So he probably doesn't understand that internet copyright infringement not as big a deal as it sounds...or that downloading isn't precisely theft, because the "original" isn't gone; it's just been duplicated.
Are you off your rocker? He "doesn't understand"? Of course he understands! If he sells a book where he's going to get royalties, do your think he "doesn't understand that its not theft" if they print and sell a million extra books that they don't give him royalties on? If he sells to a magazine with pay based on their circulation and they just hand his story over to a couple of other magazines without compensating him, do you think he "doesn't understand" that being theft of his work? There is NO DIFFERENCE between that and what we are talking about here. In both cases, he has been paid for a set number of "physical items" and all those are still there after someone produces extra items to sell without compensation.
I'm sorry, but on this issue, it is very clearly you who doesn't understand how and why proffessional writers get paid. He isn't being paid by the magazine to give them a few thousand preprinted inserts - there was no exchange of physical property to begin with. So blabbing about how the "oringinal is still there" is totally meaningless to the way he gets paid.
Now some geek is gonna start talking about how "people don't want that revenue model" and how he will just have to do something different because "he doesn't have a marketable product." Let me give you a free market clue. An unmarketable product is one that people either don't want, or don't want at the price its offered at so they don't get it. It is not a product that you don't want to pay the price, so instead you take it for free.
If you don't like the fact that H.E. expects to recieve some compensation for the distribution of his work, don't read it. Don't read any work that the author wants to be paid for. Enjoy the high caliber of work published "for the joy of it" free on the internet. And if enough people feel the same way, maybe there really will be a "revolution" in the way pubishing is done. But if you decide that you like H.E.s work and want to read it, but don't feel like accepting his terms, you are just a thief, and he understands that very well.
In the/. world, the sexual revolution must have happened because men got tired of having to marry women or pay prostitutes to have sex, so they just started raping any woman they felt like, and since women weren't getting compensation, they started offering "free love" as an alternate model because no one respected the old one. In the real world, some men and some women decided to have "free love" because it was what they individually wanted, and some men and women decided to "hold out" for more, and most importantly, no one legalized rape just because some people "Gave it away for free." And yet somehow, folks here seem to think that stealing people's work by ignoring their clearly stated contract for offering it is going to make them say "oh, well, since people want my work but refuse to pay me and just take it anyway, I might as well lie back and enjoy it and hope they bless me with lecture fees." Thats not the free market, buddy, thats mob rule.
OK, rant over. If I have some money left at the end of the month I'll send a check to the legal fund, because overall I think they are argueing an important point. In the meantime, I better sign up for the National Writers Union and hope I still have some rights to control of my work in 5 years.
The right to own (including IP) is included in the united nations declaration of human rights (article 17).
er, would you mind quoting the relevant passage? I can't help but think that some phrase like "the product of ones labor" or "fair compensation therefor" belongs in there somewhere.
Imagine, if the patriots had lost, then everyone would be celebrating the day the evil seperatists lost.
well, in fairness, we don't have an "anti confederate day" celebration or anything. But if the colonists had lost, would there be hardcore yankees who called themselves "declarationists" and wanted to use the 13 star flag on license plates? And argue for the right to fly said flag over state capitols in the orriginal colony states? And would officials of the Angican church say that such was just "anti crown bigotry dressed up as cultural pride"?
Well, we can't take these things too far, I guess.:>
The colonists broke the law to form the US. I live in Canada. We managed to become our own country without breaking the law. We just followed what the population wanted and used to proper channels to get what we wanted.
ah, but in the US, the "patriots" weren't willing to actually wait until the majority of the population agreed with them. Between the loyalists and the apathetic, revolution was not a majority position. Thats why the revolutionaries had to use propaganda (such as the yellow journalism surrounding the so called "boston massacre" that we just celebrated the aniversery of) and lies to whip up enough support to start something, then once they were violent enough to get a retaliation that pushed more of the apathetics into opposing the British "oppressors".
History is a funny thing. Things that everyone knows turn out not to be true sometimes.
hmm.. I'm sorry, perhaps an apporximate date on that would have helped. I was actually quoting a recent nut case who had decided that the annexation of texas had never been legal and tried to set up his ranch as the capital of the true independant nation of texas. Of course then he decided that he didn't need to pay any taxes and could pay off debts with his own currency and thus lost his amusment value and got his ass shut down. I was trying to point out the lack of international interest in a real government dealing with some posers calling themselves one.
In spite of their attempts to draw inferences, AFAIK no nation has actually recognized sealand as a nation. If and when the time comes when they have something the UK wants (or something they want badly enough to stop) I anticipate a similar lack of interest in their shutdown.
