I love all the responses to the "witch" bit in my post because it got a lot of people to point out that context is the most important thing when quoting from any source. Your response is the best though as it didn't resort to acrobatics of interpretation to make that point. However, I do have to answer your last question in the affirmative- African animist priests are to this day often referred to as "witch doctors" not because they (necessarily) practice infanticide, host stealing, etc., but because they are "heathens". Point, again, in about interpretation- hate speech is so subjective that it's impossible to fairly legislate (outside of clear calls for violence) without banning all sorts of speech, often religious, because of how some people could interpret these old texts.
In real life you're going to find most religions contain direct commands like this one (Christianity is, fortunately, an exception).
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" Exodus 22:18
A witch, based on most Christian teachings, is anyone who doesn't believe in Christ and practices a religion (and more specifically anyone who practices a "nature" or animist religion). Hence, Christians, if they follow the Bible, must kill everyone who is not a Christian. What was that you were saying about Christianity not commanding it's followers to hate/kill everyone else? If you need more examples of text like this, please pick up your Bible. Leviticus alone can easily make my case.
On topic, if we're to ban hate speech, then I say that your book should should be the first to go. However, I believe that we should be allowed, by the state, to hate paedophiles, rapists, murderers, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Taoist, Janists, Wiccans, Buddhists, Hindi, Blacks, Browns, Reds, Whites, Pinks, Hydrocephalics, or even my Great Aunt Martha. It's on your soul though if you do hate. Please don't tell people to kill these groups... that should get you arrested. (Are you thumbing through your Bible right now? Are you noticing that it does tell you to kill witches?)
Oh, and if you insist on hating others, don't bring Christ into it, He was good guy.
Just in case you're not a troll... The first amendment prevents the government from imposing unreasonable restrictions on free speech. As a individual, however, you can sign any contract you want with another party which limits your right to speech, eating hot dogs, wearing plaid pants, or anything else you want to sign away. If you break the contract you will liable in a civil suit for breach of contract. But, yeah, Thompson, in my opinion, acts like such an asshat that he'd break the contract anyway. Oh, IANAL.
Ummm, if you can detect that the host nation has tampered with the device, doesn't that tell you something important too? Heck, most "controls" being used on reactors right now are like fancy lock-out-tag-out bands; they don't prevent tampering, they just expose that it happened. It's the people who visit the sites (or who aren't allowed into the sites, which, again, tells you something) which do the actual detecting. This anti-neutrino detector is just another tool, not a panacea.
This AC raises an important point, namely that tax laws are so completely frakked up that a normal, college educated, fully functioning member of society can't interpret them. We have so many nuanced, confusing, ridiculously complex laws (tax laws foremost among them), that it's reached the point where you can't obey them all because you can't understand them even if you have them all in front of you. I don't know who's legally right in this matter, but it feels unconstitutional to me for NY to collect these taxes from anyone but the NY "affiliates" themselves. I know that "truthiness" doesn't count in a courtroom, and it's silly to have to rely on it at all, but we're left with little else now-a-days.
Dude, cut back on your work hours... it's causing you to hallucinate that because you think that things should be a certain way that everyone else should change the way they live/work/govern themselves to accommodate you. I work nights, but I don't whine that most grocery stores aren't open at 2A.M. when I want to shop; because I understand that just about everyone else finds it more convenient to have them open during the daytime. Most people don't climb mountains and feel that there should be a premium charged to those who want services in relation to their hobby of climbing high peaks. Deal with it or move to Nepal.
Are words (full of) content, or are they tools, or both? If they are mere tools, then they are empty of meaning on their own. All books are made of words, and all book are full of content. So, they aren't empty, but they're made of words? Then either words in combination or words on their own are tools which convey content.
Since we have dictionaries which list single words, and define their symbolic content, then I'd argue that words contain content. Put together with other words we get a rich contextual soup (or at least the potential thereof). So words, their content, and the context in which they are presented define the content of the work as a whole. So, tools, since they contain content, matter greatly to the work as a whole. In other words, your five word argument is empty.
Want more? Try reading a book in loose-leaf form (like laser printouts for galleys), then spiral bound, then paper, then hard back, then a nice leather-bound rough-front cotton-paper edition, then in PDF on a Kindle. Now tell me that physical materials, tools and mediums, don't matter either. Heck, change just one word in one of Hamlet's soliloquies and see if it has the same meaning and impact.
