual, we have to have something that we can be passionate about, an aspiration, an ambition. I want to be a good painter, so I'll go and paint. I want to be a good writer, so I write. etc. The barriers of entry are both social, and personal. Social because you can't follow tomorrow's discussion of last night's TV show unless you saw it, and personal because taking up something new requires the same conviction that a leap of faith would require. And most people would rather make that leap of faith instead, since that's physically effortless...
Has there been US government sponsored censorship in the past? Certainly, but no worse than any other country that has ever existed. Is there censorship going on now in the US? I don't see how it could be, with a 24 hour news cycle and the web.
This is such a cop-out. What you're effectively saying is, well, we're less evil than Satan, so we must be good. No. There's either censorship, or there isn't. And when there is, it isn't acceptable.
The first amendment stipulates that the government cannot pass laws that limit or take away (abridge) our the freedom of speech. That means, the government cannot censor what we say, or promote censorship. The first amendment, and what most people say is freedom of speech, has nothing to do with what a person can and cannot say. The first amendment says that people can say what they want, and suffer no consequences imposed by the government for doing so. There are caveats to that of course, i.e. yelling fire in a packed theater.
If freedom of speech is just being to say anything, then these Burmese bloggers indeed have such a freedom. They're not physically restricted in any way to say whatever they want, whenever they want. They have that freedom. The thing is, the Burmese government is going to come and haul them off to prison for it. That's a consequence imposed by their government. So they don't really have what the first amendment grants us. They are being censored.
Being flagged as a terrorist, constantly tailed and surveilled upon, put on the no-fly-list, etc. is a consequence imposed by the US government. And thus our first amendment rights have been violated. We are being censored.
The question now is, how restrictive is the government going to get before it reverses, if it eventually reverses?
I think the problem is that we're all programmers here, or we've been (somewhat ironically) trained to think that way.
All programming, and hence all programming languages are ultimately based on mathematics, and not only that, but discrete math in particular. In the computer world, there are no ambiguity, no nuances, no uncertainty. And so all programming languages are disposable, because the underlying code will always produce the same results. Subsequently, because of this, we can create metrics to determine what language is "better." Programming languages are constructs we invent in order to bridge the gap between man and machine, between how we think and how a machine "thinks."
And therein lies the problem. We cannot look at human languages from this perspective, because to do so would imply that there is a countably infinite set of abstractions to which all human languages can be reduced. But humans are not machines, where there are two and only two states for every bit. The number of states of human psychology is uncountably infinite, and each language effectively is a different set of such "irrational" elements. Translation, in this respect, is the process of rounding of these "irrational" elements into rational elements from which we can create unions, but that's tangental. This means that the loss of any one language is the loss of a whole set of irreplicable symbols. And not only do we lose a whole set, but a set wherein the the elements have a relationship on an even higher level of abstraction, and hence we lose that information as well.
So we don't just lose the parts--the methods of expressing thoughts--we lose the sum, which is, in part, the culture and the history that led to such ways of thinking. And that's what people here, and everywhere, have to start realizing. It might be great to standardize the world on certain languages or certain sets of languages to facilitate communication. But it's bad if in that process of standardization, we lose every other language. And it doesn't have to be that way. True multilinguals, can and do exist.
What I can't believe is that I just made an analogy between mathematics and human language...
Judges get to determine what evidence is permissible or not. Evidence illegaly gathered would only be thrown out in court. So long as we have habeus corpus, we'll be fine.
If Windows Update needs to be updated before it can work, then how did these updates get through without Windows Update being updated? And, if Windows Update is capable of updating itself through this means, why does this method not query the user for permission first? That is, why wasn't the querying built into this secondary means in the first place?
Either way, it looks like a backdoor, through and through.
Besides, it doesn't matter what Microsoft's intentions are. It doesn't matter that Windows Update was the one needing the update. It doesn't even matter that this update was broken. What matters is that an update happened without the user being able to stop or forestall it. In a production environment, that is unacceptable, for a myriad of reasons that have been discussed. In a casual environment, that is getting very close to invasion of privacy.
And EULA's aren't going to help much. The hardware is still mine, and it is still my choice what software gets put on it.
But is there app to say, automatically do this in an easy, hands-off, user-friendly way? Can I press a button, and have it save the system's state that I can restore back to later on, with another press of a button? Can I press a button to bring up a scheduler do schedule this? Can I boot from another device (like from CD or USB) and easily access the restore feature for the primary, or any drive with the OS installed?
