Reading original manuscripts is a useful skill, sure, but it's not one that everyone needs.
You're talking about the skill of reading. You're arguing that not everyone needs to be able to read, where reading means deciphering word-forming symbols on a page which look similar but not necessarily identical to symbols you have learnt. Have I walked into some sort of alternative reality where nerds are posting that the skill of reading is archaic? And that only a "small number of professional historians" need to do it?
As for understanding the message, it is true that sometimes certain domain-specific skills are needed to study original documents in a particular subject, or at least to perform the most fruitful study. But anyone reasonably educated can get something out of reading an original. To take one extreme, any man can read a facsimile of the original US Constitution and get something out of it, but a legal scholar or historian could get more out of it. For a middle ground, Newton's Opticks is extremely readable to the layperson with very little technical skill required. As is some Darwin. And an annotated set of extracts of Newton's Principia is a much better introduction to Newtonian mechanics than any annoying high school "here is a list of Newton's 3 laws". I mean "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" - you can repeat it to the end of days and sound smart, but what the hell is that supposed to mean? And "F=ma" is neat and concise but conveys much less meaning than Newton's albeit far more wordy formulation.
For over a century you had the quite different Newtonian and Leibnitzian notations - but turns out (of course) you do exactly the same calculations in either, and can translate any given proof back and forth.
If you're only differentiating wrt/ one variable, yes. But you're missing the point with Leibniz notation that you can do cunning manipulations with the symbols directly. It's like CS freshmen proudly announcing, "Well all computers are the same cos they're Turing complete!" Uhuh.
It turns out that the different notations reflected two different ways of looking at the calculus which in turn reflected two different ways of looking at mathematics, the battle between which has been a significant part of mathematical development since. The notations also camouflaged the nonsense inherent in both versions of the calculus that was the infinitesimal quantity, which then in no resolvable way represented both something and nothing and had to wait for Cauchy et al. to come to the rescue.
Also, Newtonian notation remains less cumbersome where appropriate, as well as conveying the original physical landscape for it was developed. I've read and used it often. Furthermore, take the dot, shift it to the right and leak it down the page a bit to give you...
Leibniz was well-known for being not only messy but also making silly mistakes. It was greatly assuring to find out he made sign errors as trivial as the ones I make, but it required a faithful reproduction of his works to find out that the errors were his and not some editor's.
We're so compartmentalised with our knowledge today that we may be able to describe the function of every part of a tree without having the first idea how to plant a forest. Reading original works (often by those who may have lacked the skills for the former) helps with the latter, I think.
you should never actually need to handle original manuscripts
You should probably not be handling the original manuscripts because they are old, delicate, valuable, etc. But you may want to refer to scans or copies of manuscripts which have been badly typeset, overly edited or not typeset at all.
Many times the earlier notation is that way simply because it is the first clumsy attempt to present a new idea that is not yet understood fully
That's the sometimes naive first impression, yes. Another possibility is that the concepts were looked at in a different way, or that the notation (and, sometimes, lack of notation) reflects how people thought about the problem rather than today's drive to syntactic uniformity at the expense of understanding. Klein warned in his pedagogical work about modern mathematics becoming mindless symbol manipulation, and - looking at the way mathematics is taught in the classroom today - he was right to do so. See also the failure of Semantic MathML.
these are terms that do not apply to the research in a subject, but apply only to research on history of the subject, the people in the subject and other 'feelgood' style-over-substance issues that are not actually relevant to the subject at hand.
You couldn't be more wrong. Mathematics, for example, is the application of the human mind to pattern / relationship recognition. This is a human activity and you will achieve much more as a mathematician if you don't just know the facts but also refine your thought processes. One of the best ways of doing this is to study how other good mathematicians think and find out how their ideas have evolved.
For example, it is undoubtedly better and more efficient to learn geometry from a modern textbook instead of a direct translation of Euclides
I completely disagree. I have gained the most insight into Euclidean (!) geometry by reading Euclid's Elements with commentaries. This includes studying elucidations of the deficiencies in Euclid which motivated other geometries - information any school textbook on Euclidean geometry is far too vague in the first place to pick apart.
