I think the [citation needed] ones are great. far far better to highlight something questionable which isn't backed up than to delete the article(which seems far more popular)
sadly there are always humans who want to eradicate knowledge and they thrive when times are hard. In any apcalyptic scenario you can be sure there would be people who actively tried to destroy old knowledge.
I have no mental block when it comes to the concept that addiction itself is a harm. You on the other hand seem to have an extremely solid block over the fact that you have zero right to control other peoples lives be it for their own good or for your own desires.
It's a hell of a lot more expensive to pay for the damage caused by the crimes, the police to arrest, the border agents to look for drugs, the prison officers to guard and the cell around him than to just provide subsidized heroin to an addict.
Heroin addicts are surprisingly functional when they're able to obtain heroin.
Your approach just takes a moderate problem and turns it into an awful problem.
You seem massively deluded in one important respect: I could buy all the heroin, meth or cocaine I wanted. I could buy ectsacy in most of the clubs on a night out.
Drugs are not remotely hard to get your hands on. I get casual offers in some clubs. I have no interest in them any more than I do tobbacco which is almost as easy to buy(gotta have ID for that).
You've decided that it's somehow your duty or right to protect all those casual idiots from themselves even though it's their lives and none of yours buisness.
yes I get where you're coming from: you;ve arbritrarily decided that people should be allowed hurt/kill themselves and get addicted but only to drugs which are slightly slower at killing them.
The SUBSTANCE ITSELF is not good or bad. If people were being unknowingly injected with heroin while they slept that would be a problem. If people were having alcohol funneled into their mouths while they were passed out that would be a problem.
But I don't give a shit if someone of their own free will chooses to start taking something which is bad for them be it cyanide pills or cough-syrup.
My body is my body. Not yours. My health is my health. Not yours.
It doesn't matter if a drug causes me to die on the spot or get a happy feeling, it's my death, not yours.
You have no right to arbritrarily decide that I can't do things you think are bad for me.
"but for the highly inebriating+highly addicting, you have a substance that overrides willpower, causing you to want to do nothing except zone out for hours, unable to maintain a job or relationship, and become caught in a biochemical feedback cycle that overwhelms all other desires in your life save one: more, more, more... you can't cope with any joy or depression in your life without resorting to the substance. nothing in your life becomes possible without the substance. you are now a slave. "
Alcoholics trying to quit will eat boot polish, steal, become violent and that's pretty similar to the decriptions I've heard from them.
"free access to only the worst substances zombifies people, making them unable to support themselves (and then society has to support them). therefore, society sees that it is cheaper to simply prevent the creation of such zombies in the first place (and additionally, preserve the free will of those who would otherwise become slaves to a substance)"
By what possible measure could the "war on drugs" ever be cheaper? Addiction counciling is orders of magnitude cheaper than keeping someone in jail for a decade. The crime and violence caused by lucrative drug markets created by the war on drugs cost society far more than feeding and sheltering the far end of the curve who completely go off the rails.
"you don't actually believe addiction to cocaine/ meth/ heroin is harmless"
I don't but I also believe you have no right whatsoever to decide that people have some kind of a duty to do only what is good for them. Freedom isn't freedom unless you are free to do stupid things and harm yourself.
cocaine?heroin?meth? Cocaine is surprisingly similar to caffine in many ways. If anything it's the form that people take it in which makes it dangerous. And the war on drugs and retarded drug laws encourage highly concentrated and potent forms of the drugs which are also the most dangerous.
It's as if someone sat down and thought "how can we make this problem worse than it already is?" "Oh I know, lets create a situation where addicts have to pay more for their drugs so they steal and commit crimes to support their habbit!" "Oh and we could create a situation where the quality of the drugs is far lower causing more medical problems!" "Oh and lets make it so that the suppliers have an incentive to increase their market by getting new users addicted!" "And we could then start shitting all over the constitution and justify it by saying we have to do it to deal with all the problems we just created!!! FANTASTIC!!!!"
Wow. Just wow. It's rare to come across people outside politics and thwe church choir who are so utterly utterly blinkered.
It's particularly funny because you use the example of the mafia.
free and unfettered access to the most addictive/inebriating drugs leads to a reasonably stable population of people who freely choose to take drugs.
So for the sake of saving lives from the hell of addiction, and preserving civilization from this infection, there will ALWAYS be a war on alcohol, forever. the war on alcohol is a permanent aspect of every civilization that ever existed and ever will. or at least that's what people believed during that excercise in futility known as Prohibition.
