Sure, ditch the suit and tie. After all, it's not like Steve Jobs wears them to special events. But why go barefoot? The guy probably wears shoes outside his home, so why take them off to get on stage and deliver a speech to respected academics?
Respectable/serious attire are necessary not to convince your audience that you are right, but to convince them that you are "normal" by everybody else's standards. It's a big part of the fight right now.. to show that crippled, proprietary code is not the norm and that it is possible to have a system based on free - or at least open - code in the "real world". To show that it's not an outrageous idea. And it doesn't help when your leaders are barefoot lunatics who dislike shampoo and don't cut their hair.
Yes of course, because Sudan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are controlled by fundamentalists of the muslim faith, right? Not even Afghanistan is anymore. I have a muslim friend who is not from a poor socio-economic background and who is studing bio-medicine and genealogy. Should she be deported from your precious country because she happens to observe a faith that believes in the monotheist uber-deity, and that we and the beautiful universe around us are not merely the product of meaningless, accumulated chance events?
I believe we *are*, but I am not arrogant enough to suggest discriminating against people due to some misunderstanding of a biological field. To truly understand evolution people need to be well-read in molecular biology, it really is not a topic for meaningful discussion in middle school. I wonder how many muslim graduate biology students have read your comment and felt that you are an idiot.
I have no idea why patents (as currently defined/interpreted by law) exist. I really don't. For years I have tried to understand why info that is not comprised of trade secrets or other documentation that is legally bound by secrecy - why that info, when released to the world, becomes taboo for anyone else to use or benefit from without permission. Where is the logic in this?
I agree that if you contribute something to human civilization, you should be recognized for it, and others trying to take credit for it should be penalized(for falsity - they are lying). So if you innovate an engineering method or make a scientific contribution, the world owes you recognition when using your addition to human knowledge, but the world *does not* owe you a royalty fee. You do not own information or rent it out. Not if you publish it for everyone to see. While it is still secret your privacy rights protect it, but the moment you go ahead and release it, the entire world, including commercial entities, have no logical obligation of obtaining any permission from you to deploy that information in any manner.
So much time wasted over nothing. Human greed is infuriating.
Gets a bit more complicated when it's a "they" who count the vote not a single "he". And unless you live in a totalitarian society like, say, the one Stalin had oppressed/dream-talked into submission to his every command, there should not be an easy way to convince all the people who should be involved in the voting procedure to do something illegal. That is why people on slashdot want less machinery/electronics and more people/paper involved - it is hard to pull off a conspiracy with thousands of people.
And in the western world we like to think that election fraud is an exception, not the norm. Perhaps Stalin was thinking of Soviet Russia, where quantum -encrypted voting results observe YOU!
Why would anyone consider whether or not something exists when there is no evidence to suggest that there is such a thing in the first place? Lack of knowledge of how the universe came to be the way it is - ignorance is the theist's evidence. Humans have a habit of attributing things they don't know to deities and supernatural effects, because that conveniently solves the problem. Why worry about impossibly difficult questions to derive understanding from physics axioms when you can say "god did it?"
Actually, our existence is indeed arguably miraculous. We are sentient beings that have developed out of a turbulent, meaningless group of events in the physical universe, and are sitting here today communicating and debating these concepts as well as our own psychology, over tecnology that we have created as a culmination of years of mathematics and logic (computation) as well as a mastering of our environment(engineering). This is fscking incredible. Most people are not smart. This is too much. To them, this could not have happened without some unseen guiding power. There is no need to argue with them, you are literally arguing with ignorance (the evidence, remember?).
I will not argue with you about your instinctive inclinations - if you do not feel the non-learned instinct most people have for protecting their reproductive organs with clothing at most times, and particularly in front of other people, then there is little in the way of argument that will convince you. The idea that those who do have these feelings are "hiding something" is correct here. They are in this case "hiding" something which society in general agrees they should be hiding.
Why is it wrong to be hiding something? More importantly, do you not see the basic freedom involved in the ABILITY to hide something that is in your possession alone from others? The reason why you may hide it is irrelevant. It is your simple freedom of action (or inaction, where the activity is to reveal) in relation to things that you OWN, that is important. And if you don't understand that, then I will force you to keep your clothes on at all times inside your own house until you get it.
