I suppose this is supposed to make us forget that Putin has jailed his critics, restricted the press, and rigged the electoral system to guarantee his victory?
No, no! It's supposed to make us know he does this all in AWESOME ways. As far as dictators go, and my country had its fair share of them, I'd have appreciated it if they at least had been entertaining. The way things are, Putin is posed to eventually chose his successor by organizing a Mortal Kombat-style championship. Wouldn't THAT be fun?:-D
And a real man wouldn't be so terrified by a bunch of girls in a punk band that he'd have to send them to prison for standing up to him.
Well, as I read on the case it seems they were condemned on some kind of anti-hate-speech. Russian judges don't seem to distinguish between, say, an antisemite band storming a synagogue to chant white-power songs, and an anti-christian storming a church to chant anti-whatever-it-is-they-do-in-churches-over-there songs, punishing both kinds of cases (as well as anti-muslims storming mosques, religious nuts storming atheist reunions etc.) under the same general rule. IMHO, as long as the rule were applied fairly across the board, there'd be no reason for a distinction to be made exempting "anti-christians in churches" from it. So, the question is: is it applied fairly around?
... and people will shift to vendors who simply offer a straight-up price without trying to play games.
Unfortunately that doesn't happen. A few people will, but most won't care, as the trouble of changing habits most often than not outweighs small annoyances. Besides, there are tons of people out there who enjoy the challenge of gaming the system when purchasing. I remember reading about an US retail chain who tried playing straight prices (sorry, I don't remember its name), lost tons of money, and had to revert to crazy pricing schemes (bundles, coupons, rebates, loss leaders, special days for this or that, points and all that other crap) a few months ago mostly for those reasons.
In a medical context, "Working" means performing better than a placebo. By this definition, homeopathy DOES NOT work.
However, for those for whom it "worked", it performed 100% well.
A lot of the time, maybe most of it, medicine practice is anecdotal. Taken on aggregate (i.e., not at the individual practice level, but at the statistic research level), sure, decisive patterns arise. When you climb down to each individual case though, it all comes back, hard, to the purely anecdotal. So, if the medic's guts, when he looks the patient in the eyes, makes him think "eh, maybe for this one homeopathy will do", and it actually does, in the very narrow sense of "I'm feeling much better now doc, thanks!" , what blame is to be found in it?
We're finding that genetic information exists beyond what's coded in DNA.
That trivial to solve. Add as many parameter as you need and iterate over them. Let's say you want to add proteinomics to the problem. You've just expanded the mapping to (set of all possible DNAs) * (set of all possible proteins). Suppose the environment is important too. Then you expand it again, to ((set of all possible DNAs) * (set of all possible proteins)) ^ (set of all possible interactions). And so on and so forth, all of which still neatly delimited to cardinality Aleph-0.
The map is not the territory. It's our concepts of the world that are pale shadows of reality, not the other way around.
True enough, but even so, mapping helps our understanding. Without them we're reduced to what passed for science in the 15th century, i.e., go around personally experiencing lots and lots and lots of individual things because anything else, including trying to apply math or logic to reality, is mere Platonism. After all, numbers aren't real, only concrete stuff you can hold in you hands devoid of all conceptual frameworking, is real.
... theologians have no way of finding out whether God really did imagine such things.
But they can propose the question. We know, from the platonic mapping, that the existent, even if infinitely complex, is but a small subset of the domain of possibles. So a lot of questions arise on, for example, what exactly is this larger domain, if it has limits and of which nature, what might encompass it, how is it that we can even imagine it, be it real or not, etc. The usual pattern is to name encompassing totality "god", but there's no need to use this term if one thinks its other, more mythological meanings, can cause issues.
Such mappings' main utility isn't in providing answers. The answers, if any, are usually the uninteresting part, specially because they're always lacking. The ability serious theologians and philosophers have to point inconsistencies in any deeply held belief system, including materialist ones, is what's really fun in all of this. The questions, and the attempts to cope with them, are the awesome part.
It depends on how you take the word. If one means some kind of intelligent smoke embedded in the body, which, granted, is probably how many people visualize it, sure, it doesn't. But then you have from its original, quite concrete linguistic meaning of "that which makes something move", for which a dictionary could provide "soul: n. any kind of power source", to Aristotelian-derived positions in terms of body shape, for which it would be something like "soul: n. (math, logic, biology) an equation or logical description of the disposition of atoms required so as to obtain a functional organic body; syn. with: molecular formula, DNA, proteinomics, ecology, biography etc."
Christian philosophy, like any philosophy that adheres to Platonic notion of ideas, is totally incapable of dealing with what we're finding out these days.
