Things I use every day that I cannot stop using without dying: Bed. Toilet. Kitchen.
Things I use every day that I could remove without dying: Computer. Shower. Contact lenses. Hairbrush. Toothbrush. Computer chair.
I presume you're going to pick up my salary when I get fired from not working? Or when I drive in for a meeting at work (I telecommute) smelling like a dead dog, or with wildly unkempt hair? Or crash the car because I can't see?
I don't know what sort of hedonistic lifestyle you live, but I don't do any frivolous thing every day. The closest is TV, which I do about thrice a week, and MUDing, which I do on days I have nothing to do during work, usually twice a week. Anything else already has weekly gaps, because I do them on weekends, where I go and see a movie or get a book, and treat myself to Taco Bell or something. Sometimes I have no money and I go a weekend or two without doing anything.
It is, however, utterly immoral to suggest finding someone guilty of a crime soley [sic] to 'teach them restraint'.
Isn't that what justice systems have been based on for thousands of years? If not all of western society? I don't agree that the punishment always fits the crime or that the punishment is a good deterrent, but that is the system we have (change it, I'll help).
And of rather dubious benefit to immediately clear their record. All you'd have taught them at that point is how to abuse the court system.
Merely a suggestion.
No, but it's possible I wasn't clear here. We punish people to 'teach them restraint', in addition to removing them from society, and even, hopefully, teach others restrait. But I didn't say punish, I said 'find guilty'. We find people guilty because they are guilty of the crimes accused, and for no other reason.
Not because they are black, not because they are, like you think in this case, rude arrogent jerkoffs, not because they sleep around and misuse women, not because we 'know' they really committed some worse crimes and weren't punished, not because they actually have commited worse crimes. We find them guilty because the state has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they are guilty.
You, however, wished to use the 'finding them guilty' part to teach them a lesson, with no punishment. And the reason you wish to remove the punishment is because you know they didn't actually commit the crime they were accused of, and do not wish to them to be harmed with a real felony conviction.
This is intensely a violation of our court system and everything it stands for.
Laws can't be harmed, but when you are talking about the collective morality (the "line") then you must acknowledge that an amoral stance is one which will only get you in trouble (and everyone else). If you approach societies boundaries with the *any* sense of morality you're off to a good start.
No. First of all, societal boundaries have almost nothing to do with the law. There are plenty of things that are illegal but okay in society, and even more things that are not done in society but legal. Where they do met up, it's where we've decided that someone who breaks that specific rule harms society to such an extent that we must stop them. Most societial rules are nowhere near that bad to break.
And, on top of that, if you base your morality on societal, that leads right into Nazi Germany or witch burning or slavery or all the various times in history that societies have decided something is okay and been utterly wrong. Society does not dictate morality, and it cannot.
If someone is shown that there are consequences to rather inane actions maybe they will be more mindful of "the rules" (social norms, laws, etc) of what is expected of them as people.
Oh, yes. Everyone fall in line. The system is always right, the system has asolute power, don't buck the system.
Here's a shocker for you: I don't believe in rules and laws. At all. I base no moral decisions on them, I ascribe them no moral weight.
Now, I tend not to break them, for the same reason I tend not to play catch with sharp knifes...it's fairly dangerous. Or, at least, not break them too obviously.
And, of course, a lot of laws are against things that I am morally opposed to, and thus I wouldn't break them even if I could get away with it.
And some laws appear to be just 'good planning' that makes everything easy for us in general, even if they are in my way at that specific time, like red lights. I tend to obey those laws in the specifics because I agree with them in the general.
Laws are not moral decisions. Anyone who refrains from killing people because it's illegal is a dangerous and immoral person. You cannot 'offshore' you morality to the law, because the law changes. You cannot assert that it is immoral to break the law, because if you come up with a system of ethics based on cur
Oh, yes, feel free to pick apart my post without even slightly mentioning what 'free will' means. That's exactly what I expect from people who assert it exists. Heaven forbid they have to explain it, it just magically exists.
And, for the record, free will is the idea that there is your body/brain, and there is something else controlling it, something not measurable. That it grants us, unlike everything else, have some mystical level of 'choice'.
It doesn't matter where it resides, or what you call it. The concept, when applied to time travel, is that situtations in time travel that result in people making decisions twice don't (have to) result in them making the same decision, despite everything in the universe being the same. Hence, logically, this thing called 'free will' exists outside the universe, but that's not really important. (1)
The second I point that out, however, people talking about free will immediately redefine it into 'self aware'. No, we already have a phrase to describe self-awareness, and that's, duh, self aware or sentient. And I suspect that's what you're talking about when you talk about how you can observe self awareness in yourself. The ability to observe yourself make decisions does not imply that, given a second time, you'd come to a different decision. There's no way to ever observe that, you cannot run the same decison-making process twice.
But all this doesn't surprise me, because the other thing that ticks me off when people start talking about 'free will' when discussing time travel is that none of them know what it means.
1) And, hey, if people want to use quantum mechanics/chaos theory to argue that the entire universe is non-repeatable, like the other post here, go ahead. It's called the 'butterfly effect', and, hell, for all I know it's true. I'm just saying people who think it somehow magically applies solely to people are crazy.
And the same thing for arguing that the universe isn't determinalistic at all, even the first time. Alright, that could be true. The craziness comes from accepting the universe is solely effect following cause, except when it applies to people, who can do anything they 'want' within the laws of physics. Or that the universe is non-deterministic and people are even moreso.
We don't want to punish spammers because they think they're smarter, you fucktard. We want to punish them because they are harming us. (And, um...spammers are noticably not smarter. Rule #3 for spammers: Spammers are dumb. That sort of jealously theory might work on lawyer-hate, but not on people walking around thinking they are smart, and are so obviously not.)
