We've been getting it served up to us at our breakfast tables for a few weeks here in the UK. The good news is that the legal requirement for anonymity stops the media from publishing the photos that they're longing to show.
What particular group? The GP referred to "religionists", which is a matter of belief, not a matter of being in a particular group. Somebody could leave Al Qaeda and join a pacifist organisation like the Quakers, it seems they'd still be condoning violence according to the post I replied to.
The GP referred to "moderate religionists", not "moderate Muslims". A particular religion may have problems, but that doesn't mean that all religion has the same problems.
And for what it's worth, Muslims do condemn the violence: Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) wrote "The gross injustices of 9/11 and 7/7 exposed the distorted ideas and misdeeds of those who have turned from the path of Muhammad and his work in guiding humanity to peace and happiness. Victory in Islam is not to cause destruction; but to see people enter the religion in crowds, not running away from it!" link, and many other Muslims have condemned such violence. But that doesn't reflect the consensus view of Islam that the media has constructed, so it doesn't get reported.
It's a difficult question to answer, but it's one that the moderates are going to have to figure out. Any group that can't police their own extremists will, sooner or later, find themselves dragged into a war with everyone else.
My point is that they're not "their" extremists; they are extremists with some arbitrary characteristic in common with those you say should control them. You might as well hold all black people responsible for any atrocities committed by black people, all heterosexual people responsible for all atrocities commited by heterosexuals, and so on. When feminists accuse all men of being rapists, whilst I deplore rape I'm bound to say "actually, no I'm not". And it's not my responsibility as a man to sort out "my" rapists (it's my responsibility as a participant in society to support the efforts of society to sort out rapists).
If they want their religion to continue getting respect, they need to police their own.
Er, how? The moderates usually have no authority over the extremists, so how should they police them? In what sense are the extremists the moderates' "own"? Your logic is like saying that I am responsible for the murder and torture of Baby P because as a British subject I am responsible for policing my own. Just how might I have done that?
It's interesting that every single person in the article is against it except for a dnc congressman.
What you need to ask at that point is "Is that the actual spread of opinion, or is it evidence that the article is so biased as to be laughable"? I'm not saying which way I think it is with the referenced article, just that you seem to have forgotten that the second possibility is even possible.
Ok, I got some undeserved karma recently (by being modded insightful for a joke) so I can afford to burn some by being off-topic.
What I mean to say, but don't because it makes an awkward sentence is: Paying for, storing, distributing, and filming child porn: Thought crime.
Except that none of those are thoughts, they're physical actions.
In each of these cases, your helping create supply and/or demand
I dispute this. Only paying for it creates demand.
Actively seeking it out creates demand, too, because that provides a possible advertising revenue stream. I don't think that's illegal yet, though -- as long as you fail.
which does in fact hurt children.
I dispute that too. The only action of those specified that hurts a child is actual abuse, and only that and directly commissioning such should be a crime.
There is the little matter of effectiveness. Making only the abuse and direct commissioning the offences just means that the abuse will take place in places without such legistaltion or with ineffective enforcement, which I'd guess is pretty much how things are anyway because those things are already offences in most civilised countries. If one wants to limit child abuse, the most effective means is likely to be to tackle all parts of the abuse chain that fall within your administration.
I think it is a real issue. I have a serious problem with other people's information flow being stopped by any entity for any reason.
Child porn is certainly data, but is it information?
Would The Economist care about equations? No. Would a real economist? Yes -- my economics text books are littered with them. If I were a "Quant" I would want to take books with equations on the road with me.
Find out why they want the doc format. Quite often, they just want some "standard" or widely-recognized document format, and will accept PDF, for example. So just convert the LaTeX to PDF; it's straightforward.
At least two reasons. They want something that they know how to work with when they take ownership of the documents -- so now my task is not just converting my company but also all of our customers -- and some customers want some types of documents submitted using MS Word templates that make extensive use of macros (which prevents me using OO.o, too).
Incidentally, the science and engineering departments of many universities encourage use of LaTeX for writing dissertations, and even provide templates for that purpose. Both of my grad schools did, and the one where I'm a docent also does. Humanities departments may be different, but even they will appreciate the management of bibliographies and citation formatting capabilities of LaTeX/BibTeX.
