What a poverty of imagination. Space travel (of terrestrial origin) has been around roughly 2 millionths of a percent of the time there has been life on earth. It's a matter of apes or angels. Extraterrestrial life is probably either pre-sentient or so far beyond humanity that it doesn't care about us any more than we care about the drama of warring ant colonies. You're acting like some iron age dipshit who just saw somebody try to fly with wings made of wax and concludes dismissively that men will just never fly. After all, nobody has flown to us, therefore it must be impossible! It can't possibly be because we simply don't know how yet, no sir.
I'm at work so I don't dare do such a thing, but based on natural assumptions alone... when are people going to learn how the Streissand Effect works?! If you don't want attention the best thing you can do is ignore somebody. Trying to silence them is about as effective as handing them a megaphone, because in addition to whatever 'interesting' thing they were saying about you before, they can now additionally talk about how you're suppressing them to a forum which above almost all other things despises suppression as antithetical to its essential nature.
Net neutrality means a lot of things to different people. To the consumer it means being able to use the service they pay for in any way that the want. If somebody pays for unlimited use of a connection with x speed up and y speed down, and then the ISP tries to impose arbitrary limits or downshifts speeds on some or all traffic based on the individual user or the type of content, that is unethical. The ISP is then failing to render the service it has been paid to provide within the parameters it advertised.
You of course have some personal problem with "piracy", but you see that cannot be enforced without the wholesale compromise of privacy. If you want to limit or eliminate bittorrents for example because of their evil file sharing potential, you then also limit or eliminate one of the primary distribution methods for Linux distributions' install disk images. Should I not be able to download Linux just so you can feel better that somebody can't download copyrighted content? Should all content transmitted be 'inspected' by some internet Gestapo to make sure that the content isn't copyrighted?
The other level of network neutrality is that of content providers themselves and their relationships with bandwidth providers (ISPs). Within this there is the division of a 'positive' traffic agreement such as paying to give a certain type of traffic the highest priority vs. a 'negative' traffic agreement where the payment is for reducing traffic of a certain type to the lowest priority or eliminating it altogether. Conceivably, for example, hulu could pay AT&T to prioritize its traffic above others to reduce the effects its users would feel during peak congestion hours on networks. As a consequence all non-hulu traffic would have higher latency (though probably not too much). Or Vimeo could pay Verizon to downgrade Veoh's traffic, or even to block all their traffic, as a bid to undermine their competition, which could lead to a bidding war between the two companies and Verizon to disrupt/eliminate each other's traffic from that ISP to the detriment of all consumers involved.
You'll note that where network neutrality applies to content providers, file sharing is not involved at all. It's also not about defraying/'passing on' costs. It's about paying for 'premium' treatment or paying to kneecap your competition. Both of which are detrimental to some degree to the broader interests of internet users.
All of that being said, I think you're a dick, a moralist asshole who wants to support a corrupt system of middlemen enforcing an obsolete paradigm of false scarcity. Funny thing is, I'm not even a leftist, I'm a minarcho-capitalist, but intellectual property has no place in a truly free market. A truly free market would allow for people to use their resources in whatever way they can, and if one person can produce another person's idea cheaper and better, the second person should not be able to go crying to the government to make the first person stop. People should be paid to work, not paid 'residuals' or 'royalties' for years based on something they did in a few hours.
I don't mind that people quote me, but at least have the common courtesy to attribute it to me. (This is not the first time on/. and it's starting to annoy me.)
Yes, why don't you learn about them? While the concept of the Japanese internment was morally and ethically wrong, the camps themselves were run as humanely as any POW camp according to and in excess of the standards of the Geneva Convention. The Japanese were housed and fed in the same manner as those guarding them. They were given medical attention if and when they needed it, once again to the same standard as that given to the camp administration itself. They were not forced to involuntary labor, there was no systemic sexual or physical abuse (not that there isn't a bad apple in every system, but it was not supported by the system itself).
I will never defend the idea behind the internment camps, but the camps themselves were as good if not better than any POW camp during that period. To attack the camps' conditions one would have to level similar criticism at every form of military and civil imprisonment in the world at that time. That does not make for much of an indictment.
Especially when contrasted with the Japanese treatment of their prisoners of war, which did include civilian internment as well. Why don't we compare and contrast American Pastime with Empire of the Sun? It's absolutely absurd. The Japanese starved, assaulted, and labored both their military and civilian prisoners to death by the hundreds of thousands. They withheld medical treatment regularly and watched their prisoners die slow deaths from simple infections.