You really are at the first stage of moral development, aren't you? Where fear motives your actions. I honestly thought you were trolling.
To clarify morality for you: People who think they have the right to do whatever they want because they can are bad people.
This includes spammers. This includes the actual troublemakers at schools, not intelligent people who are attempting to learn and whose actions get misunderstood by ignorant teachers.
And, finally, this includes YOU, although you appear to be smart enough to understand that you can't get away with a lot of stuff. Yes, you, Mr. Motivated-by-Fear, are on exactly the same moral ground as these other people, you just know more.
Which has lead you to making conclusions like 'me murdering people'='me getting locked up', ergo murder is immoral, and generalizing that to 'me acting as smart as I am'='me being treated poorly in the nightmare that is school', ergo acting smart is immoral.
What shows what kind of goofy morality you can come up with when you're motived solely by fear.
It can also lead to rather nonsensical results where you attempt to trap people into commiting crimes, to 'educate' them, instead of attempting to prevent the crimes, as you suggested would be good in your post. This is utterly silly.
Either the rules are important, and every effort should be made to stop people from breaking them, or they are not important, and should not exist. Obviously if we can't stop them, we should use the people caught as a deterrent, but stopping the crime is the ideal.
Laws do not exist as some abstract entity, and it is not 'moral' to obey the law and 'immoral' to disobey them. Laws cannot be harmed or rewarded, and thus your relationship to the law itself is amoral.
It is, however, utterly immoral to suggest finding someone guilty of a crime soley to 'teach them restraint'. And of rather dubious benefit to immediately clear their record. All you'd have taught them at that point is how to abuse the court system.
There's more I could type on that, but frankly I think everyone can see how fucking stupid you are. Maybe you need to learn to restrain your urge to punish people who aren't as 'enlightened' as you.
If students are 'abusing' laptops, and, BTW, this probably means 'chatting on the instead of doing work', the obvious solution is to stop handing them the damn laptops!
Alternately, forget about security, just reset the drives when they are turned in. (Make the students turn it on and start the restore CD when they turn it in, if you don't have staff.) That's what sane people would do.
Of course, then they can, gasp, download porn! Of course, almost half the students in high school are 17 or older, and can thus purchase porn at a video place, but whatever.
And if they can download porn at home, they already have a net connection and can thus already download porn. (Not that any software would be able to stop them.)
Frankly, this looks like 'I don't want my mother logging my chats and email with my girlfriend, or my porn download. So I will continue to use the school's computer, despite warnings from them.'
And you know whose fault that is? The mother's, for trying to spy on everything her high school child does, and the schools, for continuing to loan out the laptop for no reason.
Let's say this had happened in the military, you were put in a classroom and told to turn on your computer, and someone did this.
Now, I'm not an expert on the military, I don't the rules or anything, but would someone have gotten in trouble for solving an obviously minor problem with the equipment in a training situtation? Equipment that they, as owners and operators of TVs, knew how to fix?
I'm not talking about the 'break them down and build them up' boot camp type training, where you get in trouble for completely made-up things. I'm talking about a normal training situtation.
Somehow I don't think so. People in the military are expected to be able to solve minor problems themselves, and every single order requires some interpetation.
"Don't touch anything", for example, would imply hovering in midair, so obviously there's some judgement call on what 'anything' is. The trick is to make sure the orders are clear (I'm sure officers have classes on that.) and that people taking orders will all interpet them identically. (And I'm sure there are classes on that.)
The failure here wasn't 'disobeying orders', it was failure to give clear orders, coupled with general incompetence on the part of the order-giver at understanding technology.
And if officer training them had reacted like that, with an equivilent punishment, (suspension of a week is fairly serious)...well the punishment might have stood anyway. But I'm fairly certain that officer wouldn't be training any more people like that. Going around giving ambigious orders and overreacting when people show initiative is not something the military looks for in its officers.
In the educational system, there are good people, and bad people.
The good people fundementally wish for students to learn.
The bad people fundementally wish for students to do what they are told.
Both of them are willing to overlook what they do not want done as long as it does not interfer with what they do want done. But interfer with their major goal, and you're toast.
There are no 'gravitons', we're pretty sure. Gravity shows no quantum effects at the scale you'd expect them if it was made of particles.
Of course, they might exist, and somehow not be quantum particles, but I think the whole 'distortion of space' is a better idea than inventing some new class of particles that we have no idea of how they could exist.
And it's not 'creationism' per se, it's the 'young earth' thing that asserts the universe is only 6011 years old or whatever, counting from Adam. This is obviously inane and disprovable if you look at the Milky Way, unless God created the stars and then a bunch of light halfway to earth. (Or maybe just the light. Why bother making other galaxies? Just make the light from them, no one will ever know.)
Which, hey, is possible, but very goofy of God.
So the young earth people instead assert that the speed of light was VERY fast at one time. (And that some of the very very far things are not actually that far.) I mean incredibly fast, like a billion times faster.
Of course, none of them have ever explained where all that energy went. Or how the EM spectrum managed to stay pretty much intact throughout that. Remember, humans living on earth the entire time. No huge blasts of radiation sterilizing the earth, which is what I suspect would happen to starlight, much less sunlight, if you cut the speed of light by that much that fast.
I wish that someday people wouldn't debate 'free will' like it actually means something everytime time travel is mentioned.
Free will has absolutely nothing to do with event following cause. It has absolutely nothing to do with physics at all, because it's a made-up concept. It's philosophical.
If you want to assert that something outside this reality, or inside this reality but not part of your measurable body, is controlling 'you', fine. Whatever.
However, trying to make up weird rules about how it's affected by time travel is just absurd when you can't even agree on what you're talking about, and don't actually have any reason to think it exists.
