>The basic privacy is moot because she was offered a card without an RFID chip.
Her father outright stated that the reason they didn't accept that was because of the strings attached: revoking their right to not endorse the program. Now while I don't agree with their religious interpretation I do respect their right to have it, and to express it - that includes not only NOT wearing the tag but the right to ask others not to do so as well. She was being offered a consolation prize but only if she (and her whole family - people who are NOT school students) agree to give up their right to express their believes to others about this matter.
In other words -the alternative offered is no better (in fact exactly because I don't agree with the religious position - I think it's WORSE) than the original problem !
>This is no different than if an employer requires an employee to wear an RFID badge at work. If you choose not to wear the badge you are fired for not following policy. Same thing at this school; if you don't wear the badge you are expelled (virtually the same as getting fired).
No, they are exact opposites. Employer pays you - and you show up by choice (you have a legal right to quit). You pay the school (through taxes and fees). They are the ones serving YOU.
She cites BOTH reasons, and considering both are constitutional rights... er... why is standing up for one less than the other ? Religious freedom is the SAME freedom that gives an atheist the right to denounce god. You can't have your cake and eat it to.
>I doubt that this system here is much different from clocking in to the lessons.
It's massively different. Do you know why ? Because you are PAID to be at work, while you (or your parents but it amounts to the same thing) PAY to go to school.
The roles of authority are in fact, exactly, reversed. A school is there to serve YOUR need to get an education. We allow them to institute a measure of discipline so that one selfish kid cannot interfere with the other kids wanting the same. But this is no different than a shop putting up a "one per customer" sign on a special, they are merely protecting the rights of their OTHER customers. But the school is the CUSTOMER here, moreso - they are a STATE customer paid for by TAX money - that makes them public SERVANTS. They're duty is to give children the education their parents WANT - never the other way around.
Do you get why this is different? Allowing your schools to make a rule that intrudes on religious freedom (whether or not you agree with the religion or it's interpretation of the rule is NOT in fact relevant) is NO different from allowing the president to ban the practise of Islam.
That's what this is like. An employer is well within his rights to decree that a Muslim wanting to do Friday prayers must put in leave for it if it falls during business hours - and this is why many muslims prefer to work for other muslims (who won't make a rule like that but would rather close the shop) . That's fine because it's a voluntary choice to work for THIS employer and he is paying you for your time and obedience. The school is not paying her by mutually agreed contractual consent for HER obedience. She is paying THEM to teach her - and the limits to their making of rules ENDS at "is needed to ensure that she does not disrupt the education of OTHER paying customers".
>There is no motive to take offence on that as different is not necessarily better or worse.
Yes. There is. There is a fundamentally offence whenever you ascribe to somebody a trait they have not exhibited and pretty much all the worst shit that happened in history can be shown to have been caused by exactly that. It's no more true of sex/gender than it is of race. And the simple scientific fact is that the very IDEA of "men" and "women" are flawed, there are at least 26 variations on the XY chromosome that can chemically exist, of which at least 14 are viable and at least 8 have been observed in what we regard as normal, healthy humans. That's 8 different sexes - at least. On a surface examination those 8 are indistinguishable from either a 'man' or a 'woman' - yet their biochemistry is radically different. This is exactly why olympic sex tests have such difficulty finding a standard to settle on - because there isn't one in nature. The others are various forms hermaphrodite (which occurs in nature and therefore I reject the concept that they are NOT natural - we use surgery to make them one or the other more out of psychological need to shelter them than because it's medically required).
Many cultures on this planet have more than 2 gender's as well, in fact three or more is actually more common - western culture is basically unique in only having two! This is probably, at least in part, responsible for the embrace of androgyny and cross-gender identification of western subcultures.
The only valid traits to ascribe to a person are the traits that PERSON has exhibited. Anything else is conjecture and always far more likely to be false than true as it's based on a truly bad set of assumptions.
I stand by a firm belief that the experiments that supposedly show otherwise were flawed in numerous ways (scientists looking for evidence to support their theory instead of looking for evidence to disprove it, subjects acting on subconscious pressure to behave the way they sense the scientists expect them too etc.) as they simply don't match up to the known facts of human DNA and biology. We don't HAVE two sexes, we have at least 8 - that LOOKS like two on the surface.
And that's before you even consider individual deviation - the one thing we know for sure is that everybody deviates from even cultural norms in SOME ways. We can create lose categories of deviation (for example: the 'tomboy' stereotype) but they themselves show how flawed the idea of categorizing human behaviour is. Take any two tomboys you know and compare how many interests they have in common and how many they don't. Which 'girly' things do one like and the other not? Which 'boy' things do they both like and which is liked by only one ?
Even for a well-known 'category' we quickly realise that we cannot make ANY assumptions. Two tomboys may both like to climb trees but only one likes toy trucks, or neither likes to climb trees... even when you have two people both identifying with the same label you cannot make any predictions about them with ANY degree of accuracy. Saying girls are like this and boys are like that is as meaningless as assuming ALL geeks love spiderman (how odd that many of the comic-book geeks I know despise him and consider Batman the epitomy of superheroes - I completely disagree and have always considered spiderman a better character). You can only even say "they both like superheroes" because we've both identified as such OURSELVES - many computer geeks don't like comic books or superheroes at all - yet it's considered a mainstay of their culture.
We can say that my born-culture (Afrikaans) likes to braai (that is cook meat over an open fire). But many people born into this culture don't like that, some are vegetarians and only like to braai vegetables, some hate the idea of cooking outdoors. You can identify a cultural trait as existing, but you can NEVER ascribe it to any member of that culture until you have observed it in that PARTICULAR member. The same goes for the cultural traits associated with gender and sex.
