Among my pet theories, or speculations, really, is that the principle of coherence is tremendously important to any "mind" (individual, group, etc.).
By "coherence", I mean the mental and nervous-system processes that allow you to walk through a door by pulling it open without your feet stopping it. Your feet just want to keep walking, since they "know" the task at hand is to move forward, and that's what they do. But components of the system know that a door handle must be pulled and that the body, as a whole, must move somewhat out of the way of the door.
With insufficient or inefficient communication, the system breaks down. E.g. if the "mind" uses the kind of straightforward reward/punishment system humans typically design into systems involving large numbers of humans, the mental components controlling the feet are likely to be "rewarded" for moving forward, and thus unlikely to be willing to arbitrarily stop and walk backwards a bit just because some other component (the strategizing component), which has its own ideas about rewards, says "walk backwards right now".
Since most people reading this "know" the obvious answer is "well, the mind controlling the body as a whole knows its job, so the other parts just go along", that may seem like a trivial example, but, based on my observations of children at all sorts of ages, it seems to me that much of childhood consists of properly organizing one's own mind so as to achieve just this sort of coherence.
Even well-adjusted adults run into all sorts of problems regarding coherence. Using a cell phone to make a convenience call while driving in challenging (e.g. city) traffic is an example: while components of the person's mind recognize the danger, other components take over and say "even though I theoretically value my life and property [car] over the need to make this call, I've decided to punt the risk and enjoy myself".
Is that a stupid decision? Hard to put a value judgement on it, but it certainly isn't an entirely coherent one, since driving safely and operating a cell phone have at least some degree of conflict, and, there being no need to make that call, the coherent decision would be to either not make the call, or to pull over to make it safely.
(No, I'm not in any way advocating laws regarding using cell-phones while driving.)
And the examples I've given here involve highly-interconnected systems having only low-latency components. That is, the moment one component of a human mind says "the door will have to swing towards me when I open it", another component can respond by saying "better back out of the way then".
Groups of humans (and most other minds) have much lower-bandwidth, higher-latency connections, and probably fewer of them, between components of the (collective) mind. Hence the need for humans to post comments on/., or for honeybees to do a funny dance to "describe" the location of a newfound source of pollen.
So a group of humans can be "stupid" simply because it fails at being sufficiently coherent in its decision-making processes. The lack of numerous, high-quality, high-bandwidth, low-latency connections, compared to that enjoyed by a single human mind, makes coherence very difficult.
Humans make up for this somewhat by creating communications systems that other creatures have not yet been shown to be able to connect into, much less create on their own. The most prominent examples I can think of are the price system (the free market) and the Internet, each of which vastly speeds up and interconnects certain aspects of communication necessary for coherent thinking across a widely-dispersed collective mind.
Humans also "intelligently" (as well as somewhat coherently) respond to the obvious defects in "group thinking" by severely constraining the range of actions that a group can commit, the degree to which certain actions can be committed arbitrarily, etc.
That is, knowing that the communication among distinct minds -- components of the group mind -- is poor, compared to that of a single human mind, humans almost inevitably set up procedural rules for that mind to follow, partly to pattern the natural "rules" limiting organic minds in nature.
E.g. your own feet simply can't suddenly decide to strangle you, so explicit rules to limit that possibility are unnecessary in the human mind.
On the other hand, a given "foot soldier" in a group of humans has the capacity to incapacitate the humans serving in "higher" capacities, so the system as a whole must take that into account and protect against it using artificially-constructed rules, barriers, and so on.
So, I believe another reason groups of humans can appear to be "stupid" is that they don't act in ways a single human would if he could -- because the rules of the group are specifically set up to avoid such actions being taken, the group needing to be explicitly constrained until such time as the group decides its "thinking process" is sufficiently advanced to throw off those restraints.
In my opinion, then, the assumption that intelligence is purely additive is incorrect. Intelligence is hard to objectively define, but surely includes the degree to which a mind achieves what it sets out to achieve. Yet even determining the latter -- the motive of the mind in question -- is a challenge for both the detached observer and the mind itself. Therefore, simply adding distinct minds, while it increases theoretical ("gross"?) intelligence, also significantly muddies both the clarity of the overall motive of the group and the speed, accuracy, and responsiveness of the communications among those individual minds.
(This line of thinking, my pet speculations and theories, are, I believe, why I tend to view society, politics, governments, and so on in ways that are "out of step" with most trends in contemporary political thought. In most cases where I disagree with others, it is because I grant more freedom to decide for themselves how to act to those who most directly bear the consequences for their actions. That's consistent with not accepting the notion that multiple minds means a similar multiple of group intelligence over that of a single mind. Yet I also see why it's necessary for groups to restrict actions of their members, just as minds, in conjuction with their corresponding body plans, necessarily restrict the freedoms of their members. I mention this as a sort of advance warning against simply agreeing with my pet theories because I might write them persuasively, or happen to hit on some interesting issues, above -- as far as most other/. posters are concerned, as anyone can determine by reviewing my posting history, I'm either a highly dangerous anti-government lunatic or an idiotic pro-government apologist.;-)
Isn't this the same court that said Casey could join the PGA tour with his bad legs?
It does seem a bit confusing, but, AFAIK, the only direct implication of the Casey decision was that the PGA was forced to change its rules regarding whether golf carts could be used at certain levels of play during tournaments.
(There were plenty of indirect implications, of course.)
That's a bit less of an impact than the gov't forcing an employer to keep an employee on salary doing something that someone else might do better, etc.
Looking at other comments here, it seems as though the issue boils down to Casey having an ADA-compliant disability (his disability impairs his ability to do normal life stuff, i.e. walk) and the women in this suit having a disability that doesn't quite meet that standard.
So, the PGA was forced to accommodate Casey's disability, but Toyota (or whoever) isn't forced to accommodate the woman's CTS disability, under the rules of the ADA.
(Apologies if I have various facts wrong; haven't read the decisions, and I know basically nothing about golf.)
The reason earth asteroid collision defense is not a huge priority is, as far as I can tell, there aren't any viable solutions.
That and, as far as most people can tell, there aren't any pseudo-solutions promoting global collectivism that can be foisted off on the public (or, more precisely, elites in the press and in government).
After all, there aren't any viable solutions to Global Warming, but clearly it is a huge priority.
(There are practical remedies to problems Global Warming poses, such as strengthening individual property rights and responsibilities and greatly lowering taxes worldwide to give peoples more freedom and opportunity to relocate to preferable climates as they see fit, but nobody's talking about those. If those remedies did become the canonical recipe for dealing with Global Warming -- or Cooling, or even ordinary, everyday climate change -- I believe most funding for Global Warming research would dry up overnight.)
A large-scale asteroid impact, like a supervolcano eruption, is the sort of thing that probably won't happen in the near future, but if (or when) it does, the results will be absolutely, unquestionably catastrophic for humanity on earth.
Global Warming, on the other hand, will happen comparatively gradually, most of its short-term effects will be predictable, and will impact societies that respect the rule of law, property rights, and individual choice much less negatively than others. (Compare the death tolls due to violent storms -- a likely and frequent short-term result of Global Warming -- among peoples around the globe vis-a-vis these measures. I'm not positive, but you're probably lots safer as a poor person in the USA than a middle-class or even wealthy person in a third-world country, because defense against such storms is, apparently, best provided by collective self-interest in the community.)
Disclaimer: I don't know, or claim to know, whether Global Warming, large-scale asteroid impact, or erupting-supervolcano risks are real. I'm merely comparing how they're presented, as "issues", in the popular, political, and scientific media, in terms of risks and remedies, and am suggesting that, perhaps, some risks are purposely inflated, and others deflated, because the issue happens to coincide with the political aims, or planned power-trips, of certain parties.
I.e. you should trust pronouncements about Risks To Mankind made by groups with even tenuous political relationships no more than you trust pronouncements of the safety of Genetically Modified Crops made by the likes of Monsanto. Just because a group doesn't directly profit financially doesn't imply they have no "sinister agenda" guiding their spin on an issue.
Yes, I was just riffing on the excess of the wordlet "hole" in your post.
But it was worth it if that's why you wrote your reply -- a clear explanation of several aspects of practical security on public computing networks.
Have a Happy New Year!
(And, yes, the moderation was unfair -- apparently some moderators prefer to impose their notion of what constitutes humor on the/. community by not merely leaving "unfunny" jokes based on the topic unmoderated, but by moderating them "offtopic".)
've never understood that argument. If you hold to it, you'd have to say "I can't explain how a [pilot's] brain operates, yet I in which I'm sitting."
But if you understand enough about how something operates, you can trust it to do certain things, to a level that makes one choice preferable to another for your own survival.
What do we understand about pilot's brains? Well, being human, they're built, from the ground up, on the instinct for survival, as are all nervous systems and brains in the animal kingdom.
And, having been trained to fly, and approved to fly by people and organizations who, themselves, have a lot to lose if they fail to land the plane properly, they're likely to be highly skilled at flying while also doing what they're instinctively programmed to do: survive -- in this case, land the plane safely. There's no such instinct we can demonstrate in computational systems, so trusting one to fly a plane is best done only when its correctness can be demonstrated logically to an extent well beyond that of doing so for an animal or human brain.
To me, one of the biggest challenges of AI is not so much to get it to do "cool" things. It's to get it to do things that are worth integrating into human society while having the AI "understand" that one of its primary functions is to help ensure the survival of the human species, especially the humans it is specifically designed to serve.
Until we can understand how a deterministic intelligence (e.g. a computer) manages to "think" that way, we're better off trusting our lives, as many of us do in one way or another, to dogs, cats, horses, and so on, because, despite not understanding exactly how they think (and not even knowing for certain whether they, or we, are deterministic), we are reasonably assured that they do think in terms of survival: their own, their species, and their (extended-by-humans) family.
Therefore, what we convince them to do will almost always be backed-up by the inborn, "failsafe" instinct for survival.
Experience with deterministic technologies shows quite the opposite: tell a computer to crash or kill its owner, and it will, without a second thought (assuming it can in the first place).
So while I find "random-growth" technologies like Genetic Programming (GP) and neural nets quite interesting and full of potential, I see them as, currently, a poor middle ground between software and wetware.
With wetware (animals and humans), its instinct for survival, plus its easy teachability, makes it fairly trustworthy in many "natural" situations.
With software, its demonstrable, decomposable logic makes it trustworthy in many "artificial" situations.
With middle-ground technologies like GP, neither an assurance of an instinct for (organic-level) surival nor a demonstrable, decomposable logic is offered in the general case.
So these middle-ground technologies are best used in situations where they're not needed for trust, rather for optimization, and/or their "output", that is, the end product of their mutation process, is itself a viable candidate for "software" in that it can be reasonably analyzed as a deterministic automaton.
In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume we'll learn a lot about teaching, learning, determinism, and such by exploring these technologies, so while I wouldn't want to fly in a plane piloted by a still-learning GP-based computer (I'd prefer a trained dog for a pilot, frankly), it's still cool to see all these avenues being so creatively explored.
But what ever gave you the idea I'm a Democrat or a supporter of "hate crime" legislation?
Nothing. It just wouldn't have surprised me to learn that you were, or had been, a supporter.
Such combinations of beliefs haven't been difficult to find lately. E.g. people who seemed to stay very quiet, if not outright supportive, regarding the raid to "rescue" Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives (who I believe are American citizens), now express grave concern about whether military tribunals deny non-citizens their Constitutional rights.
It's not that I don't appreciate anybody expressing concerns about rights. But it might be helpful if more people were aware of the importance of choosing their battles, their "enemies", their victims, and their collateral damage, more wisely. Otherwise, it's difficult to take seriously someone who thinks an armed raid of a law-abiding poor (right-wing, Christian?) family is "necessary" when they turn around and lament the treatment of people who may well have sworn to die for the cause of murdering innocent Americans.
And, personally, I'd love to see more interviewers (journalists, whatever) ask such questions when they're faced with someone saying "military tribunals deny basic rights to the accused", e.g.: "how did you respond to the armed raid of the household of the Elian Gonzalez relatives -- did you protest that their rights were denied, or do you feel they posed a greater threat to US interests than people tried as terrorists under Bush's military tribunals?".
