The US has been building its empire trying to think of itself as the world's police.
I think the key phrase that triggered for me is "trying to think of itself". If the US had actually succeeded in thinking of itself (as the world's police), I think the world would be a much better place. Because successful police protect the community they are assigned to, not their own interests or someone else's interests, and successful police learn the cultures and ways of the community they are assigned to, so that they can gain the trust and respect of that community and not negligently make things worse.
But instead of becoming the world's police, the United States became the world's legionaries. Legionaries weren't there to serve the local community; sure, they provided law and order, but people knew it was Rome's law and Rome's order, and if the local guy in charge was a corrupt tyrant, Rome didn't care too much so long as Rome's tribute was paid.
That said, I still think the US could succeed if it wakes up in time to the rot that gnaws at its heart. Because I see the increasing militarisation of the county, state and federal police within the United States itself, the increasing distance between rulers and ruled, the increasing disparities of wealth and encroachments upon liberty, and I wonder if I see the curse of Rome repeating itself:
"Official cruelty, supporting extortion and corruption, may also have become more commonplace.[14] While the scale, complexity, and violence of government were unmatched,[17] the emperors lost control over their whole realm insofar as that control came increasingly to be wielded by anyone who paid for it.[18] Meanwhile the richest senatorial families, immune from most taxation, engrossed more and more of the available wealth and income,[19] while also becoming divorced from any tradition of military excellence." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire
To paraphrase McCarthy, "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the government as being members of child trafficking rings and who nevertheless are still working and operating in the United States."
If you've got actual evidence to back up your claim, set the wheels in motion - but don't get trigger-happy. As much as I'm disgusted with government, we do not want or need another red scare.
Don't forget the 8% "oops we've decided we wrongly convicted you, good thing we only sent you to death row instead of immediately executing you" rate. I'm not kidding - between 2001 and 2010 there were 551 state executions, and 48 exonerations on appeal, in the US. And that's the known rate - what's the unknown rate?
The twisted logic is wrong.
When crimes are responded to with such unreasonable and unthinking overkill, an intelligent lawful person will determine that they need to emigrate before they get caught up in the madness, an intelligent unlawful person will determine that they either need to emigrate or make sure some innocent patsy will go down for their crimes, and both will consider the logic of doing something that's actually deserving of a sentence they expect to receive.
Hmm. To a rough approximation, there are five targets of value in a war: the opposing force, the opposing infrastructure, the opposing commander, the opposing government, and the opposing populace.
When your use of robot workers to make robot factories to build robot armies means you just make more if the enemy shoots them, the enemy is going to pick another target.
What - or rather who - do you think they will pick?
I look at manufacturer warranties. Companies always want to minimise their costs, and that includes the cost of their failures. So if they're only offering the minimum allowable by law*, I've found that's a reasonable indicator their QA is also likely to be the minimum allowable.
Another warning sign is when companies decide to cut the warranty terms on their established product lines, or bring in replacement lines with worse warranties.
(*in some countries a minimum of two years warranty on certain product types is mandated by law, so it can be useful to check the manufacturers international websites to see what they offer in countries with less protection)
In your scenario, management screwed up when they asked the IT security team for legal advice ("what fines are we looking at"), and IT security screwed up when they didn't respond with some variation of "let's ask the company lawyer".
The government is actually following the rules, but many people fail to understand what the rules actually are and mistakenly believe the law is being broken.
Is it the people that are failing to understand the rules, or is it the government that is failing to explain them? In my opinion it's a bit of both, but as government is the side of the equation that has been granted the privilege of coercive force, it's government that has the much greater obligation.
They were no doubt both well schooled in the ideological position of the US being the great evil in the world as in common in some circles.
What if they weren't? What if their ideological position is that the US is still a great good in the world, but that due to a (long-ongoing) lack of vigilance, its great power has also been co-opted by those with evil intent? After all, with great power comes great responsibility - and in that regard, it's notable that you mention John (Anthony) Walker. When asked how he managed to pass top secret intelligence to the Russians for 18 years before being caught in 1985, he was quoted as responding, "KMart has better security than the Navy". While Walker was clearly a traitor, rather than a whistleblower like Manning and Snowden, the latter are also on record concerning the systemic lack of security - i.e. vigilance, responsibility - that enabled them to obtain and release the data they revealed to the world.
