Haven't you ever heard of the Slippery Slope Conspiracy? It involves a bunch of government agents who scream "Slippery Slope" at the most absurd things so that people will be desensitized to Slippery Slope claims because they will think that the people who make those claims are a bunch of nut-bars! And in another month's time the Slippery Slope Conspirators will have achieved a perfectly zero coefficient of social friction and make the rest of us their true slaves! Not only will we be digging canals with spoons and carrying spoons full of dirt 20 miles up hill both ways and with a 50 lb. steel ball tied to our ankle, but we will be happy for it!
Note to conspiracy-conspiracy theorists: I'm not being serious. Just to be clear, this conspiracy is a figment of my sarcastic imagination and not real.
This is a form of healthcare. You pick up garbage in order to limit the spread of disease, which is far more effective as well as far cheaper than getting medical treatment after the fact.
As for the "recycling" bit: cities usually consider composting and recycling to divert waste from dumps. They do this for economic reasons rather than political reasons because (for some strange reason) very few people want to live near a landfill. Maybe it's because landfills create poor environmental conditions that impact people's health.
So I would say that their priorities are in the right place.
Most people care about the results, not the specifications. Indeed, most people don't understand the background information required to understand specifications. So the marketeers have to simplify things. Which is awfully hard to do when you're talking about a static image on a website, which would make low end video appear on par with high end video. So they simplify things.
Do I agree with that simplification? Not really. Do I understand that simplification? Absolutely. After all, even though it is fraudulent in the purest sense of the word it is relatively realistic when you are talking about real time rendering of 3-D graphics.
Have you ever walked down a street listening to music? Even with the music at full blast, you can still hear oncoming vehicles. So you are still left with a situation where either the motorist or pedestrian could be at fault.
You're in the convenience store to grab a bottle of water because you're dehydrating after jogging. After quickly glancing at the labels you grab the one that makes the above claim. It has nothing to do with being stupid. It has nothing to do with the implication about other products. It is just that your mind is making a subconscious decision based upon a quick glance at the bottle.
The problem is human psychology, not irrational beliefs.
If we were talking about a culinary definition of planets, I would totally agree with you. After all, their work has nothing to do with astronomical bodies.
We are talking about culinary definitions of plants, for which it is completely acceptable for them to have their own definitions. After all, the properties of those plants will affect the products of their labours.
I can use more serious games in my life. A hundred percent serious, nitty gritty political or economically serious, and even technically or ideologically serious. I don't even care if the game violates my world view. Just give me something to think about when I drop the controller and rejoin the real world. Until that happens, I will spend most of my time in literature because a good author will do more to challenge me than the typical mass media title (regardless of the media).
On point 2: government contributes a hell of a lot to innovation, as well as pure research (which is necessary for some innovation). Claiming otherwise it to ignore all of the work done in publicly funded university labs from around the world.
Maybe I should give you two ripe examples that you can understand: the computer and the internet. The former simply would not have been developed without government intervention. Without the latter, we would be living in an expensive and tightly controlled network environment (like AOL or Compuserve of days gone by).
There are two ways to take your comment: you either want me to pay for what you value, yet you don't want to pay for what I value; or you think that people should only pay for what they value themselves.
From prior experience, most people will claim the latter but mean the former. After all, as soon as you outline the consequences (i.e. cutting funding to their cherished programs) they start screaming bloody murder.
But just in case you claim the latter and actually mean the latter, have you ever considered the consequences? User pay ultimately means that funding is unstable. User pay ultimately means that most programs will be underfunded because people are far more willing to pay for things that tangibly affect their life. And I'm talking about things like bridge maintenance here. Or schools, because some people don't value education (never mind being able to afford it). Oh, and who's going to pay for the prisons once those uneducated bastards are thieving and murdering to make a living? The prisoners themselves? Giggle.:)
Yes, public funding is "fork it over or face the consequences". But most of them are broader social consequences. Quick frankly, I couldn't care less about what happens to people who choose not to pay taxes because they have too much of a "me-me" attitude to give a damn about.
