Back at version 3.62 it really was the best in a lot of ways. You could fit the entire binary on a 3.5" floppy disk, and it was fast even on the slowest machines. You could kill scripts and formatting and image loading (or enable them) on a window by window basis with a single click. If it had been Free Software it would have changed the world. Instead, it has only bloated with age. Knowing that the new version is based on Chrome I doubt I will even bother to try it.
"I know you don't get it. That's why you struggle to understand how Islam is different to the others. You see, the other mythologies *were* just as bad, but have reformed. They are no less bullshit today, but they agree with separation of Church and State. No-one in the mainstream of these religions contests this. Furthermore, both of these assert no authority over non-believers. "
There are actually around a dozen explicitly Christian nations, and quite a few more that despite separating church and state at some level nonetheless have recognised national churches. Judaism, or at least the Orthodox Rabbinate, has a state as well.
The fundamentalist Muslims are typically Salafists or Wahhabis. Those sects are a tiny minority. The largest sect of Islam is the Sufis. They are often targets of terror attacks, fundamentalists hate them.
The danger here is that if we believe the nonsense you believe, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The majority of muslims are moderate, but enough indiscriminate bombing and we might just be able to reverse that...
It strains credulity to believe anyone could be as dense as you are acting here.
The wiki article notes that the phrase is commonly misused (like most any technical phrase) but it also alerts you as to what we are referring to - human computers were used for centuries to do exactly what digital computers do today, in e.g. astronomy. They would take input, mechanically apply the designated algorithm, and produce output, just as I have described. They usually worked in teams, with many processors running either in parallel, serial, or both, depending on the job. In the article I linked you can even see a picture of some human computers along with their requisite tools - desks, paper, pens.
You are either extraordinarily dense, extraordinarily ignorant of the subject you chose to expound on, or both.
"It's really just a question of who should be sitting on a stockpile of money and pumping that back into themselves? The government, or a company that makes iPads?"
Neither, please.
But if that's really the only choices you can come up with? Apple should get the money. At least they wont use it to drop bombs. Probably.
Being a human computer is not simply doing a trivial sum in ones head. It means taking input (on paper) doing complicated calculations with that input (again, on paper) and then producing output (on paper.)
"The human doesn't need any hardware to add two numbers, or calculate sums of angles. "
Incorrect. A human needs a pen and paper in order to do the calculations (of course we can do trivial sums in our head but a 'human calculator' requires more than that.) An abacus is extremely helpful as well. And of course, the numbers come from somewhere (input) and when the calculations are complete they are then transmitted in some way as well (output.)
I never said they could do it without any hardware. A human calculator needs essentially the same hardware to do this that a digital computer would. A general purpose digital computer still needs I/O devices to do anything useful, and a human computer doing the same job would need the same.
"So, for example, a patent claim of triangulating a position given three signals is not patentable, because we could do that on paper. But a patent claim that includes receiving those signals from a GPS satellite with an antenna is patentable. "
Which just shows the absurdity of the patent regime. Your argument that a human being could not do that is worse than wrong, it's entirely ignorant. There is no way to triangulate signals without having an antenna involved, and the type of antenna is a purely functional choice based on the situation. Absolutely anything that a computer can do, a person can do. I/O devices? All the computer does with them is send and receive numbers - just exactly the same way a human computer would send and receive numbers appropriately in the same situation.
Yes, when a corporation or any other sort of business pays taxes, that tax is simply another expense which they pass onto their customers. There are a few possible variations on that - if one business is hit with a tax that its competitors manage to avoid, for instance, that business is likely to be OUT of business as a result. But if it's imposed across the board, it simply adds to the operating costs of the businesses affected, and the entire tax burden falls on individuals. When the companies in question are huge multinationals that just means it's even less likely that we little people will be able to find any workable way around paying it.
You can call me stupid and post silly pictures all you want but it's still true.
I dont agree that tax is inevitable (or only possible to get rid of via anarchy) but setting that aside and accepting your contention for the sake of argument - taxes in such a situation should still be assessed directly against the people that actually have to pay them, so that they arent invisible.
You pose a false dilemma. You imply there are only two possible answers, but in fact they are both wrong, and the correct answer is entirely different.
Now let's start with another question, one you didnt include. Do you think multinationals pay tax or not?
Because if you think they do you sir do not understand the basics here. They do not pay taxes, never have, never will. Any and all taxes assessed against them are and will be paid by their customers. No amount of fiddling with tax codes is ever going to change that basic fact, and beyond that, any such fiddling is inevitably going to be done with the interests of said multinationals at the forefront, since they are the ones that wield enough influence with legislators to get what they want.
