I'm in principle against the very notion of copyright and patents, but between both extremes of my ideal and what currently exists, there's a middle ground that would make things much more sane, if it ever had any hope of being implemented in law, which it doesn't: the abolition of the concept of transferring (and of licensing with exclusivity) one's intellectual production, what would mean making moral rights and copy rights one and the same. Being employed by a corporation in this scenario might still mean ceding a non-exclusive right for them to use your intellectual production, maybe with a clause of non competition for as long as you worked for them. And such a law would need a clause establishing a hard upper limit on for how long a ceding contract could be valid before requiring a renegotiation. But the net result would be that you'd still fully own your intellectual production, and would be able to re-license it to whomever you wished, again and again and again, once the initial term was up. Big pharma, big software, big labels, big anything, would be "big" only so long as lots and lots of intellectual producers were willing to keep within them. If they left, for whatever reason, the corporation itself would break apart, thus giving HUGE incentives for these corporations to do things in a sensible manner. Much more so, at least, than what we have today.
We're a corporation and we need to maintain stability and compatibility over fancy and chic. You get a laptop. With Windows. And a BlackBerry... if you're lucky.
Stop being lazy. For anything important, put it in a locked down VM image (including, if needed, an IE6 configured to never, ever access the actual Internet). Plus, for iPads, iPhones, Androids and the like, a remote desktop utility to access such a locked down VM session running elsewhere, perhaps with the screen size already adjusted. You get all the control you need (not "want", need), all the while allowing your users to be sufficiently happy.
It'd be interesting for the sake of spicing things up if all these services, and the groups behind them, used "free speech" and similar terms as part of their names. The mainstream media would have a field day spreading news about an UK judge banning a site called "FreeSpeechNews" by "Team Combatants of Liberty", much more so at least than about him banning something as esoteric-sounding as "newzbin" by some guys who cal themselves dogs. Just imagine the headlines!
Even pirates should lean the value of marketing. Use it for your own advantage. It might not be glamorous, but it's worth the effort.
They survive and grow because they stimulate and develop either direct or indirect overdependency on them, which works because its of a kind most people really don't want to leave. Say what you want about the Amish and similar movements, but one thing is certain: they are immune from this, and likely to remain so. Such freedom has quite a high price though.
It instantly made me want to renew my account again. Must.... resist.....
One good thing about living here in Brazil is that our summer happens around Christmas. If Blizzard releases the expansion before that I'm surely going to be a very happy re-subscriber for at least two and half months of college vacation, three weeks of which will also be job vacation.:-D
It's guaranteed that I'll only see a sublime work of genius like this on a day without mod-points. Keep up the good work.
Hehe, thank you. I'd be flattered weren't for the fact that I'm only applying a method of critique developed by one of my Philosophy teachers. The genius thus is in him, not in me.:-)
If you can read French or Portuguese and you're interested in a more detailed analysis on how chronocentrism is a form of prejudice and discrimination, the links point to his speech at UNESCO's 1997 international symposium "Forms and Dynamics of Exclusion in Contemporary Societies". Its title can be roughly translated as "The most excluded among the excluded: the dead's silence as model for the living forbidden to speak."
Unfortunately I don't recommend automatic translators for them. I've looked at what Google's one outputs and the result is impossible to understand. Well, once I have time I'll work in translating the Portuguese version into English. Until then, there's no alternative, sorry.:-(
This might sound like nitpicking, but people seeing women as equal to men isn't a "twenty-first century" concept. In fact, 2400 years ago Plato was already defending that, for example, if a woman is capable of governing a state, she should be allowed to, not blocked because of her sex.
We should stop being chronocentrists, which is as much a discriminatory state of mind as ethnocentrism. A given year, or a collection of years, has no attached value. Something happening "in the 21st century" isn't better just because it's happening "after" whatever came before. Ideas, such as that women and men must have equal rights, must be judged in themselves, not because of when they appeared, or when they became mainstream, or when they stopped being mainstream, or whatever.
