Personally, I find this vision disturbing, and am personally against add-ons that don't 'repair' the human body. I'm by no means religious, but there has to be some pride in using what was given to you by luck of the draw to the best of your abilities.
Pfft, you were born into a developed country with twentieth-century medical technology. You're way past using what was given to you by the luck of the draw to the best of your abilities.
Incidentally, if you are in favor of using what was given to you by random chance, then why aren't you against modifications which repair the human body?
I've never understood the idea that the form homo sapiens has had since it first evolved is somehow sacrosanct. It isn't. It's even less so in a technological society. Our bodies aren't special at all, if anything they're kind of mediocre. The mind is what's important, and people aren't going to be less human because they have better reflexes, or vision, or panimmunity, or whatever-else-have-you. Yet I keep hearing claims that they are, or that if they aren't it's bad anyway, and I've yet to hear a reason that doesn't come down to "it's just wrong, alright?"
thus pushes the question, what will be normal then?
20/20 vision.
It's not an absolute system of measurement, but it's one relative to the general populace. If, at some underermined point in the future, just about everyone's got their eyes redone so that they have 20/10 vision by our standards, they'd have 20/20 by their own because the average person would see clearly, at 20 feet, just what any other average person would see at 20 feet.
Most folks who get cancer, pak, ALS, alhemizers, and other terminal diseases died from them within a few years. Yet, this article is offering medical expectations that weren't even possible on star trek..
Cell phones, circuit breakers, useful computer security, and convinient flashlights are all impossible on Star Trek. Roddenberry also like to believe in other bullshit, like "some technologies are evil," and handwove them out of his setting via blanket bans so he wouldn't have to trouble his utopia with controversy.
Christ, people, it's a mediocre television show with poorly-done science and technology, not the yardstick by which feasibility should be determined. Why not read a book or something, instead of using popular television to tell you what can and cannot be done?
Gene Roddenberry predicted a war between enhanced humans and regular humans.
And, of course, Roddenberry was a clear-eyed pragmatist with an accurate and not-at-all moralist view of what the future would - er, I mean should - involve...
And, of course, that's the only reason anybody could question the safety or utility of "the next big thing".
Actually, as often than not it is the main reason people are attacking "the next big thing," at least in the case of things like genetic engineering or civilian access to spaceflight. There's the mindset that if I can't have it, then nobody should, which is ironic considering these people are supposedly attacking other peoples' selfishness.
A lot of the justifications pay lip service to the precautionary principle and other things - and some people actually mean it and don't wrap it up in "butbutbuttherich!" type language - but at its heart there's a whole lot of sour-graping going on - much like the post I responded to, in which that was the only complaint.
There's a lot of other silly arguments in favor of proscribing gengineering out there; that's just one of the silliest, up there with "playing God" being considered an actual rebuttal.
Intelligence is precisely as valuable as its application; no more, no less. If it's used well, it has worth; if it's used poorly or not at all, then it doesn't. Where it comes from is irrelevant.
If so, is it fair to give people an advantage because they have money?
Is it fair to give people an advantage because they can afford a nice car, a business suit, tuition at a prestigious university, blah blah blah?
The bullshit "good things are bad because the rich can afford it and I can't!" thing is cute the first twenty thousand times or so, but really now, it's old. It's funny how things work; they start out unreachably expensive at first and then become more accessible.
Provided, at least, that myopic, jealous Luddites don't get them banned or suppressed because they're offended that they can't reap the benefits on day one like someone who has a few more zeroes in their bank account.
So, what else do you rail against just because some people can benefit from affording it while others can't? Education? Computers? Housing in the good part of town?
Humans are born to biological parents, sans nanobots. Any modification of this human form is a deviation from what it is popularly believed to be human. I think the important commonality is that of sentient consciousness, [etc]
I pretty much agree with what you have to say there. I might have been unclear explaining my beef with the folks who throw 'not human anymore!' around; the problem to me is that they overwhelmingly seem to mean it in a pejorative sense. "Inhuman" is just about as loaded a term as "subhuman" is anymore, and I don't understand why folks are so eager to throw the term around. It's not the idea that people are differentiated from baseline humanity - it's the idea that they're seen as worse than, based purely on the existence of some modification.