Conceivably, lots of small places might give a damn. I wonder what the Scottish Nationalist Party would have to say about it.
Well, bearing in mind that I'm not scottish and am extrapolating the party's position from their name, I would guess they'd say that its a complete slap in the face to a people with a real history as a nation to even think about extending recognition to a family of egotistical gits playing "castle" on a little fort they have to import drinking water to. (which britain built in the first place).
At least that's what I'd say.
[paraphrase morons] "this is the president of the independant nation of Texas! We are under attack by a forgien power and seeking international aid!" [/paraphrase morons] guess how many nations stepped in?
Characters should be more free to conflict with each other, nobody's going to be moralizing about "interference with other cultures," and there should be generally more action all around.
However, in order to throw in some back consistency, there would be at least one story arc in which such interference led to some horrible outcome for both the culture involved and the budding federation, thus leading to the prime directive in the first place. (And bust up the old joke about the impossible episode where the ship encounters a situation made much easier by application of the prime directive.)
That is just ridiculous. All that will happen is that any company with any stake in a.org domain (slashdot.org being a prime example) will spin off a 'not-for-profit' LLC to keep their status.
I don't think its quite that simple. Relationships between "sister" organizations of different tax statuses are pretty complicated in my expereince. Its unlikely that a clearly for profit site could keep content the same just because they had a non profit wing of the company.
OTOH,/. is not a particularly commerce based site, and if the accounting worked so that the banner ads only paid for the upkeep of the site itself, instead of producing profit for the holding company, there could be a good argument for keeping the.org.
Besides, who says dolphins don't make tools - or at least toys?
From my tour of the Living Seas (Epcot, research, not training, 1997) I also recal some of the researchers describing situations where the dolphins would use tools if they were in a situation where the materials were present and needed. The whole tool thing is a little bit of a red herring since a dolphins natural habitat is a tool poor environment, while homonids evolved in a tool rich environment. (early tools were found objects that could be thrown or used to extend reach, modifying and actually producing tools came later.) From a research paper I did several years ago on tool use, I don't recal any purely ocean dwelling animals* that used tools, while many "low intelligence" land animals did. Hence my opinion that spontaneous tool use as a intelligence criterion is parochial.
I liked your link, BTW. I suspect that dolphins are one step better than merely inteligent and will be found to be artistic (song, etc). Sigh, if only I'd stuck with the PhD program...
*shore dwellers like sea otters had tool use, but there are comfortable on land as well as in the water.
Whether is it good or bad, there are definite signs of an advanced intelligence. For example, humans are no longer constrained to certain environments; we can now take our environments with us. Dolphins still seem to exist within their environment.
Is this a universal sign of intelligence, or an application of inteligence to a species specific desire? It is VERY tricky to judge levels of inteligence cross species, especially since humans always set themselves up at the top of the pile and look for tests to confirm their assumptions. (the history of animal intelligence testing is rife with examples of tests that were dismissed as "inaccurate" judgments of intelligence because they gave the "wrong" answer in where they ranked humans.)
Its also important not to confuse cultural accomplishments with signs of species level inteligence. There is little reason to believe that our biological ability to reason has evolved significantly since the stone age, and no reason to imagine that a "tribe" of modern children raised without the cultural buildup of knowlege would progress in their lifetimes to even a bronze age level of technology (silly Ayn Rand stories aside). Don't let a lucky choice of your number and kind of ancestors lull you into a false sense of superiority.
Taking our environment with us is one way in which humans have applied their intelligence. I'd never rank it as an acid test that could be applied to another species unless we knew A LOT more about its psychology. Experimental/cognitive psychologists will make a judgement they have been training and studying to make, and the rest of us will say "oh".
That said, language without tool use is like writing a Perl script without an interpreter: it does nothing. Until dolphins can create their own tools, either through us really uplifting them or a la the oft quoted Onion article, we can't really consider them intelligent.
Speaking as a former major in animal psych, this is an intensely parochial definition of intelligence. Are you saying that if you get talking with a dolphin and it can solve puzzles, beat you at chess, understand the microsoft case and help you with your love life* you won't consider it "intelligent" because they don't have the oppossable thumbs or (in most cases) any need for tool use? (If you are counting on tool use for your sense of superiority, you better not read anything on it. Unless you want to consider chickens smarter than dolphins) The presures and needs of their environment are entirely different than ours, so attempting to judge their true intellectual capacity by what we have done is just foolish.
With any luck we will establish cominication and find that from their point of view the little toys we build are all cute and clever, but until they can help us learn to navigate the world by ultrasonic landmarks, they won't be able to "really consider us intelligent".