So, while I agree with your sentiment, I must disagree with the way you express it. Calling for someone to change his behavior because of the "age" or "era" in which he lives is to incur in the "appeal to authority" fallacy. In fact, the only intellectually correct approach is to defend an idea by its own merits, not dwelling into its "ageity" at all.
Do more, or less, than this, and what you'll be doing won't be a rational defense of an idea, but merely a rhetorical one. In other words, politics, not reason.
ease up on the guy, he's probably had way to many years on Windows.
That's also the case, but I'm actually also a hobbyist and know my way around Linux pretty well. In fact, many time I'm in a hurry and don't even bother loading X: I do whatever I need in console mode and am done with it.
It just so happens that nowadays I work full time and go to night college, consequently having only a few hours per weekend to play around in my home box, a much different scenario than when I started figuring out Debian, back in 1997. Very pragmatic consequence: I prefer using those few hours doing useful or fun stuff rather than fixing obscure annoyances. Thus, if I can solve something in one hour by wiping sda1 and reinstalling the OS, my actual data and custom compiled software being well secured in sda3, sda4, a shelf of DVD-Rs and Amazon S3, that's exactly what I'll do.
Simply put, sometimes doing things "the right way" just isn't worth the effort.
I experienced frequent Firefox crashes due to Flash in my Ubuntu box, which went being upgraded from 6.06 to 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04. But then my hard disk crashed and I had to reinstall Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch. It's been now three months of this fresh installation, and in this period Flash has never, ever, crashed my Firefox. It's been rock solid.
My wild guess then would be that your setup is half-broken much like mine was. Try that old Windows trick of wiping your hard disk and reinstalling your Linux distribution, whatever it is. It might be the solution.
Now, this doesn't mean Flash in Linux isn't still full of bugs. It not respecting transparencies and correct depth levels in pages is a major annoyance. But at least crashing isn't part of the list anymore, at least for me.
And what happens should developed countries' governments start to regulate ADCs more capable than 16-bit 44.1 kHz the way they regulate prescription drugs: to be used only by a licensed audio technician?
Easy: a black market. The factories in China were those are produced would be very happy at producing double each order, then delivering the original quantity to the purchaser and the other half to the nearest contraband dealer.
Worst case scenario, people will start sharing schematics around. Then what? Government regulation of generic Operational Amplifiers? And once that pass, of transistors, so that you don't build your own tabletop HiFi OpAmp?
I thought with Wine you could import the DirectX files and it would translate down to hardware.
Unfortunately that isn't the case. I'm not a 3D programmer, much less a low level driver developer, so what I'm writing here might not be accurate, but from what I've read both DirectX and OpenGL are just standardized middleware APIs for the actual graphics driver, which receives the calls and translates them into low level commands to the hardware. What happens (as far as I know) then is that Windows' driver model provides hooks for hardware manufacturers to provide the required low level support for both DirectX and OpenGL, while Linux (or X, I dunno) only provides it for OpenGL, since there's no standardized way to get a DirectX back-end in there.
What's then the point of installing Microsoft's DirectX DLLs in Wine, since they themselves don't do anything hardware-related? Well, it's simply so that you get the full DirectX API, rather than the subset Wine managed to reverse engineer and code, possibly without full optimization. But the effect as far as raw performance goes is still roughly the same: a fake DirectX-enabled board receives the high-level calls and, instead of translating them into hardware command to the board, translates them into OpenGL calls, then sent to the actual driver.
It is a damned shame there is fifty different ways to do everything in Linux EXCEPT graphics,which is tied to the dead horse that is OpenGL.
2D in the X Window System is also very poor. Try this experiment in both X and Windows: open some CPU performance monitoring app; now open Gmail inside Firefox (same version on both); set it to show 50 or 100 e-mails in the message list; open one or more Gtalk frames; start scrolling up and down fast; look at Firefox's CPU usage or, if your computer old enough, just "feel" how both Firefoxes behave.