The original version, sure. But it's been expanded quite a lot. Take the DNA, for instance. If you consider it as a logical problem, you have a open bound set of possible DNAs: A, C, T, G, AC, AT, AG, CT, CG, TG, ACT, ACG... up to and including every single organism that ever lived or will live, plus a much more gigantic set of ones which never did and never will. The listing is open bound and purely logical, no different from any math sequence, and like them it doesn't depend on any living being with one or other of these possible DNAs actually existing, only on pure logic for the formal definition and, if one so desired, a computer to go about listing them. So, if you take the position that math conclusion are true, not a mere invention of the human mind, you have the quite interesting consequence that any living being is an instantiation of an archetypal DNA sequence that's existed since forever in the realm of math truths. Plus: there's no limit on how many instantiations of that same exact sequence can exist (twins, clones, fully lab-engineered etc.), and that each one eternally outlives their instantiations. And presto: here's your Platonic ideas vindicated and well, within biology of all things.
By the way, this approach works quite nicely when one wants to make Christian notions compatible with evolution. Just say God created all "species" (DNAs) ideas "in the beginning" (of forever), while their method of instantiation is mostly evolution, which goes around causing a few among that infinite set to actually appear, but not actually creating anything new, since the whole set is logically predetermined. Easy enough!:-)
These "Before iPhone, after iPhone" images are a direct consequence of the touch screen becoming the primary input device
I'm all for Samsung in this because I don't believe in IP, but I must say that I clearly remember, when the iPhone came out, that it was criticized all around for not having a keyboard and/or not having a stylus. This means that nowadays we only consider keyboard-less/stylus-less touch screens a primary input device because Apple came and showed how to do it in a way not only comfortable enough for people to not cringe at bare-hands touch screen usage, but to actually like doing it this way, up to and including not even considering the previous approaches anymore. So, arguing that touch screens as we use them today would come to light anyway and result in such specific ways of doing things is a possibility, but by no means a clear certainty.
I’ve come to the conclusion, that CmdrTaco just doesn't give a shit. (Guess even he considers the site not worth the effort anymore.:/)
I don't know Perl beyond the basics, but I'm going with a wild guess that, over the years, there's at least some thoroughly tested, debugged and properly secured Unicode libraries out there able to replace whatever crazy REGEX runs behind/.'s code, probably with minimal effort.
On the other hand, I can also see how converting the huge text database might make things somewhat more difficult, or at least time consuming, take for instance that time when the number of comments hit the 32-bit limit in the DB's index column and they had to update it to 64-bit. If I remember correctly, adding new comments had to be suspended for a few days. Compared to updating the all text fields' character set/collation from (presumably) latin1_generic to utf8_unicode (one never, ever, should use the utf8_generic hack when seriously going about supporting Unicode), that simpler index conversion would feel like a walk in the park.
So evidently many of you folks believe this is reason enough to pirate the content. If a patent isn't available for licensing by its owner, and thus not "available for purchase anywhere," is that also reason enough to pirate the patent? What about violating GPL, since it isn't "available for purchase anywhere," either? I'm talking about the enforcement of prevailing law, not anyone's philosophical issues with intellectual property.
Yes, it is reason enough. I give an example of the silliness copyright causes. Here in Brazil there was a relatively famous writer a few years ago who died. His widow, heir to his copyrights, happened to become member of a religion for which his works were considered offensive. Being the rightful copyright owner, she thus decided to block any new edition of his works. The situation persists, and might continue for about 50 years, unless a Disney happens again and it goes on for longer still.
Copyright without copyduty is morally abhorrent. If a rights holder doesn't provide the copies only he can presumably make, why, yes, by all means, we, the people, will do it for him! Because the moment he fails on his duty, it becomes ours.
..except there were many centuries of 'anti-science' in there as well
Not really. This is a popular misconception, popularized by some authors in the 16th century and then again in the 18th, which entered the public consciousness and stuck. If you actually go and study the history of ideas over the period you'll see lots of quite interesting stuff happening all over the place during the whole period, specially in math and logic, but also in engineering, chemistry, metallurgy and many other fields, all of which became quite useful down the line and without which post-Galilean stuff wouldn't have been possible. On the other hand, it is quite accurate that a few decades, spread over the last 500 years or so, were difficult for scientists, but those periods were by far the exception, not the rule.
As for recent developments in the US, looking from afar (I'm in Brazil) it doesn't seem that bad. You guys still do most of the important research around. What happens in a few schools around is hardly enough to cause major impacts. Besides, these things come and go following the generations. If the current one moves one direction, the next one moves the other, if for no other reason than being rebellious. Provided the net result is positive, and so far it's been, the risk of things coming full stop is quite low.
I think the unknown is far more fascinating than the known.