>A lot of what you say makes sense and I agree with the spirit of your post, but claiming that women breastfeeding is down to culture strikes me as mental
Well I never meant to suggest it was bad of culture, merely that it isn't unchangeable. The link between hormones and thoughts/emotions are well-known to work both ways (sufficiently so that some species can change sex at will) merely activating a fully functional set of glands that are already there seems fairly minor in comparison.
> Is it cultural in pigs too? Rats? No. Pigs and Rats don't have cultures. Culture is an emergent phenomenon of intelligence - and vice versa. They are quite clever creatures but they have not developed culture, they don't yet have sufficiently advanced communication ability for that to happen. However the mental ability that matters here is ANOTHER emergent phenomenon of high intelligence which, by all accounts, is equally absent from these species. The ability we call "free will". Culture and Free Will are two contradictory sets of pressures - culture demands conformity, free will demands self-expression and individualism. This is quite common in evolution - having two contradicting pressures battle until they reach a balance... and we got quite a few such battles happening in our heads. Culture vs. free will is one of them.
Over time I believe free will has been winning - gaining small victories with every generation. Perhaps one day we'll recognize that culture is entirely superfluous (because it is) and that free will is much more important than we thought (because it is).
So that's the essence of my whole argument: individual free will can overcome both physical and cultural 'limitations' of ALL kinds - even the progesterone limitation on male lactation (apparently). You cannot make any assumptions on people based on either sex or gender because people do HAVE free will. And that's before we even factor in individual personality -... another force that works in conjunction with free will in most cases, but sometimes contradicts it.
>It's foolish to ignore either aspect. Watching my wife after she had our child, there are *definitely* strong biochemical and physical differences between men and women.
I dispute both claims. And the idea that there is only 2 sexes, let alone only 2 genders. The evidence to the contrary is too strong. For your own example: are you aware that newborns recognize their FATHER's voice BEFORE they recognize their mother's voice ? If you see "different biochemical reactions" in her - I call that her being more committed to parenthood than you - a CULTURAL prescept. In fact, there is a growing movement of men who use mental excercises and bonding-activities to stimulate male lactation (without liver damage) - that is to say massively increase their own progresterone production purely through emotional action (no supplements or such) in order to be able to breastfeed. Even the most basic and simple biological version of "women's work" (that is to say: breastfeeding) is delineated ONLY by culture.
>That *said*... the vast majority of people, when raised in a society with strong gender roles, will generally exhibit them. That's no more meaningful than saying "the vast majority of people when raised in a society that has a particular religion will generally embrace it" - it's still discriminatory and wrong to ASSUME that you are a Christian just because you speak English - as is expecting any particular behaviour on the basis of whether or not you have a penis.
>So expecting women or men to consistently act like that society's image of women and men isn't sexist. Yes. It is. It's the very definition of sexism as it immediately precludes individual choice. Not to mention that even biologically the lines blur massively - there is no "men/women" divisor, rather a giant gray area with everybody somewhere in there. Some people have androgyn deficiencies and others have an excess and both are perfectly normal - even though it's absolutely irrational to expect two people with radically different levels of this hormone to behave in a similar manner just because they are in the same gender/sex box.
But I think "anticipating" may have been a less offensive term from you than "expecting" - not unsexist, but less so. Expecting implies expectation which has strong overtones of demand and authoritarianism.
>Saying that they *must* act that way because biology is immutable is. As well.
>It's a complex, multi-variate system involving years of cultural and individual programming running on a meat machine that is also influenced by its base hardware and and its chemical sensors. No one should really claim that they completely understand it.
I agree with that- but then you disprove your own argument. The only SENSIBLE thing you can do in light of all that insecurity is to respect individual choice above all else and constantly guard yourself against making assumptions about people. The very definition of all discrimination is to make assumptions about individual nature based on group membership, when the group membership is involuntary (as in sex or race) the discrimination is far more severe. Therefore the only way to NOT be a chauvinist, or a racist, or fill-in-bigot-of-choice-here is to assume NOTHING about an individual except what traits that individual has already exhibited. That is to say - actively make an effort to ignore group membership entirely - and get to know people as individuals.
>Hardly. Recognizing that there are differences between the sexes is common sense. Judging people's values and defining their roles solely by their sexes is sexism.
Those "differences" are provably superficial and purely cultural -as well proven by other cultures having radically different role expectations from sexes and both sexes playing into those different expectations with the same level as they do to the ones in ours. Hell even in our own subcultures this view is greatly challenged. Consider for example the highly androgynous gender-roles of the metal and goth cultures - or the outright girly look of glam metal (which then ironically became equated with having the "guts to be glam" - the MOST masculine thing a man could do was to act feminine).
No my friend, the differences between the sexes exist only in the physical form.
I just finished watching the entire TNG again a few days ago - in no single episode is there any mention that suggests alcohol is illegal. On the contrary other scenes (notably the ones on his family farm both after the Borg incident and in the series finale "All good things") it is clear that traditional winemaking is alive and well in the winelands of France. This would lend credence to the theory that alcohol hasn't been made illegal, but merely become vastly unpopular with all but a few traditionalists. There are hints that suggest this in several episodes when the topic comes up. It is, of course, also possible that alcohol - while legal - is restricted for members of Starfleet. This would be quite different however, Starfleet is a naval organisation focussed on exploration but in times of war they clearly also fill a military role and they have clearly inherited their culture from the more elite forces in present-day military organisations. It is not unknown even now for military members to be held to a higher standard of behaviour than citizens, exactly to protect the rights of those civilians to do the things they aren't allowed to (I personally disagree with this philosophy but it would be perfectly consistent). So I would say, if there is any rule about alcohol at all it would be "against regulations" rather than "illegal".