Why this happens? Because while Windows has a robust accelerated 2D system, with lots of tricks going on behind the scenes to make things like the content of windows move as they should, X hasn't. In fact, last time I read about this it still was under discussion how to implement it "the proper way". And since "the proper way" hasn't been agreed upon yet, the result is we're stuck with a very old, poorly performing, all but surpassed, solution.
And yet, guess what? I run Ubuntu as my home OS, as I really like it despite X's graphical weaknesses. Good thing I'm not that much into games...
Which means our best bet is a combination of Wine getting "good enough" DX9 and DX10 support
The problem with this is that the Wine approach is to translate DirectX API calls into their OpenGL equivalents, what slows down things significantly, not to mention OpenGL currently doesn't support all the newest DirectX features.
If DirectX continues to be the standard for PC gaming, the only "good" approach would be to have it implemented directly into whatever layer OpenGL itself currently resides. This way Wine would be able to forward DirectX calls directly to the underlying driver, as it currently does when you're luckily playing a Windows OpenGL game in it, without translation overheads.
Absent this, playing games in Linux will continue to either be a worse experience than in Windows, since you'll have to set the game options to a lower graphical level than it might have in Windows, or a more expensive one, since you'll have to purchase more expensive hardware to get the full intended experience.
In general, sentience without egoistical or similar motives tends to be completely neutral in relation to other beings, and what will most likely happen is that we give the machines incentives other than the human-evolved ones to keep it going, and thinking. This is an immense task.
There's a nice scifi books where this very concept of biological machines built from neurons but without the "emotion engine" play a central role at the ending: Starfish, by Peter Watts (BY-NC-SA 2.5 licensed).
In the novel these machines aren't programmed, they're taught to follow certain patterns, what in turn requires a behavior reinforcement mechanism to exist. The questions is: what happens if you take such a completely amoral biocomputer, highly optimized at processing certain kinds of data (in the case, cleaning viruses from live Internet traffic), and replace the IO system allowing it to deal with things such as ecosystems?
What are they going to do once they have the gun to your head? Pull the trigger? That's when the real revolution begins. People will only accept so much.
In China they did and still do exactly this. You're causing minor annoyances, you're condemned to 20 years of torture at a political prison. You continue being annoying, they shot your neck (100% guaranteed to kill), then bill your family for the execution costs.
Listen, most people aren't revolutionaries. They only want to go along with their lives. Revolutions don't happen when "the people" rise. Revolutions happen when "a group" intent in taking power rise. Sure, "the people" in general must be willing to accept the new government, or at least not mind the revolutionaries, what usually happens if the current institutions aren't popular and the revolutionaries show they can hold ground and enforce their way.
But "not minding" is the most normal people will ever do. There's no point fantasizing it'll ever be different. It won't.
the idea that you could compute my 27 character long pass phrase is stupid as well.
Well, if medicine and biological engineering continue progressing at a geometric pace, in a few years they'll simply scan your password out of your brain (not to mention anything else you're trying to hide). Then things will start becoming interesting.
And yet, by hosting the Olympics in China, they are anyway.
Actually, I'd say the IOC is associated with atrocities for a long time:
Winter 1936: Nazi-Germany Summer 1936: Nazi-Germany Summer 1980: Soviet Union Winter 1984: Communist Yugoslavia
In addition to the above cases, weren't for WW2 and these instances would also have happened:
Winter 1940: Theocratic-Totalitarian Imperial Japan Summer 1940: Theocratic-Totalitarian Imperial Japan Winter 1944: Fascist Italy (1939 vote)
All in all, "Summer 2008: China" is far from an exception. Simply put, the IOC doesn't care, never cared, and probably won't start caring anytime soon, if ever.
they would port to MacOS before they would port to linux.
