I read recently that the same has happened in Australia, that adult women with A cups are now illegal in vanilla pr0n. What kind of message does that send to women? That their bodies are so abnormal that images of same are abhorrent threats to social order?
I would eliminate at least one, maybe two of those 'vast's. Christ, man, do you know how many erotic doujins are out there? I would bet money on hundreds of thousands (those manga-kas are prolific). With thousands if not tens of thousands more every year. Yes, I know, 'normal' manga numbers probably in the millions, but in your efforts to vindicate the genre I think you're protesting too much. I also wouldn't rely too much on the 'I don't know where any is' personal experience anecdote. I'm pretty sure that if you knew more creepy otaku shut-ins with loli-shaped pillows that you could find some lolicon pretty close to where-ever you are in Japan, unless the sales have transitioned more online.
When 'erring on the side of caution' means thought crimes, that's too far. You say that pedophiles should expect supervision and scrutiny... for what happens in their heads? Molesters deserve supervision and scrutiny (after prison, just like any other dangerous criminal), but people who are just aroused by kids and take no action deserve no more special treatment than somebody turned on by violence who is nonetheless never physically violent.
Abstract concerns like normalizing a market for harmful criminal activity through (what should be, ethically) non-harmful, non-criminal cannot be allowed to set precedents. It's like a person said in a comment in another thread, it is completely messed up that a person can technically become a criminal in Australia with a piece of paper and a pencil in a locked room. Trying to protect real people by protecting imaginary ones is as psychologically dysfunctional as pedophilia itself (not to mention wholly detrimental to whole genres of art, not just simulated CP).
...you sound jealous because you spend so much time caring...
Apparently you willfully ignored (typical/.) the 'few minutes on the internet' part of my last response as contrasted with real actions expected to yield some kind of produced result.
...and his peers think he's doing it well...
You think the art community is monolithically behind this guy? What are you smoking?
Where does the energy come from, to get all worked up?
Indeed, where could I possibly find the incalculable amounts of energy required to spend a few minutes typing some opinions on the internet! Lord knows I even used strong wording which is universally understood to require Herculean efforts compared to typing mere normal words.
Why would you even bother to care?
Once again, you ignored how I earlier explained that I simply am pleased to express my opinion. There's nothing deeper to it, no matter how much somebody such as yourself or the others want to project a negative motivation onto me, it's just not that complex.
It's just like the deep sarcasm I used with regard to my response about getting worked up. You could project a negative motivation and think I did it because I'm a jerk and I thought it would totally destroy you emotionally somehow or whatever, but that would be wrong. I did it because it amused me, because the very act of doing it made me smile because I thought it was funny. The simplest explanation is usually the best one.
Incidentally, I completely agree, I think much or most of the 'art' in question is horrendous, really horrendous. But I don't give a crap, which is why I (literally) can't be bothered to care.
So, I'm postulating that the reason you care is that you are actually jealous of the guy doing the thing getting the respect you wish you had and the money you wish you had. That's my point.
But you bother to care about my opinion, which if we use your framework for analysis means that you're jealous that I expressed my opinion, that I was respected (modded +5) for my opinion, and that you wish you had expressed your opinion and gotten the same. Maybe you're right, about yourself, and that is why it's called projection .
That makes even less sense. Material in the universe is expanding, galaxies are moving away from each other, yes, but in so far as anybody knows, the electron shell of a hydrogen atom is the same in one galaxy vs another, and (again as far as anybody knows) has not changed based on changes in distance between materials. Is this idea based on any observed phenomena at all? It's all well and good to say that *if* sub-atomic particles expand away from each other the atomic structure loses integrity, but if there is no observed or expected environmental condition that enables such behavior, then the hypothetical doesn't mean anything.
