A lot of the underlying code that allows WMP to run is stuff that loads when XP is booting. The tradeoff is that XP takes longer to boot so that programs take less time to load later on (because it's already pre-loaded all the underlying system stuff; it's really just the front-end interface that has to load, and that's relatively lightweight compared to the dozens of codecs, media drivers, DRM stuff, etc. that XP loaded when you were booting up. And the 7MB of RAM is what the WMP binary itself uses, not counting all the memory taken up by the aforementioned codecs, drivers, etc. that are lower-level XP software.
Not that this proves anything, but you seem to be under the impression that the entirety of WMP is contained in that 17 MB directory, which (to the best of my knowledge) is not the case.
if a Hafnium bomb could be built, it is thought that a golf ball sized chunk could produce the energy equivalent of 10 tons of conventional explosives
1 golf ball = 10 tons of (e.g.) TNT
1,000 golf balls = 10,000 tons of TNT = 10 kilotons of TNT
1,000,000 golf balls = 10,000,000 tons of TNT = 10 megatons of TNT
Thus one million golf balls' worth of Hafnium would (theoretically) produce an explosion with the force of 10 megatons of TNT. The original poster was correct.
Open source developers are not your employee/slave,
Not true. If MS donated, say, a million dollars to the Mozilla Foundation, I'm sure they'd be more than willing to create an Avalon, XAML, or.NET branch.
What? If they donated a million dollars to Mozilla, and Mozilla then decided to create an Avalon/XAML/.NET branch, the Mozilla developers still wouldn't be MS's employees or slaves.
The grandparent was talking about OS developers in the general case; naturally it's possible to contrive all sorts of situations where an open source developer is your employee. (Slavery is a bit more difficult, what with its being illegal and all.)
3m-sided cube is 9.8425 feet on a side, or 118.11 inches, or 1,647,631 cubic inches. A golf ball is 1.73 inches in diameter, or 3.142436 cubic inches. A million golf balls would be thus 3,142,436 cubic inches, or 1.907 times larger than a 3m cube. QED, one million golf ball volumes would not fit into a 3m cube. It would take a cube 3.7m on a side, which is considerably larger.
Fusion bombs are nowhere near that large. Incidentally, a cube 3 meters on a side is 27 cubic meters, not 9 cubic meters.
It might be reasonable to assume that if we manage to achieve clinical immortality, we might be able to transform ourselves to vastly increase our mental capacities, or download our consciousness into a computer, blah blah science-fiction-cakes. Read Diaspora, Schild's Ladder, or Permutation City by Greg Egan for ideas. Yeah, I know it's just sci-fi, but as long as we're dreaming, let's dream big, instead of assuming one fantastical thing and then assuming we wouldn't be able to get past problems it might engender.
Someone came up with that idea quite awhile ago here on/., but I don't recall the story or context, unfortunately. It was along the lines of:
"Ashcroft's Corollary to Godwin's Law: As a debate proceeds, the probability that one or more parties will be accused of being or supporting terrorists will approach 1."
I've never quite understood the strange enmity that many Bay Area residents have toward L.A. The only thing I can think of is some kind of envy, because nobody in L.A. gives any thought, positive or negative, to San Francisco.:)
The spammers are way ahead of you -- there was a Slashdot article about this some time ago.
So either:
1) You thought of something clever independently. Congrats! You've got a bright future ahead of you as a programmer.
2) You forgot that you'd read an article about this, and thought you came up with it on your own. Poor you. You've got a dim future ahead of you as a tech support monkey.
3) You pretended to come up with this idea on your own even though you know you read it in an article. Programmers of the world, tremble in fear, and witness the birth of a middle manager.
Copyright law (in the U.S.) does not give the copyright holder any say over how their work is used by an individual who legally possesses a copy. Copyright law only gives power to the copyright holder over making and distributing copies, and (where appropriate) publicly performing the work. If you legally buy a copy of a work that is available to any member of the public willing to pay, you can take that copy home and read it, listen to it, watch it, burn it (set it on fire, not burn it to a CD), wallpaper your room with it, wipe your ass with it, or whatever else you see fit. (As long as that use isn't illegal in other senses, e.g. you may not beat someone to death with it.)