Which is also pretty good. MacOS X uses OpenGL for its 3D rendering. Porting a 3D app or game to MacOS then means having already done most of the work needed for it to run in Linux, since both are also Unix systems. Adding the remaining pieces needed to make it fully Linux-ready afterwards is pretty much trivial.
What makes you so sure the Aztecs didn't know the earth was round?
I didn't mean they didn't know it was a sphere (actually, I don't know whether this was the case or not). My comment was directed to OP's time frame, who said Aztecs knew Earth as round before the (non-existent) flat-earthers of 500 years ago.
To be more precise: given that the Aztec society formed 800 years ago, and that the time frame of the actual flat-earth discussion in Europe was 2400 years ago, the Aztecs evidently couldn't have come before something that happened 1200 years earlier. Result: a revised post wouldn't have reason to mention them.
I think that the term 'News' should not apply to a 500-year old debate.
I think you're confusing two different things. 500 years ago people discussed whether the Earth was fixed of movable, but no one had any doubt whatsoever about it being a sphere. Earth's shape, and even its rough diameter, have been acknowledged scientific facts for way more than two millennia.
Fix your sentence to "I think that the term 'News' should not apply to a 2400-year old debate", remove your reference to the Aztecs, and your post will be in the correct time frame.;)
I'm from Brazil, and no, orkut doesn't mean or sound like our equivalent for "hot sex". It sounds like nothing actually. If anything, the feel is that of a typical meaningless foreign brand name.
Gameplay-wise, WoW is pretty sparse. There is some tactical depth but the missions are very repetitive, the story is almost non-existent, and crafting is a joke.
Hmm... I kept playing WoW for roughly 2 years mostly because of the incredible story. The thing is: it isn't presented to you as a narration, you gather it by reading quest texts and connecting the bits and pieces of information in your head.
I know lots of people who don't care to read quest texts, much less try to find the overall meaning of what little they read. These are the only ones who tell me, with a straight face, that the game has none or almost no story.
This is probably from some other thinker, not Aquinas. He adopts Aristotle's concept of soul, in which matter is indistinct. Matter has a purpose in causing individuation to be determined for any non-specific form, but once there's an individual (form+matter), there's an absolute individual essence which constitutes him. Losing its matter afterwards doesn't changes that essence, as in fact nothing could.
Now, Aquinas books are complex to read. For the most part, he writes like this: a question, followed by as many authoritative answers from as many sources as he managed to find (sometimes ten or more), followed by his own answer, then by his rebuttal of each and every of the answers by other authors cited before. Thus, it's perfectly possible that you could find such a statement about cannibals in one of his works, but in the list of answers he'll later rebutte.
Doubtful, Saint Augustine was a Berber and the likelihood he would have been the only black Berber seems remote.
There are indeed black Berbers. But okay, I must concede that since the only thing we know about Augustine was that he was a Berber, we cannot be sure of which group he came. In any case, non-black ethnic Berbers still have darker skin than ethnic Italians, so the point remains.
Well, if Jesus is God, then he owns the whole Universe and beyond. Can't be richer than that, can he?
Anyway, if you go beyond the Gospels into Acts, you'll see the apostles made such a money-less community. The problem is, it didn't last. At the end, they had to ask Paul to go around get donations from the churches abroad, what he did. Morals: being poor is good and all, provided you have someone from whom to ask money once poorness' ugly side shows up.
Oh, and by the way: the land the Church owned in Europe up to the 18th century were usually reserved for usage by the landless or anyone under persecution of angry Feudal lords. When those Church lands were appropriated by the many greed governments around, they got distributed among nobles, bourgeois and other close friends of said governments. That's when being a poor European landless peasant really became a problem (for the peasant).