And, while I'd "learnt" it before from modern textbooks, the most helpful elucidation of non-Euclidean geometry from the PoV of actually being able to do interesting work with it was reading Lobachevsky's Geometrische Untersuchungen - though I will admit to having an English translation to hand. It's the difference between having a reference to some piece of technology and enjoying a dialogue with the inventor. If you can't see the value of the latter, please think.
Confidence can be an influential factor in success and failure.
Is it, though? Or is it the usual correlation vs causation thing?
IOW, in the non-pathological case, might it not be that confidence reflects a rational evaluation of the likelihood of success? And the language used merely reflects that confidence.
In particular, I'd say I'm "trying" to do something when I'm not sure that I'm going anywhere toward achieving it. It doesn't mean that I am failing at it, or that I even think I'm failing at it, just that I haven't yet been able to measure positive progress.
I'll take a machine-written copy over the original handwritten manuscript any day -- precisely BECAUSE it allows me to focus on the substance
So, are you offering to do the typing out? I agree that it's harder to read old handwritten works than their typeset equivalents, if the typesetting is good, but I consider being able to read a useful skill - and "to be able to read" has meant, before the last couple of decades, being able to decipher varying and unclear letter forms from a host of sources, not just taking in the neat, predictable fonts of typesetting.
You are quite honestly declaring that you don't think you should have to learn to read, except in a limited sense.
Except the letters ain't the "substance" of a old work on mathemathics.
This also is often wrong. The development of notation is an incredibly important part of the development of mathematics, and you'll probably become a better mathematician by understanding how notation evolved and bounced between descriptions, words, word-like squiggles, discrete symbols and diagrams. You may also miss a lot of the spirit of an old work by looking at a neatly edited and typeset version.
I'd even risk being an ignorant asshole when I say "if it's in cursive, it's not worth my time reading it." - I know it's wrong to say that, but damn does it feel good.
It must be depressing to outright refuse to read thousands of man-years worth of original mathematical, scientific, medical and philosophical works because they used ink and joined letters together. "You historians may have made the effort to carefully collect, preserve and scan these works, but they're just remnants of a past(*) age until you also type them up for me!"
And I'm sure in the current fashion of style-over-substance you fit right in telling the kids you're not going to look at their technically excellent work because they dared to use a pen rather than master LaTeX (or *cringe* Word - which, unlike TeX, rarely if ever produces something even as neat as fair handwriting).
I started off with reading the last three sentences of your post and it reminded me of century-old racist propaganda.
Then I read back a bit and realised that actually it had the Politically Correct upgrade applied, with the same purpose of preserving an underclass but selecting a different collection of unfortunates.
One problem with all freedom-vs-authoritarianism arguments is that each side takes such a long time to acknowledge that the other has a different view of the notion of "harmless".
One of the consequential mistakes made by those campaigning for the freedom[tm] side is the assumption that the authoritarians just have a huge ego: "How dare you impose your opinion on me!!!"
But the authoritarian is sometimes (N.B.) the one with the lesser ego. He doesn't want alcohol or drugs or gambling or driving or whatever regulated for his own sake, but because he wants to create a more cohesive / safe society - one where prevention is chosen over cure as a solution to problems developed by individuals which others must then solve.
The entirely freedom-oriented argument might sound enticing at first: "He's harmless - leave him be!" But a junkie, for example, tends not to be harmless, as he's got to get his fix somewhere. Even if he is a junkie with a small retirement account, however, he may get to the point where he needs medical attention. Then who is supposed to pick up the cost? "Leave him to die! He abused his freedom!" some cry. Suddenly, the freedom guy seems less cuddly and kind.
The offer of security can be abused by tyrants, just as the offer of a cheap meal to any prepared to sit quietly at a table can be abused with a vial of poison. The freedom guy argues from the view that man is so egotistic that an offer for comfort will inevitably be accompanied by an abuse. In the extreme, he is taking the hilariously two-faced Thatcher's rhetoric seriously: "there is no such thing as society" except as an oppressive system which must be crushed.