If it is fought, you create a zombie underclass of addicts and a financially fattened mafia.(try reading about prohibition, the exact same lines you're peddling were dragged out whenever people talked about legalization with the exact same justifications. It was people like you who handed the mafia power and money on a silver platter by trying to enforce their morals on everyone else)
surely you see this is far far worse for the individual and society than the side effects of any addictive substance, right?
I don't actually believe addiction to cocaine/meth/heroin/alcohol/tobbaco/caffine is harmless. I do believe that orders of magnitude more lives are destroyed by the futile fight against individuals wishes to be self destructive. the war on drugs has many negative effects on society.Many many negative effects on society. Far more than the drugs ever would. For something like marijuana, legalization is the solution.
every large overall class has started out as a minor subclass.
Pleanty of currently available tech can make people dead yet is accepted because of it's benefits. Pleanty of old tech if it were developed today would be stopped in it's tracks before it's benefits could be shown.
I know academics who work in drug trials who just love to point out that penecilin would almost certainly not even make it through the early stages of trial were it invented today because so many people are severly alergic to it.
It would almost certainly cause some severe reaction in some of first test subject and the plug would be pulled before they ever got to the stage of testing it on people who are actually sick. It would be considered a failed project and the world would miss out on it and it's derivatives.
That's the point. We can't know. I'm not even talking about malicious suppression etc.
Perhaops well meaning regulations on radioactive isotopes have prevented/delayed the discovery of some really novel tech.
If the whole betamacs case had gone another way technology around digital recording/playback may have been massively stunted.
Hell the current biotech industry is looking very interesting but I'm wondering if fears about people cooking up viruses will cause it to be regulated to the point that advancement is stunted.
My point is that tech doesn't always shape law- law can shape tech as well.
Those are crosses they choose of their own free will to bear.
They include DRM to stop you from passing on the patches along with the game when you re-sell it. They tie multiplayer to their own servers rather than allow players to host their own.
They shoot themselves in the foot and then charge their customers and the owners of second hand games for the medical bills.
Very true but it's still a worthwhile avenue to try since academics are more likely to see things in a more open-source friendly manner and often have at least some sway over the departments.
The ending of my book is also "extra content". I am offering "extra content" for the $10, not requiring it to buy the second-hand book. You can still read the book without that "extra content".
Keep in mind, that I owe proofread copies and endings only to the original purchaser, and technically, I don't even owe that. Proofreading and providing corrected and finished copies over the net isn't free.(Staff, hosting servers, etc.) and when a book is sold to someone else, it effectively doubles the amount of proofreading I had built into the original price.
My book is still 100% readable without the spelling corrections or ending.
To bring the book industry into the 21st century I propose a system whereby printed books be changed such that instead of the second half of the book you get a code which will allow you to access the end of the story through the publishers website. The ending shall be a free add-on which you may only access through our online service. You will be prohibited from transfering access to the ending to anyone since it's a service rather than an item.
If you want to know the ending after you've bought a book second hand you'll have to pay a 10 dollar fee to us.
Personally I think he'd be going at this from the human angle.
It's a university? The careers of Academics are generally heavily based on publishing the work they've done with their names attached.
For coders it's less explicit but having a large body of published work can also be important and academics generally get the idea of open source.
Talk to some senior academics you get on well with. Talk about it the same way as you would if the university were not allowing you to publish research done on uni time. They may not like the idea and weigh in on your side which would be a big help.
Worst case you don't really get anywhere. Best case some bullish professor will arrange things so your work gets published. You may end up with some academics name on the code along with yours.
Storming about and arguing about who owns the code is very unlikely to do any good since you probably don't and the GPL doesn't help you on that score.
Allies in the right place are worth a thousand lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
what i don't get is why do the editors even get to decide what's notable?
Notable in this context presumably means "of interest to a reasonable number of people"
set a hit counter on every page and if they don't get hits they get deleted.
I think the [citation needed] ones are great.
far far better to highlight something questionable which isn't backed up than to delete the article(which seems far more popular)
sadly there are always humans who want to eradicate knowledge and they thrive when times are hard.
In any apcalyptic scenario you can be sure there would be people who actively tried to destroy old knowledge.
I have no mental block when it comes to the concept that addiction itself is a harm.
You on the other hand seem to have an extremely solid block over the fact that you have zero right to control other peoples lives be it for their own good or for your own desires.
