I'll hold you to that and raise you a, "I hope you will be patting yourself on the back saying, 'at least I didn't get eaten by a lion' when you have some wasting disease as an old man and no amount of money can help you".;P Jeers.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
It seems like you think that when my hard work and good luck finally run out, I'll regret that I didn't waste more of my life envying those luckier than myself, instead of being grateful and content for what luck I got and the good run I had?
Please, by all means, hold me to my philosophy! I pray every day that when my body finally fails, or when ill fortune maims or cripples me, I will have the honesty and the wisdom to appreciate all the good I had, rather than turning into a bitter and hypocritical old man.
Since you're using the Internet, I think it's safe to say that civilization has given you a much better life than anything you have a right to expect. How much time do you spend each day, being grateful for how good you have it; versus how much time you spend each day disgruntled because civilization didn't give you everything Bill Gates has?
As opposed to the cost of not dying that most of the people in third world countries are struggling to make...
Ah, but this is the natural human condition: living in caves, using sticks and rocks as tools, struggling every day to keep body and soul together.
If your life is any better than that, you're already a step ahead of the game. Instead of complaining that somebody else, through some combination of hard work and good luck, is two steps ahead of the game, we should all be grateful we're not inside the lion already. Because "inside the lion" is a much more natural and fitting end to the human condition than all the things we've come up with to postpone that day.
I'm sick and tired of this whining and complaining, that simply because one primitive cave man scored himself a bicycle or a smallpox vaccine or a two bedroom/three bathroom house, that now every primitive cave man on the planet is entitled to a bicicyle, a smallpox vaccine, and a two bed/three bath house.
And yet the Supreme Court still allows our elected and appointed agents to issue permits and abridge use of public property. Why do you think that is?
I think it's because there's a difference between claiming you're going to peacably assemble, and producing bona fides to support this claim and taking responsibility for living up to this claim.
I think it's not so much about abridging the right to peacably assemble; it's about arbitrating between two citizens, where the first citizen's peaceful assembly abridges the second citizen's peaceful assembly.
Obviously, the steps of City Hall are used for much more than just protesting. All these other activities, which citizens have the right or privilege to engage in, are abridged the moment there's a protest on the steps of City Hall. Therefore, without wanting to abridge my fellow citizen's right to peaceably assemble, I do very much want them to schedule a specific time and get a permit and otherwise present bona fides and accept responsibility for the inconvenience they're causing the rest of us by their peaceable assembly.
Public spaces are not free-for-all, anything-goes spaces. They're shared spaces. Your right to protest doesn't trump my right to get to work in the morning without being delayed by your march through the streets. Your right to protest is not a license to inconvenience your fellow citizens at will.
And that's why permits are necessary, and why peaceable assembly in public spaces requires civic oversight.
First of all, the British had all kinds of methods at their disposal, to shut Ghandi down. Not only that, but international tolerance for violent and lethal methods was much greater in those days. What ultimately saved Ghandi was that the British culture itself couldn't stomach ongoing oppression of Ghandi and his fellow protestors. They didn't have to develop an immunity to searing pain. They just had to develop a commitment to suffering through a temporary period of hardship, until the better side of British culture and international opinion gave in to their demands.
Obviously, such an approach would not have worked in Soviet Russia, where the culture had demonstrably no qualms at all about ongoing oppression of dissidents. In that case, only violent revolution and death, or else escape from the system entirely (e.g., to the West), were the only options.
I notice you've not considered either of those options here, but continue to write as if a crowd-control pain ray is the omega of dissent-stifling and the kryptonite of protesters.
I mean, all vendors are going to have problems, and cause problems from time to time.
But if these CIOs are anything like my CIO, their problems have little to do with the vendors getting the blame, and everything to do with the CIO's own ignorance and incompetence.
CIO: I heard great things about this vendor, but whenever we tried to work with them, they sucked.
REALITY: The vendor is quite capable of doing great things... for CIOs who understand the technology, its uses, and its limitations; and have planned accordingly.