The DMCA (and now various DRM schemes) effectively give the copyright holder a right they never had before: the right to dictate how you can use that work in the privacy of your own home. Copyright law doesn't say that Disney can force you to only watch their Aladdin DVD using software that Disney has approved... but the DMCA does. Since the DVD CCA controls its DVD decryption software as a trade secret, and only licenses it to DVD player-manufacturing companies who paid them a fee, AND since (thanks to the DMCA) it is illegal for a customer to reverse-engineer that DVD player in order to find out how the decryption works and write their own software... well, you get the picture.
The solution to this problem is left as an exercise for the reader.
Copyright isn't for "intellectual property," it's for creative works, e.g. novels, poetry, short stories, movies, comics, music, artwork, etc. Copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets are all forms of intellectual property.
remember Werner Von Braun's observation that people are the most sophisticated computer there is AND the only one we can mass-produce.
The actual quote: "Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." (emphasis added)
No, there is technically no such thing as a naturally intuitive interface. However, there is such a thing as a naturally unituitive interface.
Interfaces that are not "naturally unintuitive" are by definition intuitive. As long as there exists at least one interface which is not "naturally unintuitive" (which you apparently believe PS to be), your statements contradict each other. This has no bearing on whether PS or GIMP are actually intuitive or not, I just thought I'd point out that your argument makes no sense as you've stated it.
Photoshop is immediately intuitive to the vast majority of computer users who sit down at it. The GIMP is NOT
Presumably you have some hard statistical evidence to back this up, beyond the inevitable, "Well everyone *I* know who has tried PS/GIMP has liked/hated it!" You do know what confirmation bias is, right?
I really hope this leads to more free educational videos online. The BBC has been doing a great job of making that material available for free
An experiment was carried out to determine the effects of an open source video codec on the Internet. Here we have our lab assistant, Len, who has been empowered via sulphagne to shoot lasers from his eyes. Let's see what happens when we introduce Len to the codec.
I suppose the average effect of a given weapon might be used to determine whether it should be legal. Weapons that are effective at personal defense (handguns, certainly; but assault rifles?) would be justified, but weapons designed for destroying buildings, killing large numbers of people at a time, or destroying cities have little bearing on personal defense. Of course, the nature of our society affects this: if the crime rate were significantly higher, such that armed gangs roamed the streets in such force that very few places had police as the ultimate authority, it would probably be justifiable for private citizens to own more powerful, more destructive weapons.
But as it stands, in the U.S. at least, a private citizen is exceedingly unlikely to need to fight off a sizable armed force, or in fact more than one or two assailants at a time. (I'm sure there are some exceptions to this.) As such, it's justifiable to limit civilians to very small arms, at least from the point of view of personal defense from other civilians.
In other words, if you can't use the weapon to attack someone who is inside your home without destroying your home in the process, then the weapon's not generally okay to have. Granted you could fuck up parts of your home with a handgun (and enough bullets), but generally by the time a few bullets are exchanged, either you or the intruder are going to be wounded or dead. With weapons that are ineffective at home defense (e.g. a two-man chaingun or somesuch), or weapons that would blow your home to smithereens (artillery, nuclear weapons), there is no reasonable personal-defense justification for a private citizen to own one.
Of course, it's arguable that the primary reason to allow citizens to "bear arms" is to defend against a corrupt government, and not merely to protect against criminals... in which case, tactical and strategic weaponry (howitzers, tanks, nukes) are possibly justifiable. This seems to be an interesting side-effect of the fact that in 1776, the government didn't really have weapons that private citizens couldn't also easily get. Small arms were everywhere. At best the government also had cannon, but these were completely ineffective against the kind of guerilla warfare the colonials undertook. As a result, when creating the Constitution, it seemed reasonable to the framers that civilians should be able to arm themselves as well as the goverment, so that they might prevent an oppressive regime from taking over. It's pretty obvious that they neither predicted the advance of technology (not that we should have expected them to), nor the creeping advance of government, slowly taking more and more power over the centuries.
These days, the government has weapons far beyond what a normal citizen can reasonably procure or produce -- field artillery, tanks, helicopters, aircraft, gravity bombs, guided missiles, nuclear weapons, etc. So this has become a very interesting debate indeed.