Having said that, we could also consider what we know about Roddenberry himself. Roddenberry was a devoted hedonist and he stated publicly that he restrains himself when writing Star Trek because no studio would dare to air what he really wants to write. As he put it in one interview: "If I wrote the future as I think it would really be, no studio in America would dare to show it." Granted he said this during the ToS years - and he is clearly already a bit more liberal by the time of TNG - but make no mistake, the allusions to sexual freedom in Star Trek is massively watered down compared to the future Roddenberry truly foresaw. His vision was one where automation had made all labour unneeded and life could be devoted purely to the seeking of pleasure. Indeed exactly that is what MADE Star Fleet elite, in a world without any competitive requirement to excel, these are people who chose to excel purely for the sake of personal self-fulfilment - who gave up much of the free life of pleasure available to all - for the reward of exploration and the burden of duty. Do you really think that a man whose philosophies were built around the ideal of a world where mankind has all it's needs met and can focus purely on wants, where excellence is a choice made only for it's OWN reward - that such a man, would also envision a world where a great source of pleasure has been banished ? On the contrary - everything I saw in TNG was of a man far more liberal than the rest of the media of the time - even watered down. He touches on same-sex equality and attacks attempts to cure gays via a subtle and indirect manner in one episode, frequently has character's love affairs crossing the boundaries of species (indeed TNG ends with a Betazoid falling in love with a Klingon - what a match) and his heroes (of both genders) are quite promiscuous - hell in the first season of TNG he has Data and Yar getting it on (a clear alegory of approval for women who enjoy sex toys - long before this was fashionable enough to be discussed in cosmo and on Oprah). No, I daresay everything we know about Gene strongly suggests that banning alcohol is simply not likely - replacing it for on-duty military personnel with something that offers the same pleasure and none of the negative side effects, very much within that expectation.
>That's just not true. All Xbox 360 DVD-based games are required to run with minimal installation (and minimal patch size - though DLC is different, of course), so they will run even on systems with 4GB flash instead of an HDD. More recently they MS added support for installing the full game to HDD (which does make a big difference in load times) but it it's definitely not *required*.
This hasn't been true for a long time. I've personally bought (and returned) a final fantasy game that could not install without a hard drive present.
> I was furious with them for wasting my time, but kept my temper in check and departed without burning any bridges. This has only happened to me once though, in almost 20 years in the field.
If a company does that to me, I'll send them a bill for my time at market consultant-developer rates. They may not like you realizing it but there is a massive opportunity cost - in the time they wasted from me I could have made that much money, since they took that time under false pretenses I would demand they pay me for it. If they then refused, you bet your ass I'd sue them.
>And many of these universities patent and license their work as well. Revenue from these licenses help fund medical/pharma research and the university in general.
Univesities also did this research prior to the late 1990s - and that is relevant because the law that ALLOWS universities to patent publicly funded research wasn't passed in the USA until 2002 (it was a Dubya law in other words). The late Michael Chrighton severely argued against the law and even wrote a book (Next) about why it's a bad law.
Even despite it's recognized bad effects, giving anybody a monopoly on selling something the public paid for is outright theft of tax dollars. If the public pays for it, it belongs in the public domain.
So you genuinely believe that pharmaceutical companies primarily invest their own money, and do so because patents reward them ? Too bad it's not how it works in the real world. In the real world the bulk of investment in medical research is already done with public funds - but private companies are allowed to get a patent (that is - a monopoly) on selling the results of that publicly funded research. Haven't you NOTICED that most health researchers work at public universities, and NOT for pharmaceutical companies ?
Just a few weeks ago we had a/. article about an HIV vaccine, if you read the article however, you would learn that the research was funded by the Canadian government.
Taxpayers are already paying for drugs to be developed, we should not have to pay exorbitant monopoly rates to use them later - anybody who can manufacture them should be competing for our dollars on the basis of who can do it cheaper.
And if the USA then take it's entire African foreign aid budget and turns it into tax-write-offs for pharmaceutical companies who provide free-of-charge medicines to Africa instead- THIS African for one would applaud that. Not least because our own brand of political douchebags would find malaria tablets a LOT harder to launder into their private stashes than cash.
Indeed, in the very episode the GP cites Guinan gives (then Captain) Scott a supply of rare brandy to drink from, a few scenes later we learn that this brandy had been a gift to her from Picard.
In another episode Picard visits his families wine farm while recovering after being assimilated into the borg collective and it becomes clear that the family still produces traditional wine with alcohol in it. Indeed it's clear throughout the series that synthahol has all the advantages of alcohol and achieves exactly the same effects - only without the disadvantages (you can get sobered up instantly and don't get a hangover).
But you're actually making part of our argument for us. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" and when people use the word they conflate a number of laws wanting us to think of them as similar when in fact they have almost nothing in common. Copyright - automatic, lasts a long time, applies to execution of ideas only. Patents - not automatic, lasts a relatively short time, applies to ideas themselves rather than to execution Trademark - not automatic, lost if not defended, can last indefinitely - applies to neither ideas nor execution.
In fact trademarks are not a law of benefit to trademark holders at all (at least not in it's intention), it's intention is to be a consumer protection law - so that when you buy something you can trust it's the real thing (what you describe is a case for proper trademark enforcement which most FOSS people have no problem with whatsoever - indeed I've never met one who did).