The thing is, everything gets abused. There's no solution to social ills that doesn't bring its own host of problems along with it.
THESIS: Law enforcement personnel will abuse this device. ANTITHESIS: Protesters will abuse their right to peaceful assembly, requiring devices such as this. SYNTHESIS: A wash. Neither argument is compelling, but instead each is canceled by the other.
Anyway, I think you will find that getting actively involved in your local politics is much more productive, much more satisfying, and much better overall, than protesting in the streets of some large city.
Why should human beings be entitled to quality medical care?
What have you done to deserve quality medical care? How far does your entitlement go? Are you entitled to find a smart person and force them to develop better medical care, in order to benefit you? Are you entitled to find someone who has already developed better medical care, and force them to give it to you? Are you entitled to find someone who is providing quality medical care at a price of their own choosing, and force them to lower the price to benefit you? Are you entitled to a percentage of the income of your fellow citizens, to fund whatever quality of medical care tickles your fancy?
Are you entitled to a state of the art, $10,000, ultralight carbon fiber and titanium wheelchair, or just any old $100 wheelchair?
Are you entitled to the most expensive and extreme treatment, or just the cheaper but less effective treatment? Are you entitled to force people to develop a more effective treatment? Are you entitled to get the newer more expensive treatment at the same cost as the older, cheaper treatment?
Are you, in fact, entitled to anything other that whatever wealth you manage to accumulate through your own hard work and good luck, and whatever goods and services you buy with that wealth?
But what is your alternative? Obviously, an anything goes, first come first serve approach to competing claims on the public space isn't going to work. There needs to be some kind of oversight, and some kind of arbitration. You can't just co-opt a public space for a protest, without regard to how you may be disrupting the lives of your fellow citizens.
And who else is going to provide oversight and arbitration of the use of public spaces, except you and I, as fellow citizens, via our constitutioanlly-defined elected and appointed agents?
Did you have some better idea for managing competing claims on public spaces, except through the same democratic system we use to manage all of our competing claims with our fellow citizens?
But I get your point. If you're having trouble protesting the protest permit process, there are really only two options available to you: Mahatma Ghandi or Che Guevara.
I recommend protesting anyway, publically, non-violently, a la Ghandi. When the world sees your moral superiority and the mistreatment you are receiving at the hands of your government, perhaps your government will be shamed into recognizing your rights. It worked for Ghandi, it could work for you.
If it doesn't work for you, though, there's always the last resort: violent revolution. Good luck with that, but better to die fighting for freedom than live peacefully as a slave, right? Besides, you might win anyway.
The right to free assembly just means that you're free to gather with like-minded individuals somewhere. If you gather on private property, 'nuff said.
But if you gather on public property, your gathering will prevent your fellow citizens from using that property themselves. Since your fellow citizens have an equal privilege to use public property, and since your desire to use it doesn't trump their desire to use it, some kind of arbitration is needed.
And that arbitration is carried out by exactly the people you'd want to carry it out: elected representatives of the citizenry or their appointed public servants. That is, the arbitration is carried out by you and me, as citizens, via our constitutionally-defined agents.
How else should our conflicting claims on our joint property be decided?
You might be the lawful driver of a car, but not have your license and registration with you. In that case, being lawful but not having the permits with you makes you unlawful after all.
In the same way, your protest might be lawful, but unless you actually go down to city hall and get the appropriate permit, you'll end up getting a faceful of crowd control anyway.
Or did you have some sort of philosophical objection to the idea that a thing might be permissible in theory and also require specific proof of permission in practice?
If it's a choice between a loudspeaker saying "you guys need to leave here" and this, well, then I'd rather have the loudspeaker. It's all a matter of degrees.
Yeah, it's a matter of the degree to which you actually want people to leave.
So how long will it take before everybody decides that these expensive new technologies are actually entitlements that every human being has a right to?
