I RTFA and others to try and find out if this woman actually did try to SELL the music (not the kind of "piracy" I am guilty of on a daily basis) but I could find nothing. I don't know where the OP who are so against her are getting their info. Can anyone please confirm if she is being sued for downloading music or if it is a much more serious case of "real piracy"?
In either case, a poor mother of 2 probably can't handle hundreds of thousands of dollars, even for trying to sell a few songs. There is no doubt that the fine was not fitting, and that the legal system is ignorant and disgusting.
Are you sure it's the same thing? When I post on slashdot, it's the slashdot domain (establishment/publication/corporation) that publishes, they are the ones exposed to the internet and thus they are required to show who they really are because as a non-individual they do not have the rights of individuals. I am not posting my name and address because I am not required to, and if I was then I probably won't. It's like publishing an anonymous column in a magazine.
Domains are estates. They are not individuals. I have a right to know to whom each "estate" belongs, because that is public information. The internet presence established by putting some text up on a website you don't own is I think a little different from purchasing part of the internet, claiming it yours (because of it's unique identity) and setting up a business out of it...etc
And trust me, you do not want the intelligence agencies, governments..etc to hide behind anonymity on the internet. There are too many scenarios to be afraid of.
Clarification: GP statement is correct in terms of this particular implementation. I was just pointing out that although I agree it wont work and it's silly to think that people draw the same strokes every time, there are other ways to do this.
Nigerian emails have resulted in me *gaining* negative money for several years now. It's not fair for them to be *charged* negative money. It just isn't.
Oh great. Now that you're doing the ethical thing, I (and all other happy hosts) am going to have to hunt down the people at MY party to give them their shirts, as opposed to using them to decorate my wall.
Girls... You make life so difficult.
PS: Did anyone figure out why there was a rm -rf/* on the back? I didn't understand why.
So much talk, so little value. Holy shit, I miss the days of Feynman and Einstein and Max Born. What is happening to the world? Must everyone defend to the death every silly mistake they make? If you're wrong, you're wrong; we don't want to hear about your philosophy in life and your contributions to mankind and your plans for the future, just apologize and get on with science. Jeezus.
And now the super funny moderator-sans-grey-matter mods me down. Lets see how long we can play this game, asshole. Parent has been modded up thankfully. I love slashdot.
That's what the GP is saying, genius. He knows the number for euro to candian will be smaller than euro to dollar, becuase now the loonie is worth more than the USD. That's the whole point of the joke - $10K US dollars for 70 euro.:)
Why did people mod this offtopic? It's just a guy thanking another for a pretty funny comment.. mods, please fix this idiocy and mod him insightful, I'm out of points.
Oh and one more thing: you know that passage in the bible about Jesus running in the streets and crying with tears into the night
Eli! Eli! Lama sabachtani!! Don't know if you knew this, but it's actually a bad transliteration of aramaic/arabic
Ilaahi! Ilaahi! lima sabaghtani? My god! my god! for what didst thou createth me?!
Apparently the guy who wrote it up couldn't answer that very important question, either.
In short, you are taxing yourself with an exercise of trying to design what is known as a "miracle" (which you know will never happen). You want to see a ghost. You want a miracle genius, a physical anomaly..
You are trying too hard. How about a documented occurrence of the red sea being split into two huge mountains (story of moses) or people being raised alive from their graves (jesus)? God seems to have done everything but ONLY in the past. Totally sucks, doesn't it - he just gave up on us believing now, because (as the Quran says) the ones before us didn't believe when they saw what they saw, if they ever saw it. We have to live in miserable doubt and the eternal agony of hell because God got tired of pulling tricks? Why doesn't "God" just make us believe/do/whatever he wants? Why all this nonsense? Why the games? Why are we here?
It is laughable to think an "uber-deity" would go to these lengths to "prove" himself. If he existed and wanted you to know it, you would know it. Some will say that god won't do it because this [trumpets and drum-roll here] "defeats the purpose" of faith. To which I say:
What the hell is the purpose? To be created on a small wet planet then get obscure messages from dead men so that you somehow defy all reason and come to some sort of belief in unseen things in the sky that want you to do silly rituals on earth, while ignoring all the other unseen things in the sky that all the other dead men want you to believe in? And if you decide not to, due to using the SAME MIND that the SAME GOD supposedly GAVE you, you are cast as evil and tormented in punishment for ever and ever, after you've lived in a noble, humble and respectable way in the real world?