Just wish I could understand why people constantly see the idea of modifications as some horrific threat to an undefined intangible, and rail against it to the point where they want to prevent people from being augmented. "If we were more intelligent it would be a Bad Thing!" Augh, I just don't get it. But yeah, I'm on the verge of starting to sound like tloh said he keeps coming across like, so I'll spare the world the rant for now.;)
What's wrong with existing as a human? Why do we have to constantly "improve" upon our existence? My take on any modifications to humanity are such that it's basically pointless.
Yeah, my eyeglasses and vaccination-induced immunity to smallpox and stuff sure are pointless. And I've got a feeling that I'm probably happier than some of my prior, less-intelligent ancestors, whose main concern was whether they'd die of disease or being eaten by the ancestors of one of our current species of housepets.
What, you don't consider stuff like those to be improvements (granted, the glasses are more of a fix)? So just where do you draw the line? Why does it make a difference if a modification is technological in the nanotech sense, or biological in the sense of vaccination? You don't oppose vaccines too, do you? Common sense says no, but since you dismiss all possible modifications out of hand, you're using a wide enough brush that I might as well swat you with it a little.
And why do people keep thinking that a human with some kind of modification is either inhuman or subhuman anyway?
Does this mean 10% WILL NOT ID? Well, if this is on a voluntary basis, then you (hopefullY) have those 10%. And those that won't ID will be rewarded by your business. That simple.
That's correct; the photo ID is not required as a law, but is instead a voluntary commitment entered into by some of the retailers. You're required to show ID within the participating stores, but not elsewhere, and the stores themselves aren't - to my knowledge - required to have this policy in the first place. They choose to.
Now, that 90% is almost certainty the entirety of retailers where most people in Canada buy games, so it might as well be law, but yeah. Basically the remaining 10% are independent stores, smaller, more obscure chains, and so on.
I think it is quite relevant, and I think you ad hominem attacks are rather uncalled for. What you are implying is that the US should be spending on research at least as much, on a per unit of wealth basis (still as of yet not defined to my satisfaction)as India is currently doing.
I await your pointing out where I said any such thing. I'm a patient man, but I suppose I'll be waiting for some time.
There are some highways, but it is not a comprehensive national system by any means. Highways in India are what we call roads in the US. Roads in India are any man-made attempt at surface equalization. Packed earth counts as a road. Gravel counts as a road. Even the World Bank indicates only 500km of highways in India are actualy more than two lanes.
Yeah, I'm going to call bullshit on this one. 500km out of 3.3 million kilometers of highways are more than two lanes? Puh-leeze. Give me more sources to back that up and I'll consider it accurate, but until then I'm gonna flatly reject this.
Why don't you go ask the starving children, dozens of whom will come to greet you the moment you step foot in that country, if that research means anything to them. I have no doubt that perhaps some interesting research goes on in India, but clearly there is disconnect between the ultimate goal of research, ie building a greater civilization, and the research that is currently taking place.
Heh. Calls me on ad-hominems and then starts throwing false dichotomies around as though they have a connect with the real world. How cute.
My usual question is to ask you where you get the idea that a nation of one billion people is only capable of either doing "useful" research, or the stuff you're dismissing as frivolous. You imply that they shouldn't lift a finger to do anything other than the most basic-needs type of stuff and discard anything else because it doesn't have immediate practical benefits.
People keep making this asinine claim that the United States and a couple of other western countries are the only nations which should - or should be permitted to - undertake any kind of advanced research, with this general overtone of "you're not ready for this kind of knowledge yet." That strikes me as little more than despicable, hateful condescension, and I give it little more than the tiny scrap of respect if almost deserves, and nothing more.
Researching obscure technologies is a luxury for advanced civilizations, which comparitively, India is not.
So what, are you advocating that Indian researchers should be told what they may and may not learn about? And who gives you the right to define what is an obscure enough technology for us Civilized Folk to be able to learn about to the exclusion of everyone else?
Research for the sake of research is a modern sickness.
No, it's a very old and beneficial one. The current sickness is the active defense of ignorance. Unlike knowledge for its own sake, this one is actually dangerous. The ignorance involved in condemning the idea of 'pure' research is astonishing, to say the least.
Until India is able to pave their roads to a reasonable extent AT LEAST consistent with the Roman Empire of approximately 2000 years ago, then we can talk.
So what if India has more papers per unit of wealth (whatever that means), they dont even have enough wealth to pave their roads! This entire planet is rock. They can't find a million unemployed people and have them start digging?
I believe this is where you explain why paved roads are a prerequisite for researching and publishing papers. As much fun as it is to compare apples and oranges, your comparison here is only a couple of baby steps beyond "oh yeah? Well, you're funny looking!"