So it has nothing to do with what I think *should* happen here, but only with what we know from experience and reason does, will and must happen. Whatever tax burden corporations are purportedly saddled with, it is the individual that ultimately pays them.
The solution is to reduce government spending, and thus the total tax burden. All the noise about corporate taxation serves a single purpose - to distract people from that fact and keep us divided and blaming each other so that we dont unite against our common oppressors.
"Let me ask you a question â" is your objection that felons who have served their time can't vote or that the standard for felonies â" those major crimes against society â" has been watered down? Because it sounds to me that it is the watering down of felonies that is your issues â" and I would agree with you there."
I cant speak for the other poster but I would say both contentions are correct. A lot of things are being called felonies now that should not be. But even beyond that, I believe the grandparent poster is correct. Once someone has served their 'debt to society' and are released they should be free again.
"And some functions really have to be reserved to some form of government at a basic level, unless you want to start outsourcing things like making laws and starting wars to private industry."
Instead of assuming such functions would have to be 'outsourced' why not consider eliminating them? Certainly starting wars is a function we could do without.
To the contrary, it is a very precise and correct phrase that sets the entire issue in its proper context. What do you call it when someone takes money from you involuntarily? Theft. What do you call it when you voluntarily give someone money in exchange for a product or service? Commerce. The two words cover most logical possibilities, but to cover them all we must introduce a third term - gift. This is when you give money to someone, but your benefits are intrinsic or internal, rather than the other person giving you something in exchange.
With those three words we cover all logical possibilities for describing a situation where money changes hands.
Is taxation commerce? Statists often attempt to argue that it is - that the government provides services which taxes pay for. But this does not stand up to scrutiny - because the crucial element of *voluntary exchange* is missing. If you have no need for these 'services' can you opt out? No, pay up. If the 'services' are actually inimicable to your well being, and you would voluntarily pay simply for their absence? No one cares, pay up or we will send men with guns to take it.
So it's not commerce. What about charity? Again, this may seem reasonable if you dont think about it - there are similarities. Charity is giving money for the greater good, and all states *claim* that they spend tax money for the greater good. But again, the crucial element is missing - taxes are *not* voluntary.
So we have ruled out two of the three words that can describe how money changes hands, and have one left by process of elimination - theft. But does it really fit? Well, yes it does. Taxes are not voluntary, and if people dont often get teams of armed men sent out after them over it is only because the mere threat, explicit or implicit, is strong and credible and normally suffices. When people take what belongs to you, using force or threat of force, without your consent, that is theft.
The governmental wrong-doing is obvious. They steal money, openly, blatantly, and use it for all manner of evil. The big multi-national corporations are hardly paragons of virtue, but looking narrowly at 'tax avoidance' - using any and all legal means to minimise the loss - it's hard to see how there could possibly be anything wrong with that.
It was all information then. Nowadays it's a lot bulkier but 98% of it is crap. There may be as much useful information on it but it's a lot harder to find it when every search brings up millions of pages of bullshit. And the 'improvements' in the search engines have been quite negative on balance as well.
Cookies used to be really easy to deal with using mozilla, it wrote them all to cookies.txt. You just went in, deleted cookies.txt once, then mkdir cookies.txt. Then set it to allow cookies across the board. All websites worked fine, but anytime you restarted the browser they were all gone. Not 100% ideal but still a quick and relatively foolproof way to assert some sanity. So of course they changed that.
Now... let me get this straight, they are thinking about maybe, eventually, blocking third party cookies by default. Better late than never I guess, but it seems pathetic both in timing and scope as well, since they appear to be worried only about cookies(!) rather than scripting. Third party scripts are a much bigger problem. Both cases should have been blocked by default 10 years or more ago. At this point, yes, I would imagine some problems.
Only a few years ago I would predict people would eventually argue this with a straight face, as you appear to have just done. I was laughed at.
Just because a business that depends on ads for revenue doesnt obligate you to watch them. That's absurd. Next you need surveillance in my home to make sure I dont 'steal' a tv program by going to the bathroom during a commercial break, right?
Words fail me, I cannot express how stupid your post and argument are.
Slashdot Mirror
Back at version 3.62 it really was the best in a lot of ways. You could fit the entire binary on a 3.5" floppy disk, and it was fast even on the slowest machines. You could kill scripts and formatting and image loading (or enable them) on a window by window basis with a single click. If it had been Free Software it would have changed the world. Instead, it has only bloated with age. Knowing that the new version is based on Chrome I doubt I will even bother to try it.