In short: actual History is more complicated than our cherished oversimplifications would prefer it to be.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in principle against the very notion of copyright and patents, but between both extremes of my ideal and what currently exists, there's a middle ground that would make things much more sane, if it ever had any hope of being implemented in law, which it doesn't: the abolition of the concept of transferring (and of licensing with exclusivity) one's intellectual production, what would mean making moral rights and copy rights one and the same. Being employed by a corporation in this scenario might still mean ceding a non-exclusive right for them to use your intellectual production, maybe with a clause of non competition for as long as you worked for them. And such a law would need a clause establishing a hard upper limit on for how long a ceding contract could be valid before requiring a renegotiation. But the net result would be that you'd still fully own your intellectual production, and would be able to re-license it to whomever you wished, again and again and again, once the initial term was up. Big pharma, big software, big labels, big anything, would be "big" only so long as lots and lots of intellectual producers were willing to keep within them. If they left, for whatever reason, the corporation itself would break apart, thus giving HUGE incentives for these corporations to do things in a sensible manner. Much more so, at least, than what we have today.
We're a corporation and we need to maintain stability and compatibility over fancy and chic. You get a laptop. With Windows. And a BlackBerry... if you're lucky.
Stop being lazy. For anything important, put it in a locked down VM image (including, if needed, an IE6 configured to never, ever access the actual Internet). Plus, for iPads, iPhones, Androids and the like, a remote desktop utility to access such a locked down VM session running elsewhere, perhaps with the screen size already adjusted. You get all the control you need (not "want", need), all the while allowing your users to be sufficiently happy.
It'd be interesting for the sake of spicing things up if all these services, and the groups behind them, used "free speech" and similar terms as part of their names. The mainstream media would have a field day spreading news about an UK judge banning a site called "FreeSpeechNews" by "Team Combatants of Liberty", much more so at least than about him banning something as esoteric-sounding as "newzbin" by some guys who cal themselves dogs. Just imagine the headlines!
Even pirates should lean the value of marketing. Use it for your own advantage. It might not be glamorous, but it's worth the effort.
They survive and grow because they stimulate and develop either direct or indirect overdependency on them, which works because its of a kind most people really don't want to leave. Say what you want about the Amish and similar movements, but one thing is certain: they are immune from this, and likely to remain so. Such freedom has quite a high price though.
It instantly made me want to renew my account again. Must.... resist.....
One good thing about living here in Brazil is that our summer happens around Christmas. If Blizzard releases the expansion before that I'm surely going to be a very happy re-subscriber for at least two and half months of college vacation, three weeks of which will also be job vacation. :-D
It's guaranteed that I'll only see a sublime work of genius like this on a day without mod-points. Keep up the good work.
Hehe, thank you. I'd be flattered weren't for the fact that I'm only applying a method of critique developed by one of my Philosophy teachers. The genius thus is in him, not in me. :-)
If you can read French or Portuguese and you're interested in a more detailed analysis on how chronocentrism is a form of prejudice and discrimination, the links point to his speech at UNESCO's 1997 international symposium "Forms and Dynamics of Exclusion in Contemporary Societies". Its title can be roughly translated as "The most excluded among the excluded: the dead's silence as model for the living forbidden to speak."
Unfortunately I don't recommend automatic translators for them. I've looked at what Google's one outputs and the result is impossible to understand. Well, once I have time I'll work in translating the Portuguese version into English. Until then, there's no alternative, sorry. :-(
Join the fucking twenty-first century.
This might sound like nitpicking, but people seeing women as equal to men isn't a "twenty-first century" concept. In fact, 2400 years ago Plato was already defending that, for example, if a woman is capable of governing a state, she should be allowed to, not blocked because of her sex.
We should stop being chronocentrists, which is as much a discriminatory state of mind as ethnocentrism. A given year, or a collection of years, has no attached value. Something happening "in the 21st century" isn't better just because it's happening "after" whatever came before. Ideas, such as that women and men must have equal rights, must be judged in themselves, not because of when they appeared, or when they became mainstream, or when they stopped being mainstream, or whatever.