These things are radically different sets of laws with completely different goals and implement in very different (often completely contradictory) manners. Trademarks can't be called a property by any reasonable measure and in fact unlike the others cannot be said to even enable market-forming, they are purely there to protect consumer's interests - not those of trademark HOLDERS but those of ordinary citizens. They are also highly restricted because they apply to words - so they don't get turned into a form of censorship. This is why a trademark is limited to a certain field of endeavour (a trademark on the name windows in computing cannot be enforced on companies that make glass panes to fit into holes in your wall or vice versa), and why they are lost if not defended and if (despite defending them) they become common-usage terminology (this is why Johnson and Johnson lost the trademark on "band-aid", "kleenex" was lost in the same way).
There is no way to lose your copyright before it expires. You can sue somebody for violating a patent even if a billion other people did it and you never sued any of them before.
See - these things are completely separate things and should be discussed and debated separately. When we discuss patent reform, throwing copyright into the discussion will only confuse the issue since they are almost entirely opposite in their structure. If we discuss trade-mark enforcement we have literally NOTHING to gain by conflating patent and copyright issues with that. I live in Africa and I've lived through some of the problems you describe. I contracted malaria in Nigeria and know the fear of wondering whether the malaria tablets the doctor prescribed and the pharmacy sold me are actually the real thing or just repackaged aspirins. I'm in favor of strong trademark enforcement to prevent such things. At the same time I'm in favor of radical patent reform and possibly even abolishment. I really hope my country remains firm and refuses to allow software patents forever, because that is a MAJOR industrial advantage for us. A US company cannot sue us for patent infringement (which every program in the world does) but we COULD sue them - and since they cannot then blackmail us - they leave us alone. We're one of the last countries where a software company doesn't have to compile a huge stockpile of patents just to survive.
There is a bit of that happening. Luxury companies offering the wealthy protection against extreme weather events already exist (for example a company that promises hurricane evacuation on first class travel systems). Other companies are investing heavily in tools to profit from climate disasters - particularly where those are expected to hit poor regions/countries, there is a fortune to be made out of the suffering of those people who are displaced, killed etc.
Make no mistake - when you're rich, there is no such thing as bad news, if the market rises - they get richer, if the market falls they get richer, they are already figuring out how to do the same with climate change. Naomi Klein's blog had an article with some more concrete examples just last week.
The last time somebody tried Eugenics it turned into some of the cruelest and most liberty-destroying laws in world-history. In the USA it became Jim Crow laws, in Germany it caused the holocaust.
Hence the author's position - while a dysgenic slide of this nature is concerning, the only way one could even try to change it would involve something that is far, far worse.
Agreed, with a few (very rare) exceptions. Notably - try getting a (fully supported) older webcam to work with skype in Linux. Skype only speaks V4L2 and if the webcam driver only speaks V4L1 then you're screwed.
Go put your hand behind your fridge - notice that the iron grid there is quite a bit warmer than room temperature ? But the inside of the fridge is cold...
See to make the fridge cold, we have to MOVE the heat inside it somewhere, that grid is where it ends up being radiated away from.
The grid gets warmer, so the fridge can get colder.
>Please prove that the commenter was bribed by the oil industry, that there exists any attempt by oil industry companies and that any money is on the table. I want receipts, invoices or funding statements in company records. Otherwise you're just full of shit.
Of course, because it's standard practise for companies to keep careful, public accounting records of illegal or deceitful activities (paying shills is sometimes the former and always the latter).
>How about when the police have him in custody, or officially filed charges? It's not the medias job to identify criminals, it's their job to report when the proper authorities do that.
Wrong. In fact when the system works the media is an incredibly powerful ally to law enforcement. Exactly because things like free press laws can allow people to talk to the media without revealing their own identities, this gives the media access to whistleblowers who may have (good) reason to be weary of going to law enforcement. The media for example is an ideal tool to uncover corruption WITHIN law enforcement (where whistleblowing can be very dangerous if done in your own name and publicly). Of course good journalists would seek evidence to back up a story before airing it - but when such a story is aired and evidence presented it gives other elements of law enforcement a very strong bases on which to pursue investigations.
There's a reason we call the media the 'fourth chamber' of government - they are meant to be a social and political watchdog, and if you abandon that role for them - then free press laws make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Relative to this, my username here, which is also the basis of my.co.za domain name is also used by a person in the USA - who happens to have the.com version of the same domain name. When we learned of each other, we both thought that it was pretty cool - and left it at that, but I wonder if a law-enforcement type would really be able to tell the difference (or bother to try ?)
Even moreso - he already had it on twitter, so my twitter handle is actually my real name. Now get this - there is a local celebrity in my country (national team rugby player - which is a HUGE deal in our culture) who happens to have the same name as me. He got on twitter well after me, and settled for name_ - no worries there, I think he showed good grace by not demanding that because he is a celebrity I should give up my named account just because we happen to have the same initials+surname and both prefer that as our given name (and I was doing so well before he BECAME famous). I do quite often get tagged in discussions on rugby (which I have zero interest in) though - wit messages intended for him. I try to be graceful and just kindly point out to the people that they got the wrong guy and give them his proper account while I'm at it.
I know that in the USA there is a law prohibiting somebody from registering a celebrity's name as a domain name though and I wonder how that would play in a case like this, if I'd registered my name as a domain name - could he complain on the basis that it's the name of a celebrity - even though in fact the name I registered is my OWN name ?
That's a major flaw with this law, just in my own life I just pointed out two cases where it would cause great degrees of difficulty for law enforcement to do anything useful with it as a monitoring tool anyway. Two people who have nothing to do with me, but I could end up being monitored for their actions - and vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
>The basic privacy is moot because she was offered a card without an RFID chip.
Her father outright stated that the reason they didn't accept that was because of the strings attached: revoking their right to not endorse the program.