The Big Rip sounds like it doesn't pass the sniff test... the idea that matter/energy needs to relate by weak/strong force interaction to other matter/energy or IT WILL EXPLODE LOLOLOL. I just don't buy it. Matter is self-contained. The gravity of the moon doesn't come from the earth, and the gravity of the earth doesn't come from the sun. The relationship isn't some kind of inherited cascade. The implied units of relationship don't make any sense to me either... so galaxies have to be in interaction range of each other or THEY EXPLODE LOLOLOL? Galaxies? Why wouldn't all the stars, planets, and smaller material chunks within each galaxy be enough to relate to each other, assuming the premise of the theory? The whole thing sounds like something some PhDs came up with while on mind-altering drugs.
Yeah I know I'm replying to myself, but I just figured out how to expand my analogy and make it more clear.
What if the universe right now is like water, and everything in behaves consistently for the state, but what if some 'universal' threshold is passed, and the universe 'freezes'? The 'frozen' universe would be physically consistent as well, but in a completely different way. However, it's impossible to know how, because we can't 'freeze' the universe ourselves and observe the difference.
IANAP, but it seems to me that there may be aspects to physics at work at the 'universe' level that we just don't have the ability to observe, let alone analyze and test. Our knowledge of the physical universe is so small, and our ability to model and test physical properties is so limited, I think that most theories that try to explain phenomena outside/beyond the level of a planetary system are not much more than well-reasoned extrapolated estimates. This why we have revelations like this that the math doesn't jive with the latest observation because our equipment wasn't good enough before or the model wasn't complete.
I think it's entirely possible that there are 'thresholds' in physics, that matter and energy will behave in a consistent way until some threshold is passed, and then the behavioral consistency will change. There's no way to test or observe this, which makes it by definition unscientific, but I don't think that it's really a matter of alternate universes or laws. Alternate in relation/comparison perhaps, but no more so than a matter state change (ice behaves in one consistent way, water in another, but they're not alternate materials, a threshold just needs to be crossed).
Keep on drinking the Haterade, Luddite. So why don't you go back and live the way your prehistoric ancestors did? After all, if increased life expectancy is so bad, just give up all the advancements that have tripled it. After all, mankind was so much nicer back then, right? Aside from all the human sacrifice and slavery and misogyny...
Hmm, let's put this together shall we? When people's lifetimes were extended they had more time to think, become wiser, less concerned with death and the future of their progeny, all in all became less barbaric... hmm... maybe the trend would continue? Maybe, relieving the pressure of death even more would civilize mankind as a whole even more?
I'm not sure if it's what you meant to say, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that art has to be always positive (you said "art should appeal and have the ability to make one happy"). I think 'good' art is whatever captured sensory experience has the ability to connect emotionally with people, with the depth of feeling really being the 'grade' of the artwork. Whether that's beauty or sadness or nobility or pain or what-have-you, it must resonate with people. And if more people look at a work of art and get nothing but feeling of bland meaninglessness and of annoyance at the wasting of time, it is as I say elsewhere to my several detractors a 'net harm' to people, regardless if a few actually do connect with it without the aid of mind-altering drugs.
Ah, I see, so by your logic, if somebody despises people who commit genocide, then really that person's motivation is that the mass murderers are getting so much attention that the person secretly wishes he were a mass murderer too? This is hyperbole of course, but the point is, you are attempting to deny that something can be held in negative regard without an honest lack of respect.
The reality is much more simple I'm afraid. If I thought modern art was a 'real threat' of which to be 'afraid' then I would be working against it in a much more real and effective way than this. As it is, a few minutes venting on the internet is purely self-satisfying. Because I choose to say something, and phrase it as it pleases me, does not make me some neurotic wreck compared to you (if as you say you harbor a similar opinion). It could even be argued, though I do not do so, that your failure to voice your opinion could itself be as or more neurotic, simply in the opposite direction.