Anyway, sorry if my earlier post appeared to label you in any way.
You don't need anti-terrorist laws, you just need effective enforcement of the usual laws
This same logic was used to resist so-called "hate crime" laws.
It seems to have failed there, too, logic having little to do, as far as I can tell, with the state of race relations in US political discourse.
And since those committing "hate crimes" hardly constituted a direct menace against the entire Western world, the USA, Christianity, or whatever "terrorists" attack, I'll be surprised if your logic works even half as well when it comes to terrorism.
(Note that I happen to agree with your logic. But it won't surprise me to learn that you support, or used to support, hate-crime laws that amplified punishment based on words used during the commission of a crime, for example, because it seems to me many of the same people worrying about losing civil liberties and having an excess of laws passed to defend against terrorism also supported just those same things happening when it was done in the name of race relations. If not in your case, I wonder if anyone's having second thoughts about their enthusiasm for advocating hate-crime laws, now that they see how much more power that sort of thing gives into government hands -- a government that has the annoying tendency to, on occasion, allow Republicans to direct its operations.)
BTW, I also appreciate your insightful questioning about the distinction between government-sanctioned and non-government-sanctioned activities, vis-a-vis the word "terrorist".
I think the distinctions include more than just the usual cynical reasons.
For one thing, governments, especially of the sort we're talking about (the US), are, compared to terrorist cells, highly visible and largely public in their doings. They have an ongoing, visible exchange of ideas and power with the people they exist to protect and serve.
While no human government approaches perfection in those respects, it's clearly easier to convince the local, state, or federal government to help you protect a freedom you cherish than it is to convince a local "terrorist" group likewise -- taking into account not only the mere act of the group agreeing with you, but effectively helping.
For another thing, for better or worse, governments have a fairly intricate system, or dance, of depending on each other for support, validation, information, and so on. Seems to me one of the most fundamental of duties of a government is to police its own citizens; else it won't maintain "recognition" status from other governments, as "evil-doers" use the territory maintained by a government failing to police it propertly to launch attacks against other nations.
Whereas, terrorist organizations, necessarily keeping most of their activities and communications hidden from public view, can't enjoy nearly the same "rich tapestry" of interdepencies that help keep governments from acting unilaterally to an excessive degree.
For yet another thing, governments' claim to fame is some semblance of what I call coherence -- the ability to focus all of the "body" on a task at hand, the quality that prevents your walking feet from kicking a door shut while your hand tries to pull it open -- while terrorist organizations' thrive on the notion that their intents, purposes, and capacities are highly distributed and, thus, not necessarily focused.
The upshot? Yes, a government might well do something just as "evil", on initial analysis, that a terrorist cell does, but:
The government typically provides some way for the populace to "fix" it using nonviolent means (in the USA, we call these "elections"; some call them "Supreme Court Rulings";-).
The government typically acts against its own citizens in such actions, while terrorists tend to focus on outsiders. Another government's response to such an act is more likely to be what an ordinary American's response is to learning that Al Queda leaders brutally execute "their own" for various spurious reasons -- "whoah, that's bad, but at least they're keeping their own people in line, making less trouble for us".
It's usually easier to effectively change the behavior of a government, especially when it comes to turning away from highly brutal acts, than to do the same for terrorist organizations. Getting various nations to, e.g., do away with the death penalty for some or all crimes has, as far as my limited knowledge of history informs me, taken less time and less deaths of innocents than convincing the IRA, PLO, and/or other "terrorist" organizations to do something far more obviously "right": give up killing innocents. Which makes sense, since the means by which people attain and maintain positions of authority tend to differ: in governments, the ability to convince lots of people of your care for their well-being is more important than being an efficient planner of mass murders; in terrorist organizations, I would think that publically and convincingly coming out against further violence gets you demoted real fast.
For these and other reasons, I can see why people insist on drawing a bright, if squiggly and sometimes-moving, line between organizations like the UN, the US government, even the Pakistani government, and those like the IRA, PLO, Al Queda and the Taliban.
Ultimately, all of these organizations (presumably) claim to be trying to make things better by the appropriate use of force. So it ends up being a question of their legitimacy as organizations (which includes their aims, their tactics, and so on), something that is, in this day and age, largely decided by governments, as well as by the press and the people.
Or, a simpler answer: since the only form of organization humans grant the privilege of writing what we call "law" is "government", and every practical organization must make distinctions between internal and external states, behaviors, and so on, it isn't surprising that these "governments" find doing certain things acceptable that they have laws against other people or organizations doing on their own.
That's why we have the death penalty and also laws against murder; why we have the GPL and yet it, itself, isn't licensed under the GPL; etc.
These quips suffer from the same problem that they are trying to accuse the original "aphorists" of. They oversimplify things while ignoring other key critical details.
That's generous -- more precisely, they cover evil intent with the attractive wallpaper of geniality.
I'm well-aware of how the words "feminazi" and "smoking nazi" are used, and you're right (in the rest of your post) -- they are far more precise in identifying people with certain mindsets than implied by handwaving like "they just want to breathe clean air".
I used to make it quite clear that I preferred non-smoking areas in restaurants, and used to object when smokers would light up in them regardless. That didn't make me a "smoking Nazi", since I was just defending my personal privilege to breathe cleaner air, as provided for by rules advertised by the local establishment.
A real "smoking Nazi" is someone who goes much further -- who resents the fact that a bar or restaurant has smoking patrons so much, regardless of the fact that he never intends to visit it himself, that he seeks to deny them (and the establishment's owner) the right to decide for themselves whether and how smoking will be permitted.
Personally, I'd prefer words like "Nazi" be granted freedom from even the whiff of abuse, but, given how history has, so far, treated Nazism as the most foul of systems while rewarding Communism -- which has murdered far more innocents -- with laurel wreaths, I can see why people trying to make a point about the pervasive tyrannical mindset don't worry about actually diluting the term itself.
And, just as I gave up worrying about smoker's freedoms, thanks to their disdain for the rights of their neighbors to breathe fresh air in designated non-smoking areas, and thus perhaps helped let the "Smoking Nazis" win, I don't see any need to defend the term "nazi" against misuse by those who are, generally, using that term in defense of my freedoms, even if I don't ever plan to exercise some of them myself.
(I should say I've had the pleasure of knowing "polite" smokers, including an officemate who would smoke in the hallway to avoid inconveniencing me! Too bad they formed such a tiny minority of smokers that their own freedoms were overwhelmed within some 20 years.)
Over the last few months the word "terrorist" has lost all meaning.
Agreed, the word has been abused by linguistic pirates.
Reminds me of Bernard Lewinsky's complaint that his daughter Monica's behavior shouldn't lead to people referring to a certain intimate act as a "Lewinsky". I think he pointed out that hijacking a family name based on one infamous incident would be just another form of McCarthyism, or something....
(This post brought to you by PFTETOWLAPAH -- People For The Ethical Treatment Of Words Like "Abuse", "Pirate", and "Hijack".;-)
The one flaw in your plan is that the folks that make these worms[...]don't have a great set of computer skills, outside of those needed to find holes. It's a bit easier to find and exploit holes then it is to find and patch those holes, so the assholes will always have the advantage.
Your logic has too many holes.
Or perhaps you can explain how a particular kind of hole will always have an advantage due to people who need to find and exploit holes in general?
Maybe it's just a matter of convincing them that they, or at least each other, are instances of a kind of hole, thus encouraging them to find and exploit each other?
You misunderstood him -- he's right, fossil fuels have done the "world's poor" no good whatsoever.
Remember, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow. Repeat that over and over, ad naseum, to fuel the anti-capitalist, anti-American fervor that must replace your rational thought-processes.
Then, consider this little fact: using the same sorts of statistical tricks that support such statements about the rich-versus-poor gap and "not doing the world's poor any good", the following statement is 100% true:
The gap between the old and the young has been growing for decades, and continues to grow.
See, that's exactly true as well! You compare the average age of the youngest 10% of the population to that of the oldest 10% over a series of points in time, and that's the result you get!
And because the old get all sorts of privileges (voting rights the young mostly don't get, retirement benefits, senior discounts, special housing for the elderly, not to mention far better treatment by police -- no "age profiling"), it's clear we must do whatever it takes, worldwide, to reduce this gap between the old and the young, just as so many conscientious people and organizations are trying to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.
Sadly, since the young will always be young, the only way to reduce the gap between the old and the young is to kill a whole bunch of old people, or otherwise ensure their early demise.
That shouldn't be surprising, though, since that's the same basic agenda of the rich-poor-gap crowd: they invoke the problems of the "poor" merely to hide their true agenda, which is to impoverish the rich -- since, obviously, the poor must always remain poor, using the guidelines they themselves have established.
The logic seems inescapable to me: the reason so many people talk about the "world's poor" and the "rich-poor gap" is because they thoroughly, deeply resent the wealthy and seek ways to forcefully reduce their wealth, just as, if they paid attention to the old-young gap, they'd inevitably have to "retire" the elderly a la "Logan's Run". (A movie I can't recall much about offhand, except people were forcibly killed, using an intentionally-mystified process, when they hit 30.)
What's the secret ingredient here? The stark truth is that, in most cases, in industrialized, especially economically free nations, the poor don't remain poor, therefore, there's no continuing problem with the "world's poor", and the "rich-poor gap" is nothing more than an illustration of the increased wealth that most everyone enjoys as a result of industrialization and economic freedom.
Yes, there are poor, just as there are young. But, most of the poor are the young, or the very old; the former, as they grow up, typically become wealthier, precisely because they use their growing experience and intelligence to figure out how to help others (generally called "trading", "employment", etc. -- sick, twisted capitalist concepts, my friends!), and the latter, because they've retired, they've chosen to take it easy and not worry about continuing to earn a large income while they live off their retirement funds.
Now, of course, there are truly, desperately poor people in the world, and those who truly work to help them don't cloud their mission by citing pseudo-statistics, babbling platitudes about fossil fuels, or bother themselves over how rich so-and-so happens to be. Helping the poor is, and has been for millenia, a straightforward thing to do, almost never requiring resorting to any form of forced collectivism. That's why so few people actually engage in it: most "advocates for the poor" are really collectivists, or, more generally, tyrants in disguise.
In short: he's right, fossil fuels haven't done the world's poor a bit of good, because every person who was once poor for whom they did do good is no longer poor, and, therefore, is not a member of "the world's poor".
Using his same rationale, the following haven't done the "world's poor" a "bit of good":
Capitalism
Communism
Organized religion
Atheism
Charitable Organizations
The United Nations
The Internet
People For The American Way
The American Civil Liberties Union
The Southern Poverty Law Center
Mother Teresa
Rush Limbaugh
Isn't a commitment to substitute feel-good, knee-jerk platitudes for rational thought wonderful?
Hmm, that's a new one on me. Using a google search, I checked out what it seems to refer to.
I don't get it. Seems to be animated sexuality, or maybe pornography, or something.
My impression is, there's a smaller audience for CG within the general market for popular entertainment (TV and movies) than for "real" people, and I think a big part of that is because viewers really do get a lot out of putting themselves in the character's shoes, or fantasizing about meeting the character, each of which are often indistinguishable, in the viewer's imagination, from the corresponding real actor.
CGI replacements greatly lower the "feasibility factor". They still work great (maybe even better) for those who simply want to see stuff depicted (whatever "stuff" they like), but take the anticipation of ever meeting the "real person" out of the equation for many others.
For example, my wife and I watched (finally, on tape) "Buffy: The Musical" last night, and one of the things I enjoyed was evaluating the various levels of accomplishment of the various actors in singing and dancing. (I sing but don't dance.)
(My conclusion, based on only one viewing I must stress: Anthony Head beats the others out in the singing department by a nose, but Michelle Trachtenberg blew everyone else away in the dance department. I mean, compared to the other scoobies; the "incidentals" dancing in the background were top-notch, as far as I could tell, which makes sense, since that's what they were hired for.)