*"ah, just get some of your buddies together and gang rape a shark. You'll feel better."
It will be impossible for anyone to prove that my real intent was not simply to point to an informative site on the internet, but to point to a site that could point to a site that is illegal.
hint: if you make these sort of statements in a public forum and they can be tied definitively back to you, that would be a good start. If you point to the site as a "Good source of DeCSS information" and tell everyone to "be sure to check the links page!" it would also become a wee bit obvious.
Generally, I would imagine that any action that clearly communicates the "value" of your page to seekers of DeCSS will also communicate your intent to anyone who would wish to make an issue of it. But you can play the Executive Ice Scraper if you want.
Saying the 'criteria is intent' means we're talking about a thought-crime.
I know "thought-crime" is supposed to act on/. readers like a bell for pavlov's dogs, but if this is how you define it, you better make room for a lot of thought crimes in the law. There are few crimes where intent and motive are not vital criteria for whether a crime has been committed, what the crime is and what the sentance will be.
The fact that you can come up with tricky little grey areas where intent will be relevant doesn't make the law a thought crime anymore than grey areas in the murder laws make them thoughtcrimes. Trying to say it does just makes you look silly, (and unfortunately can implies that there are no good arguments against the law. Don't want that.)
The job of a lawyer is to win his cases. The job of the professor would be to be fair and honest.
read the quoted part that I was responding to again. that was my point. That by focusing only on winning, the lawyer is not part of a "truth finding" system at all. If the job of a lawyer is to be part of a system to find the truth, a lawer that always wins, regardless of true guilt or innocence is a bad lawyer. If he is a good lawyer, then our court system is not there to find the truth, but to act as a slightly more civilized trial by combat.
Regarding your example of a prof on a thesis committee: that sounds more like a biased judge than a good lawyer. It's not adversarial, it's judicial.
well, it is called "defending your thesis" for a reason - the judges/jury is supposed to question your conclusions and try to poke holes in your methods. Different disiplines and levels of thesis have different levels of scrutiny, but it is theoretically a partially adversarial process.
Who says scientists and engineers(paid or unpaid) can't be bribed?
bribery is illegal. The lawyer could be disbarred, the case ruled a mistrial and the side that bribed the witness screwed. While possible it is hugely less likely than lawyers introducing bias into the experts they have legally hired.
"hey, there's a tiny chance of a problem with this system! we better stick with the one that we know the problem exists in at hight levels!" Thats real bright.
Every time I hear that word, I hear, "I hate you and what you think, and think that your priorities are misbegotten...
Hey now, that implies that such libertarians are capable of understanding that other people have different priorities than they do. Get it straight! Non-libertarians are just DUMB, they have to be "educated" (never convinced, never debated, just educated to the one truth) and once they achieve true understanding, then they will "understand" the self evident, only possible way a situation could be viewed.*
Sheesh, get the average libertarian talking about different people's priorities, they might start thinking that people of intelligence and good faith** can still disagree on issues where multiple rights and freedoms are ballanced.
*If anyone takes this as non-sarcasm, please let me know so I can calibrate.
**religious faith or sincere consideration, whichever is appropriate to the discussion.
Furthermore, the whole premise of the American judicial system is that that the adversary system is the best way to get at the truth.
But does it work? And do most people think its even supposed to?
Let me ask you a question : If you have a defense lawyer, assigned his clients at random, and he wins every single case - never even plea bargins, just always wins an aquital - is he a good lawyer? Most people I've asked this question say yes imediately. Most are confused on how there could be any question. But if you look at real adversarial truth processes, its different.
If you had a professor assigned to thesis jurys that in every case he was there the thesis defense failed - no one ever got their thesis with him on the jury asking questions - would he be a good jury member? If you had a Defender of the Faith (formerly known as the Devil's Advocate) who presents an adversarial point of view when cannonizing saints, and not one person is made a saint during his tenure, is he a good defender of the faith? In these cases, most would say no - the point of the system is to weed out those truely unworthy, not to stage gladitorial fights between champions and praise the one that always wins. But we are saying the opposite when we praise a lawyer that always wins.
In theory, the adversarial justice system is there to find the truth. In practice, it seems to work to determine the truth. It's trial by combat - if Lancelot prevails, the queen's honor is intact, and the facts be damned. The idea that Lancelot would take a dive to make sure that the truth of combat occasionaly matches the facts is sacrilige.
