Mark you, this is not our ombudsmann, which is someone appointed to help us against the goverment, but our consumer-ombudsmann who helps against corporations:).
I'll take one of each, thanks. Now, how to convince our congresscritters to appoint someone to watch over them and their major campaign contributors and help the public out when either screws up?
To quote Susie Derkins from Calvin and Hobbes, "Might as well wish for a pony while I'm at it.":(
Do geeks latch on to software like jocks latch on to sports teams, or what? No matter what is said, it always has to be punctuated by "but my team is the best."
Do you really need to ask this question? Of course geeks do that. Unless they aren't computer geeks. Star Trek geeks battle over favorite episodes or captains, RPG geeks can't suffer a criticism of "their" game system, and I'm sure some Paleontologists geeks get their knickers in a twist when someone disses their favorite dinosaur, "Tarbosaurus could totally kick Dryptosaurus' ass!" "Could not!" "Could so!"
Sometimes OSSers have more in common with Christian Evangelicals and cheeseheads than geeks...
This is a human thing, most everyone is fundamentalist about something, and most people identify more with a particular group than they do with humanity as a whole. Should geeks be above this kind of thing? Maybe, but very few people have the emotional and moral intelligence to rise above their upbringing.
Go to opensuse.org to get it free. Though you might want to wait a few months for them to patch a few things, 10.1 has been a little buggy in some places.
I'm marking you as a friend because you are a great debater, and that, quite frankly, is the whole reason I visit slashdot. I'd rather have people disagree with me intelligently than agree with me for no good reason. I set my preferences to give friends a bonus, so I can see what they have to say even if they aren't modded up.
To address your first point, building your relativism into your terms still means you are using realativism, and really kind of makes my point for me. Killing is an absolute term. Someone was alive, now they're dead, you killed them. Murder is a relative term. Who decides if it was murder?
As you say, "This is usually handled by people breaking themselves into groups who approach the idea of a particular moral absolute from the same direction, which I believe then makes the absolute a relative. Absolute to them, relative for everyone else holding a different absolute." That means it's actually relative. Relative absolutism, hehe.
I like to take it one step further and introduce the concept of levels: family, tribe, village, society, humanity. Relative in this concept means a comparison at the same level. Absolute refers to comparison between a higher level and a lower level. To use murder as an example, some societies believe murder for revenge is justified, some don't. That's relative. From the absolute standpoint of humanity as a whole, I believe it isn't justified, because it harms humanity, drives us apart, and validates performing an irreversible act based on imperfect information.
As to the second point, well I must admit that google puts itself in a weak position by claiming to do no evil. If they claimed to do "the least possible evil," they would have a better case, but you won't get much marketing traction claiming something like that. Everyone likes to think that.
You make a very good point about google's practices perhaps justifying censorship in some people's eyes. Who knows? From what I have read about Chinese attitudes towards it, you may well be right. I'm no google fanboi. But they are reconsidering being in the market, which leads me to believe that they honestly want to do the right thing, but are perhaps confused as to what it is.
As to my motivations and practices in debating here, well, I like to think that I have arrived at my position through continued introspection. I like to believe that I can change my preconceptions when the evidence says they are invalid. I like to think I operate from a nuanced point of view that is superior to an absolutist position. Yes, I'm an arrogant dick.:)
But I don't believe I am in any way morally superior. I do things for my own selfish reasons. If my opinions happen to help others come to some sort of better understanding of themselves and their world, good. If not, tough. Everyone must make their own path in this crazy world, and no one has any final answers. But honest debate and dialectic helps each of us to understand our own positions better even if it helps no one else. You won't get that if you don't put your ideas out there.
And that, again, is why I'm marking you as a friend.:)
Ah, moral absolutism. How simplistic. Almost as simplistic as complete moral relativism. Is killing someone always wrong? I guess you don't believe in self defense. Killing is always wrong, right? No qualifying things, no putting them in context, wrong is wrong. Doesn't matter that some thug is trying to stick a knife in you, killing is wrong.
Censorship is wrong. It doesn't matter that censorship is going to happen in China whether you do it or someone else does it. And it makes no difference that you put a notice on every page saying that something has been censored, whereas other companies won't. You are still an evil censor and you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Let me introduce the concept of harm reduction. In a complex world, one can not predict all outcomes and potential harm inherent in an action, but one can try to reduce the amount of harm done. Perhaps, by refusing to participate in censorship, Google would make things worse for the Chinese than if they do participate and call attention to the fact that they are censoring things.