The moral difference between the Japanese treatment of prisoners and the American treatment of prisoners is as wide as the gulf between genocide and mere wrongful imprisonment. They are not even in the same class.
That which cannot or can no longer be known becomes effectively immaterial as a contribution to humanity and can have no meaningful interaction with its development. You might as well argue about a million different things that somebody *might* have written or said but were similarly lost or not transcribed. Why stop there? What about all the ideas never given voice? The potential thoughts left unthought? Your position reduces to absurdity rather quickly. Unless there is some yet hidden treasure trove of ancient science fiction on clay tablets buried somewhere, what is unknown about that part of literary history is in fact unknowable to people in the present time, and therefore irrelevant.
(Ironically you undermine your original reference, as if we're supposed to wonder about things lost or untranscribed, then for all we know there was some unknown work by some unknown person created at some unknown time before Lucian's True History.)
While I don't think Barr had a wholesale Damascus road conversion to 'true' libertarianism, voting Libertarian for President is, unfortunately, in reality more symbolic than effective. And if the country suddenly woke up and LP fever swept the electorate and Barr had won, would anybody really be disappointed? Not me. Though in truth I wish it was Wayne Allyn Root at the top of the ticket.
You have made a fundamental mistake in your assessment. It's only partially about buying in, but another perhaps even more significant part is about fear. On each side you have a core of bandwagon party line douchebags who will buy into virtually every part of the platform and fight for it to the death. Then you have the party periphery of moderates that like some, are neutral to some, and might even dislike some of the platform, but are certainly more afraid of the other platform than they are apathetic about their own. Then there are the independents (hi!) who hate enough of both platforms that fear of one over the other is no longer such a big deal.
Quite frankly I think that the duopoly exists because the right controls the churches and the left controls the schools. All the bullshit the right is wrong about comes from the churches, and half the bullshit the left is wrong about comes from the schools.
I don't know what solution there really is, but I think part of it should be a two pronged assault: a) secular humanist (atheist/agnostic) "evangelism" to challenge the blind beliefs of the masses and b) abolition of Departments of Education at all levels of government.
Yes, and the Bible also says the Earth doesn't move and the Sun goes around it. If 'He' wanted that corrected wouldn't 'He' have done that by now? The Bible is bullshit. However, it remains that Jesus Christ himself according to the Bible commanded his followers to buy swords. I'm sure that if the scene had taken place in the present era it would have been guns. It's simply a matter of what could be bought to serve the function of self-defense (which was obviously Christ's intention as he got all mad when his disciples preemptively attacked somebody with the aforementioned swords).
Not to dismiss Lucian of Samosata (of whom I am exceedingly fond, his Hermotimus dialogue was catalytic in my teenage apostasy), but he was an outlying exception. While his True History was the first work of fiction that could be called science fiction, there would be none others like it until the modern era.
You make perfect sense, this is exactly why recruitment for the armed forces is done with grisly carnage instead of half-fictitious visions of grandiose self-empowerment./sarcasm
No really, you don't attract people with tedium or horror. You attract them with glossy simplifications and broad-minded, hopeful intangibles.
Too bad there are several people who claim to have done that, and they frequently report different 'gods' if any at all. Quite frankly I'd sooner believe accounts of Sikhist Waheguru than all the moral bankruptcy of Yahweh. However the universe works well enough without any gods, so I'll stick to believing only in things I could reasonably expect to prove to myself if I so chose.
And that's self defeating, a self-fulfilling prophecy, like all the other people who say 'I'm not wasting my vote on somebody who can't win!' And then they don't win... surprise... because people didn't vote for them.
It's all fun and games until somebody is garroted by a peripheral cable... all the more reason to go wireless I suppose. But then you have hazardous batteries and nutjobs who think that very low power radio transmitters are going to give them cancer. You just can't win.
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What a poverty of imagination. Space travel (of terrestrial origin) has been around roughly 2 millionths of a percent of the time there has been life on earth. It's a matter of apes or angels. Extraterrestrial life is probably either pre-sentient or so far beyond humanity that it doesn't care about us any more than we care about the drama of warring ant colonies. You're acting like some iron age dipshit who just saw somebody try to fly with wings made of wax and concludes dismissively that men will just never fly. After all, nobody has flown to us, therefore it must be impossible! It can't possibly be because we simply don't know how yet, no sir.