I'm long out of the engineering faculty, and my recent work has been in the humanities faculty (doing statistical stylistics, for what it's worth) -- the class and tutor were excited when I showed them Zotero.
The idea of.doc rather than.odf is that MS users can still use Wird, whereas.odf would force them to learn a new word processor. I suspect the fear with.pdf is that they might get PDFs with annotation forbidden so they couldn't add their comments (which I agree is a weak argument, becuase the same could be said of.doc).
Perhaps they knew the economy was going down the pan and took a dive so that the Democrats would get the blame? Memories of the New Statesman episode "The Party's Over".
Once you have an entire department/work group saying that this small free piece of software is going to have a very significant boost to their productivity very few companies say no. I doubt these people are getting to pick and choose thier softare completely, but they can request software that is going to have a large positive impact on their productivity, and they will often get it.
Unfortunately, if it is just some in the workgroup saying that, and others say it's irrelevant for their work, management is likely to say that the training and maintenance overhead of having dual standards outweighs the productivity benefit of the new tool. It's hard to prove that's wrong, even when you're pretty confident it is. Even in an MS Office environment I had a very hard job getting Visio accepted, because as far as management was concerned MS Draw was adequate.
That wouldn't be allowed at work, on the grounds that nobody could take over and edit the equations if I went under a bus. Where do all you folks work, that you can choose the tools you work with? And how do they manage business continuity?
Nope. I'm a part-timer, takes a lot longer that way.
Then, welcome to the mathematical community, where you will be laughed at for doing anything in word.
Nope, I'm already in the engineering community (we use equations too) and like I say, customers want Word format documents.
Also (and more importantly) you'll probably get carpel tunnel syndrome from using "equation editor."
Yes, that's why I use laTeX when I can, but the option isn't always open to me. At least my present employer is relaxed about my having it on my work computer -- as far as my previous employer was concerned, it wasn't in list of official company software, so I couldn't have it. Those folks who think people get to choose the software they use clearly have no experience of corporate life.
As consultants, we deliver documents such as safety cases that the customer takes ownership of. Our formal deliverables are always PDF (for the reason you give, and also so that it's relatively fixed so nobody is likely to come back with a modified version and say it's ours. But most customers ask for.doc as well, so they're not locked in to us for subsequent changes.
Editing formulae is a big concern for me, but my customers demand.doc format, and laTeX to Word conversion just doesn't cut it, unfortunately. For college work I use laTeX, but even that is likely to change as they are moving over to electronic submission and require.doc format too (although to their credit they are promoting OO.o as the way to generate the.doc files).
Formatting of mathematical formulae can break between MS Office 2003 and 2007, too. 2007 does support the old, compatible equation editor, but it's not the default, and the add-in for 2003 for viewing 2007 documents renders 2007 equations as poor-quality images. So although no compatibility problems might be an overstatement, OO.o is probably no worse for eBook compatibility (where macros won't matter) than Word.
I think you're missing my point. By "almost impossible" I meant "very low probability", not "infinitesimal probability". Had I meant "infinitesimal probability" there would have to be an infinite number of planets or an infinite duration universe to get the very many trials I suggested, which wouldn't work, would it?
Which might be why I can get treated for cancer on the (UK) NHS, but I don't get an annual check-up. Although even insurance companies take steps to minimise their outgoings, which in the case of healthcare might reasonably include check-ups.
As I said, donate to relevant charities. Our country donates more to charity than anyone so I'm sure it could easily be funded.
And if not enough is given to charity? I don't know about "our" country, but in my country charitable giving for the elderly is pitiful; I suspect it's way behind children, animals, the environment, culture and heritage. The elderly aren't photogenic, you see.
Nope, no flaw. The flaw is in your moral code. You believe the ends can justify the means
Nope, I'm no utilitarian.
and as a result you've discarded all possibility of an ethical foundation, for how can you answer the question, "what should I do?" in any situation without the foreknowledge that your choice of action will have the correct results. History is filled with the unintended consequences of people willing to discard all principles to fulfill goals at whatever means necessary.
