I strongly dislike this argument of "you didn't vote, so your opinion doesn't matter".
Let's take the classic exercise of "two oncoming trains, do you save your grandmother or 10 children (and you've only time to save one)?" Electing to do neither is also a valid choice.
A friend of mine is a pastor who comes from a family of Christian missionaries in Japan. Christianity is actually growing rather quickly in that country thanks largely to the work of Christian missionaries.
I'm actually quite interested in seeing how Japan looks from a religious standpoint 100 years from now. It's probably the only country that is having Christianity brought to it after civilization has developed to such a degree.
Apologies if I offended you, but Atheists as a group tend not to believe in God. Lack of belief in God, I've found, is often due to a healthy sense of skepticism and desire for proof and evidence. A Good BS detector is powered by a healthy sense of skepticism.
The statement that I made is no different or less accurate than "All Christians believe in Jesus". If you don't believe in Jesus, most people probably wouldn't consider you a Christian.
Also, I don't have a neckbeard (just a goatee!) and Doritos are inferior to the greatly superior Ruffles.
And there is no functional proof of the bible? Have you looked around recently ?
Sure. I have 20/20 vision and I do turn my head about quite a bit nowadays, so it's safe to say that I have indeed looked around recently. d:
Strange how all developed countries have such a huge number of churches, and there is really only a single exception to that rule.All regions that did not have the bible, or had it taken from them, are wastelands at best, although "constant warzones for more than 1000 years" would not be all that inaccurate.
All developed countries have a huge number of McDonald's as well. Places without McDonald's are wastelands at best, as well. Doesn't mean their food is any good.
Do you suppose this is a coincidence?
Nope, it's just that established and comfortable civilizations have money to spare to build luxuries like churches.
Yes, there is functional proof that math works. And there is actual proof that math is wrong (or at least everything based on the peano axioms).
Yep, the thing is is that math is always changing. Religion is not. Mathematics 100 years from now will be largely different and improved compared to the math of today. Religion 100 years from now will still be as harmful, demeaning, and destructive to mankind as it is today.
(Aside - I don't mean any of the peaceful, saner religions. Wiccans, Pagans, etc. - at least the ones I've met - don't try to force their beliefs on others and decree that their way is the right way above some other guy's Space Santa.
Even if that proof did not exist (and it's a bit young), math and the Bible have another thing in common. According to the first incompleteness theorem, any mathematical theory is either wrong, or unproveable. This obviously means everyone who says "math works" is making a statement of belief, not the least bit better founded than "God made the world", or Santa Claus.
But atheists that actually know anything about the foundation of mathematics, much less ones that actually take such knowledge into account, now that's rare. Of course, whether they do one or the other, not know about mathematical foundations, or the other, disregard scientific knowledge about mathematical foundations, they remain hypocrites.
The difference is that math has practical applications in society whereas religion has, at best, philosophical applications. One is useful, the other is just a 2000+ year old badly-written version of The Lord of the Rings.
Technically science is in much worse shape than the Bible. It is conceivable that proof will be given for what the Bible says. But since Kurt Gödel proved his thesis, it is INconceivable that theoretical proof will be given for what science says. People, philosophers and mathematicians have been trying to wring their way out of this particular can of worms for closing on 7 decades now, and not the least bit of progress has been made, everyone still does everything based on the (known to be flawed) Peano axioms (or worse : PFC + C, which is evidently wrong, meaning that math is fundamentally limited : there are valid questions mathematics cannot describe, some embarassingly simple, that are inconceivable to ever get resolved, no matter how much science we know, now or in the future).
Good sir, rather than spend another paragraph replying to your argument, I refer you to this image.
It is my sincere hope that this post will make you think a little bit about using correct and rigorous arguments to reach a conclusion. It would make the world a better place.
You've certainly made interesting points, I'll give you that!
By the by, if you find any stories about anything supernatural in the Bible ever happening and being provable, I'd sure love to see them. They'd make quite an interesting read.
Well, to be fair, God and Santa have a lot in common.
They both have omniscience (i.e. they can supposedly see everything at all times. Creepy!)