Oops, I was too busy dreaming of the grinding gears of the difference engine to remember point two.:)
The second point is that the modern taxation system works because there is something for everyone. Bleeding hearts like myself see funding going to science and social programs. Rednecks see taxes going towards infrastructure and national security. (Sorry about the over generalizations there, but I use them only to illustrate a point.) Now I know that everyone loves to grumble about taxes, but most people will pay them because they receive some benefits from them. A system of universal taxation wouldn't work otherwise because the people who aren't serve would eventually revolt (which we have seen historically).
In other words, if you want my tax dollars to fund roads you better be willing to see some of your tax dollars go to science.
Sorry, but I want public funding to go towards scientific research for two reasons.
First and foremost, you need public funding to support pure science. There are a few branches of pure science that will attract private donations, but most won't. Take astronomy vs. computers in the pre-WWII era. Astronomy was almost entirely impractical, but it attracted deep pockets. Real computers (i.e. anything beyond adding machines) received very little love at all, even though they turned out to be hugely important to society down the road. Computers were developed primarily because of government funding during and after WWII. Heck, even Charles Babbage received government funding. But all of the other computing projects (and there were a few) received inadequate funding and ended up going nowhere.
That is pretty much how science operated prior to the twentieth century. It even worked, in a limited sense. After all, it did give scientific research a huge kick-start. But let's be realistic too. It would be next to impossible to maintain current rates of scientific progress using that model because you can achieve far higher funding levels by taxing a hundred million people a dollars a head per year than you would by persuading a hundred people to donate a million dollars a head. (Since very few of those donations would be offered on an annual basis.)
Memories (or notes) don't change radically. Ditto for biometrics. Yet behaviours do change, as soon as a person's priorities change. It may not happen often and there is probably a transition period, but I would be lying if I claimed that I am the same person I was a year ago.
For a group concerned about military security, like DARPA, denying access based upon behavioural changes may be appropriate. After all, it may demonstrate bribery or blackmail or some other change of heart. But for everyday transactions it is inappropriate. After all, would you want to be denied access to your money because you went from a greedy SOB to a charitable person (or vica versa).
In a sense, I agree. You won't find me arguing the moment that they want to block child porn and many forms of hate speech. Keep in mind that all of these acts constitute criminal activities (even, in some cases, copyright infringement).
Beyond that, I don't share your confidence that the slippery slope will continue. There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles. And even that makes an underlying cynical assumption that the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as policing is only interested in abolishing freedom. Quite frankly, I believe that most democratic governments are trying to balance the needs for law and order with freedom. (I'm not saying they are always right, just that I don't believe in the cynical view.)
So arguments like this really come down to this: do you want to give the government tools to maintain law and order, or do you want to neuter them and face the consequences of lawlessness?
Ah yes, the classical "slippery slope" argument. The problem being that we tend to stop sliding down the slope as soon as the illegal activities run out. Which means everything after hate speech (unless you are trying to do something idiotic like incite a riot or threatening to murder a doctor).
I was a bit concerned in this case because Usenet was involved, which has more legal activity than (say Pirate Bay). Then I looked at the site itself. It is about indexing pirated material. So I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for the "freedom" advocates here because I'm not into the freedom to commit crimes angle.
On the other hand, it is also completely appropriate to request the block on The Pirate Bay. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this site facilitates the distribution of materials against the rights holders wishes. Which is kinda illegal.
Actions like this are, in my opinion, much better than more clandestine approaches since it utilizes information that is made available to the public. (The Pirate Bay openly displays which torrents are available. A rights holder can use a BitTorrent client to verify that it is their material being distributed.) It does not circumvent a person's expectation to privacy since the information is made available in a public manner.