Indeed. Aristotle wrote a book 2400 years ago called, appropriately enough, "Questions". It's 400 pages of questions without answers, things he'd like to know but didn't, most if not all of them biology-related. As of today we have about 25% of them answered. At this rate in 7000 years we'll get answers for the remaining one (much less if things proceed exponentially, but a noticeable amount of time nonetheless). And that not taking into account the tons upon tons of additional unanswered questions added since...
It's immoral to allow some to determine the distribution of their work for a limited time?
Yes, it is. You don't do it by yourself, you know? You go to nanny State and papa Government and beg them to please, pretty please, violate the property rights of every single other human being on Earth for your own benefit, so that my computer isn't mine anymore, it's the government's, which now merely allows me to use it in the ways they deem right and legit. That's quite immoral, yes.
Which isn't to mean authors shouldn't be rewarded. But they should be rewards in whatever way the free market develops, not by way of employing the full force of the hugest apparatus of violence ever assembled in the History of mankind.
Nope, the old Kindle's have a rudimentary web browser you can enable in one of the settings menus. Works fine on 3G.
True enough. On the other hand, my Kindle 3's 3G connection went kaput a few months ago and I haven't missed it. I guess I could have saved some money buying the WiFi-only model back then. In fact, now that I think about it, I connect it to my home WiFi once every two weeks or so, and I'm reading on it all the time. I wonder if my usage pattern is typical.
Google News usually shows the first few sentences under the link, is that a significant part? In my opinion it's not, but that is what the discussion is about.
It really depends on the news source. Traditionally newspaper articles, specially those written for syndication, are written in a quite annoying style in which the most important bit of information comes in the first paragraph, then each subsequent paragraph adds less and less relevant details, until you reach to the absolutely useless stuff that's there only to fill space. This is done this way so that any number of newspapers can buy the article and make it fit their wildly varying available space, as the purchasing newspaper's editor can simply chop any number of paragraphs from the end without the need to rewrite anything. Extreme example: do you know those columns in "world news" sections full of single-paragraph news bits? Each one of those is a full article from some newspaper abroad which that newspaper purchased then simply chopped down to the very first paragraph to fit the space. So, when a news aggregation service such as Google displays the first paragraph of such an article, it's effectively showing you the meat of the article, the very bit of content other newspapers actually pay for.
The workaround for news aggregators would be to display some random paragraph from the middle down to the end of the article rather than the first paragraph. But doing so would make them useless. So you can see the accusation has merit. The best solution, however, would be for news sources to not write articles in this style to begin with. I so much despise it that it's one of the reasons I don't stand newspapers. Introduction-development-conclusion, that's how non-journalist/newspaper-editors write and pretty much prefer to read, not the other way around.
And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
Actually, the Christian Hell is the Greek Hades, in which the Greek religion said everyone went no matter what. You had some slight better places within Hades for good people, such as the Elysium Fields, but it was commonly accepted that going to anywhere in Hades wasn't good, and that staying alive was way better, thank you very much. (Olympus, by the way, was the realm of the gods and demigods, not of dead humans.) So, early Christian apologetics at the time went more or less like this:
Christian: "Hey, bro! Do you have a minute?" Greek: "Yeah, sure. What is it?" Christian: "I'd like to talk to you about a hot new Eastern religion I follow. But before, please tell me: where do you go after you're die?" Greek: "Well, to Hades. Everyone knows that." Christian: "And what if I told you you can actually go to Olympus instead?" Greek: "What? How come!? That's unpossible!!!11!1!!!" Christian: "Ah, but it's very possible! Let me tell you about this god of mine..."
PS.: By the way, the Christians don't think certain specific things lead to Hell/Hades. Keeping in line with the Greek religion, it's all of them. Do anything or nothing at all, and you go to Hades anyway. It's merely the standard human afterlife, no strings attached. Heaven/Olympus is an optional alternative.
Are you trying to point out that Atheists don't understand the concept of "sola scriptura" or what?
Which, incidentally, doesn't make sense. For you to accept the principle of "sola scriptura" you have to accept an extra-scriptural tradition saying, as its first extra-scriptural commandment: "you shall use this scriptura". And if you accepted one extra-scriptural commandment which by its very nature is clearly superior to the whole of that scriptura, well, why not others?
...so much so that it is written in their so-called "holy book" that every single man is permitted to marry four (4) wives at any given time - which is to say, that little head can get to visit 4 different holes instead of one
It says so, but it also says you have to give a house and full pension to each one so that each can live as if she were your single wife, they all not being allowed to live together (harems were one of the common pre-Islamic practices Muhammad tried to abolish -- in which, as is the case in others, he was only partially successful: as the thesis proposes, culture wins). In practice then only very rich Muslims have more than one wife. The huge majority is monogamous, if for no other reason than that they simply don't have money for more than one wife.