It must be nice living in your black and white world, reducing all potential decisions down to some absolute right and wrong. Let me ask, where does this absolute scale of right and wrong come from? Did you just make it up? Did someone tell you what it is? Did God tell you? How do you know for sure you have the right list?
People like you scare me. How much unnecessary suffering in this world do you suppose was created by people who knew, absolutely, that they were doing the right thing?
They'll lower the price of music as soon as Columbia lowers the price of cocaine, and not a moment sooner. What, you expect music industry executives to go without their cocaine? How else are fat balding 50-something men supposed to stay hip and with-it and get the hot 18 year old chicks?
Tiered Internet isn't about Bandwidth
on
DRM and Democracy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That is not what we are talking about. Everyone here is fine with the fact that people pay more for more bandwidth. The problem is that the Internet is like a lot of interconnecting kingdoms. Each kingdom wants to make the citizens of every other kingdom pay to cross it's borders. The problem is that to get anywhere, you have to cross dozens of kingdoms. Right now, you just pay the kingdom you live in, your ISP. And the places you go, they pay their own kingdom. And the kingdoms have a deal: Kingdom A lets Kingdom B's traffic cross it's borders and vice versa.
What the tiered internet is all about is extorting more money out of you and the places you want to visit. Anytime you want to visit someplace outside your kingdom, you will have to pay extra. Most backbone level ISPs are owned by media companies. So, say you use AOL. Any time you want to access something not owned by Time/Warner, you wil have to pay a premium or suffer slowdowns or outright blockages.
Will you even be able to find speach critical of Time/Warner? Doubtful. Will you be able to find political speach that potentially damages Time/Warner's interests in Washington? Highly unlikely. Do you see the frightening problem here? I sure hope so.
Soon after the singularity, I assume we will develop the ability to go back in time, and record the exact atomic and subatomic structure of everyone who ever lived. Then we resurect them. So don't worry, your relatives will be there.;)
Oh, and we will develop a group consciousness, assisted by AI, where everyone can choose to either experience life as just themselves, to experience the lives of others on an indvidual basis, or to experience themselves as the seat of consciousness of the group. We'll call it God, but we will have created it, not the other way around.
Seriously, well put. I'm going to remember that line of reasoning. But then, Jebus was a vampire who wanted us to drink his blood so we would have everlasting life with him after we died, so I imagine Christians would really be okay with the whole sticking a tube in your neck and feeding off of you thing.
This was different data, on the same damn laptop. I think the guy was in on it. Nothing else was stolen, just his laptop, which, oopsie! had not one but two sets of valuable data which were not supposed to be on it. Here's what I think went down:
Dude had some bad debts to some bad men. Said bad men approached him with a way he could pay them off. Just get data for ID theft on his laptop then leave it in his house and they would make it look like a burglary. Dude does so, and reports laptop stolen, but not the data on it. Later, after other Bad Dudes are off his back, dude has a change of heart and admits the data was on the laptop.
I know, never ascribe to malice or greed what can adequately be ascribed to incompetence, but I think the facts in this case are pretty damn fishy.
He said something along the lines of, "If you have something, and in sharing it you have no less, then it is a sin not to share it." Of course he was refering to the "Good News" of Jesus' sacrifice and God's forgiveness, but it applies to anything that can be produced for zero opportunity cost to society.
So everyone who claims to own intellectual "property" is a sinner. And that whole usury thing? Yup, anyone who lends money for profit is a sinner too. Our whole modern American society, while claiming to be Christian, is founded on principals that Christ and early Christians found sinful.
But that's the way of the world. When you are young and have nothing to lose you are a radical. As you get older and have more to protect, you become more and more conservative.
Note that I'm not a Christian, nor a capitalist, but I'm not really trying to troll either group. I'm just trying to get people thinking.
Oh, I am a big sim fan. And a coaster fan. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 is one of my all time favorite games, although for designing huge parks, RCT2 is still the best.
Yes, we can communicate across the globe instantaneously. The content of that communication hasn't changed all that wildly.
According to Marshall McLuhan's book, "The Medium is the Massage" (it should have been "message," but the printer screwed it up and Marshal thought that illustrated his point better) it is the physical facts of new media and how they impact human consciousness that changes society, not the messages those media carry. So instantaneous global communication is not superficial and has definitely changed society.