For my part, I really don't know where I stand. When I was younger, I was unassailably anti-gun, and then later I heard some very persuasive arguments (mostly of the defending-from-the-government variety) that tilted me more in favor of gun ownership. At this point, I'm realizing that, much like most things in life, the entire debate is an intensely complicated arena with no clear, simple solutions. Preliminarily, I tend to think the following:
1) Private citizens should be allowed to own certain weapons. Which weapons is matter for debate, and depends on how likely we are to have to fight off the government in the near future. Better than arming everyone might be to disempower the government to a degree, and bring it more under the control of the people, instead of letting it become increasingly autonomous and corrupt.
2) If you own a weapon, that is your right, but with it comes responsibility. You must be fully trained in the use of that weapon. You must take responsibility for the weapon and whatever it g
If they don't want you to be able to do thing 'x' with it, then you can't, it's that simple.
Wrong. Copyright law does not give the copyright holder any rights over what a work can be used for. It only gives rights over making and distributing copies of that work (and in some cases, public performances of that work, where appropriate). It says nothing about what I may do with a copy of your work in the privacy of my home.
Up until 1998, that meant that if I went to the store and bought a DVD, I could legally come home and play that DVD on a DVD player, computer, toaster, xylophone, or any other device I could somehow jury-rig into playing a DVD. I could also set the DVD on fire, break it into bits, or print out a text dump of the DVD and wallpaper my bathroom with it. All legally.
Then the DMCA came along. This made it illegal to circumvent encryption that restricted access to copyrighted works, if you did not have a separate right to access that work (by having the proper key for the encryption -- e.g. a licensed DVD player).
For the first time in history, copyright holders gained the right to tell us what we could legally do with copies of their works that we purchased legally. This is a right they had never had before, and (just as before) there is no legitimate reason for them to have that ability. It has the only effect of increasing their profits, and they already had far more than sufficient compensation for the act of creation before the DMCA was invented.
(One tiny exception to the above is that you could sign a contract with a copyright holder, saying that in exchange for you giving them money, they would give you a copy of their work, and you would agree not to use it in certain ways. So in that circumstance, you might legally be prohibited (by the contract you signed) from doing certain things with the DVD. However, normal store purchases of copyrighted works never had and still do not form any contractual obligation between the copyright holder and the customer; nothing is signed, no contract is present, no terms are specified or agreed to. So de facto, this does not happen.)
Means to infringe on someone else's rights should _never_ be outlawed.
I may just be playing Devil's advocate here, but what about something like nuclear weapons? If guns should be legal, but shooting people illegal, then why shouldn't nuclear weapons be legal, but nuking people illegal? Or do you really think it would be a good idea to make nuclear weapons legal for any random citizen to own?
The justification is that while a tool itself does not necessarily need to be used for an illegal purpose, there may not be any legal uses for a particular tool. When this is the case, since it's (usually) easier to prevent the manufacture of such tools than it is to go after every illegal action performed with them, it is therefore simpler and easier to outlaw the tool rather than merely outlaw its uses.
Of course, when it is not easier to prevent creation of the tool than it is to pursue those who make illegal use of it, as is the case with software, the argument goes right out the window.
It seems to me (I may be wrong) that agencies like the FBI may well be empowered to exist because of this paragraph from Article II, Section 2:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States,
whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments. (emphasis added)
I'm not arguing that all federal agencies, programs, and departments are necessarily strictly Constitutional, but there certainly does seem to be a Constitutional basis for some of them. Debate is, of course, welcome.
Those with faith would probably mention that there's more to life than just competing with everybody else.
I've known (and known of) quite a number of people who had faith but had no problem with looking at life this way. Quite a lot of fundamentalist religious types believe that they best serve their God by out-competing everyone else -- making great achievements "for the glory of God," and so forth.
That's a rather scientific, results-oriented way of looking at it
Considering the only alternative is an irrational, random-outcome-oriented way of looking at it, what exactly is wrong with being scientific?
Science can't really say God does or does not exist, though, because God theoretically has the capability to do anything he/she pleases, and there's no way you can test that with a scientific theory.
Nobody sanely claims that science can do so, so what's your point? Those who understand the scientific process know that the supernatural is (by definition) outside the realm of scientific inquiry.
As a side note, even such a well-known atheist as Carl Sagan believed in God near the end.
I assume you're able to provide evidence for this claim. I'd like to know what it is, since I've never heard this claim before (and it is a pretty outlandish claim, considering Sagan's history).
Death has a powerful concentrating effect on people's minds.