To return to alcohol: we have seen that an outright ban does no good, whatever your aim. But its manufacture and sale is still heavily regulated. Is this an imposition of ego? Should it be treated as cocaine at the end of C19? Should cocaine be so treated? What about all other prescription drugs? If I can make them and sell them, why should anyone stop me?
Well, a lot of people that causality Inc. sell these batches of unregulated drugs to are going to get addicted or overdose. A brain is just another part of the body - to say that it is perfectly rational or perfectly informed is a philosophical fantasy. It will be tempted. It will be weak. It will be ill. And society judges that it's immoral to take (too much) advantage of that - especially when society will have to pick up the pieces.
Where we have deregulated the extent to which advantage can be taken of the weak, we end up harming everyone: the subprime mortgage hiccough is an obvious contemporary example. Particular individuals got very rich from associated dealings, at the cost of everyone else involved.
try running Windows 95 on modern hardware...
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 0
...notice the speed? That's how responsive an OS should be today. And no bullshit layers of indirection excuses. The hardware is capable, and the software just needs to be made efficient.
Windows 95's upbeat but non-hipster marketing marked the start of a high point for Microsoft. They were essentially saying "here's something we think is good enough to do lots of things with, and we're going to help you do that" - and they were right. It wasn't anywhere near interesting technically, but it was accessible, cheap, familiar and MS encouraged it to become well-supported on a variety of hardware.
I don't know who Roberto Sparese is, but I'm sure he'll get a few more hits to his Facebook account as other readers also wonder whether that was actually a little-known word and not just a typo.
If that person is a cult hero like Assange or Reiser, sure. Of course, if "someone" is the US government, the vast majority of/.ers have no compunctions about assuming guilt, to the point of inventing dozens of theories for which there is exactly zero proof.
And this is precisely as it should be: view the government with suspicion and subject it to appropriate scrutiny and restrictions. But assume that private individuals are innocent until proven guilty.
If you don't like that the government's special powers mean it requires special attention, don't work for the government. What are you afraid of, soldier?
Society would be a lot better if everyone was allowed to have a gun on them at all times - people wouldn't go out of their way to be jerks
Why? Would a gunfight become an acceptable solution to dealing with a "jerk"?
Criminals already have guns that they carry so the law abiding citizens would be able to defend themselves
A well trained gun carrier might be able to defend himself. But someone who merely owns and exposes a gun? Hell no.
and police abuse would stop pretty quick too.
Exactly how would police abuse stop? Put another way, what exactly are you intending to do with your gun to affect how a police officer behaves, and what do you think the outcome will be?
Is this actually true? I guess a more helpful pair of questions would be:
Do women tend to vote more for socially liberal or more for socially authoritarian policies than men?
Do women tend to vote more for economic laissez-faire or more for state economic control than men?
(Considering the obvious female-votes-for-Thatcher example in the UK, we have to evaluate the hypothesis that women voted for Thatcher merely because she was a woman.)
Neither the police nor the judges set the law (in theory), but they must implement it. Whoever legislates listens selectively to pressure groups which also represent their interests, i.e. groups which give the government more arbitrary and overreaching control. The Think of The Women and Children Alliance wins joint first prize among such groups, along with the Protect us from The Foreigner out to Destroy our Way of Life Coalition.
These valiant organisations together comprise the Distraction and Excuse Group, which is to government as old as prostitution in the streets.
So, which results of Assange's "data thieving" (those bits belong to me! stop putting them in the same order!) are most offensive? Does it concern you most that he might help stop Americans being sent to kill and to die unnecessarily, or simply that he uncovers incompetence and corruption?
releases it without any effort put into finding out if theres anything of value
You clearly haven't read them.
or wrong actually IN it.
Even if you don't believe that he asked for help redacting data, and even if you don't believe that the delays in release are to check for problems with content, you're forgetting:
It doesn't matter. He's publishing credible leaked source material, not vouching for its 100% accuracy. Funnily enough, no publisher of compendia of source material has vouched for the 100% accuracy of that material. This is fortunate, because otherwise we'd have no information on anything published ever. He reports, you decide.