Uh, China's already doing that hardcore. Look up Vanguard's documentary called Chinatown, Africa.
Mechanical Turk FTW. Apparently we don't really need strong AI so long as we have cheap labor in the 3rd world.
One wonders how many times he has been Rick Roll'd and Goatse'd.
I'm at work so I don't dare do such a thing, but based on natural assumptions alone... when are people going to learn how the Streissand Effect works?! If you don't want attention the best thing you can do is ignore somebody. Trying to silence them is about as effective as handing them a megaphone, because in addition to whatever 'interesting' thing they were saying about you before, they can now additionally talk about how you're suppressing them to a forum which above almost all other things despises suppression as antithetical to its essential nature.
Net neutrality means a lot of things to different people. To the consumer it means being able to use the service they pay for in any way that the want. If somebody pays for unlimited use of a connection with x speed up and y speed down, and then the ISP tries to impose arbitrary limits or downshifts speeds on some or all traffic based on the individual user or the type of content, that is unethical. The ISP is then failing to render the service it has been paid to provide within the parameters it advertised.
You of course have some personal problem with "piracy", but you see that cannot be enforced without the wholesale compromise of privacy. If you want to limit or eliminate bittorrents for example because of their evil file sharing potential, you then also limit or eliminate one of the primary distribution methods for Linux distributions' install disk images. Should I not be able to download Linux just so you can feel better that somebody can't download copyrighted content? Should all content transmitted be 'inspected' by some internet Gestapo to make sure that the content isn't copyrighted?
The other level of network neutrality is that of content providers themselves and their relationships with bandwidth providers (ISPs). Within this there is the division of a 'positive' traffic agreement such as paying to give a certain type of traffic the highest priority vs. a 'negative' traffic agreement where the payment is for reducing traffic of a certain type to the lowest priority or eliminating it altogether. Conceivably, for example, hulu could pay AT&T to prioritize its traffic above others to reduce the effects its users would feel during peak congestion hours on networks. As a consequence all non-hulu traffic would have higher latency (though probably not too much). Or Vimeo could pay Verizon to downgrade Veoh's traffic, or even to block all their traffic, as a bid to undermine their competition, which could lead to a bidding war between the two companies and Verizon to disrupt/eliminate each other's traffic from that ISP to the detriment of all consumers involved.
You'll note that where network neutrality applies to content providers, file sharing is not involved at all. It's also not about defraying/'passing on' costs. It's about paying for 'premium' treatment or paying to kneecap your competition. Both of which are detrimental to some degree to the broader interests of internet users.
All of that being said, I think you're a dick, a moralist asshole who wants to support a corrupt system of middlemen enforcing an obsolete paradigm of false scarcity. Funny thing is, I'm not even a leftist, I'm a minarcho-capitalist, but intellectual property has no place in a truly free market. A truly free market would allow for people to use their resources in whatever way they can, and if one person can produce another person's idea cheaper and better, the second person should not be able to go crying to the government to make the first person stop. People should be paid to work, not paid 'residuals' or 'royalties' for years based on something they did in a few hours.
I don't mind that people quote me, but at least have the common courtesy to attribute it to me. (This is not the first time on /. and it's starting to annoy me.)
Yes, why don't you learn about them? While the concept of the Japanese internment was morally and ethically wrong, the camps themselves were run as humanely as any POW camp according to and in excess of the standards of the Geneva Convention. The Japanese were housed and fed in the same manner as those guarding them. They were given medical attention if and when they needed it, once again to the same standard as that given to the camp administration itself. They were not forced to involuntary labor, there was no systemic sexual or physical abuse (not that there isn't a bad apple in every system, but it was not supported by the system itself).
I will never defend the idea behind the internment camps, but the camps themselves were as good if not better than any POW camp during that period. To attack the camps' conditions one would have to level similar criticism at every form of military and civil imprisonment in the world at that time. That does not make for much of an indictment.
Especially when contrasted with the Japanese treatment of their prisoners of war, which did include civilian internment as well. Why don't we compare and contrast American Pastime with Empire of the Sun? It's absolutely absurd. The Japanese starved, assaulted, and labored both their military and civilian prisoners to death by the hundreds of thousands. They withheld medical treatment regularly and watched their prisoners die slow deaths from simple infections.