Do I have a better solution? Incremental reforms perhaps, and having impartial scientific testimony is a great start, but it doesn't do to have no defense, unless you've finally bioengeneered a true philosopher-king. In the real world, we're likely stuck with the adversarial system, but that doesn't mean that we have to ignore its flaws, and the fact that it often isn't even trying to "get at the truth" is a pretty big one.
This girl should be commended, She performed a real scientific experiment, she came up with a hypothosis and figured out an inovative way to test it. She then documented her findings.
no, not really. She came up with a hypothesis about people's motivations "people would prefer the white barbies because they're used to them" and then tested only preference. She threw in a "control" variable that completely overwhellemed the adult choice (what was the other doll wearing, a burlap sack?) and (if the incredibly biased and ranting writer can be trusted to get this right) wrote up her results as if her hypothesis (which she did not test) had been proven on children.
And how bloody inovative is showing kids two barbie dolls and asking which they like?
The writer also doesn't say what her conclusions WERE, yet flatly asserts that she wasn't having a discussion on race, just presenting findings. Frankly, I'd hold off on that distinction until i could see the actual project. Students of that age rarely know the difference between the conclusion and the discussion.
Anyway, the experiement didn't test her stated hypothesis, used a flat and boring experimental method and most likely drew unwarrented conclusions. B+ if her printing was neat.
(evil on) Oh, and she is learning a lot more about doing real research and getting it funded than she would be if no one cared about her subject matter, doncha think? (evil off)
For example: Canada is not bereft of free-speech advocates, but they have actually been told by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council: "In Canada, we respect freedom of speech, but do not worship it."
I know, it made me want to move to Canada. (sensible attitudes, *swoon*!)
Look at "hate crime" legislation. Guess what that is? Pretty soon, you say the wrong joke or believe in the wrong thing or say the wrong thing and you will be fined and put in jail.
yep, thats right, thats what its all about.... Oops! thats not what any of those laws are about! In fact its jst a strawman of anti hate crime types (and not even the smart ones at that.)
For example, right-wing anti-homosexuality laws (Which Alan Turing was a victim of). These laws tried to physically force people to not be homosexual. They failed and were very destructive. However, we have swung the other way and now have left-wing "hate crime laws" and "tolerance" initiatives. They are just as bad.
really? Would you like to explain how not being allowed to harrass a fellow student in college, or not being allowed to discriminate in hiring, or being held to a higher standard for drawing a swastika on a church sign than putting a kilroy on a alley wall are all "just as bad" as being jailed or involuntarily committed for your sexual oreintation? I'd be thrilled to know.
If you want to fight for free speech, start with fighting against things like trying to force the Boy Scouts to accept athiests and homosexuals---even if you think they should. Because you never know if you might be the next target of some government official or special interest group who does not like the way you think.
hmmm... you know, if I thought that I could be supported by the government from a congressional charter down to explorer scout troops getting the time of police and fire fighters, but I could still claim a lot of BS "small private groups"* tosh, I think the government SHOULD dislike how I'm thinking. And if you think telling the scouts to either play by one set of rules (private group not given extra perks by the government everywhere you look) or the other (publicly supported group that doesn't discriminate) is a free speech issue, you're even loonier than most of the libertarians arround here.
* The "oh we have to respect the beliefs of the tiny troops who meet in homes and churches" BS was proven a lie when the main (centrally run, authoritarian) scout council revoked the charters of some of those small local troops who decided they were OK with gay volunteers. So I guess it doesn't have a damn thing to do with individual rights of association at all, does it?
That isn't Christianity - it might be how Christianity has been perverted by some of the 'churches'. Sex is supposed to be something you only do with your spouse but it is also supposed to be joyful - which is much nicer than mere fun!
Not trying to start a flame war, just curious - What is the scriptural reference for this attitude? (I'm assuming it has one if this is the truth thats been twisted by churches). I ask, because while this is a basic Jewish idea I have heard, the only NT reference to sex that I know of is Paul, who IIRC actually considered even marital sex a sin. The only way to really be with god was to be celibate, but for those who were not capable of celibacy, sex within marriage was a "lesser evil" for channelling your sinful urges.
I have not read the entire NT however, and if there is a contridicting verse I'm missing, I'd love to know.
Roddenberry was at least somewhat progressive. It was what NBC thought would sell that caused ST to come out the way it did.
Oh, no argument there. Thats why I tried to make it clear that I was talking about sci fi on TV. I'd love to see what Roddenbury would have created in a social world had he been writing a book rather than a TV series. Sci fi books tend to be much more progressive than TV shows - some seem to exist mostly to think about the social future rather than the tech one (childhoods end springs to mind).