People who argue about how they 'could' do something else, and thus foreknowledge of their actions is impossible, need to seriously think about, you know, the past, which we also know about and where they 'could' have done something else but didn't.
You want to fight something, don't fight hypothetical time travel, go and fight about the supposedly 'immutable' past, and leave everyone who doesn't have a weird fixation on what they 'choose' to do alone. We know that if we were facing situtations that we faced before with exactly the same knowledge, if we were reliving a moment of history, we'd do exactly the same thing, because that's what we did the first time. Duh.
Only crazy people think otherwise. Until these people can alter their own past decisions with the 'fact' they could have done something else, they don't really belong in the discussion at all, as they are crazy.
Re: Information transfer *is* what's limited by c
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Scientists Speed up Light
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There is no such thing as faster than the speed of light, in relativity, despite people talking about it. Reality itself propogates at the speed of light.
Which is why if you go faster than light, your reality is backwards and cause follows effect. You aren't even really going faster than light, you're going slower than light and backwards in time. If you were to approach 2x the speed of the light, you'd appear to slow down to everyone else, and end up casually strolling facing the wrong way. (And this would be trival to do, as going 2x the speed of light would be a simple matter of going 1.00001x and then trying to stop.)
So it's not a premise about the speed of light. The speed of light defines time. It is absolute. While you can't accelerate faster than the speed of light, that's not the point. The point is that light always travels at exactly the same speed, and light carries reality along with it.
By 'reality, I mean exactly that. I can see you do something while I did something else, and those events happened at the same time to me. You, being a light year away, saw them two years apart, and we're both right, from our frame of reference. That's relativity. Events happen when the light reaches you. (And by light, I mean hypothetical vacuum light, not artifically slowed light.)
People hear 'nothing can travel faster than light', and 'everything is relative' and don't quite grasp is. According to relativity, time doesn't exist independent of the speed of light, just like gravity doesn't exist independent of the distortion in space caused by mass. In fact, energy:time::matter:gravity is a pretty good analogy of what's going on.
And everything I just wrote, according to quantum mechanics, is a complete and utter lie.
Quantum mechanics has been proven to be non-local (operating faster than light) with Bell's Theorem. It's not even a theory, we have actual physical proof that events at one place can effect the outcome at another faster than light. We don't even need quantum tunnelling, good ole quantum interference does it for us.
Now, Bell's Theorem doesn't let us get information faster than light. However, it clearly knows what's going on faster than light, so at least bookkeeping information can go faster than light.
And, incidentally, you don't need quantum tunneling or any sort of equipment to get light going faster than light. Light, until you measure it, is smeared into a probability wave. Sometimes, by sheer chance, you can measure one and it will end up collapsing at the front of the wave. Thus having moved a tiny fraction faster than light.
And some will collapse at the end of the wave, moving a tiny fraction slower than light, which is just as much a crime for light to do in relativity.
I'm fairly certain we've actually measured what we think is this happening, from pulsars. Probablity waves from photons from stars can spread across meters until they hit something, where they instantly collapse into one point. (At which point relativity runs screaming from the room, because points a meter away from each other should not be able to communicate instantly.) A meter isn't a long time, lightwise, but I seem to recall something about measuring 'fast' photons.
This is why physicists have so many drunken fistfights.
There's no reason that the amount of time required to calculate the next step of the universe would have anything to with the amount of time passing in such a virtual universe.
And 'elementary particles' don't exist, or have you missed the last 100 years of quantum physics? Everything acts like a probability wave until you get to a certain level of interaction. Or you can say that as 'Everything is a probablity wave, but past a certain size there only is one thing possible, which it has 100% odds of being.'.
Arguing that the 'real things' in our universe are things simulated on a computer is silly, because there are no 'real things' in our universe to start with. It's just a whole mishmash of energy levels and probabilities that looks like real things to us giants.
'biggest problem with hydrogen is currently production'. Good god.
'Hydrogen' doesn't solve anything. It might be a nice storage system for electricity, and if all electric cars are hydrogen, we could charge them faster with replacing it than via batteries.But it doesn't do a damn thing about powering anything.
And we already have a storage system for eletricity, it's called the power grid.
Basically, hydrogen is the concept that, instead of generating power and shipping it via the power grid, we'll generate power and ship it via truck. Um, okay.
There is no possible way that will be 'better' in any form. re: Laws of Thermodynamics. And we'll have to power the damn truck, too.
And if you mention 'we could generate it closer', which is some reoccuring myth, I have to point out that either we're shipping the electricty to there via wire (Which means you just admitted that wires were a better transport system than hydrogen, and I fail to see why we shouldn't use them for the 'last mile', considering those wires already exist.) or we're generating the electric power to generate the hydrogen there, in which case we could just stop screwing around and generate electric power there instead.
If hydrogen was a better manner of storage than batteries, we'd be using hydrogen right now in batteries. It's not like cracking water is difficult.
And the damn thing is explosive, I don't care how careful you are, nothing helps if a tractor trailer rams the station. A gas station catching fire has nothing on a hydrogen station exploding.
I can't believe people think this 'hydrogen' thing is useful, although I've noticed they've started calling it the 'hydrogen economy' instead of 'hydrogen power', presumably because they realized you can't get power from it. But no one is explaining how a 'hydrogen economy' is better than an 'electric economy', which has the bonus of actually already existing. Sure, we need to get rid of the 'gas economy', but we already figured out how to get electric power to almost every home in this nation, so it's trivial to set up a 'pay-per-charge' system, or even a physical battery-swapping system if charging is too long.
See, what's getting me is that people rightly are realizing that just switching to electic cars isn't enough while our grid is powered off oil, but they then nonsensically think that the solution is a different sort of battery. Um...no.