Like (I hope) most people, I do understand that we can't simply close down the various TLAs and expect peace and rainbows to erupt worldwide. I do understand that the various organisations that defend us are necessary to that defence.
However. I also understand that when a government decides that it is acceptable to bend or ignore the rules to make a hard job easier, and the agencies tasked with carrying out that job answer "yes sir", those agencies are part of the problem; they are taking the law into their own hands, thus they are "in power". It's the intrinsic nature of the beast - "if you dob us in for doing something bad, we'll dob you in for asking us to do it, so now you're going to ignore the other bad things we're going to do or you can kiss your comfortable retirement goodbye".
And what we have is a culture of government+agencies where this is happening. We need to stop denying that we are on the slippery slope. We need to put the brakes on and take our medicine. Manning, Snowden, et al - they aren't the disease. They're the symptoms. They're the warning signs that the checks and balances of a healthy government are being compromised from within. And people like Feinstein and Rogers, even if they're not complicit themselves, are still holding their hands over their ears singing "la la la" while they try to shoot the messengers.
From 2001 to 2010, the US executed 551 death-row prisoners and exonerated 48 on appeal (based on checking sources cited by wikipedia).
I don't know Snowden's opinion on it, but personally I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a court system that has an 8% rate of "oops, we found we wrongly sentenced you to death" (plus an unknown rate of never finding out), especially if I'd happened to seriously embarrass the government by revealing they'd been systemically ignoring the bill of rights.
Is Snowden facing the death penalty? Does it matter? When a powerful government, that claims to be a champion of liberty and justice, tolerates a known 8% risk of murdering its own citizens, it doesn't speak well for that government's likely diligence towards those facing other sentences.
The Supreme Court held in Katz v. United States (1967), that the monitoring and recording of private conversations within the United States constitutes a "search" for Fourth Amendment purposes, and therefore the government must generally obtain a warrant before undertaking such domestic recordings.
The protection of "private conversations" has been held to apply only to conversations where the participants have not only manifested a desire but also a reasonable expectation that their conversation is indeed private and that no other party is listening in. In the absence of such a reasonable expectation, the Fourth Amendment does not apply, and surveillance without warrant does not violate it. Privacy is clearly not a reasonable expectation in communications to persons in the many countries whose governments openly intercept electronic communications, and is of dubious reasonability in countries against which the United States is waging war. (emphasis mine)
So... thanks to the abject failure of the TLAs to keep their attempt at a global panopticon under wraps, such that it is becoming a reasonable expectation that the United States government is spying on everyone, including its own citizens within its own borders, does that mean the Fourth Amendment no longer applies to anything US citizens do on the phone/internet?
DA: "Your Honor, our surveillance showed the defendant read the Slashdot article about our surveillance, therefore he could not have had a reasonable expectation of privacy when our surveillance recorded the Skype conversation he had the following week with his partner in which he admitted to speaking in a free speech zone without a permit."
P.S. Sorry if I just ruined your reasonable expectation of privacy by posting this where you could read it.
True democracy, as I understand it, requires the _informed_ consent of the people - something the government is unwilling to allow, since its dominant unwritten policy can be mostly summed up as "better to risk getting caught in a lie than to be honest from the beginning".
Every single official in government has a duty and obligation to uphold the Constitution. If they want to have a secret intelligence organisation that reads everyone's letters and listens to everyone's conversations, because they truly believe the only way to protect our freedom is to create and control a global panopticon?
They should follow the law and seek an Amendment, like everyone else. Otherwise they're just hypocrites violating their oath of office.
The worst they can do with your food/drink order is... also kill you. Recent conversation at a restaurant:
Me: "Do you use a separate oil for cooking your chips?" Them, cheerily: "No, but our chips are gluten-free!" Me: "When you cook gluten-free chips in oil that's been used to cook gluten food, the chips aren't gluten-free any more." Them: *blank look of incomprehension*
While gluten won't kill me outright if I accidentally eat some, consider those who are allergic to things like peanuts or shellfish....