That might be relevant if I were promoting utilitarianism. Still, I think you overstate your case. How can I answer the question "shall I cook for dinner tonight" without the foreknowledge that my actions will result in a satisfying meal and not in the house being burned down? History is littered with the unintended consequence of houses being burned down whilst trying to prepare a satisfying meal. Of course, in real life we don't have perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of any of our decisions, but most of us have enough intelligence to make a sufficiently reasonable stab at it to get on with life.
The cure to your problem is to stop trying to save everyone, stop putting everyone else's interests above your own self-interest
Ok, there goes my charitable giving. Where did you say the money was going to come from, by the way?
and stop sacrificing everyone else's self-interests to what's convenient to you - in this case, promoting legislation that quickly accumulates money to fulfill your ill-conceived goal (saving everyone), rather than promoting the voluntary donation of money to charities that will support the elderly.
Hardly convenient to me -- I'd sooner not pat tax. But you never addressed my point about the consequences of your policy, which we know because it's widespread in the third-world. Families have as many children as they can, because that's the best assurance of welfare in old age. Resources get stretched to the limit leading to severe shortages, high crime and a poor standard of life for everyone.
The former is more convenient for you but violates individual rights, while the latter takes more work but violates no rights.
"Rights". That's an interesting word. Where do these "rights" come from?
When I am forced to take money out of my paycheck and "give" it to the government for my future medical needs and retirement because the government demands it, damn straight its an entitlement. I am *entitled* to get my money back.
It's not a savings plan, it's an insurance plan. I'm not entitled to go to my insurer and demand "My house hasn't burned down. Give me all my premium payments back".
A more reasonable solution is for everyone to support their own parents with the increased money they'll have from not dumping their money into the social security black hole.
Yes, that way whoever has the most kids gets the best retirement. Anybody who reaches old age childless, or whose children die (for example, killed on active service in the armed forces) is clearly a waster who has contributed nothing to society and deserves to be thrown on the scrapheap.
Unless there's a flaw in your argument, of course...
Slashdot Mirror
We've been getting it served up to us at our breakfast tables for a few weeks here in the UK. The good news is that the legal requirement for anonymity stops the media from publishing the photos that they're longing to show.
Leave the group.
What particular group? The GP referred to "religionists", which is a matter of belief, not a matter of being in a particular group. Somebody could leave Al Qaeda and join a pacifist organisation like the Quakers, it seems they'd still be condoning violence according to the post I replied to.
The GP referred to "moderate religionists", not "moderate Muslims". A particular religion may have problems, but that doesn't mean that all religion has the same problems.
And for what it's worth, Muslims do condemn the violence: Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) wrote "The gross injustices of 9/11 and 7/7 exposed the distorted ideas and misdeeds of those who have turned from the path of Muhammad and his work in guiding humanity to peace and happiness. Victory in Islam is not to cause destruction; but to see people enter the religion in crowds, not running away from it!" link, and many other Muslims have condemned such violence. But that doesn't reflect the consensus view of Islam that the media has constructed, so it doesn't get reported.
It's a difficult question to answer, but it's one that the moderates are going to have to figure out. Any group that can't police their own extremists will, sooner or later, find themselves dragged into a war with everyone else.
My point is that they're not "their" extremists; they are extremists with some arbitrary characteristic in common with those you say should control them. You might as well hold all black people responsible for any atrocities committed by black people, all heterosexual people responsible for all atrocities commited by heterosexuals, and so on. When feminists accuse all men of being rapists, whilst I deplore rape I'm bound to say "actually, no I'm not". And it's not my responsibility as a man to sort out "my" rapists (it's my responsibility as a participant in society to support the efforts of society to sort out rapists).
If they want their religion to continue getting respect, they need to police their own.
Er, how? The moderates usually have no authority over the extremists, so how should they police them? In what sense are the extremists the moderates' "own"? Your logic is like saying that I am responsible for the murder and torture of Baby P because as a British subject I am responsible for policing my own. Just how might I have done that?
It's interesting that every single person in the article is against it except for a dnc congressman.
What you need to ask at that point is "Is that the actual spread of opinion, or is it evidence that the article is so biased as to be laughable"? I'm not saying which way I think it is with the referenced article, just that you seem to have forgotten that the second possibility is even possible.