I'm aware you're on the pro-privacy side, but it should not have to come to this. We DO have nothing to hide, some of us, yet the sanctity of our privacy should not be violated by anybody all the same. Even if we feel comfortable revealing something (information, body parts..etc) the revealing should still be a matter of our choice, done with our permission and with our knowledge. Why should I be compelled to do something that I have no interest in doing? Because you are asking me to? Who gives you authority over me? There are nudists who are perfectly convinced they have nothing to hide, and indeed they take it all off. But not for you. It's called freedom.
I hate to tell you this, but there are these huge stretches of land in the US called the "fly-over" states..perhaps you've heard of them. I doubt they will be ever saturated with anything, much less IPv6 networks. Maybe cows, I dunno. Whenever you get the impulse to imagine a technologically saturated western world where everything is so advanced that it doesn't matter to look anymore, always remember
His is a typical fallacy, and the answer to it is: randomness is not evidence of a "will", it is the complete opposite.
Having said this, nothing at all is "random". Everything abides by causality at some physical level; you cannot escape it, and there is also no reason to fear it. The free-will vs determinism debate is pointless. Science can only accept reason.
Really? The first time they could communicate with each other? what were they doing on the site before? Sending each other shitty application invites. And poking.
So, being a security-minded techie, you spend ages obfuscating your email on websites..etc, and the day you are defeated it is not by some advanced optical recognition crawler, but by mass distribution from the Department of freakin Homeland Security.
In the hour that followed, dozens of readers replied to the exposed list of recipients, causing the "mini-DDoS" with demands to unsubscribe, pleas to others to cease replying, urgent requests from the Department of Defense and DHS officials for recipients to "kindly stop now please," a "vote for me" political ad, job offers and updates on the local weather. Local weather updates, eh. I love America.
RTFA: they are not detecting heat signatures, they are shooting IR at the car's passenger locations and judging the returned rays given previously known "reflective properties" of human skin. It may be harder, but less costly (energy wise) to spoof, especially if thin transparent coating for the head-rests with just the right "properties" can be made. No need to heat anything.
Well, I live in DC too, and if I commute with passengers in my car and get ticketed because the grand camera can't detect a friend who is hunched over, getting something out of the front compartment, just looking around, or otherwise inconveniently positioned for the skin-reflection test(RTFA), I'm gonna be pissed.
Meanwhile, the guy with the invisible spoof-skin coating on his seats gets away.
Actually, now that I've RTFA (hey, I live there, I had to) it seems that they are use light-reflective measures of the human skin to determine if there is a passenger in the seat. Problems:
-Passenger slumped/not perfectly positioned -Passenger too tall/short -Excessive winter clothing (only face skin visible) -Materials can be manufactured to meet the criteria -Vehicle bodies / windshield glass interference + variation between manufacturers of cars..etc
Udall's Fourth Law: Any change or reform you make is going to have consequences you don't like.
Straight from the slashdot quotes, very convenient. Now the problem with techy solutions, and the reason slashdot geeks will always be skeptical of them, leading to other geeks making fun of the said skepticism as a sort of mature outlook on the matter - the problem is that technology always has loopholes:
You introduce a harmless little thing like an IR based camera solution and suddenly people buy thin, invisible, heated coating for their seats or windshields that will fool your nifty little cam for a little cost. Camera tech evolves to identify human heat signatures using pattern matching techniques on the images. Spoofing tech evolves to comply. Police begin searches of cars... do you see where this is going?
I live (and go to grad school) in DC; I honor the code, everybody I know does, and HOV lanes almost never get blocked because of violators, AFAIK. If they do, then maybe the troopers on the road, instead of being busy tossing salad, can keep an eye out for infractions and produce solid cases that nobody can contend. Humans are good for some things. Use them. Automating criminalization is not easy, and should be avoided when possible.
Nobody has ever converted to anything - any faith whatsoever - on the edge of a sword or a weapon. Compulsion defies monotheist rhetoric, and it doesn't last very long, let alone thousands of years. Name one society that instantaneously and forcibly converted to Islam (or anything else) and lasted.
Truth is, religions and various ideologies try to gain authority over land in order to make it easier for the concerned faith/ideology to spread. Muslims were to be impaled on stakes during those early days in the christian dominated world. Have you heard of Count Dracula(Vlad III)? This is the sort of control the Muslims were fighting. To the best of my understanding, forced actions re neither rewarded nor punished in Islam due to their lack of sincere "intention".
I know that's a subjective statement, but do you realize that it's subjective? Because... Yep, but it's a lot more agreed upon than the hateful nonsense that guy was throwing around. I hope you realize his comments were a little "subjective" too.