I'll start with a personal anecdote. Back in my home metro-area of Seattle, an artist was paid a quarter of a million dollars for a meaningless boondoggle called "Adjacent, Against, Upon". It's three rocks near, partially on, and wholly on three concrete slabs. If you really, really work at it, you can think about what those concepts mean, but you know what else can do that? The title plaque by itself. Most people look at and think, 'what a waste of money' and move on. That money could have been used for essential city services, rather than providing a physical impetus that causes most people who see it to lose more faith in the priorities of the municipal government and mankind in general. In summary: it harms more people (through mildly depressing loss of faith) than it enlightens (the limited effect of which could be reproduced more cheaply) and the diversion of funds deprives others.
Moving onward and upward, art can be politically, socially, or morally harmful. Artistic propaganda that supports dictatorships by glorifying obedience and demonizing dissent. Art that perpetuates stereotypes that reinforce negative, retrogressive social elements such as racism, misogyny, etc. Art that destabilizes, disunifies, and antagonizes for insufficient reason, such as insulting and disrespecting religious or social groups for no deeper purpose than insult and disrespect.
All of these things and more are ways that art has, can, and will continue to harm society. These are the most egregious, where the 'net negative' I spoke of earlier is most obvious, but when it comes to art that is just bad, rather than evil, quantification becomes more difficult because bad art carries little meaning positive or negative.
However, I am nonetheless hoisted by my own petard where my choice of words is concerned. I am willing to accept that, as I said before, I harbor no guilt. That does not diminish its applicability as previously used.
Though it is a realm hard to quantify, the question is, does a work of art have a net benefit or a net detriment to society? Does it 'encourage' or 'express more value' than it 'discourages' or 'erodes faith in human competency or endeavor'? I put these things in quotes because they do not fully express what I'm trying to say. To wax Krishnamurti-esque, language is often as much a barrier to understanding as it is an aid. (Though Krishnamurti would think I was a jerk, because he hated stratification and conflict for virtually any reason.)
To try to answer your questions, I believe there are differences in taste between art which provides a net benefit to society, but I also believe there are artworks that actually degrade or retrogress and do net harm to society as well.
It's like food. Japanese food nor the people who like it are not superior to Italian food or the people who like it, but either is superior to the people who like fast food, because fast food, though it may sate an immediate hunger, is actually harmful and low quality, so the people who like it are actually boorish rubes, regardless of how much pleasure they derive from hurting themselves. (Nor would I have them stopped by regulation, people are entitled to run their own lives, even badly. However, I feel no guilt in feeling superior.)
I never said these things were not art, as is said elsewhere in comments on this topic, art 'is' whatever thing somebody 'frames' as art. Calling anything art makes it art, the question is whether that art is good or bad, successful or a failure. What I said is that these pieces of art are bad, are failures, because their audience is so limited, and that audience itself is appreciative for delusionally poor motives.
The P-39 was dumped on the Soviets precisely because Americans hated to fly it and it was known to be inferior. Do you think we would give the soviets anything we truly believed was good? How many Mustangs or B-17s did we give them? None. The top of the line was kept at home.
The Soviet airmen should be commended for being able to take lemons and make lemonade, but that doesn't mean they weren't still lemons.
You say yourself, 'later tanks' aka they learned the lesson too late. If they hadn't cheaped out on their early mass produced things like the Panzers I-III and made tons of Panzer IVs the Wehrmacht would have been unstoppable.
Of what am I supposedly jealous? The art criticism I said I could and did do, but for which I hated myself? Or the crass creation of things which I consider embarrassing to humanity itself? What are you saying, 'don't knock it 'til you've tried it'? You might as well say the same of telemarketing or something similarly crass and parasitic.