Nothing personal, but this is meaningless gibberish. What exactly is it concentrating? I've nearly died a few times and never once did I even consider starting to believe in God.
You really don't have that much to lose, if you want to look at it rationally. Blaise Pascal once said something along these lines. Either (1) God exists, or (2) God does not exist. In case (2), whether or not you believe does not matter. In case (1), it very much matters. Incidentally, in either case not believing doesn't really confer any long term benefit. I guess it depends on whether or not you're a gambling man.:)
Pascal's Wager is extremely problematic. Off the top of my head:
1) The Wager proposes a false dichotomy by assuming that the only possibilities are A) the Christian God exists, or B) no gods exist. It excludes the rather obvious C) one or more non-Christian gods exist.
2) What if you believe in the wrong God? If you're going to assume that a god exists, how can you be sure which one it is? If you believe in God (Yahweh) but the real god is Zoroaster (or Zeus, Odin, etc.) isn't he going to be pretty pissed off if you worship the wrong god? Believing in God is NOT a no-lose proposition.
3) The Christian God, from what I've seen in the Bible, would not take kindly to those who choose to believe only because they've weighed the benefits -- namely, because they're taking a calculated gamble.
This page goes into more detail about Pascal's Wager.
Thanks for pointing that out. Oddly enough, I actually have read the Bible up through 1 Kings, but it was several years ago and I don't seem to have retained much of it.;)
So I guess the explanation really IS, "And then a whole bunch of miracles happened." There's no point in even arguing that it should have been logically problematic, since the Bible itself explicitly states that God performed several miracles in order to help Noah actually perform his task.
This is kind of a double-edged sword, but both edges actually work against the Bible. On the one hand, literalists who try to come up with logical explanations for the Flood can be shut down by saying, "Why are you trying to explain it? The Bible says it was a bunch of miracles. Surely that's good enough for you?" And those who say, "We don't need to explain the Flood, the Bible says God did miracles, so that's what happened!" can be bludgeoned with the usual faith-vs.-empirical-evidence stick.
This is... possibly a good point, actually, now that I think about it. If you're going to assume that God actually did manage to flood the world, why not assume that he miraculously made it possible for the carnivores to survive on whatever non-animal food Noah brought along?
I think the issue is that the grandparent (and others like him... such as me) aren't assuming that the one happened but not the other. What we're saying is more like this:
"The idea of a worldwide flood itself has all these various and sundry problems, A, B, C, etc..."
"But IF you come up with explanations for those problems (without invoking miracles), then you have the problem of Noah building this incredibly unlikely boat, and sub-problems D, E, F, etc..."
"But even IF you assume that Noah got the boat built (without God performing a specific boat-building miracle), then you have to figure out how Noah got all the animals to the boat, sub-problems G, H, I, etc..."
"But, again, even IF you assume that Noah got all the animals there (again, without a divine miracle to help), you have to figure out how he kept thousands of animal species and millions of insect species alive and fed for 40 days, which causes sub-problems J, K, and L... etc..."
And so on and so forth. The whole idea is to point out the innumerable problems with the whole plan. Naturally you can just invoke miracles left and right, but the whole point of scientific inquiry is to understand our world, and if the response to that is, "You shouldn't try to understand it, you should just have faith," then guess what? Those who understand it are inevitably going to out-compete those who don't.
Something that I think gets lost frequently in the Noah's ark discussion is the fact that most relegions have a flood myth in one form or another.
Not hardly. It gets brought up every time. Those who believe that the Great Flood literally happened claim that most ancient cultures had flood myths because, well, the Flood actually happened. Those who are aware of the literally complete lack of evidence supporting any kind of worldwide Great Flood claim that most ancient cultures had flood myths because they tended to live along rivers or on floodplains, which did (and still do) flood from time to time. History embellishes, especially spoken history, and it's no surprise that a flood myth would arise in numerous different cultures.
Re flood myths: Keep in mind that, especially in antiquity, the overwhelming majority of nascent civilizations were situated on rivers.
What do rivers do every so often?
Flood.
What do humans do with old stories?
Embellish them.
All it takes is a few severe floods, a few hundred years of stories passed down and embroidered a bit here and there, and you've got a worldwide flood... and every society can generate its own.
There's also the hypothesis that the Black Sea flooded a few thousand years ago: the Bosporus straits were originally high enough to keep the waters of the Mediterranean at bay. Eventually they eroded, and the Med flowed into the lower terrain of what is now the Black Sea.