Let me introduce you to Sharia law, which includes "politics, economics, banking, business, contracts, family, sexuality, hygiene, and social issues", and is based on the Koran. You are perfectly correct on all the above, except on politics. Islam delves into almost every corner of life where morality can apply, but there is no political structure or agenda defined in the Quran or even the Hadith. All they have is a bunch of advisory statements like "obey your leader once you've chosen them" and "consult collectively on all matters". Even the wiki article you link to doesn't claim otherwise, methinks.
That's interesting, I didn't know he gave away all of his possessions before dying. That's not really the point. The GP was trying to say that Muhammad used his prophethood to his own benefit. I tried to give you guys a better picture of how this guy lived, and indeed how he died. In the age of palaces and slaves and endless luxury, the people who controlled the whole of Arabia (he and later his companions) were cursing the burdens of power and living humble lives in mud huts, yet weeping on their death beds, feeling they had not done enough to deserve a better "afterlife". They don't sound like tyrants to me. The GP is comparing them to Egyptian pharaohs. He is wrong.
And I do not believe he had more than 4 wives at once, and like I said he only slept with 2 or 3 women in his entire lifetime, but again I'm not really versed on this part of the history. I was not very interested in the details the GP seems interested in, because my intent was to study, not hate. And really, the Arab pagan merchants had hundreds of women, slave girls..etc. Muhammad was not extravagant by any means.
Why is it that the simple name of "Allah" is somehow so special that it could never have been used in all of time for anything other than the Islamic god? Please go back and read again what I wrote. The clueless GP was doing the moon-god routine by saying that since the word "allah" was used by someone before Muhammad, then the monotheist deity Muhammad worshipped must have been named after a pagan god. It is a stupid statement that shows how oblivious he (or his sources) are to the actual language he is referring to. There was no moon-god: the Arabs didn't have one. This fabrication is discussed elsewhere on this thread so I won't go into it here. Muhammad did not have to invent a new word to describe his god because he did not invent his deity either - like you said, religions draw on their surroundings - Muhammad's "Allah" is simply the Abrahamic God, and the term, like I said in my post, was used by most Abrahamic faiths as well as the pagans, who recognized the "great god" but had deities alongside him. That's why Muhammad's father was named as such, and why Abdulla is like John to the Arab Muslims until today. There is no mystery there at all.
It's great that you're into Arabic poetry, shame you can't read the native versions though. I love the pre-Islamic stuff, very strong (and difficult to understand). And you're very right it can be prettier than any religious text..it's just that the Quran is extraordinarily expressive and unique in it's rythm and wording..much or Arabic grammar rules today use it as a text book. Thanks for the reply;)
How about somebody who has actually lived in the middle east for many years, and can speak Arabic fluently, and has studied the religion with it's most most revered traditionalist scholars and pious men? I've read the Quran, in its native tongue. He's wrong.
I honestly have no idea what can cause you to think these things about Islam in particular. Apparently we share sentiments about religion in general, but if there is one major faith that opens the door for peaceful co-existence and respect for all human life, it is Islam.
"God does not forbid you from those who do not fight you for your faith nor drive you from your homes, that you deal kindly/righteously with them and that you be equitable towards them, for truly God loves those who are equitable" Quran 60:8
I say it's a good thing they interpret it literally. For our sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, ditch the suit and tie. After all, it's not like Steve Jobs wears them to special events. But why go barefoot? The guy probably wears shoes outside his home, so why take them off to get on stage and deliver a speech to respected academics?
Respectable/serious attire are necessary not to convince your audience that you are right, but to convince them that you are "normal" by everybody else's standards. It's a big part of the fight right now.. to show that crippled, proprietary code is not the norm and that it is possible to have a system based on free - or at least open - code in the "real world". To show that it's not an outrageous idea. And it doesn't help when your leaders are barefoot lunatics who dislike shampoo and don't cut their hair.
Common sense has been dead much, much longer.
Yes of course, because Sudan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are controlled by fundamentalists of the muslim faith, right? Not even Afghanistan is anymore. I have a muslim friend who is not from a poor socio-economic background and who is studing bio-medicine and genealogy. Should she be deported from your precious country because she happens to observe a faith that believes in the monotheist uber-deity, and that we and the beautiful universe around us are not merely the product of meaningless, accumulated chance events?
I believe we *are*, but I am not arrogant enough to suggest discriminating against people due to some misunderstanding of a biological field. To truly understand evolution people need to be well-read in molecular biology, it really is not a topic for meaningful discussion in middle school. I wonder how many muslim graduate biology students have read your comment and felt that you are an idiot.
