So would you suggesting banning all of that because it's "alters the persons intuition of what is ok"?
Nope. I am suggesting you as a society actually reflect on your own values. For example, when I get to see gun debate in the US it seems that there is a foregone conclusion that rights to bear arms is good and ideas that guns are somehow bad are dangerous. If enough people will start to believe that, then those guns might start to be banned. Why are you afraid that reason might compel your nation to ban/restrict/frown upon guns?
What facts? There are no facts, only intuitive reasoning. That is the whole point. The OP also has no facts, better yet, no reasoning and even the statements made were just sarcastic.
My common sense tells me that anyone who cannot erect a concrete wall between fantasy and reality is insane, suffering retardation, or otherwise mentally incompetent
I hope you agree with my main point, which is that common sense is unreliable.
I should add that fore quite a while philosophers have struggled with getting reliable knowledge about external world and so far there has been little success. That is to say, basically we all are living in a fantasy world. It has some links to the objective reality, but the vast majority of things you intuitively believe are more or less false.
So - what do you feel about depictions of crime in media then? Gateway to crime? Violent computer games? Novels? Music?
I have noticed that USA media is rather fond of depicting gun usage as either really cool or at least just normal. And I see that Americans consider rights to bear arms as part of their identity, so I am not that surprised by the regular shootings you have there. I certainly see that media, be it movies/games/books/music has a strong impact on society.
What I am still surprised about is that people are not willing to discuss the implications of the media on their societies.
Perhaps measure response to stimuli before and after use of such a doll?
If the issue is “does sex toys increase desire or reduce shame to have sex with living humans?” then this could give meaningful answers. But in this case we are more interested in whether this will increase sexual abuse. How do you measure the link between the two?
You are right, this is common sense. However, the same common sense teaches us that the Sun is rotating around Earth.
My common sense is telling me that using sex dolls can blur the line between a person and an object. Most people consider other humans as real persons just like them, but through the "right education", they can see other people as objects. This is not because they are sick. Chattel slavery came about when certain races were even considered different species and thus could be treated as animals. If you were a white person living in the Southern USA before the civil war, your social reality would inform you that blacks were not real people. Now, what does this have to do with sex dolls?
Lets take a person who is attracted to prepubescent children. General social norms would inform him that having sex with children is not acceptable (unless they have isolated themselves in a social bubble of those who think otherwise). They would normally believe that a child has certain autonomy and unalienable rights. Now this person buys a sex robot with high degree of realism (AI, realistic materials and whatnot). The design goal of the machine is specifically to resemble as closely as possible the real thing. This machine has no autonomy or rights. The person now learns that they can do anything with the “doll” and that is perfectly fine. The problem is that the sex with the doll alters the persons intuition of what is ok to do with children.
You might argue that since that person now has a sex doll, why would they rape a child? To that I must ask, why would anybody cheat on their spouse? People fall in love, want to experiment and what not.
If you think that people can understand difference between real humans and machines, I would say that if asked this way, then most would answer correctly, but study about physics students understanding of physics does not make me hopeful. Yes, intellectually they understand that everyday physics is governed by Newtons laws, but practically they have Aristotelian understanding at best. What are the chances that a regular person can compartmentalize difference between robots and people, when the robots are explicitly made as people-like and possible?
Sure, this is just my common sense reasoning, which at best as valid as Aristotelian physics. I just want to warn you that common sense ofttimes is faulty, that is why science was invented.
rather than having to deal with the bugs and random system-no-longer-boots issues
This is rather interesting. As a Fedora user I have lived with systemd for quite a while and now looking back I can say that i had much more issues with booting and shutdown before switching to systemd. Perhaps I'm just lucky, perhaps software has matured more and with time such bugs get caught regardless of init systems.
My point was that systemd is modular. It is an umbrella term that encompass init system itself, logind, journald, udevd and other daemons and utilities. I personally don't care much about monolith vs. modular meta discussion, since those are vague terms to begin with and each approach has problems of its own, therefore I tend to discard opinion that can be summed up with “project X should be modular/monolith”, unless they have actually worked with the software and the architecture has limited them somehow.
That being said, have you written software for systemd or used its API? If so, what were the issues that would have been solved by further modularization? Have you contacted systemd team (yes, there are many) about the issues? If so and they didn't buy your case, what were the reasons for rejecting proposal?
If you have had issues with administrating machines running systemd, what issues were there because of “monolith design”? The parent “Viol8” was concerned with attack surface, but in this particular case the surface attack could be easily reduced by disabling the service.
I am not saying that systemd is flawless, but the OP made a point that other software is well designed and well written. Which is not true. I would suggest reading The Unix-Haters handbook.
Thanks for actually saying what you "have been saying". But "not having to reboot to upgrade your system" until very recently has not been true for Linux kernel.
We don't want a huge monolithic application as init since that brings a huge attack surface to the most important process in the OS
Perhaps we need to get rid of Linux kernel as well. But seriously, to reduce the attack surface, just disable unused services (the article even points out that Debian has systemd-resolved disabled by default). systemd is modular.