And for those mocking how easy it is to circumvent these blocks: sure it is. On the other hand, they are not trying to stop piracy because they know that piracy cannot be stopped. They are trying to do damage control, and that may just work. After all, they only need to stop the people who *may* buy their products. There is very little sense in wasting resources to tackle piracy by those who will never buy their product.
It places a clearly defined limit on the size of the installation media. That, in turn, places a limit upon how much has to be downloaded. And bandwidth is still at a premium for servers and end users.
I think that most of the remaining arguments are moot, except that it's possible that some of older computers may only have a CD writer. (Though I do expect anything that would run Ubuntu would have the ability to read DVDs.)
Society decided that nerds were cool, then decided to actually make those nerdy activities cool. They did so by making it more sociable (e.g. hackerspaces) and more socially responsible (e.g. fablabs). These are good things because it means that people are actually playing with technology, sharing the fruits of their labour, and broadening their understanding in many aspects of life.
The old fashioned nerd still exists, but I'm confident that you'll find that they are still outcasts. After all, people find it easier to relate to people who can relate to people than to people who relate to machines.
You may be consistent, but you are probably hypocritical.
Would you like to see the roadways that you use dug up? Those are subsidized by taxes, and are essential for everything from personal transportation to industry.
Do you seriously want to depend upon unaccountable businesses to provide safe water? Remember, businesses will gladly raise rates and cut safety measures simply to break even (and that is before you factor in greed or negligence).
Are you willing to go without electricity? A lot of our power comes from megaprojects ranging from hydroelectric dams to nuclear reactors, none of which would have been build without government backing.
The basic rule is that you don't depend upon unaccountable businesses to provide essential shared resources. When you do, society will fall apart.
The internet may be important but the telephone remains more important, especially in remote areas where it is the norm for business and power distribution may be less than reliable (POTS usually has backup power supplies, which is useful in emergencies).
On the other hand, there are plenty of places where the telephone system is just fine and they are looking for broadband.
So shouldn't the region be deciding what's more important given their needs and level of development?
These sorts of arguments have been going on since at least the Luddites and probably much earlier. Yet people still work, because they want to work. People will find things that machines cannot currently do, and they will do that until they are replaced by machines, then they will find something else to do. And it has allowed humanity to accomplish many amazing feats that we would usually classify as progress.
It has allowed us to build functioning cities without the fear of trivial diseases that used to kill millions. It has allowed us to focus upon increasing agricultural production instead of wrecking our bodies trying to feed ourselves. It has allowed us to build massive and mostly functioning economic systems that are forward looking, rather than satisfying the needs and using the resources of the moment. And, since most of us are technophiles, it has permitted us to emulate bits and pieces of the human mind so that we can focus upon the creative bits (how do I do this?) instead of being intimidated by menial repetitive tasks.
Sure there are problems, like losing the security of doing the same job until you die (do you really want that?). Yet I would rather live in a world where machines contribute to our lives rather than die in a world because my job makes me a cripple, or there isn't enough food, or diseases run rampant, or having to do 'for ( i = 1; i = 1000000; i++ ) { }' to understand a new bit of physics leaves me contemplating suicide.
OMG, YOU'RE RIGHT! If the system fails to reach even one person, the government is going to start rounding up people off the street and tossing them into forced labour camps. After all, it's for the children!
This message was brought to you by the Emergency Hysteria System (EHS).
You will be able to use PAL/NTSC for a fair bit longer than any other currently available standard for video. Keep in mind that PAL and NTSC have been around for decades and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon because a lot of equipment either depends upon it or will fall back to it. Even "VGA" is unlikely to exist as far into the future because it was a *relatively* specialis standard (at least when compared to PAL/NTSC).