I'm also kinda curious as to how much you know about the country anyway. You do know that India has weird things like highways, major cities, electricity and so on, right? This claim that they're somehow trapped two millenia in the past is pretty ignorant, even by the standards of Slashdot's usual brilliance about anything outside of the US' borders.
I know people have this kneejerk reaction to assume anything coming out of other countries has to be some affront or threat to Our Way Of Life that must be put down as much as possible, but things have been getting more infantile than usual these days. "Oh, but nothing they do matters, because they're not us yet!"
And I thought the Kipling echoes of the article blurb itself were annoying..
Let's be a little more, uh, down to earth in our problem solving, please? We've got a lot of problems right here on earth, folks- and I'd much rather you all put that brainpower to them.
Oh, the world would be such a better place if people this ignorant did what they used to do - that is, fail to survive to adulthood.
I'll ask you the same thing I've asked many people before, and the same thing I've never once recieved a satisfactory answer for: Where do you get this delusion that we have to lock ourselves to the planet's surface until we've Solved Things Here first, and why do you think doing something involving space development is so expensive as to wipe out the possibility of accomplishing things on the ground?
So the "history of Freedom" is confined to the United States, 1984-2004?
Come on. Relative to real freedom-related events, pretty much anything in the OSS movement is irrelevant. Wikipedia and Firefox are cool, but they have nothing alongside allowing people to vote or publicly speak their mind. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
Yes, but when you know only enough to know that the article's incredibly wrong, all you can do is slash stuff out without actually being able to fix the thing. Short of spending some time digging through some primary sources, considering the guy in question's more than a little obscure, all I'm currently able to do is call bullshit.
Most readers wouldn't be able to do even that, and a majority would just take the article at face value. The scale of the screwups in some of the articles in the history section throws the entire site into doubt.
If Wikipedia is so riddled with errors that you have to already know the material on-site to be able to read it with any chance of catching or correcting errors, then it's largely useless for anything more than the most casual lookups.
Nevermind what happens when you get someone who's both wrong about something and eager to defend their broken interpretation of an article by "fixing" it every time it's corrected...
Hmm.. get a job at brittanica or encarta and try that experiment.
I'd imagine it's a little more difficult to get a job at Britannica or Encarta and try that experiment, than it is to do the same thing with Wikipedia articles. Why don't you give it a shot, lemme know how it works out? I'll wait.
People keep pointing out that anyone can contribute to Wiki articles as though it's a good thing. To me, that's its primary fault.
It's also started contaminating other sites anyway. My main interest is history, and I poke around for historical stuff online as a hobby, much as I do it offline for academic purposes. One thing I've noticed in the past year or so is that a whole lot of history info, especially for classical history, has been replaced on other sites with word-for-word copies from Wikipedia articles, some of which are absolute, total bullshit (compare with the pre-broken version.
Because of the idiot who decided to insert the incorrect information into this article, dozens of other sites not on Wiki are now carrying incorrect information that can't simply be fixed by anyone with an Internet connection. As well, that scale of error throws pretty much the rest of that section of the site into significant doubt.
If you want to send a good message, send one that describes our achievements as a race, our dreams and aspirations. I believe that this sort of message will say a lot more about us and about what we are really made of. Is it more important to know what you were born with, or what you made with what you were given?
That's also going to be a lot more difficult for anyone out there to actually end up deciphering.
Sending the human genome implies that we know what the human genome is, which is in and of itself something of an accomplishment and speaks to our abilities.
Nah, I just despise the hypocrisy of that level of a misanthrope. I was insulting and sarcastic because the attitude he displayed is one of the few that I find genuinely intolerable, like most other kinds of self-deluded bigots who deserve little more than disdain for their contempt for humanity.
Sometimes people are just idiots. Getting after someone's case because you get off on the power trip is bullying; calling a spade a spade, however, is not. I tolerate neither bigots no the artificial attitudes of the type I responded to in the first place.
And yeah, compared to the jackasses that guy seems to have experienced, I have experienced the upper side of humanity, and my group of friends are examples thereof. Just because it's popular and trendy these days to buy into some depressing, pessimistic, cynical delusion that everything out there is horrible and evil and innately bad doesn't mean I have to drink the same kool-aid.
I'd imagine someone who actively hopes for the extinction of mankind would tend not to see that as worth bothering with. Depending on who's judging, though, with that kind of attitude you're fucked either way.