Those are the kinds of questions linux devs need to be asking, if they want to see wider linux adoption. Otherwise, answering GP's question with "back up" some files won't help anyone with less than expert knowledge of the OS's internals. By not even providing methods of backing up, i.e. software that might automate the task, reliable hardware suggestions, etc., you practically blew the GP's question off with a run-around. It isn't trolling, but it's something politicians and salesmen would do, not intellectuals.
And for the record, your answer is effectively: No, such a program does not exist for linux, to the best of your knowledge.
He has the country wrong, but the premise correct. I take it you come from the Chen/Zen school of Buddhism. The Lamas from Tibet have been using Buddhism as their justification for power over the people as much as the Catholic Church did with Christianity in Europe. There are many methods of oppression, and many of those do not involve violence or go against Buddhist scripture. Like all things, the various things scripture says is subject to interpretation and to picking and choosing. The fact that there are so many schools of Buddhism should clue you to that fact. The Buddhism practiced in places other than China and Japan are not the same.
There needs to be separation of Church and State. State leaders can be religious, and can have advisors who are religious. But the State itself should not be tied to any Church. That is, religion should not be used to justify the actions of the state.
And for the record, your post about what a Buddhist fanatic would do is what Falun Gong people are doing now. Those people are not Buddhist, though they've taken some of Buddhism's ideals to extremes. And while they're an enormous cult, they're a despised minority in China (including Taiwan). Extremism in any way, shape, or form, is bad. Buddhism (at least Chen/Zen Buddhism) actively discourages it. So a radical or fanatical Buddhist is a logical fallacy. One or the other qualifier, has to be false. That is not to say that there aren't fundamental Buddhists. Though, fundamental when applied to Buddhism doesn't produce quite the same results as fundamental when applied to the Abrahamic religions. But I don't need to tell you that...
Seriously, I think a U.S. invasion would be better than a weapons deal, simply because we wouldn't leave the weapons behind after the fighting is done.
Then groups of them will buy weapons from Russia or China (but mostly Russia and ex-soviet countries), and we'll have Iraq all over again.
Maybe the US should just leave everyone else alone, until perhaps they start asking for help? We don't see problems with Israel (though helping them has caused us other problems, but that's the price of taking sides in somebody else's war).
Slashdot Mirror
Out of sight, out of mind. That's human nature, to take the shortest, most direct, most effective route in dismissing a problem. The same short-sighted thinking is prevalent in every aspect of modern western society, every level of education, every class of wealth.
People would rather try to hammer the square peg into the round hole rather than find the square hole that it fits into.
Different subscriptions.
These are service subscriptions, i.e. subscriptions that provide a service.
GP is talking about content subscriptions, i.e. subscriptions that provide an actual product.
Service subscriptions work, because anyone can provide a service, and the need for a service varies over time.
Product subscriptions are rentals. And rentals work only when the need varies over time. Which, for music, that need does not. In fact, musical tastes rarely change. Instead, they grow.
goes away if you terminate your service
Or, when the service terminates itself. Which is an even better reason for not subscribing.
That's the difference between continuous and discrete. Bits, by nature, function in a discrete manner. Thus, functional groups must be discrete as well, e.g. based on the power of the states of a bit. However, continuous groups can be arbitrary.
And hence, bits can be grouped using base-10 when the frame of reference is a continuous entity (space and/or time), while they cannot when referenced functionally, i.e. described by other bits.
Oh, and by the way, as you no doubt know, bits uses the lowercase 'b' while bytes uses the uppercase 'B'.
Why do they have to remove linux to get windows installed? Couldn't they dual boot? In fact, couldn't the computers be set up to have a second partition for the windows install?
Yeah, where are those mod points, 'cause then I could mod up the AC that replied to GP.
Along comes someone wanting to create an entry on Wikipedia about a comic, but they haven't a clue how to cite references - or where the media has failed - actually know that you should source everything in an encyclopedia.
Just because someone doesn't know how to cite sources doesn't merit their article for deletion. It's partly the job of an editor to go out and find those sources and perform other forms of clean up. Besides, the sourcing criteria is ridiculous. Primary sources are sources, and yet wikipedia forbids anything but secondary sources, and on physical no less. Where do you think secondary sources get their information from? Primary sources. Duh. And anyone who knows anything about knowledge will know that the most accurate representation of the truth (without actually being involved) is created through the use of multiple primary sources, not through one or many secondary sources.
Oh, and *please* do donate.
I'm not going to donate a cent to wikipedia. The current ideology of limiting wikipedia to the definition of a print encyclopedia is not the wikipedia I want. If that's the kind of website the admins want, then I'm going let them support it. I, on the other hand, will not even so much as contribute until things start turning around--zealous admins start getting dismissed, articles start getting restored, etc.