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't you ever heard of the Slippery Slope Conspiracy? It involves a bunch of government agents who scream "Slippery Slope" at the most absurd things so that people will be desensitized to Slippery Slope claims because they will think that the people who make those claims are a bunch of nut-bars! And in another month's time the Slippery Slope Conspirators will have achieved a perfectly zero coefficient of social friction and make the rest of us their true slaves! Not only will we be digging canals with spoons and carrying spoons full of dirt 20 miles up hill both ways and with a 50 lb. steel ball tied to our ankle, but we will be happy for it!
Note to conspiracy-conspiracy theorists: I'm not being serious. Just to be clear, this conspiracy is a figment of my sarcastic imagination and not real.
This is a form of healthcare. You pick up garbage in order to limit the spread of disease, which is far more effective as well as far cheaper than getting medical treatment after the fact.
As for the "recycling" bit: cities usually consider composting and recycling to divert waste from dumps. They do this for economic reasons rather than political reasons because (for some strange reason) very few people want to live near a landfill. Maybe it's because landfills create poor environmental conditions that impact people's health.
So I would say that their priorities are in the right place.
Actually, we should be working on energy efficiency.
Nuclear may be relatively safe but, when things do go wrong, we have to live with the consequences for a wee bit longer.
Most people care about the results, not the specifications. Indeed, most people don't understand the background information required to understand specifications. So the marketeers have to simplify things. Which is awfully hard to do when you're talking about a static image on a website, which would make low end video appear on par with high end video. So they simplify things.
Do I agree with that simplification? Not really. Do I understand that simplification? Absolutely. After all, even though it is fraudulent in the purest sense of the word it is relatively realistic when you are talking about real time rendering of 3-D graphics.
Have you ever walked down a street listening to music? Even with the music at full blast, you can still hear oncoming vehicles. So you are still left with a situation where either the motorist or pedestrian could be at fault.
You're in the convenience store to grab a bottle of water because you're dehydrating after jogging. After quickly glancing at the labels you grab the one that makes the above claim. It has nothing to do with being stupid. It has nothing to do with the implication about other products. It is just that your mind is making a subconscious decision based upon a quick glance at the bottle.
The problem is human psychology, not irrational beliefs.
The edict is sane.
If we were talking about a culinary definition of planets, I would totally agree with you. After all, their work has nothing to do with astronomical bodies.
We are talking about culinary definitions of plants, for which it is completely acceptable for them to have their own definitions. After all, the properties of those plants will affect the products of their labours.
I can use more serious games in my life. A hundred percent serious, nitty gritty political or economically serious, and even technically or ideologically serious. I don't even care if the game violates my world view. Just give me something to think about when I drop the controller and rejoin the real world. Until that happens, I will spend most of my time in literature because a good author will do more to challenge me than the typical mass media title (regardless of the media).
On point 2: government contributes a hell of a lot to innovation, as well as pure research (which is necessary for some innovation). Claiming otherwise it to ignore all of the work done in publicly funded university labs from around the world.
Maybe I should give you two ripe examples that you can understand: the computer and the internet. The former simply would not have been developed without government intervention. Without the latter, we would be living in an expensive and tightly controlled network environment (like AOL or Compuserve of days gone by).
Then there is medical research ...
There are two ways to take your comment: you either want me to pay for what you value, yet you don't want to pay for what I value; or you think that people should only pay for what they value themselves.
From prior experience, most people will claim the latter but mean the former. After all, as soon as you outline the consequences (i.e. cutting funding to their cherished programs) they start screaming bloody murder.
But just in case you claim the latter and actually mean the latter, have you ever considered the consequences? User pay ultimately means that funding is unstable. User pay ultimately means that most programs will be underfunded because people are far more willing to pay for things that tangibly affect their life. And I'm talking about things like bridge maintenance here. Or schools, because some people don't value education (never mind being able to afford it). Oh, and who's going to pay for the prisons once those uneducated bastards are thieving and murdering to make a living? The prisoners themselves? Giggle. :)
Yes, public funding is "fork it over or face the consequences". But most of them are broader social consequences. Quick frankly, I couldn't care less about what happens to people who choose not to pay taxes because they have too much of a "me-me" attitude to give a damn about.