It's already leaked. Once he has it ("he" being the community of Wikileaks workers), you can assume that everyone who can do anything useful with the information has it. There are no operational disadvantages whatever to his publishing it, except perhaps that you might reduce the morale of a few military grunts who disobey orders omg and download it on their home computers. Well, good news for you, the US military is fighting for the freedom (among other things) to criticise, lampoon and otherwise laugh at the US military. When that dirty hippy is putting a flower in your rifle, you can be smug that - at least in theory - it's thanks to you that he gets to do that without someone like you blowing his brains out.
You keep making arguments that don't seem to recognize a difference which is why you're having a problem following me.
I am very clearly recognising the difference - you're just having trouble understanding language. If you don't want sex with someone unless they want sex with you, then you don't want sex with them if they don't want sex with you.
To clarify for the third time: the "one reason for not raping someone is that they don't want to have sex with you, even if you want sex with them" doesn't apply. It doesn't apply because you specifically automatically don't want to have sex with a not already willing person.
To most people, only the latter appeals.
Absolute bullshit. There are no supermodels hanging on the arms of 80 year old tramps.
You, Sir, are the worst sort of psychological abuser: one who vehemently denies reality in order to create a void filled by ludicrous fantasy, one which can be used to manipulate the vulnerable and naive.
Of course there are a few (men) of the most passive sort who only want sex with those who want to have sex with them. But for most in the real world relationships are a trade of values. In the "ideal" trade, each person knows exactly what the other wants, but that still doesn't mean they both want the same thing. But, as any fule kno, a fundamental problem with free trade is that there is no such thing as a perfectly informed party.
The enhanced CRB checks many English firms do before employment will reveal arrest records, and an arrest record with various magic words will pretty much deny you employment in various fields where you're dealing with the "young and vulnerable". If your career is in care of the young and vulnerable, of course, this may mean a ruined career.
It's hard to know what to do about this. The obvious answer would be "a CRB check shouldn't reveal arrests". But arrests should not be private, because that would enable secret internment. So, if the state stopped offering the serivce, it then becomes a matter of some private organisation trolling arrest records and sorting by person, then selling a lookup service.
Another possibility is to make it illegal to discriminate based on certain aspects of a CRB record. This will work as "well" as sex/race/etc discrimination laws, I guess.
The only long-term solution is to get it in people's thick heads that an arrest is meaningless, unless perhaps the person has been released on bail (or its local equivalent).
I wish I had his skill and his balls. He, at least, is going some way to watching the watchers.
And if there are any times that attention whoring is absolutely warranted, it is now.
I just hope he's not David Kelly'd.
Before I go, let me just accuse every/. commenter below me in this article of rape. I hope you judge Assange for the accusations against him as you'd hope people treat mine against you.
Sorry, but you wrote in a stand alone paragraph quite emphatically:
Look, you misinterpreted what you read and want to save face. Of course one reason for not raping someone is that you don't want to have sex with them. To generalise, one reason for not forcing X is that you didn't want to do X anyway. The fact that I clarified in the Q/A format just confirms that you're being intentionally obtuse.
"this" that I can work out that you're referring to as a "feminist fantasy"
The feminist fantasy is that sex is something which two people equally want with a full range of mutually understood and experienced emotional and physical attraction. (And everything else is "rape".)
It is not some "feminist fantasy" to expect mutuality in sex. That is the default for healthy people.
It is not a feminist fantasy to expect you not to be made to have sex with force or the threat of force. But it is romantic nonsense to expect mutuality in the sense that two people having sex do so out of equal and straightforward desire to have sex with each other, and it is a feminist fantasy to consider it the default.
Let's just stick to the reasoning beings known as homo sapiens that we were discussing.
The drive for sex is primitive and evolved. You're denying reality if you don't study it in the context of your evolution.
For reference, one person being in the mood and getting another person in the mood happens all the time. The only connection this has to rape is...
...that sex usually isn't about "mutual involvement", but about persuasion. And "getting in the mood" might, in your romantic fantasy world, involve dreamy seduction to get the person wanting sex for the sake of sex. But all voluntary human relationships are about trade, and all that matters is that the other person is willing to take something (money, gifts, conversation, security, etc.) in return for the sex - they don't have to want sex per se.