That's me. I'm the other one, I was basically an outcast in school. I'm a complete misanthrope who wishes an asteroid would hit the Earth. I'm financially successful, but I can never trust anyone enought to make a lasting friendship because my worst torment came from people who claimed to be friends. As far as I'm concerned, humanity is a vast failure and the sooner it vanishes, the better.
And it doesn't end as you enter adulthood, not if you really look at things. People are the same approval seeking, filthy conformist fuckers from the time their baby brains become fully wired until the day they die. Nothing changes. The only reason most stop pulling bullshit after age 18 is because their asses can be sued or arrested.
Funny, as a former and still-sorta outcast myself, my own circle of friends has been doing quite well for themselves and each other, and ranks among one of the most mutually-supportive band of human beings I've ever heard of. You'd almost think that your experience was, like, not necessarily indicative of the entire population of the planet Earth. Funny, that.
And just because you've touched one of my time-to-be-a-jackass buttons at the same time, I'm going to wonder out loud why people keep pretending to believe that humanity sucks so much and should just wipe itself out already. I mean, if they really thought it was that unbearable, there're a variety of quick, easy and painless ways out. Alas, the suicide rate among the really loud misanthropes is low enough that I find myself increasingly convinced they don't really mean it, and are just angsting for its own sake.
I wonder about this prefixing crap, myself. Someone's stalking you? They are a stalker. Someone's stalking you and part of the process involves tracking you online? They are not a cyberstalker. They are a stalker, no prefix. Full stop.
Spades continue to be spades. I don't see why everyone seems to find it so terribly difficult to understand.
As for the impotence of mere words, Ernest Adams said it well: "We've all heard that 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' It's a lie we tell children to thwart their natural and righteous desire to punch anyone who verbally abuses them. The fact is that words can hurt them. The most screwed-up people I know were screwed up by words, not by sticks and stones."
Yes. If "Internet bullying" (sic) is all a child has to worrry about these days, well, frankly, good.
Physical bullying is hard to ignore; namecalling can be much easier. With the internet and blocking software, it's even easier.
It's more than that. Take the joy of being harassed at school and add to it the fact that you can't even be left alone in the safety of your own house.
Stick a little fear on top of that - you could compose that perfect, literate, well-crafted retort, but you could also be picking your teeth out of the back of your head by three o'clock the next day should you try it.
Harassment online isn't "all" a kid on the wrong end of it has to worry about. It doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it wouldn't be happening if there wasn't someone else physically Out There with something out for his target. Especially if you don't have total control over blocking or tracking things, it's one more refuge snipped out from under the victim - one they can fight back in a lot more easily, it's true, but not without risking the same sort of stuff as though they'd mouthed off to someone twice their size in person.
One is that the Internet, with its lack of visual feedback, magnifies badness. It's very easy to be perceived as rude when it's just words, without gestures and facial expressions behind them.
This one makes me wonder at times. I've totally lost count of the number of times where someone online will view a disagreeing statement - even if it's polite, well-worded, constructive or even outright deferential - flew off the handle or plummeted into despair because that disagreement simply had to be an incredibly rude personal attack.
Alternately, you'll see people at times offering the most groveling of public apologies for "offending" people because they recieve those disagreements, whether or not there's any actual rudeness behind them. Insert a confused "uhhh... forgiven...?" from onlookers.
I've encountered that sort of thing now and then offline, but it's far, far more common on the Net. It seems a kind of opposite of the "Ooh, anonymity! I can be an asshole!" thing, only setting off peoples' insecurity instead of their aggression.
Slashdot Mirror
Pfft, you were born into a developed country with twentieth-century medical technology. You're way past using what was given to you by the luck of the draw to the best of your abilities.
Incidentally, if you are in favor of using what was given to you by random chance, then why aren't you against modifications which repair the human body?
I've never understood the idea that the form homo sapiens has had since it first evolved is somehow sacrosanct. It isn't. It's even less so in a technological society. Our bodies aren't special at all, if anything they're kind of mediocre. The mind is what's important, and people aren't going to be less human because they have better reflexes, or vision, or panimmunity, or whatever-else-have-you. Yet I keep hearing claims that they are, or that if they aren't it's bad anyway, and I've yet to hear a reason that doesn't come down to "it's just wrong, alright?"
-PS
20/20 vision.