It's a sad, nonsensical fucking "purpose" then isn't it. Like the sort of things thought up by six year olds, or madmen. I prefer sanity, thank you very much. Maybe if their sadistic fscking gods are also sane, they will understand and spare me.
When you "prove a negative" in mathematics you are merely disproving the (positive) opposite of your assertion, for every possible situation. The entire proof/disproof thing is based on induction and absurdity, and there is always a set of axioms you must begin with, because they make the process ultimately feasible. In math/logic, most negative statements *can* be proved, or else they can be disproved, because the axioms are very simple, conventional truths.
The physical world is more complex, where negative and positive statements, derived from previous mathematical and physical truths, are possible, but novel proposals about reality are only "positive" in nature. Empirical evidence is used to provide inductive backing for positive statements *only*. When you say the earth is not flat, the negative statement is proved by combining mathematical axioms with physical observations that result in absurdity. Of course, you can also prove that the earth is in fact round, but that is another matter, for you are then proving a positive statement (which then can be used as a logical disproof for flatness claims).
But lets say you want to talk about an isolated particle z, claiming that it exists. You need to first provide either theoretical or empirical evidence. The theoretical is uninteresing..it is just a consequence of information that already exists, so it's a simple math exercise. You are only novel when you add to theory/information by offering an observation (I saw a trail in a cloud chamber). You defend your statement by proving a few negative statements via mathematics, like "it is not particle a or b which we already know because that leads to conclusion x, which is absurd". Your proofs of the negatives are simply a reduction to absurdity of the other possibilities, leaving only YOUR possibility (new particle) standing. But if you hadn't observed the particle somehow in the FIRST PLACE, then you cannot even begin. We have nothing to talk about. Hence in the real world, you are bound to begin - no matter how distant that beginning is- with reality, and reality is what you observe. The physical axioms are true not because of convention but because you observe something in the world around you that you believe you can formulate into an undefeatable truth, and you hold it undefeated.
Having said this, you cannot actually disprove proposed physical statements about the world: you can only knock down the "proofs" for them. You cannot disprove "the earth is flat" or "a particle a exists that has property b".... You cannot disprove because you do not need to. The increase in information offered by each of those statements is the step that needs to be justified, because it is adding something to our dear list of truths, and that justification is what needs to stand the test of our skepticism.
God (ghosts..etc) is physics - in terms of information: God is an addition, a new thing, a proposal, an increase in entropy. If you observe things that lead to belief in his existence, then all the other possibilities leading to your observations must be eliminated(as in the particle case above), and of course this is not possible because science is hard to eliminate. Hence you cannot prove God. You cannot defeat the logical skepticism.
And you do not need to disprove him either, because there is nothing to disprove. He is not a logical product of predicates nor is he a tangible object of study, he is a proposed reality that cannot be linked to anything at all. So why should we worry about him? I was at one time religious, I still feel the instinctive pull, the psychological comfort and evolved appreciation in my human cognition of the universe's beauty and order. But if there was a God, he has left us in logical confusion. We have no reason to be worried about the promises that come from the mouths of ancient people, long dead, much less their threats.
The atheist doesn't want to prove anything about otherworldy things. The atheist's request is merely to be left alone.
It's not just the faces, it's all about the hair. When was the last time you saw a president who did not have great hair? This is an important part of politics, because healthy hair means a healthy economy. Also, presidents with non-presidential faces WILL lower troop morale on the battlefield. America needs good genes, you degenerate schmucks.
You are mislead if you think less "optimism" is somehow going to degrade their pseudo-religious conviction (if they are religious terrorists). They take the stuff you want them to think about for granted. It is not a spectrum; not open to question.
In fact more optimism can help here - less chance of letting go of your life and abandoning everything to go join a bunch of unemployed criminals seeking eternal salvation/obscure cause.
Actually, both the "west" and the "east" modded you into oblivion because they think those soldiers were worse than scum, and not only did they destroy any credibility we had in the war and strengthened the support for radicals, they pretty much proved the enemy's point for them. It is your point of view that is disgusting and anomalous, not everybody else's. And yes, sexual torture methods are used to "defeat" the subjects' ego utterly leading to emotional breakdown and -the torturer hopes- hopelessness (hence ease of deriving info). People can get past an electric shock session and beatings pretty easily..this is far, far more difficult to get over. I guess if you don't realize that by yourself then neither I nor the moderators nor the whole world can get you to understand. Suffice to say that the soldiers who did this would not defend themselves as you defend do. Rhetoric like yours is what gives al-qaeda the upper hand, your voiced opinion is all they need.