The solution is to make cars that use as little power (Gas and electric combined) as possible, and when they use power, use electrical. Then stop using gas at all. So as we switch the grid over to non-oil, we all win. (Some of us already are on hydroelectric.)
Blackjack and poker have never been games of pure chance.
And, yeah, this concept that you're 'not allowed' to be intelligent has pretty much convinced me that if I ever go to Vega for whatever reason (I'm unlikely to go for gambling.), I'm going to learn to count cards, and delibrately go in and do it.
And probably get caught and banned, but, hey, that's one more person on their list they'd have to watch for.
I think more people need to comment on how Windows file sharing randomly doesn't work on small networks.
Yeah, it works great if you can afford a WINS server, but as everyone who's ever had a LAN party knows, it sometimes magically fails on small networks.
The problem with Windows isn't that Windows can't be managed competently. It can, and proper management should at require no more than the same order of magnitude as a Unix system that gets used the same amount.
And comparing Unix servers to Windows desktop is inheritly misleading. Desktops get pounded on. Windows desktops might have more security issues than Unix desktops, and that does raise the TCO, a lot, but don't compare them to Unix servers that sit in the corner forever. Properly adminned Windows servers can almost do that, barring updates every month.
It's just that, while the amount of competent Windows admin roughly equals the number of competent Unix admin, the number of completely incompetent Windows admin vastly outnumbers the number of completely incompetent Unix admin. This is because the incompetent bar is lower on Windows.
Or maybe a better way to put it is that there's a middle ground between competent and incompetent, let's call it quasicompetent, before I piss anyone off. Normally self-taught, thinks they understand everything, but can't explain, for example, LDAP or domain servers.
And quasicompetent Unix admin are almost as good as competent Unix ones. They will be able to get everything up and running. They'll be the ones who don't have shell scripts to do 90% of their work for them, and couldn't build the existing network, although they can maintain it fine once pointed at the tools the competent one wrote.
Whereas quasicompetent Windows admin will constantly be running around, doing updates, restoring from installs, reconfiguring, deleting adware and viruses, rebooting, adding hardware with broken drivers, etc etc.
What does this mean? If you hire a quasicompetent Unix admin, your network will basically work, and they will sit around in a screened bitchx all day talking with their friends.
If you hire a quasicompetent Windows admin, you will have no end of trouble if your network is over 15 computers.
And there's absolutely no obvious way to tell the difference between quasicompetent people and competent people, even after you've hired them. They all seem to know how to perform every task, but the competent knows what should be done to solve a problem, whereas the quasicompetent one just knows how to make it go away for now.
And all (important) crimes do require intent. It's called mens rea.
There are a very very few that do not, like speeding or parking violations, where the mere facts of the evidence makes you guilty, called 'strict libability' crimes, but those are never felonies. They're usually ticketable offenses, in fact. Everything else requires intent to commit the crime.
The difference between homicide and manslaughter is that homicide requires intent to kill, whereas voluntary manslaughter merely requires 'intent to harm', without the actual malic reaching a level of murder.
And involuntary manslaughter? Well, there are two version. One's misdemeanor version of felony murder. The intent required there is to merely commit another crime. If you a committing a misdemeanor when you kill someone, it is involuntary manslaughter, just like it's felony murder when you kill them during any felony.
The other version of manslaughter is negligence, and I suspect it's what you're thinking of when you talk about 'manslaughter'. However, crimes that require negligence require intent. In fact, negligence is a form of intent. That sounds strange to have phrased that way, but failure to do something that you should have know needed to be done is a form of intent.
Basically, the difference between manslaughter and murder is what your intent is, but both of them require intent, aka, mens rea, as do all felonies. Suggesting that manslaughter doesn't require intent is just ignorance.
And your 'intent to take' concept is stupid. No law, anywhere, has ever defined theft as that. It's defined as 'intent to permanently deprive'. (I probably should have pointed out the 'permanent' earlier, but I was trying to point out the 'deprive' part. Some forms of 'theft', BTW, do not require it being permanent, like embezzlement, which is illegal even if you intend to get the money back. But basic theft, aka, larceny, aka, theft by taking, does. I think all 'theft' does.)
And, you know, you'd look less ignorant if you googled a bit and found specific examples of where it is explicitly stated that borrowing is legal. That's according to the University of Texas Criminal Law Department and the Georgia Bar Ass., BTW. Search for 'borrow'.
It's just that court cases where that was argue successfully are had to find.
Here's an appeal where the lawyer said it should worked as a defense, although for some reason he couldn't legally argue it at that point. Normally it's larceny if you move things, even slightly, in an attempt to take them, but he argued that the defendent couldn't have possibly been attempting to steal giant earth-moving equipment.
And here's a very interesting Supreme Court transcript where they talk about the specific lack of the word 'intent' in a certain bank robbery statute. Where they actually talk about people stealing money from a bank with the intent to return it, and how while larcency laws would say that's legal, the Federal bank robbery laws, as written might imply it's not, as they just require 'stealing'. And they don't know if they were meant to be written that way or not, as it happened when they rewrote the definition of steal of be 'intent to deprive' as a 'clean-up', apparently not in an attempt to change the actual crime.
That's the Supreme Court, for those not paying attention. And regardless of whether the bank robbery laws require intent to deprive or not, that doesn't change what they think about 'larcency'. They all accept it requires the intent to permanently deprive. (Robbery, FYI, requires taking from the physical possession of people, usually by intimidation or force.)
All toilets would work perfectly well without complicated plungers and levers if they were facing the other direction.
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam
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Ending Spam
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Spammers don't have a message.
Spammers are paid to send out a message. They get paid if you see the message or not.
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam
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Ending Spam
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Hrm, I thought spammers already were sending out 100 times more spam.
Damn, they've countered our plan before we started!
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam
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Ending Spam
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Ah, but you don't need the police to put up with it.