It's not an absolute system of measurement, but it's one relative to the general populace. If, at some underermined point in the future, just about everyone's got their eyes redone so that they have 20/10 vision by our standards, they'd have 20/20 by their own because the average person would see clearly, at 20 feet, just what any other average person would see at 20 feet.
-PS
Cell phones, circuit breakers, useful computer security, and convinient flashlights are all impossible on Star Trek. Roddenberry also like to believe in other bullshit, like "some technologies are evil," and handwove them out of his setting via blanket bans so he wouldn't have to trouble his utopia with controversy.
Christ, people, it's a mediocre television show with poorly-done science and technology, not the yardstick by which feasibility should be determined. Why not read a book or something, instead of using popular television to tell you what can and cannot be done?
-PS
And, of course, Roddenberry was a clear-eyed pragmatist with an accurate and not-at-all moralist view of what the future would - er, I mean should - involve...
-PS
Actually, as often than not it is the main reason people are attacking "the next big thing," at least in the case of things like genetic engineering or civilian access to spaceflight. There's the mindset that if I can't have it, then nobody should, which is ironic considering these people are supposedly attacking other peoples' selfishness.
A lot of the justifications pay lip service to the precautionary principle and other things - and some people actually mean it and don't wrap it up in "butbutbuttherich!" type language - but at its heart there's a whole lot of sour-graping going on - much like the post I responded to, in which that was the only complaint.
There's a lot of other silly arguments in favor of proscribing gengineering out there; that's just one of the silliest, up there with "playing God" being considered an actual rebuttal.
-PS
I consider this a fringe benefit. ;)
-PS
Intelligence is precisely as valuable as its application; no more, no less. If it's used well, it has worth; if it's used poorly or not at all, then it doesn't. Where it comes from is irrelevant.
If so, is it fair to give people an advantage because they have money?
Is it fair to give people an advantage because they can afford a nice car, a business suit, tuition at a prestigious university, blah blah blah?
The bullshit "good things are bad because the rich can afford it and I can't!" thing is cute the first twenty thousand times or so, but really now, it's old. It's funny how things work; they start out unreachably expensive at first and then become more accessible.
Provided, at least, that myopic, jealous Luddites don't get them banned or suppressed because they're offended that they can't reap the benefits on day one like someone who has a few more zeroes in their bank account.
So, what else do you rail against just because some people can benefit from affording it while others can't? Education? Computers? Housing in the good part of town?
-PS
-PS
I pretty much agree with what you have to say there. I might have been unclear explaining my beef with the folks who throw 'not human anymore!' around; the problem to me is that they overwhelmingly seem to mean it in a pejorative sense. "Inhuman" is just about as loaded a term as "subhuman" is anymore, and I don't understand why folks are so eager to throw the term around. It's not the idea that people are differentiated from baseline humanity - it's the idea that they're seen as worse than, based purely on the existence of some modification.
Just wish I could understand why people constantly see the idea of modifications as some horrific threat to an undefined intangible, and rail against it to the point where they want to prevent people from being augmented. "If we were more intelligent it would be a Bad Thing!" Augh, I just don't get it. But yeah, I'm on the verge of starting to sound like tloh said he keeps coming across like, so I'll spare the world the rant for now. ;)
-PS
Yeah, my eyeglasses and vaccination-induced immunity to smallpox and stuff sure are pointless. And I've got a feeling that I'm probably happier than some of my prior, less-intelligent ancestors, whose main concern was whether they'd die of disease or being eaten by the ancestors of one of our current species of housepets.
What, you don't consider stuff like those to be improvements (granted, the glasses are more of a fix)? So just where do you draw the line? Why does it make a difference if a modification is technological in the nanotech sense, or biological in the sense of vaccination? You don't oppose vaccines too, do you? Common sense says no, but since you dismiss all possible modifications out of hand, you're using a wide enough brush that I might as well swat you with it a little.
And why do people keep thinking that a human with some kind of modification is either inhuman or subhuman anyway?
-PS
That's correct; the photo ID is not required as a law, but is instead a voluntary commitment entered into by some of the retailers. You're required to show ID within the participating stores, but not elsewhere, and the stores themselves aren't - to my knowledge - required to have this policy in the first place. They choose to.
Now, that 90% is almost certainty the entirety of retailers where most people in Canada buy games, so it might as well be law, but yeah. Basically the remaining 10% are independent stores, smaller, more obscure chains, and so on.
-PS
I await your pointing out where I said any such thing. I'm a patient man, but I suppose I'll be waiting for some time.
