> Is there any way that you can distribute computers based on academic performance? It might seem like bribery in a sense, but in this case it just might make sense. Better performing students would obviously make good use of having a laptop and being more productive, so why not save money and let them enjoy the prize?
Why not give them money equal to the cost of one of these laptops instead of one of these laptops? If you're gonna bribe these kids you might as well make it a bribe worth taking.
Anyway I highly doubt these kids are unable to get their hands on an unrestricted computer if they so desire, so bribing them with restricted laptops is not going to work.
> But lets say that the kids didn't mind people seeing what they did on these machines; how do you think the parents would feel about someone being able to spy on their kid that extensively? I really don't see that going over well at all...
Pedobear is in your childrens school, reading their email/chat and downloading their photos?:P
You can easily block booting from usb flash drive/cd/dvd/whatever in the BIOS. Put a password on the bios and you've stopped most students from booting another OS (sure the BIOS can be changed/reset, but this usually requires some skill).
I'd be careful blocking stuff like that. If there are a few restrictions that don't bother ordinary users much, there is little incentive to find a way to remove the restrictions. Once the restrictions become annoying the little bastards will find a way to remove them.
> Let's take something that we can all agree on: murder (as in, killing another human being for no reason or for a purely selfish reason (rough definition, I think you get my point though)). Is murder not wrong under any and all circumstances?
So you're picking a relatively straight-forward black-and-white example and use that to 'prove' that there are no shades of grey?
You'll have to come up with a better definiton. Surely to kill someone to preserve ones life is selfish, therefore by your definition, if you kill someone in self-defense, you are a murderer (and therefor a bad person, since ethics are absolute and we all agree mudred is wrong). Protecting your own interests is always selfish.
Personally, would not support a law that allows people to shoot burglars unless they are trying to physically harm people. I don't believe a tv and some money are worth killing for, and doing so makes you a murderer IMHO. It appears there are places on this planet where people disagree with me. But it seems you know the absolute universal ethics, so please enlighten me and tell me, am I right or wrong on this matter?
> I will say that in some ways suicide is the ultimate form of narcissism, that people convince themselves to believe that their problems are tremendously great and in turn don't care about how their actions will affect their loved ones around them.
I wonder why people always accuse people who commit suicide of narcism, while at the same time not accusing the suicide-person's loved ones of being narcistic for wanting someone who is obviously extremely unhappy to continue suffering so that they may enjoy that persons company.
> But if you would extend that argument to say statutory rape is a "victimless crime," we will have to agree to disagree, and I think this story is a good example of my own thoughts. Reckless sex with a girl led to the very adult consequence of an unwanted pregnancy, which
Surely it wasn't the statutory rape that led to pregnancy, but the sex? There is no reason to believe that the girl wouldn't have gotten pregnant if she were a year older, so the exact same thing would have happened.
Because sending email to many people is cheap. If one out of 200 spammed people buys the product the spam is advertising, the spammer is making a decent profit.
Just send a helicopter. Getting on the Everest can probably be done in about an hour or two with a helicopter and some rope, assuming the weather is good. Retrieving a body shouldn't be that tricky once you know where it is, unless it ended up in some hole in the ground or under a lot of snow.
> My idea was more like: We have something special. A will/power to survive, that outweighs even the Borg assimilation nanites.
While it's nice to think about humans as 'awesome' and 'special', I bet our will and power to survive is nothing compared to that of a klingon/hirogen/romulan.
> But who am I arguing with. "totally sucks" is such a deep and good argument...;)
Hehe, it's only a deep and good argument when I'm the one saying it:p
> The whole experience of seeing that struggle of humanity to survive, when it's as close to dead as it possibly could be... is the point of it. The rest only exists to serve that purpose. That special power is just a tool. And a pretty good one, from the perspective of the transmission of feelings.
It just feels too much like the matrix to me, and also a bit like Hugh, like another poster pointed out.
> I wonder if you ever studied the psychology of movies/games in depth like I have? (It's my job.)
I haven't. But I don't think that is really relevant since this is all about personal taste. I suppose a chef studies food for his job too, but his/her opinion about what I find delicious is no better than mine:)
Seriously, your Star Trek idea totally sucks. And the borg would probably be even more dangerous to the federation when they adopted humanity's standards for what is right and what is wrong.