They both have an evil counterpart. Opposite God, we have Satan/Lucifer/other religions Gods, and on Santa's side we have various sundry devils/demons/evil elves that drag bad kids off to Hell, whip them, etc.
They both can magically warp space and time to get from Point A to Point B.
They're both exploited by people for monetary gain. On God's side, we have televangelists. On Santa's side, we have Coca-Cola.
They're both commonly depicted as old white dudes with epic beards.
They both reward people who follow their twisted set of rules and punish people who don't.
Well, there's six ways that they are similar. If you'd like I could give you a full baker's dozen, but I think I've shown that I am anything but a "lazy intellectual.
For the cost of shipping a human to another planed you should have not much of a problem to build one. The reason robots are so inferior is mainly because they are cheap.
Right, and yet despite all the money Honda is throwing at Asimo it still can't do everything a human can do nearly as well or remotely as fast.
And how exactly do you propose we build a factory that can build rockets on the moon? For the cost to launch all the required stuff to the moon you could likely do an in depth exploration of all the rest of the solar system, you know, that kind of exploration where you actually learn something new. Also to actually build something on the moon, so that you don't need hundreds or thousands of workers, it would help to have some good autonomous robots, the kind of robot you might learn to build when you actually build robots for space exploration.
Why should we bring construction materials to the Moon when it already has lovely things like Iron, Titanium, Magnesium, Aluminum, and many other materials? We don't need to bring construction material to the Moon; we just need to bring mining equipment.
Thats what the orbit is good for. You don't really want to learn about long term effects when you are already on the trip to Mars, as that would be a little late to actually do something about it.
Getting into orbit still requires putting people in space, so that still goes with my point.
I find our robotic space probes quite inspirational and for the cost of human space colonies you could probably shoot enough to the moon that school kids could drive a few on them on their Xboxs for promotional purposes. That would be cool.
You might, yeah. That's because (and I don't think I'm making a far-flung assumption here), you're a geek. I'm sure many people can tell you that Sputnik was the first satellite to make it into space (especially those who lived through it). I wonder how many Americans can tell you what the first man-made object that landed on the moon (P.S. it was the Soviet's Luna Program) compared to how many Americans could tell you who was the first man that landed on the moon? I'd wager that if you sampled 100 everyday Americans, 98 could tell you Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, 20 or so could tell you Buzz Aldrin was the second, and maybe 2 or 3 could tell you that the Luna Program was the first man-made object on the moon.
If cost isn't a concern you are just wasting time and money and you won't ever create something that is actually sustainable. Just look at the moon program, sure we managed to shoot man to the moon, but we failed at actually building cheap rockets. Thus no more moon rockets for now, as it isn't worth the cost.
We're not going to put anything worthwhile in space for anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars in launch and operations costs. The U.S. military probably spends more on toilet seats and hammers than NASA spends on their entire budget. NASA's budget is comparatively small to the overall yearly U.S. budget.
If it cost $100 billion to make a spaceship that could launch out of orbit under its own power (i.e. no throwaway boosters, just refueling), would you consider that a worthwhile cause? I think most people wouldn't, but that's because mankind is full of a bunch of short-sighting dumbasses. We need to think of space exploration as a very, very long term project - not in terms of months or years but in terms of decades and centuries.
Right now, stuff like the Hexayurt is being deployed in Haiti. So if your area is struck by a massive disaster there will be millions of people lining up to help you. But what about the people who live in impoverished (but otherwise not destroyed) areas?
I imagine the best solution would be some sort of modular apartment block. I doubt you could put it sideways in a C-130 and just plop it down somewhere, but it would ideally be something that could be built in a fraction of the time it would take to make a full-on apartment building. Here's how it would work:
The whole thing would be a structurally sound apartment block that could hold around 20 families. So maybe 5 floors with four apartments on each.
The roof would have a water tank that connects to a sprinkler system as well as a common indoor water pump. Water that goes to the pump itself passes through a standardized filter. There would also be a rain/condensation collection system on the roof.
An array of solar panels to provide power for the high-efficiency (and again, standardized) lights in the apartment.
Three or four power-generating bikes in a room adjacent to the batteries (which are hooked up to the solar cells). In the event of low power, people can get on the bikes to get the batteries charged up.