And for the record, notability to me means that a particular topic contains or can potentially (based on sister topics) contain too much information to put into a parent (more general) page without impractically lengthening the parent page. That is, notability should be a standard by which information is organized.
As well, sourcing should be used to validate unsourced information, hence improve the quality of existing information, not be a standard by which articles are judged to be relevant.
There's also the matter of karma points, wherein the positive gets no karma points, while the negative loses karma points. So unless someone has karma to burn, posting something funny typically is a lose-lose situation.
/.'s readers largely falling into one demographic.
With a corresponding negative modifier, there'll be a lot less AC jokes, I'm sure.
On the downside, it might introduce mod wars where a comment constantly jumps between 3 and 5 every few seconds because mods keep trying to add to or subtract from it. Unfortunately, what's funny and not is highly subjective and varies far more than the other modifiers, despite
The building is 18 stories, 16-24 feet every two stories. If we use the high number, and say 24 feet every two stories, cut off the top story for the garage-less penthouse, that's 204 feet, which is about 62 meters.
Which makes it about 602kJ, or 0.169kWh. Or about (169 / 100 * 60) = 101 minutes, in the time it takes to go up. Considering we're dealing only with 1000kg and not the full 3630kg limit, I think that's a fair number to use for both up and down. So it's 202 minutes of a 100W light bulb for a round trip from bottom to top back to bottom.
There are 14 units with garages, 7 per elevator. Assuming that all 7 units use their garage once and only once, that's 1 unit where the elevator must go the maximum distance, and another 6 units with only a fraction of that distance. Essentially, it figures to about 4 round trips per elevator per day, or 808 minutes of a 100W light bulb.
Now, I have about 6 energy-saving light bulbs at home that use about 24W, but spit out the equivalent of 100W bulbs (dining room, 2x living room, kitchen, study/bedroom/bathroom). They're on for about 6 hours in the evening, and 2 in the morning on average, using the equinox to measure (typically from about 7pm-1am, and then from about 6am to 8am).
Assuming that i didn't have energy-saving light bulbs, the energy consumption for a day's elevator would be about 808 / 6 or 2.25 hours of lighting.
However, if I had energy-saving light bulbs, that's about 9 hours. So in essence, the operation of this elevator would consume the equivalent of lighting an extra apartment unit for a day.
Note, I made a lot of assumptions, didn't stick to those rules about significant digits, etc. so take it with a grain of salt. But the power requirements of this is minor, given the assumption that it'll only make 4 round trips a day.
On the other hand, say a round trip requires about 5 minutes, not including the loading/unloading. Every 20 minutes of elevator use would be 8-9 hours of an apartment's lighting consumption.
Now, these are all ideal numbers (energy required, in light bulbs, to lift a car 17 stories and then back down, or something like that). The actual power consumption is going to be much higher.
Oh boy are you wrong (as are so many other people)...
For a large project with multiple major players, if Microsoft buys up Novell, then any contribution to the Linux kenerl that Novell developers made in the capacity of a Novell employee and representing Novell, can be removed from the project. In fact, while it's good form to notify everyone that licenses are being changed some time before the actual change occurs, I don't believe there's anything preventing them from outright changing their code contributions from GPL to private.
And it would be quite illegal to possess or distribute those pieces of code from that point on.
Now, if developers contributed under their own name and what's technically considered their own time, that's a different story.
As for buying up a small company, Microsoft could still change the license immediately, and it would again be illegal to possess or distribute the code. Which means: no forking!
especially if you do not remove that content when the copyright holder alerts you to it.
I thnk you're confusing things. The site doesn't own the content; it just links to it. There's no law that states site operators have to remove links when requested. The laws only apply to the sites hosting the content itself.
I'm not particularly against this action, however foolish and pointless it might seem. But I am against using law enforcement resources for such a trivial thing when there are rape and murder cases that remain unsolved. What this shows is that the priorities of said law enforcement agency and hence the government that runs the agency are not where they ought to be.
I don't know...they recently renovated an old, gothic-style church near where I live, and it's still gray and bleak.
The same way you fill a 40TB HDD: porn.
Yeah, but with torture in Gitmo, warrentless wiretapping, etc. that argument doesn't fly either.
Preaching one thing and then turning around and doing the opposite is called hypocricy. Preaching one thing and ignoring it when your friend is doing the opposite is just as bad, if not worse.
If AT&T can get immunity for the same violations committed within the US on US citizens, why not Yahoo?