If BtM had been done via CGI, I don't care how perfectly (or imperfectly) rendered the characters were -- it would not have been as much fun to watch, knowing what I was seeing had no real relationship to real people having to dance (or have dance doubles do it for them). Add in CG voices and singing, and it would have made the whole exercise nearly pointless. The sincere attempts at singing from everyone (actors with whom we've become quite familiar due to the length of the run of "Buffy") were, for me, a big part of what made it enjoyable.
The only way anyone could truly replace that sort of enjoyment with CG stuff is if they did it "under the table" -- where the actors themselves are CG'd, and the parts they play simulated on top of that, so there's not so much perfection as perfectly depicted human imperfection in the various performances.
Since I happen to think simulating something like a Sarah Michelle Gellar (or even a Kristina Abernathy from TWC) as a distinct performer over a period of years, growing in acting ability, maturity, and so on, is pretty much as hard as full Artificial Intelligence, I'm not expecting it around the corner, and doubt it'd be kept secret just who is and who isn't CG for any practical length of time.
(Of course, once we're all in The Matrix, that's another story entirely.)
CGs might attract interest from a small % of the population, but, let's face it, if I'm fantasizing (purely hypothetically;-) that Sela Ward might someday show up at my house, put her arms around me, look into my eyes, and tell me I'm God's gift to women, I'm already dealing with a pretty significant willing-suspension-of-disbelief issue, and that's without having to also deal with the possibility that she's just a bunch of bits in a computer somewhere!
(Posting anonymously in case friends, or my wife, sees this. I am posting anonymously, right? Right??)
Probably the best thing about making friends in the IT workplace is that you end up learning stuff that you might otherwise miss out on, even from those who aren't experts.
For example, just a few weeks ago, I was chatting with someone here at work, and it turns out he's this expert on SOAP, XML, COM, DCOM, HTML, XHTML, CORBA, RPC, with experience building enterprise-ready web sites supporting VPN, secure access, and all sorts of cool stuff.
Now, sure, he was no "compiler jock" like me, but, seeing as I work primarily in an office here at home, on my own, and compilers aren't exactly cutting-edge technology, so I don't really do a good job of keeping up on what's new and hot in the industry, I appreciated the opportunity to learn what I could from him rather than just say to myself "he probably couldn't tell SPARCv9 from PDP-8 assembler, what an idjit". And since I don't need to work more than a few months a year these days, thanks to the relative dearth of people with certain skills, I had time on my hands.
So I asked him all sorts of questions about his areas of expertise, the client/server model, the prospects for.NET, his experiences getting and having an MSCE, and so on.
I really learned a lot, and wanted to talk more, but didn't want to get him in trouble with his boss, so I politely let him get back to work.
You see, it was getting dark, and he had to finish mowing my lawn.
My Polish nationality and backwards nature have definitely helped me hack software, especially when I'm writing code in Forth, PostScript, and the like.
I mean, who's better at dealing with those languages than someone who's Reverse Polish?
You should thank cburley for politely attempting to help you shed some of your sophomoric attitude and thereby lessen the inevitable regret you'll feel one day in the (far) future when you realize how many years of your life you wasted being a stupid ass.
For what it's worth, I wish I could thank those who politely (or otherwise) helped me become less of a "stupid ass". There's very little I've written in this thread that isn't a rebuke to how I thought, reasoned, and even debated just a few short years ago.
As a practical aside, you might note that in many oppressive societies, outspoken, hotheaded loudmouths are marginalized, imprisoned, or in some cases killed by their own government. In my estimation, a person like yourself has much to worry about in such a society and it would be to your benefit to quit helping them tighten the noose around your neck.
Hate to rain on your parade, but history suggests that it's much more likely that I would be the target of such treatment than fmaxwell. Jesus, Ghandi, MLKJr, and the like weren't killed for proposing legislation, going along with the status quo, and such. (I'm clearly not in their league, but you can see how vicious and violent a reaction my writings, stressing the importance of nonviolence, trigger in someone who sees himself as a conforming member of the prevailing establishment.) Scale my writings and effect up, and the corresponding reactions would scale up similarly.
And if you think atheists like fmaxwell are most likely the culprits, I'm not sure I'd agree. In practice, the most likely "assassins" of people preaching practical nonviolence (which must necessarily start in an individual by eliminating his own tyrannical thinking) are those of his own "stripe".
After all, fmaxwell and other atheists (and I've recently taken on several of them on/., and they also ended up leaving the discussion without answering key questions -- see Malcontent and junkgrep) can more easily turn away from such debate with a Christian and still remain cohorts, validating each other's belief (or nonbelief;-), celebrating each other's status, and so on.
On the other hand, someone who calls themselves "Christian" and takes on power is not only as likely as fmaxwell to see my arguments as a threat to his potential tyrannies, but has to also fear that, by associating my beliefs with Christianity, I delegitimize him to an extent I don't delegitimize an atheist.
(More likely, a follower of such a tyrant Christian would be the doer of such a deed, with or without the approval of his idol.)
Labels -- such as "atheist", "Christian", "tyrant", "compassionate" -- though abstractions, are potent ones to humans, and they tend to find much comfort by defining themselves in terms of them -- those they attach to themselves as well as those they evidently hold at arms' length.
Besides, as 20th-Century history showed, Christians are far more likely to be murdered by atheists than vice versa. So, really, fmaxwell should sleep well, unafraid of the threats he apparently (irrationally?) believes I pose to him and the world he so loves.
Of course, none of this is likely to really be an issue for either of us. If a career offending people such as fmaxwell or even being a pompous, self-righteous jerk (as you believe he's been, and I'm inclined to agree;-) was a strong predictor of a violent death, I'd have been dismembered by wolves years ago.
What I hope for, instead, is that my writings might help inspire some to provide more rational, thoughtful responses to the kind of arguments and threats posed by people such as fmaxwell, and that those so inspired give me, and crediting me, not even the first thought, much less the second.
to cburley. If you're reading this, GOOD JOB! Isn't it cool how your kick-ass posts got modded to jack squat?
Thanks for the compliment! And, given the distance this thread strayed from the topic and their rejection of the various dominant mind-sets on/., it's remarkable to me that they've not been modded down more than they have. IMO, the moderators, as a group, have been rather generous, sufficient enough to offset both rational ("this is getting offtopic") and irrational ("he's kicking my sacred cow") negative mods.
How you manage to jump to the conclusion that I believe "the US market represents an optimal outcome for US consumers" is beyond me.
I pointed out that it evidently does not represent an outcome anywhere near the ideal that a small group of "the rich and powerful" would impose if they could...which you implied they would like to do.
There's a vast area between the claims you made, which I rejected, and "an optimal outcome" -- it's called "the excluded middle", i.e. the middle choice excluded by your either/or, black/white logic.
I am curious about those other nations you claim enjoy a higher standard of living -- would you say their system of government and market involves power concentrated in (corresondingly) fewer hands -- a sort of elite -- than the US, or more? Can you give examples of how the government and market work together there to ensure citizens have the choices US citizens don't (and, presumably, can't in our quasi-free-market system) have?
Don't try to twist words to impose your morality on all of those who disagree with you.
Uh, here's a clue: that's what you've been proposing to do throughout this discussion, impose your morality. I may talk about my morality, but I'm not imposing it -- by passing or pushing for legislation, by celebrating SC judgements, and so on.
As far as your claim that "the Supreme Court allowed a disabled professional golfer to continue to earn a living", that is an out-and-out lie. The Supreme Court, as I understand it, forced an independent organization to change its rules for a game to accommodate someone who was already entirely free to play the game however he saw fit, using whatever rules he liked, assembling and organizing with others with a like mind for that purpose, purchasing, renting, or borrowing land and/or other resources for that purpose.
How is a professional golfer supposed to earn a living by "purchasing, renting, or borrowing land" on which to play golf? He's a golfer, not an investment banker. And, like it or not, the PGA is the only game in town for professional golfers -- just as the NBA is for pro basketball players. The rules weren't "changed". The PGA was just required to make a reasonable accomodation for a handicapped player. Golf is about hitting a ball into a hole, not about walking and that's what the Supreme Court decided.
Like I said, maybe the PGA had a legal monopoly. But it, too, is just a bunch of golfers who've run their show as they saw fit. I'm sorry you don't agree with their rules.
But, if you and everyone else who celebrated the SC decision as a "victory" had, instead of the court case, simply organized your own golf association, with the rules set up as you see fit, I'm pretty sure it would have worked out quite well.
I don't see that he had a Constitutional right to change the rules of an organization that did, as far as I can tell, have a Constitutional right to peaceably assemble and decide for itself what its rules of play were.
For someone who's so quick to point out his supposed "Christianity", you sure don't seem to have much in common with Christ when it comes to compassion for the less fortunate.
Ah, the classic lie of a tyrant. The SC+ADA decision was not a compassionate decision, it was, fundamentally, a tyrannical one. "We don't like the rules you use for golf, PGA. We're going to make you change them. By force, if necessary. We have the guns and the ammo to do it."
Now, compassion may have been useful as an excuse for that decision, and I'm certainly in favor of the PGA making compassionate decisions on its own.
But I don't hold a gun to peoples' heads, force them to do something I want, then claim I'm being "compassionate" as people like yourself do.
That's what being a Christian is substantially about. Not imposing your will on others. Look it up; it's throughout the teachings of Christ. Pretty much the only nasty words he had for sinners was for those who put themselves in positions of power, tyrannizing others, i.e. imposing their wills on others. Look at the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven." No room for "my" (or "your") will there.
So, if that disabled golfer came to me with his problem, my compassion might lead me to a) heal him as many Christians have done to people in his situation; b) help him persuade the PGA to accommodate him; c) start and/or organize a new golf leagure that would accommodate him; or d) encourage him to compete in alternate venues and pay him the difference in $$ between what they pay him and what he'd get as a PGA golfer if they had changed the rules.
See how none of those options imposes my will on others, or encourages him to do the same? They're all entirely consistent with Christianity, and none of them are tyrannical.
(That is, of course, why hardly anybody talks about those options. Our entire society is thoroughly indoctrinated into the "tyrannical options" for solving problems.)
Let's face it, the reason Timothy McVeigh happened is because of people like you
You are another Timothy McVeigh with your rantings about dying for a cause, "tyrants", Waco, gun control, etc. I never mentioned anything about any of that.
Look, I expanded on the McVeigh point because you brought it up originally in your earlier post:
If you don't see that as an anti-government sentiment, you probably think of Timothy McVeigh as a patriot.
That's how tyrants think and operate: they blame others for the problems brought about because of their mind-sets. I hadn't mentioned McVeigh at all, but there you were, associating me with him, all because I challenged your comment about "anti-government hate-mongering". Tyrants hate being challenged on their terms, so they spew hatred, breathing out threatenings and slaughter at their victims.
I simply said that junk e-mail, like junk faxes, should be made illegal.
Here you lie yet again -- a common tactic of the tyrant defending his "rights" (in league with fellow tyrants) to exercising his tyrannies over others.
What you first proposed about making spam illegal didn't even show up on my radar, nor did what the other poster said in response about such laws being potentially turned against people who aren't really spammers. (Haven't we covered this ground before? Of course we have.)
It was when you accused him of "Republican anti-government hate-mongering" that I joined the discussion. It was at that point that you brought up McVeigh.
And it was at that point that I realized you weren't someone who just thought legislating against spam was a good idea, but in fact someone who is a tyrant-wannabe -- whose every explanation, defense, and accusation is rooted in imposing his will on other people. (In response to my examples, you might instead have said "yes, those might well be examples of abuse of well-intentioned laws, but I believe that happens rarely enough to not be a serious concern where anti-spam measures are involved". But, then, you could have simply said that to the original poster in the first place without throwing in the "anti-government hate-mongering" rhetoric commonly used by today's tyrant-wannabes, and I wouldn't have even gotten involved in the first place and upset you so.)
That hardly makes you unique -- it's a common malady in today's society, especially in the USA, where we're all encouraged, as fellow citizens, to share in the common defense of our nation, and to individually and collectively own property and prosper by developing it, etc. A great development, historically speaking, in my opinion, but it does seem to encourage more citizens to feel as though they have a right to tyrannize others, because of their wide opportunity to choose how to live their own lives as they see fit, and the necessities that implies (versus having some totalitarian government figure it all out for us).