You beat me to the punch. It is the careful metering out of stimulus/reward that makes games addictive. But there are many kinds of players, some want that, others want to play in an open ended sandbox mode, others just want to win as quickly as possible.
Extraordinary rendition would seem a likely use for these during peacetime. Zip in anywhere, drop out of the sky and nab your guy before he has time to flee, then arrange a pickup after the need for surprise is gone.
Nah, the capitalist way is taking what used to be free and charging for it, while hoping people will be too stupid to notice.
It seems to work well for them, too.
There, I fixed that for ya. It's called primitive accumulation of capital: you take what was free and charge people for it. Marx got a lot of things wrong, and Bakunin was certainly right about where communism leads, but let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
No one's censoring you. You don't have any right to force me to read what you are writing. This isn't your server, it isn't your bandwidth. My brain is not yours to stick dirty little pieces of totalitarian propaganda into. It just so happens that I read slashdot at -1 threshold with troll, offtopic, flamebait, and overrated given a +2, so I can spot mod abuse.
Not only is what is happening to you not censorship, it isn't even mod abuse. It is a community policing itself to keep out the undesireable elements. If you don't like it here, I suggest you leave. No one will miss you.
Buh-bye! Don't let the ACK hit you in the ass on your way out.
On one hand, you're right to privacy is being eroded, on the other hand, I really want them to find people who are planning attacks on my country.
Guess what? You're right to privacy being eroded is an attack on this country. Considering that your chance of dying in a terrorist attack is about the same as being hit by lightning, I'd say that this administration's attacks against our country are far more serious, if not immediately deadly.
Slashdot Mirror
Mark you, this is not our ombudsmann, which is someone appointed to help us against the goverment, but our consumer-ombudsmann who helps against corporations :).
:(
I'll take one of each, thanks. Now, how to convince our congresscritters to appoint someone to watch over them and their major campaign contributors and help the public out when either screws up?
To quote Susie Derkins from Calvin and Hobbes, "Might as well wish for a pony while I'm at it."
Perhaps the question needs wider phrasing: can the IT industry - not just the malware side - be trusted?
Um, you're asking this of a bunch of people reading slashdot on company time...
Oh it's news, just not front page news. I'm just waiting for all the mistaken "OOOhhh that Zonk and his crazy gaming articles" comments. ;)
Do geeks latch on to software like jocks latch on to sports teams, or what? No matter what is said, it always has to be punctuated by "but my team is the best."
Do you really need to ask this question? Of course geeks do that. Unless they aren't computer geeks. Star Trek geeks battle over favorite episodes or captains, RPG geeks can't suffer a criticism of "their" game system, and I'm sure some Paleontologists geeks get their knickers in a twist when someone disses their favorite dinosaur, "Tarbosaurus could totally kick Dryptosaurus' ass!" "Could not!" "Could so!"
Sometimes OSSers have more in common with Christian Evangelicals and cheeseheads than geeks...
This is a human thing, most everyone is fundamentalist about something, and most people identify more with a particular group than they do with humanity as a whole. Should geeks be above this kind of thing? Maybe, but very few people have the emotional and moral intelligence to rise above their upbringing.
Go to opensuse.org to get it free. Though you might want to wait a few months for them to patch a few things, 10.1 has been a little buggy in some places.
I am that deluded. To be the next step, it would have to have not happened yet. ooooooWEEEEEooo! /takes off tinfoil hat
I concur. That analogy was as inappropriate and out-of-proportion as Hitler gassing the Jews just because they laughed at him in art school.
I'm marking you as a friend because you are a great debater, and that, quite frankly, is the whole reason I visit slashdot. I'd rather have people disagree with me intelligently than agree with me for no good reason. I set my preferences to give friends a bonus, so I can see what they have to say even if they aren't modded up.
:)
:)
To address your first point, building your relativism into your terms still means you are using realativism, and really kind of makes my point for me. Killing is an absolute term. Someone was alive, now they're dead, you killed them. Murder is a relative term. Who decides if it was murder?
As you say, "This is usually handled by people breaking themselves into groups who approach the idea of a particular moral absolute from the same direction, which I believe then makes the absolute a relative. Absolute to them, relative for everyone else holding a different absolute." That means it's actually relative. Relative absolutism, hehe.