It's not "idealistic" to say people enjoy their partner enjoying sex as well.
But it is idealistic to assume that this is relevant for the majority of non-forced sexual encounters.
If I feel in a particular way, it's a fair bet that many other people do as well.
It's a fair bet that most people would say "I'm not racist", and "I don't lie", and even "I'm a decent kind of guy". And if not, you can persuade them by fair means or by misrepresentation. Which wouldn't be rape. But it would be more like sex.
. Well, I make the point that in the porn I've seen, the woman is usually acting as if she enjoyed it or is stimulated by it,
Wanting to watch someone act well is completely different from wanting to watch reality. I enjoy certain movies in which people act dangerous fighting or even killing, but I do not experience any enjoyment from watching people fight or kill for real.
Seriously, seek help. You need it.
Just give up. You're like a pirate throwing poodles from his sinking ship to nip at my heels. It's entertaining, but you'll still end up at the bottom of the ocean.
You said the only two reasons why one wouldn't commit rape are a desire not to hurt another and a fear of being caught.
Did you read the context in the previous sentence? I was posing a question and giving an indirect answer ("rape, which is not chosen because..."). The question began:
If someone wants to have sex with you and you aren't willing to give it...
This automatically excludes the case where you don't want to have sex with someone because they're not willing to have sex with you. This is a feminist fantasy which implies that two people suddenly want to have sex with each other with equal gusto precisely at the same time and for the same duration, and that sex is hardly about one fantasising and persuading the other.
Sex occurs for a lot of reasons, and I have yet to read evidence that "because both people/animals simultaneously suddenly became equally physically and emotionally enthusiastic" is the major reason.
I imagine a lot of men want a prostitute they go with to act like they're enjoying it.
I don't know. Why do you imagine this? It seems odd to project your claimed sexual ideals on others. Do you look at porn? Does it bother you that the woman almost certainly has no interest in you beyond the payment you'll offer to her / her employer?
Slashdot Mirror
Reading original manuscripts is a useful skill, sure, but it's not one that everyone needs.
You're talking about the skill of reading. You're arguing that not everyone needs to be able to read, where reading means deciphering word-forming symbols on a page which look similar but not necessarily identical to symbols you have learnt. Have I walked into some sort of alternative reality where nerds are posting that the skill of reading is archaic? And that only a "small number of professional historians" need to do it?
As for understanding the message, it is true that sometimes certain domain-specific skills are needed to study original documents in a particular subject, or at least to perform the most fruitful study. But anyone reasonably educated can get something out of reading an original. To take one extreme, any man can read a facsimile of the original US Constitution and get something out of it, but a legal scholar or historian could get more out of it. For a middle ground, Newton's Opticks is extremely readable to the layperson with very little technical skill required. As is some Darwin. And an annotated set of extracts of Newton's Principia is a much better introduction to Newtonian mechanics than any annoying high school "here is a list of Newton's 3 laws". I mean "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" - you can repeat it to the end of days and sound smart, but what the hell is that supposed to mean? And "F=ma" is neat and concise but conveys much less meaning than Newton's albeit far more wordy formulation.
For over a century you had the quite different Newtonian and Leibnitzian notations - but turns out (of course) you do exactly the same calculations in either, and can translate any given proof back and forth.
If you're only differentiating wrt/ one variable, yes. But you're missing the point with Leibniz notation that you can do cunning manipulations with the symbols directly. It's like CS freshmen proudly announcing, "Well all computers are the same cos they're Turing complete!" Uhuh.
It turns out that the different notations reflected two different ways of looking at the calculus which in turn reflected two different ways of looking at mathematics, the battle between which has been a significant part of mathematical development since. The notations also camouflaged the nonsense inherent in both versions of the calculus that was the infinitesimal quantity, which then in no resolvable way represented both something and nothing and had to wait for Cauchy et al. to come to the rescue.