By the way, I don't see a problem with apologizing for Islam. I do that from time to time, as I do for Christianity, Judaism and others, even though I myself am a pagan polytheist. It's fun!;)
Sexuality in a religious context is invariably screwed up and is invariably about women... controlling, limiting, branding and especially blaming.
I remember reading a thesis saying it more of a cultural phenomenon ultimately targeted at children by way of the women. The idea was that in societies were you can trust mostly everyone else as individuals, women were (and are) freer because you can trust your neighbor or the guy from that other family to self control and not come make your wife pregnant for you. On the other hand, on those were another person's word to you is worth shit if his clan leader as much as sneezes and men have no self control, you restrict your wife (a single person), because there's no way you can restrict everyone else. Middle Eastern societies follow the later pattern, and hence women over there have no freedom, the religion (or lack thereof) of the involved of secondary concern, so much so things were basically the same before Islam, and among followers of other religions. On the other hand, many Western ones are of the individualized trusting kind, and in those women are freer or actually free, the religion (or lack thereof too) of the involved also of secondary concern.
In short: place any religion, or none, on a given cultural context, and it'll be speedily adapted to that cultural context. The reverse also happens, with the religion changing the cultural context, but this is a much subtler process, and if a certain cultural aspect of the society is very entrenched (such as the total lack of mutual trust between non-clan individuals), it might not yield at all.
States are now puppets of the corporations. This is something I can't seem to make anarchist-capitalists understand. They don't comprehend that money == power.
But this happens because the current standard of "doing politics" is money-based. There are alternative systems in which having money doesn't translate into having power (at least not automatically), such as those based on birth (monarchy/feudalism) or merit (the pre-modern Chinese bureaucracy), but they're mostly frown upon, and for good reasons. Then there are those in which money basically isn't permitted, but those also don't solve the issue, as in them you simply declare the de jure political rulers as being the de facto owners of 100% of the money, there not existing any distinction whatsoever anymore. The solution, if any, definitely isn't clear.
If you're going to put tolls on the entire country, just do it in a much cheaper fashion - put a tax on gas. Far cheaper to implement, and doesn't have the privacy implications.
Ah, but that's the point: here in Brazil we already have tax on gas: roughly 50% of the end price. And on the vehicles themselves: also about 50% of the end price (yep, if a model is sold here and in the US, ours is priced at roughly twice its US counterpart). And tolls on privately built roads (there was a promise back when those were introduced that it would lead to decreased taxes on gas -- it didn't happen, evidently). Now all that remains is to put tolls on every other street, so it's all covered (there's a promise private road tolls will be replaced by the per distance automatic one -- I'm not holding my breath). But just ask someone who's visited us what they think of our roads, streets etc. To sum it up: that money hasn't gone where it should.
And do what? Write their own OS and take on Microsoft head-to-head? Release only products with Linux on them?
That's actually a viable solution. If all the OEMs banded together to fully fund Wine and Mono developments, in short time both would reach 99.999% Windows compatibility, including every single DirectX game out there, perhaps even by funding its implementation in the kernel for optimal performance rather than the current, slower but easier process of OpenGL translation. Then, except for very old, very specialized hardware needs, Linux would be all you'd need. Want to support those too? Well, why not? After Wine/Mono are done, keep funding a little more, this time the ReactOS project, which is basically Wine over a kernel supporting Windows drivers. And bye-bye MS.
Sure, MS would sue like mad. But given they've all banded together anyway, joining forces and showing MS the anti-SCO treatment by thoroughly destroying most of MS' patent portfolio in the process would be the logical next step. And then, after the decade-long onslaught, license the few surviving valid MS patents, and live happily ever after.
What innovation? Neither Apple nor Samsung sell innovative products...
I guess it depends on what one means by "innovation". Myself, I think the only actual recent innovation in the field of anything hardware-related was the invention of memristors. Everything else are just iterations over iterations of the same old resistor/capacitor/inductor, under the same old principles of computer science. But if you expand the definition of innovation to include some of those iterations, then at some point, yes, Apple can be seen as an innovator.
I like the layout too, but I have to partially disagree on the "easy on the eyes", at least when it comes to font size. With current screen resolutions and sizes I find its 13px text somewhat on the "small" side of the scale. If anything, the only change I'd make would be increasing the default to something in the 14px~16px range plus a very small increase in the distance between lines, thus making the reading experience more e-book-like. But that'd be it. Everything else about Wikipedia's design feels right.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose this is supposed to make us forget that Putin has jailed his critics, restricted the press, and rigged the electoral system to guarantee his victory?
No, no! It's supposed to make us know he does this all in AWESOME ways. As far as dictators go, and my country had its fair share of them, I'd have appreciated it if they at least had been entertaining. The way things are, Putin is posed to eventually chose his successor by organizing a Mortal Kombat-style championship. Wouldn't THAT be fun? :-D
And a real man wouldn't be so terrified by a bunch of girls in a punk band that he'd have to send them to prison for standing up to him.