You just need the jury to.;)
Re:Esprit d'Corps
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Ending Spam
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Don't be silly.
Mobs attacking spammers should only be armed with plastic spoons. All fourteen million of them.
Remember, if you only poke them once, it's not only not murder, it's not even assault, and perfectly legal under the CAN-POKE-SPAMMERS act, as long as they have a 'business relationship' with you, which they obviously created by spamming you.
And, to make it fair, they are allowed to opt out of any member of the mob poking them. One at a time, in writing, and we'll even waive the 48 hours to process it can traditionally take to process. (Of course, that person is free to go out and get some more people to stand in line, or even get back in line under another name.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a parole officer, that's just a mishmash of energy levels and probabilities. ;)
Things I use every day that I could remove without dying: Computer. Shower. Contact lenses. Hairbrush. Toothbrush. Computer chair.
I presume you're going to pick up my salary when I get fired from not working? Or when I drive in for a meeting at work (I telecommute) smelling like a dead dog, or with wildly unkempt hair? Or crash the car because I can't see?
I don't know what sort of hedonistic lifestyle you live, but I don't do any frivolous thing every day. The closest is TV, which I do about thrice a week, and MUDing, which I do on days I have nothing to do during work, usually twice a week. Anything else already has weekly gaps, because I do them on weekends, where I go and see a movie or get a book, and treat myself to Taco Bell or something. Sometimes I have no money and I go a weekend or two without doing anything.
Isn't that what justice systems have been based on for thousands of years? If not all of western society? I don't agree that the punishment always fits the crime or that the punishment is a good deterrent, but that is the system we have (change it, I'll help).
And of rather dubious benefit to immediately clear their record. All you'd have taught them at that point is how to abuse the court system.
Merely a suggestion.
No, but it's possible I wasn't clear here. We punish people to 'teach them restraint', in addition to removing them from society, and even, hopefully, teach others restrait. But I didn't say punish, I said 'find guilty'. We find people guilty because they are guilty of the crimes accused, and for no other reason.
Not because they are black, not because they are, like you think in this case, rude arrogent jerkoffs, not because they sleep around and misuse women, not because we 'know' they really committed some worse crimes and weren't punished, not because they actually have commited worse crimes. We find them guilty because the state has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they are guilty.
You, however, wished to use the 'finding them guilty' part to teach them a lesson, with no punishment. And the reason you wish to remove the punishment is because you know they didn't actually commit the crime they were accused of, and do not wish to them to be harmed with a real felony conviction.
This is intensely a violation of our court system and everything it stands for.
Laws can't be harmed, but when you are talking about the collective morality (the "line") then you must acknowledge that an amoral stance is one which will only get you in trouble (and everyone else). If you approach societies boundaries with the *any* sense of morality you're off to a good start.
No. First of all, societal boundaries have almost nothing to do with the law. There are plenty of things that are illegal but okay in society, and even more things that are not done in society but legal. Where they do met up, it's where we've decided that someone who breaks that specific rule harms society to such an extent that we must stop them. Most societial rules are nowhere near that bad to break.
And, on top of that, if you base your morality on societal, that leads right into Nazi Germany or witch burning or slavery or all the various times in history that societies have decided something is okay and been utterly wrong. Society does not dictate morality, and it cannot.
If someone is shown that there are consequences to rather inane actions maybe they will be more mindful of "the rules" (social norms, laws, etc) of what is expected of them as people.
Oh, yes. Everyone fall in line. The system is always right, the system has asolute power, don't buck the system.
Here's a shocker for you: I don't believe in rules and laws. At all. I base no moral decisions on them, I ascribe them no moral weight.
Now, I tend not to break them, for the same reason I tend not to play catch with sharp knifes...it's fairly dangerous. Or, at least, not break them too obviously.
And, of course, a lot of laws are against things that I am morally opposed to, and thus I wouldn't break them even if I could get away with it.
And some laws appear to be just 'good planning' that makes everything easy for us in general, even if they are in my way at that specific time, like red lights. I tend to obey those laws in the specifics because I agree with them in the general.
Laws are not moral decisions. Anyone who refrains from killing people because it's illegal is a dangerous and immoral person. You cannot 'offshore' you morality to the law, because the law changes. You cannot assert that it is immoral to break the law, because if you come up with a system of ethics based on cur
And, for the record, free will is the idea that there is your body/brain, and there is something else controlling it, something not measurable. That it grants us, unlike everything else, have some mystical level of 'choice'.
It doesn't matter where it resides, or what you call it. The concept, when applied to time travel, is that situtations in time travel that result in people making decisions twice don't (have to) result in them making the same decision, despite everything in the universe being the same. Hence, logically, this thing called 'free will' exists outside the universe, but that's not really important. (1)
The second I point that out, however, people talking about free will immediately redefine it into 'self aware'. No, we already have a phrase to describe self-awareness, and that's, duh, self aware or sentient. And I suspect that's what you're talking about when you talk about how you can observe self awareness in yourself. The ability to observe yourself make decisions does not imply that, given a second time, you'd come to a different decision. There's no way to ever observe that, you cannot run the same decison-making process twice.
But all this doesn't surprise me, because the other thing that ticks me off when people start talking about 'free will' when discussing time travel is that none of them know what it means.
1) And, hey, if people want to use quantum mechanics/chaos theory to argue that the entire universe is non-repeatable, like the other post here, go ahead. It's called the 'butterfly effect', and, hell, for all I know it's true. I'm just saying people who think it somehow magically applies solely to people are crazy.
And the same thing for arguing that the universe isn't determinalistic at all, even the first time. Alright, that could be true. The craziness comes from accepting the universe is solely effect following cause, except when it applies to people, who can do anything they 'want' within the laws of physics. Or that the universe is non-deterministic and people are even moreso.