How the hell did that turn into an argument about abortions, gun control, tyrants, Waco, etc.?
They sprang from examples I gave of laws being used for purposes well beyond what they were intended to be used for, or for which they were advertised. That was the point of this discussion, remember? Whether such unintended consequences might be a concern?
The ringing truth of this debate is that you aren't so much unwilling to consider unintended consequences of laws, you actually seem to thrive, at least psychologically, on them, because they feed into your desire to impose your will on others.
So, it doesn't matter to you whether RICO was intended to target non-mafia-like organizations such as Operation Rescue, or ADA was intended to be used as an opportunity to rewrite rules of professional sports, or gun-control legislation was intended to be used as a means to launch an all-out assault on an obscure far-right Christian cult -- all that matters to you was that "the right thing happened". (Please, correct me simply and directly if I'm wrong -- I'm basing this on your steadfast refusal to back down on any of these issues and agree that concerns about abuse of law aren't inherently illegitimate, anti-government, etc.)
So the original poster was dead-on. People like you will say "let's pass anti-spam legislation now", then celebrate when that legislation is contorted to prosecute some group, or disadvantaged individual, who didn't actually spam, but who may conceivably be claimed to have broken some tiny letter of that law.
You need psychological counseling.
As a tyrant-wannabe, I'm sure you'll consider various ways to impose it on me. Whether I truly need it is beside the question in your mind; you're far less concerned about how I conduct my life, how I treat my friends, my wife, to what charities I contribute, whether I'm law-abiding, hard-working, thoughtful, resourceful, than you are over the fact that I'm disagreeing with you and pointing out what the facts are regarding your advocacy in this thread.
"Morality policing?" You mean things like the religious right trying to ban[I assume you mean to put a colon here:] abortions
Yes.
same sex marriages
Yes, though, here, the question is, what business does government have telling people what constitutes a marriage at all and impose any requirements on others vis-a-vis the marriage covenant?
needle exchange programs for drug addicts
Of course. If people want to offer needles to addicts, what business is it of anyone else's? Ditto for condoms...and, in a strictly technical sense at least, for guns as well!
gays in the military
Yes.
sex education in schools
Private or public? Private, certainly; those schools and the parents who send their students there can decide for themselves what and how to teach. Public, similar, except the question is raised, if the government forces people to send their children to public schools (and especially if it doesn't offer real choice via vouchers or something), it's not seethingly evil to try to get the schools to not teach one's own child things outside of one's religious convictions.
and medical-marijuana use for terminal cancer patients?
Oh, of course. This is a no-brainer anyway; does anyone really fear terminal cancer patients "graduating" to drugs like heroin and crack, and running around knocking over convenience stores to pay for their next fix? Sheesh. Don't get me started on the whole "drug war" anyway; about the only thing conceivably bloodier, domestically, would be a war against guns.
You are rude, insulting, and totally without honor. You have called me names and made slanderous accusations. If this is your idea of Christianity, I'm proud to be an atheist.
Being a Christian doesn't mean never being rude, nor avoiding saying things interpreted as being insulting. I do have honor, since I believe everything I said is clearly backed up by the evidence on hand, and since I never claimed you couldn't be healed of your tyrannical urges. As far as "proud to be an atheist", well, I'll let that stand as an advertisement for atheism, coming from someone with such deeply-held tyrannical convictions.
As a Christian, I'm willing to die for my ideals.
The world will be a better place for all of us if you make good on that -- for if you continue on the path you've started down, I fear that you you will be capable of unspeakable acts of violence.
I'll also let that stand as an advertisement for atheism -- publically stating that the world would be a better place if I just up and died. Maybe I'll show your comment to my wife, my mother, my sister, her husband -- I've occasionally tried to convince them that tyranny itself is one of the root causes of evil, and that attacking it -- not individual people, not their freedom to choose how to live -- would yield the most violent reaction, as was experienced by Jesus, who challenged the validity of the tyrannical rule of the Romans and the Jewish leaders of his time. You seem to be bearing out my "prophecy" in speech.
It's also interesting to note that you claim I'm capable of unspeakable violence because I'm willing to die for my beliefs. Is it also your claim that you are not capable of unspeakable violence? Why not -- is it because you're an atheist? Because you prefer to leave the dirty job of committing violence to impose your beliefs on others to hired help, such as policeman and military men? A combination of both, perhaps?
E.g. would you be capable of merely ordering unspeakable acts of violence be committed against someone, even if you couldn't consider committing the acts by your own hand?
If not, how about if you were merely one of several people who voted on whether to issue such an order -- would you be capable of voting in favor of ordering unspeakable violence?
If not, how about simply speaking up and "being counted" -- do you have it in you to simply say "it would be great if so-and-so were dead", knowing your speech might set in motion the acts necessary to bring that about, just as a mafia Don might?
At some point in there, you've got to admit the answer is "yes", since you've already done it. And my whole point is, if you're willing to "will" it, you might as well admit you're willing to "do" it, except for your own distaste for gruesome matters and/or your desire to avoid being seen by others as actually carrying out those acts.
Whereas I, someone willing to commit violence on behalf of the State until not long ago (e.g. consider enlisting during Desert Storm, despite being of little use as a "fighter" in the pertinent sense), no longer believes it valid according to his religion, says so, and is now told, by an atheist no less, that the world would be better off if he up and died.
And you're trying to convince me I'm being a bad Christian, by saying such things? Hmm, I know you're an atheist and all, but you might find more persuasive ways to get your points across if you actually learned the story of Christ Jesus first. For example, instead of suggesting I'd be better off dying for my cause, you might pat me on the back and tell me I'm mightily appreciated for my thoughtful posts -- that's the sort of thing that really puts die-hard followers of Christ Jesus off their feed, especially coming from an atheist.;-)
Anyone who would find any justification for the acts of Timothy McVeigh or the Operation Rescue murderers is a sick and dangerous man.
And, of course, I did no such thing. Again, I pointed out that these cases involved legislation beyond what the intent of its authors likely was, and how extreme the results are.
The same thing applies, of course, to tyrant-wannabes who style themselves "Christian" as a means to gain power.
(And it seems to me that you've implicitly justified events such as the Waco invasion, Ruby Ridge, and so on, by continuing to fight against legitimate concerns that well-intentioned laws might be twisted by government to the detriment, even death, of innocents.)
But, whether tyrants call themselves "priest" or "king" to gain power, they worship tyranny, first and foremost. They may claim to be compassionate, intelligent, wise, clever, etc., but their first priority is to rule.
And, the careful reader will note that I never, in this thread, advocated any form of violence, or threat of violence, against you or others who believe as you do. I warned you that you might have to face it for your beliefs, as I readily admitted I realized I (and, in fact, we all) do, but that's hardly the same thing.
Yet, true to most any tyrant, you've not only lied about what you've said and others (the SC) have done, you've plainly advocated violence against me, claiming the world would be a better place if I were dead.
I leave it to the thoughtful, compassionate reader to decide for himself whose belief system better represents a promise for a peaceful world.
All that being said, I realize it's quite likely that the evident hatred you direct towards me comes not from anything personal per se -- since you really don't know anything about me (or at least I'm hoping that, for example, you don't have a visceral hatred for the Fortran programming language;-) -- but stem from a typical reaction to being "called out" on moral grounds and not finding anything reassuringly solid to grab onto except the hope that an innocent person might die, and/or fearing that someone as assured of the beliefs he espouses as you clearly imagine me to be, since those beliefs differ from yours, must necessarily constitute a threat to you, or perhaps to the world as a whole.
So, however you were feeling when you posted that, and however this post makes you feel, rest assured that you are loved by God, by His Christ, and, therefore, God willing, by me, and that I intend to never commit violence against you or your family, and pray that someday I might find some means to do a practical good deed for you or someone you care about.
But if you are upset that RICO laws were used to fight anti-abortion terrorists and murderers and that the Supreme Court allowed a disabled professional golfer to continue to earn a living, we don't have enough in common to make further discussion between us worthwhile.
We already have laws against terrorists and murderers, and I'm no expert on the case, but there's evidently been substantial debate over the appropriateness of RICO in some of the actual cases it's been used for by the infant-murdering lobby (you use loaded words, I'll use 'em too, okay?).
As far as your claim that "the Supreme Court allowed a disabled professional golfer to continue to earn a living", that is an out-and-out lie. The Supreme Court, as I understand it, forced an independent organization to change its rules for a game to accommodate someone who was already entirely free to play the game however he saw fit, using whatever rules he liked, assembling and organizing with others with a like mind for that purpose, purchasing, renting, or borrowing land and/or other resources for that purpose. Unless the PGA had a government-imposed monopoly on anyone trying to make a living playing golf, the feds (SC+ADA) had no business interfering; and, if they did, it's the government's fault for imposing that monopoly in the first place. (I gather this is roughly the issue with baseball, so maybe it is with the PGA, but I've heard nobody commenting on this case mention that.)
Let's face it, the reason Timothy McVeigh happened is because of people like you -- people who can't get up in the morning without first thinking about how to get the government to impose their wills on others' lives, whether it's gun control, morality policing, whatever, but don't have the guts to impose it themselves, directly. People like you decided to rant, rave, lie, cheat, and tyrannize others, in direct defiance of the Constitution, by forcing gun-control legislation and implementation down the throats of Americans, claiming "oh, it's just to get guns out of the hands of criminals", knowing full well (if they had a brain in their heads) that the government would someday use the legislation and its desire to "make a statement" by attacking, using extreme force, an organization that, until that moment, had not been behaving criminally (in a manner as advertised by the gun-control lobby as the target of the laws). And, thanks to people like you, heroic law-enforcement officers get injured, maimed, and killed in the line of duty trying to impose laws you write on people who aren't evil, who are uninterested in committing any real crimes, but who have finally had it with the nearly-constant increase in government intrusiveness in their lives. Then people like you seek to make excuses for things like the Waco event, seeing a "kindred spirit" in someone like Janet Reno and thus not campaigning to have her fired, something that, by itself, would probably have been all it took to stop the OKC bombing from ever taking place. (McVeigh, for all his "evil", doesn't compare to the Unabomber in this respect: McVeigh's act was in retaliation for a series of clearly unconstitutional blunders by legislators, the executive branch, and the American people; the Unabomber acted in retaliation for human civilization and its inherent nature.)
Indeed, you and I don't have enough in common. You are a tyrant, probably just a tyrant wannabe, but a tyrant nevertheless, and it's now clear to anyone reading this thread why, to you, anyone who opposes continued expansion of government intrusiveness is an "anti-government hate-monger", because you love imposing your will on other people using force -- as the Supreme Court did in the golf case, as gun-control laws did (via government) at Waco, as Clinton plus many Republicans did with the Communications Decency Act (another clearly unconstitutional intrusion), and so on.
Whereas people like me, once hypnotized by the attraction of the passing of laws to "solve problems" and deluded into thinking that even the US government had an acceptable track record of fairly enforcing them -- regardless of the particular branch involved -- have shaken ourselves out of the stupor of pseudo-intellectualism, in which one is judged primarily by one's own presumed ability to direct the lives of others, and chosen instead to start each day by acknowledging our own inadequacy when it comes to directing others' lives, imposing our will, whether directly or collectively by vote, on others by force or threat of force, and regret the times we've felt forced to do it under various dire circumstances. And we've learned to recognize the blantantly obvious fact that, however "perfect" our proposed rules might be, they'll still be interpreted, executed, and imposed by fallible humans, not omniscient beings whose only concern is for the "public good", which is how government is usually billed (and what it should be all about, versus what it ever is, not being any more perfectable than are individual human beings). We figure, instead of trusting a vast array of people unknown to us to impose our wills on our behalf, why not just simplify the equation and trust our neighbor to do the right thing in the first place -- own guns or don't? allow a disabled friend to play in a golf game or not? view pornography on their home computer or not? -- because the government is fundamentally a weapon of mass destruction that is best kept sheathed, especially not pointed at our neighbors for every perceived slight or inconvenience or offense in our lives, and so that it may be more effective at actually doing what is critical to the preservation of the lives of its citizens, such as the defense of our borders, the assessing of risks, and so on.