No, that's simple. The complex part is what happens when the government decides to enforce your claim that you also own the copies that are in other people's possession, including their memories, and any copies that result from those, ad infinitum.
I'd argue that IP law is a plutocratic concept, not a socialist concept: it concentrates the power to disseminate thought/culture/knowledge in the hands of monied private interests, for which government acts as mob enforcer in return for its cut (including bribes and/or "revolving door" positions).
I'd agree that it is a tremendous interference by the government in the free market.
Fair point, but you've not responded to my central argument: one cannot simply allow personal consumption to be exempt from copyright law without demolishing whole industries.
Why not? Why would that be a bad thing for _society_? Those industries only exist because of copyright law, and copyright law doesn't recognise rights, it restricts them. It doesn't say "we give the author the ability to make copies", it says, "we deny everyone else the ability to make copies".
Doesn't it strike you as odd, that a set of laws purporting to promote the progress of science and the arts instead enforces artificial scarcity that makes certain activities extraordinarily profitable for extraordinarily few? Was it ever really about the progress?
If I should have to show you why I think taking away the liberties of the many for the few is a bad thing, you should certainly have to show me why you think it is a good thing.
If we treated the dissemination of science and the arts as an inalienable right of all individuals, to be protected by force of law, rather than as a set of government-mandated monopolies of arbitrary durations and scopes renegotiable by men of wealth and influence to their own purposes, to be protected by force of law (and this latter is what we have), would the baseline quality of life of the people decline or increase?
And isn't that baseline quality of life, what government is supposed to be for? Not just a few of the people, or even most of the people, but "the people"? The only way I can see that you can do that fairly (or at least equally unfairly), is to govern in such a way as most helps the ultimate goal of raising that baseline. Not an easy goal, certainly, a very hard goal, but one that should be at least approached with an egalitarian outlook.
Thankyou. And I apologise, I was being snarky, so thankyou again, for reminding me to be polite. My position: I'm agnostic. Some queries:
You simply have no way to test that at one or more points in history, say, extraterrestrial genetic engineers "helped" biological development by directly engineering some particularly complex biological attributes that, proposably, could not have occurred given the mechanisms of random mutations and natural selection alone
Though, if we are to suggest that possibility, we should also ask, did those extraterrestrial genetic engineers, with their ability to directly engineer those attributes, reach such ability via those mechanisms of random mutations and natural selections alone, or were they in turn "helped", and so on. (and then someone starts arguing Infinite Turtles vs First Cause and I get a headache)
(though, for that matter, he could just randomly flip through the attributes and test for meeting the desired conditions and get there a lot faster, so it's unclear what this "proves")
Hmm. If we simply test for meeting the desired conditions, rather than let the experiment test any/all conditions as it encounters them, then wouldn't we be biasing the experiment with our own desires?
"Algorithms" are something that is designed. So, yes, if you're asking from my perspective, they were involved. However, you don't "get to" claim the same, if you are denying design is a necessary component to the explanation.
Yes, what we design, we call algorithms. "A process or set of rules to be followed in calculations". Although, or at least it seems to me, when nature does it, we call it "physics" (or chemistry, or whatever). Isn't it the same thing for the subject, though? To the apple falling from a tree, or a genetic sequence "evolving", does it matter whether it is because a "computer program" made it do so or a "natural law" made it do so? If I carefully abrade a boulder and its surroundings to balance it upon a small rock, or natural weathering does the abrading, then - from the perspective of the boulder "discovering" itself balanced upon a small rock - is there any observable difference? (cue my headache again)
Which is what I meant by the universe-as-computer. Whether it is "designed" or "not designed", the universe (as we currently understand it) appears to have rules and capacity in ways that we can liken to the computers we build having rules and capacity. Is the "possibility space" of the universe big enough to allow for us humans to have come about by "chance" (a randomness constrained by rules)? What does that even mean, since no matter the answer we'll keep looking anyway?