"I know you don't get it. That's why you struggle to understand how Islam is different to the others. You see, the other mythologies *were* just as bad, but have reformed. They are no less bullshit today, but they agree with separation of Church and State. No-one in the mainstream of these religions contests this. Furthermore, both of these assert no authority over non-believers. "
There are actually around a dozen explicitly Christian nations, and quite a few more that despite separating church and state at some level nonetheless have recognised national churches. Judaism, or at least the Orthodox Rabbinate, has a state as well.
The fundamentalist Muslims are typically Salafists or Wahhabis. Those sects are a tiny minority. The largest sect of Islam is the Sufis. They are often targets of terror attacks, fundamentalists hate them.
The danger here is that if we believe the nonsense you believe, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The majority of muslims are moderate, but enough indiscriminate bombing and we might just be able to reverse that...
Our current president has a Nobel prize as well. For 'peace.' So, yeah, I trust the judgement of the Nobel committee - NOT.
Since I clearly never argued any of the strawmen you just attributed to me, you are simply trolling. Goodbye.
It strains credulity to believe anyone could be as dense as you are acting here.
The wiki article notes that the phrase is commonly misused (like most any technical phrase) but it also alerts you as to what we are referring to - human computers were used for centuries to do exactly what digital computers do today, in e.g. astronomy. They would take input, mechanically apply the designated algorithm, and produce output, just as I have described. They usually worked in teams, with many processors running either in parallel, serial, or both, depending on the job. In the article I linked you can even see a picture of some human computers along with their requisite tools - desks, paper, pens.
You are either extraordinarily dense, extraordinarily ignorant of the subject you chose to expound on, or both.
"It's really just a question of who should be sitting on a stockpile of money and pumping that back into themselves? The government, or a company that makes iPads?"
Neither, please.
But if that's really the only choices you can come up with? Apple should get the money. At least they wont use it to drop bombs. Probably.
In the US, you can generally sue for anything you can find a lawyer willing to file the paperwork on.
Winning the case might be a bit more difficult however.
No, he's talking to you, and he's spot on.
Being a human computer is not simply doing a trivial sum in ones head. It means taking input (on paper) doing complicated calculations with that input (again, on paper) and then producing output (on paper.)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
"The human doesn't need any hardware to add two numbers, or calculate sums of angles. "
Incorrect. A human needs a pen and paper in order to do the calculations (of course we can do trivial sums in our head but a 'human calculator' requires more than that.) An abacus is extremely helpful as well. And of course, the numbers come from somewhere (input) and when the calculations are complete they are then transmitted in some way as well (output.)
I never said they could do it without any hardware. A human calculator needs essentially the same hardware to do this that a digital computer would. A general purpose digital computer still needs I/O devices to do anything useful, and a human computer doing the same job would need the same.
"So, for example, a patent claim of triangulating a position given three signals is not patentable, because we could do that on paper. But a patent claim that includes receiving those signals from a GPS satellite with an antenna is patentable. "
Which just shows the absurdity of the patent regime. Your argument that a human being could not do that is worse than wrong, it's entirely ignorant. There is no way to triangulate signals without having an antenna involved, and the type of antenna is a purely functional choice based on the situation. Absolutely anything that a computer can do, a person can do. I/O devices? All the computer does with them is send and receive numbers - just exactly the same way a human computer would send and receive numbers appropriately in the same situation.
Indeed, you are living proof of that particular statement.
Yes, when a corporation or any other sort of business pays taxes, that tax is simply another expense which they pass onto their customers. There are a few possible variations on that - if one business is hit with a tax that its competitors manage to avoid, for instance, that business is likely to be OUT of business as a result. But if it's imposed across the board, it simply adds to the operating costs of the businesses affected, and the entire tax burden falls on individuals. When the companies in question are huge multinationals that just means it's even less likely that we little people will be able to find any workable way around paying it.
You can call me stupid and post silly pictures all you want but it's still true.
I dont agree that tax is inevitable (or only possible to get rid of via anarchy) but setting that aside and accepting your contention for the sake of argument - taxes in such a situation should still be assessed directly against the people that actually have to pay them, so that they arent invisible.
You pose a false dilemma. You imply there are only two possible answers, but in fact they are both wrong, and the correct answer is entirely different.
Now let's start with another question, one you didnt include. Do you think multinationals pay tax or not?