Durable - but not valuable as scrap - construction materials. For instance, the main frame of the building could be made of steel, but the pipes could be PVC. Power wires and whatnot can be encased in PVC piping to make it less enticing to strip and sell them.
Using Science to adjust to the local area - Building in a desert? Paint the building white so that it doesn't absorb heat. Building in a cold zone? Paint it black so it absorbs and retains heat. Etc.
This is gonna be the stuff of the future and probably the best way to handle the "slums" situation. We standardize it, we drop it in, we let the people take care of it.
Most atheists and agnostics I know question (or deny - but that seems to be a dirt word nowadays)the validity of man-cause global warming.
I've found that's because most Atheists or Agnostics have better BS detectors and critical thinking skills. In short, we are skeptics, meaning we question most anything that doesn't have hard evidence to support it.
I don't put stock in any fairy tale, whether it be about Santa Claus, God, or conspiracy theories, unless there is evidence to back it up. They do make fun thinking exercises, though.
If people had your attitude we would never get anywhere. We learn how to do things well by actually fucking building things and going places.
Yes, it will cost money. Yes, people will die. There is not one robot that exists today that can do what a human can do better on an extraterrestrial surface. And let's not even forget the benefits of having colonies on the moon and in space.
Sure, we can recreate the conditions of a moon colony out in Antarctica. Can we recreate the gravity, which would make a lunar base an ideal staging ground for launching ships?
Can we recreate the effects of zero gravity on the human body and learn about how that will effect us in long term space travel?
Can a man sitting in a geodesic dome in Antarctica inspire schoolchildren the same way that Neil Armstrong and co. did when they went to the moon?
Cost isn't and shouldn't be the only concern when it comes to exploration. If people worried about the cost of exploring, Columbus would have never made it to America, America would have never made it to the moon, and the ISS would just be some scientists pipe dream while 50 overweight NASA techs sit at computers reading telemetry from probes and satellites.
Or, Ubisoft can stop ruining games. Do you know why Blizzard or Valve doesn't get.as much shit despite the Steam/BNET DRM they have going on (and will have in the future)? Because the quality of their games makes it an acceptable compromise. Ubisoft fails at this miserably.
Take Beyond Good & Evil, for instance. One of the greatest games I've ever played. Beautiful graphics for a PS2-era game, awesome musical score, fun gameplay, and they go and mess it up in a number of ways:
They released it alongside two of their own games: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. There were also many other strong commercial competitors released at that time. To Ubisoft's credit, Laurent Detoc (Executive Director, North America, Ubisoft) basically admitted that he massively fucked that up.
Takng almost 7 years to put out a proper sequel.
Completely fucking up the PC port (and, assuming that they themselves did not do the port, allowing the company who ported it to fuck it up) to the point that most keys can not be remapped and game pads won't work at all unless you use an external program like XPadder.
When you can make games on the same level of quality as Blizzard and Valve, then you'll earn my sympathies (and my sales). The "we release when we're finished" business model works for them. When you have anything in a game that seems like an afterthought or seems poorly thought out, that says to me that you were rushed to deadline and just went with whatever you could do best in the time you had.
Can you make an Assassin's Creed game that's not repetitive?
How about a game where you can skip cutscenes (granted, a blazing innovation in technology that has only been around for 10 years).
How about a Splinter Cell: Totally Doesn't Feel Like An Expansion Pack to the Last Game?
Ubisoft doesn't rush games out as badly as some companies do, but IMO they've failed to innovate in favor of putting out a sequel with largely the same gameplay so they can meet their Q3 deadline. Beyond Good & Evil 2 will be your saving grace. Don't fuck that up and you'll earn back some of the respect of your customers.
If the person knows about an across-the-street webcam he can call the police because that's illegal.
No, it isn't. You made the claim, burden of proof is on you. Go ahead and dig up a law about it somewhere in the civilized world.
Filming random people and publishing the images is illegal without their permission.
Not if its in a public place in America it isn't.
People may be visible but they have a reasonable expectation that their movements are not permanently recorded anywhere without somebody going to great trouble to do it (following you around and writing it down, probably would violate stalking laws).