Well, as I read on the case it seems they were condemned on some kind of anti-hate-speech. Russian judges don't seem to distinguish between, say, an antisemite band storming a synagogue to chant white-power songs, and an anti-christian storming a church to chant anti-whatever-it-is-they-do-in-churches-over-there songs, punishing both kinds of cases (as well as anti-muslims storming mosques, religious nuts storming atheist reunions etc.) under the same general rule. IMHO, as long as the rule were applied fairly across the board, there'd be no reason for a distinction to be made exempting "anti-christians in churches" from it. So, the question is: is it applied fairly around?
... and people will shift to vendors who simply offer a straight-up price without trying to play games.
Unfortunately that doesn't happen. A few people will, but most won't care, as the trouble of changing habits most often than not outweighs small annoyances. Besides, there are tons of people out there who enjoy the challenge of gaming the system when purchasing. I remember reading about an US retail chain who tried playing straight prices (sorry, I don't remember its name), lost tons of money, and had to revert to crazy pricing schemes (bundles, coupons, rebates, loss leaders, special days for this or that, points and all that other crap) a few months ago mostly for those reasons.
In a medical context, "Working" means performing better than a placebo. By this definition, homeopathy DOES NOT work.
However, for those for whom it "worked", it performed 100% well.
A lot of the time, maybe most of it, medicine practice is anecdotal. Taken on aggregate (i.e., not at the individual practice level, but at the statistic research level), sure, decisive patterns arise. When you climb down to each individual case though, it all comes back, hard, to the purely anecdotal. So, if the medic's guts, when he looks the patient in the eyes, makes him think "eh, maybe for this one homeopathy will do", and it actually does, in the very narrow sense of "I'm feeling much better now doc, thanks!" , what blame is to be found in it?
We're finding that genetic information exists beyond what's coded in DNA.
That trivial to solve. Add as many parameter as you need and iterate over them. Let's say you want to add proteinomics to the problem. You've just expanded the mapping to (set of all possible DNAs) * (set of all possible proteins). Suppose the environment is important too. Then you expand it again, to ((set of all possible DNAs) * (set of all possible proteins)) ^ (set of all possible interactions). And so on and so forth, all of which still neatly delimited to cardinality Aleph-0.
The map is not the territory. It's our concepts of the world that are pale shadows of reality, not the other way around.
True enough, but even so, mapping helps our understanding. Without them we're reduced to what passed for science in the 15th century, i.e., go around personally experiencing lots and lots and lots of individual things because anything else, including trying to apply math or logic to reality, is mere Platonism. After all, numbers aren't real, only concrete stuff you can hold in you hands devoid of all conceptual frameworking, is real.
... theologians have no way of finding out whether God really did imagine such things.
But they can propose the question. We know, from the platonic mapping, that the existent, even if infinitely complex, is but a small subset of the domain of possibles. So a lot of questions arise on, for example, what exactly is this larger domain, if it has limits and of which nature, what might encompass it, how is it that we can even imagine it, be it real or not, etc. The usual pattern is to name encompassing totality "god", but there's no need to use this term if one thinks its other, more mythological meanings, can cause issues.
Such mappings' main utility isn't in providing answers. The answers, if any, are usually the uninteresting part, specially because they're always lacking. The ability serious theologians and philosophers have to point inconsistencies in any deeply held belief system, including materialist ones, is what's really fun in all of this. The questions, and the attempts to cope with them, are the awesome part.
There's no such thing as a soul.
It depends on how you take the word. If one means some kind of intelligent smoke embedded in the body, which, granted, is probably how many people visualize it, sure, it doesn't. But then you have from its original, quite concrete linguistic meaning of "that which makes something move", for which a dictionary could provide "soul: n. any kind of power source", to Aristotelian-derived positions in terms of body shape, for which it would be something like "soul: n. (math, logic, biology) an equation or logical description of the disposition of atoms required so as to obtain a functional organic body; syn. with: molecular formula, DNA, proteinomics, ecology, biography etc."
Christian philosophy, like any philosophy that adheres to Platonic notion of ideas, is totally incapable of dealing with what we're finding out these days.