I think the majority of people who saw those videos disagree with you very very strongly. You are responding in a typical "western" fashion, taking pure physical pain over psychological damage (which can be far more difficult to recover from). I guess it's part of the materialist path most of our nations have been walking down. There are people who would rather die than be put through that kind of humiliation, literally.
I can't believe you just said that. Sexual humiliation is one of the most extreme and repulsive methods of torture anyone can go through, particularly if you are raised in a culture that is conservative in any way. How about I take your sister and strip her of her clothes, tie her hands to the ceiling and cover her head in a black bag while strangers laugh and take photos of her, occasionally touching here, groping there.. you can't be completely unaware of the relationship between dominance and sex(thereby the absolute assault on personal diginity in related torture methods). The Islamists who capture our men may kill them in a savage manner, but even they - the brainwashed criminals - would never stoop to the level of inhuman shit our "soldiers" displayed.
Oh yeah, and when people are raped (which is probably the part you dont see in the pics) they are also going through something that others can pay money for in different circumstances. Pain comes in different flavors.
If the people you are addressing are staring in disbelief at the state you're in, you are probably not dressed "properly" for the situation, where "properly" indicates normalcy and moderation in attire generally acceptable by tradition or practice. And no its not about whether you have socks on or not, you are *completely* ignoring the bigger picture. He looks like a fucking caveman. We are not cavemen. It's not nice to be branded as such when you are trying to say something to the world that is contrary to what the billion-dollar corporation business models. Try going with his outfit - barefoot - to a restaurant somewhere (never mind a respected academic institution to give a speech). See if they let you in through the door.
I'm sorry to say, it doesn't. Firefox 2.0, latest updates. Check out the google search form you have on the top. The button appears behind the banner, so only part of the button shows. I too can prove this with screenshots;)
Slashdot Mirror
I RTFA and others to try and find out if this woman actually did try to SELL the music (not the kind of "piracy" I am guilty of on a daily basis) but I could find nothing. I don't know where the OP who are so against her are getting their info. Can anyone please confirm if she is being sued for downloading music or if it is a much more serious case of "real piracy"?
In either case, a poor mother of 2 probably can't handle hundreds of thousands of dollars, even for trying to sell a few songs. There is no doubt that the fine was not fitting, and that the legal system is ignorant and disgusting.
Are you sure it's the same thing? When I post on slashdot, it's the slashdot domain (establishment/publication/corporation) that publishes, they are the ones exposed to the internet and thus they are required to show who they really are because as a non-individual they do not have the rights of individuals. I am not posting my name and address because I am not required to, and if I was then I probably won't. It's like publishing an anonymous column in a magazine.
Domains are estates. They are not individuals. I have a right to know to whom each "estate" belongs, because that is public information. The internet presence established by putting some text up on a website you don't own is I think a little different from purchasing part of the internet, claiming it yours (because of it's unique identity) and setting up a business out of it...etc
And trust me, you do not want the intelligence agencies, governments..etc to hide behind anonymity on the internet. There are too many scenarios to be afraid of.
Clarification: GP statement is correct in terms of this particular implementation. I was just pointing out that although I agree it wont work and it's silly to think that people draw the same strokes every time, there are other ways to do this.
Welcome to the world of pattern classification. I do not think all systems have to be implemented in the way you imply.
Nigerian emails have resulted in me *gaining* negative money for several years now. It's not fair for them to be *charged* negative money. It just isn't.
Your eyes surely deceive you. You too can achieve similar effects, with a little practice:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html
Oh great. Now that you're doing the ethical thing, I (and all other happy hosts) am going to have to hunt down the people at MY party to give them their shirts, as opposed to using them to decorate my wall.
/* on the back? I didn't understand why.
Girls... You make life so difficult.
PS: Did anyone figure out why there was a rm -rf
So much talk, so little value. Holy shit, I miss the days of Feynman and Einstein and Max Born. What is happening to the world? Must everyone defend to the death every silly mistake they make? If you're wrong, you're wrong; we don't want to hear about your philosophy in life and your contributions to mankind and your plans for the future, just apologize and get on with science. Jeezus.