So, while I agree with your sentiment, I must disagree with the way you express it. Calling for someone to change his behavior because of the "age" or "era" in which he lives is to incur in the "appeal to authority" fallacy. In fact, the only intellectually correct approach is to defend an idea by its own merits, not dwelling into its "ageity" at all.
Do more, or less, than this, and what you'll be doing won't be a rational defense of an idea, but merely a rhetorical one. In other words, politics, not reason.
No wonder Alan Moore gets so annoyed over what's done to his old works...
ease up on the guy, he's probably had way to many years on Windows.
That's also the case, but I'm actually also a hobbyist and know my way around Linux pretty well. In fact, many time I'm in a hurry and don't even bother loading X: I do whatever I need in console mode and am done with it.
It just so happens that nowadays I work full time and go to night college, consequently having only a few hours per weekend to play around in my home box, a much different scenario than when I started figuring out Debian, back in 1997. Very pragmatic consequence: I prefer using those few hours doing useful or fun stuff rather than fixing obscure annoyances. Thus, if I can solve something in one hour by wiping sda1 and reinstalling the OS, my actual data and custom compiled software being well secured in sda3, sda4, a shelf of DVD-Rs and Amazon S3, that's exactly what I'll do.
Simply put, sometimes doing things "the right way" just isn't worth the effort.
I experienced frequent Firefox crashes due to Flash in my Ubuntu box, which went being upgraded from 6.06 to 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04. But then my hard disk crashed and I had to reinstall Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch. It's been now three months of this fresh installation, and in this period Flash has never, ever, crashed my Firefox. It's been rock solid.
My wild guess then would be that your setup is half-broken much like mine was. Try that old Windows trick of wiping your hard disk and reinstalling your Linux distribution, whatever it is. It might be the solution.
Now, this doesn't mean Flash in Linux isn't still full of bugs. It not respecting transparencies and correct depth levels in pages is a major annoyance. But at least crashing isn't part of the list anymore, at least for me.
And what happens should developed countries' governments start to regulate ADCs more capable than 16-bit 44.1 kHz the way they regulate prescription drugs: to be used only by a licensed audio technician?
Easy: a black market. The factories in China were those are produced would be very happy at producing double each order, then delivering the original quantity to the purchaser and the other half to the nearest contraband dealer.
Worst case scenario, people will start sharing schematics around. Then what? Government regulation of generic Operational Amplifiers? And once that pass, of transistors, so that you don't build your own tabletop HiFi OpAmp?
Analog hacking: the next frontier.
I thought with Wine you could import the DirectX files and it would translate down to hardware.
Unfortunately that isn't the case. I'm not a 3D programmer, much less a low level driver developer, so what I'm writing here might not be accurate, but from what I've read both DirectX and OpenGL are just standardized middleware APIs for the actual graphics driver, which receives the calls and translates them into low level commands to the hardware. What happens (as far as I know) then is that Windows' driver model provides hooks for hardware manufacturers to provide the required low level support for both DirectX and OpenGL, while Linux (or X, I dunno) only provides it for OpenGL, since there's no standardized way to get a DirectX back-end in there.
What's then the point of installing Microsoft's DirectX DLLs in Wine, since they themselves don't do anything hardware-related? Well, it's simply so that you get the full DirectX API, rather than the subset Wine managed to reverse engineer and code, possibly without full optimization. But the effect as far as raw performance goes is still roughly the same: a fake DirectX-enabled board receives the high-level calls and, instead of translating them into hardware command to the board, translates them into OpenGL calls, then sent to the actual driver.
It is a damned shame there is fifty different ways to do everything in Linux EXCEPT graphics,which is tied to the dead horse that is OpenGL.