Flood myths don't need an extremely logically problematic worldwide flood to explain them. There's a much simpler, more logical, and much better-supported (evidence-wise) explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the underlying code that allows WMP to run is stuff that loads when XP is booting. The tradeoff is that XP takes longer to boot so that programs take less time to load later on (because it's already pre-loaded all the underlying system stuff; it's really just the front-end interface that has to load, and that's relatively lightweight compared to the dozens of codecs, media drivers, DRM stuff, etc. that XP loaded when you were booting up. And the 7MB of RAM is what the WMP binary itself uses, not counting all the memory taken up by the aforementioned codecs, drivers, etc. that are lower-level XP software.
Not that this proves anything, but you seem to be under the impression that the entirety of WMP is contained in that 17 MB directory, which (to the best of my knowledge) is not the case.
1,000 golf balls = 10,000 tons of TNT = 10 kilotons of TNT
1,000,000 golf balls = 10,000,000 tons of TNT = 10 megatons of TNT
Thus one million golf balls' worth of Hafnium would (theoretically) produce an explosion with the force of 10 megatons of TNT. The original poster was correct.
The grandparent was talking about OS developers in the general case; naturally it's possible to contrive all sorts of situations where an open source developer is your employee. (Slavery is a bit more difficult, what with its being illegal and all.)
3m-sided cube is 9.8425 feet on a side, or 118.11 inches, or 1,647,631 cubic inches. A golf ball is 1.73 inches in diameter, or 3.142436 cubic inches. A million golf balls would be thus 3,142,436 cubic inches, or 1.907 times larger than a 3m cube. QED, one million golf ball volumes would not fit into a 3m cube. It would take a cube 3.7m on a side, which is considerably larger.
Fusion bombs are nowhere near that large. Incidentally, a cube 3 meters on a side is 27 cubic meters, not 9 cubic meters.
It might be reasonable to assume that if we manage to achieve clinical immortality, we might be able to transform ourselves to vastly increase our mental capacities, or download our consciousness into a computer, blah blah science-fiction-cakes. Read Diaspora, Schild's Ladder, or Permutation City by Greg Egan for ideas. Yeah, I know it's just sci-fi, but as long as we're dreaming, let's dream big, instead of assuming one fantastical thing and then assuming we wouldn't be able to get past problems it might engender.
Someone came up with that idea quite awhile ago here on /., but I don't recall the story or context, unfortunately. It was along the lines of:
"Ashcroft's Corollary to Godwin's Law: As a debate proceeds, the probability that one or more parties will be accused of being or supporting terrorists will approach 1."
I've never quite understood the strange enmity that many Bay Area residents have toward L.A. The only thing I can think of is some kind of envy, because nobody in L.A. gives any thought, positive or negative, to San Francisco. :)
The spammers are way ahead of you -- there was a Slashdot article about this some time ago.
So either:
1) You thought of something clever independently. Congrats! You've got a bright future ahead of you as a programmer.
2) You forgot that you'd read an article about this, and thought you came up with it on your own. Poor you. You've got a dim future ahead of you as a tech support monkey.
3) You pretended to come up with this idea on your own even though you know you read it in an article. Programmers of the world, tremble in fear, and witness the birth of a middle manager.
Copyright law (in the U.S.) does not give the copyright holder any say over how their work is used by an individual who legally possesses a copy. Copyright law only gives power to the copyright holder over making and distributing copies, and (where appropriate) publicly performing the work. If you legally buy a copy of a work that is available to any member of the public willing to pay, you can take that copy home and read it, listen to it, watch it, burn it (set it on fire, not burn it to a CD), wallpaper your room with it, wipe your ass with it, or whatever else you see fit. (As long as that use isn't illegal in other senses, e.g. you may not beat someone to death with it.)
The DMCA (and now various DRM schemes) effectively give the copyright holder a right they never had before: the right to dictate how you can use that work in the privacy of your own home. Copyright law doesn't say that Disney can force you to only watch their Aladdin DVD using software that Disney has approved... but the DMCA does. Since the DVD CCA controls its DVD decryption software as a trade secret, and only licenses it to DVD player-manufacturing companies who paid them a fee, AND since (thanks to the DMCA) it is illegal for a customer to reverse-engineer that DVD player in order to find out how the decryption works and write their own software... well, you get the picture.