Then these people are irrevocably stupid. Satellites alone can and have been used to track individuals. But let's entirely forget about those and just look at the dearth of CCTV cameras all over the place. If the law wanted to track you, all they would have to do is subpoena the necessary places to get the footage and have some low pay grade agent go through them all. (Granted, this would make tracking everyone all the time highly impractical, but if they were trying to establish that you were in X area at Y time it would be relatively easy for them to do.
We don't want the government to do automatic surveillance of us and we don't want corporations to do that either.
Too late, already happens. The NSA's entire job basically falls down to gathering information and establishing databases about people (including American citizens). That's not to mention all of the private corporations who have collected said data.
Yes, if I aim the device at someone else's window, and zoom in so I can see people inside, that would be illegal. But accidentally recording a neighbor nude, when he's outside in plain view? Don't be absurd, that's not illegal.
Right, but Google isn't doing that.
Regardless, privacy should be on the burden of the persons expecting it when it comes to who can see what. If you don't want people to see in your house, shut the curtains.
What? People have known for decades that their movements would be permanently recorded by any nearby ATMs, convenience stores, or any other establishment with a video camera overlooking a public area. It's absurd to say people have an expectation of privacy when they're outdoors. Quite the contrary.
Exactly. Going back to your previous point, let's say the gas station across the street from your home isn't specifically zoomed in on your home but has very high resolution cameras which make zooming in digitally a trivial matter. If you tried to sue them to get the cameras moved or whatever, the judge would most likely laugh you out of court and tell you to close your curtains.
What reasonable privacy can you expect in the out-of-doors or with the curtains open?
You don't like people looking into your yard, put up a high fence. You don't want to be on satellite? Sun yourself underneath the porch or a shade. It's the way the world is nowadays and making it illegal won't make the fundamental technology go away.
"...would prohibit programs from being installed without the informed consent of the authorized computer user. The legislation would also prohibit software that would prevent the authorized user from blocking the installation of programs and/or disabling or removing any program. Software developers would be required to clearly inform users when their files are made available to anyone.
I've never understood the need for this letter, at least the way it is used in Portuguese. There is a restaurant nearby my home called Café Opçao. It's pronounced "ohp-SAO". It's a bloody S! Why don't you just put a bloody S there?!
If going green means that I never have another cheap plastic bag fall apart in my hands, so much the better. I love the $0.99 tougher bags branded with the store's name; I have a set of 6 that has lasted two years. It's probably ended up being cheaper than the cost of all those plastic bags and they are way more reliable and reusable.
Slashdot Mirror
overwhelmingly large homosexual user base engaging in homosexual child sex tourism in Thailand?
Sex Tourism?
There's an app for that.
I strongly dislike this argument of "you didn't vote, so your opinion doesn't matter".
Let's take the classic exercise of "two oncoming trains, do you save your grandmother or 10 children (and you've only time to save one)?" Electing to do neither is also a valid choice.
Why couldn't you say "cleverer than they look" so I could use a delightful John Cleese quote?
Scientific opinions are constantly changing and reforming, religions opinions aren't. Film at 11.
A friend of mine is a pastor who comes from a family of Christian missionaries in Japan. Christianity is actually growing rather quickly in that country thanks largely to the work of Christian missionaries.
I'm actually quite interested in seeing how Japan looks from a religious standpoint 100 years from now. It's probably the only country that is having Christianity brought to it after civilization has developed to such a degree.
Apologies if I offended you, but Atheists as a group tend not to believe in God. Lack of belief in God, I've found, is often due to a healthy sense of skepticism and desire for proof and evidence. A Good BS detector is powered by a healthy sense of skepticism.
The statement that I made is no different or less accurate than "All Christians believe in Jesus". If you don't believe in Jesus, most people probably wouldn't consider you a Christian.
Also, I don't have a neckbeard (just a goatee!) and Doritos are inferior to the greatly superior Ruffles.
And there is no functional proof of the bible? Have you looked around recently ?
Sure. I have 20/20 vision and I do turn my head about quite a bit nowadays, so it's safe to say that I have indeed looked around recently. d:
Strange how all developed countries have such a huge number of churches, and there is really only a single exception to that rule.All regions that did not have the bible, or had it taken from them, are wastelands at best, although "constant warzones for more than 1000 years" would not be all that inaccurate.