2D in the X Window System is also very poor. Try this experiment in both X and Windows: open some CPU performance monitoring app; now open Gmail inside Firefox (same version on both); set it to show 50 or 100 e-mails in the message list; open one or more Gtalk frames; start scrolling up and down fast; look at Firefox's CPU usage or, if your computer old enough, just "feel" how both Firefoxes behave.
Why this happens? Because while Windows has a robust accelerated 2D system, with lots of tricks going on behind the scenes to make things like the content of windows move as they should, X hasn't. In fact, last time I read about this it still was under discussion how to implement it "the proper way". And since "the proper way" hasn't been agreed upon yet, the result is we're stuck with a very old, poorly performing, all but surpassed, solution.
And yet, guess what? I run Ubuntu as my home OS, as I really like it despite X's graphical weaknesses. Good thing I'm not that much into games...
Which means our best bet is a combination of Wine getting "good enough" DX9 and DX10 support
The problem with this is that the Wine approach is to translate DirectX API calls into their OpenGL equivalents, what slows down things significantly, not to mention OpenGL currently doesn't support all the newest DirectX features.
If DirectX continues to be the standard for PC gaming, the only "good" approach would be to have it implemented directly into whatever layer OpenGL itself currently resides. This way Wine would be able to forward DirectX calls directly to the underlying driver, as it currently does when you're luckily playing a Windows OpenGL game in it, without translation overheads.
Absent this, playing games in Linux will continue to either be a worse experience than in Windows, since you'll have to set the game options to a lower graphical level than it might have in Windows, or a more expensive one, since you'll have to purchase more expensive hardware to get the full intended experience.
In general, sentience without egoistical or similar motives tends to be completely neutral in relation to other beings, and what will most likely happen is that we give the machines incentives other than the human-evolved ones to keep it going, and thinking. This is an immense task.
There's a nice scifi books where this very concept of biological machines built from neurons but without the "emotion engine" play a central role at the ending: Starfish, by Peter Watts (BY-NC-SA 2.5 licensed).
In the novel these machines aren't programmed, they're taught to follow certain patterns, what in turn requires a behavior reinforcement mechanism to exist. The questions is: what happens if you take such a completely amoral biocomputer, highly optimized at processing certain kinds of data (in the case, cleaning viruses from live Internet traffic), and replace the IO system allowing it to deal with things such as ecosystems?
Let's say the result is pretty troublesome.
What are they going to do once they have the gun to your head? Pull the trigger? That's when the real revolution begins. People will only accept so much.
In China they did and still do exactly this. You're causing minor annoyances, you're condemned to 20 years of torture at a political prison. You continue being annoying, they shot your neck (100% guaranteed to kill), then bill your family for the execution costs.
Listen, most people aren't revolutionaries. They only want to go along with their lives. Revolutions don't happen when "the people" rise. Revolutions happen when "a group" intent in taking power rise. Sure, "the people" in general must be willing to accept the new government, or at least not mind the revolutionaries, what usually happens if the current institutions aren't popular and the revolutionaries show they can hold ground and enforce their way.
But "not minding" is the most normal people will ever do. There's no point fantasizing it'll ever be different. It won't.
the idea that you could compute my 27 character long pass phrase is stupid as well.
Well, if medicine and biological engineering continue progressing at a geometric pace, in a few years they'll simply scan your password out of your brain (not to mention anything else you're trying to hide). Then things will start becoming interesting.
And yet, by hosting the Olympics in China, they are anyway.
Actually, I'd say the IOC is associated with atrocities for a long time:
Winter 1936: Nazi-Germany
Summer 1936: Nazi-Germany
Summer 1980: Soviet Union
Winter 1984: Communist Yugoslavia
In addition to the above cases, weren't for WW2 and these instances would also have happened:
Winter 1940: Theocratic-Totalitarian Imperial Japan
Summer 1940: Theocratic-Totalitarian Imperial Japan
Winter 1944: Fascist Italy (1939 vote)
All in all, "Summer 2008: China" is far from an exception. Simply put, the IOC doesn't care, never cared, and probably won't start caring anytime soon, if ever.
they would port to MacOS before they would port to linux.