Your analysis is almost certainly correct, and it's why the only thing I hate more than modern art is modern artists and their fans. There was a time long, long ago when art was about years of honing talent to create previously unknown and unexpressed works of beauty in the world. Now it's about cheap, crass attempts at being 'clever', weird, shocking, or so blandly inscrutable as to be worthless to most people. A couple months ago I went to the Hirshhorn and beheld all the boxes, piles of painted garbage, and random lines and thought to myself, to what is the common man supposed to relate in this drivel? Only a handful of prigs think such things have meaning, and the meaning they largely invent to see if they can outwit the other prigs in their artsy clique. I had to do that myself in college for classes that related to visual arts, and it made me despise myself to know I was drawing lines in the air and spewing completely fabricated bullshit that in truth should have no association with the crass visual grotesquery I was supposedly describing, but in such contexts that passes for 'insight'. If a piece of art cannot convey some emotional meaning to a wide audience it is worthless. It is a failure of communication and of art itself.
Australia's government does not (to anybody's knowledge) materially support hacking businesses in other countries to help quash dissent in their own. I agree that Australia's censorship schemes are reprehensible, but the main issue with China is state-sponsored hacking, and Google is the first big name to take a stand on that, and they are using the long-running 'human rights debate' as their weapon of face-losing revenge.
So what do you want to field, the 21st century equivalent of the 'good enough' BF-109? Mass produced mediocrity? The F-22 is, unequivocally, the most superior aircraft extant in its role. What pricetag do you put on 'the best'? What logistical costs are acceptable?
I would say that designing the LCS to be disposable was a bad idea in the first place. There should be only three design goals for any military hardware 1) crew safety 2) combat effectiveness 3) resource efficiency in operation. If it costs more money to accomplish those goals, spend it, or you'll regret it. You'll get things like the P-39, where the brass decided they could save money on the engine, at the cost of making it a combat ineffective death trap.
By taking that clause out of context, you're making it mean something else. In context of the paragraph it means reducing heat *in one place* vs. another. Once again, net heat increase may be both acceptable and necessary if the area of increased heat handles it better and enables the area of decreased heat to function where it otherwise would fail/degrade. I can see you're trying to be both clever and pedantic, but you're just failing to comprehend and I don't know what you think you're adding to this discussion.
It always amuses me when people try to raise performance as a point against a first generation lab prototype vs. a tenth generation refined technology in production. The question is not whether these piezoelectric heat engines/pumps are more efficient than peltiers now, but rather can they be more efficient than peltiers in the future after further development, or is there a foreseeable upper limit to the technology that makes such an application unlikely even with development?
There *is* a need for heat reduction at very small scales, especially in mobile devices or even the implant devices of the future. Of course heat has to go somewhere, the only issue is that the destination of the heat be better able to deal with it than the source.
Quite bluntly, I think there's something wrong with you. You're trying to apply apply standards of human treatment and/or civil rights to machines that look human. What's next, should we pity the animatronics in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland? Framed in another ethical context, what about non-humaniform automations? If you make a car 'intelligent' enough to drive itself (which is entirely possible in a society that can create a humaniform machine to take the physical place of a human to drive a car), how is it any different from a robot doing it? Hell, in that sense, the car is a robot. And it's not going to 'talk back' either, or have needs or feelings. The only difference is that it's still shaped like a car and not a person. So what? If you attach so much importance to the form of something, rather than the essence of what it is, does, and is for, you have problems. You're projecting emotional states and conditions onto inanimate objects because of what they look like, like a child bonding with stuffed animals. Get help.
This is not to say that in some far future there may be a point where civil rights will be appropriate for very high level AI-driven machines (and that regardless of what they are shaped like). If a machine is self-aware, capable of selecting goals for itself for its own reasons that are not hard-coded by a creator, something like a Data from Star Trek, then yes, a machine like that should be respected as analogous to a human. However, if it's just something designed to perform tasks, and doesn't have any ability aside from what it's told to do like machines and low level AI today, there is no need for civil rights, because there will be no independent/individual goals/happiness/perspective to protect anymore than you would protect your dishwashing machine.
Slashdot Mirror
The above post is mine, I accidentally checked the AC box.