And now the super funny moderator-sans-grey-matter mods me down. Lets see how long we can play this game, asshole. Parent has been modded up thankfully. I love slashdot.
That's what the GP is saying, genius. He knows the number for euro to candian will be smaller than euro to dollar, becuase now the loonie is worth more than the USD. That's the whole point of the joke - $10K US dollars for 70 euro. :)
Why did people mod this offtopic? It's just a guy thanking another for a pretty funny comment.. mods, please fix this idiocy and mod him insightful, I'm out of points.
That's why I usually just say "agnostic" to denote that I don't really want to talk about it. You are right, people on both sides are usually stupid.
Apparently the guy who wrote it up couldn't answer that very important question, either.
In short, you are taxing yourself with an exercise of trying to design what is known as a "miracle" (which you know will never happen). You want to see a ghost. You want a miracle genius, a physical anomaly..
You are trying too hard. How about a documented occurrence of the red sea being split into two huge mountains (story of moses) or people being raised alive from their graves (jesus)? God seems to have done everything but ONLY in the past. Totally sucks, doesn't it - he just gave up on us believing now, because (as the Quran says) the ones before us didn't believe when they saw what they saw, if they ever saw it. We have to live in miserable doubt and the eternal agony of hell because God got tired of pulling tricks? Why doesn't "God" just make us believe/do/whatever he wants? Why all this nonsense? Why the games? Why are we here?
It is laughable to think an "uber-deity" would go to these lengths to "prove" himself. If he existed and wanted you to know it, you would know it. Some will say that god won't do it because this [trumpets and drum-roll here] "defeats the purpose" of faith. To which I say:
What the hell is the purpose? To be created on a small wet planet then get obscure messages from dead men so that you somehow defy all reason and come to some sort of belief in unseen things in the sky that want you to do silly rituals on earth, while ignoring all the other unseen things in the sky that all the other dead men want you to believe in? And if you decide not to, due to using the SAME MIND that the SAME GOD supposedly GAVE you, you are cast as evil and tormented in punishment for ever and ever, after you've lived in a noble, humble and respectable way in the real world?
It's a sad, nonsensical fucking "purpose" then isn't it. Like the sort of things thought up by six year olds, or madmen. I prefer sanity, thank you very much. Maybe if their sadistic fscking gods are also sane, they will understand and spare me.
When you "prove a negative" in mathematics you are merely disproving the (positive) opposite of your assertion, for every possible situation. The entire proof/disproof thing is based on induction and absurdity, and there is always a set of axioms you must begin with, because they make the process ultimately feasible. In math/logic, most negative statements *can* be proved, or else they can be disproved, because the axioms are very simple, conventional truths.
The physical world is more complex, where negative and positive statements, derived from previous mathematical and physical truths, are possible, but novel proposals about reality are only "positive" in nature. Empirical evidence is used to provide inductive backing for positive statements *only*. When you say the earth is not flat, the negative statement is proved by combining mathematical axioms with physical observations that result in absurdity. Of course, you can also prove that the earth is in fact round, but that is another matter, for you are then proving a positive statement (which then can be used as a logical disproof for flatness claims).
But lets say you want to talk about an isolated particle z, claiming that it exists. You need to first provide either theoretical or empirical evidence. The theoretical is uninteresing..it is just a consequence of information that already exists, so it's a simple math exercise. You are only novel when you add to theory/information by offering an observation (I saw a trail in a cloud chamber). You defend your statement by proving a few negative statements via mathematics, like "it is not particle a or b which we already know because that leads to conclusion x, which is absurd". Your proofs of the negatives are simply a reduction to absurdity of the other possibilities, leaving only YOUR possibility (new particle) standing. But if you hadn't observed the particle somehow in the FIRST PLACE, then you cannot even begin. We have nothing to talk about. Hence in the real world, you are bound to begin - no matter how distant that beginning is- with reality, and reality is what you observe. The physical axioms are true not because of convention but because you observe something in the world around you that you believe you can formulate into an undefeatable truth, and you hold it undefeated.
Having said this, you cannot actually disprove proposed physical statements about the world: you can only knock down the "proofs" for them. You cannot disprove "the earth is flat" or "a particle a exists that has property b".... You cannot disprove because you do not need to. The increase in information offered by each of those statements is the step that needs to be justified, because it is adding something to our dear list of truths, and that justification is what needs to stand the test of our skepticism.