Now while I don't agree with their religious interpretation I do respect their right to have it, and to express it - that includes not only NOT wearing the tag but the right to ask others not to do so as well.
She was being offered a consolation prize but only if she (and her whole family - people who are NOT school students) agree to give up their right to express their believes to others about this matter.
In other words -the alternative offered is no better (in fact exactly because I don't agree with the religious position - I think it's WORSE) than the original problem !
>This is no different than if an employer requires an employee to wear an RFID badge at work. If you choose not to wear the badge you are fired for not following policy. Same thing at this school; if you don't wear the badge you are expelled (virtually the same as getting fired).
No, they are exact opposites. Employer pays you - and you show up by choice (you have a legal right to quit). You pay the school (through taxes and fees).
They are the ones serving YOU.
She cites BOTH reasons, and considering both are constitutional rights... er... why is standing up for one less than the other ?
Religious freedom is the SAME freedom that gives an atheist the right to denounce god. You can't have your cake and eat it to.
>I doubt that this system here is much different from clocking in to the lessons.
It's massively different. Do you know why ?
Because you are PAID to be at work, while you (or your parents but it amounts to the same thing) PAY to go to school.
The roles of authority are in fact, exactly, reversed. A school is there to serve YOUR need to get an education. We allow them to institute a measure of discipline so that one selfish kid cannot interfere with the other kids wanting the same. But this is no different than a shop putting up a "one per customer" sign on a special, they are merely protecting the rights of their OTHER customers.
But the school is the CUSTOMER here, moreso - they are a STATE customer paid for by TAX money - that makes them public SERVANTS.
They're duty is to give children the education their parents WANT - never the other way around.
Do you get why this is different?
Allowing your schools to make a rule that intrudes on religious freedom (whether or not you agree with the religion or it's interpretation of the rule is NOT in fact relevant) is NO different from allowing the president to ban the practise of Islam.
That's what this is like. An employer is well within his rights to decree that a Muslim wanting to do Friday prayers must put in leave for it if it falls during business hours - and this is why many muslims prefer to work for other muslims (who won't make a rule like that but would rather close the shop) . That's fine because it's a voluntary choice to work for THIS employer and he is paying you for your time and obedience.
The school is not paying her by mutually agreed contractual consent for HER obedience. She is paying THEM to teach her - and the limits to their making of rules ENDS at "is needed to ensure that she does not disrupt the education of OTHER paying customers".
>There is no motive to take offence on that as different is not necessarily better or worse.
Yes. There is. There is a fundamentally offence whenever you ascribe to somebody a trait they have not exhibited and pretty much all the worst shit that happened in history can be shown to have been caused by exactly that.
It's no more true of sex/gender than it is of race. And the simple scientific fact is that the very IDEA of "men" and "women" are flawed, there are at least 26 variations on the XY chromosome that can chemically exist, of which at least 14 are viable and at least 8 have been observed in what we regard as normal, healthy humans.
That's 8 different sexes - at least.
On a surface examination those 8 are indistinguishable from either a 'man' or a 'woman' - yet their biochemistry is radically different. This is exactly why olympic sex tests have such difficulty finding a standard to settle on - because there isn't one in nature. The others are various forms hermaphrodite (which occurs in nature and therefore I reject the concept that they are NOT natural - we use surgery to make them one or the other more out of psychological need to shelter them than because it's medically required).
Many cultures on this planet have more than 2 gender's as well, in fact three or more is actually more common - western culture is basically unique in only having two! This is probably, at least in part, responsible for the embrace of androgyny and cross-gender identification of western subcultures.
The only valid traits to ascribe to a person are the traits that PERSON has exhibited. Anything else is conjecture and always far more likely to be false than true as it's based on a truly bad set of assumptions.
I stand by a firm belief that the experiments that supposedly show otherwise were flawed in numerous ways (scientists looking for evidence to support their theory instead of looking for evidence to disprove it, subjects acting on subconscious pressure to behave the way they sense the scientists expect them too etc.) as they simply don't match up to the known facts of human DNA and biology. We don't HAVE two sexes, we have at least 8 - that LOOKS like two on the surface.
And that's before you even consider individual deviation - the one thing we know for sure is that everybody deviates from even cultural norms in SOME ways. We can create lose categories of deviation (for example: the 'tomboy' stereotype) but they themselves show how flawed the idea of categorizing human behaviour is.
Take any two tomboys you know and compare how many interests they have in common and how many they don't. Which 'girly' things do one like and the other not? Which 'boy' things do they both like and which is liked by only one ?
Even for a well-known 'category' we quickly realise that we cannot make ANY assumptions. Two tomboys may both like to climb trees but only one likes toy trucks, or neither likes to climb trees ... even when you have two people both identifying with the same label you cannot make any predictions about them with ANY degree of accuracy.
Saying girls are like this and boys are like that is as meaningless as assuming ALL geeks love spiderman (how odd that many of the comic-book geeks I know despise him and consider Batman the epitomy of superheroes - I completely disagree and have always considered spiderman a better character). You can only even say "they both like superheroes" because we've both identified as such OURSELVES - many computer geeks don't like comic books or superheroes at all - yet it's considered a mainstay of their culture.
We can say that my born-culture (Afrikaans) likes to braai (that is cook meat over an open fire). But many people born into this culture don't like that, some are vegetarians and only like to braai vegetables, some hate the idea of cooking outdoors.
You can identify a cultural trait as existing, but you can NEVER ascribe it to any member of that culture until you have observed it in that PARTICULAR member.
The same goes for the cultural traits associated with gender and sex.