The solution to this problem is left as an exercise for the reader.
Copyright isn't for "intellectual property," it's for creative works, e.g. novels, poetry, short stories, movies, comics, music, artwork, etc. Copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets are all forms of intellectual property.
Good quotes.
I suppose the average effect of a given weapon might be used to determine whether it should be legal. Weapons that are effective at personal defense (handguns, certainly; but assault rifles?) would be justified, but weapons designed for destroying buildings, killing large numbers of people at a time, or destroying cities have little bearing on personal defense. Of course, the nature of our society affects this: if the crime rate were significantly higher, such that armed gangs roamed the streets in such force that very few places had police as the ultimate authority, it would probably be justifiable for private citizens to own more powerful, more destructive weapons.
But as it stands, in the U.S. at least, a private citizen is exceedingly unlikely to need to fight off a sizable armed force, or in fact more than one or two assailants at a time. (I'm sure there are some exceptions to this.) As such, it's justifiable to limit civilians to very small arms, at least from the point of view of personal defense from other civilians.
In other words, if you can't use the weapon to attack someone who is inside your home without destroying your home in the process, then the weapon's not generally okay to have. Granted you could fuck up parts of your home with a handgun (and enough bullets), but generally by the time a few bullets are exchanged, either you or the intruder are going to be wounded or dead. With weapons that are ineffective at home defense (e.g. a two-man chaingun or somesuch), or weapons that would blow your home to smithereens (artillery, nuclear weapons), there is no reasonable personal-defense justification for a private citizen to own one.
Of course, it's arguable that the primary reason to allow citizens to "bear arms" is to defend against a corrupt government, and not merely to protect against criminals... in which case, tactical and strategic weaponry (howitzers, tanks, nukes) are possibly justifiable. This seems to be an interesting side-effect of the fact that in 1776, the government didn't really have weapons that private citizens couldn't also easily get. Small arms were everywhere. At best the government also had cannon, but these were completely ineffective against the kind of guerilla warfare the colonials undertook. As a result, when creating the Constitution, it seemed reasonable to the framers that civilians should be able to arm themselves as well as the goverment, so that they might prevent an oppressive regime from taking over. It's pretty obvious that they neither predicted the advance of technology (not that we should have expected them to), nor the creeping advance of government, slowly taking more and more power over the centuries.
These days, the government has weapons far beyond what a normal citizen can reasonably procure or produce -- field artillery, tanks, helicopters, aircraft, gravity bombs, guided missiles, nuclear weapons, etc. So this has become a very interesting debate indeed.
For my part, I really don't know where I stand. When I was younger, I was unassailably anti-gun, and then later I heard some very persuasive arguments (mostly of the defending-from-the-government variety) that tilted me more in favor of gun ownership. At this point, I'm realizing that, much like most things in life, the entire debate is an intensely complicated arena with no clear, simple solutions. Preliminarily, I tend to think the following:
1) Private citizens should be allowed to own certain weapons. Which weapons is matter for debate, and depends on how likely we are to have to fight off the government in the near future. Better than arming everyone might be to disempower the government to a degree, and bring it more under the control of the people, instead of letting it become increasingly autonomous and corrupt.
2) If you own a weapon, that is your right, but with it comes responsibility. You must be fully trained in the use of that weapon. You must take responsibility for the weapon and whatever it g
Up until 1998, that meant that if I went to the store and bought a DVD, I could legally come home and play that DVD on a DVD player, computer, toaster, xylophone, or any other device I could somehow jury-rig into playing a DVD. I could also set the DVD on fire, break it into bits, or print out a text dump of the DVD and wallpaper my bathroom with it. All legally.
Then the DMCA came along. This made it illegal to circumvent encryption that restricted access to copyrighted works, if you did not have a separate right to access that work (by having the proper key for the encryption -- e.g. a licensed DVD player).
For the first time in history, copyright holders gained the right to tell us what we could legally do with copies of their works that we purchased legally. This is a right they had never had before, and (just as before) there is no legitimate reason for them to have that ability. It has the only effect of increasing their profits, and they already had far more than sufficient compensation for the act of creation before the DMCA was invented.