God (ghosts..etc) is physics - in terms of information: God is an addition, a new thing, a proposal, an increase in entropy. If you observe things that lead to belief in his existence, then all the other possibilities leading to your observations must be eliminated(as in the particle case above), and of course this is not possible because science is hard to eliminate. Hence you cannot prove God. You cannot defeat the logical skepticism.
And you do not need to disprove him either, because there is nothing to disprove. He is not a logical product of predicates nor is he a tangible object of study, he is a proposed reality that cannot be linked to anything at all. So why should we worry about him? I was at one time religious, I still feel the instinctive pull, the psychological comfort and evolved appreciation in my human cognition of the universe's beauty and order. But if there was a God, he has left us in logical confusion. We have no reason to be worried about the promises that come from the mouths of ancient people, long dead, much less their threats.
The atheist doesn't want to prove anything about otherworldy things. The atheist's request is merely to be left alone.
It's not just the faces, it's all about the hair. When was the last time you saw a president who did not have great hair? This is an important part of politics, because healthy hair means a healthy economy. Also, presidents with non-presidential faces WILL lower troop morale on the battlefield. America needs good genes, you degenerate schmucks.
You are mislead if you think less "optimism" is somehow going to degrade their pseudo-religious conviction (if they are religious terrorists). They take the stuff you want them to think about for granted. It is not a spectrum; not open to question.
In fact more optimism can help here - less chance of letting go of your life and abandoning everything to go join a bunch of unemployed criminals seeking eternal salvation/obscure cause.
No, you missed the big news:
15B for a "social-networking" website where people can "poke" each other and buy each other little gifts that are pictures of teddy bears and ducks.
Actually, both the "west" and the "east" modded you into oblivion because they think those soldiers were worse than scum, and not only did they destroy any credibility we had in the war and strengthened the support for radicals, they pretty much proved the enemy's point for them. It is your point of view that is disgusting and anomalous, not everybody else's. And yes, sexual torture methods are used to "defeat" the subjects' ego utterly leading to emotional breakdown and -the torturer hopes- hopelessness (hence ease of deriving info). People can get past an electric shock session and beatings pretty easily..this is far, far more difficult to get over. I guess if you don't realize that by yourself then neither I nor the moderators nor the whole world can get you to understand. Suffice to say that the soldiers who did this would not defend themselves as you defend do. Rhetoric like yours is what gives al-qaeda the upper hand, your voiced opinion is all they need.
I think the majority of people who saw those videos disagree with you very very strongly. You are responding in a typical "western" fashion, taking pure physical pain over psychological damage (which can be far more difficult to recover from). I guess it's part of the materialist path most of our nations have been walking down. There are people who would rather die than be put through that kind of humiliation, literally.
I can't believe you just said that. Sexual humiliation is one of the most extreme and repulsive methods of torture anyone can go through, particularly if you are raised in a culture that is conservative in any way. How about I take your sister and strip her of her clothes, tie her hands to the ceiling and cover her head in a black bag while strangers laugh and take photos of her, occasionally touching here, groping there.. you can't be completely unaware of the relationship between dominance and sex(thereby the absolute assault on personal diginity in related torture methods). The Islamists who capture our men may kill them in a savage manner, but even they - the brainwashed criminals - would never stoop to the level of inhuman shit our "soldiers" displayed.
Oh yeah, and when people are raped (which is probably the part you dont see in the pics) they are also going through something that others can pay money for in different circumstances. Pain comes in different flavors.
If the people you are addressing are staring in disbelief at the state you're in, you are probably not dressed "properly" for the situation, where "properly" indicates normalcy and moderation in attire generally acceptable by tradition or practice. And no its not about whether you have socks on or not, you are *completely* ignoring the bigger picture. He looks like a fucking caveman. We are not cavemen. It's not nice to be branded as such when you are trying to say something to the world that is contrary to what the billion-dollar corporation business models. Try going with his outfit - barefoot - to a restaurant somewhere (never mind a respected academic institution to give a speech). See if they let you in through the door.
I'm sorry to say, it doesn't. Firefox 2.0, latest updates. Check out the google search form you have on the top. The button appears behind the banner, so only part of the button shows. I too can prove this with screenshots ;)
Their web page is also incorrectly rendered in firefox - check out the google search button that gets hidden behind the banner.
A webpage made only for internet explorer showing a talk by RMS. Why is he even trying.