The original version, sure. But it's been expanded quite a lot. Take the DNA, for instance. If you consider it as a logical problem, you have a open bound set of possible DNAs: A, C, T, G, AC, AT, AG, CT, CG, TG, ACT, ACG... up to and including every single organism that ever lived or will live, plus a much more gigantic set of ones which never did and never will. The listing is open bound and purely logical, no different from any math sequence, and like them it doesn't depend on any living being with one or other of these possible DNAs actually existing, only on pure logic for the formal definition and, if one so desired, a computer to go about listing them. So, if you take the position that math conclusion are true, not a mere invention of the human mind, you have the quite interesting consequence that any living being is an instantiation of an archetypal DNA sequence that's existed since forever in the realm of math truths. Plus: there's no limit on how many instantiations of that same exact sequence can exist (twins, clones, fully lab-engineered etc.), and that each one eternally outlives their instantiations. And presto: here's your Platonic ideas vindicated and well, within biology of all things.
By the way, this approach works quite nicely when one wants to make Christian notions compatible with evolution. Just say God created all "species" (DNAs) ideas "in the beginning" (of forever), while their method of instantiation is mostly evolution, which goes around causing a few among that infinite set to actually appear, but not actually creating anything new, since the whole set is logically predetermined. Easy enough! :-)
He didn't play within the rules of society. He went against it.
Hmm... I guess that covers the "philosopher" side.
He stole a liver to which he wasn't entitled. He declared a thermonuclear war on android.
And this the "warrior" one. :-)
These "Before iPhone, after iPhone" images are a direct consequence of the touch screen becoming the primary input device
I'm all for Samsung in this because I don't believe in IP, but I must say that I clearly remember, when the iPhone came out, that it was criticized all around for not having a keyboard and/or not having a stylus. This means that nowadays we only consider keyboard-less/stylus-less touch screens a primary input device because Apple came and showed how to do it in a way not only comfortable enough for people to not cringe at bare-hands touch screen usage, but to actually like doing it this way, up to and including not even considering the previous approaches anymore. So, arguing that touch screens as we use them today would come to light anyway and result in such specific ways of doing things is a possibility, but by no means a clear certainty.
I’ve come to the conclusion, that CmdrTaco just doesn't give a shit. (Guess even he considers the site not worth the effort anymore. :/)
I don't know Perl beyond the basics, but I'm going with a wild guess that, over the years, there's at least some thoroughly tested, debugged and properly secured Unicode libraries out there able to replace whatever crazy REGEX runs behind /.'s code, probably with minimal effort.
On the other hand, I can also see how converting the huge text database might make things somewhat more difficult, or at least time consuming, take for instance that time when the number of comments hit the 32-bit limit in the DB's index column and they had to update it to 64-bit. If I remember correctly, adding new comments had to be suspended for a few days. Compared to updating the all text fields' character set/collation from (presumably) latin1_generic to utf8_unicode (one never, ever, should use the utf8_generic hack when seriously going about supporting Unicode), that simpler index conversion would feel like a walk in the park.
So evidently many of you folks believe this is reason enough to pirate the content. If a patent isn't available for licensing by its owner, and thus not "available for purchase anywhere," is that also reason enough to pirate the patent? What about violating GPL, since it isn't "available for purchase anywhere," either? I'm talking about the enforcement of prevailing law, not anyone's philosophical issues with intellectual property.
Yes, it is reason enough. I give an example of the silliness copyright causes. Here in Brazil there was a relatively famous writer a few years ago who died. His widow, heir to his copyrights, happened to become member of a religion for which his works were considered offensive. Being the rightful copyright owner, she thus decided to block any new edition of his works. The situation persists, and might continue for about 50 years, unless a Disney happens again and it goes on for longer still.
Copyright without copyduty is morally abhorrent. If a rights holder doesn't provide the copies only he can presumably make, why, yes, by all means, we, the people, will do it for him! Because the moment he fails on his duty, it becomes ours.
..except there were many centuries of 'anti-science' in there as well
Not really. This is a popular misconception, popularized by some authors in the 16th century and then again in the 18th, which entered the public consciousness and stuck. If you actually go and study the history of ideas over the period you'll see lots of quite interesting stuff happening all over the place during the whole period, specially in math and logic, but also in engineering, chemistry, metallurgy and many other fields, all of which became quite useful down the line and without which post-Galilean stuff wouldn't have been possible. On the other hand, it is quite accurate that a few decades, spread over the last 500 years or so, were difficult for scientists, but those periods were by far the exception, not the rule.
As for recent developments in the US, looking from afar (I'm in Brazil) it doesn't seem that bad. You guys still do most of the important research around. What happens in a few schools around is hardly enough to cause major impacts. Besides, these things come and go following the generations. If the current one moves one direction, the next one moves the other, if for no other reason than being rebellious. Provided the net result is positive, and so far it's been, the risk of things coming full stop is quite low.
I think the unknown is far more fascinating than the known.
Indeed. Aristotle wrote a book 2400 years ago called, appropriately enough, "Questions". It's 400 pages of questions without answers, things he'd like to know but didn't, most if not all of them biology-related. As of today we have about 25% of them answered. At this rate in 7000 years we'll get answers for the remaining one (much less if things proceed exponentially, but a noticeable amount of time nonetheless). And that not taking into account the tons upon tons of additional unanswered questions added since...