There are some highways, but it is not a comprehensive national system by any means. Highways in India are what we call roads in the US. Roads in India are any man-made attempt at surface equalization. Packed earth counts as a road. Gravel counts as a road. Even the World Bank indicates only 500km of highways in India are actualy more than two lanes.
Yeah, I'm going to call bullshit on this one. 500km out of 3.3 million kilometers of highways are more than two lanes? Puh-leeze. Give me more sources to back that up and I'll consider it accurate, but until then I'm gonna flatly reject this.
Why don't you go ask the starving children, dozens of whom will come to greet you the moment you step foot in that country, if that research means anything to them. I have no doubt that perhaps some interesting research goes on in India, but clearly there is disconnect between the ultimate goal of research, ie building a greater civilization, and the research that is currently taking place.
Heh. Calls me on ad-hominems and then starts throwing false dichotomies around as though they have a connect with the real world. How cute.
My usual question is to ask you where you get the idea that a nation of one billion people is only capable of either doing "useful" research, or the stuff you're dismissing as frivolous. You imply that they shouldn't lift a finger to do anything other than the most basic-needs type of stuff and discard anything else because it doesn't have immediate practical benefits.
People keep making this asinine claim that the United States and a couple of other western countries are the only nations which should - or should be permitted to - undertake any kind of advanced research, with this general overtone of "you're not ready for this kind of knowledge yet." That strikes me as little more than despicable, hateful condescension, and I give it little more than the tiny scrap of respect if almost deserves, and nothing more.
Researching obscure technologies is a luxury for advanced civilizations, which comparitively, India is not.
So what, are you advocating that Indian researchers should be told what they may and may not learn about? And who gives you the right to define what is an obscure enough technology for us Civilized Folk to be able to learn about to the exclusion of everyone else?
Research for the sake of research is a modern sickness.
No, it's a very old and beneficial one. The current sickness is the active defense of ignorance. Unlike knowledge for its own sake, this one is actually dangerous. The ignorance involved in condemning the idea of 'pure' research is astonishing, to say the least.
-PS
So what if India has more papers per unit of wealth (whatever that means), they dont even have enough wealth to pave their roads! This entire planet is rock. They can't find a million unemployed people and have them start digging?
I believe this is where you explain why paved roads are a prerequisite for researching and publishing papers. As much fun as it is to compare apples and oranges, your comparison here is only a couple of baby steps beyond "oh yeah? Well, you're funny looking!"
I'm also kinda curious as to how much you know about the country anyway. You do know that India has weird things like highways, major cities, electricity and so on, right? This claim that they're somehow trapped two millenia in the past is pretty ignorant, even by the standards of Slashdot's usual brilliance about anything outside of the US' borders.
I know people have this kneejerk reaction to assume anything coming out of other countries has to be some affront or threat to Our Way Of Life that must be put down as much as possible, but things have been getting more infantile than usual these days. "Oh, but nothing they do matters, because they're not us yet!"
And I thought the Kipling echoes of the article blurb itself were annoying..
-PS
Oh, the world would be such a better place if people this ignorant did what they used to do - that is, fail to survive to adulthood.
I'll ask you the same thing I've asked many people before, and the same thing I've never once recieved a satisfactory answer for: Where do you get this delusion that we have to lock ourselves to the planet's surface until we've Solved Things Here first, and why do you think doing something involving space development is so expensive as to wipe out the possibility of accomplishing things on the ground?
-PS
Come on. Relative to real freedom-related events, pretty much anything in the OSS movement is irrelevant. Wikipedia and Firefox are cool, but they have nothing alongside allowing people to vote or publicly speak their mind. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
-PS
Most readers wouldn't be able to do even that, and a majority would just take the article at face value. The scale of the screwups in some of the articles in the history section throws the entire site into doubt.
If Wikipedia is so riddled with errors that you have to already know the material on-site to be able to read it with any chance of catching or correcting errors, then it's largely useless for anything more than the most casual lookups.
Nevermind what happens when you get someone who's both wrong about something and eager to defend their broken interpretation of an article by "fixing" it every time it's corrected...
-PS
I'd imagine it's a little more difficult to get a job at Britannica or Encarta and try that experiment, than it is to do the same thing with Wikipedia articles. Why don't you give it a shot, lemme know how it works out? I'll wait.
People keep pointing out that anyone can contribute to Wiki articles as though it's a good thing. To me, that's its primary fault.