(and then we're back to how did the rules get there, and universes within universes, and someone's arguing Infinite Turtles versus First Cause all over again)
Sorry, take it a down a notch for me, please. What do you mean by 'proposing causal exclusivity to "evolutionary" processes'?
If I'm even vaguely understanding what you're saying, I'll amend and ask, "were genetic algorithms involved in producing that human"? Because I am aware that "only evolution occurs" is not science.
And what exactly then were you trying to convey with your own statement ("I've seen code that was designed to use genetic algorithms. I've yet to see such code generate itself.")?
Really? The code you saw that was designed to use genetic algorithms, what generated it? Perchance, a human? Tell me, what type of algorithm produced that human? Then you've just seen code (that used genetic algorithms) generate code (that used genetic algorithms).
Oh, but wait, perhaps you meant the machine code you saw hasn't yet generated a human? Well, perhaps it needs a bigger machine with more processing power. Perchance, a universe?
Trouble is, many people seriously contemplating suicide already aren't thinking straight. They may read "I think people who commit suicide are pussies" and jump straight to "I'm a pussy, I'm a loser, the world would be better off without me".
Yeah, that's broken. But that's suicidal thinking in a nutshell: messed up. It's a hellish place to be, when not only can you not trust the brain you're using to think with, you might not even realise you shouldn't be trusting it (and realising this can be depressing in itself).
Re self-preservation versus risk-taking. You're right, it is even more complicated. But while risk-taking is an instinct that can run counter to self-preservation, in a healthy person the goal is still _improving_ your life, not ending it. Sure, you might have occasionally thought, "I could get seriously injured or killed doing this", but I'm going to guess that if you ever thought, "hey, I _will_ be seriously injured or killed doing this, it _is_ immediate suicide to keep going," then your risk-taking drive most likely evaporated and your self-preservation drive kicked into high gear (unless some other instinct was involved, like rescuing an endangered child).
While the final act of suicide can seem impulsive, reaching that point - grinding down self-preservation to the point where it no longer gets in the way - is rarely a short journey. You mention you've gone sky diving: if you were about to jump and the person behind you yelled that your chute pack was torn, would you still leap out of that perfectly good airplane? For a person contemplating suicide, the thought process won't be, "oh crap, I could've died" - instead, it could well be, "Can I pretend I didn't hear them?"
Slashdot Mirror
I think the key phrase that triggered for me is "trying to think of itself". If the US had actually succeeded in thinking of itself (as the world's police), I think the world would be a much better place. Because successful police protect the community they are assigned to, not their own interests or someone else's interests, and successful police learn the cultures and ways of the community they are assigned to, so that they can gain the trust and respect of that community and not negligently make things worse.
But instead of becoming the world's police, the United States became the world's legionaries. Legionaries weren't there to serve the local community; sure, they provided law and order, but people knew it was Rome's law and Rome's order, and if the local guy in charge was a corrupt tyrant, Rome didn't care too much so long as Rome's tribute was paid.
That said, I still think the US could succeed if it wakes up in time to the rot that gnaws at its heart. Because I see the increasing militarisation of the county, state and federal police within the United States itself, the increasing distance between rulers and ruled, the increasing disparities of wealth and encroachments upon liberty, and I wonder if I see the curse of Rome repeating itself:
"Official cruelty, supporting extortion and corruption, may also have become more commonplace.[14] While the scale, complexity, and violence of government were unmatched,[17] the emperors lost control over their whole realm insofar as that control came increasingly to be wielded by anyone who paid for it.[18] Meanwhile the richest senatorial families, immune from most taxation, engrossed more and more of the available wealth and income,[19] while also becoming divorced from any tradition of military excellence." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire
So, basically, the actions of the CIA had lasting consequences?
To paraphrase McCarthy, "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the government as being members of child trafficking rings and who nevertheless are still working and operating in the United States."
If you've got actual evidence to back up your claim, set the wheels in motion - but don't get trigger-happy. As much as I'm disgusted with government, we do not want or need another red scare.