If you want an education, then go to the library. If you want to network, acclimate yourself to the social milieu of your chosen field, and party, then go to college. You aren't paying for textbook knowledge... of course at only 2k per semester, you're not getting in with the right crowd anyway, but that's a whole other discussion.
Expensive? Damn straight. I'd pay $1000 for an OS that was warranted to be secure for my work computers, wouldn't you? Heck currently I pay orders of magnitude (real orders of magnitude, not market-speak orders of magnitude) more than $1000 for the software on my business servers. Then, I'd run the $100 "home edition" on a gaming rig. And a shortlist of third party software? Bring it on. I'll only run Adobe and Kodak at work, and then put "Uncle Bob's HAckSorS Shareware" on said gaming rig. Kind of like how I have a sedan for the road and motorcycle for off-road, different environments entail different risks and different limits on cost expended to ameliorate said risk. While we're on cars... A good car doesn't turn left across traffic on it's own, it requires a stupid user/driver to do that. A decent OS won't ask hackers into it, it should require will-full ignorance/misuse by the user to infect an OS. Please put limits on application designers. Your post only makes is all to clear that we will have to impose limits, as it's not viewed as profitable for them to police themselves enough to even put out a reliable product let alone a warranted one.
Nice summary. To add to it just a hair, I've always used "SF" to mean "Science-fiction and Fantasy". That way I encompass any interpretation of what may be speculative vs. purely fantastic as well as good old storytelling. That way I can call BSG SF instead of a just a soap opera, I'd feel dirty using the word "science" around that show (one of my favorites!) otherwise.
All talk? I guess the one who says he's a great teacher but can't hack doing it outside of his own home.
Listen, if you can do your part to educate your own kids, that's great; we all do what we can and as long as you keep it positive, that's, like I said, great. You've got your family covered. It's just that a lot of us get sick of people thinking that as long as "I've got mine" that somehow they can sit back, enjoy what's theirs, and lecture others about how stupid others are for not having a setup exactly like theirs. If you've got yours, fine. If you've got an ability, then share it, don't brag about it. Either get out there and teach again, or STFU about how others should be teaching/paying more to teachers/home schooling/being more like you. BTW, I'm not big on kids, so I don't have any and I don't teach them. But a co-worker stopped me the other day to say how people don't take the time to say it, but how everybody appreciates that when people ask a question I take the time to stop, help people out, and explain things multiple ways until they understand the answer or have a way to get the answer they need. A few people within hearing distance popped up and said, yeah, they like that I help them rather than snap off an incomplete answer or sigh, roll my eyes, or say "you should know that". I share my knowledge because it makes my world a better place. I'm just upset with myself that I've lectured you instead of truly helping you to understand. But at least now I understand better why some people just roll their eyes and sigh.
If you're so great at teaching your kid, then why aren't you in a school teaching a classroom of kids? Wouldn't that be better for everyone as you'd be able to properly educate your child's peers (giving her a better place to live) while still giving her a top tier education?
You had multiple cable companies but only one line. It IS like the electric company that way. But unlike the power company you can run signals from different sources over that line. I still agree with your conclusion that that we need to get rid of single provider contracts with local governments and re-introduce competition into the market. But it's the fact that the one provider in the area believes that they "own" the one line into everyone's house, and that politico's believe that lie, that we're having the most trouble getting competition going again.
I believe that was implicit in the GP's post. If you choose to live in a civilized society, then you must live by that civilization's rules- for the good of the society, even when it's not 100% in your immediate interest. But you are still welcome to go live like a hermit, or find others who want to move with you and start up a new society in the wilderness from scratch where you can have any rules you want... until you bump up against a neighboring society, and then you have to act civilized again or get spanked down. Might be easier just to learn to live with others in the first place.
First, good post, and I'm not arguing, but would like to elucidate...
1. Right on, except for Stilgar. I always thought that one point about the Fremen was that they were smarter than just a bunch of tribal tough guys. They may have required you to be ultra-tough, but I think that they were smart enough keep a wise leader even if he got a little soft in the middle. Rippling abs, after all, won't manage the infrastructure for enough cisterns to re-aquify a planet.