In a way, the Borg have dealt with this crap already, if memory serves, there was this unimatrix zero thing in the voyager series. The borg queen found a way to detect the borg that were affected by it, and blew up their ships. Along with millions of unaffected borg, but she figured it was more important to be perfect.
What's the fun of karma when you never lose it once you get to excellent?
> Ya know all of this would be so easy if someone invented a chronoscope to view past time periods (reference Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past"). Then instead of guessing what happened 10 billion years ago, we could just look and see with our own eyes.
We have such a thing, but we call it a 'telescope' instead of a chronoscope. Want to know what happened 10 billion years ago? Just look at something 10 billion lightyears away (or at least, something that was 10 billion lightyears away 10 billion years ago).
You start out as a 'girl'. Then your Y-chromosome triggers the production of male hormones that will turn you into a guy. If I remember correctly there are people who do not react to testosterone (probably unrelated to the stuff discussed in the article, although I must admit I didn't read it), so even when they have XY chromosomes they are born looking exactly like a girl.
> Wouldn't we rather live in a world of more women than men? As opposed to more men than women? Think about it.
I'm thinking, but it's not working. Give some reasons why we (as a species, not 'we' as male/.'ers) would want to live in a world with (significantly) more women than men?
> If we had more men than women, wouldn't there be more aggression?
I doubt we'll ever be dependent on technologies like IVF, since it it safe to assume there is a lot of selection against men who are unable to reproduce, UNLESS we start using IVF on a massive scale.
To be more precise, it contains the cowpox virus, a relatively (compared to smallpox) harmless virus that looks so much like the smallpox virus that being infected by one will give you immunity to both. Since the smallpox virus does no longer occur in the wild, some (many? most?) countries stopped vaccinating against it.
> It contains antibodies to vpds (vaccine preventable diseases) as well as the illness du jour
Sounds like passive immunization to me, so the effects should quickly fade after your stop drinking that breast milk.
> it contains healthful bacterium (now marketed as pro-biotics in your friendly formula brand)
Seriously? I didn't know. I'm not saying you're wrong, but how the hell did those bacteria get in that milk?
> as well as stem-cells
Huh? What use are orally ingested stem cells from another organism to a baby? They shouldn't survive your stomach, and even when they do they shouldn't be able to enter your body, and even when they do they should be rejected.
> If you're immortal, but you have lots of offspring who spread out (so they don't compete for resources with the immortal parents), and mutations happen at mitosis, you could have an immortal, evolving species.
Not really. We humans also have mutations at mitosis. Mutations in your body: most of the time nothing bad happens, sometimes the cell dies, sometimes cancer happens, and only very rarely do you grow an extra organ that makes beer come out of your nipples.
Can't we just map the IP-address to a single bit that says '0' (good) or '1' (bad) (we'll call it the evil bit, in honor of rfc3514)? With IP4 that could be done on an ordinary desktop computer for all possible IP-addresses in about 512MB, with O(1) lookup, no need to hash, unless you were to write something along the lines of 'int hash(int ip) { return ip; }', then it would be a perfect hash:).
> Free Healthcare. Not a right. It's a misunderstanding of rights to imagine it could be. Nothing that is 'given' can be a right. A right only allows, never gives. There is no right to housing, medical care, food, or tv. Only a right to not be restricted from obtaining any of those, if you could otherwise produce or trade for them.
It all depends what you consider to be the default behavior.If you think that people who cannot afford medical attention should be left on the streets to die, then indeed, by your definition of 'right', free healthcare doesn't make sense. However, in many civilized countries most people think that when someone is in need of medical attention they should get it, rather than being left to suffer and die. In such a country free healthcare makes sense as a right even with your definition of 'right' (not giving healthcare to those who cannot afford it would be restricting healthcare to those with money).
Slashdot Mirror
> Is there any way that you can distribute computers based on academic performance? It might seem like bribery in a sense, but in this case it just might make sense. Better performing students would obviously make good use of having a laptop and being more productive, so why not save money and let them enjoy the prize?
Why not give them money equal to the cost of one of these laptops instead of one of these laptops? If you're gonna bribe these kids you might as well make it a bribe worth taking.