I read recently that the same has happened in Australia, that adult women with A cups are now illegal in vanilla pr0n. What kind of message does that send to women? That their bodies are so abnormal that images of same are abhorrent threats to social order?
I would eliminate at least one, maybe two of those 'vast's. Christ, man, do you know how many erotic doujins are out there? I would bet money on hundreds of thousands (those manga-kas are prolific). With thousands if not tens of thousands more every year. Yes, I know, 'normal' manga numbers probably in the millions, but in your efforts to vindicate the genre I think you're protesting too much. I also wouldn't rely too much on the 'I don't know where any is' personal experience anecdote. I'm pretty sure that if you knew more creepy otaku shut-ins with loli-shaped pillows that you could find some lolicon pretty close to where-ever you are in Japan, unless the sales have transitioned more online.
When 'erring on the side of caution' means thought crimes, that's too far. You say that pedophiles should expect supervision and scrutiny... for what happens in their heads? Molesters deserve supervision and scrutiny (after prison, just like any other dangerous criminal), but people who are just aroused by kids and take no action deserve no more special treatment than somebody turned on by violence who is nonetheless never physically violent.
Abstract concerns like normalizing a market for harmful criminal activity through (what should be, ethically) non-harmful, non-criminal cannot be allowed to set precedents. It's like a person said in a comment in another thread, it is completely messed up that a person can technically become a criminal in Australia with a piece of paper and a pencil in a locked room. Trying to protect real people by protecting imaginary ones is as psychologically dysfunctional as pedophilia itself (not to mention wholly detrimental to whole genres of art, not just simulated CP).
...you sound jealous because you spend so much time caring...
Apparently you willfully ignored (typical /.) the 'few minutes on the internet' part of my last response as contrasted with real actions expected to yield some kind of produced result.
...and his peers think he's doing it well...
You think the art community is monolithically behind this guy? What are you smoking?
Where does the energy come from, to get all worked up?
Indeed, where could I possibly find the incalculable amounts of energy required to spend a few minutes typing some opinions on the internet! Lord knows I even used strong wording which is universally understood to require Herculean efforts compared to typing mere normal words.
Why would you even bother to care?
Once again, you ignored how I earlier explained that I simply am pleased to express my opinion. There's nothing deeper to it, no matter how much somebody such as yourself or the others want to project a negative motivation onto me, it's just not that complex.
It's just like the deep sarcasm I used with regard to my response about getting worked up. You could project a negative motivation and think I did it because I'm a jerk and I thought it would totally destroy you emotionally somehow or whatever, but that would be wrong. I did it because it amused me, because the very act of doing it made me smile because I thought it was funny. The simplest explanation is usually the best one.
Incidentally, I completely agree, I think much or most of the 'art' in question is horrendous, really horrendous. But I don't give a crap, which is why I (literally) can't be bothered to care.
So, I'm postulating that the reason you care is that you are actually jealous of the guy doing the thing getting the respect you wish you had and the money you wish you had. That's my point.
But you bother to care about my opinion, which if we use your framework for analysis means that you're jealous that I expressed my opinion, that I was respected (modded +5) for my opinion, and that you wish you had expressed your opinion and gotten the same. Maybe you're right, about yourself, and that is why it's called projection .
That makes even less sense. Material in the universe is expanding, galaxies are moving away from each other, yes, but in so far as anybody knows, the electron shell of a hydrogen atom is the same in one galaxy vs another, and (again as far as anybody knows) has not changed based on changes in distance between materials. Is this idea based on any observed phenomena at all? It's all well and good to say that *if* sub-atomic particles expand away from each other the atomic structure loses integrity, but if there is no observed or expected environmental condition that enables such behavior, then the hypothetical doesn't mean anything.
I assume since the parent was not moderated 'offtopic' that some mod is using 'offtopic' as 'I disagree'. Classy.