What I mean to say, but don't because it makes an awkward sentence is: Paying for, storing, distributing, and filming child porn: Thought crime.
Except that none of those are thoughts, they're physical actions.
In each of these cases, your helping create supply and/or demand I dispute this. Only paying for it creates demand.
Actively seeking it out creates demand, too, because that provides a possible advertising revenue stream. I don't think that's illegal yet, though -- as long as you fail.
which does in fact hurt children. I dispute that too. The only action of those specified that hurts a child is actual abuse, and only that and directly commissioning such should be a crime.
There is the little matter of effectiveness. Making only the abuse and direct commissioning the offences just means that the abuse will take place in places without such legistaltion or with ineffective enforcement, which I'd guess is pretty much how things are anyway because those things are already offences in most civilised countries. If one wants to limit child abuse, the most effective means is likely to be to tackle all parts of the abuse chain that fall within your administration.
I think it is a real issue. I have a serious problem with other people's information flow being stopped by any entity for any reason.
Child porn is certainly data, but is it information?
They want something they can edit, so they're not locked in to us for future amendments. laTeX to .doc tools are not all that good.
When I did work in a big corporation I wasn't allowed to add executables such as laTeX to my computer, under pain of dismissal.
Would The Economist care about equations? No. Would a real economist? Yes -- my economics text books are littered with them. If I were a "Quant" I would want to take books with equations on the road with me.
Find out why they want the doc format. Quite often, they just want some "standard" or widely-recognized document format, and will accept PDF, for example. So just convert the LaTeX to PDF; it's straightforward.
At least two reasons. They want something that they know how to work with when they take ownership of the documents -- so now my task is not just converting my company but also all of our customers -- and some customers want some types of documents submitted using MS Word templates that make extensive use of macros (which prevents me using OO.o, too).
Incidentally, the science and engineering departments of many universities encourage use of LaTeX for writing dissertations, and even provide templates for that purpose. Both of my grad schools did, and the one where I'm a docent also does. Humanities departments may be different, but even they will appreciate the management of bibliographies and citation formatting capabilities of LaTeX/BibTeX.
I'm long out of the engineering faculty, and my recent work has been in the humanities faculty (doing statistical stylistics, for what it's worth) -- the class and tutor were excited when I showed them Zotero.
The idea of .doc rather than .odf is that MS users can still use Wird, whereas .odf would force them to learn a new word processor. I suspect the fear with .pdf is that they might get PDFs with annotation forbidden so they couldn't add their comments (which I agree is a weak argument, becuase the same could be said of .doc).
Perhaps they knew the economy was going down the pan and took a dive so that the Democrats would get the blame? Memories of the New Statesman episode "The Party's Over".
Once you have an entire department/work group saying that this small free piece of software is going to have a very significant boost to their productivity very few companies say no. I doubt these people are getting to pick and choose thier softare completely, but they can request software that is going to have a large positive impact on their productivity, and they will often get it.
Unfortunately, if it is just some in the workgroup saying that, and others say it's irrelevant for their work, management is likely to say that the training and maintenance overhead of having dual standards outweighs the productivity benefit of the new tool. It's hard to prove that's wrong, even when you're pretty confident it is. Even in an MS Office environment I had a very hard job getting Visio accepted, because as far as management was concerned MS Draw was adequate.
That wouldn't be allowed at work, on the grounds that nobody could take over and edit the equations if I went under a bus. Where do all you folks work, that you can choose the tools you work with? And how do they manage business continuity?
Well, you'll only be in college for 4 years.
Nope. I'm a part-timer, takes a lot longer that way.
Then, welcome to the mathematical community, where you will be laughed at for doing anything in word.
Nope, I'm already in the engineering community (we use equations too) and like I say, customers want Word format documents.
Also (and more importantly) you'll probably get carpel tunnel syndrome from using "equation editor."
Yes, that's why I use laTeX when I can, but the option isn't always open to me. At least my present employer is relaxed about my having it on my work computer -- as far as my previous employer was concerned, it wasn't in list of official company software, so I couldn't have it. Those folks who think people get to choose the software they use clearly have no experience of corporate life.