2. Really, how hard is it find some good sand dunes to film and digitally insert- they screwed the pooch on this one.
3. Definitely needed a more run-down Arrakis. However, about the unified look: I've been around the world, and despite the different alphabets used on signs, and the differences in people, it's amazing how much the same everything looks. From clothing to housing to packaging, it all just looks soooo similar. Any empire connected as well as the one in the word of Dune would have plenty of people actively trying to unify the look- everyone want to look like the rich people.
Ok, one gripe about your interpretation of the Fremen. Have you heard of "unreliable narrator"? The people who think the Fremen are stinking, disheveled, "untamed" people are the one's enslaving them. It's like how slave owners in America though of their African slaves as savages; to make them feel better about what they were doing, not as a accurate representation of who the Africans are/where. The Fremen were a proud people with a developed society (remember those cisterns again?). I think that it was a literary device to have the Fremen described that way, and then to be shown how inaccurate that description what- far more powerful than just saying "now I'm going to introduce you to a noble, civilized, but deeply misunderstood people."
4. As far as being accurate, I agree. How can someone make a more accurate interpretation in 2 hours than Sci-Fi could've in over 6 hours?
Then the biology textbook which the doctors of tomorrow will buy today can be selected by word of mouth recommendation? Or will the reviewers go though all the crap that's out there and figure out which is the best? Oh, wait, that's what publishers do now.
Let's please not lump together a publisher who brings us crap like Stephen King with publishers who bring us quality literature and informational texts. Or, if you must, please explain why the book of the month club arranging for 300 copy offset-press runs (resulting in a cheaper, higher quality product for their customers, esp. in hardback) is a bad thing compared to crappy one-off POD books of the same title?
No, we don't have a right to know Go Codes, but we do have a right to know if a government employee was using their time at work to e-mail those codes to their party leaders outside of government. You may say, "oh, they'd never do that", but now we'll never know, will we?
I can't speak for the GP poster, but my only gripes with the passport debacle is that information like that is not required to be disclosed by candidates running for national office, and the fact that government employees (contractors are employees as long as they're getting my tax money as pay) broke existing policy to access the records. If a journalist had accessed the records, fine, but not someone we all pay NOT to break our trust.
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I love all the responses to the "witch" bit in my post because it got a lot of people to point out that context is the most important thing when quoting from any source. Your response is the best though as it didn't resort to acrobatics of interpretation to make that point. However, I do have to answer your last question in the affirmative- African animist priests are to this day often referred to as "witch doctors" not because they (necessarily) practice infanticide, host stealing, etc., but because they are "heathens". Point, again, in about interpretation- hate speech is so subjective that it's impossible to fairly legislate (outside of clear calls for violence) without banning all sorts of speech, often religious, because of how some people could interpret these old texts.
And, oddly enough, I have a .25" piece of tape which can defeat any malicious code anybody may have inserted.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" Exodus 22:18
A witch, based on most Christian teachings, is anyone who doesn't believe in Christ and practices a religion (and more specifically anyone who practices a "nature" or animist religion). Hence, Christians, if they follow the Bible, must kill everyone who is not a Christian. What was that you were saying about Christianity not commanding it's followers to hate/kill everyone else? If you need more examples of text like this, please pick up your Bible. Leviticus alone can easily make my case.
On topic, if we're to ban hate speech, then I say that your book should should be the first to go. However, I believe that we should be allowed, by the state, to hate paedophiles, rapists, murderers, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Taoist, Janists, Wiccans, Buddhists, Hindi, Blacks, Browns, Reds, Whites, Pinks, Hydrocephalics, or even my Great Aunt Martha. It's on your soul though if you do hate. Please don't tell people to kill these groups... that should get you arrested. (Are you thumbing through your Bible right now? Are you noticing that it does tell you to kill witches?)
Oh, and if you insist on hating others, don't bring Christ into it, He was good guy.
"...what we grave"? What a Freudian slip!
Just in case you're not a troll... The first amendment prevents the government from imposing unreasonable restrictions on free speech. As a individual, however, you can sign any contract you want with another party which limits your right to speech, eating hot dogs, wearing plaid pants, or anything else you want to sign away. If you break the contract you will liable in a civil suit for breach of contract. But, yeah, Thompson, in my opinion, acts like such an asshat that he'd break the contract anyway. Oh, IANAL.
Ummm, if you can detect that the host nation has tampered with the device, doesn't that tell you something important too? Heck, most "controls" being used on reactors right now are like fancy lock-out-tag-out bands; they don't prevent tampering, they just expose that it happened. It's the people who visit the sites (or who aren't allowed into the sites, which, again, tells you something) which do the actual detecting. This anti-neutrino detector is just another tool, not a panacea.