I like to take it one step further and introduce the concept of levels: family, tribe, village, society, humanity. Relative in this concept means a comparison at the same level. Absolute refers to comparison between a higher level and a lower level. To use murder as an example, some societies believe murder for revenge is justified, some don't. That's relative. From the absolute standpoint of humanity as a whole, I believe it isn't justified, because it harms humanity, drives us apart, and validates performing an irreversible act based on imperfect information.
As to the second point, well I must admit that google puts itself in a weak position by claiming to do no evil. If they claimed to do "the least possible evil," they would have a better case, but you won't get much marketing traction claiming something like that. Everyone likes to think that.
You make a very good point about google's practices perhaps justifying censorship in some people's eyes. Who knows? From what I have read about Chinese attitudes towards it, you may well be right. I'm no google fanboi. But they are reconsidering being in the market, which leads me to believe that they honestly want to do the right thing, but are perhaps confused as to what it is.
As to my motivations and practices in debating here, well, I like to think that I have arrived at my position through continued introspection. I like to believe that I can change my preconceptions when the evidence says they are invalid. I like to think I operate from a nuanced point of view that is superior to an absolutist position. Yes, I'm an arrogant dick.
But I don't believe I am in any way morally superior. I do things for my own selfish reasons. If my opinions happen to help others come to some sort of better understanding of themselves and their world, good. If not, tough. Everyone must make their own path in this crazy world, and no one has any final answers. But honest debate and dialectic helps each of us to understand our own positions better even if it helps no one else. You won't get that if you don't put your ideas out there.
And that, again, is why I'm marking you as a friend.
That's "United States Department of Ass Inspectors." Sounds like a fun, until you realize they have to inspect every US ass. That's a big job!
Badump-cha! Thank you, I'll be here all night. Try the veal, it's delish!
Ah, moral absolutism. How simplistic. Almost as simplistic as complete moral relativism. Is killing someone always wrong? I guess you don't believe in self defense. Killing is always wrong, right? No qualifying things, no putting them in context, wrong is wrong. Doesn't matter that some thug is trying to stick a knife in you, killing is wrong.
Censorship is wrong. It doesn't matter that censorship is going to happen in China whether you do it or someone else does it. And it makes no difference that you put a notice on every page saying that something has been censored, whereas other companies won't. You are still an evil censor and you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Let me introduce the concept of harm reduction. In a complex world, one can not predict all outcomes and potential harm inherent in an action, but one can try to reduce the amount of harm done. Perhaps, by refusing to participate in censorship, Google would make things worse for the Chinese than if they do participate and call attention to the fact that they are censoring things.
It must be nice living in your black and white world, reducing all potential decisions down to some absolute right and wrong. Let me ask, where does this absolute scale of right and wrong come from? Did you just make it up? Did someone tell you what it is? Did God tell you? How do you know for sure you have the right list?
People like you scare me. How much unnecessary suffering in this world do you suppose was created by people who knew, absolutely, that they were doing the right thing?
They'll lower the price of music as soon as Columbia lowers the price of cocaine, and not a moment sooner. What, you expect music industry executives to go without their cocaine? How else are fat balding 50-something men supposed to stay hip and with-it and get the hot 18 year old chicks?
That is not what we are talking about. Everyone here is fine with the fact that people pay more for more bandwidth. The problem is that the Internet is like a lot of interconnecting kingdoms. Each kingdom wants to make the citizens of every other kingdom pay to cross it's borders. The problem is that to get anywhere, you have to cross dozens of kingdoms. Right now, you just pay the kingdom you live in, your ISP. And the places you go, they pay their own kingdom. And the kingdoms have a deal: Kingdom A lets Kingdom B's traffic cross it's borders and vice versa.
What the tiered internet is all about is extorting more money out of you and the places you want to visit. Anytime you want to visit someplace outside your kingdom, you will have to pay extra. Most backbone level ISPs are owned by media companies. So, say you use AOL. Any time you want to access something not owned by Time/Warner, you wil have to pay a premium or suffer slowdowns or outright blockages.
Will you even be able to find speach critical of Time/Warner? Doubtful. Will you be able to find political speach that potentially damages Time/Warner's interests in Washington? Highly unlikely. Do you see the frightening problem here? I sure hope so.
To be fair, people do and always have found ways around usury laws. Take a look at Islamic banking for a number of fun and creative ways to do it.