I wonder if there is much more that Novell could do to distance itself from the open source community than a wild backdoor romp in the sheets with Microsoft? Maybe they'll become the next FOSS SCOapegoat?
That's funny. Here I was wondering if there was much of anything the open source community could do to help Novell's bottom line. Maybe they'll come up with an office suite that's appealing to end users and corporate IT managers?
Five guys get together in a room and plan a bank robbery.
In legal terms, that's Conspiracy, and it justifies a police raid, arrests, a trial, and--if convincing evidence of Conspiracy is presented--a criminal conviction. We recognize a right to Free Assembly. We also recognize that abuse of that right is not itself always a right, but sometimes a crime.
Five guys send letters to each other, planning a bank robbery via the post office. Again, Conspiracy. We recognize a right to Free Speech. But we also recognize that abuse of that right is not itself always a right, but sometimes a crime.
Five guys get together in a chat room, or on an Internet forum, or via email, and plan a bank robbery. Exercise of the right to Free Speech, or a criminal conspiracy?
Slashdot often doesn't seem to understand just how much the Internet is going to change everything we assume to be true--especially about morality, ethics, and human rights. I often get the impression that Slashdot is so busy fetishizing the Internet as some sort of magical free speech utopia, that they totally and wilfully ignore the plain fact that it's also an excellent engine for cheap, easy, and secure plotting of criminal activities. And that Slashdot must ignore this plain fact because addressing it would require compromising their idealized vision of the Internet to reflect the realities of human nature and the technologies in question.
I'm not in favor of abridging the human right of Free Speech at all. I AM in favor of abridging the fantasy of the Internet as an anything-goes medium that magically turns criminal shit into human rights gold.
More precisely, if you don't know an expert in the field, you should probably be skeptical of Wikipedia, and refer to experts in the field anytime your research motivations extend beyond "personal amusement during a particularly slow day".
If you're not an expert, you should be skeptical about your sources. In the case of Wikipedia, you should find an actual expert you can trust, have them read the entry, and tell you their expert opinion of its reliability.
Also, note that these experts aren't necessarily saying that Wikipedia is 100% accurate or reliable. The real issue might be that where a non-expert might mistakenly disregard a large amount accurate information from Wikipedia, an expert might understand that while the majority of the information was accurate, a few important inaccuracies were also present.
To simplify, there is a scientifically accepted standard for all statistics, called 'confidence limits'. Ranges are predicted (such as ranges in temperature in 100 years time), they are only shown if there is less than a 1 in 20 (5%) chance that they are wrong.
Won't it be impossible to know "if there is less than a 1 in 20 (5%) chance that they are wrong", until we've actually waited, say, 100 years to see if the 100-year predictions really are that accurate?
What's been the predictive success of these methods so far, and what's the longest time period for which predictions using these models have proven accurate?
Do we have accurate 100-year prediction results already on record, to validate these confidence limits and future 100-year predictions?
The modelling would be pushed beyond its limits if you couldn't get sensible statistics for the outcome, even after running models for a long, long time.
How sensible are the statistics? What is their predictive success right now?
It's my understanding that the high number of variables and the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, make climate modeling much more resource-intensive, and much less consistent in its predictive power, than the same modelilng techniques in other, less complex fields.
May I use an analogy?
It seems as if you're asking, "the engine in my riding lawnmower works just fine for mowing lawns; why shouldn't I use it in a high-speed chassis to break the world land speed record?". I know this is a gross exaggeration, but have you considered the possibility that the modeling technique might have limits, and the global climate modeling pushes or even exceeds those limits?
What am I supposed to do - go into those in detail in a Slashdot post? At some point people just have to learn to trust the experts.
That's exactly what I keep saying about the experts responsible for our modern translations of the Bible, but your advice doesn't seem to be taken very seriously in that context. Why should it be taken any more seriously in the context of global climate modeling?
Actually, it is. Because if this is all that those wanting to dismiss climate modelling can come up with....