It's immoral to allow some to determine the distribution of their work for a limited time?
Yes, it is. You don't do it by yourself, you know? You go to nanny State and papa Government and beg them to please, pretty please, violate the property rights of every single other human being on Earth for your own benefit, so that my computer isn't mine anymore, it's the government's, which now merely allows me to use it in the ways they deem right and legit. That's quite immoral, yes.
Which isn't to mean authors shouldn't be rewarded. But they should be rewards in whatever way the free market develops, not by way of employing the full force of the hugest apparatus of violence ever assembled in the History of mankind.
Nope, the old Kindle's have a rudimentary web browser you can enable in one of the settings menus. Works fine on 3G.
True enough. On the other hand, my Kindle 3's 3G connection went kaput a few months ago and I haven't missed it. I guess I could have saved some money buying the WiFi-only model back then. In fact, now that I think about it, I connect it to my home WiFi once every two weeks or so, and I'm reading on it all the time. I wonder if my usage pattern is typical.
Google News usually shows the first few sentences under the link, is that a significant part? In my opinion it's not, but that is what the discussion is about.
It really depends on the news source. Traditionally newspaper articles, specially those written for syndication, are written in a quite annoying style in which the most important bit of information comes in the first paragraph, then each subsequent paragraph adds less and less relevant details, until you reach to the absolutely useless stuff that's there only to fill space. This is done this way so that any number of newspapers can buy the article and make it fit their wildly varying available space, as the purchasing newspaper's editor can simply chop any number of paragraphs from the end without the need to rewrite anything. Extreme example: do you know those columns in "world news" sections full of single-paragraph news bits? Each one of those is a full article from some newspaper abroad which that newspaper purchased then simply chopped down to the very first paragraph to fit the space. So, when a news aggregation service such as Google displays the first paragraph of such an article, it's effectively showing you the meat of the article, the very bit of content other newspapers actually pay for.
The workaround for news aggregators would be to display some random paragraph from the middle down to the end of the article rather than the first paragraph. But doing so would make them useless. So you can see the accusation has merit. The best solution, however, would be for news sources to not write articles in this style to begin with. I so much despise it that it's one of the reasons I don't stand newspapers. Introduction-development-conclusion, that's how non-journalist/newspaper-editors write and pretty much prefer to read, not the other way around.
...make it convenient to abandon your business interests by simply pushing a single button!
Why would our pressing a button cause us to abandon them?
Oh, right! When you say "your business interests" you don't mean us, the actual customers paying actual money for actual products! Got it!
You're confusing the Christian doctrine to what Christians believe. I can tell you that they're extremely different for the most part.
Ah, yes, true enough.
And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
Actually, the Christian Hell is the Greek Hades, in which the Greek religion said everyone went no matter what. You had some slight better places within Hades for good people, such as the Elysium Fields, but it was commonly accepted that going to anywhere in Hades wasn't good, and that staying alive was way better, thank you very much. (Olympus, by the way, was the realm of the gods and demigods, not of dead humans.) So, early Christian apologetics at the time went more or less like this:
Christian: "Hey, bro! Do you have a minute?"
Greek: "Yeah, sure. What is it?"
Christian: "I'd like to talk to you about a hot new Eastern religion I follow. But before, please tell me: where do you go after you're die?"
Greek: "Well, to Hades. Everyone knows that."
Christian: "And what if I told you you can actually go to Olympus instead?"
Greek: "What? How come!? That's unpossible!!!11!1!!!"
Christian: "Ah, but it's very possible! Let me tell you about this god of mine..."
PS.: By the way, the Christians don't think certain specific things lead to Hell/Hades. Keeping in line with the Greek religion, it's all of them. Do anything or nothing at all, and you go to Hades anyway. It's merely the standard human afterlife, no strings attached. Heaven/Olympus is an optional alternative.
Are you trying to point out that Atheists don't understand the concept of "sola scriptura" or what?
Which, incidentally, doesn't make sense. For you to accept the principle of "sola scriptura" you have to accept an extra-scriptural tradition saying, as its first extra-scriptural commandment: "you shall use this scriptura". And if you accepted one extra-scriptural commandment which by its very nature is clearly superior to the whole of that scriptura, well, why not others?
...so much so that it is written in their so-called "holy book" that every single man is permitted to marry four (4) wives at any given time - which is to say, that little head can get to visit 4 different holes instead of one
It says so, but it also says you have to give a house and full pension to each one so that each can live as if she were your single wife, they all not being allowed to live together (harems were one of the common pre-Islamic practices Muhammad tried to abolish -- in which, as is the case in others, he was only partially successful: as the thesis proposes, culture wins). In practice then only very rich Muslims have more than one wife. The huge majority is monogamous, if for no other reason than that they simply don't have money for more than one wife.