It's a hell of a lot more expensive to pay for the damage caused by the crimes, the police to arrest, the border agents to look for drugs, the prison officers to guard and the cell around him than to just provide subsidized heroin to an addict.
Heroin addicts are surprisingly functional when they're able to obtain heroin.
Your approach just takes a moderate problem and turns it into an awful problem.
You're quite right.
It is modern day pillaging and slavery.
With a thin venere of justification.
You seem massively deluded in one important respect:
I could buy all the heroin, meth or cocaine I wanted.
I could buy ectsacy in most of the clubs on a night out.
Drugs are not remotely hard to get your hands on.
I get casual offers in some clubs.
I have no interest in them any more than I do tobbacco which is almost as easy to buy(gotta have ID for that).
You've decided that it's somehow your duty or right to protect all those casual idiots from themselves even though it's their lives and none of yours buisness.
There is a whole world of casual idiots who get a chance to leap off a bridge every single day of their lives.
Obviously we need to ban bridges.
FOR THEIR PROTECTION!
yes I get where you're coming from: you;ve arbritrarily decided that people should be allowed hurt/kill themselves and get addicted but only to drugs which are slightly slower at killing them.
The SUBSTANCE ITSELF is not good or bad.
If people were being unknowingly injected with heroin while they slept that would be a problem.
If people were having alcohol funneled into their mouths while they were passed out that would be a problem.
But I don't give a shit if someone of their own free will chooses to start taking something which is bad for them be it cyanide pills or cough-syrup.
My body is my body. Not yours.
My health is my health. Not yours.
It doesn't matter if a drug causes me to die on the spot or get a happy feeling, it's my death, not yours.
You have no right to arbritrarily decide that I can't do things you think are bad for me.
"but for the highly inebriating+highly addicting, you have a substance that overrides willpower, causing you to want to do nothing except zone out for hours, unable to maintain a job or relationship, and become caught in a biochemical feedback cycle that overwhelms all other desires in your life save one: more, more, more... you can't cope with any joy or depression in your life without resorting to the substance. nothing in your life becomes possible without the substance. you are now a slave. "
Alcoholics trying to quit will eat boot polish, steal, become violent and that's pretty similar to the decriptions I've heard from them.
"free access to only the worst substances zombifies people, making them unable to support themselves (and then society has to support them). therefore, society sees that it is cheaper to simply prevent the creation of such zombies in the first place (and additionally, preserve the free will of those who would otherwise become slaves to a substance)"
By what possible measure could the "war on drugs" ever be cheaper?
Addiction counciling is orders of magnitude cheaper than keeping someone in jail for a decade.
The crime and violence caused by lucrative drug markets created by the war on drugs cost society far more than feeding and sheltering the far end of the curve who completely go off the rails.
"you don't actually believe addiction to cocaine/ meth/ heroin is harmless"
I don't but I also believe you have no right whatsoever to decide that people have some kind of a duty to do only what is good for them. Freedom isn't freedom unless you are free to do stupid things and harm yourself.
cocaine?heroin?meth?
Cocaine is surprisingly similar to caffine in many ways.
If anything it's the form that people take it in which makes it dangerous.
And the war on drugs and retarded drug laws encourage highly concentrated and potent forms of the drugs which are also the most dangerous.
It's as if someone sat down and thought
"how can we make this problem worse than it already is?"
"Oh I know, lets create a situation where addicts have to pay more for their drugs so they steal and commit crimes to support their habbit!"
"Oh and we could create a situation where the quality of the drugs is far lower causing more medical problems!"
"Oh and lets make it so that the suppliers have an incentive to increase their market by getting new users addicted!"
"And we could then start shitting all over the constitution and justify it by saying we have to do it to deal with all the problems we just created!!! FANTASTIC!!!!"
Wow.
Just wow.
It's rare to come across people outside politics and thwe church choir who are so utterly utterly blinkered.
It's particularly funny because you use the example of the mafia.
free and unfettered access to the most addictive/inebriating drugs leads to a reasonably stable population of people who freely choose to take drugs.
So for the sake of saving lives from the hell of addiction, and preserving civilization from this infection, there will ALWAYS be a war on alcohol, forever. the war on alcohol is a permanent aspect of every civilization that ever existed and ever will. or at least that's what people believed during that excercise in futility known as Prohibition.
If it is fought, you create a zombie underclass of addicts and a financially fattened mafia.(try reading about prohibition, the exact same lines you're peddling were dragged out whenever people talked about legalization with the exact same justifications. It was people like you who handed the mafia power and money on a silver platter by trying to enforce their morals on everyone else)
surely you see this is far far worse for the individual and society than the side effects of any addictive substance, right?