So, while some of us plead to a God who we believe is the only lawgiver and judge, most of us just can no longer accept the delusion that, as difficult as it is to run our own lives and, where appropriate, direct the lives of our young offspring, we're somehow capable of also adequately deciding how others must live and forcing our wills on them by some means -- individually or collectively. Nor do we accept the proposition, ludicrous in both theory and practice, that there's a pre-determinable elite capable of governing in our stead.
Indeed, the reason the original poster expressed concern about possible anti-spam legislation, and certainly the reason I chimed in, is because people like you never stop and say "hmm, even though I might agree with the outcome of this law/case/government intervention/mass burning of far-right government-hating Christians/whatever, it's clear to me this did not truly follow the letter or intent of the law and, therefore, I can't support it; and maybe I should think twice, in the future, about supporting further legislation that might be similarly twisted to someone else's disadvantage".
So, go ahead and worship at the altar of governmental intervention in other peoples' lives, and sneer at those of us who campaign for self-control on the part of every human -- every potential tyrant -- as you clearly enjoy doing. Go ahead and hold a gun to my head to make sure I don't try to discourage a woman from having an abortion of convenience, or maintain rules of a game, or talk freely with my friends on the Internet. I won't try to stop you, as long as I believe my own rhetoric about avoiding imposing my will on others.
But make no mistake: you are the more tyrannical of the two of us, and, someday, somebody who is willing to do what it takes to stop people like you might decide he'd rather see my idea of self-government, rather than your notions of the importance of ever-expanding government, prevail.
As a Christian, I'm willing to die for my ideals. Are you willing to die for the ones you've espoused here? Would you be willing to personally force the PGA to allow a disabled golfer to use a cart when nobody else had been before, if you knew the response from the PGA might be a hail of gunfire, for example?
My guess: no, you're not. In my experience, tyrant wannabes are usually cowards; I have yet to meet a supporter of gun control who has actually gone door to door insisting people turn over their guns to them. Not in the way some of us have stood up to bullies and criminals and thus know what it takes -- risks as well as rewards -- to actually govern, and are thus, I would tend to think, less likely to blithely accept the notion that "there oughtta be a law" is the solution to every problem.
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Among my pet theories, or speculations, really, is that the principle of coherence is tremendously important to any "mind" (individual, group, etc.).
By "coherence", I mean the mental and nervous-system processes that allow you to walk through a door by pulling it open without your feet stopping it. Your feet just want to keep walking, since they "know" the task at hand is to move forward, and that's what they do. But components of the system know that a door handle must be pulled and that the body, as a whole, must move somewhat out of the way of the door.
With insufficient or inefficient communication, the system breaks down. E.g. if the "mind" uses the kind of straightforward reward/punishment system humans typically design into systems involving large numbers of humans, the mental components controlling the feet are likely to be "rewarded" for moving forward, and thus unlikely to be willing to arbitrarily stop and walk backwards a bit just because some other component (the strategizing component), which has its own ideas about rewards, says "walk backwards right now".
Since most people reading this "know" the obvious answer is "well, the mind controlling the body as a whole knows its job, so the other parts just go along", that may seem like a trivial example, but, based on my observations of children at all sorts of ages, it seems to me that much of childhood consists of properly organizing one's own mind so as to achieve just this sort of coherence.
Even well-adjusted adults run into all sorts of problems regarding coherence. Using a cell phone to make a convenience call while driving in challenging (e.g. city) traffic is an example: while components of the person's mind recognize the danger, other components take over and say "even though I theoretically value my life and property [car] over the need to make this call, I've decided to punt the risk and enjoy myself".
Is that a stupid decision? Hard to put a value judgement on it, but it certainly isn't an entirely coherent one, since driving safely and operating a cell phone have at least some degree of conflict, and, there being no need to make that call, the coherent decision would be to either not make the call, or to pull over to make it safely.
(No, I'm not in any way advocating laws regarding using cell-phones while driving.)
And the examples I've given here involve highly-interconnected systems having only low-latency components. That is, the moment one component of a human mind says "the door will have to swing towards me when I open it", another component can respond by saying "better back out of the way then".
Groups of humans (and most other minds) have much lower-bandwidth, higher-latency connections, and probably fewer of them, between components of the (collective) mind. Hence the need for humans to post comments on /., or for honeybees to do a funny dance to "describe" the location of a newfound source of pollen.
So a group of humans can be "stupid" simply because it fails at being sufficiently coherent in its decision-making processes. The lack of numerous, high-quality, high-bandwidth, low-latency connections, compared to that enjoyed by a single human mind, makes coherence very difficult.
Humans make up for this somewhat by creating communications systems that other creatures have not yet been shown to be able to connect into, much less create on their own. The most prominent examples I can think of are the price system (the free market) and the Internet, each of which vastly speeds up and interconnects certain aspects of communication necessary for coherent thinking across a widely-dispersed collective mind.
Humans also "intelligently" (as well as somewhat coherently) respond to the obvious defects in "group thinking" by severely constraining the range of actions that a group can commit, the degree to which certain actions can be committed arbitrarily, etc.
That is, knowing that the communication among distinct minds -- components of the group mind -- is poor, compared to that of a single human mind, humans almost inevitably set up procedural rules for that mind to follow, partly to pattern the natural "rules" limiting organic minds in nature.
E.g. your own feet simply can't suddenly decide to strangle you, so explicit rules to limit that possibility are unnecessary in the human mind.
On the other hand, a given "foot soldier" in a group of humans has the capacity to incapacitate the humans serving in "higher" capacities, so the system as a whole must take that into account and protect against it using artificially-constructed rules, barriers, and so on.
So, I believe another reason groups of humans can appear to be "stupid" is that they don't act in ways a single human would if he could -- because the rules of the group are specifically set up to avoid such actions being taken, the group needing to be explicitly constrained until such time as the group decides its "thinking process" is sufficiently advanced to throw off those restraints.
In my opinion, then, the assumption that intelligence is purely additive is incorrect. Intelligence is hard to objectively define, but surely includes the degree to which a mind achieves what it sets out to achieve. Yet even determining the latter -- the motive of the mind in question -- is a challenge for both the detached observer and the mind itself. Therefore, simply adding distinct minds, while it increases theoretical ("gross"?) intelligence, also significantly muddies both the clarity of the overall motive of the group and the speed, accuracy, and responsiveness of the communications among those individual minds.
(This line of thinking, my pet speculations and theories, are, I believe, why I tend to view society, politics, governments, and so on in ways that are "out of step" with most trends in contemporary political thought. In most cases where I disagree with others, it is because I grant more freedom to decide for themselves how to act to those who most directly bear the consequences for their actions. That's consistent with not accepting the notion that multiple minds means a similar multiple of group intelligence over that of a single mind. Yet I also see why it's necessary for groups to restrict actions of their members, just as minds, in conjuction with their corresponding body plans, necessarily restrict the freedoms of their members. I mention this as a sort of advance warning against simply agreeing with my pet theories because I might write them persuasively, or happen to hit on some interesting issues, above -- as far as most other /. posters are concerned, as anyone can determine by reviewing my posting history, I'm either a highly dangerous anti-government lunatic or an idiotic pro-government apologist. ;-)
It does seem a bit confusing, but, AFAIK, the only direct implication of the Casey decision was that the PGA was forced to change its rules regarding whether golf carts could be used at certain levels of play during tournaments.
(There were plenty of indirect implications, of course.)
That's a bit less of an impact than the gov't forcing an employer to keep an employee on salary doing something that someone else might do better, etc.
Looking at other comments here, it seems as though the issue boils down to Casey having an ADA-compliant disability (his disability impairs his ability to do normal life stuff, i.e. walk) and the women in this suit having a disability that doesn't quite meet that standard.
So, the PGA was forced to accommodate Casey's disability, but Toyota (or whoever) isn't forced to accommodate the woman's CTS disability, under the rules of the ADA.
(Apologies if I have various facts wrong; haven't read the decisions, and I know basically nothing about golf.)
That and, as far as most people can tell, there aren't any pseudo-solutions promoting global collectivism that can be foisted off on the public (or, more precisely, elites in the press and in government).
After all, there aren't any viable solutions to Global Warming, but clearly it is a huge priority.
(There are practical remedies to problems Global Warming poses, such as strengthening individual property rights and responsibilities and greatly lowering taxes worldwide to give peoples more freedom and opportunity to relocate to preferable climates as they see fit, but nobody's talking about those. If those remedies did become the canonical recipe for dealing with Global Warming -- or Cooling, or even ordinary, everyday climate change -- I believe most funding for Global Warming research would dry up overnight.)
A large-scale asteroid impact, like a supervolcano eruption, is the sort of thing that probably won't happen in the near future, but if (or when) it does, the results will be absolutely, unquestionably catastrophic for humanity on earth.
Global Warming, on the other hand, will happen comparatively gradually, most of its short-term effects will be predictable, and will impact societies that respect the rule of law, property rights, and individual choice much less negatively than others. (Compare the death tolls due to violent storms -- a likely and frequent short-term result of Global Warming -- among peoples around the globe vis-a-vis these measures. I'm not positive, but you're probably lots safer as a poor person in the USA than a middle-class or even wealthy person in a third-world country, because defense against such storms is, apparently, best provided by collective self-interest in the community.)
Disclaimer: I don't know, or claim to know, whether Global Warming, large-scale asteroid impact, or erupting-supervolcano risks are real. I'm merely comparing how they're presented, as "issues", in the popular, political, and scientific media, in terms of risks and remedies, and am suggesting that, perhaps, some risks are purposely inflated, and others deflated, because the issue happens to coincide with the political aims, or planned power-trips, of certain parties.
I.e. you should trust pronouncements about Risks To Mankind made by groups with even tenuous political relationships no more than you trust pronouncements of the safety of Genetically Modified Crops made by the likes of Monsanto. Just because a group doesn't directly profit financially doesn't imply they have no "sinister agenda" guiding their spin on an issue.
Yeah, best sci-fi TV show ever!!
But it was worth it if that's why you wrote your reply -- a clear explanation of several aspects of practical security on public computing networks.
Have a Happy New Year!
(And, yes, the moderation was unfair -- apparently some moderators prefer to impose their notion of what constitutes humor on the /. community by not merely leaving "unfunny" jokes based on the topic unmoderated, but by moderating them "offtopic".)
But if you understand enough about how something operates, you can trust it to do certain things, to a level that makes one choice preferable to another for your own survival.
What do we understand about pilot's brains? Well, being human, they're built, from the ground up, on the instinct for survival, as are all nervous systems and brains in the animal kingdom.
And, having been trained to fly, and approved to fly by people and organizations who, themselves, have a lot to lose if they fail to land the plane properly, they're likely to be highly skilled at flying while also doing what they're instinctively programmed to do: survive -- in this case, land the plane safely. There's no such instinct we can demonstrate in computational systems, so trusting one to fly a plane is best done only when its correctness can be demonstrated logically to an extent well beyond that of doing so for an animal or human brain.
To me, one of the biggest challenges of AI is not so much to get it to do "cool" things. It's to get it to do things that are worth integrating into human society while having the AI "understand" that one of its primary functions is to help ensure the survival of the human species, especially the humans it is specifically designed to serve.
Until we can understand how a deterministic intelligence (e.g. a computer) manages to "think" that way, we're better off trusting our lives, as many of us do in one way or another, to dogs, cats, horses, and so on, because, despite not understanding exactly how they think (and not even knowing for certain whether they, or we, are deterministic), we are reasonably assured that they do think in terms of survival: their own, their species, and their (extended-by-humans) family.
Therefore, what we convince them to do will almost always be backed-up by the inborn, "failsafe" instinct for survival.
Experience with deterministic technologies shows quite the opposite: tell a computer to crash or kill its owner, and it will, without a second thought (assuming it can in the first place).
So while I find "random-growth" technologies like Genetic Programming (GP) and neural nets quite interesting and full of potential, I see them as, currently, a poor middle ground between software and wetware.
