This paper explores the legal implications of violating "robots.txt", a technical standard widely used by webmasters to communicate restrictions on automated access to website content. Although historically regarded as a voluntary guideline, the rise of generative AI and large-scale web scraping has amplified the consequences of disregarding "robots.txt" directives. While previous legal discourse has largely focused on criminal or copyright-based remedies, we argue that civil doctrines, particularly in contract and tort law, offer a more balanced and sustainable framework for regulating web robot behavior in common law jurisdictions. Under certain conditions, "robots.txt" can give rise to a unilateral contract or serve as a form of notice sufficient to establish tortious liability, including trespass to chattels and negligence. Ultimately, we argue that clarifying liability for "robots.txt" violations is essential to addressing the growing fragmentation of the internet. By restoring balance and accountability in the digital ecosystem, our proposed framework helps preserve the internet's open and cooperative foundations. Through this lens, "robots.txt" can remain an equitable and effective tool for digital governance in the age of AI.
Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement" relation between worlds,but this relation can be understood in multiple ways, none of which is particularly clear. We critically examine the proliferation of definitions of determinism in the recent literature, arguing that these definitions fail to deliver clear verdicts about actual scientific theories. We advocate a return to a formal approach, in the logical tradition of Carnap, that treats determinism as a property of scientific theories, rather than an elusive metaphysical doctrine. We highlight two key distinctions: (1) the difference between qualitative and "full" determinism, as emphasized in recent discussions of physics and metaphysics, and (2) the distinction between weak and strong formal conditions on the uniqueness of world extensions. We argue that defining determinism in terms of metaphysical notions such as haecceities is unhelpful, whereas rigorous formal criteria such as Belot's D1 and D3 offer a tractable and scientifically relevant account. By clarifying what it means for a theory to be deterministic, we set the stage for a fruitful interaction between physics and metaphysics.
Powołaniem każdej osoby konsekrowanej jest bycie pielgrzymem nadziei. Współczesny świat potrzebuje nadziei, którą jest Jezus Chrystus. Być pielgrzymem nadziei, to być zwiastunem Dobrej Nowiny. Osoby konsekrowane niosą nadzieję dzisiejszemu człowiekowi pogrążonemu w swoistej beznadziei. Czynią to przede wszystkim poprzez duszpasterstwo obecności — obecności przy drugim człowieku spragnionym miłości.
Ivan Ivanov, Τρισαγιον – in the Byzantine and Old Bulgarian Liturgical Practice. Characteristics, Features and Use in the Liturgical Tradition of the Church.
The study focuses on the ecclesiastical, social, and political prerequisites
for the formation of liturgical features in the Byzantine Empire and their
impact on Old Bulgarian and Slavic liturgical traditions. It examines the
characteristics of Byzantine and Old Bulgarian studies regarding liturgical
and Eucharistic practices within the context of both Bulgarian and international
liturgical research on the Liturgy and the Eucharist. Special attention
is given to certain peculiarities of Byzantine liturgies, such as the
Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, as
well as the Old Bulgarian Liturgy, with a particular focus on the role of the
Trisagion. The study clarifies the connection between the Trisagion and
the Liturgy of the Catechumens and the Liturgy of the Faithful. It proposes
a liturgical and theological interpretation of the Trisagion in relation to
Byzantine, Old Bulgarian, and Slavic traditions. Biblical and patristic foundations
for the Trisagion of the Angels are explored, and comparisons are
made with other forms of the Angelic song, such as the Cherubic Hymn
and the Sanctus – Post-Sanctus. The study includes their presence in the
liturgical life of the Church and their role as a theological phenomenon
within Church life. The research is based on authentic ancient Byzantine,
Old Bulgarian, and Slavic liturgical codices and prayer books (Euchologion),
as well as on liturgical and Eucharistic texts (anaphors) found in
Greek and Slavic liturgical books (Slujebnik). It demonstrates the connection
between Byzantine prototypes and Byzantine theology, and the Old
Bulgarian and Slavic models from the IX to the XV centuries, in which
the Trisagion is a central component. Additionally, the study includes liturgical
interpretations and analyses of medieval texts in comparison with
modern liturgical practices of the Church.
Modern realities and the current organization of the educational process necessitate that religious education be conducted online and at a distance. The use of information systems and networks equates to interactive teaching methods, offering new opportunities for implementing innovative practices by educational specialists. This paper presents our pedagogical experience with interdisciplinary lessons. We briefly describe the preparation, organization, and execution of lessons with 3rd-grade students from “Panayot Volov” Primary School, who are enrolled in the “Orthodox Christian Values and Traditions” program.
