Again, another ignoramus lumps all Christians in with the Roman Catholic church.
Hmmm.... I didn't do that. But no matter. As soon as someone calls you an ignoramous instead of actually providing a reasoned response, you know he doesn't have one.
The whole JEDP hypothesis approaches absurdity once higher criticism methods lead to every word in a passage being attributed to a different author. It starts resembling the garlands of epicycles Copernicus used in an attempt to make perfect circular orbits fit his particular model of the solar system.
I guess you got modded 5:Insightful for use of the terms "garlands" and "epicycles".
Historical biblical scholarship is not the same as literary criticsm. Literary criticism is largely an attempt to gain insight into the mind of the artist, and it is mostly ego-driven baloney. The goal in scholarship, when lacking definitive evidence, is to produce a hypothesis which is the most plausible, straightforward explanation given known (indefinitive) evidence. And so far as I understand it the evidence for JEDP, while not definitive, is a helluva lot stronger than that for the single-author hypothesis (or other major ones). Evidence includes: linguistic and statistical analysis of the text; historical events and the need to jibe with them; numerous repeated stories in the text which can be grouped off with other repeated stories to make internally consistent groups (which are inconsistent with other groups); and an awful lot more. And the trend is bad: generally speaking as new evidence has come to light, it has weakened the single-author argument.
Strikingly, it's the God-wrote-it or Moses-wrote-it-under-God's-direction groups that have constructed epicycles like Copernicus: heap upon heap of crapola attempting to apologize for the mounds of inconsistencies between their theory and the text. At some point the whole house of cards will come crashing down.
It's also striking that you used epicycles to justify your position, as Copernicus is not the one most famous for having to need them. No, that was Ptolemy, and by extension, the Catholic Church. Strange how religion starts needing to build these weird constructions when faced with even a small chunk of damning data.
the "or any later version" clause is NOT in the GPL
I beg to differ. Search for "later". A charitable reading of section 9 is that you have three options when you deploy under the license: (1) specify a GPL version -- this is not explicilty stated, only implied (2) specify a minimum GPL version (3) allow any GPL version.
But the example for how to apply the GPL will do #2. And if you don't include any notice in your program, then you are bound to #3. Guess what percentage of coders release their code under one of those two because they didn't realize the #1 was even an option.
The linux kernel does not, for example.
Parts are, parts aren't. From extable.c for example (a random selection):
/* Rewritten by Rusty Russell, on the backs of many others... Copyright (C) 2001 Rusty Russell, 2002 Rusty Russell IBM.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. ...
So you can choose to be bound by a later licence if you like, or stick with the version that you agreed to.
Only if you are the licensee. If you are the licensor using the GPL, you have no say in whether or not the license gets upgraded.
This is not good news. There is a massive amount of code out there which relies on the GPL. Let's say that you put out code under the GPL 2.x and Stallman suddenly decides in 3.0 to add a clause that says that the licensee no longer has to do the viral thing, can use your name in his advertisements, gets to poke you in the eye. Great, says the licensee: I'm upgrading! Time to get eye poked out.
This is why the GPL is bad: using it puts enormous faith in the hands of people who, not to put to fine a point on it, are crazies. This is how we want to be showcasing the stability of the open source paradigm?
"Commercial benefit" is the sine qua non of copyright
Nonsense. I copyright things all the time and distribute them for no commercial benefit whatsoever, and furthermore it's fine if others benefit from them through limited, free licensing from me. It's called open source.
Things outside of open source are copyrighted all the time for reasons other than commercial benefit.
...and about forty Republican congressmen, it would appear. Sounds to me like a bipartisan defeat.
Re:You are confusing two issues
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 3, Informative
By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit. This is so far from fair use it's not debatable.
"Using" is not a term of art or law. Before you're going to claim that this isn't debatable, I'd like you to specify exactly which right Google is infringing on.
I'll give you a hint. The only possible thing Google could be thought to be infringing on is the right to distribute derivative works. Except that derivative works is defined by the Copyright act as:
a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.
The important phrase here is work. A snippet is not a work, nor is a system. A database can be a work, but it is hardly settled law that such a work qualifies as having been "recast, transformed, or adapted" (under the Copyright Act's usage of those terms) -- at any rate, far from "not debatable". Further, the distributing the derived work, not for using it in other ways. And it is certainly the case the making money off of one's work is not a protected right. You'll be hard pressed to find the phrase "commercial benefit" in the Copyright act.
It's worthwhile mentioning that if Iowa was a country, it would be #1 by far. Same goes for most of the midwest.
Huh. Why is that? Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that nearly every country we're "behind" has no significant proportion of people in poverty?
Our middle class citizenry, to this day, still beats out their middle-class citizenry in math and science scores. The problem is that you're comparing by mean, and we are saddled with class divisions these other countries don't have due to their small size, homogeneous population, and almost inconsequential immigrant histories.