With wetware (animals and humans), its instinct for survival, plus its easy teachability, makes it fairly trustworthy in many "natural" situations.
With software, its demonstrable, decomposable logic makes it trustworthy in many "artificial" situations.
With middle-ground technologies like GP, neither an assurance of an instinct for (organic-level) surival nor a demonstrable, decomposable logic is offered in the general case.
So these middle-ground technologies are best used in situations where they're not needed for trust, rather for optimization, and/or their "output", that is, the end product of their mutation process, is itself a viable candidate for "software" in that it can be reasonably analyzed as a deterministic automaton.
In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume we'll learn a lot about teaching, learning, determinism, and such by exploring these technologies, so while I wouldn't want to fly in a plane piloted by a still-learning GP-based computer (I'd prefer a trained dog for a pilot, frankly), it's still cool to see all these avenues being so creatively explored.
Nothing. It just wouldn't have surprised me to learn that you were, or had been, a supporter.
Such combinations of beliefs haven't been difficult to find lately. E.g. people who seemed to stay very quiet, if not outright supportive, regarding the raid to "rescue" Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives (who I believe are American citizens), now express grave concern about whether military tribunals deny non-citizens their Constitutional rights.
It's not that I don't appreciate anybody expressing concerns about rights. But it might be helpful if more people were aware of the importance of choosing their battles, their "enemies", their victims, and their collateral damage, more wisely. Otherwise, it's difficult to take seriously someone who thinks an armed raid of a law-abiding poor (right-wing, Christian?) family is "necessary" when they turn around and lament the treatment of people who may well have sworn to die for the cause of murdering innocent Americans.
And, personally, I'd love to see more interviewers (journalists, whatever) ask such questions when they're faced with someone saying "military tribunals deny basic rights to the accused", e.g.: "how did you respond to the armed raid of the household of the Elian Gonzalez relatives -- did you protest that their rights were denied, or do you feel they posed a greater threat to US interests than people tried as terrorists under Bush's military tribunals?".
Anyway, sorry if my earlier post appeared to label you in any way.
This same logic was used to resist so-called "hate crime" laws.
It seems to have failed there, too, logic having little to do, as far as I can tell, with the state of race relations in US political discourse.
And since those committing "hate crimes" hardly constituted a direct menace against the entire Western world, the USA, Christianity, or whatever "terrorists" attack, I'll be surprised if your logic works even half as well when it comes to terrorism.
(Note that I happen to agree with your logic. But it won't surprise me to learn that you support, or used to support, hate-crime laws that amplified punishment based on words used during the commission of a crime, for example, because it seems to me many of the same people worrying about losing civil liberties and having an excess of laws passed to defend against terrorism also supported just those same things happening when it was done in the name of race relations. If not in your case, I wonder if anyone's having second thoughts about their enthusiasm for advocating hate-crime laws, now that they see how much more power that sort of thing gives into government hands -- a government that has the annoying tendency to, on occasion, allow Republicans to direct its operations.)
BTW, I also appreciate your insightful questioning about the distinction between government-sanctioned and non-government-sanctioned activities, vis-a-vis the word "terrorist".
I think the distinctions include more than just the usual cynical reasons.
For one thing, governments, especially of the sort we're talking about (the US), are, compared to terrorist cells, highly visible and largely public in their doings. They have an ongoing, visible exchange of ideas and power with the people they exist to protect and serve.
While no human government approaches perfection in those respects, it's clearly easier to convince the local, state, or federal government to help you protect a freedom you cherish than it is to convince a local "terrorist" group likewise -- taking into account not only the mere act of the group agreeing with you, but effectively helping.
For another thing, for better or worse, governments have a fairly intricate system, or dance, of depending on each other for support, validation, information, and so on. Seems to me one of the most fundamental of duties of a government is to police its own citizens; else it won't maintain "recognition" status from other governments, as "evil-doers" use the territory maintained by a government failing to police it propertly to launch attacks against other nations.
Whereas, terrorist organizations, necessarily keeping most of their activities and communications hidden from public view, can't enjoy nearly the same "rich tapestry" of interdepencies that help keep governments from acting unilaterally to an excessive degree.
For yet another thing, governments' claim to fame is some semblance of what I call coherence -- the ability to focus all of the "body" on a task at hand, the quality that prevents your walking feet from kicking a door shut while your hand tries to pull it open -- while terrorist organizations' thrive on the notion that their intents, purposes, and capacities are highly distributed and, thus, not necessarily focused.
The upshot? Yes, a government might well do something just as "evil", on initial analysis, that a terrorist cell does, but:
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For these and other reasons, I can see why people insist on drawing a bright, if squiggly and sometimes-moving, line between organizations like the UN, the US government, even the Pakistani government, and those like the IRA, PLO, Al Queda and the Taliban.The government typically provides some way for the populace to "fix" it using nonviolent means (in the USA, we call these "elections"; some call them "Supreme Court Rulings" ;-).
The government typically acts against its own citizens in such actions, while terrorists tend to focus on outsiders. Another government's response to such an act is more likely to be what an ordinary American's response is to learning that Al Queda leaders brutally execute "their own" for various spurious reasons -- "whoah, that's bad, but at least they're keeping their own people in line, making less trouble for us".
It's usually easier to effectively change the behavior of a government, especially when it comes to turning away from highly brutal acts, than to do the same for terrorist organizations. Getting various nations to, e.g., do away with the death penalty for some or all crimes has, as far as my limited knowledge of history informs me, taken less time and less deaths of innocents than convincing the IRA, PLO, and/or other "terrorist" organizations to do something far more obviously "right": give up killing innocents. Which makes sense, since the means by which people attain and maintain positions of authority tend to differ: in governments, the ability to convince lots of people of your care for their well-being is more important than being an efficient planner of mass murders; in terrorist organizations, I would think that publically and convincingly coming out against further violence gets you demoted real fast.
Ultimately, all of these organizations (presumably) claim to be trying to make things better by the appropriate use of force. So it ends up being a question of their legitimacy as organizations (which includes their aims, their tactics, and so on), something that is, in this day and age, largely decided by governments, as well as by the press and the people.
Or, a simpler answer: since the only form of organization humans grant the privilege of writing what we call "law" is "government", and every practical organization must make distinctions between internal and external states, behaviors, and so on, it isn't surprising that these "governments" find doing certain things acceptable that they have laws against other people or organizations doing on their own.
That's why we have the death penalty and also laws against murder; why we have the GPL and yet it, itself, isn't licensed under the GPL; etc.
That's generous -- more precisely, they cover evil intent with the attractive wallpaper of geniality.
I'm well-aware of how the words "feminazi" and "smoking nazi" are used, and you're right (in the rest of your post) -- they are far more precise in identifying people with certain mindsets than implied by handwaving like "they just want to breathe clean air".
I used to make it quite clear that I preferred non-smoking areas in restaurants, and used to object when smokers would light up in them regardless. That didn't make me a "smoking Nazi", since I was just defending my personal privilege to breathe cleaner air, as provided for by rules advertised by the local establishment.
A real "smoking Nazi" is someone who goes much further -- who resents the fact that a bar or restaurant has smoking patrons so much, regardless of the fact that he never intends to visit it himself, that he seeks to deny them (and the establishment's owner) the right to decide for themselves whether and how smoking will be permitted.
Personally, I'd prefer words like "Nazi" be granted freedom from even the whiff of abuse, but, given how history has, so far, treated Nazism as the most foul of systems while rewarding Communism -- which has murdered far more innocents -- with laurel wreaths, I can see why people trying to make a point about the pervasive tyrannical mindset don't worry about actually diluting the term itself.
And, just as I gave up worrying about smoker's freedoms, thanks to their disdain for the rights of their neighbors to breathe fresh air in designated non-smoking areas, and thus perhaps helped let the "Smoking Nazis" win, I don't see any need to defend the term "nazi" against misuse by those who are, generally, using that term in defense of my freedoms, even if I don't ever plan to exercise some of them myself.
(I should say I've had the pleasure of knowing "polite" smokers, including an officemate who would smoke in the hallway to avoid inconveniencing me! Too bad they formed such a tiny minority of smokers that their own freedoms were overwhelmed within some 20 years.)
Agreed, the word has been abused by linguistic pirates.
Reminds me of Bernard Lewinsky's complaint that his daughter Monica's behavior shouldn't lead to people referring to a certain intimate act as a "Lewinsky". I think he pointed out that hijacking a family name based on one infamous incident would be just another form of McCarthyism, or something....
(This post brought to you by PFTETOWLAPAH -- People For The Ethical Treatment Of Words Like "Abuse", "Pirate", and "Hijack". ;-)
Your logic has too many holes.
Or perhaps you can explain how a particular kind of hole will always have an advantage due to people who need to find and exploit holes in general?
Maybe it's just a matter of convincing them that they, or at least each other, are instances of a kind of hole, thus encouraging them to find and exploit each other?
Well, now that you mention it....
Remember, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow. Repeat that over and over, ad naseum, to fuel the anti-capitalist, anti-American fervor that must replace your rational thought-processes.
Then, consider this little fact: using the same sorts of statistical tricks that support such statements about the rich-versus-poor gap and "not doing the world's poor any good", the following statement is 100% true:
See, that's exactly true as well! You compare the average age of the youngest 10% of the population to that of the oldest 10% over a series of points in time, and that's the result you get!
And because the old get all sorts of privileges (voting rights the young mostly don't get, retirement benefits, senior discounts, special housing for the elderly, not to mention far better treatment by police -- no "age profiling"), it's clear we must do whatever it takes, worldwide, to reduce this gap between the old and the young, just as so many conscientious people and organizations are trying to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.
Sadly, since the young will always be young, the only way to reduce the gap between the old and the young is to kill a whole bunch of old people, or otherwise ensure their early demise.
That shouldn't be surprising, though, since that's the same basic agenda of the rich-poor-gap crowd: they invoke the problems of the "poor" merely to hide their true agenda, which is to impoverish the rich -- since, obviously, the poor must always remain poor, using the guidelines they themselves have established.
The logic seems inescapable to me: the reason so many people talk about the "world's poor" and the "rich-poor gap" is because they thoroughly, deeply resent the wealthy and seek ways to forcefully reduce their wealth, just as, if they paid attention to the old-young gap, they'd inevitably have to "retire" the elderly a la "Logan's Run". (A movie I can't recall much about offhand, except people were forcibly killed, using an intentionally-mystified process, when they hit 30.)
What's the secret ingredient here? The stark truth is that, in most cases, in industrialized, especially economically free nations, the poor don't remain poor, therefore, there's no continuing problem with the "world's poor", and the "rich-poor gap" is nothing more than an illustration of the increased wealth that most everyone enjoys as a result of industrialization and economic freedom.
Yes, there are poor, just as there are young. But, most of the poor are the young, or the very old; the former, as they grow up, typically become wealthier, precisely because they use their growing experience and intelligence to figure out how to help others (generally called "trading", "employment", etc. -- sick, twisted capitalist concepts, my friends!), and the latter, because they've retired, they've chosen to take it easy and not worry about continuing to earn a large income while they live off their retirement funds.
Now, of course, there are truly, desperately poor people in the world, and those who truly work to help them don't cloud their mission by citing pseudo-statistics, babbling platitudes about fossil fuels, or bother themselves over how rich so-and-so happens to be. Helping the poor is, and has been for millenia, a straightforward thing to do, almost never requiring resorting to any form of forced collectivism. That's why so few people actually engage in it: most "advocates for the poor" are really collectivists, or, more generally, tyrants in disguise.
In short: he's right, fossil fuels haven't done the world's poor a bit of good, because every person who was once poor for whom they did do good is no longer poor, and, therefore, is not a member of "the world's poor".
Using his same rationale, the following haven't done the "world's poor" a "bit of good":
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Isn't a commitment to substitute feel-good, knee-jerk platitudes for rational thought wonderful?Capitalism
Communism
Organized religion
Atheism
Charitable Organizations
The United Nations
The Internet
People For The American Way
The American Civil Liberties Union
The Southern Poverty Law Center
Mother Teresa
Rush Limbaugh
Before Computers, silly!