Oops, I was too busy dreaming of the grinding gears of the difference engine to remember point two. :)
The second point is that the modern taxation system works because there is something for everyone. Bleeding hearts like myself see funding going to science and social programs. Rednecks see taxes going towards infrastructure and national security. (Sorry about the over generalizations there, but I use them only to illustrate a point.) Now I know that everyone loves to grumble about taxes, but most people will pay them because they receive some benefits from them. A system of universal taxation wouldn't work otherwise because the people who aren't serve would eventually revolt (which we have seen historically).
In other words, if you want my tax dollars to fund roads you better be willing to see some of your tax dollars go to science.
Sorry, but I want public funding to go towards scientific research for two reasons.
First and foremost, you need public funding to support pure science. There are a few branches of pure science that will attract private donations, but most won't. Take astronomy vs. computers in the pre-WWII era. Astronomy was almost entirely impractical, but it attracted deep pockets. Real computers (i.e. anything beyond adding machines) received very little love at all, even though they turned out to be hugely important to society down the road. Computers were developed primarily because of government funding during and after WWII. Heck, even Charles Babbage received government funding. But all of the other computing projects (and there were a few) received inadequate funding and ended up going nowhere.
That is pretty much how science operated prior to the twentieth century. It even worked, in a limited sense. After all, it did give scientific research a huge kick-start. But let's be realistic too. It would be next to impossible to maintain current rates of scientific progress using that model because you can achieve far higher funding levels by taxing a hundred million people a dollars a head per year than you would by persuading a hundred people to donate a million dollars a head. (Since very few of those donations would be offered on an annual basis.)
Memories (or notes) don't change radically. Ditto for biometrics. Yet behaviours do change, as soon as a person's priorities change. It may not happen often and there is probably a transition period, but I would be lying if I claimed that I am the same person I was a year ago.
For a group concerned about military security, like DARPA, denying access based upon behavioural changes may be appropriate. After all, it may demonstrate bribery or blackmail or some other change of heart. But for everyday transactions it is inappropriate. After all, would you want to be denied access to your money because you went from a greedy SOB to a charitable person (or vica versa).
In a sense, I agree. You won't find me arguing the moment that they want to block child porn and many forms of hate speech. Keep in mind that all of these acts constitute criminal activities (even, in some cases, copyright infringement).
Beyond that, I don't share your confidence that the slippery slope will continue. There are many losses of freedom that society simply will not tolerate and, even if society did, there are civil liberties organizations that will step up to the ball and fight those battles. And even that makes an underlying cynical assumption that the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as policing is only interested in abolishing freedom. Quite frankly, I believe that most democratic governments are trying to balance the needs for law and order with freedom. (I'm not saying they are always right, just that I don't believe in the cynical view.)
So arguments like this really come down to this: do you want to give the government tools to maintain law and order, or do you want to neuter them and face the consequences of lawlessness?
Ah yes, the classical "slippery slope" argument. The problem being that we tend to stop sliding down the slope as soon as the illegal activities run out. Which means everything after hate speech (unless you are trying to do something idiotic like incite a riot or threatening to murder a doctor).
I was a bit concerned in this case because Usenet was involved, which has more legal activity than (say Pirate Bay). Then I looked at the site itself. It is about indexing pirated material. So I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for the "freedom" advocates here because I'm not into the freedom to commit crimes angle.
Mars is for Amerika. Venus is for Russia.
Seriously. Look at where each nation has had its successes and failures.
BT is correct in insisting upon a court order.
On the other hand, it is also completely appropriate to request the block on The Pirate Bay. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this site facilitates the distribution of materials against the rights holders wishes. Which is kinda illegal.