As usual, there already is a language that allows this, and (as usual) it's called Lisp.:-)
The unique specialness of an operator is that it may exist in a non-LL form, typically to provide infix notation. This is what makes an operator different from a function. But the defining feature of Lisp's syntax is that it is LL. It seems to me that by definition Lisp cannot support operator overloading. Sometimes Lisp is not the answer to any question foo.
Since neither Lisp, Scheme, nor Dylan (in its Lisp form anyway) support operators at all your statement is curious. By which I mean, untrue.
Now it's true that Common Lisp supports read-macro characters. But AFAIK it does _not_ support read-macro characters which extend the parser in a non-LL fashion so as to provide inline operators. That is, you can't make a read-macro called + which can be called like this: a + b. Because 'a' has already been parsed, evaluated, and completed. Oh, sure you can hack up some ugliness like +(a b), but that's basically a function now, isn't it.
Here's how a secret patent works. NSA invents something and receives a patent for it which it holds in secret so no one else understands how the invention works. Twenty years later Researcher X and Company Y comes up with the idea and tries to patent it. At that point the USPTO reveals that NSA already holds the patent, it becomes public knowledge, and NSA retains patent control over it.
The government has no copyrights, trademarks, patents, or anything else that could be considered intellectual property.
All false. The US government can hold copyrights, and can both hold and produce trademarks and patents. Furthermore, parts of the government can produce secret patents, something no one else can do. What the government cannot do is produce copyrighted material.
Another option: move the Hubble into orbit around the moon. I wonder if THAT would provide sufficient resolution (and if it'd be cheaper than landing on the moon again).
Sean
Baloney. Here, let's let your supply-sider friends at Cato describe the situation:
Total Revenue Growth. Nominal federal revenues dou-bled in the 1980s from $517 billion to $1.031 trillion. From 1981 to 1989 real federal revenues climbed by 20 percent. As a share of GDP, however, federal tax revenues fell by 1.0 percentage point during that period.
CATO has to admit that, as a share of the GDB, revenues fell. And this despite them cooking the books as much as possible to suggest an increase of 20% in absolute terms:
It looks to me that CATO's not using real dollars here -- which is profoundly dishonest. They're using absolute dollars; this makes revenue increases artificially larger and decreases artificially smaller.
CATO's not including 1980 and they are including 1989 (when Reagan wasn't in office). Why? Because doing so allows them to discount drops in 1980 and include rises in 1989.
CATO neglects to mention Reagan's tax hike in 1984.
What? You get a GUI? Us poor windows people have to use the CLI (at least as far as I can see). Not that it isn't powerful (I actually like it, but I'm abnormal).
Must be fun watching the DVD in ASCII art then.:-)
Let's not get too anal-retentive here. Laffer was a supply-side economist, and his "curve" was, IMHO, nothing more than the trivially obvious application of elasticity to taxation. The Curve describes the amount of revenue brought in as a function of the percentage of taxation: if you tax 0% you get 0 revenue; if you tax 100% you get 0 revenue because the economy shuts down; and somewhere in-between there must be at least one non-zero revenue position, so the curve goes up from 0 and back down to 0.
That's all well and good, but Laffer didn't stop there -- he argued that we're at a position where the slope of that curve is negative -- that is, if we tax more, our revenue decreases. The Laffer Curve is the central argument to supply-side economics.
What's amazing is the degree to which supply-side economics resembles religion: because it is almost entirely devoid of evidence. Supply-siders are the creationists of the economics world. It is fairly rare to find any government, much less our own relatively low-tax government, which has ever received lower revenue from marginally higher taxation (or vice versa). Even during the Reagan years, when the supply-siders ran free like herds of buffalo in the White House, the tax cut resulted in dramatically lower revenue.
Well, duh. The problem with Laffer's argument is that, if the government was trying to maximize revenue, it'd just hill-climb right up to the top of the Laffer Curve and stay there. But there is a second force at work: voter anger. If you raise taxes too much you get voted out of office. This force acts to pull taxes down, and hence to the left (positive-slope) side of the curve. The stronger that force, the more on the positive-slope side. To counter this, you need some force to actually move to the negative-slope side, but Laffer, nor any other supply-siders, have ever really proposed one.
Slashdot Mirror
Me: "I'm from the US?"
Japanese Citizen: "Really? Where in Hollywood?"
Me: "No, not Hollywood."
Japanese Citizen: "Oh, I am sorry. Do you like New York?"
No I don't. All I have to do is aruge that the US proportion of Christianity is nontrivial. The guy said "hardly any". Which is total baloney.
Historical biblical scholarship is not the same as literary criticsm. Literary criticism is largely an attempt to gain insight into the mind of the artist, and it is mostly ego-driven baloney. The goal in scholarship, when lacking definitive evidence, is to produce a hypothesis which is the most plausible, straightforward explanation given known (indefinitive) evidence. And so far as I understand it the evidence for JEDP, while not definitive, is a helluva lot stronger than that for the single-author hypothesis (or other major ones). Evidence includes: linguistic and statistical analysis of the text; historical events and the need to jibe with them; numerous repeated stories in the text which can be grouped off with other repeated stories to make internally consistent groups (which are inconsistent with other groups); and an awful lot more. And the trend is bad: generally speaking as new evidence has come to light, it has weakened the single-author argument.
