Funny thing, Disney probably has prior art on duck noises:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck

Personally, I think the problem is that we have Male and Female sports in the Olympics. If all sexes competed in all events there wouldn't be an issue. Of course, that would mean that some sports are dominated by some sexes. Big deal. That's life. Go into any university and walk into a sociology lecture, then walk into an engineering lecture and you'll see these extremes. To inclusive of both sexes, the trick is not to segregate sports, but to ensure that enough variety of sports that half the sports are dominated by men and half by women.

The bigger issue has to deal with genetic modification and doping. I think the core of the problem is that a good Olympic sport really would be about skill, not mechanics. Take running or weight lifting. If you win, what have you proved? Only that you've been gifted with a good body and have trained it or "enhanced" it enough to win. Now look at something like gymnastics or rock climbing. If you win, what have you proved? You've proved that you've trained your body to master a skill. In these sports, genetic modification and doping may help, but by far, your skill is what causes you to win. If the Olympics moved towards these sorts of competitions, they'd be a lot better off.

If morality is decided by consensus, then it's a meaningless concept. Who decides who gets to sit at the table to decide this consensus? In your caveman example, does the consensus involve the cavemen? How about cavemen who are not part of the original social contract? Should they be forced into the contract. How about both Cavemen and animals? Animals by not Cavemen? Or just the maggots that will eat whatever the Cavemen leave behind? Why shouldn't all life be involved? If so, isn't living inherently immoral since it's impossible to go one day without either intentionally or unintentionally killing some form of life. So the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (www.vhemt.org) is aiming too low. The most moral thing anyone could do is to create a viral that makes all life on earth sterile.

Now if morality is absolute, all your questions have answers -- it depends on the inherent nature of all the agents involved. Discoverying that absolute morality merely involves discovering the nature of things. For instance, is it moral to kill a bacteria by washing your hands with alcohol? Of the morality of the situation depends on the nature of the bacteria and the nature of the morality of killing. If it is immoral to kill any life, then it's okay to kill a computer program but not okay to kill a bacteria. This doesn't necessarily mean extreme VHEMT, if it is more moral to kill bacteria than to perform sensitive spinal surgery without washing your hands after touching a cadaver. Your morality is still absolute, but it's a hierarchal lesser of two evils morality. If it is immoral to kill sentient beings, you're off the hook on bacteria but you're on the hook for monkeys. And if it's immoral only to kill humans, you're off the hook for monkeys too but on the hook for killing a Nazi. There are several theories of morality I can I write several volumes on the topic, but you get the idea.

My own sense is, morality is meaningful, so it is must be absolute.

Punch a moral relativist in the nose and he will say you were wrong to do it and feel morality justified in punching you back. He won't say, "It's wrong in my morality, but I know it's not wrong in yours" or "That was painful so I must inflict pain on you to protect myself from future attacks" or "Hey, that's not in the social contract, we need to get to a lawyer and sort this out legally". This gives us a strong hint that absolute morality exists even in the mind of the moral relativist.

(As a side note, if you punch a Buddhist Monk in the nose, he'd probably just sigh and say "Karma", but even this lake of moral indignation involves acceptance of a moral absolute, namely Karma).

I don't buy that.

As they say in Hollywood, if you can't be famous, be infamous, but don't be ignored.

Being the villain is seen by some people as "sexy" and "raw" and "full of life". If being a heroes seems too high to aim for, and being "average" seems like being a cog in a wheel, then villainy is the choice many people make.

For the record, unicycles give all the above, plus:
* They're much cheaper
* They're easier to repair.
* Due to their compact size, you carry them into malls and restaurants since their size and weight is little different than a guitar. Thus there's no need to lock it up.
* Switching between unicycle and foot is easy due to their light size and easy carriability
* They give you the feel of being on a bike with the flexibility of walking.

Of course, there are disadvantages:
1. You need a bit of time to learn (although not as much as most people think)
2. Where-ever you go, kids follow because they think you're part of some performance.

Being an introvert, point (2) stopped me from using mine, but being able to attract attention should make the unicycle an extrovert's dream -- it's a definite conversation starter.

Actually, hierarchies really don't exist in nature. They *almost* fit how things work in nature, but every once and a while someone throws in multiple inheritance like the platypus, or someone who is both a "Student" and an "Employee", or in the family hierarchy someone will throw in a redneck or Polynesian population to gun the works. It's even worse. Sometimes, things that you thought were part of the hierarchy (e.g. in the animal kingdom, has wings versus doesn't have wings) really should be attributes since wings are "reinvented" many times in nature. Similarly, some things that used to be attributes, such as having a certain set of gene sequences at a certain locations with a certain functions, really need to be part of the hierarchy rather than the attributes. It's one reason why Ontologies are defined in declarative languages like OWL rather than a more logical hierarchal structured language.

Sure. There are several.

If you do clinical work, you're fairly familiar with EAV databases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model

and The Associative Model of Data:
http://www.lazysoft.com/docs/other_docs/AMD.pdf

These data models are best when either your schema is inherently hazy (e.g. in case of patient information) of where the schema is so big that it's impossible to manage (e.g. enterprise data warehousing).

Upon dying, Bill Gates went to final judgement.

St. Peter said to his, "Now Bill, you have done some good things, and you have done some bad things. It has been decided to let you decide where you want to go".

So, Bill takes a look at hell and sees these beautiful women running around, in 30 degree Celsius temperature, on beautiful beaches.

Then he took a look at heaven and it was nice, you know harps and singing and worship and stuff like that.

So he said to St. Peter that he would like to go to hell.

About a week later, St. Peter went down to hell to check on Bill. There he saw him, neck deep in molten sulfur, being whipped by demons.