It's also started contaminating other sites anyway. My main interest is history, and I poke around for historical stuff online as a hobby, much as I do it offline for academic purposes. One thing I've noticed in the past year or so is that a whole lot of history info, especially for classical history, has been replaced on other sites with word-for-word copies from Wikipedia articles, some of which are absolute, total bullshit (compare with the pre-broken version.
Because of the idiot who decided to insert the incorrect information into this article, dozens of other sites not on Wiki are now carrying incorrect information that can't simply be fixed by anyone with an Internet connection. As well, that scale of error throws pretty much the rest of that section of the site into significant doubt.
-PS
-PS
That's also going to be a lot more difficult for anyone out there to actually end up deciphering.
Sending the human genome implies that we know what the human genome is, which is in and of itself something of an accomplishment and speaks to our abilities.
-PS
Sometimes people are just idiots. Getting after someone's case because you get off on the power trip is bullying; calling a spade a spade, however, is not. I tolerate neither bigots no the artificial attitudes of the type I responded to in the first place.
And yeah, compared to the jackasses that guy seems to have experienced, I have experienced the upper side of humanity, and my group of friends are examples thereof. Just because it's popular and trendy these days to buy into some depressing, pessimistic, cynical delusion that everything out there is horrible and evil and innately bad doesn't mean I have to drink the same kool-aid.
-PS
-PS
And it doesn't end as you enter adulthood, not if you really look at things. People are the same approval seeking, filthy conformist fuckers from the time their baby brains become fully wired until the day they die. Nothing changes. The only reason most stop pulling bullshit after age 18 is because their asses can be sued or arrested.
Funny, as a former and still-sorta outcast myself, my own circle of friends has been doing quite well for themselves and each other, and ranks among one of the most mutually-supportive band of human beings I've ever heard of. You'd almost think that your experience was, like, not necessarily indicative of the entire population of the planet Earth. Funny, that.
And just because you've touched one of my time-to-be-a-jackass buttons at the same time, I'm going to wonder out loud why people keep pretending to believe that humanity sucks so much and should just wipe itself out already. I mean, if they really thought it was that unbearable, there're a variety of quick, easy and painless ways out. Alas, the suicide rate among the really loud misanthropes is low enough that I find myself increasingly convinced they don't really mean it, and are just angsting for its own sake.
-PS
I wonder about this prefixing crap, myself. Someone's stalking you? They are a stalker. Someone's stalking you and part of the process involves tracking you online? They are not a cyberstalker. They are a stalker, no prefix. Full stop.
Spades continue to be spades. I don't see why everyone seems to find it so terribly difficult to understand.
As for the impotence of mere words, Ernest Adams said it well: "We've all heard that 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' It's a lie we tell children to thwart their natural and righteous desire to punch anyone who verbally abuses them. The fact is that words can hurt them. The most screwed-up people I know were screwed up by words, not by sticks and stones."
-PS
Physical bullying is hard to ignore; namecalling can be much easier. With the internet and blocking software, it's even easier.
It's more than that. Take the joy of being harassed at school and add to it the fact that you can't even be left alone in the safety of your own house.
Stick a little fear on top of that - you could compose that perfect, literate, well-crafted retort, but you could also be picking your teeth out of the back of your head by three o'clock the next day should you try it.
Harassment online isn't "all" a kid on the wrong end of it has to worry about. It doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it wouldn't be happening if there wasn't someone else physically Out There with something out for his target. Especially if you don't have total control over blocking or tracking things, it's one more refuge snipped out from under the victim - one they can fight back in a lot more easily, it's true, but not without risking the same sort of stuff as though they'd mouthed off to someone twice their size in person.
-PS
This one makes me wonder at times. I've totally lost count of the number of times where someone online will view a disagreeing statement - even if it's polite, well-worded, constructive or even outright deferential - flew off the handle or plummeted into despair because that disagreement simply had to be an incredibly rude personal attack.
Alternately, you'll see people at times offering the most groveling of public apologies for "offending" people because they recieve those disagreements, whether or not there's any actual rudeness behind them. Insert a confused "uhhh... forgiven...?" from onlookers.
I've encountered that sort of thing now and then offline, but it's far, far more common on the Net. It seems a kind of opposite of the "Ooh, anonymity! I can be an asshole!" thing, only setting off peoples' insecurity instead of their aggression.
Anyone else noticed this at all?
-PS