If you want to publish fan-fic about how “the left” victimize software developers, there are more appropriate places, like dedicated fan-fic sites for all tastes, however bizarre.
If a service doesn't quite fit systemd, work on systemd until it fits, don't rewrite it!
Part of the appeal of the systemd is that it minimises the idiosyncrasies of all the different tools. You don't have to rewrite the services, but fitting them to systemd is reasonable. For example, udev was not rewritten, just integrated.
originals were made by experts in that field
Whatever made you say that? There are no mandatory security audit, secure coding practices, mandatory code reviews, qualification certificates or anything like that in free software. Some of it is even insecure by design (I'm looking at you, X.org). systemd will get rid of these bugs eventually as time goes on.
Of course, all theses problems could have been avoided, if it had been written in C++14 or rust from the beginning. (And yes, that was sarcasm. Sorry.)
It's hardly better. “more luck in opportunities” indicates that this is a specific kind of “luck”. Even the privileges of the king in the French absolutism was essentially “more luck in the opportunities presented to him”.
odds are that he will have had more luck in the opportunities presented to him
Do you have a better word to describe this phenomena than “privilege”?
Saying that we both have more power and prestige because we're white is nonsense.
Privilege is not binary, nor single dimensional. You are more privileged on the social status and income dimension. And I guess you all are enjoying all the privileges that physically and mentally abled enjoy.
Assuming all else is equal, this is easy to answer: Twice as long. Hurray for binary!
This holds true on the assumption that game play rate is constant. My back of the envelope (literally) calculations indicate, that if the growth of of games played is linear, then after twice the time, the total amount of games will increase fourfold.
[..]nobody would believe any of their shit if they had a grounding in logic and critical thinking[...]
I guess you are not familiar with the theological traditions of Abrahamic religions, which are not strangers to logic or critical thinking. The problem is not lacking those skills, it's the lack of domain knowledge. I used to believe a lot of bullshit (Who am I kidding? I still believe a lot of bullshit, I just don't know which ones are bs), but rarely have I got rid of false beliefs because I learned De Morgan's laws, or found out about yet another fallacy. If you don't know anything about chemistry and biology, “structured water” sounds as credible as quantum cryptography.
Slashdot Mirror
So would you suggesting banning all of that because it's "alters the persons intuition of what is ok"?
Nope. I am suggesting you as a society actually reflect on your own values. For example, when I get to see gun debate in the US it seems that there is a foregone conclusion that rights to bear arms is good and ideas that guns are somehow bad are dangerous. If enough people will start to believe that, then those guns might start to be banned. Why are you afraid that reason might compel your nation to ban/restrict/frown upon guns?
What facts? There are no facts, only intuitive reasoning. That is the whole point. The OP also has no facts, better yet, no reasoning and even the statements made were just sarcastic.
My common sense tells me that anyone who cannot erect a concrete wall between fantasy and reality is insane, suffering retardation, or otherwise mentally incompetent
I hope you agree with my main point, which is that common sense is unreliable.
I should add that fore quite a while philosophers have struggled with getting reliable knowledge about external world and so far there has been little success. That is to say, basically we all are living in a fantasy world. It has some links to the objective reality, but the vast majority of things you intuitively believe are more or less false.
So - what do you feel about depictions of crime in media then? Gateway to crime? Violent computer games? Novels? Music?
I have noticed that USA media is rather fond of depicting gun usage as either really cool or at least just normal. And I see that Americans consider rights to bear arms as part of their identity, so I am not that surprised by the regular shootings you have there. I certainly see that media, be it movies/games/books/music has a strong impact on society.
What I am still surprised about is that people are not willing to discuss the implications of the media on their societies.
I think he means take note of the data points.
Since this is criminal activity that has a strong stigma, getting unbiased data points seems like a really difficult thing to do.
Perhaps measure response to stimuli before and after use of such a doll?
If the issue is “does sex toys increase desire or reduce shame to have sex with living humans?” then this could give meaningful answers. But in this case we are more interested in whether this will increase sexual abuse. How do you measure the link between the two?
If pedophiles are people who CAN'T control their natural impulses to have sex with children
That is not what paedophilia is. By that understanding, heterosexual man is a man that can't control their impulse to have sex with women.
You are right, this is common sense. However, the same common sense teaches us that the Sun is rotating around Earth.
My common sense is telling me that using sex dolls can blur the line between a person and an object. Most people consider other humans as real persons just like them, but through the "right education", they can see other people as objects. This is not because they are sick. Chattel slavery came about when certain races were even considered different species and thus could be treated as animals. If you were a white person living in the Southern USA before the civil war, your social reality would inform you that blacks were not real people. Now, what does this have to do with sex dolls?
Lets take a person who is attracted to prepubescent children. General social norms would inform him that having sex with children is not acceptable (unless they have isolated themselves in a social bubble of those who think otherwise). They would normally believe that a child has certain autonomy and unalienable rights. Now this person buys a sex robot with high degree of realism (AI, realistic materials and whatnot). The design goal of the machine is specifically to resemble as closely as possible the real thing. This machine has no autonomy or rights. The person now learns that they can do anything with the “doll” and that is perfectly fine. The problem is that the sex with the doll alters the persons intuition of what is ok to do with children.