You really are at the first stage of moral development, aren't you? Where fear motives your actions. I honestly thought you were trolling.
To clarify morality for you: People who think they have the right to do whatever they want because they can are bad people.
This includes spammers. This includes the actual troublemakers at schools, not intelligent people who are attempting to learn and whose actions get misunderstood by ignorant teachers.
And, finally, this includes YOU, although you appear to be smart enough to understand that you can't get away with a lot of stuff. Yes, you, Mr. Motivated-by-Fear, are on exactly the same moral ground as these other people, you just know more.
Which has lead you to making conclusions like 'me murdering people'='me getting locked up', ergo murder is immoral, and generalizing that to 'me acting as smart as I am'='me being treated poorly in the nightmare that is school', ergo acting smart is immoral.
What shows what kind of goofy morality you can come up with when you're motived solely by fear.
It can also lead to rather nonsensical results where you attempt to trap people into commiting crimes, to 'educate' them, instead of attempting to prevent the crimes, as you suggested would be good in your post. This is utterly silly.
Either the rules are important, and every effort should be made to stop people from breaking them, or they are not important, and should not exist. Obviously if we can't stop them, we should use the people caught as a deterrent, but stopping the crime is the ideal.
That would require getting them on the stand, though, and there's a simpler one:
It's a crime to lie to Federal law enforcement, and in many cases local law enforcement.
So let's just find something they don't want people to know about, and send the cops in to ask them about it. Instant felony charges!
Laws do not exist as some abstract entity, and it is not 'moral' to obey the law and 'immoral' to disobey them. Laws cannot be harmed or rewarded, and thus your relationship to the law itself is amoral.
It is, however, utterly immoral to suggest finding someone guilty of a crime soley to 'teach them restraint'. And of rather dubious benefit to immediately clear their record. All you'd have taught them at that point is how to abuse the court system.
There's more I could type on that, but frankly I think everyone can see how fucking stupid you are. Maybe you need to learn to restrain your urge to punish people who aren't as 'enlightened' as you.
If students are 'abusing' laptops, and, BTW, this probably means 'chatting on the instead of doing work', the obvious solution is to stop handing them the damn laptops!
Alternately, forget about security, just reset the drives when they are turned in. (Make the students turn it on and start the restore CD when they turn it in, if you don't have staff.) That's what sane people would do.
Of course, then they can, gasp, download porn! Of course, almost half the students in high school are 17 or older, and can thus purchase porn at a video place, but whatever.
And if they can download porn at home, they already have a net connection and can thus already download porn. (Not that any software would be able to stop them.)
Frankly, this looks like 'I don't want my mother logging my chats and email with my girlfriend, or my porn download. So I will continue to use the school's computer, despite warnings from them.'
And you know whose fault that is? The mother's, for trying to spy on everything her high school child does, and the schools, for continuing to loan out the laptop for no reason.
Let's say this had happened in the military, you were put in a classroom and told to turn on your computer, and someone did this.
Now, I'm not an expert on the military, I don't the rules or anything, but would someone have gotten in trouble for solving an obviously minor problem with the equipment in a training situtation? Equipment that they, as owners and operators of TVs, knew how to fix?
I'm not talking about the 'break them down and build them up' boot camp type training, where you get in trouble for completely made-up things. I'm talking about a normal training situtation.
Somehow I don't think so. People in the military are expected to be able to solve minor problems themselves, and every single order requires some interpetation.
"Don't touch anything", for example, would imply hovering in midair, so obviously there's some judgement call on what 'anything' is. The trick is to make sure the orders are clear (I'm sure officers have classes on that.) and that people taking orders will all interpet them identically. (And I'm sure there are classes on that.)
The failure here wasn't 'disobeying orders', it was failure to give clear orders, coupled with general incompetence on the part of the order-giver at understanding technology.
And if officer training them had reacted like that, with an equivilent punishment, (suspension of a week is fairly serious)...well the punishment might have stood anyway. But I'm fairly certain that officer wouldn't be training any more people like that. Going around giving ambigious orders and overreacting when people show initiative is not something the military looks for in its officers.
In the educational system, there are good people, and bad people.
The good people fundementally wish for students to learn.
The bad people fundementally wish for students to do what they are told.
Both of them are willing to overlook what they do not want done as long as it does not interfer with what they do want done. But interfer with their major goal, and you're toast.
Of course, they might exist, and somehow not be quantum particles, but I think the whole 'distortion of space' is a better idea than inventing some new class of particles that we have no idea of how they could exist.
And it's not 'creationism' per se, it's the 'young earth' thing that asserts the universe is only 6011 years old or whatever, counting from Adam. This is obviously inane and disprovable if you look at the Milky Way, unless God created the stars and then a bunch of light halfway to earth. (Or maybe just the light. Why bother making other galaxies? Just make the light from them, no one will ever know.)
Which, hey, is possible, but very goofy of God.
So the young earth people instead assert that the speed of light was VERY fast at one time. (And that some of the very very far things are not actually that far.) I mean incredibly fast, like a billion times faster.
Of course, none of them have ever explained where all that energy went. Or how the EM spectrum managed to stay pretty much intact throughout that. Remember, humans living on earth the entire time. No huge blasts of radiation sterilizing the earth, which is what I suspect would happen to starlight, much less sunlight, if you cut the speed of light by that much that fast.
Free will has absolutely nothing to do with event following cause. It has absolutely nothing to do with physics at all, because it's a made-up concept. It's philosophical.
If you want to assert that something outside this reality, or inside this reality but not part of your measurable body, is controlling 'you', fine. Whatever.
However, trying to make up weird rules about how it's affected by time travel is just absurd when you can't even agree on what you're talking about, and don't actually have any reason to think it exists.