Don't forget the 8% "oops we've decided we wrongly convicted you, good thing we only sent you to death row instead of immediately executing you" rate. I'm not kidding - between 2001 and 2010 there were 551 state executions, and 48 exonerations on appeal, in the US. And that's the known rate - what's the unknown rate?
The twisted logic is wrong.
When crimes are responded to with such unreasonable and unthinking overkill, an intelligent lawful person will determine that they need to emigrate before they get caught up in the madness, an intelligent unlawful person will determine that they either need to emigrate or make sure some innocent patsy will go down for their crimes, and both will consider the logic of doing something that's actually deserving of a sentence they expect to receive.
Hmm. To a rough approximation, there are five targets of value in a war: the opposing force, the opposing infrastructure, the opposing commander, the opposing government, and the opposing populace.
When your use of robot workers to make robot factories to build robot armies means you just make more if the enemy shoots them, the enemy is going to pick another target.
What - or rather who - do you think they will pick?
Heh. Be thankful for the lumps, we might not exist without them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry
Yes.
And even when they don't believe, so long as they accept, the outcome is the same.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."
I look at manufacturer warranties. Companies always want to minimise their costs, and that includes the cost of their failures. So if they're only offering the minimum allowable by law*, I've found that's a reasonable indicator their QA is also likely to be the minimum allowable.
Another warning sign is when companies decide to cut the warranty terms on their established product lines, or bring in replacement lines with worse warranties.
(*in some countries a minimum of two years warranty on certain product types is mandated by law, so it can be useful to check the manufacturers international websites to see what they offer in countries with less protection)
Afghanistan was invaded because it was a trap.
Iraq was invaded because Saddam bit the hand that fed him.
There were other reasons, of course. The above are still true.
As for the Patriot Act, I'll agree it was a response - the wrong one. How many in Congress even read what they voted on?
In your scenario, management screwed up when they asked the IT security team for legal advice ("what fines are we looking at"), and IT security screwed up when they didn't respond with some variation of "let's ask the company lawyer".
Is it the people that are failing to understand the rules, or is it the government that is failing to explain them? In my opinion it's a bit of both, but as government is the side of the equation that has been granted the privilege of coercive force, it's government that has the much greater obligation.
What if they weren't? What if their ideological position is that the US is still a great good in the world, but that due to a (long-ongoing) lack of vigilance, its great power has also been co-opted by those with evil intent? After all, with great power comes great responsibility - and in that regard, it's notable that you mention John (Anthony) Walker. When asked how he managed to pass top secret intelligence to the Russians for 18 years before being caught in 1985, he was quoted as responding, "KMart has better security than the Navy". While Walker was clearly a traitor, rather than a whistleblower like Manning and Snowden, the latter are also on record concerning the systemic lack of security - i.e. vigilance, responsibility - that enabled them to obtain and release the data they revealed to the world.
Like (I hope) most people, I do understand that we can't simply close down the various TLAs and expect peace and rainbows to erupt worldwide. I do understand that the various organisations that defend us are necessary to that defence.
However. I also understand that when a government decides that it is acceptable to bend or ignore the rules to make a hard job easier, and the agencies tasked with carrying out that job answer "yes sir", those agencies are part of the problem; they are taking the law into their own hands, thus they are "in power". It's the intrinsic nature of the beast - "if you dob us in for doing something bad, we'll dob you in for asking us to do it, so now you're going to ignore the other bad things we're going to do or you can kiss your comfortable retirement goodbye".
And what we have is a culture of government+agencies where this is happening. We need to stop denying that we are on the slippery slope. We need to put the brakes on and take our medicine. Manning, Snowden, et al - they aren't the disease. They're the symptoms. They're the warning signs that the checks and balances of a healthy government are being compromised from within. And people like Feinstein and Rogers, even if they're not complicit themselves, are still holding their hands over their ears singing "la la la" while they try to shoot the messengers.
From 2001 to 2010, the US executed 551 death-row prisoners and exonerated 48 on appeal (based on checking sources cited by wikipedia).