TV in general seems (to me) to be a beat ahead of the heartland (just enough that they don't get worried) and two beats behind the coasts in terms of social representation. Movies run the gauntlet between painfully retrograde and slightly (but I'm sure painfully for others) progressive. Books can be whatever they want to be.:)
Sexist posing aside, the infamous miniskirts are just a symbol of a real issue of "prequel" writing. To put it shortly, most TV sci fi is modern society with future tech.
Star trek was never about the future of human society - it was about the current human society transplanted into a futuristic world. Hence male captains, doctors and engineers and female communication officers, nurses and yeomen (secretaries). Real issues of society were handled symbolicly - interspecies romances outnumbered interracial ones even in the new series. The pace of societal change within the trek universe was based on when the series were made, not when they were set. (ST of course isn't alone in this - B5, even though it was written by an atheist, had a just this moment view of religion again with troublesome current issues handled symbolicly through another species.)
So how would ST handle the confusion of a new show with todays societal norms being set before the old series? The Enterprise was a statistical anomaly? Kirk was just a throwback who didn't want to work with anyone but straight white males as semi equals? Starfleet was having a REALLY bad fashion decade never equaled before or since? Or maybe they'll just admit that the future is always now with better tech and avoid the issue entirely. That would likely be easiest.
Kahuna Burger
Re:when you're the leader of the free world
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 2
Wow, I can't tell if this is a joke or a troll. Bravo in either case.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you off your rocker? He "doesn't understand"? Of course he understands! If he sells a book where he's going to get royalties, do your think he "doesn't understand that its not theft" if they print and sell a million extra books that they don't give him royalties on? If he sells to a magazine with pay based on their circulation and they just hand his story over to a couple of other magazines without compensating him, do you think he "doesn't understand" that being theft of his work? There is NO DIFFERENCE between that and what we are talking about here. In both cases, he has been paid for a set number of "physical items" and all those are still there after someone produces extra items to sell without compensation.
I'm sorry, but on this issue, it is very clearly you who doesn't understand how and why proffessional writers get paid. He isn't being paid by the magazine to give them a few thousand preprinted inserts - there was no exchange of physical property to begin with. So blabbing about how the "oringinal is still there" is totally meaningless to the way he gets paid.
Now some geek is gonna start talking about how "people don't want that revenue model" and how he will just have to do something different because "he doesn't have a marketable product." Let me give you a free market clue. An unmarketable product is one that people either don't want, or don't want at the price its offered at so they don't get it. It is not a product that you don't want to pay the price, so instead you take it for free.
If you don't like the fact that H.E. expects to recieve some compensation for the distribution of his work, don't read it. Don't read any work that the author wants to be paid for. Enjoy the high caliber of work published "for the joy of it" free on the internet. And if enough people feel the same way, maybe there really will be a "revolution" in the way pubishing is done. But if you decide that you like H.E.s work and want to read it, but don't feel like accepting his terms, you are just a thief, and he understands that very well.
In the /. world, the sexual revolution must have happened because men got tired of having to marry women or pay prostitutes to have sex, so they just started raping any woman they felt like, and since women weren't getting compensation, they started offering "free love" as an alternate model because no one respected the old one. In the real world, some men and some women decided to have "free love" because it was what they individually wanted, and some men and women decided to "hold out" for more, and most importantly, no one legalized rape just because some people "Gave it away for free." And yet somehow, folks here seem to think that stealing people's work by ignoring their clearly stated contract for offering it is going to make them say "oh, well, since people want my work but refuse to pay me and just take it anyway, I might as well lie back and enjoy it and hope they bless me with lecture fees." Thats not the free market, buddy, thats mob rule.
OK, rant over. If I have some money left at the end of the month I'll send a check to the legal fund, because overall I think they are argueing an important point. In the meantime, I better sign up for the National Writers Union and hope I still have some rights to control of my work in 5 years.
Kahuna Burger
er, would you mind quoting the relevant passage? I can't help but think that some phrase like "the product of ones labor" or "fair compensation therefor" belongs in there somewhere.
Kahuna Burger
well, in fairness, we don't have an "anti confederate day" celebration or anything. But if the colonists had lost, would there be hardcore yankees who called themselves "declarationists" and wanted to use the 13 star flag on license plates? And argue for the right to fly said flag over state capitols in the orriginal colony states? And would officials of the Angican church say that such was just "anti crown bigotry dressed up as cultural pride"?
Well, we can't take these things too far, I guess. :>
Kahuna Burger
ah, but in the US, the "patriots" weren't willing to actually wait until the majority of the population agreed with them. Between the loyalists and the apathetic, revolution was not a majority position. Thats why the revolutionaries had to use propaganda (such as the yellow journalism surrounding the so called "boston massacre" that we just celebrated the aniversery of) and lies to whip up enough support to start something, then once they were violent enough to get a retaliation that pushed more of the apathetics into opposing the British "oppressors".