He said to St. Peter, "What happened to all the beautiful women, and the beaches and the 30 degree Celsius temperature?"

Peter replied, "That was just demo."

> If the will is, even in part, determined by the environment, it may as well be completely determined by the environment.

Your definition of freedom is not the common definition. Freedom simply means you are not completely determined by your inputs.
We are partly determined by gravity (i.e. we're kept down on earth) but we can still move around.

In fact, freedom requires us to be bound in some way. Proof? Imagine that you were not bound by your skin, bones, and muscles. You'd be an amorphous blob that couldn't do anything other than float around and expand like a gas since your boundaries would not have any bound either.

See "Degrees of Freedom" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(statistics) ) for a more technical definition of freedom.

> Why would you hate the concept of not having a free will? Whether you do or do not have free will doesn't change anything in any meaningful way.

Are you serious? If you have no free will then you are likely irrational and your arguments are likely nonsense. Proof?

Assume there is no free will. Then, you are completely determined by your programming. Either your programming is rational or irrational. If it is irrational, you can prove that you are rational without seeing a flaw in your logic. The formal term for this is cognitive dissonance ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance ). If you're rational, you have no such guarantee, since crazy people think they're rational. There are an infinite number of ways you can be programmed to be wrong only a finite number of ways you can be show to be rational. Therefore, it's infinitely more probably that you are irrational.

If you have no free will, no-one is responsible for anything. After all, you can't help whatever you do. It is not moral to sentence a mass murderer to prison since the mass murderer could no nothing else. Now you might say that society has no choice but to convict the mass murder, so it's also okay, but then I can say that if the UN, EU, US, and China chooses to brainwash the world's population into believing Scientology and Incan human sacrifice that's also okay since they have no choice.

Take away free will and you take away everything.

> Can someone explain to me why it's legal to patent genes in the first place?
> I thought patents were supposed to be for new and unique inventions.

Agreed. That's why I'd let them patent the gene to breast cancer. If they invented breast cancer, then they're accepting responsible for it.

I'll leave it to the lawyers in the Slashdot crowd to follow this to it's logical conclusion.

> what is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Well that depends on how fast you swallow? ;-)

More seriously, English is an ambiguous language. For instance, what does, "The clown threw a ball" mean? Is he having a party or playing games?
It doesn't get better, even when adding words since "The clown threw a ball for charity" implies a fund raising party while "The clown threw a ball, for charity and hit the target" implies a dunking machine and "The clown threw a ball, for charity and hit the target of 100 million dollars" implies a fund raising party again.

We understand each other because, at least in our local areas, a certain meaning is the default meaning. When someone in a big city says "call me", you understand that they mean "phone me" or "text me", but if that person were more rural you understand that "call me" means "yell for me" or "send someone to get me". It's all a matter of social context. We also ask for more information when we aren't sure or if we discover that what we thought we understood doesn't jive with what's being said now.

I'm not sure how Wolfram Alpha works, but unless it knows where you are located and what your culture I don't know how it'll truly understand you or give you better results than an "english to french/italian/korean/russian/swedish/afrikaner" translator, which despite trying to solve a much simpler problem end up giving only marginally useful results.

Until the day translators actually work, I'd trust google's "dumb searching" over alpha's "smart searching".

Occam's razor isn't the one true measure of truth. If it were, then Quantum mechanics and General Relativity would never have been accepted.
But in this case, Occam's razor doesn't apply because prepositionally, your statement is equivalent (or even more complex) to the grandparent post.
Compare:
. "People Pirate" Because "Try before buy"
. "People Pirate" Because ("People want free" or "People are lazy")

WRT disasters, it's a different phenomenon. It's more an example of the tragedy of the commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). You need food and supplies, and if you don't get it first, someone else will. If you believe others will steal to get it, and you'll only follow the rules if other people will (i.e. you're more concerned about fairness than morality), then you will steal whatever you need and feel justified. This is basic game theory.

Given that open source works, and given that music sales actually increased when Napster and their successors came on the scene, I think that the grandparent's hypothesis is likely correct for a large number of cases.

But it's easy to test out -- follow the DOOM model. Provide a fully functional version that includes a "typical" game for free and encourage copying, then provide advanced levels that are worth purchasing and ask people not to pirate because a good enough free version exists.

Will there be piracy in this model? Sure, but I'd be surprised if it were anywhere near as big as it is now.

I know that in this age, cynicism is considered more wise than realistic optimism, but the movers and shakers in any age are not the cynics, they're the realistic optimists like RMS, who can see objectively why something is not working and find a way to make it work the way it should.

Sorry, I didn't want to stirrup any trouble.

While I agree Musicians need a stable income, should animals be saddled with such debt? What should our mane priority be as a society? Answering that question, is our first hurdle.

Why use VFAT when ISO 9660 (the CD image format) is freely available, seems more flexible, and is used in at least as many devices as VFAT?

> These checksums serve only 1 purpose: and that is to properly put back together any number of files to their starting point.
> And if there wasnt the movie file, those checksums would mean diddly squat,

In other words, once you remove all the voodoo-to-the-average-joe mathspeak, its just a glorified URL link.

Linking has nothing to do with derivative works, no matter how much you dress it up in math or tech or business jargon.

But leaving that aside a moment, as far as "math transformed derivative work", how is it any different than counting the number number of characters in a copyrighted work? If you need to be fancy I can write a five character math symboled APL program that treats each character as the number one and sums up the vector. This too is a "math transformed derivative work", but I don't see people claiming it's a derivative work. The Bittorrent metadata format is not, in fact a "math transformed derivative work". Investigate it yourself, or if you don't have the time, just look inside one. It really is little more than a glorified URL link.