You might argue that since that person now has a sex doll, why would they rape a child? To that I must ask, why would anybody cheat on their spouse? People fall in love, want to experiment and what not.
If you think that people can understand difference between real humans and machines, I would say that if asked this way, then most would answer correctly, but study about physics students understanding of physics does not make me hopeful. Yes, intellectually they understand that everyday physics is governed by Newtons laws, but practically they have Aristotelian understanding at best. What are the chances that a regular person can compartmentalize difference between robots and people, when the robots are explicitly made as people-like and possible?
Sure, this is just my common sense reasoning, which at best as valid as Aristotelian physics. I just want to warn you that common sense ofttimes is faulty, that is why science was invented.
find out if having childlike sex dolls are a stepping stone to abusing real children
Can you give a general outline of how to make such study that can demonstrate causality and get past ethics committee?
rather than having to deal with the bugs and random system-no-longer-boots issues
This is rather interesting. As a Fedora user I have lived with systemd for quite a while and now looking back I can say that i had much more issues with booting and shutdown before switching to systemd. Perhaps I'm just lucky, perhaps software has matured more and with time such bugs get caught regardless of init systems.
My point was that systemd is modular. It is an umbrella term that encompass init system itself, logind, journald, udevd and other daemons and utilities. I personally don't care much about monolith vs. modular meta discussion, since those are vague terms to begin with and each approach has problems of its own, therefore I tend to discard opinion that can be summed up with “project X should be modular/monolith”, unless they have actually worked with the software and the architecture has limited them somehow.
That being said, have you written software for systemd or used its API? If so, what were the issues that would have been solved by further modularization? Have you contacted systemd team (yes, there are many) about the issues? If so and they didn't buy your case, what were the reasons for rejecting proposal?
If you have had issues with administrating machines running systemd, what issues were there because of “monolith design”? The parent “Viol8” was concerned with attack surface, but in this particular case the surface attack could be easily reduced by disabling the service.
Usually it is solved with benefits and social housing.
I am not saying that systemd is flawless, but the OP made a point that other software is well designed and well written. Which is not true. I would suggest reading The Unix-Haters handbook.
Thanks for actually saying what you "have been saying". But "not having to reboot to upgrade your system" until very recently has not been true for Linux kernel.
We don't want a huge monolithic application as init since that brings a huge attack surface to the most important process in the OS
Perhaps we need to get rid of Linux kernel as well. But seriously, to reduce the attack surface, just disable unused services (the article even points out that Debian has systemd-resolved disabled by default). systemd is modular.
If you want to publish fan-fic about how “the left” victimize software developers, there are more appropriate places, like dedicated fan-fic sites for all tastes, however bizarre.
Told what exactly? That software has bugs?
If a service doesn't quite fit systemd, work on systemd until it fits, don't rewrite it!
Part of the appeal of the systemd is that it minimises the idiosyncrasies of all the different tools. You don't have to rewrite the services, but fitting them to systemd is reasonable. For example, udev was not rewritten, just integrated.
originals were made by experts in that field
Whatever made you say that? There are no mandatory security audit, secure coding practices, mandatory code reviews, qualification certificates or anything like that in free software. Some of it is even insecure by design (I'm looking at you, X.org). systemd will get rid of these bugs eventually as time goes on.
Of course, all theses problems could have been avoided, if it had been written in C++14 or rust from the beginning. (And yes, that was sarcasm. Sorry.)
A rich black guy has every bit the same opportunity as a rich white guy. A poor black guy has the same opportunities as a poor white guy.
While I am not a sociologist, quick search for social mobility shows that poor blacks are more likely to stay poor.
It's hardly better. “more luck in opportunities” indicates that this is a specific kind of “luck”. Even the privileges of the king in the French absolutism was essentially “more luck in the opportunities presented to him”.
You have confused “unprotected people” with “outlaws”.
You have confused science with scientific method. The former has quite a few biases.
odds are that he will have had more luck in the opportunities presented to him
Do you have a better word to describe this phenomena than “privilege”?
Saying that we both have more power and prestige because we're white is nonsense.
Privilege is not binary, nor single dimensional. You are more privileged on the social status and income dimension. And I guess you all are enjoying all the privileges that physically and mentally abled enjoy.
Assuming all else is equal, this is easy to answer: Twice as long. Hurray for binary!
This holds true on the assumption that game play rate is constant. My back of the envelope (literally) calculations indicate, that if the growth of of games played is linear, then after twice the time, the total amount of games will increase fourfold.
[..]nobody would believe any of their shit if they had a grounding in logic and critical thinking[...]
I guess you are not familiar with the theological traditions of Abrahamic religions, which are not strangers to logic or critical thinking. The problem is not lacking those skills, it's the lack of domain knowledge. I used to believe a lot of bullshit (Who am I kidding? I still believe a lot of bullshit, I just don't know which ones are bs), but rarely have I got rid of false beliefs because I learned De Morgan's laws, or found out about yet another fallacy. If you don't know anything about chemistry and biology, “structured water” sounds as credible as quantum cryptography.