[ILUG-BOM] [OT] Is your PC legal?

[Bhargav Bhatt]

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?