Hmm, that's a new one on me. Using a google search, I checked out what it seems to refer to.
I don't get it. Seems to be animated sexuality, or maybe pornography, or something.
My impression is, there's a smaller audience for CG within the general market for popular entertainment (TV and movies) than for "real" people, and I think a big part of that is because viewers really do get a lot out of putting themselves in the character's shoes, or fantasizing about meeting the character, each of which are often indistinguishable, in the viewer's imagination, from the corresponding real actor.
CGI replacements greatly lower the "feasibility factor". They still work great (maybe even better) for those who simply want to see stuff depicted (whatever "stuff" they like), but take the anticipation of ever meeting the "real person" out of the equation for many others.
For example, my wife and I watched (finally, on tape) "Buffy: The Musical" last night, and one of the things I enjoyed was evaluating the various levels of accomplishment of the various actors in singing and dancing. (I sing but don't dance.)
(My conclusion, based on only one viewing I must stress: Anthony Head beats the others out in the singing department by a nose, but Michelle Trachtenberg blew everyone else away in the dance department. I mean, compared to the other scoobies; the "incidentals" dancing in the background were top-notch, as far as I could tell, which makes sense, since that's what they were hired for.)
If BtM had been done via CGI, I don't care how perfectly (or imperfectly) rendered the characters were -- it would not have been as much fun to watch, knowing what I was seeing had no real relationship to real people having to dance (or have dance doubles do it for them). Add in CG voices and singing, and it would have made the whole exercise nearly pointless. The sincere attempts at singing from everyone (actors with whom we've become quite familiar due to the length of the run of "Buffy") were, for me, a big part of what made it enjoyable.
The only way anyone could truly replace that sort of enjoyment with CG stuff is if they did it "under the table" -- where the actors themselves are CG'd, and the parts they play simulated on top of that, so there's not so much perfection as perfectly depicted human imperfection in the various performances.
Since I happen to think simulating something like a Sarah Michelle Gellar (or even a Kristina Abernathy from TWC) as a distinct performer over a period of years, growing in acting ability, maturity, and so on, is pretty much as hard as full Artificial Intelligence, I'm not expecting it around the corner, and doubt it'd be kept secret just who is and who isn't CG for any practical length of time.
(Of course, once we're all in The Matrix, that's another story entirely.)
(Posting anonymously in case friends, or my wife, sees this. I am posting anonymously, right? Right??)
For example, just a few weeks ago, I was chatting with someone here at work, and it turns out he's this expert on SOAP, XML, COM, DCOM, HTML, XHTML, CORBA, RPC, with experience building enterprise-ready web sites supporting VPN, secure access, and all sorts of cool stuff.
Now, sure, he was no "compiler jock" like me, but, seeing as I work primarily in an office here at home, on my own, and compilers aren't exactly cutting-edge technology, so I don't really do a good job of keeping up on what's new and hot in the industry, I appreciated the opportunity to learn what I could from him rather than just say to myself "he probably couldn't tell SPARCv9 from PDP-8 assembler, what an idjit". And since I don't need to work more than a few months a year these days, thanks to the relative dearth of people with certain skills, I had time on my hands.
So I asked him all sorts of questions about his areas of expertise, the client/server model, the prospects for .NET, his experiences getting and having an MSCE, and so on.
I really learned a lot, and wanted to talk more, but didn't want to get him in trouble with his boss, so I politely let him get back to work.
You see, it was getting dark, and he had to finish mowing my lawn.
My Polish nationality and backwards nature have definitely helped me hack software, especially when I'm writing code in Forth, PostScript, and the like.
I mean, who's better at dealing with those languages than someone who's Reverse Polish?
For what it's worth, I wish I could thank those who politely (or otherwise) helped me become less of a "stupid ass". There's very little I've written in this thread that isn't a rebuke to how I thought, reasoned, and even debated just a few short years ago.
Hate to rain on your parade, but history suggests that it's much more likely that I would be the target of such treatment than fmaxwell. Jesus, Ghandi, MLKJr, and the like weren't killed for proposing legislation, going along with the status quo, and such. (I'm clearly not in their league, but you can see how vicious and violent a reaction my writings, stressing the importance of nonviolence, trigger in someone who sees himself as a conforming member of the prevailing establishment.) Scale my writings and effect up, and the corresponding reactions would scale up similarly.
And if you think atheists like fmaxwell are most likely the culprits, I'm not sure I'd agree. In practice, the most likely "assassins" of people preaching practical nonviolence (which must necessarily start in an individual by eliminating his own tyrannical thinking) are those of his own "stripe".
After all, fmaxwell and other atheists (and I've recently taken on several of them on /., and they also ended up leaving the discussion without answering key questions -- see Malcontent and junkgrep) can more easily turn away from such debate with a Christian and still remain cohorts, validating each other's belief (or nonbelief ;-), celebrating each other's status, and so on.
On the other hand, someone who calls themselves "Christian" and takes on power is not only as likely as fmaxwell to see my arguments as a threat to his potential tyrannies, but has to also fear that, by associating my beliefs with Christianity, I delegitimize him to an extent I don't delegitimize an atheist.
(More likely, a follower of such a tyrant Christian would be the doer of such a deed, with or without the approval of his idol.)
Labels -- such as "atheist", "Christian", "tyrant", "compassionate" -- though abstractions, are potent ones to humans, and they tend to find much comfort by defining themselves in terms of them -- those they attach to themselves as well as those they evidently hold at arms' length.
Besides, as 20th-Century history showed, Christians are far more likely to be murdered by atheists than vice versa. So, really, fmaxwell should sleep well, unafraid of the threats he apparently (irrationally?) believes I pose to him and the world he so loves.
Of course, none of this is likely to really be an issue for either of us. If a career offending people such as fmaxwell or even being a pompous, self-righteous jerk (as you believe he's been, and I'm inclined to agree ;-) was a strong predictor of a violent death, I'd have been dismembered by wolves years ago.
What I hope for, instead, is that my writings might help inspire some to provide more rational, thoughtful responses to the kind of arguments and threats posed by people such as fmaxwell, and that those so inspired give me, and crediting me, not even the first thought, much less the second.
Thanks for the compliment! And, given the distance this thread strayed from the topic and their rejection of the various dominant mind-sets on /., it's remarkable to me that they've not been modded down more than they have. IMO, the moderators, as a group, have been rather generous, sufficient enough to offset both rational ("this is getting offtopic") and irrational ("he's kicking my sacred cow") negative mods.
I pointed out that it evidently does not represent an outcome anywhere near the ideal that a small group of "the rich and powerful" would impose if they could...which you implied they would like to do.
There's a vast area between the claims you made, which I rejected, and "an optimal outcome" -- it's called "the excluded middle", i.e. the middle choice excluded by your either/or, black/white logic.
I am curious about those other nations you claim enjoy a higher standard of living -- would you say their system of government and market involves power concentrated in (corresondingly) fewer hands -- a sort of elite -- than the US, or more? Can you give examples of how the government and market work together there to ensure citizens have the choices US citizens don't (and, presumably, can't in our quasi-free-market system) have?
Uh, here's a clue: that's what you've been proposing to do throughout this discussion, impose your morality. I may talk about my morality, but I'm not imposing it -- by passing or pushing for legislation, by celebrating SC judgements, and so on.
Like I said, maybe the PGA had a legal monopoly. But it, too, is just a bunch of golfers who've run their show as they saw fit. I'm sorry you don't agree with their rules.
But, if you and everyone else who celebrated the SC decision as a "victory" had, instead of the court case, simply organized your own golf association, with the rules set up as you see fit, I'm pretty sure it would have worked out quite well.
I don't see that he had a Constitutional right to change the rules of an organization that did, as far as I can tell, have a Constitutional right to peaceably assemble and decide for itself what its rules of play were.
Ah, the classic lie of a tyrant. The SC+ADA decision was not a compassionate decision, it was, fundamentally, a tyrannical one. "We don't like the rules you use for golf, PGA. We're going to make you change them. By force, if necessary. We have the guns and the ammo to do it."
Now, compassion may have been useful as an excuse for that decision, and I'm certainly in favor of the PGA making compassionate decisions on its own.
But I don't hold a gun to peoples' heads, force them to do something I want, then claim I'm being "compassionate" as people like yourself do.
That's what being a Christian is substantially about. Not imposing your will on others. Look it up; it's throughout the teachings of Christ. Pretty much the only nasty words he had for sinners was for those who put themselves in positions of power, tyrannizing others, i.e. imposing their wills on others. Look at the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven." No room for "my" (or "your") will there.
So, if that disabled golfer came to me with his problem, my compassion might lead me to a) heal him as many Christians have done to people in his situation; b) help him persuade the PGA to accommodate him; c) start and/or organize a new golf leagure that would accommodate him; or d) encourage him to compete in alternate venues and pay him the difference in $$ between what they pay him and what he'd get as a PGA golfer if they had changed the rules.
See how none of those options imposes my will on others, or encourages him to do the same? They're all entirely consistent with Christianity, and none of them are tyrannical.
(That is, of course, why hardly anybody talks about those options. Our entire society is thoroughly indoctrinated into the "tyrannical options" for solving problems.)
Look, I expanded on the McVeigh point because you brought it up originally in your earlier post:
That's how tyrants think and operate: they blame others for the problems brought about because of their mind-sets. I hadn't mentioned McVeigh at all, but there you were, associating me with him, all because I challenged your comment about "anti-government hate-mongering". Tyrants hate being challenged on their terms, so they spew hatred, breathing out threatenings and slaughter at their victims.
Here you lie yet again -- a common tactic of the tyrant defending his "rights" (in league with fellow tyrants) to exercising his tyrannies over others.
What you first proposed about making spam illegal didn't even show up on my radar, nor did what the other poster said in response about such laws being potentially turned against people who aren't really spammers. (Haven't we covered this ground before? Of course we have.)
It was when you accused him of "Republican anti-government hate-mongering" that I joined the discussion. It was at that point that you brought up McVeigh.
And it was at that point that I realized you weren't someone who just thought legislating against spam was a good idea, but in fact someone who is a tyrant-wannabe -- whose every explanation, defense, and accusation is rooted in imposing his will on other people. (In response to my examples, you might instead have said "yes, those might well be examples of abuse of well-intentioned laws, but I believe that happens rarely enough to not be a serious concern where anti-spam measures are involved". But, then, you could have simply said that to the original poster in the first place without throwing in the "anti-government hate-mongering" rhetoric commonly used by today's tyrant-wannabes, and I wouldn't have even gotten involved in the first place and upset you so.)
That hardly makes you unique -- it's a common malady in today's society, especially in the USA, where we're all encouraged, as fellow citizens, to share in the common defense of our nation, and to individually and collectively own property and prosper by developing it, etc. A great development, historically speaking, in my opinion, but it does seem to encourage more citizens to feel as though they have a right to tyrannize others, because of their wide opportunity to choose how to live their own lives as they see fit, and the necessities that implies (versus having some totalitarian government figure it all out for us).
They sprang from examples I gave of laws being used for purposes well beyond what they were intended to be used for, or for which they were advertised. That was the point of this discussion, remember? Whether such unintended consequences might be a concern?
The ringing truth of this debate is that you aren't so much unwilling to consider unintended consequences of laws, you actually seem to thrive, at least psychologically, on them, because they feed into your desire to impose your will on others.
So, it doesn't matter to you whether RICO was intended to target non-mafia-like organizations such as Operation Rescue, or ADA was intended to be used as an opportunity to rewrite rules of professional sports, or gun-control legislation was intended to be used as a means to launch an all-out assault on an obscure far-right Christian cult -- all that matters to you was that "the right thing happened". (Please, correct me simply and directly if I'm wrong -- I'm basing this on your steadfast refusal to back down on any of these issues and agree that concerns about abuse of law aren't inherently illegitimate, anti-government, etc.)
So the original poster was dead-on. People like you will say "let's pass anti-spam legislation now", then celebrate when that legislation is contorted to prosecute some group, or disadvantaged individual, who didn't actually spam, but who may conceivably be claimed to have broken some tiny letter of that law.