This article examines the role of colonial censuses conducted in British India between 1871 and 1941 in the construction of Muslim identity, focusing on the Punjab case. It argues that the censuses were not merely instruments of demographic record keeping, but rather constituted a fundamental part of a knowledge regime that transformed flexible, overlapping forms of belonging into rigid, hierarchical, and standardized categories. In the Punjab context, caste affiliations, biradari networks, and sectarian divisions were reinterpreted through this colonial interpretive framework; rural–urban distinctions and tensions between zamindars and artisans intersected with census-based classifications in areas such as representation, education, employment, and military mobilization. Methodologically, the study relies on a close reading of the Punjab Census Reports between 1871 and 1941 and related administrative regulations; it traces their reflections in political demands, petitions submitted by Muslim community leaders and organizations, electoral practices, and struggles for representation, while also engaging in a comparative analysis with the literature of the history of religions. The findings reveal that census categories were not only externally imposed structures but also instruments strategically appropriated by local actors. For example, peasant communities highlighted their names in official records to obtain tax exemptions, Sufi sheikhs sought to have their disciples classified under separate sectarian categories, and merchant guilds made use of specific identity classifications to protect their economic interests. While Syed Ahmad Khan incorporated census data into a modernist program aimed at strengthening Muslims institutionally, politically, and educationally, Muhammad Iqbal, in his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, articulated a dynamic vision of Islamic identity that transcended static classifications, nourished by the concepts of khudi and collective subjectivity. Iqbal’s approach inspired postcolonial Islamic politics to interpret identity not as an essentialist construct but as a field of consciousness and action that is constantly renewed. From the perspective of the history of religions, the censuses not only made visible the internal plurality of Islam (Sunnī, Shīʿī, Ahl-i Hadis, Deobandī, Barelwī) but also reshaped boundary-making with Hindu and Sikh traditions. Building on this observation, this study argues that colonial censuses functioned not merely as administrative instruments but as key mechanisms of epistemic and political transformation, through which Muslim identity in Punjab was constructed.
Francisco Salas-Molina, Filippo Bistaffa, Juan A. Rodriguez-Aguilar
We tackle the problem of computing a consensus according to multiple ethical principles -- which can include, for example, the principle of maximum freedom associated with the Benthamite doctrine and the principle of maximum fairness associated with the Rawlsian principles -- among the preferences of different individuals in the context of Group-Decision-Making. More formally, we put forward a novel formalisation of the above-mentioned problem based on a multinorm approximation problem that aims at minimising multiple p-metric distance functions, where each parameter p represents a given ethical principle. Our contribution incurs obvious benefits from a social-choice perspective. Firstly, our approach significantly generalises state-of-the-art approaches that were limited to only two ethical principles (p set to one, for maximum freedom, and p set to infinity, for maximum fairness). Secondly, our experimental results considering an established test case demonstrate that our approach is capable, thanks to a novel re-weighting scheme, to compute a multi-norm consensus that takes into account each ethical principle in a balanced way, in contrast with state-of-the-art approaches that were heavily biased towards the p=1 ethical principle
The devastating health, societal, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic illuminate potential dangers of unpreparedness for catastrophic pandemic-scale cyber events. While the nature of these threats differs, the responses to COVID-19 illustrate valuable lessons that can guide preparation and response to cyber events. Drawing on the critical role of collaboration and pre-defined roles in pandemic response, we emphasize the need for developing similar doctrine and skill sets for cyber threats. We provide a framework for action by presenting the characteristics of a pandemic-scale cyber event and differentiating it from smaller-scale incidents the world has previously experienced. The framework is focused on the United States. We analyze six critical lessons from COVID-19, outlining key considerations for successful preparedness, acknowledging the limitations of the pandemic metaphor, and offering actionable steps for developing a robust cyber defense playbook. By learning from COVID-19, government agencies, private sector, cybersecurity professionals, academic researchers, and policy makers can build proactive strategies that safeguard critical infrastructure, minimize economic damage, and ensure societal resilience in the face of future cyber events.