All developed countries have a huge number of McDonald's as well. Places without McDonald's are wastelands at best, as well. Doesn't mean their food is any good.
Do you suppose this is a coincidence?
Nope, it's just that established and comfortable civilizations have money to spare to build luxuries like churches.
Yes, there is functional proof that math works. And there is actual proof that math is wrong (or at least everything based on the peano axioms).
Yep, the thing is is that math is always changing. Religion is not. Mathematics 100 years from now will be largely different and improved compared to the math of today. Religion 100 years from now will still be as harmful, demeaning, and destructive to mankind as it is today.
(Aside - I don't mean any of the peaceful, saner religions. Wiccans, Pagans, etc. - at least the ones I've met - don't try to force their beliefs on others and decree that their way is the right way above some other guy's Space Santa.
Even if that proof did not exist (and it's a bit young), math and the Bible have another thing in common. According to the first incompleteness theorem, any mathematical theory is either wrong, or unproveable. This obviously means everyone who says "math works" is making a statement of belief, not the least bit better founded than "God made the world", or Santa Claus.
But atheists that actually know anything about the foundation of mathematics, much less ones that actually take such knowledge into account, now that's rare. Of course, whether they do one or the other, not know about mathematical foundations, or the other, disregard scientific knowledge about mathematical foundations, they remain hypocrites.
The difference is that math has practical applications in society whereas religion has, at best, philosophical applications. One is useful, the other is just a 2000+ year old badly-written version of The Lord of the Rings.
Technically science is in much worse shape than the Bible. It is conceivable that proof will be given for what the Bible says. But since Kurt Gödel proved his thesis, it is INconceivable that theoretical proof will be given for what science says. People, philosophers and mathematicians have been trying to wring their way out of this particular can of worms for closing on 7 decades now, and not the least bit of progress has been made, everyone still does everything based on the (known to be flawed) Peano axioms (or worse : PFC + C, which is evidently wrong, meaning that math is fundamentally limited : there are valid questions mathematics cannot describe, some embarassingly simple, that are inconceivable to ever get resolved, no matter how much science we know, now or in the future).
Good sir, rather than spend another paragraph replying to your argument, I refer you to this image.
It is my sincere hope that this post will make you think a little bit about using correct and rigorous arguments to reach a conclusion. It would make the world a better place.
You've certainly made interesting points, I'll give you that!
By the by, if you find any stories about anything supernatural in the Bible ever happening and being provable, I'd sure love to see them. They'd make quite an interesting read.
Well, to be fair, God and Santa have a lot in common.
Well, there's six ways that they are similar. If you'd like I could give you a full baker's dozen, but I think I've shown that I am anything but a "lazy intellectual.
Have a Happy Winter Solstice this year!
For the cost of shipping a human to another planed you should have not much of a problem to build one. The reason robots are so inferior is mainly because they are cheap.
Right, and yet despite all the money Honda is throwing at Asimo it still can't do everything a human can do nearly as well or remotely as fast.
And how exactly do you propose we build a factory that can build rockets on the moon? For the cost to launch all the required stuff to the moon you could likely do an in depth exploration of all the rest of the solar system, you know, that kind of exploration where you actually learn something new. Also to actually build something on the moon, so that you don't need hundreds or thousands of workers, it would help to have some good autonomous robots, the kind of robot you might learn to build when you actually build robots for space exploration.
Why should we bring construction materials to the Moon when it already has lovely things like Iron, Titanium, Magnesium, Aluminum, and many other materials? We don't need to bring construction material to the Moon; we just need to bring mining equipment.
Thats what the orbit is good for. You don't really want to learn about long term effects when you are already on the trip to Mars, as that would be a little late to actually do something about it.
Getting into orbit still requires putting people in space, so that still goes with my point.
I find our robotic space probes quite inspirational and for the cost of human space colonies you could probably shoot enough to the moon that school kids could drive a few on them on their Xboxs for promotional purposes. That would be cool.