I don't know Snowden's opinion on it, but personally I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a court system that has an 8% rate of "oops, we found we wrongly sentenced you to death" (plus an unknown rate of never finding out), especially if I'd happened to seriously embarrass the government by revealing they'd been systemically ignoring the bill of rights.
Is Snowden facing the death penalty? Does it matter? When a powerful government, that claims to be a champion of liberty and justice, tolerates a known 8% risk of murdering its own citizens, it doesn't speak well for that government's likely diligence towards those facing other sentences.
It occurs to me wonder if they've also scored a mission kill on the Fourth Amendment.
Consider these two paragraphs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(2001%E2%80%9307)#Fourth_Amendment_issues
So... thanks to the abject failure of the TLAs to keep their attempt at a global panopticon under wraps, such that it is becoming a reasonable expectation that the United States government is spying on everyone, including its own citizens within its own borders, does that mean the Fourth Amendment no longer applies to anything US citizens do on the phone/internet?
DA: "Your Honor, our surveillance showed the defendant read the Slashdot article about our surveillance, therefore he could not have had a reasonable expectation of privacy when our surveillance recorded the Skype conversation he had the following week with his partner in which he admitted to speaking in a free speech zone without a permit."
P.S. Sorry if I just ruined your reasonable expectation of privacy by posting this where you could read it.
"1) The NSA was acting legally."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(2001%E2%80%9307)
I'm really not sure how anyone manages to keep a straight face when they say things like that, but I guess on the internet it's not necessary.
True democracy, as I understand it, requires the _informed_ consent of the people - something the government is unwilling to allow, since its dominant unwritten policy can be mostly summed up as "better to risk getting caught in a lie than to be honest from the beginning".
Every single official in government has a duty and obligation to uphold the Constitution. If they want to have a secret intelligence organisation that reads everyone's letters and listens to everyone's conversations, because they truly believe the only way to protect our freedom is to create and control a global panopticon?
They should follow the law and seek an Amendment, like everyone else. Otherwise they're just hypocrites violating their oath of office.
The worst they can do with your food/drink order is... also kill you. Recent conversation at a restaurant:
Me: "Do you use a separate oil for cooking your chips?"
Them, cheerily: "No, but our chips are gluten-free!"
Me: "When you cook gluten-free chips in oil that's been used to cook gluten food, the chips aren't gluten-free any more."
Them: *blank look of incomprehension*
While gluten won't kill me outright if I accidentally eat some, consider those who are allergic to things like peanuts or shellfish....
How close are we to that, anyway?
No, that's simple. The complex part is what happens when the government decides to enforce your claim that you also own the copies that are in other people's possession, including their memories, and any copies that result from those, ad infinitum.
I'd argue that IP law is a plutocratic concept, not a socialist concept: it concentrates the power to disseminate thought/culture/knowledge in the hands of monied private interests, for which government acts as mob enforcer in return for its cut (including bribes and/or "revolving door" positions).
I'd agree that it is a tremendous interference by the government in the free market.
Why not? Why would that be a bad thing for _society_? Those industries only exist because of copyright law, and copyright law doesn't recognise rights, it restricts them. It doesn't say "we give the author the ability to make copies", it says, "we deny everyone else the ability to make copies".
Doesn't it strike you as odd, that a set of laws purporting to promote the progress of science and the arts instead enforces artificial scarcity that makes certain activities extraordinarily profitable for extraordinarily few? Was it ever really about the progress?
If I should have to show you why I think taking away the liberties of the many for the few is a bad thing, you should certainly have to show me why you think it is a good thing.
If we treated the dissemination of science and the arts as an inalienable right of all individuals, to be protected by force of law, rather than as a set of government-mandated monopolies of arbitrary durations and scopes renegotiable by men of wealth and influence to their own purposes, to be protected by force of law (and this latter is what we have), would the baseline quality of life of the people decline or increase?
And isn't that baseline quality of life, what government is supposed to be for? Not just a few of the people, or even most of the people, but "the people"? The only way I can see that you can do that fairly (or at least equally unfairly), is to govern in such a way as most helps the ultimate goal of raising that baseline. Not an easy goal, certainly, a very hard goal, but one that should be at least approached with an egalitarian outlook.
