More or less, the mistake the censorship proponents seem to have made here was starting too big. They should have stayed with the already-classic formula of first passing a vaguely-worded law allowing them to block child porn, then gradually expanding these powers to other content. You're supposed to gradually heat the water the frog is in, not just drop it in an already-boiling kettle. I'm sure they'll get it right next time.
Stop looking for logic here. This is how it works: Children are abused, child porn is available on-line. People, understandably, are angry about this. Someone, somewhere suggests that no-one should be able to see such material, the government takes action to block access to it. Any argument against blocking is seen as an argument for neglecting children. Any call for rational discussion is seen as a sign of emotional coldness.
If someone suggested the cops should be given the right to monitor internet-connections in real-time and immediately arrest and castrate everyone seen attempting to access child porn, I think they would get significant support for their idea.
Furthermore, how will they prevent people from using third-party add-ons to encrypt their comms themselves? If you can't make your own skype client then you need to encrypt the audio before skype catches it, and decrypt it after skype plays it out. Shouldn't be impossible. But that's not the point, is it? Blanket surveillance measures will never catch determined adversaries, they are useful only against the population at large. This is the every-citizen-is-a-potential-criminal mindset at work yet again.
Yes yes, but obviously governments will rarely, if ever, welcome technology that increases the power of the citizen. They are there to *govern*. In other words, no government will much give a damn if a hostile country listens in on calls made into their territory if preventing that means any decrease in their own ability to conduct surveillance. They were fine with it before Skype, why would they care now?
Looking through the article and the NASA press release linked therein, NASA seems to be treating this as an educational tool:
The NASA Learning Technologies (LT) project supports the development of projects that deliver NASA content through innovative applications of technologies to enhance education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Research and development are at the core of the LT mission. LT seeks to enhance formal and informal education in STEM fields with the goal of increasing the number of students in those fields of study and is currently investigating the development of a NASA-based massively multiplayer online educational game (MMO).
Now, I don't know about you, but I can see a lot of worse things to spend some money on than getting people interested in science.
There's an interesting point: Why the need to buy games at launch? It's not like games vanish in a matter of months. If you're constantly, say, a year behind the curve, you avoid having to keep your hardware on the cutting edge and you still get to play as much as you like, since a game released a year ago is new to you. It's not like there's a huge amount of (or, arguably, any) improvement happening in games in terms of how much fun they are to play, the graphics just seem to be getting more realistic.
Maybe they're worried about their audio book sales. I don't know how many people are willing to listen to a synthesized reading of a book, especially fiction, but let's set that aside for a moment.Maybe their profits on audio books are high, at least in comparison to profits on books sold on Kindle. Maybe they don't want to lose the ability to sell you a book twice - once in written form, once in audio. Again, I don't know how many people would want to buy both. Depends on the book, probably.
Keep in mind we're talking about mainstream pop music here. It's not like it was creative before Auto-tune. Big-money pop-music is about identifying trends as quickly as possible and milking them dry before moving on to the next big thing, any creativity is accidental.
That often does seem to be the case. The legal system should not, in my opinion, be about retribution, but about maintaining social stability. Many seem to think otherwise.
Seems to me you argue for absolute morals because it is convenient. Where, pray tell, do such morals come from, if we leave out an authority above mankind? The closest we come is the combination of genetics and upbringing, which certainly leaves us with a lot of moral common ground. To deny that almost all of us share a great deal of moral beliefs would be absurd. But operating under the assumption of no supreme judge to set the parameters of "right" and "wrong", these belief systems represent no moral value outside their own frame of reference.
When you posit I have, under my views, no "right" to complain about the actions of others, you are bringing an absolutist judgment into a relativistic system. You are trying to compare my moral space, if you will, against that of a hypothetical oppressor of mine, in a "higher" space, where both can be viewed and objectively evaluated. This is not possible. There is no such higher moral space. For me, my set of morals is everything, although they are not set in stone, and although I am aware that every other person carries similarly important personal beliefs with them. Most of the time these do not conflict severely. As noted before, there is a lot of common ground. Sometimes the beliefs do conflict, in which case, if the differences can not be peacefully resolved, the side with the greater ability to oppress wins.