Which is also pretty good. MacOS X uses OpenGL for its 3D rendering. Porting a 3D app or game to MacOS then means having already done most of the work needed for it to run in Linux, since both are also Unix systems. Adding the remaining pieces needed to make it fully Linux-ready afterwards is pretty much trivial.
What makes you so sure the Aztecs didn't know the earth was round?
I didn't mean they didn't know it was a sphere (actually, I don't know whether this was the case or not). My comment was directed to OP's time frame, who said Aztecs knew Earth as round before the (non-existent) flat-earthers of 500 years ago.
To be more precise: given that the Aztec society formed 800 years ago, and that the time frame of the actual flat-earth discussion in Europe was 2400 years ago, the Aztecs evidently couldn't have come before something that happened 1200 years earlier. Result: a revised post wouldn't have reason to mention them.
I think that the term 'News' should not apply to a 500-year old debate.
I think you're confusing two different things. 500 years ago people discussed whether the Earth was fixed of movable, but no one had any doubt whatsoever about it being a sphere. Earth's shape, and even its rough diameter, have been acknowledged scientific facts for way more than two millennia.
Fix your sentence to "I think that the term 'News' should not apply to a 2400-year old debate", remove your reference to the Aztecs, and your post will be in the correct time frame. ;)
I'm from Brazil, and no, orkut doesn't mean or sound like our equivalent for "hot sex". It sounds like nothing actually. If anything, the feel is that of a typical meaningless foreign brand name.
Gameplay-wise, WoW is pretty sparse. There is some tactical depth but the missions are very repetitive, the story is almost non-existent, and crafting is a joke.
Hmm... I kept playing WoW for roughly 2 years mostly because of the incredible story. The thing is: it isn't presented to you as a narration, you gather it by reading quest texts and connecting the bits and pieces of information in your head.
I know lots of people who don't care to read quest texts, much less try to find the overall meaning of what little they read. These are the only ones who tell me, with a straight face, that the game has none or almost no story.
This is probably from some other thinker, not Aquinas. He adopts Aristotle's concept of soul, in which matter is indistinct. Matter has a purpose in causing individuation to be determined for any non-specific form, but once there's an individual (form+matter), there's an absolute individual essence which constitutes him. Losing its matter afterwards doesn't changes that essence, as in fact nothing could.
Now, Aquinas books are complex to read. For the most part, he writes like this: a question, followed by as many authoritative answers from as many sources as he managed to find (sometimes ten or more), followed by his own answer, then by his rebuttal of each and every of the answers by other authors cited before. Thus, it's perfectly possible that you could find such a statement about cannibals in one of his works, but in the list of answers he'll later rebutte.
Doubtful, Saint Augustine was a Berber and the likelihood he would have been the only black Berber seems remote.
There are indeed black Berbers. But okay, I must concede that since the only thing we know about Augustine was that he was a Berber, we cannot be sure of which group he came. In any case, non-black ethnic Berbers still have darker skin than ethnic Italians, so the point remains.
Well, if Jesus is God, then he owns the whole Universe and beyond. Can't be richer than that, can he?
Anyway, if you go beyond the Gospels into Acts, you'll see the apostles made such a money-less community. The problem is, it didn't last. At the end, they had to ask Paul to go around get donations from the churches abroad, what he did. Morals: being poor is good and all, provided you have someone from whom to ask money once poorness' ugly side shows up.
Oh, and by the way: the land the Church owned in Europe up to the 18th century were usually reserved for usage by the landless or anyone under persecution of angry Feudal lords. When those Church lands were appropriated by the many greed governments around, they got distributed among nobles, bourgeois and other close friends of said governments. That's when being a poor European landless peasant really became a problem (for the peasant).
In short: actual History is more complicated than our cherished oversimplifications would prefer it to be.