If all they can come up with is that global climate modeling is so unreliable that it tempts the under-informed to mistrust modeling in general, isn't that enough?
Also, if your faith in global climate modeling is so strong, why such a weaksauce defense of it? Can't you be bothered to argue in favor of trusting the modeling, rather than simply arguing against extending distrust of the modeling to other fields?
Slashdot Mirror
Background checks are a blatant violation of our right to privacy!
Our entire civilization will be replaced by a fascist tyranny the moment we allow background checks to happen!
I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
It seems like you think that when my hard work and good luck finally run out, I'll regret that I didn't waste more of my life envying those luckier than myself, instead of being grateful and content for what luck I got and the good run I had?
Please, by all means, hold me to my philosophy! I pray every day that when my body finally fails, or when ill fortune maims or cripples me, I will have the honesty and the wisdom to appreciate all the good I had, rather than turning into a bitter and hypocritical old man.
Since you're using the Internet, I think it's safe to say that civilization has given you a much better life than anything you have a right to expect. How much time do you spend each day, being grateful for how good you have it; versus how much time you spend each day disgruntled because civilization didn't give you everything Bill Gates has?
Jeers, indeed.
Ah, but this is the natural human condition: living in caves, using sticks and rocks as tools, struggling every day to keep body and soul together.
If your life is any better than that, you're already a step ahead of the game. Instead of complaining that somebody else, through some combination of hard work and good luck, is two steps ahead of the game, we should all be grateful we're not inside the lion already. Because "inside the lion" is a much more natural and fitting end to the human condition than all the things we've come up with to postpone that day.
I'm sick and tired of this whining and complaining, that simply because one primitive cave man scored himself a bicycle or a smallpox vaccine or a two bedroom/three bathroom house, that now every primitive cave man on the planet is entitled to a bicicyle, a smallpox vaccine, and a two bed/three bath house.
And yet the Supreme Court still allows our elected and appointed agents to issue permits and abridge use of public property. Why do you think that is?
I think it's because there's a difference between claiming you're going to peacably assemble, and producing bona fides to support this claim and taking responsibility for living up to this claim.
I think it's not so much about abridging the right to peacably assemble; it's about arbitrating between two citizens, where the first citizen's peaceful assembly abridges the second citizen's peaceful assembly.
Obviously, the steps of City Hall are used for much more than just protesting. All these other activities, which citizens have the right or privilege to engage in, are abridged the moment there's a protest on the steps of City Hall. Therefore, without wanting to abridge my fellow citizen's right to peaceably assemble, I do very much want them to schedule a specific time and get a permit and otherwise present bona fides and accept responsibility for the inconvenience they're causing the rest of us by their peaceable assembly.
Public spaces are not free-for-all, anything-goes spaces. They're shared spaces. Your right to protest doesn't trump my right to get to work in the morning without being delayed by your march through the streets. Your right to protest is not a license to inconvenience your fellow citizens at will.
And that's why permits are necessary, and why peaceable assembly in public spaces requires civic oversight.
First of all, the British had all kinds of methods at their disposal, to shut Ghandi down. Not only that, but international tolerance for violent and lethal methods was much greater in those days. What ultimately saved Ghandi was that the British culture itself couldn't stomach ongoing oppression of Ghandi and his fellow protestors. They didn't have to develop an immunity to searing pain. They just had to develop a commitment to suffering through a temporary period of hardship, until the better side of British culture and international opinion gave in to their demands.
Obviously, such an approach would not have worked in Soviet Russia, where the culture had demonstrably no qualms at all about ongoing oppression of dissidents. In that case, only violent revolution and death, or else escape from the system entirely (e.g., to the West), were the only options.
I notice you've not considered either of those options here, but continue to write as if a crowd-control pain ray is the omega of dissent-stifling and the kryptonite of protesters.
If these CIOs are anything like my CIO...
I mean, all vendors are going to have problems, and cause problems from time to time.