The moral difference between the Japanese treatment of prisoners and the American treatment of prisoners is as wide as the gulf between genocide and mere wrongful imprisonment. They are not even in the same class.
You clearly do not know anything about the history of communist dictators and arcade games. It was Fidel Castro.
You pedantry is born of obtusery (obviously he was talking about the US military alone), and you have consequently contributed nothing.
Wait... so you're saying that people who produce and provide need to penalized? That sounds awfully familiar...
That which cannot or can no longer be known becomes effectively immaterial as a contribution to humanity and can have no meaningful interaction with its development. You might as well argue about a million different things that somebody *might* have written or said but were similarly lost or not transcribed. Why stop there? What about all the ideas never given voice? The potential thoughts left unthought? Your position reduces to absurdity rather quickly. Unless there is some yet hidden treasure trove of ancient science fiction on clay tablets buried somewhere, what is unknown about that part of literary history is in fact unknowable to people in the present time, and therefore irrelevant.
(Ironically you undermine your original reference, as if we're supposed to wonder about things lost or untranscribed, then for all we know there was some unknown work by some unknown person created at some unknown time before Lucian's True History.)
While this is generally true, there was one case where one of my coworkers shook my hand when he found out I had voted for Barr.
While I don't think Barr had a wholesale Damascus road conversion to 'true' libertarianism, voting Libertarian for President is, unfortunately, in reality more symbolic than effective. And if the country suddenly woke up and LP fever swept the electorate and Barr had won, would anybody really be disappointed? Not me. Though in truth I wish it was Wayne Allyn Root at the top of the ticket.
You have made a fundamental mistake in your assessment. It's only partially about buying in, but another perhaps even more significant part is about fear. On each side you have a core of bandwagon party line douchebags who will buy into virtually every part of the platform and fight for it to the death. Then you have the party periphery of moderates that like some, are neutral to some, and might even dislike some of the platform, but are certainly more afraid of the other platform than they are apathetic about their own. Then there are the independents (hi!) who hate enough of both platforms that fear of one over the other is no longer such a big deal.
Quite frankly I think that the duopoly exists because the right controls the churches and the left controls the schools. All the bullshit the right is wrong about comes from the churches, and half the bullshit the left is wrong about comes from the schools.
I don't know what solution there really is, but I think part of it should be a two pronged assault: a) secular humanist (atheist/agnostic) "evangelism" to challenge the blind beliefs of the masses and b) abolition of Departments of Education at all levels of government.
Yes, and the Bible also says the Earth doesn't move and the Sun goes around it. If 'He' wanted that corrected wouldn't 'He' have done that by now? The Bible is bullshit. However, it remains that Jesus Christ himself according to the Bible commanded his followers to buy swords. I'm sure that if the scene had taken place in the present era it would have been guns. It's simply a matter of what could be bought to serve the function of self-defense (which was obviously Christ's intention as he got all mad when his disciples preemptively attacked somebody with the aforementioned swords).
Whooooooosh!
Not to dismiss Lucian of Samosata (of whom I am exceedingly fond, his Hermotimus dialogue was catalytic in my teenage apostasy), but he was an outlying exception. While his True History was the first work of fiction that could be called science fiction, there would be none others like it until the modern era.
You make perfect sense, this is exactly why recruitment for the armed forces is done with grisly carnage instead of half-fictitious visions of grandiose self-empowerment. /sarcasm
No really, you don't attract people with tedium or horror. You attract them with glossy simplifications and broad-minded, hopeful intangibles.
Too bad there are several people who claim to have done that, and they frequently report different 'gods' if any at all. Quite frankly I'd sooner believe accounts of Sikhist Waheguru than all the moral bankruptcy of Yahweh. However the universe works well enough without any gods, so I'll stick to believing only in things I could reasonably expect to prove to myself if I so chose.
And that's self defeating, a self-fulfilling prophecy, like all the other people who say 'I'm not wasting my vote on somebody who can't win!' And then they don't win... surprise... because people didn't vote for them.
I for one can say fuck em both, I voted for Barr.
Luke 22:36.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means.
It's all fun and games until somebody is garroted by a peripheral cable... all the more reason to go wireless I suppose. But then you have hazardous batteries and nutjobs who think that very low power radio transmitters are going to give them cancer. You just can't win.
Well, if it helps any, xkcd has a map of who controls various blocks (across classes).