The development of Courses of Action (COAs) in military operations is traditionally a time-consuming and intricate process. Addressing this challenge, this study introduces COA-GPT, a novel algorithm employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for rapid and efficient generation of valid COAs. COA-GPT incorporates military doctrine and domain expertise to LLMs through in-context learning, allowing commanders to input mission information - in both text and image formats - and receive strategically aligned COAs for review and approval. Uniquely, COA-GPT not only accelerates COA development, producing initial COAs within seconds, but also facilitates real-time refinement based on commander feedback. This work evaluates COA-GPT in a military-relevant scenario within a militarized version of the StarCraft II game, comparing its performance against state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. Our results demonstrate COA-GPT's superiority in generating strategically sound COAs more swiftly, with added benefits of enhanced adaptability and alignment with commander intentions. COA-GPT's capability to rapidly adapt and update COAs during missions presents a transformative potential for military planning, particularly in addressing planning discrepancies and capitalizing on emergent windows of opportunities.
The article deals with the analysis of biblical themes in the Coptic apocryphon the detailed title of which can be translated as “The Mysteries of John, the Apostle and Holy Virgin, That (the mysteries) Were Taught to Him in Heaven”. The text is fully preserved in Sahidic in the late copy of the beginning of the 11th century and originates from the monastery of Saint Mercurius in Hagr Edfu located in the south of Egypt. There is also a small fragment in Bohairic from the monastery of Saint Macarius in Wadi al-Natrun. The very fact of existence of this copy which comes from the monastery in the north and was compiled in another dialect indicates that the apocryphon must have been a widespread and significant piece of work with its important role in preserving the written tradition in the Coptic language. The codex with the complete version of the text currently kept at the British Library (Or. 7026) was published by Sir E. A. W. Budge in the anthology of works in Sahidic from the collection of the British Museum at that time: Budge E. A. W. Coptic Apocrypha in the Dialect of Upper Egypt. London, 1913. As the elaborate title at the beginning of the text states, the story is about the ascent of John the Apostle to Heaven where he gets to know different mysteries by asking the Cherub that accompanies him. This narrative is peculiar in a way, since it has accumulated traditions and perceptions of different cultures seamlessly combined with each other within one textual space. The main objective is to analyze the episodes which refer to the Old Testament, the majority of them to the Book of Genesis. Being compared with respective passages from the Holy Scripture, they represent distinctive features that, in turn, give an opportunity to judge how certain biblical themes were reflected in the apocryphal literature of Christian Egypt. Moreover, on the basis of the analysis conducted along with the additional material and sources taken into consideration one may better comprehend how the author tried to interpret the canonical text sometimes including it into realities of Egyptian culture and referring to different legends.
Multi-domain warfare is a military doctrine that leverages capabilities from different domains, including air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace, to create a highly interconnected battle network that is difficult for adversaries to disrupt or defeat. However, the adoption of 5G technologies on battlefields presents new vulnerabilities due to the complexity of interconnections and the diversity of software, hardware, and devices from different supply chains. Therefore, establishing a zero-trust architecture for 5G-enabled networks is crucial for continuous monitoring and fast data analytics to protect against targeted attacks. To address these challenges, we propose a proactive end-to-end security scheme that utilizes a 5G satellite-guided air-ground network. Our approach incorporates a decision-dominant learning-based method that can thwart the lateral movement of adversaries targeting critical assets on the battlefield before they can conduct reconnaissance or gain necessary access or credentials. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our game-theoretic design, which uses a meta-learning framework to enable zero-trust monitoring and decision-dominant defense against attackers in emerging multi-domain battlefield networks.
As "Space Mobility and Logistics" was listed as one of the five core competencies in the US Space Force's doctrine document, there is a growing interest in developing technologies to enable in-space refueling, servicing, assembly, and manufacturing as well as other in-space logistics operations. Modeling for space mobility and logistics requires a new approach that differs from conventional astrodynamics because it needs to consider the coordination of multiple vehicles to satisfy an overall demand; namely, the optimal trajectory of one vehicle does not necessarily lead to the optimal campaign solution that contains multiple vehicles and infrastructure elements. In addition, for in-space servicing applications, we need additional analysis capabilities to analyze and optimize the sizes of the fuel/spare depots and their inventory/sparing policies with orbital mechanics in mind. To tackle these challenges, there have been various attempts to leverage terrestrial logistics-driven techniques, coupled with astrodynamics, to enhance in-space operations. This paper aims to provide a review of the literature by categorizing the state-of-the-art studies in two ways: (1) by application questions that are addressed; and (2) by logistics-driven methods that are used in the studies. The two categorizations are expected to help both practitioners and researchers understand the state of the art and identify the under-explored and promising future research directions.