Anyway I highly doubt these kids are unable to get their hands on an unrestricted computer if they so desire, so bribing them with restricted laptops is not going to work.
> But lets say that the kids didn't mind people seeing what they did on these machines; how do you think the parents would feel about someone being able to spy on their kid that extensively? I really don't see that going over well at all...
Pedobear is in your childrens school, reading their email/chat and downloading their photos? :P
You can easily block booting from usb flash drive/cd/dvd/whatever in the BIOS. Put a password on the bios and you've stopped most students from booting another OS (sure the BIOS can be changed/reset, but this usually requires some skill).
> Block certain protocols as well, p2p, etc.
I'd be careful blocking stuff like that. If there are a few restrictions that don't bother ordinary users much, there is little incentive to find a way to remove the restrictions. Once the restrictions become annoying the little bastards will find a way to remove them.
> Let's take something that we can all agree on: murder (as in, killing another human being for no reason or for a purely selfish reason (rough definition, I think you get my point though)). Is murder not wrong under any and all circumstances?
So you're picking a relatively straight-forward black-and-white example and use that to 'prove' that there are no shades of grey?
You'll have to come up with a better definiton. Surely to kill someone to preserve ones life is selfish, therefore by your definition, if you kill someone in self-defense, you are a murderer (and therefor a bad person, since ethics are absolute and we all agree mudred is wrong). Protecting your own interests is always selfish.
Personally, would not support a law that allows people to shoot burglars unless they are trying to physically harm people. I don't believe a tv and some money are worth killing for, and doing so makes you a murderer IMHO. It appears there are places on this planet where people disagree with me. But it seems you know the absolute universal ethics, so please enlighten me and tell me, am I right or wrong on this matter?
> I will say that in some ways suicide is the ultimate form of narcissism, that people convince themselves to believe that their problems are tremendously great and in turn don't care about how their actions will affect their loved ones around them.
I wonder why people always accuse people who commit suicide of narcism, while at the same time not accusing the suicide-person's loved ones of being narcistic for wanting someone who is obviously extremely unhappy to continue suffering so that they may enjoy that persons company.
What is the rational reason for self-preservation?
Having sex with a girl 17 years of age is pedophilia these days? You're an idiot.
> But if you would extend that argument to say statutory rape is a "victimless crime," we will have to agree to disagree, and I think this story is a good example of my own thoughts. Reckless sex with a girl led to the very adult consequence of an unwanted pregnancy, which
Surely it wasn't the statutory rape that led to pregnancy, but the sex? There is no reason to believe that the girl wouldn't have gotten pregnant if she were a year older, so the exact same thing would have happened.
> Also, nobody was attacked after saying bad things about it. I think.
You're just thinking that because we hide the bodies very well.
> Makes me wonder why do they bother.
Because sending email to many people is cheap. If one out of 200 spammed people buys the product the spam is advertising, the spammer is making a decent profit.
I was imagining using a rope to enter and exit the helicopter. No need for the heli to touch that mountain.
Just send a helicopter. Getting on the Everest can probably be done in about an hour or two with a helicopter and some rope, assuming the weather is good. Retrieving a body shouldn't be that tricky once you know where it is, unless it ended up in some hole in the ground or under a lot of snow.
YMMV, I have no experience climbing mountains.
> My idea was more like: We have something special. A will/power to survive, that outweighs even the Borg assimilation nanites.
While it's nice to think about humans as 'awesome' and 'special', I bet our will and power to survive is nothing compared to that of a klingon/hirogen/romulan.
> But who am I arguing with. "totally sucks" is such a deep and good argument... ;)
Hehe, it's only a deep and good argument when I'm the one saying it :p
> The whole experience of seeing that struggle of humanity to survive, when it's as close to dead as it possibly could be... is the point of it. The rest only exists to serve that purpose. That special power is just a tool. And a pretty good one, from the perspective of the transmission of feelings.
It just feels too much like the matrix to me, and also a bit like Hugh, like another poster pointed out.
> I wonder if you ever studied the psychology of movies/games in depth like I have? (It's my job.)