Two examples can be made of this: A lone psychopath killer versus the members of the society they live in, and one state versus another in a war sparked by a moral issue. (Let's assume the latter actually happens.) In the first case, the psychopath is dealt with according to whatever customs the society has, and few would argue the killer was in the right. In the latter case, two large groups of people have critically conflicting views of morality. Probably the war is not about an abstract statement of morals, but rather actions resulting from them. In any case, you either accept that both sides have their own, equally important views, or you evaluate the views and decide that one side is more in the "right" than the other. To do the latter, either you need a supreme judge as a source of moral code, or you need to rely on your own set of morals, probably backed up by most of the people of your society. (Actually, in the last case it is possible to both accept the "right" of the one party to their views and to believe their views are wrong and therefore act against them.)
Now, here's the thing. Relativism doesn't do away with "right" and "wrong". Almost all of us have a strong emotional response to wrongful actions, as we perceive them. Almost all of us will, in some circumstances, act upon our personal morals to the detriment of others, even if we do believe their moral choices are just as correct to them as ours to ourselves. The difference to an absolutist system is that the responsibility for such choices can not be deferred to any external party. There is the individual and the choices they make, and they have to live with them.
Your absolute definition is, to me, simply one of many relative definitions of right and wrong. Without a supreme authority there can be no absolute definition. That doesn't mean an individual can't act based on their own morals, but they have to accept others may disagree with them. I tend to see moral certainty as a crutch. Life is not black and white, what seems wrong in one situation may seem right in another. You make the choices you make, often between one "wrong" and another.
For example, we have prisons. I put it to you that it is a dreadful thing to be deprived of your freedom. Still we put people in prison because the costs of not doing so are seen to be too great. This does NOT make it "right" to imprison anyone, to claim it does is comforting but deluded. It is simply necessary. (Well, that's a different discussion.)
What I'm getting at here is that accepting moral relativism doesn't necessarily mean accepting every kind of behaviour. It can also mean acting on your own beliefs, even to the detriment of others, and accepting that your own judgment is all you have to fall back on. Pragmatically, absolute and relative morals behave the same way. If one view - let's say mine - is absolutely correct, then everything I do that is in accordance with that view is acceptable. If every view is equally correct, then everything I do in accordance with my own view is correct in my own system, and that's as good as it can ever get. To live is to tread on others. You can try to minimize that if you wish, but you will hurt others, and no justification will make that hurt go away. You just make do.
Well, a commenter on a Finnish news site replied to similar criticisms by claiming that some of Nokia's design departments are locked out of the internet, and also their computers encrypt anything put on USB drives etc. so that the files can not be viewed on third-party computers. According to the commenter, this effectively makes company e-mail the only way of sending out digital copies of design documents.
Now, it seems unlikely that, even if this is all true, the security policies of these departments would be tight enough to keep a determined spy from getting information out, but I guess in theory this could explain how the law would be of use in preventing industrial espionage.
Arrested for what? I'm not sure there is a law forbidding company representatives from saying their company will leave if the legislative environment of a country is not changed to their liking.
In a way, this is a good thing. The sooner Obama ceases to be seen as the Messiah, the better. The last thing a democracy needs is a strong, popular leader.
In fact, to a certain kind of mind these are scary times indeed. First an unpopular administration significantly expands the powers of government at the cost of the liberties of the individual, then a feverishly adulated man is given the excessive powers thus created. Hopefully people will have the sense and self-critique necessary to call their saviour out on any missteps he makes.
So everything the government publishes on the internet should be hosted by a non-governmental organization? After all, the government could simply edit their websites to remove embarrassing information.
Also, rational arguments hold little sway in public discussion of issues relating to children. In fact, trying to bring up studies and hard data that go against the popular views will get you branded a cold-hearted ivory-tower academic. Few parents are willing to listen to research if it contradicts "what their hearts tell them".
3) Copyright for most media downloaded without authorization in the Netherlands is held by parties outside the NL. Not paying for foreign products leaves the Dutch consumer with more money to spend locally.
Why would a minor worry about being unable to buy a game in a store anyway? I'm pretty sure The Pirate Bay doesn't check for age. Legally binding age restrictions on games will increase piracy.
[...]mercaptans [...] are responsible for most the disagreeable oder of flatus.
No kidding, man! Sea captains derive their authority from their stench. This is why you don't get sailors like you used to have anymore - too much personal hygiene.
Slashdot Mirror
So the filter would block the Internet?
More or less, the mistake the censorship proponents seem to have made here was starting too big. They should have stayed with the already-classic formula of first passing a vaguely-worded law allowing them to block child porn, then gradually expanding these powers to other content. You're supposed to gradually heat the water the frog is in, not just drop it in an already-boiling kettle. I'm sure they'll get it right next time.