Actions like this are, in my opinion, much better than more clandestine approaches since it utilizes information that is made available to the public. (The Pirate Bay openly displays which torrents are available. A rights holder can use a BitTorrent client to verify that it is their material being distributed.) It does not circumvent a person's expectation to privacy since the information is made available in a public manner.
And for those mocking how easy it is to circumvent these blocks: sure it is. On the other hand, they are not trying to stop piracy because they know that piracy cannot be stopped. They are trying to do damage control, and that may just work. After all, they only need to stop the people who *may* buy their products. There is very little sense in wasting resources to tackle piracy by those who will never buy their product.
It places a clearly defined limit on the size of the installation media. That, in turn, places a limit upon how much has to be downloaded. And bandwidth is still at a premium for servers and end users.
I think that most of the remaining arguments are moot, except that it's possible that some of older computers may only have a CD writer. (Though I do expect anything that would run Ubuntu would have the ability to read DVDs.)
Society decided that nerds were cool, then decided to actually make those nerdy activities cool. They did so by making it more sociable (e.g. hackerspaces) and more socially responsible (e.g. fablabs). These are good things because it means that people are actually playing with technology, sharing the fruits of their labour, and broadening their understanding in many aspects of life.
The old fashioned nerd still exists, but I'm confident that you'll find that they are still outcasts. After all, people find it easier to relate to people who can relate to people than to people who relate to machines.
You may be consistent, but you are probably hypocritical.
Would you like to see the roadways that you use dug up? Those are subsidized by taxes, and are essential for everything from personal transportation to industry.
Do you seriously want to depend upon unaccountable businesses to provide safe water? Remember, businesses will gladly raise rates and cut safety measures simply to break even (and that is before you factor in greed or negligence).
Are you willing to go without electricity? A lot of our power comes from megaprojects ranging from hydroelectric dams to nuclear reactors, none of which would have been build without government backing.
The basic rule is that you don't depend upon unaccountable businesses to provide essential shared resources. When you do, society will fall apart.
And the list can go on.
The internet may be important but the telephone remains more important, especially in remote areas where it is the norm for business and power distribution may be less than reliable (POTS usually has backup power supplies, which is useful in emergencies).
On the other hand, there are plenty of places where the telephone system is just fine and they are looking for broadband.
So shouldn't the region be deciding what's more important given their needs and level of development?
These sorts of arguments have been going on since at least the Luddites and probably much earlier. Yet people still work, because they want to work. People will find things that machines cannot currently do, and they will do that until they are replaced by machines, then they will find something else to do. And it has allowed humanity to accomplish many amazing feats that we would usually classify as progress.
It has allowed us to build functioning cities without the fear of trivial diseases that used to kill millions. It has allowed us to focus upon increasing agricultural production instead of wrecking our bodies trying to feed ourselves. It has allowed us to build massive and mostly functioning economic systems that are forward looking, rather than satisfying the needs and using the resources of the moment. And, since most of us are technophiles, it has permitted us to emulate bits and pieces of the human mind so that we can focus upon the creative bits (how do I do this?) instead of being intimidated by menial repetitive tasks.
Sure there are problems, like losing the security of doing the same job until you die (do you really want that?). Yet I would rather live in a world where machines contribute to our lives rather than die in a world because my job makes me a cripple, or there isn't enough food, or diseases run rampant, or having to do 'for ( i = 1; i = 1000000; i++ ) { }' to understand a new bit of physics leaves me contemplating suicide.
OMG, YOU'RE RIGHT! If the system fails to reach even one person, the government is going to start rounding up people off the street and tossing them into forced labour camps. After all, it's for the children!
This message was brought to you by the Emergency Hysteria System (EHS).
You will be able to use PAL/NTSC for a fair bit longer than any other currently available standard for video. Keep in mind that PAL and NTSC have been around for decades and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon because a lot of equipment either depends upon it or will fall back to it. Even "VGA" is unlikely to exist as far into the future because it was a *relatively* specialis standard (at least when compared to PAL/NTSC).