Because if you think they do you sir do not understand the basics here. They do not pay taxes, never have, never will. Any and all taxes assessed against them are and will be paid by their customers. No amount of fiddling with tax codes is ever going to change that basic fact, and beyond that, any such fiddling is inevitably going to be done with the interests of said multinationals at the forefront, since they are the ones that wield enough influence with legislators to get what they want.
So it has nothing to do with what I think *should* happen here, but only with what we know from experience and reason does, will and must happen. Whatever tax burden corporations are purportedly saddled with, it is the individual that ultimately pays them.
The solution is to reduce government spending, and thus the total tax burden. All the noise about corporate taxation serves a single purpose - to distract people from that fact and keep us divided and blaming each other so that we dont unite against our common oppressors.
I see the problems. They just arent where you want them to be.
"Let me ask you a question â" is your objection that felons who have served their time can't vote or that the standard for felonies â" those major crimes against society â" has been watered down? Because it sounds to me that it is the watering down of felonies that is your issues â" and I would agree with you there."
I cant speak for the other poster but I would say both contentions are correct. A lot of things are being called felonies now that should not be. But even beyond that, I believe the grandparent poster is correct. Once someone has served their 'debt to society' and are released they should be free again.
That's a pathetic throw-away jab, and the only appropriate answer is 'no you.'
"And some functions really have to be reserved to some form of government at a basic level, unless you want to start outsourcing things like making laws and starting wars to private industry."
Instead of assuming such functions would have to be 'outsourced' why not consider eliminating them? Certainly starting wars is a function we could do without.
To the contrary, it is a very precise and correct phrase that sets the entire issue in its proper context. What do you call it when someone takes money from you involuntarily? Theft. What do you call it when you voluntarily give someone money in exchange for a product or service? Commerce. The two words cover most logical possibilities, but to cover them all we must introduce a third term - gift. This is when you give money to someone, but your benefits are intrinsic or internal, rather than the other person giving you something in exchange.
With those three words we cover all logical possibilities for describing a situation where money changes hands.
Is taxation commerce? Statists often attempt to argue that it is - that the government provides services which taxes pay for. But this does not stand up to scrutiny - because the crucial element of *voluntary exchange* is missing. If you have no need for these 'services' can you opt out? No, pay up. If the 'services' are actually inimicable to your well being, and you would voluntarily pay simply for their absence? No one cares, pay up or we will send men with guns to take it.
So it's not commerce. What about charity? Again, this may seem reasonable if you dont think about it - there are similarities. Charity is giving money for the greater good, and all states *claim* that they spend tax money for the greater good. But again, the crucial element is missing - taxes are *not* voluntary.
So we have ruled out two of the three words that can describe how money changes hands, and have one left by process of elimination - theft. But does it really fit? Well, yes it does. Taxes are not voluntary, and if people dont often get teams of armed men sent out after them over it is only because the mere threat, explicit or implicit, is strong and credible and normally suffices. When people take what belongs to you, using force or threat of force, without your consent, that is theft.
The governmental wrong-doing is obvious. They steal money, openly, blatantly, and use it for all manner of evil. The big multi-national corporations are hardly paragons of virtue, but looking narrowly at 'tax avoidance' - using any and all legal means to minimise the loss - it's hard to see how there could possibly be anything wrong with that.
Why would you need an excuse?
It was all information then. Nowadays it's a lot bulkier but 98% of it is crap. There may be as much useful information on it but it's a lot harder to find it when every search brings up millions of pages of bullshit. And the 'improvements' in the search engines have been quite negative on balance as well.
Cookies used to be really easy to deal with using mozilla, it wrote them all to cookies.txt. You just went in, deleted cookies.txt once, then mkdir cookies.txt. Then set it to allow cookies across the board. All websites worked fine, but anytime you restarted the browser they were all gone. Not 100% ideal but still a quick and relatively foolproof way to assert some sanity. So of course they changed that.
Now... let me get this straight, they are thinking about maybe, eventually, blocking third party cookies by default. Better late than never I guess, but it seems pathetic both in timing and scope as well, since they appear to be worried only about cookies(!) rather than scripting. Third party scripts are a much bigger problem. Both cases should have been blocked by default 10 years or more ago. At this point, yes, I would imagine some problems.
"I never used the word stealing" "Rips off" is a synonym.
Only a few years ago I would predict people would eventually argue this with a straight face, as you appear to have just done. I was laughed at.
Just because a business that depends on ads for revenue doesnt obligate you to watch them. That's absurd. Next you need surveillance in my home to make sure I dont 'steal' a tv program by going to the bathroom during a commercial break, right?
Words fail me, I cannot express how stupid your post and argument are.