By the way, I don't see a problem with apologizing for Islam. I do that from time to time, as I do for Christianity, Judaism and others, even though I myself am a pagan polytheist. It's fun! ;)
Sexuality in a religious context is invariably screwed up and is invariably about women... controlling, limiting, branding and especially blaming.
I remember reading a thesis saying it more of a cultural phenomenon ultimately targeted at children by way of the women. The idea was that in societies were you can trust mostly everyone else as individuals, women were (and are) freer because you can trust your neighbor or the guy from that other family to self control and not come make your wife pregnant for you. On the other hand, on those were another person's word to you is worth shit if his clan leader as much as sneezes and men have no self control, you restrict your wife (a single person), because there's no way you can restrict everyone else. Middle Eastern societies follow the later pattern, and hence women over there have no freedom, the religion (or lack thereof) of the involved of secondary concern, so much so things were basically the same before Islam, and among followers of other religions. On the other hand, many Western ones are of the individualized trusting kind, and in those women are freer or actually free, the religion (or lack thereof too) of the involved also of secondary concern.
In short: place any religion, or none, on a given cultural context, and it'll be speedily adapted to that cultural context. The reverse also happens, with the religion changing the cultural context, but this is a much subtler process, and if a certain cultural aspect of the society is very entrenched (such as the total lack of mutual trust between non-clan individuals), it might not yield at all.
States are now puppets of the corporations. This is something I can't seem to make anarchist-capitalists understand. They don't comprehend that money == power.
But this happens because the current standard of "doing politics" is money-based. There are alternative systems in which having money doesn't translate into having power (at least not automatically), such as those based on birth (monarchy/feudalism) or merit (the pre-modern Chinese bureaucracy), but they're mostly frown upon, and for good reasons. Then there are those in which money basically isn't permitted, but those also don't solve the issue, as in them you simply declare the de jure political rulers as being the de facto owners of 100% of the money, there not existing any distinction whatsoever anymore. The solution, if any, definitely isn't clear.
If you're going to put tolls on the entire country, just do it in a much cheaper fashion - put a tax on gas. Far cheaper to implement, and doesn't have the privacy implications.
Ah, but that's the point: here in Brazil we already have tax on gas: roughly 50% of the end price. And on the vehicles themselves: also about 50% of the end price (yep, if a model is sold here and in the US, ours is priced at roughly twice its US counterpart). And tolls on privately built roads (there was a promise back when those were introduced that it would lead to decreased taxes on gas -- it didn't happen, evidently). Now all that remains is to put tolls on every other street, so it's all covered (there's a promise private road tolls will be replaced by the per distance automatic one -- I'm not holding my breath). But just ask someone who's visited us what they think of our roads, streets etc. To sum it up: that money hasn't gone where it should.
That's Brazil.
And do what? Write their own OS and take on Microsoft head-to-head? Release only products with Linux on them?
That's actually a viable solution. If all the OEMs banded together to fully fund Wine and Mono developments, in short time both would reach 99.999% Windows compatibility, including every single DirectX game out there, perhaps even by funding its implementation in the kernel for optimal performance rather than the current, slower but easier process of OpenGL translation. Then, except for very old, very specialized hardware needs, Linux would be all you'd need. Want to support those too? Well, why not? After Wine/Mono are done, keep funding a little more, this time the ReactOS project, which is basically Wine over a kernel supporting Windows drivers. And bye-bye MS.
Sure, MS would sue like mad. But given they've all banded together anyway, joining forces and showing MS the anti-SCO treatment by thoroughly destroying most of MS' patent portfolio in the process would be the logical next step. And then, after the decade-long onslaught, license the few surviving valid MS patents, and live happily ever after.
Not going to happen, sure, but dreaming is fun. :)
What innovation? Neither Apple nor Samsung sell innovative products...
I guess it depends on what one means by "innovation". Myself, I think the only actual recent innovation in the field of anything hardware-related was the invention of memristors. Everything else are just iterations over iterations of the same old resistor/capacitor/inductor, under the same old principles of computer science. But if you expand the definition of innovation to include some of those iterations, then at some point, yes, Apple can be seen as an innovator.
It's clean, useable, and easy on the eyes.
I like the layout too, but I have to partially disagree on the "easy on the eyes", at least when it comes to font size. With current screen resolutions and sizes I find its 13px text somewhat on the "small" side of the scale. If anything, the only change I'd make would be increasing the default to something in the 14px~16px range plus a very small increase in the distance between lines, thus making the reading experience more e-book-like. But that'd be it. Everything else about Wikipedia's design feels right.