I'm not saying you're wrong; all I'm saying is, the public and hence the ruling class in the United States needs to clean up their own house before they start pointing out how dirty everyone else's is.
If you do a search for search, you'll find Yahoo at #11, and Google at #21.
Metasearch, Live, and MySpace take up the top 3, respectively. And quite frankly, that last page looks strikingly similar to results #1 and #2.
You just have to wait 'til they sue, and then make an offer to settle out of court. Say, $224,000 for starters.
Disclaimer: IANAL
.01% of a song (or however big the piece is relative to the song size) available for others to download can be considered copyright infringement. (Fair use doesn't cover this, simply because the intention is not covered under fair use.)
BT is an interesting case, and untested in court. If "making available" is copyright infringement, then anything goes. Just putting a file on a network share is making available. Heck leaving a CD out while a friend visits is making available. So it could be that making the
However, if making available is insufficient to show copyright infringement (intention perhaps, but no actual act), then BT might be the best option. It can be argued then that possessing and seeding only a certain percentage of a song (and only possess non-sequential, random, pieces of a preferrably compressed and password-protected file) is not copyright infringement because the data that was copied from that one person cannot be recombined into a reproduction fo a copyrighted work. Yes, if combined with several people, the data might be coherent. But then all of those people would have to be named. And if, say, 25% was in Sweden, and %10 was in China, and %15 came from South Africa, then it'd be impossible collaborated infringement. It might be breaking international laws, but last I recall, Interpol wasn't in the business of tracking down filesharers, and neither is the FBI.
Downloading isn't copyright infringement. Only uploading is. The downloaders aren't making or distributing the copy; the uploader does that. But how long that's going to remain legal (but nonetheless considered inethical) will depend on the results of the next election.
Sure. The judge changed instruction #14. I think challenging this one little detail, in and of itself, can go really far, and truly be the precedent-setter...
That's a great idea and all, but making music requires time and effort. You have to learn how to play an instrument, and play it well. You have to learn how to read music, and even interpret. You have to learn how to sing.
And in this day and age of the fast-paced, ever-changing, convenience-oriented popular culture, there is neither time nor motivation to go off acquiring new skills. Why spend three hours a day sweating over a guitar or piano when we could sit in front of the television and finish our prime-time lineup?
It's a consumer culture, because that's what everyone does: consume. Lap oup everything that's out there, even if it's trash, because we don't know what to do with ourselves when we're not consuming.
How do we change this? As an individual, we have to have something that we can be passionate about, an aspiration, an ambition. I want to be a good painter, so I'll go and paint. I want to be a good writer, so I write. etc. The barriers of entry are both social, and personal. Social because you can't follow tomorrow's discussion of last night's TV show unless you saw it, and personal because taking up something new requires the same conviction that a leap of faith would require. And most people would rather make that leap of faith instead, since that's physically effortless...
Has there been US government sponsored censorship in the past? Certainly, but no worse than any other country that has ever existed. Is there censorship going on now in the US? I don't see how it could be, with a 24 hour news cycle and the web.
This is such a cop-out. What you're effectively saying is, well, we're less evil than Satan, so we must be good. No. There's either censorship, or there isn't. And when there is, it isn't acceptable.
The first amendment stipulates that the government cannot pass laws that limit or take away (abridge) our the freedom of speech. That means, the government cannot censor what we say, or promote censorship. The first amendment, and what most people say is freedom of speech, has nothing to do with what a person can and cannot say. The first amendment says that people can say what they want, and suffer no consequences imposed by the government for doing so. There are caveats to that of course, i.e. yelling fire in a packed theater.
If freedom of speech is just being to say anything, then these Burmese bloggers indeed have such a freedom. They're not physically restricted in any way to say whatever they want, whenever they want. They have that freedom. The thing is, the Burmese government is going to come and haul them off to prison for it. That's a consequence imposed by their government. So they don't really have what the first amendment grants us. They are being censored.
Being flagged as a terrorist, constantly tailed and surveilled upon, put on the no-fly-list, etc. is a consequence imposed by the US government. And thus our first amendment rights have been violated. We are being censored.
The question now is, how restrictive is the government going to get before it reverses, if it eventually reverses?
I think the problem is that we're all programmers here, or we've been (somewhat ironically) trained to think that way.
...
All programming, and hence all programming languages are ultimately based on mathematics, and not only that, but discrete math in particular. In the computer world, there are no ambiguity, no nuances, no uncertainty. And so all programming languages are disposable, because the underlying code will always produce the same results. Subsequently, because of this, we can create metrics to determine what language is "better." Programming languages are constructs we invent in order to bridge the gap between man and machine, between how we think and how a machine "thinks."