But if these CIOs are anything like my CIO, their problems have little to do with the vendors getting the blame, and everything to do with the CIO's own ignorance and incompetence.
CIO: I heard great things about this vendor, but whenever we tried to work with them, they sucked.
REALITY: The vendor is quite capable of doing great things... for CIOs who understand the technology, its uses, and its limitations; and have planned accordingly.
Of course I don't doubt it's going to be abused.
People are asshats, remember?
The thing is, everything gets abused. There's no solution to social ills that doesn't bring its own host of problems along with it.
THESIS: Law enforcement personnel will abuse this device.
ANTITHESIS: Protesters will abuse their right to peaceful assembly, requiring devices such as this.
SYNTHESIS: A wash. Neither argument is compelling, but instead each is canceled by the other.
Anyway, I think you will find that getting actively involved in your local politics is much more productive, much more satisfying, and much better overall, than protesting in the streets of some large city.
Why should human beings be entitled to quality medical care?
What have you done to deserve quality medical care? How far does your entitlement go? Are you entitled to find a smart person and force them to develop better medical care, in order to benefit you? Are you entitled to find someone who has already developed better medical care, and force them to give it to you? Are you entitled to find someone who is providing quality medical care at a price of their own choosing, and force them to lower the price to benefit you? Are you entitled to a percentage of the income of your fellow citizens, to fund whatever quality of medical care tickles your fancy?
Are you entitled to a state of the art, $10,000, ultralight carbon fiber and titanium wheelchair, or just any old $100 wheelchair?
Are you entitled to the most expensive and extreme treatment, or just the cheaper but less effective treatment? Are you entitled to force people to develop a more effective treatment? Are you entitled to get the newer more expensive treatment at the same cost as the older, cheaper treatment?
Are you, in fact, entitled to anything other that whatever wealth you manage to accumulate through your own hard work and good luck, and whatever goods and services you buy with that wealth?
Historically?
History is full of permitted protests.
But what is your alternative? Obviously, an anything goes, first come first serve approach to competing claims on the public space isn't going to work. There needs to be some kind of oversight, and some kind of arbitration. You can't just co-opt a public space for a protest, without regard to how you may be disrupting the lives of your fellow citizens.
And who else is going to provide oversight and arbitration of the use of public spaces, except you and I, as fellow citizens, via our constitutioanlly-defined elected and appointed agents?
Did you have some better idea for managing competing claims on public spaces, except through the same democratic system we use to manage all of our competing claims with our fellow citizens?
But I get your point. If you're having trouble protesting the protest permit process, there are really only two options available to you: Mahatma Ghandi or Che Guevara.
I recommend protesting anyway, publically, non-violently, a la Ghandi. When the world sees your moral superiority and the mistreatment you are receiving at the hands of your government, perhaps your government will be shamed into recognizing your rights. It worked for Ghandi, it could work for you.
If it doesn't work for you, though, there's always the last resort: violent revolution. Good luck with that, but better to die fighting for freedom than live peacefully as a slave, right? Besides, you might win anyway.
The right to free assembly just means that you're free to gather with like-minded individuals somewhere. If you gather on private property, 'nuff said.
But if you gather on public property, your gathering will prevent your fellow citizens from using that property themselves. Since your fellow citizens have an equal privilege to use public property, and since your desire to use it doesn't trump their desire to use it, some kind of arbitration is needed.
And that arbitration is carried out by exactly the people you'd want to carry it out: elected representatives of the citizenry or their appointed public servants. That is, the arbitration is carried out by you and me, as citizens, via our constitutionally-defined agents.
How else should our conflicting claims on our joint property be decided?
People are asshats.
I flat-out expect politicians to be asshats.
I flat-out expect protesters to be asshats.
To mitigate the asshattery of the former, I endorse regular elections.
To mitigate the asshattery of the latter, I endorse a sensation of searing pain until they stop acting like asshats.
Slightly wrong, maybe.