History is a funny thing. Things that everyone knows turn out not to be true sometimes.
Kahuna Burger
Nah, pan frying is better. Have you ever noticed how close paranioa and meglomania are? I do almost everytime I read /.
Kahuna Burger
In spite of their attempts to draw inferences, AFAIK no nation has actually recognized sealand as a nation. If and when the time comes when they have something the UK wants (or something they want badly enough to stop) I anticipate a similar lack of interest in their shutdown.
Kahuna Burger
Well, bearing in mind that I'm not scottish and am extrapolating the party's position from their name, I would guess they'd say that its a complete slap in the face to a people with a real history as a nation to even think about extending recognition to a family of egotistical gits playing "castle" on a little fort they have to import drinking water to. (which britain built in the first place).
At least that's what I'd say.
[paraphrase morons] "this is the president of the independant nation of Texas! We are under attack by a forgien power and seeking international aid!" [/paraphrase morons] guess how many nations stepped in?
Kahuna Burger
However, in order to throw in some back consistency, there would be at least one story arc in which such interference led to some horrible outcome for both the culture involved and the budding federation, thus leading to the prime directive in the first place. (And bust up the old joke about the impossible episode where the ship encounters a situation made much easier by application of the prime directive.)
Kahuna Burger
I don't think its quite that simple. Relationships between "sister" organizations of different tax statuses are pretty complicated in my expereince. Its unlikely that a clearly for profit site could keep content the same just because they had a non profit wing of the company.
OTOH, /. is not a particularly commerce based site, and if the accounting worked so that the banner ads only paid for the upkeep of the site itself, instead of producing profit for the holding company, there could be a good argument for keeping the .org.
Kahuna Burger
From my tour of the Living Seas (Epcot, research, not training, 1997) I also recal some of the researchers describing situations where the dolphins would use tools if they were in a situation where the materials were present and needed. The whole tool thing is a little bit of a red herring since a dolphins natural habitat is a tool poor environment, while homonids evolved in a tool rich environment. (early tools were found objects that could be thrown or used to extend reach, modifying and actually producing tools came later.) From a research paper I did several years ago on tool use, I don't recal any purely ocean dwelling animals* that used tools, while many "low intelligence" land animals did. Hence my opinion that spontaneous tool use as a intelligence criterion is parochial.
I liked your link, BTW. I suspect that dolphins are one step better than merely inteligent and will be found to be artistic (song, etc). Sigh, if only I'd stuck with the PhD program...
*shore dwellers like sea otters had tool use, but there are comfortable on land as well as in the water.
Kahuna Burger
Is this a universal sign of intelligence, or an application of inteligence to a species specific desire? It is VERY tricky to judge levels of inteligence cross species, especially since humans always set themselves up at the top of the pile and look for tests to confirm their assumptions. (the history of animal intelligence testing is rife with examples of tests that were dismissed as "inaccurate" judgments of intelligence because they gave the "wrong" answer in where they ranked humans.)
Its also important not to confuse cultural accomplishments with signs of species level inteligence. There is little reason to believe that our biological ability to reason has evolved significantly since the stone age, and no reason to imagine that a "tribe" of modern children raised without the cultural buildup of knowlege would progress in their lifetimes to even a bronze age level of technology (silly Ayn Rand stories aside). Don't let a lucky choice of your number and kind of ancestors lull you into a false sense of superiority.
Taking our environment with us is one way in which humans have applied their intelligence. I'd never rank it as an acid test that could be applied to another species unless we knew A LOT more about its psychology. Experimental/cognitive psychologists will make a judgement they have been training and studying to make, and the rest of us will say "oh".
Kahuna Burger
Speaking as a former major in animal psych, this is an intensely parochial definition of intelligence. Are you saying that if you get talking with a dolphin and it can solve puzzles, beat you at chess, understand the microsoft case and help you with your love life* you won't consider it "intelligent" because they don't have the oppossable thumbs or (in most cases) any need for tool use? (If you are counting on tool use for your sense of superiority, you better not read anything on it. Unless you want to consider chickens smarter than dolphins) The presures and needs of their environment are entirely different than ours, so attempting to judge their true intellectual capacity by what we have done is just foolish.
With any luck we will establish cominication and find that from their point of view the little toys we build are all cute and clever, but until they can help us learn to navigate the world by ultrasonic landmarks, they won't be able to "really consider us intelligent".