This AC raises an important point, namely that tax laws are so completely frakked up that a normal, college educated, fully functioning member of society can't interpret them. We have so many nuanced, confusing, ridiculously complex laws (tax laws foremost among them), that it's reached the point where you can't obey them all because you can't understand them even if you have them all in front of you. I don't know who's legally right in this matter, but it feels unconstitutional to me for NY to collect these taxes from anyone but the NY "affiliates" themselves. I know that "truthiness" doesn't count in a courtroom, and it's silly to have to rely on it at all, but we're left with little else now-a-days.
Dude, cut back on your work hours... it's causing you to hallucinate that because you think that things should be a certain way that everyone else should change the way they live/work/govern themselves to accommodate you. I work nights, but I don't whine that most grocery stores aren't open at 2A.M. when I want to shop; because I understand that just about everyone else finds it more convenient to have them open during the daytime. Most people don't climb mountains and feel that there should be a premium charged to those who want services in relation to their hobby of climbing high peaks. Deal with it or move to Nepal.
Are words (full of) content, or are they tools, or both? If they are mere tools, then they are empty of meaning on their own. All books are made of words, and all book are full of content. So, they aren't empty, but they're made of words? Then either words in combination or words on their own are tools which convey content.
Since we have dictionaries which list single words, and define their symbolic content, then I'd argue that words contain content. Put together with other words we get a rich contextual soup (or at least the potential thereof). So words, their content, and the context in which they are presented define the content of the work as a whole. So, tools, since they contain content, matter greatly to the work as a whole. In other words, your five word argument is empty.
Want more? Try reading a book in loose-leaf form (like laser printouts for galleys), then spiral bound, then paper, then hard back, then a nice leather-bound rough-front cotton-paper edition, then in PDF on a Kindle. Now tell me that physical materials, tools and mediums, don't matter either. Heck, change just one word in one of Hamlet's soliloquies and see if it has the same meaning and impact.A suicide note would prove intent.
If you want an education, then go to the library. If you want to network, acclimate yourself to the social milieu of your chosen field, and party, then go to college. You aren't paying for textbook knowledge... of course at only 2k per semester, you're not getting in with the right crowd anyway, but that's a whole other discussion.
Oh, fine, bring reality into the discussion...
If you remember that movie, the whole point was that there are some attributes of a person which can NOT be measured.
... and me without my mod points handy. Excellent post, thank you.
Expensive? Damn straight. I'd pay $1000 for an OS that was warranted to be secure for my work computers, wouldn't you? Heck currently I pay orders of magnitude (real orders of magnitude, not market-speak orders of magnitude) more than $1000 for the software on my business servers. Then, I'd run the $100 "home edition" on a gaming rig. And a shortlist of third party software? Bring it on. I'll only run Adobe and Kodak at work, and then put "Uncle Bob's HAckSorS Shareware" on said gaming rig. Kind of like how I have a sedan for the road and motorcycle for off-road, different environments entail different risks and different limits on cost expended to ameliorate said risk. While we're on cars... A good car doesn't turn left across traffic on it's own, it requires a stupid user/driver to do that. A decent OS won't ask hackers into it, it should require will-full ignorance/misuse by the user to infect an OS. Please put limits on application designers. Your post only makes is all to clear that we will have to impose limits, as it's not viewed as profitable for them to police themselves enough to even put out a reliable product let alone a warranted one.
Nice summary. To add to it just a hair, I've always used "SF" to mean "Science-fiction and Fantasy". That way I encompass any interpretation of what may be speculative vs. purely fantastic as well as good old storytelling. That way I can call BSG SF instead of a just a soap opera, I'd feel dirty using the word "science" around that show (one of my favorites!) otherwise.
All talk? I guess the one who says he's a great teacher but can't hack doing it outside of his own home.