Stop looking for logic here. This is how it works: Children are abused, child porn is available on-line. People, understandably, are angry about this. Someone, somewhere suggests that no-one should be able to see such material, the government takes action to block access to it. Any argument against blocking is seen as an argument for neglecting children. Any call for rational discussion is seen as a sign of emotional coldness.
If someone suggested the cops should be given the right to monitor internet-connections in real-time and immediately arrest and castrate everyone seen attempting to access child porn, I think they would get significant support for their idea.
This doesn't stink of nanny state, just mean old totalitarianism.
It is said that realizing there is an issue is the first step to resolving it :)
It is also the first step to ignoring it.
Furthermore, how will they prevent people from using third-party add-ons to encrypt their comms themselves? If you can't make your own skype client then you need to encrypt the audio before skype catches it, and decrypt it after skype plays it out. Shouldn't be impossible. But that's not the point, is it? Blanket surveillance measures will never catch determined adversaries, they are useful only against the population at large. This is the every-citizen-is-a-potential-criminal mindset at work yet again.
Yes yes, but obviously governments will rarely, if ever, welcome technology that increases the power of the citizen. They are there to *govern*. In other words, no government will much give a damn if a hostile country listens in on calls made into their territory if preventing that means any decrease in their own ability to conduct surveillance. They were fine with it before Skype, why would they care now?
The NASA Learning Technologies (LT) project supports the development of projects that deliver NASA content through innovative applications of technologies to enhance education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Research and development are at the core of the LT mission. LT seeks to enhance formal and informal education in STEM fields with the goal of increasing the number of students in those fields of study and is currently investigating the development of a NASA-based massively multiplayer online educational game (MMO).
Now, I don't know about you, but I can see a lot of worse things to spend some money on than getting people interested in science.
There's an interesting point: Why the need to buy games at launch? It's not like games vanish in a matter of months. If you're constantly, say, a year behind the curve, you avoid having to keep your hardware on the cutting edge and you still get to play as much as you like, since a game released a year ago is new to you. It's not like there's a huge amount of (or, arguably, any) improvement happening in games in terms of how much fun they are to play, the graphics just seem to be getting more realistic.
That's great, somehow I don't see a colony of semiferal cats in the server room getting administrative approval any time soon, though.
Maybe they're worried about their audio book sales. I don't know how many people are willing to listen to a synthesized reading of a book, especially fiction, but let's set that aside for a moment.Maybe their profits on audio books are high, at least in comparison to profits on books sold on Kindle. Maybe they don't want to lose the ability to sell you a book twice - once in written form, once in audio. Again, I don't know how many people would want to buy both. Depends on the book, probably.
Keep in mind we're talking about mainstream pop music here. It's not like it was creative before Auto-tune. Big-money pop-music is about identifying trends as quickly as possible and milking them dry before moving on to the next big thing, any creativity is accidental.
That often does seem to be the case. The legal system should not, in my opinion, be about retribution, but about maintaining social stability. Many seem to think otherwise.
Seems to me you argue for absolute morals because it is convenient. Where, pray tell, do such morals come from, if we leave out an authority above mankind? The closest we come is the combination of genetics and upbringing, which certainly leaves us with a lot of moral common ground. To deny that almost all of us share a great deal of moral beliefs would be absurd. But operating under the assumption of no supreme judge to set the parameters of "right" and "wrong", these belief systems represent no moral value outside their own frame of reference.
When you posit I have, under my views, no "right" to complain about the actions of others, you are bringing an absolutist judgment into a relativistic system. You are trying to compare my moral space, if you will, against that of a hypothetical oppressor of mine, in a "higher" space, where both can be viewed and objectively evaluated. This is not possible. There is no such higher moral space. For me, my set of morals is everything, although they are not set in stone, and although I am aware that every other person carries similarly important personal beliefs with them. Most of the time these do not conflict severely. As noted before, there is a lot of common ground. Sometimes the beliefs do conflict, in which case, if the differences can not be peacefully resolved, the side with the greater ability to oppress wins.