The Big Rip sounds like it doesn't pass the sniff test... the idea that matter/energy needs to relate by weak/strong force interaction to other matter/energy or IT WILL EXPLODE LOLOLOL. I just don't buy it. Matter is self-contained. The gravity of the moon doesn't come from the earth, and the gravity of the earth doesn't come from the sun. The relationship isn't some kind of inherited cascade. The implied units of relationship don't make any sense to me either... so galaxies have to be in interaction range of each other or THEY EXPLODE LOLOLOL? Galaxies? Why wouldn't all the stars, planets, and smaller material chunks within each galaxy be enough to relate to each other, assuming the premise of the theory? The whole thing sounds like something some PhDs came up with while on mind-altering drugs.
Yeah I know I'm replying to myself, but I just figured out how to expand my analogy and make it more clear.
What if the universe right now is like water, and everything in behaves consistently for the state, but what if some 'universal' threshold is passed, and the universe 'freezes'? The 'frozen' universe would be physically consistent as well, but in a completely different way. However, it's impossible to know how, because we can't 'freeze' the universe ourselves and observe the difference.
IANAP, but it seems to me that there may be aspects to physics at work at the 'universe' level that we just don't have the ability to observe, let alone analyze and test. Our knowledge of the physical universe is so small, and our ability to model and test physical properties is so limited, I think that most theories that try to explain phenomena outside/beyond the level of a planetary system are not much more than well-reasoned extrapolated estimates. This why we have revelations like this that the math doesn't jive with the latest observation because our equipment wasn't good enough before or the model wasn't complete.
I think it's entirely possible that there are 'thresholds' in physics, that matter and energy will behave in a consistent way until some threshold is passed, and then the behavioral consistency will change. There's no way to test or observe this, which makes it by definition unscientific, but I don't think that it's really a matter of alternate universes or laws. Alternate in relation/comparison perhaps, but no more so than a matter state change (ice behaves in one consistent way, water in another, but they're not alternate materials, a threshold just needs to be crossed).
Yeah I think that was the joke, stultus.
Keep on drinking the Haterade, Luddite. So why don't you go back and live the way your prehistoric ancestors did? After all, if increased life expectancy is so bad, just give up all the advancements that have tripled it. After all, mankind was so much nicer back then, right? Aside from all the human sacrifice and slavery and misogyny...
Hmm, let's put this together shall we? When people's lifetimes were extended they had more time to think, become wiser, less concerned with death and the future of their progeny, all in all became less barbaric... hmm... maybe the trend would continue? Maybe, relieving the pressure of death even more would civilize mankind as a whole even more?
I'm not sure if it's what you meant to say, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that art has to be always positive (you said "art should appeal and have the ability to make one happy"). I think 'good' art is whatever captured sensory experience has the ability to connect emotionally with people, with the depth of feeling really being the 'grade' of the artwork. Whether that's beauty or sadness or nobility or pain or what-have-you, it must resonate with people. And if more people look at a work of art and get nothing but feeling of bland meaninglessness and of annoyance at the wasting of time, it is as I say elsewhere to my several detractors a 'net harm' to people, regardless if a few actually do connect with it without the aid of mind-altering drugs.
Ah, I see, so by your logic, if somebody despises people who commit genocide, then really that person's motivation is that the mass murderers are getting so much attention that the person secretly wishes he were a mass murderer too? This is hyperbole of course, but the point is, you are attempting to deny that something can be held in negative regard without an honest lack of respect.
The reality is much more simple I'm afraid. If I thought modern art was a 'real threat' of which to be 'afraid' then I would be working against it in a much more real and effective way than this. As it is, a few minutes venting on the internet is purely self-satisfying. Because I choose to say something, and phrase it as it pleases me, does not make me some neurotic wreck compared to you (if as you say you harbor a similar opinion). It could even be argued, though I do not do so, that your failure to voice your opinion could itself be as or more neurotic, simply in the opposite direction.
