Comment Re:Occums Razor (Score 1) 236
Pathetic.
Yet another reason we should find out what's wrong with your upbringing and make sure the next generation doesn't get subjected to the same mistakes.
The prosecutor did anyway because he wanted to stick The Bad Guys with something.
People who believe in the rule of law instead of Chinese or Soviet style "might make right" and like that - they see someone break a law and they don't want them to get away with it. That pardon sure showed them didn't it?
and leaked the name by mistake
I'm offended that you think I or any unfortunate readers who read your words are gullible enough to believe it.
For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas.
Whatever Phillip K. Dick's state of mind at the time Lem certainly wrote a lot of stuff of high enough quality to get translated into English, so much so that whether an artifact of a large batch of many years work being translated at once or sheer output it looked more like the work of many instead of one.
Some of his satire reflects on any large badly run org (see such things as "The Highest Possible Level of Development civilization" and apply it to places like HP that thought they were so good that they never had to do anything new again). His serious stuff includes "Solaris" which is a good book but probably close to the most unfilmable book I've ever read (it has long lists of imaginary and fruitless academic effort) , yet it got turned into two films that contain a tiny fraction of the ideas of the book, and I'm not sure how well they convey his main theme that aliens are probably going to be so alien that they and we are going to have trouble initiating communication even with years of effort and Godlike technology.
Anyway, Lem was Polish and some of his satire seemed to be based on "iron curtain" government orgs where incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
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The Geneva convention does not apply. Neither am I going to war, nor are any of the affected parties non-combatants. I do not plan to use it on POWs or on shipwrecked people.
Not to mention that I never signed it and I, as a person, cannot become a signing party considering that only nations can.
I offer Sendmail in its mid-1990s form as an example. We had several dialup customers with Microsoft Exchange servers. They'd connect and Exchange would issue an ETRN to dequeue waiting messages. The problem was that Sendmail by default, would send a "Warning: could not deliver mail for 4 hours" reply back to sender after the email had languished in the queue that long, and they dialed in sporadically and not at all on weekends so folks who emailed them would get these messages. It was bad. I wanted to disable this warning specifically for ETRN domains but not for everyone.
Does this feature exist? Sendmail documentation defined 'queuewarn' as a global setting but did not address this "deferred delivery by design" problem. Could there be a presently-undocumented or undiscovered workaround? Delving into the source it was visually apparent the answer was no, the warning was unconditional. The only workaround would have been to run a completely separate SMTP server on another IP address with the queuewarn off, and MX 'em to that. What a bother. Are domain-specific attributes available? Yes, these had a mailer flag of HOLD. Can it be addressed with a one-liner? Yes. So the _FFR_NODELAYDSN_ON_HOLD compile/config flag was born, off by default because we don't want to break things.
Just a couple of hours to discover, patch and test. another hour to render it into a contrib patch where it made its way into Sendmail. Open source is cool and when you see your own contribution being proposed as a solution to solve someone else's problem years later... that is quite satisfying.
Sendmail had the right balance of code-to-comment. What comments were there would not make sense until you understood the underlying process, and tag names were explicit enough that comments were seldom necessary.
And, as a guard, you never thought, well this is fucking stupid ??
Have you ever tried to reason with a PHB? Especially when your argument, however correct and well-supported, doesn't come from someone who has that specific responsibility?
You only know because they caught the man; in the USA the guy would still be free and nobody would be the wiser.
If somebody noticed anything fishy the usual lazy excuse of "It's not my job" would prevent actions from being taken; unless, you can be fired or sued few people here lift a finger.... and if you do take selfless initiative you are equally at risk of being fired or sued.
Freedom of religion is also freedom from religion.
No! No it isn't. Freedom of religion is the right to believe in whatever religion you want, or none at all, without the government forcing you into a more narrowly restricted subset.
At no point is the government allowed to suppress the religious beliefs of other people, just because those beliefs are unpopular. That is exactly the sort of the thing the 1st Amendment was written to prevent the government from doing.
If I walk into a butcher shop that carries dozens of animal varieties but they refuse to serve cow meat based on their beliefs, I'm gonna wonder why they're being intolerant of my belief to walk into a butcher shop and buy what the hell I want. I'm in your store to buy hamburger, not wonder or understand why you refuse to.
That is what I mean by tolerance and freedom from religion. Business is about serving the needs of every customer. If you want to shape your business around those beliefs, fine. You WILL pay for it in the end with smaller profits or even bankruptcy due to your limited ability to recognize every human being as a potential revenue stream.
Think hard about what you're actually saying.
owww, my head hurts when I think of what I'm saying.
That's so matter of fact, and leaves no room for the possibility that the theory of dark matter is wrong
Yes.
Gravitational effects show that something is there which we cannot see.
That's the bit that's treated as a matter of fact. What that stuff actually may be is where we don't have anything that can be treated on the level of facts.
So we are certain that something is there but not certain as to what it is, apart from ruling out a lot of things that should make sense but don't fit (dust, brown dwarfs etc), which is why this stuff is so mysterious.
Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. -- Andy Warhol