Listen, if you can do your part to educate your own kids, that's great; we all do what we can and as long as you keep it positive, that's, like I said, great. You've got your family covered. It's just that a lot of us get sick of people thinking that as long as "I've got mine" that somehow they can sit back, enjoy what's theirs, and lecture others about how stupid others are for not having a setup exactly like theirs. If you've got yours, fine. If you've got an ability, then share it, don't brag about it. Either get out there and teach again, or STFU about how others should be teaching/paying more to teachers/home schooling/being more like you. BTW, I'm not big on kids, so I don't have any and I don't teach them. But a co-worker stopped me the other day to say how people don't take the time to say it, but how everybody appreciates that when people ask a question I take the time to stop, help people out, and explain things multiple ways until they understand the answer or have a way to get the answer they need. A few people within hearing distance popped up and said, yeah, they like that I help them rather than snap off an incomplete answer or sigh, roll my eyes, or say "you should know that". I share my knowledge because it makes my world a better place. I'm just upset with myself that I've lectured you instead of truly helping you to understand. But at least now I understand better why some people just roll their eyes and sigh.If you're so great at teaching your kid, then why aren't you in a school teaching a classroom of kids? Wouldn't that be better for everyone as you'd be able to properly educate your child's peers (giving her a better place to live) while still giving her a top tier education?
Oh, wait, right, you're all talk."Comcast may even drop the rates..." Oh, my god, I haven't laughed so hard in years!
You had multiple cable companies but only one line. It IS like the electric company that way. But unlike the power company you can run signals from different sources over that line. I still agree with your conclusion that that we need to get rid of single provider contracts with local governments and re-introduce competition into the market. But it's the fact that the one provider in the area believes that they "own" the one line into everyone's house, and that politico's believe that lie, that we're having the most trouble getting competition going again.
I believe that was implicit in the GP's post. If you choose to live in a civilized society, then you must live by that civilization's rules- for the good of the society, even when it's not 100% in your immediate interest. But you are still welcome to go live like a hermit, or find others who want to move with you and start up a new society in the wilderness from scratch where you can have any rules you want... until you bump up against a neighboring society, and then you have to act civilized again or get spanked down. Might be easier just to learn to live with others in the first place.
First, good post, and I'm not arguing, but would like to elucidate...
1. Right on, except for Stilgar. I always thought that one point about the Fremen was that they were smarter than just a bunch of tribal tough guys. They may have required you to be ultra-tough, but I think that they were smart enough keep a wise leader even if he got a little soft in the middle. Rippling abs, after all, won't manage the infrastructure for enough cisterns to re-aquify a planet.
2. Really, how hard is it find some good sand dunes to film and digitally insert- they screwed the pooch on this one.
3. Definitely needed a more run-down Arrakis. However, about the unified look: I've been around the world, and despite the different alphabets used on signs, and the differences in people, it's amazing how much the same everything looks. From clothing to housing to packaging, it all just looks soooo similar. Any empire connected as well as the one in the word of Dune would have plenty of people actively trying to unify the look- everyone want to look like the rich people.
Ok, one gripe about your interpretation of the Fremen. Have you heard of "unreliable narrator"? The people who think the Fremen are stinking, disheveled, "untamed" people are the one's enslaving them. It's like how slave owners in America though of their African slaves as savages; to make them feel better about what they were doing, not as a accurate representation of who the Africans are/where. The Fremen were a proud people with a developed society (remember those cisterns again?). I think that it was a literary device to have the Fremen described that way, and then to be shown how inaccurate that description what- far more powerful than just saying "now I'm going to introduce you to a noble, civilized, but deeply misunderstood people."
4. As far as being accurate, I agree. How can someone make a more accurate interpretation in 2 hours than Sci-Fi could've in over 6 hours?
Then the biology textbook which the doctors of tomorrow will buy today can be selected by word of mouth recommendation? Or will the reviewers go though all the crap that's out there and figure out which is the best? Oh, wait, that's what publishers do now.
Let's please not lump together a publisher who brings us crap like Stephen King with publishers who bring us quality literature and informational texts. Or, if you must, please explain why the book of the month club arranging for 300 copy offset-press runs (resulting in a cheaper, higher quality product for their customers, esp. in hardback) is a bad thing compared to crappy one-off POD books of the same title?
No, we don't have a right to know Go Codes, but we do have a right to know if a government employee was using their time at work to e-mail those codes to their party leaders outside of government. You may say, "oh, they'd never do that", but now we'll never know, will we?
I can't speak for the GP poster, but my only gripes with the passport debacle is that information like that is not required to be disclosed by candidates running for national office, and the fact that government employees (contractors are employees as long as they're getting my tax money as pay) broke existing policy to access the records. If a journalist had accessed the records, fine, but not someone we all pay NOT to break our trust.
We've always been at war with cyber-criminals...