You might, yeah. That's because (and I don't think I'm making a far-flung assumption here), you're a geek. I'm sure many people can tell you that Sputnik was the first satellite to make it into space (especially those who lived through it). I wonder how many Americans can tell you what the first man-made object that landed on the moon (P.S. it was the Soviet's Luna Program) compared to how many Americans could tell you who was the first man that landed on the moon? I'd wager that if you sampled 100 everyday Americans, 98 could tell you Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, 20 or so could tell you Buzz Aldrin was the second, and maybe 2 or 3 could tell you that the Luna Program was the first man-made object on the moon.
If cost isn't a concern you are just wasting time and money and you won't ever create something that is actually sustainable. Just look at the moon program, sure we managed to shoot man to the moon, but we failed at actually building cheap rockets. Thus no more moon rockets for now, as it isn't worth the cost.
We're not going to put anything worthwhile in space for anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars in launch and operations costs. The U.S. military probably spends more on toilet seats and hammers than NASA spends on their entire budget. NASA's budget is comparatively small to the overall yearly U.S. budget.
If it cost $100 billion to make a spaceship that could launch out of orbit under its own power (i.e. no throwaway boosters, just refueling), would you consider that a worthwhile cause? I think most people wouldn't, but that's because mankind is full of a bunch of short-sighting dumbasses. We need to think of space exploration as a very, very long term project - not in terms of months or years but in terms of decades and centuries.
Right now, stuff like the Hexayurt is being deployed in Haiti. So if your area is struck by a massive disaster there will be millions of people lining up to help you. But what about the people who live in impoverished (but otherwise not destroyed) areas?
I imagine the best solution would be some sort of modular apartment block. I doubt you could put it sideways in a C-130 and just plop it down somewhere, but it would ideally be something that could be built in a fraction of the time it would take to make a full-on apartment building. Here's how it would work:
This is gonna be the stuff of the future and probably the best way to handle the "slums" situation. We standardize it, we drop it in, we let the people take care of it.
Most atheists and agnostics I know question (or deny - but that seems to be a dirt word nowadays)the validity of man-cause global warming.
I've found that's because most Atheists or Agnostics have better BS detectors and critical thinking skills. In short, we are skeptics, meaning we question most anything that doesn't have hard evidence to support it.
I don't put stock in any fairy tale, whether it be about Santa Claus, God, or conspiracy theories, unless there is evidence to back it up. They do make fun thinking exercises, though.
If people had your attitude we would never get anywhere. We learn how to do things well by actually fucking building things and going places.
Yes, it will cost money. Yes, people will die. There is not one robot that exists today that can do what a human can do better on an extraterrestrial surface. And let's not even forget the benefits of having colonies on the moon and in space.
Sure, we can recreate the conditions of a moon colony out in Antarctica. Can we recreate the gravity, which would make a lunar base an ideal staging ground for launching ships?
Can we recreate the effects of zero gravity on the human body and learn about how that will effect us in long term space travel?
Can a man sitting in a geodesic dome in Antarctica inspire schoolchildren the same way that Neil Armstrong and co. did when they went to the moon?
Cost isn't and shouldn't be the only concern when it comes to exploration. If people worried about the cost of exploring, Columbus would have never made it to America, America would have never made it to the moon, and the ISS would just be some scientists pipe dream while 50 overweight NASA techs sit at computers reading telemetry from probes and satellites.
Or, Ubisoft can stop ruining games. Do you know why Blizzard or Valve doesn't get.as much shit despite the Steam/BNET DRM they have going on (and will have in the future)? Because the quality of their games makes it an acceptable compromise. Ubisoft fails at this miserably.
Take Beyond Good & Evil, for instance. One of the greatest games I've ever played. Beautiful graphics for a PS2-era game, awesome musical score, fun gameplay, and they go and mess it up in a number of ways:
When you can make games on the same level of quality as Blizzard and Valve, then you'll earn my sympathies (and my sales). The "we release when we're finished" business model works for them. When you have anything in a game that seems like an afterthought or seems poorly thought out, that says to me that you were rushed to deadline and just went with whatever you could do best in the time you had.
Can you make an Assassin's Creed game that's not repetitive?
How about a game where you can skip cutscenes (granted, a blazing innovation in technology that has only been around for 10 years).
How about a Splinter Cell: Totally Doesn't Feel Like An Expansion Pack to the Last Game?