Soon after the singularity, I assume we will develop the ability to go back in time, and record the exact atomic and subatomic structure of everyone who ever lived. Then we resurect them. So don't worry, your relatives will be there. ;)
Oh, and we will develop a group consciousness, assisted by AI, where everyone can choose to either experience life as just themselves, to experience the lives of others on an indvidual basis, or to experience themselves as the seat of consciousness of the group. We'll call it God, but we will have created it, not the other way around.
(With apologies to Spider Robinson and Olaf Stapledon for stealing their ideas.)
Seriously, well put. I'm going to remember that line of reasoning. But then, Jebus was a vampire who wanted us to drink his blood so we would have everlasting life with him after we died, so I imagine Christians would really be okay with the whole sticking a tube in your neck and feeding off of you thing.
Because it's cloning Sicilians when death is on the line?
This was different data, on the same damn laptop. I think the guy was in on it. Nothing else was stolen, just his laptop, which, oopsie! had not one but two sets of valuable data which were not supposed to be on it. Here's what I think went down:
Dude had some bad debts to some bad men. Said bad men approached him with a way he could pay them off. Just get data for ID theft on his laptop then leave it in his house and they would make it look like a burglary. Dude does so, and reports laptop stolen, but not the data on it. Later, after other Bad Dudes are off his back, dude has a change of heart and admits the data was on the laptop.
I know, never ascribe to malice or greed what can adequately be ascribed to incompetence, but I think the facts in this case are pretty damn fishy.
He said something along the lines of, "If you have something, and in sharing it you have no less, then it is a sin not to share it." Of course he was refering to the "Good News" of Jesus' sacrifice and God's forgiveness, but it applies to anything that can be produced for zero opportunity cost to society.
So everyone who claims to own intellectual "property" is a sinner. And that whole usury thing? Yup, anyone who lends money for profit is a sinner too. Our whole modern American society, while claiming to be Christian, is founded on principals that Christ and early Christians found sinful.
But that's the way of the world. When you are young and have nothing to lose you are a radical. As you get older and have more to protect, you become more and more conservative.
Note that I'm not a Christian, nor a capitalist, but I'm not really trying to troll either group. I'm just trying to get people thinking.
Oh, I am a big sim fan. And a coaster fan. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 is one of my all time favorite games, although for designing huge parks, RCT2 is still the best.
Yes, we can communicate across the globe instantaneously. The content of that communication hasn't changed all that wildly.
According to Marshall McLuhan's book, "The Medium is the Massage" (it should have been "message," but the printer screwed it up and Marshal thought that illustrated his point better) it is the physical facts of new media and how they impact human consciousness that changes society, not the messages those media carry. So instantaneous global communication is not superficial and has definitely changed society.
You beat me to the punch. It is the careful metering out of stimulus/reward that makes games addictive. But there are many kinds of players, some want that, others want to play in an open ended sandbox mode, others just want to win as quickly as possible.
Extraordinary rendition would seem a likely use for these during peacetime. Zip in anywhere, drop out of the sky and nab your guy before he has time to flee, then arrange a pickup after the need for surprise is gone.
Nah, the capitalist way is taking what used to be free and charging for it, while hoping people will be too stupid to notice.
It seems to work well for them, too.
There, I fixed that for ya. It's called primitive accumulation of capital: you take what was free and charge people for it. Marx got a lot of things wrong, and Bakunin was certainly right about where communism leads, but let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
No one's censoring you. You don't have any right to force me to read what you are writing. This isn't your server, it isn't your bandwidth. My brain is not yours to stick dirty little pieces of totalitarian propaganda into. It just so happens that I read slashdot at -1 threshold with troll, offtopic, flamebait, and overrated given a +2, so I can spot mod abuse.
Not only is what is happening to you not censorship, it isn't even mod abuse. It is a community policing itself to keep out the undesireable elements. If you don't like it here, I suggest you leave. No one will miss you.
Buh-bye! Don't let the ACK hit you in the ass on your way out.
On one hand, you're right to privacy is being eroded, on the other hand, I really want them to find people who are planning attacks on my country.
Guess what? You're right to privacy being eroded is an attack on this country. Considering that your chance of dying in a terrorist attack is about the same as being hit by lightning, I'd say that this administration's attacks against our country are far more serious, if not immediately deadly.