(One tiny exception to the above is that you could sign a contract with a copyright holder, saying that in exchange for you giving them money, they would give you a copy of their work, and you would agree not to use it in certain ways. So in that circumstance, you might legally be prohibited (by the contract you signed) from doing certain things with the DVD. However, normal store purchases of copyrighted works never had and still do not form any contractual obligation between the copyright holder and the customer; nothing is signed, no contract is present, no terms are specified or agreed to. So de facto, this does not happen.)
The justification is that while a tool itself does not necessarily need to be used for an illegal purpose, there may not be any legal uses for a particular tool. When this is the case, since it's (usually) easier to prevent the manufacture of such tools than it is to go after every illegal action performed with them, it is therefore simpler and easier to outlaw the tool rather than merely outlaw its uses.
Of course, when it is not easier to prevent creation of the tool than it is to pursue those who make illegal use of it, as is the case with software, the argument goes right out the window.
Hulk debate!
1) The Wager proposes a false dichotomy by assuming that the only possibilities are A) the Christian God exists, or B) no gods exist. It excludes the rather obvious C) one or more non-Christian gods exist.
2) What if you believe in the wrong God? If you're going to assume that a god exists, how can you be sure which one it is? If you believe in God (Yahweh) but the real god is Zoroaster (or Zeus, Odin, etc.) isn't he going to be pretty pissed off if you worship the wrong god? Believing in God is NOT a no-lose proposition.
3) The Christian God, from what I've seen in the Bible, would not take kindly to those who choose to believe only because they've weighed the benefits -- namely, because they're taking a calculated gamble.
This page goes into more detail about Pascal's Wager.
Isn't incorrect information worse than no information at all?
Thanks for pointing that out. Oddly enough, I actually have read the Bible up through 1 Kings, but it was several years ago and I don't seem to have retained much of it. ;)
So I guess the explanation really IS, "And then a whole bunch of miracles happened." There's no point in even arguing that it should have been logically problematic, since the Bible itself explicitly states that God performed several miracles in order to help Noah actually perform his task.
This is kind of a double-edged sword, but both edges actually work against the Bible. On the one hand, literalists who try to come up with logical explanations for the Flood can be shut down by saying, "Why are you trying to explain it? The Bible says it was a bunch of miracles. Surely that's good enough for you?" And those who say, "We don't need to explain the Flood, the Bible says God did miracles, so that's what happened!" can be bludgeoned with the usual faith-vs.-empirical-evidence stick.
This is... possibly a good point, actually, now that I think about it. If you're going to assume that God actually did manage to flood the world, why not assume that he miraculously made it possible for the carnivores to survive on whatever non-animal food Noah brought along?
I think the issue is that the grandparent (and others like him... such as me) aren't assuming that the one happened but not the other. What we're saying is more like this:
"The idea of a worldwide flood itself has all these various and sundry problems, A, B, C, etc..."
"But IF you come up with explanations for those problems (without invoking miracles), then you have the problem of Noah building this incredibly unlikely boat, and sub-problems D, E, F, etc..."
"But even IF you assume that Noah got the boat built (without God performing a specific boat-building miracle), then you have to figure out how Noah got all the animals to the boat, sub-problems G, H, I, etc..."
"But, again, even IF you assume that Noah got all the animals there (again, without a divine miracle to help), you have to figure out how he kept thousands of animal species and millions of insect species alive and fed for 40 days, which causes sub-problems J, K, and L... etc..."
And so on and so forth. The whole idea is to point out the innumerable problems with the whole plan. Naturally you can just invoke miracles left and right, but the whole point of scientific inquiry is to understand our world, and if the response to that is, "You shouldn't try to understand it, you should just have faith," then guess what? Those who understand it are inevitably going to out-compete those who don't.
Re flood myths: Keep in mind that, especially in antiquity, the overwhelming majority of nascent civilizations were situated on rivers.
What do rivers do every so often?
Flood.
What do humans do with old stories?
Embellish them.
All it takes is a few severe floods, a few hundred years of stories passed down and embroidered a bit here and there, and you've got a worldwide flood... and every society can generate its own.
There's also the hypothesis that the Black Sea flooded a few thousand years ago: the Bosporus straits were originally high enough to keep the waters of the Mediterranean at bay. Eventually they eroded, and the Med flowed into the lower terrain of what is now the Black Sea.
Flood myths don't need an extremely logically problematic worldwide flood to explain them. There's a much simpler, more logical, and much better-supported (evidence-wise) explanation.