I don't actually believe addiction to cocaine/meth/heroin/alcohol/tobbaco/caffine is harmless. I do believe that orders of magnitude more lives are destroyed by the futile fight against individuals wishes to be self destructive. the war on drugs has many negative effects on society.Many many negative effects on society. Far more than the drugs ever would. For something like marijuana, legalization is the solution.
I hope you understand this
every large overall class has started out as a minor subclass.
Pleanty of currently available tech can make people dead yet is accepted because of it's benefits.
Pleanty of old tech if it were developed today would be stopped in it's tracks before it's benefits could be shown.
I know academics who work in drug trials who just love to point out that penecilin would almost certainly not even make it through the early stages of trial were it invented today because so many people are severly alergic to it.
It would almost certainly cause some severe reaction in some of first test subject and the plug would be pulled before they ever got to the stage of testing it on people who are actually sick.
It would be considered a failed project and the world would miss out on it and it's derivatives.
Absolutely yet even when patenting it they still publish it.
That's the point.
We can't know.
I'm not even talking about malicious suppression etc.
Perhaops well meaning regulations on radioactive isotopes have prevented/delayed the discovery of some really novel tech.
If the whole betamacs case had gone another way technology around digital recording/playback may have been massively stunted.
Hell the current biotech industry is looking very interesting but I'm wondering if fears about people cooking up viruses will cause it to be regulated to the point that advancement is stunted.
My point is that tech doesn't always shape law- law can shape tech as well.
There's a massive selection bias there.
Any technologies which are sucessfully suppressed or regulated/controlled into obscurity by definition don't get much attention.
So law has lost against technology such as explosives?
Or has that technology been massively restricted?
Has law lost and changed when faced with technology such as radar detectors?
Or has that technology just been more heavily restricted.
plenty of technology is restricted or stunted by law.
Care to in any way elaborate?
If I were to sell a book as described how would it be different from this scheme?
Those are crosses they choose of their own free will to bear.
They include DRM to stop you from passing on the patches along with the game when you re-sell it.
They tie multiplayer to their own servers rather than allow players to host their own.
They shoot themselves in the foot and then charge their customers and the owners of second hand games for the medical bills.
Very true but it's still a worthwhile avenue to try since academics are more likely to see things in a more open-source friendly manner and often have at least some sway over the departments.
In the context of my hypothetical book:
The ending of my book is also "extra content". I am offering "extra content" for the $10, not requiring it to buy the second-hand book.
You can still read the book without that "extra content".
Keep in mind, that I owe proofread copies and endings only to the original purchaser, and technically, I don't even owe that.
Proofreading and providing corrected and finished copies over the net isn't free.(Staff, hosting servers, etc.)
and when a book is sold to someone else, it effectively doubles the amount of proofreading I had built into the original price.
My book is still 100% readable without the spelling corrections or ending.
They'll attribute any lost sales to piracy whether you pirate or not.
Also- jesus christ.
They're retiring games less than a year old.
In some countries consumer laws would still put electronic good under warranty for that long.
their attitude is literally
"You shouldn't complain about it.
Just pay us over and over and over and over.
We're sure you can afford it."
To bring the book industry into the 21st century I propose a system whereby printed books be changed such that instead of the second half of the book you get a code which will allow you to access the end of the story through the publishers website.
The ending shall be a free add-on which you may only access through our online service.
You will be prohibited from transfering access to the ending to anyone since it's a service rather than an item.
If you want to know the ending after you've bought a book second hand you'll have to pay a 10 dollar fee to us.
He owns what he wrote before he started.
After he started it's likely that anything he did belongs to the university.
The GPL has zero effect on this unless the uni ever want to distribute it externally.
Personally I think he'd be going at this from the human angle.
It's a university?
The careers of Academics are generally heavily based on publishing the work they've done with their names attached.
For coders it's less explicit but having a large body of published work can also be important and academics generally get the idea of open source.
Talk to some senior academics you get on well with.
Talk about it the same way as you would if the university were not allowing you to publish research done on uni time.
They may not like the idea and weigh in on your side which would be a big help.
Worst case you don't really get anywhere.
Best case some bullish professor will arrange things so your work gets published.
You may end up with some academics name on the code along with yours.
Storming about and arguing about who owns the code is very unlikely to do any good since you probably don't and the GPL doesn't help you on that score.
Allies in the right place are worth a thousand lawyers.