I have no idea why patents (as currently defined/interpreted by law) exist. I really don't. For years I have tried to understand why info that is not comprised of trade secrets or other documentation that is legally bound by secrecy - why that info, when released to the world, becomes taboo for anyone else to use or benefit from without permission. Where is the logic in this?
I agree that if you contribute something to human civilization, you should be recognized for it, and others trying to take credit for it should be penalized(for falsity - they are lying). So if you innovate an engineering method or make a scientific contribution, the world owes you recognition when using your addition to human knowledge, but the world *does not* owe you a royalty fee. You do not own information or rent it out. Not if you publish it for everyone to see. While it is still secret your privacy rights protect it, but the moment you go ahead and release it, the entire world, including commercial entities, have no logical obligation of obtaining any permission from you to deploy that information in any manner.
So much time wasted over nothing. Human greed is infuriating.
can it see magnetic fields? Do not insult the birds.
Gets a bit more complicated when it's a "they" who count the vote not a single "he". And unless you live in a totalitarian society like, say, the one Stalin had oppressed/dream-talked into submission to his every command, there should not be an easy way to convince all the people who should be involved in the voting procedure to do something illegal. That is why people on slashdot want less machinery/electronics and more people/paper involved - it is hard to pull off a conspiracy with thousands of people.
And in the western world we like to think that election fraud is an exception, not the norm. Perhaps Stalin was thinking of Soviet Russia, where quantum -encrypted voting results observe YOU!
Actually, our existence is indeed arguably miraculous. We are sentient beings that have developed out of a turbulent, meaningless group of events in the physical universe, and are sitting here today communicating and debating these concepts as well as our own psychology, over tecnology that we have created as a culmination of years of mathematics and logic (computation) as well as a mastering of our environment(engineering). This is fscking incredible. Most people are not smart. This is too much. To them, this could not have happened without some unseen guiding power. There is no need to argue with them, you are literally arguing with ignorance (the evidence, remember?).
You were correctly modded interesting, then.
I will not argue with you about your instinctive inclinations - if you do not feel the non-learned instinct most people have for protecting their reproductive organs with clothing at most times, and particularly in front of other people, then there is little in the way of argument that will convince you. The idea that those who do have these feelings are "hiding something" is correct here. They are in this case "hiding" something which society in general agrees they should be hiding.
Why is it wrong to be hiding something? More importantly, do you not see the basic freedom involved in the ABILITY to hide something that is in your possession alone from others? The reason why you may hide it is irrelevant. It is your simple freedom of action (or inaction, where the activity is to reveal) in relation to things that you OWN, that is important. And if you don't understand that, then I will force you to keep your clothes on at all times inside your own house until you get it.
I'm aware you're on the pro-privacy side, but it should not have to come to this. We DO have nothing to hide, some of us, yet the sanctity of our privacy should not be violated by anybody all the same. Even if we feel comfortable revealing something (information, body parts..etc) the revealing should still be a matter of our choice, done with our permission and with our knowledge. Why should I be compelled to do something that I have no interest in doing? Because you are asking me to? Who gives you authority over me? There are nudists who are perfectly convinced they have nothing to hide, and indeed they take it all off. But not for you. It's called freedom.
Your rhetoric is un-nice.
I hate to tell you this, but there are these huge stretches of land in the US called the "fly-over" states..perhaps you've heard of them. I doubt they will be ever saturated with anything, much less IPv6 networks. Maybe cows, I dunno. Whenever you get the impulse to imagine a technologically saturated western world where everything is so advanced that it doesn't matter to look anymore, always remember
IDAHO: FAMOUS POTATOES!
For further info:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=idaho_blows
His is a typical fallacy, and the answer to it is: randomness is not evidence of a "will", it is the complete opposite.
Having said this, nothing at all is "random". Everything abides by causality at some physical level; you cannot escape it, and there is also no reason to fear it. The free-will vs determinism debate is pointless. Science can only accept reason.
Close, but I think what they did was they sampled neural impulses of female drivers.
RTFA: they are not detecting heat signatures, they are shooting IR at the car's passenger locations and judging the returned rays given previously known "reflective properties" of human skin. It may be harder, but less costly (energy wise) to spoof, especially if thin transparent coating for the head-rests with just the right "properties" can be made. No need to heat anything.
If that's true I will lose lots of faith in human intelligence. Lots and lots.
Well, I live in DC too, and if I commute with passengers in my car and get ticketed because the grand camera can't detect a friend who is hunched over, getting something out of the front compartment, just looking around, or otherwise inconveniently positioned for the skin-reflection test(RTFA), I'm gonna be pissed.