People who argue about how they 'could' do something else, and thus foreknowledge of their actions is impossible, need to seriously think about, you know, the past, which we also know about and where they 'could' have done something else but didn't.
You want to fight something, don't fight hypothetical time travel, go and fight about the supposedly 'immutable' past, and leave everyone who doesn't have a weird fixation on what they 'choose' to do alone. We know that if we were facing situtations that we faced before with exactly the same knowledge, if we were reliving a moment of history, we'd do exactly the same thing, because that's what we did the first time. Duh.
Only crazy people think otherwise. Until these people can alter their own past decisions with the 'fact' they could have done something else, they don't really belong in the discussion at all, as they are crazy.
Which is why if you go faster than light, your reality is backwards and cause follows effect. You aren't even really going faster than light, you're going slower than light and backwards in time. If you were to approach 2x the speed of the light, you'd appear to slow down to everyone else, and end up casually strolling facing the wrong way. (And this would be trival to do, as going 2x the speed of light would be a simple matter of going 1.00001x and then trying to stop.)
So it's not a premise about the speed of light. The speed of light defines time. It is absolute. While you can't accelerate faster than the speed of light, that's not the point. The point is that light always travels at exactly the same speed, and light carries reality along with it.
By 'reality, I mean exactly that. I can see you do something while I did something else, and those events happened at the same time to me. You, being a light year away, saw them two years apart, and we're both right, from our frame of reference. That's relativity. Events happen when the light reaches you. (And by light, I mean hypothetical vacuum light, not artifically slowed light.)
People hear 'nothing can travel faster than light', and 'everything is relative' and don't quite grasp is. According to relativity, time doesn't exist independent of the speed of light, just like gravity doesn't exist independent of the distortion in space caused by mass. In fact, energy:time::matter:gravity is a pretty good analogy of what's going on.
And everything I just wrote, according to quantum mechanics, is a complete and utter lie.
Quantum mechanics has been proven to be non-local (operating faster than light) with Bell's Theorem. It's not even a theory, we have actual physical proof that events at one place can effect the outcome at another faster than light. We don't even need quantum tunnelling, good ole quantum interference does it for us.
Now, Bell's Theorem doesn't let us get information faster than light. However, it clearly knows what's going on faster than light, so at least bookkeeping information can go faster than light.
And, incidentally, you don't need quantum tunneling or any sort of equipment to get light going faster than light. Light, until you measure it, is smeared into a probability wave. Sometimes, by sheer chance, you can measure one and it will end up collapsing at the front of the wave. Thus having moved a tiny fraction faster than light.
And some will collapse at the end of the wave, moving a tiny fraction slower than light, which is just as much a crime for light to do in relativity.
I'm fairly certain we've actually measured what we think is this happening, from pulsars. Probablity waves from photons from stars can spread across meters until they hit something, where they instantly collapse into one point. (At which point relativity runs screaming from the room, because points a meter away from each other should not be able to communicate instantly.) A meter isn't a long time, lightwise, but I seem to recall something about measuring 'fast' photons.
This is why physicists have so many drunken fistfights.
And 'elementary particles' don't exist, or have you missed the last 100 years of quantum physics? Everything acts like a probability wave until you get to a certain level of interaction. Or you can say that as 'Everything is a probablity wave, but past a certain size there only is one thing possible, which it has 100% odds of being.'.
Arguing that the 'real things' in our universe are things simulated on a computer is silly, because there are no 'real things' in our universe to start with. It's just a whole mishmash of energy levels and probabilities that looks like real things to us giants.
'Hydrogen' doesn't solve anything. It might be a nice storage system for electricity, and if all electric cars are hydrogen, we could charge them faster with replacing it than via batteries.But it doesn't do a damn thing about powering anything.
And we already have a storage system for eletricity, it's called the power grid.
Basically, hydrogen is the concept that, instead of generating power and shipping it via the power grid, we'll generate power and ship it via truck. Um, okay.
There is no possible way that will be 'better' in any form. re: Laws of Thermodynamics. And we'll have to power the damn truck, too.
And if you mention 'we could generate it closer', which is some reoccuring myth, I have to point out that either we're shipping the electricty to there via wire (Which means you just admitted that wires were a better transport system than hydrogen, and I fail to see why we shouldn't use them for the 'last mile', considering those wires already exist.) or we're generating the electric power to generate the hydrogen there, in which case we could just stop screwing around and generate electric power there instead.
If hydrogen was a better manner of storage than batteries, we'd be using hydrogen right now in batteries. It's not like cracking water is difficult.
And the damn thing is explosive, I don't care how careful you are, nothing helps if a tractor trailer rams the station. A gas station catching fire has nothing on a hydrogen station exploding.
I can't believe people think this 'hydrogen' thing is useful, although I've noticed they've started calling it the 'hydrogen economy' instead of 'hydrogen power', presumably because they realized you can't get power from it. But no one is explaining how a 'hydrogen economy' is better than an 'electric economy', which has the bonus of actually already existing. Sure, we need to get rid of the 'gas economy', but we already figured out how to get electric power to almost every home in this nation, so it's trivial to set up a 'pay-per-charge' system, or even a physical battery-swapping system if charging is too long.
See, what's getting me is that people rightly are realizing that just switching to electic cars isn't enough while our grid is powered off oil, but they then nonsensically think that the solution is a different sort of battery. Um...no.
The solution is to make cars that use as little power (Gas and electric combined) as possible, and when they use power, use electrical. Then stop using gas at all. So as we switch the grid over to non-oil, we all win. (Some of us already are on hydroelectric.)
And, yeah, this concept that you're 'not allowed' to be intelligent has pretty much convinced me that if I ever go to Vega for whatever reason (I'm unlikely to go for gambling.), I'm going to learn to count cards, and delibrately go in and do it.