(/rant /soapbox)
Thankyou. And I apologise, I was being snarky, so thankyou again, for reminding me to be polite. My position: I'm agnostic. Some queries:
Though, if we are to suggest that possibility, we should also ask, did those extraterrestrial genetic engineers, with their ability to directly engineer those attributes, reach such ability via those mechanisms of random mutations and natural selections alone, or were they in turn "helped", and so on. (and then someone starts arguing Infinite Turtles vs First Cause and I get a headache)
Hmm. If we simply test for meeting the desired conditions, rather than let the experiment test any/all conditions as it encounters them, then wouldn't we be biasing the experiment with our own desires?
Yes, what we design, we call algorithms. "A process or set of rules to be followed in calculations". Although, or at least it seems to me, when nature does it, we call it "physics" (or chemistry, or whatever). Isn't it the same thing for the subject, though? To the apple falling from a tree, or a genetic sequence "evolving", does it matter whether it is because a "computer program" made it do so or a "natural law" made it do so? If I carefully abrade a boulder and its surroundings to balance it upon a small rock, or natural weathering does the abrading, then - from the perspective of the boulder "discovering" itself balanced upon a small rock - is there any observable difference? (cue my headache again)
Which is what I meant by the universe-as-computer. Whether it is "designed" or "not designed", the universe (as we currently understand it) appears to have rules and capacity in ways that we can liken to the computers we build having rules and capacity. Is the "possibility space" of the universe big enough to allow for us humans to have come about by "chance" (a randomness constrained by rules)? What does that even mean, since no matter the answer we'll keep looking anyway?
(and then we're back to how did the rules get there, and universes within universes, and someone's arguing Infinite Turtles versus First Cause all over again)
Sorry, take it a down a notch for me, please. What do you mean by 'proposing causal exclusivity to "evolutionary" processes'?
If I'm even vaguely understanding what you're saying, I'll amend and ask, "were genetic algorithms involved in producing that human"? Because I am aware that "only evolution occurs" is not science.
And what exactly then were you trying to convey with your own statement ("I've seen code that was designed to use genetic algorithms. I've yet to see such code generate itself.")?
Really? The code you saw that was designed to use genetic algorithms, what generated it? Perchance, a human? Tell me, what type of algorithm produced that human? Then you've just seen code (that used genetic algorithms) generate code (that used genetic algorithms).
Oh, but wait, perhaps you meant the machine code you saw hasn't yet generated a human? Well, perhaps it needs a bigger machine with more processing power. Perchance, a universe?
Look around you. We're in one: http://abstrusegoose.com/275
Trouble is, many people seriously contemplating suicide already aren't thinking straight. They may read "I think people who commit suicide are pussies" and jump straight to "I'm a pussy, I'm a loser, the world would be better off without me".
Yeah, that's broken. But that's suicidal thinking in a nutshell: messed up. It's a hellish place to be, when not only can you not trust the brain you're using to think with, you might not even realise you shouldn't be trusting it (and realising this can be depressing in itself).
Re self-preservation versus risk-taking. You're right, it is even more complicated. But while risk-taking is an instinct that can run counter to self-preservation, in a healthy person the goal is still _improving_ your life, not ending it. Sure, you might have occasionally thought, "I could get seriously injured or killed doing this", but I'm going to guess that if you ever thought, "hey, I _will_ be seriously injured or killed doing this, it _is_ immediate suicide to keep going," then your risk-taking drive most likely evaporated and your self-preservation drive kicked into high gear (unless some other instinct was involved, like rescuing an endangered child).
While the final act of suicide can seem impulsive, reaching that point - grinding down self-preservation to the point where it no longer gets in the way - is rarely a short journey. You mention you've gone sky diving: if you were about to jump and the person behind you yelled that your chute pack was torn, would you still leap out of that perfectly good airplane? For a person contemplating suicide, the thought process won't be, "oh crap, I could've died" - instead, it could well be, "Can I pretend I didn't hear them?"