Meanwhile, the guy with the invisible spoof-skin coating on his seats gets away.
Technology and law are delicate when together.
Can somebody make a wooosh sound? I'm not good at it.
SeaFox: the parent was joking.
So.. why is this marked flamebait? Did the mods not finish reading the rest of the (funny) comment?
Actually, now that I've RTFA (hey, I live there, I had to) it seems that they are use light-reflective measures of the human skin to determine if there is a passenger in the seat. Problems:
..etc
-Passenger slumped/not perfectly positioned
-Passenger too tall/short
-Excessive winter clothing (only face skin visible)
-Materials can be manufactured to meet the criteria
-Vehicle bodies / windshield glass interference + variation between manufacturers of cars
Udall's Fourth Law: Any change or reform you make is going to have consequences you don't like.
Straight from the slashdot quotes, very convenient. Now the problem with techy solutions, and the reason slashdot geeks will always be skeptical of them, leading to other geeks making fun of the said skepticism as a sort of mature outlook on the matter - the problem is that technology always has loopholes:
You introduce a harmless little thing like an IR based camera solution and suddenly people buy thin, invisible, heated coating for their seats or windshields that will fool your nifty little cam for a little cost. Camera tech evolves to identify human heat signatures using pattern matching techniques on the images. Spoofing tech evolves to comply. Police begin searches of cars... do you see where this is going?
I live (and go to grad school) in DC; I honor the code, everybody I know does, and HOV lanes almost never get blocked because of violators, AFAIK. If they do, then maybe the troopers on the road, instead of being busy tossing salad, can keep an eye out for infractions and produce solid cases that nobody can contend. Humans are good for some things. Use them. Automating criminalization is not easy, and should be avoided when possible.
Nobody has ever converted to anything - any faith whatsoever - on the edge of a sword or a weapon. Compulsion defies monotheist rhetoric, and it doesn't last very long, let alone thousands of years. Name one society that instantaneously and forcibly converted to Islam (or anything else) and lasted.
Truth is, religions and various ideologies try to gain authority over land in order to make it easier for the concerned faith/ideology to spread. Muslims were to be impaled on stakes during those early days in the christian dominated world. Have you heard of Count Dracula(Vlad III)? This is the sort of control the Muslims were fighting. To the best of my understanding, forced actions re neither rewarded nor punished in Islam due to their lack of sincere "intention".
And I do not believe he had more than 4 wives at once, and like I said he only slept with 2 or 3 women in his entire lifetime, but again I'm not really versed on this part of the history. I was not very interested in the details the GP seems interested in, because my intent was to study, not hate. And really, the Arab pagan merchants had hundreds of women, slave girls..etc. Muhammad was not extravagant by any means. Why is it that the simple name of "Allah" is somehow so special that it could never have been used in all of time for anything other than the Islamic god? Please go back and read again what I wrote. The clueless GP was doing the moon-god routine by saying that since the word "allah" was used by someone before Muhammad, then the monotheist deity Muhammad worshipped must have been named after a pagan god. It is a stupid statement that shows how oblivious he (or his sources) are to the actual language he is referring to. There was no moon-god: the Arabs didn't have one. This fabrication is discussed elsewhere on this thread so I won't go into it here. Muhammad did not have to invent a new word to describe his god because he did not invent his deity either - like you said, religions draw on their surroundings - Muhammad's "Allah" is simply the Abrahamic God, and the term, like I said in my post, was used by most Abrahamic faiths as well as the pagans, who recognized the "great god" but had deities alongside him. That's why Muhammad's father was named as such, and why Abdulla is like John to the Arab Muslims until today. There is no mystery there at all.
It's great that you're into Arabic poetry, shame you can't read the native versions though. I love the pre-Islamic stuff, very strong (and difficult to understand). And you're very right it can be prettier than any religious text..it's just that the Quran is extraordinarily expressive and unique in it's rythm and wording..much or Arabic grammar rules today use it as a text book.
Thanks for the reply
I honestly have no idea what can cause you to think these things about Islam in particular. Apparently we share sentiments about religion in general, but if there is one major faith that opens the door for peaceful co-existence and respect for all human life, it is Islam. "God does not forbid you from those who do not fight you for your faith nor drive you from your homes, that you deal kindly/righteously with them and that you be equitable towards them, for truly God loves those who are equitable" Quran 60:8
I say it's a good thing they interpret it literally. For our sake.