Strikingly, it's the God-wrote-it or Moses-wrote-it-under-God's-direction groups that have constructed epicycles like Copernicus: heap upon heap of crapola attempting to apologize for the mounds of inconsistencies between their theory and the text. At some point the whole house of cards will come crashing down.
It's also striking that you used epicycles to justify your position, as Copernicus is not the one most famous for having to need them. No, that was Ptolemy, and by extension, the Catholic Church. Strange how religion starts needing to build these weird constructions when faced with even a small chunk of damning data.
But the example for how to apply the GPL will do #2. And if you don't include any notice in your program, then you are bound to #3. Guess what percentage of coders release their code under one of those two because they didn't realize the #1 was even an option.
Parts are, parts aren't. From extable.c for example (a random selection):Get ready to get poked in the eye, linux users!
This is not good news. There is a massive amount of code out there which relies on the GPL. Let's say that you put out code under the GPL 2.x and Stallman suddenly decides in 3.0 to add a clause that says that the licensee no longer has to do the viral thing, can use your name in his advertisements, gets to poke you in the eye. Great, says the licensee: I'm upgrading! Time to get eye poked out.
This is why the GPL is bad: using it puts enormous faith in the hands of people who, not to put to fine a point on it, are crazies. This is how we want to be showcasing the stability of the open source paradigm?
Display of work is narrowly defined in law to generally mean performance for an audience: and more to the point, databases are excluded from it.
Things outside of open source are copyrighted all the time for reasons other than commercial benefit.
It was *not* party-line. Only 3/4 of the democrats voted against the act. Thus approximately 30-40 republicans voted against it.
...and about forty Republican congressmen, it would appear. Sounds to me like a bipartisan defeat.
I'll give you a hint. The only possible thing Google could be thought to be infringing on is the right to distribute derivative works. Except that derivative works is defined by the Copyright act as:
The important phrase here is work. A snippet is not a work, nor is a system. A database can be a work, but it is hardly settled law that such a work qualifies as having been "recast, transformed, or adapted" (under the Copyright Act's usage of those terms) -- at any rate, far from "not debatable". Further, the distributing the derived work, not for using it in other ways. And it is certainly the case the making money off of one's work is not a protected right. You'll be hard pressed to find the phrase "commercial benefit" in the Copyright act.It's worthwhile mentioning that if Iowa was a country, it would be #1 by far. Same goes for most of the midwest. Huh. Why is that? Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that nearly every country we're "behind" has no significant proportion of people in poverty? Our middle class citizenry, to this day, still beats out their middle-class citizenry in math and science scores. The problem is that you're comparing by mean, and we are saddled with class divisions these other countries don't have due to their small size, homogeneous population, and almost inconsequential immigrant histories.
Since neither Lisp, Scheme, nor Dylan (in its Lisp form anyway) support operators at all your statement is curious. By which I mean, untrue. Now it's true that Common Lisp supports read-macro characters. But AFAIK it does _not_ support read-macro characters which extend the parser in a non-LL fashion so as to provide inline operators. That is, you can't make a read-macro called + which can be called like this: a + b. Because 'a' has already been parsed, evaluated, and completed. Oh, sure you can hack up some ugliness like +(a b), but that's basically a function now, isn't it.
Here's how a secret patent works. NSA invents something and receives a patent for it which it holds in secret so no one else understands how the invention works. Twenty years later Researcher X and Company Y comes up with the idea and tries to patent it. At that point the USPTO reveals that NSA already holds the patent, it becomes public knowledge, and NSA retains patent control over it.
Examples:
Another option: move the Hubble into orbit around the moon. I wonder if THAT would provide sufficient resolution (and if it'd be cheaper than landing on the moon again). Sean
That's all well and good, but Laffer didn't stop there -- he argued that we're at a position where the slope of that curve is negative -- that is, if we tax more, our revenue decreases. The Laffer Curve is the central argument to supply-side economics.
What's amazing is the degree to which supply-side economics resembles religion: because it is almost entirely devoid of evidence. Supply-siders are the creationists of the economics world. It is fairly rare to find any government, much less our own relatively low-tax government, which has ever received lower revenue from marginally higher taxation (or vice versa). Even during the Reagan years, when the supply-siders ran free like herds of buffalo in the White House, the tax cut resulted in dramatically lower revenue.
Well, duh. The problem with Laffer's argument is that, if the government was trying to maximize revenue, it'd just hill-climb right up to the top of the Laffer Curve and stay there. But there is a second force at work: voter anger. If you raise taxes too much you get voted out of office. This force acts to pull taxes down, and hence to the left (positive-slope) side of the curve. The stronger that force, the more on the positive-slope side. To counter this, you need some force to actually move to the negative-slope side, but Laffer, nor any other supply-siders, have ever really proposed one.
It's baloney.