>A lot of what you say makes sense and I agree with the spirit of your post, but claiming that women breastfeeding is down to culture strikes me as mental
Well I never meant to suggest it was bad of culture, merely that it isn't unchangeable. The link between hormones and thoughts/emotions are well-known to work both ways (sufficiently so that some species can change sex at will) merely activating a fully functional set of glands that are already there seems fairly minor in comparison.
> Is it cultural in pigs too? Rats?
No. Pigs and Rats don't have cultures. Culture is an emergent phenomenon of intelligence - and vice versa. They are quite clever creatures but they have not developed culture, they don't yet have sufficiently advanced communication ability for that to happen.
However the mental ability that matters here is ANOTHER emergent phenomenon of high intelligence which, by all accounts, is equally absent from these species. The ability we call "free will".
Culture and Free Will are two contradictory sets of pressures - culture demands conformity, free will demands self-expression and individualism.
This is quite common in evolution - having two contradicting pressures battle until they reach a balance... and we got quite a few such battles happening in our heads.
Culture vs. free will is one of them.
Over time I believe free will has been winning - gaining small victories with every generation. Perhaps one day we'll recognize that culture is entirely superfluous (because it is) and that free will is much more important than we thought (because it is).
So that's the essence of my whole argument: individual free will can overcome both physical and cultural 'limitations' of ALL kinds - even the progesterone limitation on male lactation (apparently). You cannot make any assumptions on people based on either sex or gender because people do HAVE free will. ... another force that works in conjunction with free will in most cases, but sometimes contradicts it.
And that's before we even factor in individual personality -
>It's foolish to ignore either aspect. Watching my wife after she had our child, there are *definitely* strong biochemical and physical differences between men and women.
I dispute both claims. And the idea that there is only 2 sexes, let alone only 2 genders. The evidence to the contrary is too strong.
For your own example: are you aware that newborns recognize their FATHER's voice BEFORE they recognize their mother's voice ?
If you see "different biochemical reactions" in her - I call that her being more committed to parenthood than you - a CULTURAL prescept.
In fact, there is a growing movement of men who use mental excercises and bonding-activities to stimulate male lactation (without liver damage) - that is to say massively increase their own progresterone production purely through emotional action (no supplements or such) in order to be able to breastfeed.
Even the most basic and simple biological version of "women's work" (that is to say: breastfeeding) is delineated ONLY by culture.
>That *said*... the vast majority of people, when raised in a society with strong gender roles, will generally exhibit them.
That's no more meaningful than saying "the vast majority of people when raised in a society that has a particular religion will generally embrace it" - it's still discriminatory and wrong to ASSUME that you are a Christian just because you speak English - as is expecting any particular behaviour on the basis of whether or not you have a penis.
>So expecting women or men to consistently act like that society's image of women and men isn't sexist.
Yes. It is. It's the very definition of sexism as it immediately precludes individual choice. Not to mention that even biologically the lines blur massively - there is no "men/women" divisor, rather a giant gray area with everybody somewhere in there. Some people have androgyn deficiencies and others have an excess and both are perfectly normal - even though it's absolutely irrational to expect two people with radically different levels of this hormone to behave in a similar manner just because they are in the same gender/sex box.
But I think "anticipating" may have been a less offensive term from you than "expecting" - not unsexist, but less so. Expecting implies expectation which has strong overtones of demand and authoritarianism.
>Saying that they *must* act that way because biology is immutable is.
As well.
>It's a complex, multi-variate system involving years of cultural and individual programming running on a meat machine that is also influenced by its base hardware and and its chemical sensors. No one should really claim that they completely understand it.
I agree with that- but then you disprove your own argument. The only SENSIBLE thing you can do in light of all that insecurity is to respect individual choice above all else and constantly guard yourself against making assumptions about people. The very definition of all discrimination is to make assumptions about individual nature based on group membership, when the group membership is involuntary (as in sex or race) the discrimination is far more severe.
Therefore the only way to NOT be a chauvinist, or a racist, or fill-in-bigot-of-choice-here is to assume NOTHING about an individual except what traits that individual has already exhibited. That is to say - actively make an effort to ignore group membership entirely - and get to know people as individuals.
>Hardly. Recognizing that there are differences between the sexes is common sense. Judging people's values and defining their roles solely by their sexes is sexism.
Those "differences" are provably superficial and purely cultural -as well proven by other cultures having radically different role expectations from sexes and both sexes playing into those different expectations with the same level as they do to the ones in ours.
Hell even in our own subcultures this view is greatly challenged. Consider for example the highly androgynous gender-roles of the metal and goth cultures - or the outright girly look of glam metal (which then ironically became equated with having the "guts to be glam" - the MOST masculine thing a man could do was to act feminine).
No my friend, the differences between the sexes exist only in the physical form.
I just finished watching the entire TNG again a few days ago - in no single episode is there any mention that suggests alcohol is illegal. On the contrary other scenes (notably the ones on his family farm both after the Borg incident and in the series finale "All good things") it is clear that traditional winemaking is alive and well in the winelands of France.
This would lend credence to the theory that alcohol hasn't been made illegal, but merely become vastly unpopular with all but a few traditionalists. There are hints that suggest this in several episodes when the topic comes up.
It is, of course, also possible that alcohol - while legal - is restricted for members of Starfleet. This would be quite different however, Starfleet is a naval organisation focussed on exploration but in times of war they clearly also fill a military role and they have clearly inherited their culture from the more elite forces in present-day military organisations. It is not unknown even now for military members to be held to a higher standard of behaviour than citizens, exactly to protect the rights of those civilians to do the things they aren't allowed to (I personally disagree with this philosophy but it would be perfectly consistent).
So I would say, if there is any rule about alcohol at all it would be "against regulations" rather than "illegal".