As a tyrant-wannabe, I'm sure you'll consider various ways to impose it on me. Whether I truly need it is beside the question in your mind; you're far less concerned about how I conduct my life, how I treat my friends, my wife, to what charities I contribute, whether I'm law-abiding, hard-working, thoughtful, resourceful, than you are over the fact that I'm disagreeing with you and pointing out what the facts are regarding your advocacy in this thread.
Yes.
Yes, though, here, the question is, what business does government have telling people what constitutes a marriage at all and impose any requirements on others vis-a-vis the marriage covenant?
Of course. If people want to offer needles to addicts, what business is it of anyone else's? Ditto for condoms...and, in a strictly technical sense at least, for guns as well!
Yes.
Private or public? Private, certainly; those schools and the parents who send their students there can decide for themselves what and how to teach. Public, similar, except the question is raised, if the government forces people to send their children to public schools (and especially if it doesn't offer real choice via vouchers or something), it's not seethingly evil to try to get the schools to not teach one's own child things outside of one's religious convictions.
Oh, of course. This is a no-brainer anyway; does anyone really fear terminal cancer patients "graduating" to drugs like heroin and crack, and running around knocking over convenience stores to pay for their next fix? Sheesh. Don't get me started on the whole "drug war" anyway; about the only thing conceivably bloodier, domestically, would be a war against guns.
Being a Christian doesn't mean never being rude, nor avoiding saying things interpreted as being insulting. I do have honor, since I believe everything I said is clearly backed up by the evidence on hand, and since I never claimed you couldn't be healed of your tyrannical urges. As far as "proud to be an atheist", well, I'll let that stand as an advertisement for atheism, coming from someone with such deeply-held tyrannical convictions.
I'll also let that stand as an advertisement for atheism -- publically stating that the world would be a better place if I just up and died. Maybe I'll show your comment to my wife, my mother, my sister, her husband -- I've occasionally tried to convince them that tyranny itself is one of the root causes of evil, and that attacking it -- not individual people, not their freedom to choose how to live -- would yield the most violent reaction, as was experienced by Jesus, who challenged the validity of the tyrannical rule of the Romans and the Jewish leaders of his time. You seem to be bearing out my "prophecy" in speech.
It's also interesting to note that you claim I'm capable of unspeakable violence because I'm willing to die for my beliefs. Is it also your claim that you are not capable of unspeakable violence? Why not -- is it because you're an atheist? Because you prefer to leave the dirty job of committing violence to impose your beliefs on others to hired help, such as policeman and military men? A combination of both, perhaps?
E.g. would you be capable of merely ordering unspeakable acts of violence be committed against someone, even if you couldn't consider committing the acts by your own hand?
If not, how about if you were merely one of several people who voted on whether to issue such an order -- would you be capable of voting in favor of ordering unspeakable violence?
If not, how about simply speaking up and "being counted" -- do you have it in you to simply say "it would be great if so-and-so were dead", knowing your speech might set in motion the acts necessary to bring that about, just as a mafia Don might?
At some point in there, you've got to admit the answer is "yes", since you've already done it. And my whole point is, if you're willing to "will" it, you might as well admit you're willing to "do" it, except for your own distaste for gruesome matters and/or your desire to avoid being seen by others as actually carrying out those acts.
Whereas I, someone willing to commit violence on behalf of the State until not long ago (e.g. consider enlisting during Desert Storm, despite being of little use as a "fighter" in the pertinent sense), no longer believes it valid according to his religion, says so, and is now told, by an atheist no less, that the world would be better off if he up and died.
And you're trying to convince me I'm being a bad Christian, by saying such things? Hmm, I know you're an atheist and all, but you might find more persuasive ways to get your points across if you actually learned the story of Christ Jesus first. For example, instead of suggesting I'd be better off dying for my cause, you might pat me on the back and tell me I'm mightily appreciated for my thoughtful posts -- that's the sort of thing that really puts die-hard followers of Christ Jesus off their feed, especially coming from an atheist. ;-)
And, of course, I did no such thing. Again, I pointed out that these cases involved legislation beyond what the intent of its authors likely was, and how extreme the results are.
The same thing applies, of course, to tyrant-wannabes who style themselves "Christian" as a means to gain power.
(And it seems to me that you've implicitly justified events such as the Waco invasion, Ruby Ridge, and so on, by continuing to fight against legitimate concerns that well-intentioned laws might be twisted by government to the detriment, even death, of innocents.)
But, whether tyrants call themselves "priest" or "king" to gain power, they worship tyranny, first and foremost. They may claim to be compassionate, intelligent, wise, clever, etc., but their first priority is to rule.
And, the careful reader will note that I never, in this thread, advocated any form of violence, or threat of violence, against you or others who believe as you do. I warned you that you might have to face it for your beliefs, as I readily admitted I realized I (and, in fact, we all) do, but that's hardly the same thing.
Yet, true to most any tyrant, you've not only lied about what you've said and others (the SC) have done, you've plainly advocated violence against me, claiming the world would be a better place if I were dead.
I leave it to the thoughtful, compassionate reader to decide for himself whose belief system better represents a promise for a peaceful world.
All that being said, I realize it's quite likely that the evident hatred you direct towards me comes not from anything personal per se -- since you really don't know anything about me (or at least I'm hoping that, for example, you don't have a visceral hatred for the Fortran programming language ;-) -- but stem from a typical reaction to being "called out" on moral grounds and not finding anything reassuringly solid to grab onto except the hope that an innocent person might die, and/or fearing that someone as assured of the beliefs he espouses as you clearly imagine me to be, since those beliefs differ from yours, must necessarily constitute a threat to you, or perhaps to the world as a whole.
So, however you were feeling when you posted that, and however this post makes you feel, rest assured that you are loved by God, by His Christ, and, therefore, God willing, by me, and that I intend to never commit violence against you or your family, and pray that someday I might find some means to do a practical good deed for you or someone you care about.
God bless you.
We already have laws against terrorists and murderers, and I'm no expert on the case, but there's evidently been substantial debate over the appropriateness of RICO in some of the actual cases it's been used for by the infant-murdering lobby (you use loaded words, I'll use 'em too, okay?).
As far as your claim that "the Supreme Court allowed a disabled professional golfer to continue to earn a living", that is an out-and-out lie. The Supreme Court, as I understand it, forced an independent organization to change its rules for a game to accommodate someone who was already entirely free to play the game however he saw fit, using whatever rules he liked, assembling and organizing with others with a like mind for that purpose, purchasing, renting, or borrowing land and/or other resources for that purpose. Unless the PGA had a government-imposed monopoly on anyone trying to make a living playing golf, the feds (SC+ADA) had no business interfering; and, if they did, it's the government's fault for imposing that monopoly in the first place. (I gather this is roughly the issue with baseball, so maybe it is with the PGA, but I've heard nobody commenting on this case mention that.)
Let's face it, the reason Timothy McVeigh happened is because of people like you -- people who can't get up in the morning without first thinking about how to get the government to impose their wills on others' lives, whether it's gun control, morality policing, whatever, but don't have the guts to impose it themselves, directly. People like you decided to rant, rave, lie, cheat, and tyrannize others, in direct defiance of the Constitution, by forcing gun-control legislation and implementation down the throats of Americans, claiming "oh, it's just to get guns out of the hands of criminals", knowing full well (if they had a brain in their heads) that the government would someday use the legislation and its desire to "make a statement" by attacking, using extreme force, an organization that, until that moment, had not been behaving criminally (in a manner as advertised by the gun-control lobby as the target of the laws). And, thanks to people like you, heroic law-enforcement officers get injured, maimed, and killed in the line of duty trying to impose laws you write on people who aren't evil, who are uninterested in committing any real crimes, but who have finally had it with the nearly-constant increase in government intrusiveness in their lives. Then people like you seek to make excuses for things like the Waco event, seeing a "kindred spirit" in someone like Janet Reno and thus not campaigning to have her fired, something that, by itself, would probably have been all it took to stop the OKC bombing from ever taking place. (McVeigh, for all his "evil", doesn't compare to the Unabomber in this respect: McVeigh's act was in retaliation for a series of clearly unconstitutional blunders by legislators, the executive branch, and the American people; the Unabomber acted in retaliation for human civilization and its inherent nature.)
Indeed, you and I don't have enough in common. You are a tyrant, probably just a tyrant wannabe, but a tyrant nevertheless, and it's now clear to anyone reading this thread why, to you, anyone who opposes continued expansion of government intrusiveness is an "anti-government hate-monger", because you love imposing your will on other people using force -- as the Supreme Court did in the golf case, as gun-control laws did (via government) at Waco, as Clinton plus many Republicans did with the Communications Decency Act (another clearly unconstitutional intrusion), and so on.
Whereas people like me, once hypnotized by the attraction of the passing of laws to "solve problems" and deluded into thinking that even the US government had an acceptable track record of fairly enforcing them -- regardless of the particular branch involved -- have shaken ourselves out of the stupor of pseudo-intellectualism, in which one is judged primarily by one's own presumed ability to direct the lives of others, and chosen instead to start each day by acknowledging our own inadequacy when it comes to directing others' lives, imposing our will, whether directly or collectively by vote, on others by force or threat of force, and regret the times we've felt forced to do it under various dire circumstances. And we've learned to recognize the blantantly obvious fact that, however "perfect" our proposed rules might be, they'll still be interpreted, executed, and imposed by fallible humans, not omniscient beings whose only concern is for the "public good", which is how government is usually billed (and what it should be all about, versus what it ever is, not being any more perfectable than are individual human beings). We figure, instead of trusting a vast array of people unknown to us to impose our wills on our behalf, why not just simplify the equation and trust our neighbor to do the right thing in the first place -- own guns or don't? allow a disabled friend to play in a golf game or not? view pornography on their home computer or not? -- because the government is fundamentally a weapon of mass destruction that is best kept sheathed, especially not pointed at our neighbors for every perceived slight or inconvenience or offense in our lives, and so that it may be more effective at actually doing what is critical to the preservation of the lives of its citizens, such as the defense of our borders, the assessing of risks, and so on.
So, while some of us plead to a God who we believe is the only lawgiver and judge, most of us just can no longer accept the delusion that, as difficult as it is to run our own lives and, where appropriate, direct the lives of our young offspring, we're somehow capable of also adequately deciding how others must live and forcing our wills on them by some means -- individually or collectively. Nor do we accept the proposition, ludicrous in both theory and practice, that there's a pre-determinable elite capable of governing in our stead.
Indeed, the reason the original poster expressed concern about possible anti-spam legislation, and certainly the reason I chimed in, is because people like you never stop and say "hmm, even though I might agree with the outcome of this law/case/government intervention/mass burning of far-right government-hating Christians/whatever, it's clear to me this did not truly follow the letter or intent of the law and, therefore, I can't support it; and maybe I should think twice, in the future, about supporting further legislation that might be similarly twisted to someone else's disadvantage".
So, go ahead and worship at the altar of governmental intervention in other peoples' lives, and sneer at those of us who campaign for self-control on the part of every human -- every potential tyrant -- as you clearly enjoy doing. Go ahead and hold a gun to my head to make sure I don't try to discourage a woman from having an abortion of convenience, or maintain rules of a game, or talk freely with my friends on the Internet. I won't try to stop you, as long as I believe my own rhetoric about avoiding imposing my will on others.
But make no mistake: you are the more tyrannical of the two of us, and, someday, somebody who is willing to do what it takes to stop people like you might decide he'd rather see my idea of self-government, rather than your notions of the importance of ever-expanding government, prevail.
As a Christian, I'm willing to die for my ideals. Are you willing to die for the ones you've espoused here? Would you be willing to personally force the PGA to allow a disabled golfer to use a cart when nobody else had been before, if you knew the response from the PGA might be a hail of gunfire, for example?
My guess: no, you're not. In my experience, tyrant wannabes are usually cowards; I have yet to meet a supporter of gun control who has actually gone door to door insisting people turn over their guns to them. Not in the way some of us have stood up to bullies and criminals and thus know what it takes -- risks as well as rewards -- to actually govern, and are thus, I would tend to think, less likely to blithely accept the notion that "there oughtta be a law" is the solution to every problem.