Two examples can be made of this: A lone psychopath killer versus the members of the society they live in, and one state versus another in a war sparked by a moral issue. (Let's assume the latter actually happens.) In the first case, the psychopath is dealt with according to whatever customs the society has, and few would argue the killer was in the right. In the latter case, two large groups of people have critically conflicting views of morality. Probably the war is not about an abstract statement of morals, but rather actions resulting from them. In any case, you either accept that both sides have their own, equally important views, or you evaluate the views and decide that one side is more in the "right" than the other. To do the latter, either you need a supreme judge as a source of moral code, or you need to rely on your own set of morals, probably backed up by most of the people of your society. (Actually, in the last case it is possible to both accept the "right" of the one party to their views and to believe their views are wrong and therefore act against them.)
Now, here's the thing. Relativism doesn't do away with "right" and "wrong". Almost all of us have a strong emotional response to wrongful actions, as we perceive them. Almost all of us will, in some circumstances, act upon our personal morals to the detriment of others, even if we do believe their moral choices are just as correct to them as ours to ourselves. The difference to an absolutist system is that the responsibility for such choices can not be deferred to any external party. There is the individual and the choices they make, and they have to live with them.
Your absolute definition is, to me, simply one of many relative definitions of right and wrong. Without a supreme authority there can be no absolute definition. That doesn't mean an individual can't act based on their own morals, but they have to accept others may disagree with them. I tend to see moral certainty as a crutch. Life is not black and white, what seems wrong in one situation may seem right in another. You make the choices you make, often between one "wrong" and another.
For example, we have prisons. I put it to you that it is a dreadful thing to be deprived of your freedom. Still we put people in prison because the costs of not doing so are seen to be too great. This does NOT make it "right" to imprison anyone, to claim it does is comforting but deluded. It is simply necessary. (Well, that's a different discussion.)
What I'm getting at here is that accepting moral relativism doesn't necessarily mean accepting every kind of behaviour. It can also mean acting on your own beliefs, even to the detriment of others, and accepting that your own judgment is all you have to fall back on. Pragmatically, absolute and relative morals behave the same way. If one view - let's say mine - is absolutely correct, then everything I do that is in accordance with that view is acceptable. If every view is equally correct, then everything I do in accordance with my own view is correct in my own system, and that's as good as it can ever get. To live is to tread on others. You can try to minimize that if you wish, but you will hurt others, and no justification will make that hurt go away. You just make do.
Not only are they happy to spread their propaganda, the advertisers probably "leaked" the material themselves in the first place.
Well, a commenter on a Finnish news site replied to similar criticisms by claiming that some of Nokia's design departments are locked out of the internet, and also their computers encrypt anything put on USB drives etc. so that the files can not be viewed on third-party computers. According to the commenter, this effectively makes company e-mail the only way of sending out digital copies of design documents.
Now, it seems unlikely that, even if this is all true, the security policies of these departments would be tight enough to keep a determined spy from getting information out, but I guess in theory this could explain how the law would be of use in preventing industrial espionage.
Arrested for what? I'm not sure there is a law forbidding company representatives from saying their company will leave if the legislative environment of a country is not changed to their liking.
You've preordered it and you're happy? Did you actually receive one also or are you just happy with the specs?
In a way, this is a good thing. The sooner Obama ceases to be seen as the Messiah, the better. The last thing a democracy needs is a strong, popular leader.
In fact, to a certain kind of mind these are scary times indeed. First an unpopular administration significantly expands the powers of government at the cost of the liberties of the individual, then a feverishly adulated man is given the excessive powers thus created. Hopefully people will have the sense and self-critique necessary to call their saviour out on any missteps he makes.
So everything the government publishes on the internet should be hosted by a non-governmental organization? After all, the government could simply edit their websites to remove embarrassing information.
Also, rational arguments hold little sway in public discussion of issues relating to children. In fact, trying to bring up studies and hard data that go against the popular views will get you branded a cold-hearted ivory-tower academic. Few parents are willing to listen to research if it contradicts "what their hearts tell them".
3) Copyright for most media downloaded without authorization in the Netherlands is held by parties outside the NL. Not paying for foreign products leaves the Dutch consumer with more money to spend locally.
Why would a minor worry about being unable to buy a game in a store anyway? I'm pretty sure The Pirate Bay doesn't check for age. Legally binding age restrictions on games will increase piracy.
If it's biological in nature, then instead of geo-thermal, treadmills! Plenty of them.
[...]mercaptans [...] are responsible for most the disagreeable oder of flatus.
No kidding, man! Sea captains derive their authority from their stench. This is why you don't get sailors like you used to have anymore - too much personal hygiene.