Having said that, we could also consider what we know about Roddenberry himself. Roddenberry was a devoted hedonist and he stated publicly that he restrains himself when writing Star Trek because no studio would dare to air what he really wants to write. As he put it in one interview: "If I wrote the future as I think it would really be, no studio in America would dare to show it."
Granted he said this during the ToS years - and he is clearly already a bit more liberal by the time of TNG - but make no mistake, the allusions to sexual freedom in Star Trek is massively watered down compared to the future Roddenberry truly foresaw. His vision was one where automation had made all labour unneeded and life could be devoted purely to the seeking of pleasure. Indeed exactly that is what MADE Star Fleet elite, in a world without any competitive requirement to excel, these are people who chose to excel purely for the sake of personal self-fulfilment - who gave up much of the free life of pleasure available to all - for the reward of exploration and the burden of duty.
Do you really think that a man whose philosophies were built around the ideal of a world where mankind has all it's needs met and can focus purely on wants, where excellence is a choice made only for it's OWN reward - that such a man, would also envision a world where a great source of pleasure has been banished ?
On the contrary - everything I saw in TNG was of a man far more liberal than the rest of the media of the time - even watered down. He touches on same-sex equality and attacks attempts to cure gays via a subtle and indirect manner in one episode, frequently has character's love affairs crossing the boundaries of species (indeed TNG ends with a Betazoid falling in love with a Klingon - what a match) and his heroes (of both genders) are quite promiscuous - hell in the first season of TNG he has Data and Yar getting it on (a clear alegory of approval for women who enjoy sex toys - long before this was fashionable enough to be discussed in cosmo and on Oprah).
No, I daresay everything we know about Gene strongly suggests that banning alcohol is simply not likely - replacing it for on-duty military personnel with something that offers the same pleasure and none of the negative side effects, very much within that expectation.
>That's just not true. All Xbox 360 DVD-based games are required to run with minimal installation (and minimal patch size - though DLC is different, of course), so they will run even on systems with 4GB flash instead of an HDD. More recently they MS added support for installing the full game to HDD (which does make a big difference in load times) but it it's definitely not *required*.
This hasn't been true for a long time. I've personally bought (and returned) a final fantasy game that could not install without a hard drive present.
> I was furious with them for wasting my time, but kept my temper in check and departed without burning any bridges. This has only happened to me once though, in almost 20 years in the field.
If a company does that to me, I'll send them a bill for my time at market consultant-developer rates. They may not like you realizing it but there is a massive opportunity cost - in the time they wasted from me I could have made that much money, since they took that time under false pretenses I would demand they pay me for it.
If they then refused, you bet your ass I'd sue them.
>And many of these universities patent and license their work as well. Revenue from these licenses help fund medical/pharma research and the university in general.
Univesities also did this research prior to the late 1990s - and that is relevant because the law that ALLOWS universities to patent publicly funded research wasn't passed in the USA until 2002 (it was a Dubya law in other words).
The late Michael Chrighton severely argued against the law and even wrote a book (Next) about why it's a bad law.
Even despite it's recognized bad effects, giving anybody a monopoly on selling something the public paid for is outright theft of tax dollars. If the public pays for it, it belongs in the public domain.
So you genuinely believe that pharmaceutical companies primarily invest their own money, and do so because patents reward them ?
Too bad it's not how it works in the real world. In the real world the bulk of investment in medical research is already done with public funds - but private companies are allowed to get a patent (that is - a monopoly) on selling the results of that publicly funded research.
Haven't you NOTICED that most health researchers work at public universities, and NOT for pharmaceutical companies ?
Just a few weeks ago we had a /. article about an HIV vaccine, if you read the article however, you would learn that the research was funded by the Canadian government.
Taxpayers are already paying for drugs to be developed, we should not have to pay exorbitant monopoly rates to use them later - anybody who can manufacture them should be competing for our dollars on the basis of who can do it cheaper.
And if the USA then take it's entire African foreign aid budget and turns it into tax-write-offs for pharmaceutical companies who provide free-of-charge medicines to Africa instead- THIS African for one would applaud that. Not least because our own brand of political douchebags would find malaria tablets a LOT harder to launder into their private stashes than cash.
Indeed, in the very episode the GP cites Guinan gives (then Captain) Scott a supply of rare brandy to drink from, a few scenes later we learn that this brandy had been a gift to her from Picard.
In another episode Picard visits his families wine farm while recovering after being assimilated into the borg collective and it becomes clear that the family still produces traditional wine with alcohol in it.
Indeed it's clear throughout the series that synthahol has all the advantages of alcohol and achieves exactly the same effects - only without the disadvantages (you can get sobered up instantly and don't get a hangover).
But you're actually making part of our argument for us. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" and when people use the word they conflate a number of laws wanting us to think of them as similar when in fact they have almost nothing in common.
Copyright - automatic, lasts a long time, applies to execution of ideas only.
Patents - not automatic, lasts a relatively short time, applies to ideas themselves rather than to execution
Trademark - not automatic, lost if not defended, can last indefinitely - applies to neither ideas nor execution.
In fact trademarks are not a law of benefit to trademark holders at all (at least not in it's intention), it's intention is to be a consumer protection law - so that when you buy something you can trust it's the real thing (what you describe is a case for proper trademark enforcement which most FOSS people have no problem with whatsoever - indeed I've never met one who did).