I haven't. But I don't think that is really relevant since this is all about personal taste. I suppose a chef studies food for his job too, but his/her opinion about what I find delicious is no better than mine :)
'We can win, we have the power of SOUL!'
Seriously, your Star Trek idea totally sucks. And the borg would probably be even more dangerous to the federation when they adopted humanity's standards for what is right and what is wrong.
In a way, the Borg have dealt with this crap already, if memory serves, there was this unimatrix zero thing in the voyager series. The borg queen found a way to detect the borg that were affected by it, and blew up their ships. Along with millions of unaffected borg, but she figured it was more important to be perfect.
What's the fun of karma when you never lose it once you get to excellent?
> Ya know all of this would be so easy if someone invented a chronoscope to view past time periods (reference Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past"). Then instead of guessing what happened 10 billion years ago, we could just look and see with our own eyes.
We have such a thing, but we call it a 'telescope' instead of a chronoscope. Want to know what happened 10 billion years ago? Just look at something 10 billion lightyears away (or at least, something that was 10 billion lightyears away 10 billion years ago).
You start out as a 'girl'. Then your Y-chromosome triggers the production of male hormones that will turn you into a guy. If I remember correctly there are people who do not react to testosterone (probably unrelated to the stuff discussed in the article, although I must admit I didn't read it), so even when they have XY chromosomes they are born looking exactly like a girl.
> Wouldn't we rather live in a world of more women than men? As opposed to more men than women? Think about it.
I'm thinking, but it's not working. Give some reasons why we (as a species, not 'we' as male /.'ers) would want to live in a world with (significantly) more women than men?
> If we had more men than women, wouldn't there be more aggression?
Why?
I doubt we'll ever be dependent on technologies like IVF, since it it safe to assume there is a lot of selection against men who are unable to reproduce, UNLESS we start using IVF on a massive scale.
To be more precise, it contains the cowpox virus, a relatively (compared to smallpox) harmless virus that looks so much like the smallpox virus that being infected by one will give you immunity to both. Since the smallpox virus does no longer occur in the wild, some (many? most?) countries stopped vaccinating against it.
> It contains antibodies to vpds (vaccine preventable diseases) as well as the illness du jour
Sounds like passive immunization to me, so the effects should quickly fade after your stop drinking that breast milk.
> it contains healthful bacterium (now marketed as pro-biotics in your friendly formula brand)
Seriously? I didn't know. I'm not saying you're wrong, but how the hell did those bacteria get in that milk?
> as well as stem-cells
Huh? What use are orally ingested stem cells from another organism to a baby? They shouldn't survive your stomach, and even when they do they shouldn't be able to enter your body, and even when they do they should be rejected.
> If you're immortal, but you have lots of offspring who spread out (so they don't compete for resources with the immortal parents), and mutations happen at mitosis, you could have an immortal, evolving species.
Not really. We humans also have mutations at mitosis. Mutations in your body: most of the time nothing bad happens, sometimes the cell dies, sometimes cancer happens, and only very rarely do you grow an extra organ that makes beer come out of your nipples.
Can't we just map the IP-address to a single bit that says '0' (good) or '1' (bad) (we'll call it the evil bit, in honor of rfc3514)? With IP4 that could be done on an ordinary desktop computer for all possible IP-addresses in about 512MB, with O(1) lookup, no need to hash, unless you were to write something along the lines of 'int hash(int ip) { return ip; }', then it would be a perfect hash :).
> I think the secret ballot is controversial. People assume it isn't and so there isn't a conversation about it.
If most people don't think something isn't controversial, then it isn't, by definition.
> Free Healthcare. Not a right. It's a misunderstanding of rights to imagine it could be. Nothing that is 'given' can be a right. A right only allows, never gives. There is no right to housing, medical care, food, or tv. Only a right to not be restricted from obtaining any of those, if you could otherwise produce or trade for them.
It all depends what you consider to be the default behavior.If you think that people who cannot afford medical attention should be left on the streets to die, then indeed, by your definition of 'right', free healthcare doesn't make sense. However, in many civilized countries most people think that when someone is in need of medical attention they should get it, rather than being left to suffer and die. In such a country free healthcare makes sense as a right even with your definition of 'right' (not giving healthcare to those who cannot afford it would be restricting healthcare to those with money).