I'll start with a personal anecdote. Back in my home metro-area of Seattle, an artist was paid a quarter of a million dollars for a meaningless boondoggle called "Adjacent, Against, Upon". It's three rocks near, partially on, and wholly on three concrete slabs. If you really, really work at it, you can think about what those concepts mean, but you know what else can do that? The title plaque by itself. Most people look at and think, 'what a waste of money' and move on. That money could have been used for essential city services, rather than providing a physical impetus that causes most people who see it to lose more faith in the priorities of the municipal government and mankind in general. In summary: it harms more people (through mildly depressing loss of faith) than it enlightens (the limited effect of which could be reproduced more cheaply) and the diversion of funds deprives others.
Moving onward and upward, art can be politically, socially, or morally harmful. Artistic propaganda that supports dictatorships by glorifying obedience and demonizing dissent. Art that perpetuates stereotypes that reinforce negative, retrogressive social elements such as racism, misogyny, etc. Art that destabilizes, disunifies, and antagonizes for insufficient reason, such as insulting and disrespecting religious or social groups for no deeper purpose than insult and disrespect.
All of these things and more are ways that art has, can, and will continue to harm society. These are the most egregious, where the 'net negative' I spoke of earlier is most obvious, but when it comes to art that is just bad, rather than evil, quantification becomes more difficult because bad art carries little meaning positive or negative.
However, I am nonetheless hoisted by my own petard where my choice of words is concerned. I am willing to accept that, as I said before, I harbor no guilt. That does not diminish its applicability as previously used.
Though it is a realm hard to quantify, the question is, does a work of art have a net benefit or a net detriment to society? Does it 'encourage' or 'express more value' than it 'discourages' or 'erodes faith in human competency or endeavor'? I put these things in quotes because they do not fully express what I'm trying to say. To wax Krishnamurti-esque, language is often as much a barrier to understanding as it is an aid. (Though Krishnamurti would think I was a jerk, because he hated stratification and conflict for virtually any reason.)
To try to answer your questions, I believe there are differences in taste between art which provides a net benefit to society, but I also believe there are artworks that actually degrade or retrogress and do net harm to society as well.
It's like food. Japanese food nor the people who like it are not superior to Italian food or the people who like it, but either is superior to the people who like fast food, because fast food, though it may sate an immediate hunger, is actually harmful and low quality, so the people who like it are actually boorish rubes, regardless of how much pleasure they derive from hurting themselves. (Nor would I have them stopped by regulation, people are entitled to run their own lives, even badly. However, I feel no guilt in feeling superior.)
I never said these things were not art, as is said elsewhere in comments on this topic, art 'is' whatever thing somebody 'frames' as art. Calling anything art makes it art, the question is whether that art is good or bad, successful or a failure. What I said is that these pieces of art are bad, are failures, because their audience is so limited, and that audience itself is appreciative for delusionally poor motives.
The P-39 was dumped on the Soviets precisely because Americans hated to fly it and it was known to be inferior. Do you think we would give the soviets anything we truly believed was good? How many Mustangs or B-17s did we give them? None. The top of the line was kept at home.
The Soviet airmen should be commended for being able to take lemons and make lemonade, but that doesn't mean they weren't still lemons.
You say yourself, 'later tanks' aka they learned the lesson too late. If they hadn't cheaped out on their early mass produced things like the Panzers I-III and made tons of Panzer IVs the Wehrmacht would have been unstoppable.
Of what am I supposedly jealous? The art criticism I said I could and did do, but for which I hated myself? Or the crass creation of things which I consider embarrassing to humanity itself? What are you saying, 'don't knock it 'til you've tried it'? You might as well say the same of telemarketing or something similarly crass and parasitic.