These things are radically different sets of laws with completely different goals and implement in very different (often completely contradictory) manners. Trademarks can't be called a property by any reasonable measure and in fact unlike the others cannot be said to even enable market-forming, they are purely there to protect consumer's interests - not those of trademark HOLDERS but those of ordinary citizens. They are also highly restricted because they apply to words - so they don't get turned into a form of censorship. This is why a trademark is limited to a certain field of endeavour (a trademark on the name windows in computing cannot be enforced on companies that make glass panes to fit into holes in your wall or vice versa), and why they are lost if not defended and if (despite defending them) they become common-usage terminology (this is why Johnson and Johnson lost the trademark on "band-aid", "kleenex" was lost in the same way).
There is no way to lose your copyright before it expires. You can sue somebody for violating a patent even if a billion other people did it and you never sued any of them before.
See - these things are completely separate things and should be discussed and debated separately. When we discuss patent reform, throwing copyright into the discussion will only confuse the issue since they are almost entirely opposite in their structure. If we discuss trade-mark enforcement we have literally NOTHING to gain by conflating patent and copyright issues with that.
I live in Africa and I've lived through some of the problems you describe. I contracted malaria in Nigeria and know the fear of wondering whether the malaria tablets the doctor prescribed and the pharmacy sold me are actually the real thing or just repackaged aspirins. I'm in favor of strong trademark enforcement to prevent such things. At the same time I'm in favor of radical patent reform and possibly even abolishment.
I really hope my country remains firm and refuses to allow software patents forever, because that is a MAJOR industrial advantage for us. A US company cannot sue us for patent infringement (which every program in the world does) but we COULD sue them - and since they cannot then blackmail us - they leave us alone. We're one of the last countries where a software company doesn't have to compile a huge stockpile of patents just to survive.
the thieves didn't steal a container of biological warfare agents instead... it would have been a far less hazardous thing to try and fence.
There is a bit of that happening. Luxury companies offering the wealthy protection against extreme weather events already exist (for example a company that promises hurricane evacuation on first class travel systems).
Other companies are investing heavily in tools to profit from climate disasters - particularly where those are expected to hit poor regions/countries, there is a fortune to be made out of the suffering of those people who are displaced, killed etc.
Make no mistake - when you're rich, there is no such thing as bad news, if the market rises - they get richer, if the market falls they get richer, they are already figuring out how to do the same with climate change.
Naomi Klein's blog had an article with some more concrete examples just last week.
The last time somebody tried Eugenics it turned into some of the cruelest and most liberty-destroying laws in world-history. In the USA it became Jim Crow laws, in Germany it caused the holocaust.
Hence the author's position - while a dysgenic slide of this nature is concerning, the only way one could even try to change it would involve something that is far, far worse.
Agreed, with a few (very rare) exceptions. Notably - try getting a (fully supported) older webcam to work with skype in Linux. Skype only speaks V4L2 and if the webcam driver only speaks V4L1 then you're screwed.
There is no contradiction.
Go put your hand behind your fridge - notice that the iron grid there is quite a bit warmer than room temperature ?
But the inside of the fridge is cold...
See to make the fridge cold, we have to MOVE the heat inside it somewhere, that grid is where it ends up being radiated away from.
The grid gets warmer, so the fridge can get colder.
Is that a contradiction too ?
>Please prove that the commenter was bribed by the oil industry, that there exists any attempt by oil industry companies and that any money is on the table. I want receipts, invoices or funding statements in company records. Otherwise you're just full of shit.
Of course, because it's standard practise for companies to keep careful, public accounting records of illegal or deceitful activities (paying shills is sometimes the former and always the latter).
>How about when the police have him in custody, or officially filed charges? It's not the medias job to identify criminals, it's their job to report when the proper authorities do that.
Wrong. In fact when the system works the media is an incredibly powerful ally to law enforcement. Exactly because things like free press laws can allow people to talk to the media without revealing their own identities, this gives the media access to whistleblowers who may have (good) reason to be weary of going to law enforcement.
The media for example is an ideal tool to uncover corruption WITHIN law enforcement (where whistleblowing can be very dangerous if done in your own name and publicly). Of course good journalists would seek evidence to back up a story before airing it - but when such a story is aired and evidence presented it gives other elements of law enforcement a very strong bases on which to pursue investigations.
There's a reason we call the media the 'fourth chamber' of government - they are meant to be a social and political watchdog, and if you abandon that role for them - then free press laws make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
> to ease these hard times
Actually, that sounds like the exact opposite of what they were aiming for...
Relative to this, my username here, which is also the basis of my .co.za domain name is also used by a person in the USA - who happens to have the .com version of the same domain name.
When we learned of each other, we both thought that it was pretty cool - and left it at that, but I wonder if a law-enforcement type would really be able to tell the difference (or bother to try ?)
Even moreso - he already had it on twitter, so my twitter handle is actually my real name. Now get this - there is a local celebrity in my country (national team rugby player - which is a HUGE deal in our culture) who happens to have the same name as me.
He got on twitter well after me, and settled for name_ - no worries there, I think he showed good grace by not demanding that because he is a celebrity I should give up my named account just because we happen to have the same initials+surname and both prefer that as our given name (and I was doing so well before he BECAME famous).
I do quite often get tagged in discussions on rugby (which I have zero interest in) though - wit messages intended for him. I try to be graceful and just kindly point out to the people that they got the wrong guy and give them his proper account while I'm at it.
I know that in the USA there is a law prohibiting somebody from registering a celebrity's name as a domain name though and I wonder how that would play in a case like this, if I'd registered my name as a domain name - could he complain on the basis that it's the name of a celebrity - even though in fact the name I registered is my OWN name ?
That's a major flaw with this law, just in my own life I just pointed out two cases where it would cause great degrees of difficulty for law enforcement to do anything useful with it as a monitoring tool anyway. Two people who have nothing to do with me, but I could end up being monitored for their actions - and vice versa.
Your general regard, respect and compassion for your fellow man is an example to us all.