*"ah, just get some of your buddies together and gang rape a shark. You'll feel better."
Kahuna Burger
hint: if you make these sort of statements in a public forum and they can be tied definitively back to you, that would be a good start. If you point to the site as a "Good source of DeCSS information" and tell everyone to "be sure to check the links page!" it would also become a wee bit obvious.
Generally, I would imagine that any action that clearly communicates the "value" of your page to seekers of DeCSS will also communicate your intent to anyone who would wish to make an issue of it. But you can play the Executive Ice Scraper if you want.
Kahuna Burger
I know "thought-crime" is supposed to act on /. readers like a bell for pavlov's dogs, but if this is how you define it, you better make room for a lot of thought crimes in the law. There are few crimes where intent and motive are not vital criteria for whether a crime has been committed, what the crime is and what the sentance will be.
The fact that you can come up with tricky little grey areas where intent will be relevant doesn't make the law a thought crime anymore than grey areas in the murder laws make them thoughtcrimes. Trying to say it does just makes you look silly, (and unfortunately can implies that there are no good arguments against the law. Don't want that.)
Kahuna Burger
read the quoted part that I was responding to again. that was my point. That by focusing only on winning, the lawyer is not part of a "truth finding" system at all. If the job of a lawyer is to be part of a system to find the truth, a lawer that always wins, regardless of true guilt or innocence is a bad lawyer. If he is a good lawyer, then our court system is not there to find the truth, but to act as a slightly more civilized trial by combat.
Kahuna Burger
well, it is called "defending your thesis" for a reason - the judges/jury is supposed to question your conclusions and try to poke holes in your methods. Different disiplines and levels of thesis have different levels of scrutiny, but it is theoretically a partially adversarial process.
Kahuna
bribery is illegal. The lawyer could be disbarred, the case ruled a mistrial and the side that bribed the witness screwed. While possible it is hugely less likely than lawyers introducing bias into the experts they have legally hired.
"hey, there's a tiny chance of a problem with this system! we better stick with the one that we know the problem exists in at hight levels!" Thats real bright.
Kahuna Burger
Hey now, that implies that such libertarians are capable of understanding that other people have different priorities than they do. Get it straight! Non-libertarians are just DUMB, they have to be "educated" (never convinced, never debated, just educated to the one truth) and once they achieve true understanding, then they will "understand" the self evident, only possible way a situation could be viewed.*
Sheesh, get the average libertarian talking about different people's priorities, they might start thinking that people of intelligence and good faith** can still disagree on issues where multiple rights and freedoms are ballanced.
*If anyone takes this as non-sarcasm, please let me know so I can calibrate.
**religious faith or sincere consideration, whichever is appropriate to the discussion.
Kahuna Burger
But does it work? And do most people think its even supposed to?
Let me ask you a question : If you have a defense lawyer, assigned his clients at random, and he wins every single case - never even plea bargins, just always wins an aquital - is he a good lawyer? Most people I've asked this question say yes imediately. Most are confused on how there could be any question. But if you look at real adversarial truth processes, its different.
If you had a professor assigned to thesis jurys that in every case he was there the thesis defense failed - no one ever got their thesis with him on the jury asking questions - would he be a good jury member? If you had a Defender of the Faith (formerly known as the Devil's Advocate) who presents an adversarial point of view when cannonizing saints, and not one person is made a saint during his tenure, is he a good defender of the faith? In these cases, most would say no - the point of the system is to weed out those truely unworthy, not to stage gladitorial fights between champions and praise the one that always wins. But we are saying the opposite when we praise a lawyer that always wins.
In theory, the adversarial justice system is there to find the truth. In practice, it seems to work to determine the truth. It's trial by combat - if Lancelot prevails, the queen's honor is intact, and the facts be damned. The idea that Lancelot would take a dive to make sure that the truth of combat occasionaly matches the facts is sacrilige.
Do I have a better solution? Incremental reforms perhaps, and having impartial scientific testimony is a great start, but it doesn't do to have no defense, unless you've finally bioengeneered a true philosopher-king. In the real world, we're likely stuck with the adversarial system, but that doesn't mean that we have to ignore its flaws, and the fact that it often isn't even trying to "get at the truth" is a pretty big one.
Kahuna Burger
no, not really. She came up with a hypothesis about people's motivations "people would prefer the white barbies because they're used to them" and then tested only preference. She threw in a "control" variable that completely overwhellemed the adult choice (what was the other doll wearing, a burlap sack?) and (if the incredibly biased and ranting writer can be trusted to get this right) wrote up her results as if her hypothesis (which she did not test) had been proven on children.
