On Thu, 26 Dec 2002, Nikhil Joshi wrote:
let me guess... u love Mathematics?.. ;) that was really novel and fun way of explaining thx
Yup. I am mathematics major :-}
Yes that's what my argument was. A criminal is a criminal no matter how many crimes he commits
We can agree to disagree here, but the above statement is not entirely true IMO. That statement amounts to saying that one can compare a petty pickpocket with someone like say Bin Laden. The linux user who uses the occasional .gif is like pickpocket and the Windows user who uses almost all pirated non-free programs for free is like Bin Laden. Decide for yourself if these two are equivalent considering the crimes they are guilty of. While the above analogy is obviously grossly out of proportions, it serves the important point of explaining the a criminal status is not like bit which can be 0 or 1. This is more like fuzzy logic (i.e it can assume some value in between). The typical linux user is closer to 0 (absolute honesty and no crime), whereas the typical windows user is closer to 1(die hard murder addict !!! :-) )
Bhargav Bhatt Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York. -- Radcliffe: Is the space of solutions to f'(x)=f(x+1) infinite dimensional?