Your analysis is almost certainly correct, and it's why the only thing I hate more than modern art is modern artists and their fans. There was a time long, long ago when art was about years of honing talent to create previously unknown and unexpressed works of beauty in the world. Now it's about cheap, crass attempts at being 'clever', weird, shocking, or so blandly inscrutable as to be worthless to most people. A couple months ago I went to the Hirshhorn and beheld all the boxes, piles of painted garbage, and random lines and thought to myself, to what is the common man supposed to relate in this drivel? Only a handful of prigs think such things have meaning, and the meaning they largely invent to see if they can outwit the other prigs in their artsy clique. I had to do that myself in college for classes that related to visual arts, and it made me despise myself to know I was drawing lines in the air and spewing completely fabricated bullshit that in truth should have no association with the crass visual grotesquery I was supposedly describing, but in such contexts that passes for 'insight'. If a piece of art cannot convey some emotional meaning to a wide audience it is worthless. It is a failure of communication and of art itself.
Australia's government does not (to anybody's knowledge) materially support hacking businesses in other countries to help quash dissent in their own. I agree that Australia's censorship schemes are reprehensible, but the main issue with China is state-sponsored hacking, and Google is the first big name to take a stand on that, and they are using the long-running 'human rights debate' as their weapon of face-losing revenge.
So what do you want to field, the 21st century equivalent of the 'good enough' BF-109? Mass produced mediocrity? The F-22 is, unequivocally, the most superior aircraft extant in its role. What pricetag do you put on 'the best'? What logistical costs are acceptable?
I would say that designing the LCS to be disposable was a bad idea in the first place. There should be only three design goals for any military hardware 1) crew safety 2) combat effectiveness 3) resource efficiency in operation. If it costs more money to accomplish those goals, spend it, or you'll regret it. You'll get things like the P-39, where the brass decided they could save money on the engine, at the cost of making it a combat ineffective death trap.
By taking that clause out of context, you're making it mean something else. In context of the paragraph it means reducing heat *in one place* vs. another. Once again, net heat increase may be both acceptable and necessary if the area of increased heat handles it better and enables the area of decreased heat to function where it otherwise would fail/degrade. I can see you're trying to be both clever and pedantic, but you're just failing to comprehend and I don't know what you think you're adding to this discussion.
It always amuses me when people try to raise performance as a point against a first generation lab prototype vs. a tenth generation refined technology in production. The question is not whether these piezoelectric heat engines/pumps are more efficient than peltiers now, but rather can they be more efficient than peltiers in the future after further development, or is there a foreseeable upper limit to the technology that makes such an application unlikely even with development?
There *is* a need for heat reduction at very small scales, especially in mobile devices or even the implant devices of the future. Of course heat has to go somewhere, the only issue is that the destination of the heat be better able to deal with it than the source.
Quite bluntly, I think there's something wrong with you. You're trying to apply apply standards of human treatment and/or civil rights to machines that look human. What's next, should we pity the animatronics in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland? Framed in another ethical context, what about non-humaniform automations? If you make a car 'intelligent' enough to drive itself (which is entirely possible in a society that can create a humaniform machine to take the physical place of a human to drive a car), how is it any different from a robot doing it? Hell, in that sense, the car is a robot. And it's not going to 'talk back' either, or have needs or feelings. The only difference is that it's still shaped like a car and not a person. So what? If you attach so much importance to the form of something, rather than the essence of what it is, does, and is for, you have problems. You're projecting emotional states and conditions onto inanimate objects because of what they look like, like a child bonding with stuffed animals. Get help.
This is not to say that in some far future there may be a point where civil rights will be appropriate for very high level AI-driven machines (and that regardless of what they are shaped like). If a machine is self-aware, capable of selecting goals for itself for its own reasons that are not hard-coded by a creator, something like a Data from Star Trek, then yes, a machine like that should be respected as analogous to a human. However, if it's just something designed to perform tasks, and doesn't have any ability aside from what it's told to do like machines and low level AI today, there is no need for civil rights, because there will be no independent/individual goals/happiness/perspective to protect anymore than you would protect your dishwashing machine.