And probably get caught and banned, but, hey, that's one more person on their list they'd have to watch for.
Yeah, it works great if you can afford a WINS server, but as everyone who's ever had a LAN party knows, it sometimes magically fails on small networks.
And comparing Unix servers to Windows desktop is inheritly misleading. Desktops get pounded on. Windows desktops might have more security issues than Unix desktops, and that does raise the TCO, a lot, but don't compare them to Unix servers that sit in the corner forever. Properly adminned Windows servers can almost do that, barring updates every month.
It's just that, while the amount of competent Windows admin roughly equals the number of competent Unix admin, the number of completely incompetent Windows admin vastly outnumbers the number of completely incompetent Unix admin. This is because the incompetent bar is lower on Windows.
Or maybe a better way to put it is that there's a middle ground between competent and incompetent, let's call it quasicompetent, before I piss anyone off. Normally self-taught, thinks they understand everything, but can't explain, for example, LDAP or domain servers.
And quasicompetent Unix admin are almost as good as competent Unix ones. They will be able to get everything up and running. They'll be the ones who don't have shell scripts to do 90% of their work for them, and couldn't build the existing network, although they can maintain it fine once pointed at the tools the competent one wrote.
Whereas quasicompetent Windows admin will constantly be running around, doing updates, restoring from installs, reconfiguring, deleting adware and viruses, rebooting, adding hardware with broken drivers, etc etc.
What does this mean? If you hire a quasicompetent Unix admin, your network will basically work, and they will sit around in a screened bitchx all day talking with their friends.
If you hire a quasicompetent Windows admin, you will have no end of trouble if your network is over 15 computers.
And there's absolutely no obvious way to tell the difference between quasicompetent people and competent people, even after you've hired them. They all seem to know how to perform every task, but the competent knows what should be done to solve a problem, whereas the quasicompetent one just knows how to make it go away for now.
It's just that, with Unix, that's usually enough.
You don't actually have to improve security, you just have to assert you improved security.
Research? Why should anyone do any research? Aren't companies and the government trustworthy?
You didn't read the link at all, did you?
And all (important) crimes do require intent. It's called mens rea.
There are a very very few that do not, like speeding or parking violations, where the mere facts of the evidence makes you guilty, called 'strict libability' crimes, but those are never felonies. They're usually ticketable offenses, in fact. Everything else requires intent to commit the crime.
The difference between homicide and manslaughter is that homicide requires intent to kill, whereas voluntary manslaughter merely requires 'intent to harm', without the actual malic reaching a level of murder.
And involuntary manslaughter? Well, there are two version. One's misdemeanor version of felony murder. The intent required there is to merely commit another crime. If you a committing a misdemeanor when you kill someone, it is involuntary manslaughter, just like it's felony murder when you kill them during any felony.
The other version of manslaughter is negligence, and I suspect it's what you're thinking of when you talk about 'manslaughter'. However, crimes that require negligence require intent. In fact, negligence is a form of intent. That sounds strange to have phrased that way, but failure to do something that you should have know needed to be done is a form of intent.
Basically, the difference between manslaughter and murder is what your intent is, but both of them require intent, aka, mens rea, as do all felonies. Suggesting that manslaughter doesn't require intent is just ignorance.
And your 'intent to take' concept is stupid. No law, anywhere, has ever defined theft as that. It's defined as 'intent to permanently deprive'. (I probably should have pointed out the 'permanent' earlier, but I was trying to point out the 'deprive' part. Some forms of 'theft', BTW, do not require it being permanent, like embezzlement, which is illegal even if you intend to get the money back. But basic theft, aka, larceny, aka, theft by taking, does. I think all 'theft' does.)
And, you know, you'd look less ignorant if you googled a bit and found specific examples of where it is explicitly stated that borrowing is legal. That's according to the University of Texas Criminal Law Department and the Georgia Bar Ass., BTW. Search for 'borrow'.
It's just that court cases where that was argue successfully are had to find.
Here's an appeal where the lawyer said it should worked as a defense, although for some reason he couldn't legally argue it at that point. Normally it's larceny if you move things, even slightly, in an attempt to take them, but he argued that the defendent couldn't have possibly been attempting to steal giant earth-moving equipment.
And here's a very interesting Supreme Court transcript where they talk about the specific lack of the word 'intent' in a certain bank robbery statute. Where they actually talk about people stealing money from a bank with the intent to return it, and how while larcency laws would say that's legal, the Federal bank robbery laws, as written might imply it's not, as they just require 'stealing'. And they don't know if they were meant to be written that way or not, as it happened when they rewrote the definition of steal of be 'intent to deprive' as a 'clean-up', apparently not in an attempt to change the actual crime.
That's the Supreme Court, for those not paying attention. And regardless of whether the bank robbery laws require intent to deprive or not, that doesn't change what they think about 'larcency'. They all accept it requires the intent to permanently deprive. (Robbery, FYI, requires taking from the physical possession of people, usually by intimidation or force.)
All toilets would work perfectly well without complicated plungers and levers if they were facing the other direction.
Spammers are paid to send out a message. They get paid if you see the message or not.
Damn, they've countered our plan before we started!
You just need the jury to. ;)
Mobs attacking spammers should only be armed with plastic spoons. All fourteen million of them.
Remember, if you only poke them once, it's not only not murder, it's not even assault, and perfectly legal under the CAN-POKE-SPAMMERS act, as long as they have a 'business relationship' with you, which they obviously created by spamming you.
And, to make it fair, they are allowed to opt out of any member of the mob poking them. One at a time, in writing, and we'll even waive the 48 hours to process it can traditionally take to process. (Of course, that person is free to go out and get some more people to stand in line, or even get back in line under another name.)