And therein lies the problem. We cannot look at human languages from this perspective, because to do so would imply that there is a countably infinite set of abstractions to which all human languages can be reduced. But humans are not machines, where there are two and only two states for every bit. The number of states of human psychology is uncountably infinite, and each language effectively is a different set of such "irrational" elements. Translation, in this respect, is the process of rounding of these "irrational" elements into rational elements from which we can create unions, but that's tangental. This means that the loss of any one language is the loss of a whole set of irreplicable symbols. And not only do we lose a whole set, but a set wherein the the elements have a relationship on an even higher level of abstraction, and hence we lose that information as well.
So we don't just lose the parts--the methods of expressing thoughts--we lose the sum, which is, in part, the culture and the history that led to such ways of thinking. And that's what people here, and everywhere, have to start realizing. It might be great to standardize the world on certain languages or certain sets of languages to facilitate communication. But it's bad if in that process of standardization, we lose every other language. And it doesn't have to be that way. True multilinguals, can and do exist.
What I can't believe is that I just made an analogy between mathematics and human language
And that's exactly what's going to happen.
Judges get to determine what evidence is permissible or not. Evidence illegaly gathered would only be thrown out in court. So long as we have habeus corpus, we'll be fine.
Oh wait...
Two questions:
If Windows Update needs to be updated before it can work, then how did these updates get through without Windows Update being updated?
And, if Windows Update is capable of updating itself through this means, why does this method not query the user for permission first? That is, why wasn't the querying built into this secondary means in the first place?
Either way, it looks like a backdoor, through and through.
Besides, it doesn't matter what Microsoft's intentions are. It doesn't matter that Windows Update was the one needing the update. It doesn't even matter that this update was broken. What matters is that an update happened without the user being able to stop or forestall it. In a production environment, that is unacceptable, for a myriad of reasons that have been discussed. In a casual environment, that is getting very close to invasion of privacy.
And EULA's aren't going to help much. The hardware is still mine, and it is still my choice what software gets put on it.
But is there app to say, automatically do this in an easy, hands-off, user-friendly way? Can I press a button, and have it save the system's state that I can restore back to later on, with another press of a button? Can I press a button to bring up a scheduler do schedule this? Can I boot from another device (like from CD or USB) and easily access the restore feature for the primary, or any drive with the OS installed?
Those are the kinds of questions linux devs need to be asking, if they want to see wider linux adoption. Otherwise, answering GP's question with "back up" some files won't help anyone with less than expert knowledge of the OS's internals. By not even providing methods of backing up, i.e. software that might automate the task, reliable hardware suggestions, etc., you practically blew the GP's question off with a run-around. It isn't trolling, but it's something politicians and salesmen would do, not intellectuals.
And for the record, your answer is effectively: No, such a program does not exist for linux, to the best of your knowledge.
But maybe it should?
He has the country wrong, but the premise correct. I take it you come from the Chen/Zen school of Buddhism. The Lamas from Tibet have been using Buddhism as their justification for power over the people as much as the Catholic Church did with Christianity in Europe. There are many methods of oppression, and many of those do not involve violence or go against Buddhist scripture. Like all things, the various things scripture says is subject to interpretation and to picking and choosing. The fact that there are so many schools of Buddhism should clue you to that fact. The Buddhism practiced in places other than China and Japan are not the same.
There needs to be separation of Church and State. State leaders can be religious, and can have advisors who are religious. But the State itself should not be tied to any Church. That is, religion should not be used to justify the actions of the state.
And for the record, your post about what a Buddhist fanatic would do is what Falun Gong people are doing now. Those people are not Buddhist, though they've taken some of Buddhism's ideals to extremes. And while they're an enormous cult, they're a despised minority in China (including Taiwan). Extremism in any way, shape, or form, is bad. Buddhism (at least Chen/Zen Buddhism) actively discourages it. So a radical or fanatical Buddhist is a logical fallacy. One or the other qualifier, has to be false. That is not to say that there aren't fundamental Buddhists. Though, fundamental when applied to Buddhism doesn't produce quite the same results as fundamental when applied to the Abrahamic religions. But I don't need to tell you that...
Seriously, I think a U.S. invasion would be better than a weapons deal, simply because we wouldn't leave the weapons behind after the fighting is done.
Then groups of them will buy weapons from Russia or China (but mostly Russia and ex-soviet countries), and we'll have Iraq all over again.
Maybe the US should just leave everyone else alone, until perhaps they start asking for help? We don't see problems with Israel (though helping them has caused us other problems, but that's the price of taking sides in somebody else's war).