You might be the lawful driver of a car, but not have your license and registration with you. In that case, being lawful but not having the permits with you makes you unlawful after all.
In the same way, your protest might be lawful, but unless you actually go down to city hall and get the appropriate permit, you'll end up getting a faceful of crowd control anyway.
Or did you have some sort of philosophical objection to the idea that a thing might be permissible in theory and also require specific proof of permission in practice?
Yeah, it's a matter of the degree to which you actually want people to leave.
So how long will it take before everybody decides that these expensive new technologies are actually entitlements that every human being has a right to?
That's funny. Here I was wondering if there was much of anything the open source community could do to help Novell's bottom line. Maybe they'll come up with an office suite that's appealing to end users and corporate IT managers?
Please tell me more about how the Internet is a magical place where people can plot a crime and call it Free Speech, but the telephone network isn't.
That's all I ask.
(And when I say "Slashdot often seems..." I mean specifically "you right now seem...".)
Five guys get together in a room and plan a bank robbery.
In legal terms, that's Conspiracy, and it justifies a police raid, arrests, a trial, and--if convincing evidence of Conspiracy is presented--a criminal conviction. We recognize a right to Free Assembly. We also recognize that abuse of that right is not itself always a right, but sometimes a crime.
Five guys send letters to each other, planning a bank robbery via the post office. Again, Conspiracy. We recognize a right to Free Speech. But we also recognize that abuse of that right is not itself always a right, but sometimes a crime.
Five guys get together in a chat room, or on an Internet forum, or via email, and plan a bank robbery. Exercise of the right to Free Speech, or a criminal conspiracy?
Slashdot often doesn't seem to understand just how much the Internet is going to change everything we assume to be true--especially about morality, ethics, and human rights. I often get the impression that Slashdot is so busy fetishizing the Internet as some sort of magical free speech utopia, that they totally and wilfully ignore the plain fact that it's also an excellent engine for cheap, easy, and secure plotting of criminal activities. And that Slashdot must ignore this plain fact because addressing it would require compromising their idealized vision of the Internet to reflect the realities of human nature and the technologies in question.
I'm not in favor of abridging the human right of Free Speech at all. I AM in favor of abridging the fantasy of the Internet as an anything-goes medium that magically turns criminal shit into human rights gold.
I'm lost.
How about a simple question: Have climate modellers already proven their ability to accurately model the global climate 100 years out, or not?
Exactly my point.
More precisely, if you don't know an expert in the field, you should probably be skeptical of Wikipedia, and refer to experts in the field anytime your research motivations extend beyond "personal amusement during a particularly slow day".
If you're not an expert, you should be skeptical about your sources. In the case of Wikipedia, you should find an actual expert you can trust, have them read the entry, and tell you their expert opinion of its reliability.
Also, note that these experts aren't necessarily saying that Wikipedia is 100% accurate or reliable. The real issue might be that where a non-expert might mistakenly disregard a large amount accurate information from Wikipedia, an expert might understand that while the majority of the information was accurate, a few important inaccuracies were also present.
What's been the predictive success of these methods so far, and what's the longest time period for which predictions using these models have proven accurate?
Do we have accurate 100-year prediction results already on record, to validate these confidence limits and future 100-year predictions?
How sensible are the statistics? What is their predictive success right now?
It's my understanding that the high number of variables and the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, make climate modeling much more resource-intensive, and much less consistent in its predictive power, than the same modelilng techniques in other, less complex fields.
May I use an analogy?
It seems as if you're asking, "the engine in my riding lawnmower works just fine for mowing lawns; why shouldn't I use it in a high-speed chassis to break the world land speed record?". I know this is a gross exaggeration, but have you considered the possibility that the modeling technique might have limits, and the global climate modeling pushes or even exceeds those limits?
Also, if your faith in global climate modeling is so strong, why such a weaksauce defense of it? Can't you be bothered to argue in favor of trusting the modeling, rather than simply arguing against extending distrust of the modeling to other fields?