Ubisoft doesn't rush games out as badly as some companies do, but IMO they've failed to innovate in favor of putting out a sequel with largely the same gameplay so they can meet their Q3 deadline. Beyond Good & Evil 2 will be your saving grace. Don't fuck that up and you'll earn back some of the respect of your customers.
We could have a Utopian society and streets paved with gold, but if an asteroid the size of Texas smashes into our planet it will be all for naught.
We, as a race, have to start by getting off this planet and then proceed to get out of our solar system.
That would pretty much be just as bad for China IMO.
Why close the Google.cn domain when they can just put up a message stating that due to the government's actions the website has been closed down?
Yeah, it will be blocked within a week, but that might hurt the Chinese position even more.
If the person knows about an across-the-street webcam he can call the police because that's illegal.
No, it isn't. You made the claim, burden of proof is on you. Go ahead and dig up a law about it somewhere in the civilized world.
Filming random people and publishing the images is illegal without their permission.
Not if its in a public place in America it isn't.
People may be visible but they have a reasonable expectation that their movements are not permanently recorded anywhere without somebody going to great trouble to do it (following you around and writing it down, probably would violate stalking laws).
Then these people are irrevocably stupid. Satellites alone can and have been used to track individuals. But let's entirely forget about those and just look at the dearth of CCTV cameras all over the place. If the law wanted to track you, all they would have to do is subpoena the necessary places to get the footage and have some low pay grade agent go through them all. (Granted, this would make tracking everyone all the time highly impractical, but if they were trying to establish that you were in X area at Y time it would be relatively easy for them to do.
We don't want the government to do automatic surveillance of us and we don't want corporations to do that either.
Too late, already happens. The NSA's entire job basically falls down to gathering information and establishing databases about people (including American citizens). That's not to mention all of the private corporations who have collected said data.
Yes, if I aim the device at someone else's window, and zoom in so I can see people inside, that would be illegal. But accidentally recording a neighbor nude, when he's outside in plain view? Don't be absurd, that's not illegal.
Right, but Google isn't doing that.
Regardless, privacy should be on the burden of the persons expecting it when it comes to who can see what. If you don't want people to see in your house, shut the curtains.
What? People have known for decades that their movements would be permanently recorded by any nearby ATMs, convenience stores, or any other establishment with a video camera overlooking a public area. It's absurd to say people have an expectation of privacy when they're outdoors. Quite the contrary.
Exactly. Going back to your previous point, let's say the gas station across the street from your home isn't specifically zoomed in on your home but has very high resolution cameras which make zooming in digitally a trivial matter. If you tried to sue them to get the cameras moved or whatever, the judge would most likely laugh you out of court and tell you to close your curtains.
Sadly, "historical reasons" is the reason so many damn languages are so goddamned difficult to learn.
Even if the law is daft?
What reasonable privacy can you expect in the out-of-doors or with the curtains open?
You don't like people looking into your yard, put up a high fence. You don't want to be on satellite? Sun yourself underneath the porch or a shade. It's the way the world is nowadays and making it illegal won't make the fundamental technology go away.
"...would prohibit programs from being installed without the informed consent of the authorized computer user. The legislation would also prohibit software that would prevent the authorized user from blocking the installation of programs and/or disabling or removing any program. Software developers would be required to clearly inform users when their files are made available to anyone.
Addendum, I hate the "Filter Error: Please use fewer junk characters".
It's meant to stop the ASCII goatse, but it very obviously doesn't and just ruins the fun for the rest of us. :*(
Updating your car is almost complete. You must restart your car for the updates to take effect.
Do you want to restart your car now?
. . . . . . . . . . [ Restart Now] . . [ Restart Later ]
ç
I've never understood the need for this letter, at least the way it is used in Portuguese. There is a restaurant nearby my home called Café Opçao. It's pronounced "ohp-SAO". It's a bloody S! Why don't you just put a bloody S there?!
If going green means that I never have another cheap plastic bag fall apart in my hands, so much the better. I love the $0.99 tougher bags branded with the store's name; I have a set of 6 that has lasted two years. It's probably ended up being cheaper than the cost of all those plastic bags and they are way more reliable and reusable.