Device to Device (D2D) communication takes advantage of the proximity between the communicating devices in order to achieve efficient resource utilization, improved throughput and energy efficiency, simultaneous serviceability and reduced latency. One of the main characteristics of D2D communication is reuse of the frequency resource in order to improve spectral efficiency of the system. Nevertheless, frequency reuse introduces significantly high interference levels thus necessitating efficient resource allocation algorithms that can enable simultaneous communication sessions through effective channel and/or power allocation. This survey paper presents a comprehensive investigation of the state-of-the-art resource allocation algorithms in D2D communication underlaying cellular networks. The surveyed algorithms are evaluated based on heterogeneous parameters which constitute the elementary features of a resource allocation algorithm in D2D paradigm. Additionally, in order to familiarize the readers with the basic design of the surveyed resource allocation algorithms, brief description of the mode of operation of each algorithm is presented. The surveyed algorithms are divided into four categories based on their technical doctrine i.e., conventional optimization based, Non-Orthogonal-Multiple-Access (NOMA) based, game theory based and machine learning based techniques. Towards the end, several open challenges are remarked as the future research directions in resource allocation for D2D communication.
Long regarded as a spiritual grandfather of sorts for the Pentecostal movement, John Wesley has been credited by some as paving the way for their doctrinal distinctive of Spirit baptism through his teaching on entire sanctification. Yet, Wesley’s language surrounding Spirit baptism and the meaning of Pentecost differs significantly from that of classical Pentecostalism, calling into question whether a direct line can be drawn from Wesley himself to this Pentecostal distinctive. This article makes the case that their doctrine of Spirit baptism owes much more to the theology of Wesley’s intended successor John Fletcher and the Holiness movement that followed than Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification, and that one may find in Fletcher’s theology the seeds that would culminate in this Pentecostal doctrine easier than one could in Wesley’s theology.
This chapter examines English understandings of Calvin and Calvinism during the reign of Elizabeth I. In particular, it focuses on the ‘Admonition Controversy’ of the 1570s, when puritan demands for further reformation stoked disputes with official church leadership. The dispute began in 1572 with the appearance of a pair of incendiary pro-Presbyterian pamphlets, the Admonition to the Parliament and the Second Admonition to the Parliament, but would continue for decades, and is now largely known for the long-running theological debate that ensued between John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright. An examination of the roots of the controversy, however, reveals that perceptions of Calvinism in England were coloured by far more than a shared doctrinal outlook or theological consensus. For some of the Elizabethan bishops, most especially, Calvin and the Genevan model of reformation were not only associated with an uncomfortable history of religious conflict, but were also tainted by a political theology that had the potential to destabilize the English state.
Predicting agents' future trajectories plays a crucial role in modern AI systems, yet it is challenging due to intricate interactions exhibited in multi-agent systems, especially when it comes to collision avoidance. To address this challenge, we propose to learn congestion patterns as contextual cues explicitly and devise a novel "Sense--Learn--Reason--Predict" framework by exploiting advantages of three different doctrines of thought, which yields the following desirable benefits: (i) Representing congestion as contextual cues via latent factors subsumes the concept of social force commonly used in physics-based approaches and implicitly encodes the distance as a cost, similar to the way a planning-based method models the environment. (ii) By decomposing the learning phases into two stages, a "student" can learn contextual cues from a "teacher" while generating collision-free trajectories. To make the framework computationally tractable, we formulate it as an optimization problem and derive an upper bound by leveraging the variational parametrization. In experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generate collision-free trajectory predictions in a synthetic dataset designed for collision avoidance evaluation and remains competitive on the commonly used NGSIM US-101 highway dataset.
En el sistema teológico adventista, el sábado tiene un papel clave, funcionando como la red neuronal del cuerpo de creencias. Como tal, entrega energía escatológica a todo el sistema. El presente artículo describe varias dimensiones escatológicas del sábado según las principales categorías de la teología sistemática: teología propiamente dicha, antropología, soteriología, eclesiología y escatología. Después de presentar los matices escatológicos del sábado evidenciados en Éxodo 20:8-11, se analiza la relación escatológica del séptimo día con cada categoría doctrinal. El artículo concluye que, como insignia escatológica del sistema teológico adventista, el sábado encarna un significado teológico rico y multifacético.