And how bloody inovative is showing kids two barbie dolls and asking which they like?
The writer also doesn't say what her conclusions WERE, yet flatly asserts that she wasn't having a discussion on race, just presenting findings. Frankly, I'd hold off on that distinction until i could see the actual project. Students of that age rarely know the difference between the conclusion and the discussion.
Anyway, the experiement didn't test her stated hypothesis, used a flat and boring experimental method and most likely drew unwarrented conclusions. B+ if her printing was neat.
(evil on) Oh, and she is learning a lot more about doing real research and getting it funded than she would be if no one cared about her subject matter, doncha think? (evil off)
Kahuna Burger
I know, it made me want to move to Canada. (sensible attitudes, *swoon*!)
Look at "hate crime" legislation. Guess what that is? Pretty soon, you say the wrong joke or believe in the wrong thing or say the wrong thing and you will be fined and put in jail.
yep, thats right, thats what its all about.... Oops! thats not what any of those laws are about! In fact its jst a strawman of anti hate crime types (and not even the smart ones at that.)
For example, right-wing anti-homosexuality laws (Which Alan Turing was a victim of). These laws tried to physically force people to not be homosexual. They failed and were very destructive. However, we have swung the other way and now have left-wing "hate crime laws" and "tolerance" initiatives. They are just as bad.
really? Would you like to explain how not being allowed to harrass a fellow student in college, or not being allowed to discriminate in hiring, or being held to a higher standard for drawing a swastika on a church sign than putting a kilroy on a alley wall are all "just as bad" as being jailed or involuntarily committed for your sexual oreintation? I'd be thrilled to know.
If you want to fight for free speech, start with fighting against things like trying to force the Boy Scouts to accept athiests and homosexuals---even if you think they should. Because you never know if you might be the next target of some government official or special interest group who does not like the way you think.
hmmm... you know, if I thought that I could be supported by the government from a congressional charter down to explorer scout troops getting the time of police and fire fighters, but I could still claim a lot of BS "small private groups"* tosh, I think the government SHOULD dislike how I'm thinking. And if you think telling the scouts to either play by one set of rules (private group not given extra perks by the government everywhere you look) or the other (publicly supported group that doesn't discriminate) is a free speech issue, you're even loonier than most of the libertarians arround here.
* The "oh we have to respect the beliefs of the tiny troops who meet in homes and churches" BS was proven a lie when the main (centrally run, authoritarian) scout council revoked the charters of some of those small local troops who decided they were OK with gay volunteers. So I guess it doesn't have a damn thing to do with individual rights of association at all, does it?
Kahuna Burger
Not trying to start a flame war, just curious - What is the scriptural reference for this attitude? (I'm assuming it has one if this is the truth thats been twisted by churches). I ask, because while this is a basic Jewish idea I have heard, the only NT reference to sex that I know of is Paul, who IIRC actually considered even marital sex a sin. The only way to really be with god was to be celibate, but for those who were not capable of celibacy, sex within marriage was a "lesser evil" for channelling your sinful urges.
I have not read the entire NT however, and if there is a contridicting verse I'm missing, I'd love to know.
Kahuna Burger.
Oh, no argument there. Thats why I tried to make it clear that I was talking about sci fi on TV. I'd love to see what Roddenbury would have created in a social world had he been writing a book rather than a TV series. Sci fi books tend to be much more progressive than TV shows - some seem to exist mostly to think about the social future rather than the tech one (childhoods end springs to mind).
TV in general seems (to me) to be a beat ahead of the heartland (just enough that they don't get worried) and two beats behind the coasts in terms of social representation. Movies run the gauntlet between painfully retrograde and slightly (but I'm sure painfully for others) progressive. Books can be whatever they want to be. :)
Kahuna Burger
Star trek was never about the future of human society - it was about the current human society transplanted into a futuristic world. Hence male captains, doctors and engineers and female communication officers, nurses and yeomen (secretaries). Real issues of society were handled symbolicly - interspecies romances outnumbered interracial ones even in the new series. The pace of societal change within the trek universe was based on when the series were made, not when they were set. (ST of course isn't alone in this - B5, even though it was written by an atheist, had a just this moment view of religion again with troublesome current issues handled symbolicly through another species.)
So how would ST handle the confusion of a new show with todays societal norms being set before the old series? The Enterprise was a statistical anomaly? Kirk was just a throwback who didn't want to work with anyone but straight white males as semi equals? Starfleet was having a REALLY bad fashion decade never equaled before or since? Or maybe they'll just admit that the future is always now with better tech and avoid the issue entirely. That would likely be easiest.
Kahuna Burger
kahuna Burger