As consultants, we deliver documents such as safety cases that the customer takes ownership of. Our formal deliverables are always PDF (for the reason you give, and also so that it's relatively fixed so nobody is likely to come back with a modified version and say it's ours. But most customers ask for .doc as well, so they're not locked in to us for subsequent changes.
Editing formulae is a big concern for me, but my customers demand .doc format, and laTeX to Word conversion just doesn't cut it, unfortunately. For college work I use laTeX, but even that is likely to change as they are moving over to electronic submission and require .doc format too (although to their credit they are promoting OO.o as the way to generate the .doc files).
Formatting of mathematical formulae can break between MS Office 2003 and 2007, too. 2007 does support the old, compatible equation editor, but it's not the default, and the add-in for 2003 for viewing 2007 documents renders 2007 equations as poor-quality images. So although no compatibility problems might be an overstatement, OO.o is probably no worse for eBook compatibility (where macros won't matter) than Word.
And it's sort of reassuring that a misspelling makes one of the UK top 10s. ("Eaton Mess" should be "Eton Mess")
I think you're missing my point. By "almost impossible" I meant "very low probability", not "infinitesimal probability". Had I meant "infinitesimal probability" there would have to be an infinite number of planets or an infinite duration universe to get the very many trials I suggested, which wouldn't work, would it?
Which might be why I can get treated for cancer on the (UK) NHS, but I don't get an annual check-up. Although even insurance companies take steps to minimise their outgoings, which in the case of healthcare might reasonably include check-ups.
As I said, donate to relevant charities. Our country donates more to charity than anyone so I'm sure it could easily be funded.
And if not enough is given to charity? I don't know about "our" country, but in my country charitable giving for the elderly is pitiful; I suspect it's way behind children, animals, the environment, culture and heritage. The elderly aren't photogenic, you see.
Nope, no flaw. The flaw is in your moral code. You believe the ends can justify the means
Nope, I'm no utilitarian.
and as a result you've discarded all possibility of an ethical foundation, for how can you answer the question, "what should I do?" in any situation without the foreknowledge that your choice of action will have the correct results. History is filled with the unintended consequences of people willing to discard all principles to fulfill goals at whatever means necessary.
That might be relevant if I were promoting utilitarianism. Still, I think you overstate your case. How can I answer the question "shall I cook for dinner tonight" without the foreknowledge that my actions will result in a satisfying meal and not in the house being burned down? History is littered with the unintended consequence of houses being burned down whilst trying to prepare a satisfying meal. Of course, in real life we don't have perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of any of our decisions, but most of us have enough intelligence to make a sufficiently reasonable stab at it to get on with life.
The cure to your problem is to stop trying to save everyone, stop putting everyone else's interests above your own self-interest
Ok, there goes my charitable giving. Where did you say the money was going to come from, by the way?
and stop sacrificing everyone else's self-interests to what's convenient to you - in this case, promoting legislation that quickly accumulates money to fulfill your ill-conceived goal (saving everyone), rather than promoting the voluntary donation of money to charities that will support the elderly.
Hardly convenient to me -- I'd sooner not pat tax. But you never addressed my point about the consequences of your policy, which we know because it's widespread in the third-world. Families have as many children as they can, because that's the best assurance of welfare in old age. Resources get stretched to the limit leading to severe shortages, high crime and a poor standard of life for everyone.
The former is more convenient for you but violates individual rights, while the latter takes more work but violates no rights.
"Rights". That's an interesting word. Where do these "rights" come from?
When I am forced to take money out of my paycheck and "give" it to the government for my future medical needs and retirement because the government demands it, damn straight its an entitlement. I am *entitled* to get my money back.
It's not a savings plan, it's an insurance plan. I'm not entitled to go to my insurer and demand "My house hasn't burned down. Give me all my premium payments back".
A more reasonable solution is for everyone to support their own parents with the increased money they'll have from not dumping their money into the social security black hole.
Yes, that way whoever has the most kids gets the best retirement. Anybody who reaches old age childless, or whose children die (for example, killed on active service in the armed forces) is clearly a waster who has contributed nothing to society and deserves to be thrown on the scrapheap.
Unless there's a flaw in your argument, of course...