Also, Newtonian notation remains less cumbersome where appropriate, as well as conveying the original physical landscape for it was developed. I've read and used it often. Furthermore, take the dot, shift it to the right and leak it down the page a bit to give you...
Leibniz was well-known for being not only messy but also making silly mistakes. It was greatly assuring to find out he made sign errors as trivial as the ones I make, but it required a faithful reproduction of his works to find out that the errors were his and not some editor's.
We're so compartmentalised with our knowledge today that we may be able to describe the function of every part of a tree without having the first idea how to plant a forest. Reading original works (often by those who may have lacked the skills for the former) helps with the latter, I think.
you should never actually need to handle original manuscripts
You should probably not be handling the original manuscripts because they are old, delicate, valuable, etc. But you may want to refer to scans or copies of manuscripts which have been badly typeset, overly edited or not typeset at all.
Many times the earlier notation is that way simply because it is the first clumsy attempt to present a new idea that is not yet understood fully
That's the sometimes naive first impression, yes. Another possibility is that the concepts were looked at in a different way, or that the notation (and, sometimes, lack of notation) reflects how people thought about the problem rather than today's drive to syntactic uniformity at the expense of understanding. Klein warned in his pedagogical work about modern mathematics becoming mindless symbol manipulation, and - looking at the way mathematics is taught in the classroom today - he was right to do so. See also the failure of Semantic MathML.
these are terms that do not apply to the research in a subject, but apply only to research on history of the subject, the people in the subject and other 'feelgood' style-over-substance issues that are not actually relevant to the subject at hand.
You couldn't be more wrong. Mathematics, for example, is the application of the human mind to pattern / relationship recognition. This is a human activity and you will achieve much more as a mathematician if you don't just know the facts but also refine your thought processes. One of the best ways of doing this is to study how other good mathematicians think and find out how their ideas have evolved.
For example, it is undoubtedly better and more efficient to learn geometry from a modern textbook instead of a direct translation of Euclides
I completely disagree. I have gained the most insight into Euclidean (!) geometry by reading Euclid's Elements with commentaries. This includes studying elucidations of the deficiencies in Euclid which motivated other geometries - information any school textbook on Euclidean geometry is far too vague in the first place to pick apart.
And, while I'd "learnt" it before from modern textbooks, the most helpful elucidation of non-Euclidean geometry from the PoV of actually being able to do interesting work with it was reading Lobachevsky's Geometrische Untersuchungen - though I will admit to having an English translation to hand. It's the difference between having a reference to some piece of technology and enjoying a dialogue with the inventor. If you can't see the value of the latter, please think.
Confidence can be an influential factor in success and failure.
Is it, though? Or is it the usual correlation vs causation thing?
IOW, in the non-pathological case, might it not be that confidence reflects a rational evaluation of the likelihood of success? And the language used merely reflects that confidence.
In particular, I'd say I'm "trying" to do something when I'm not sure that I'm going anywhere toward achieving it. It doesn't mean that I am failing at it, or that I even think I'm failing at it, just that I haven't yet been able to measure positive progress.
I'll take a machine-written copy over the original handwritten manuscript any day -- precisely BECAUSE it allows me to focus on the substance
So, are you offering to do the typing out? I agree that it's harder to read old handwritten works than their typeset equivalents, if the typesetting is good, but I consider being able to read a useful skill - and "to be able to read" has meant, before the last couple of decades, being able to decipher varying and unclear letter forms from a host of sources, not just taking in the neat, predictable fonts of typesetting.
You are quite honestly declaring that you don't think you should have to learn to read, except in a limited sense.
Except the letters ain't the "substance" of a old work on mathemathics.
This also is often wrong. The development of notation is an incredibly important part of the development of mathematics, and you'll probably become a better mathematician by understanding how notation evolved and bounced between descriptions, words, word-like squiggles, discrete symbols and diagrams. You may also miss a lot of the spirit of an old work by looking at a neatly edited and typeset version.
If I were a counselor, I'd say that the use of "trying" in a sentence implies expected failure.
"We're saving the patient's life."
"We're trying to save the patient's life."
The first may dishonestly imply a certainty. I'd much prefer to hear the second until it is confidently believed that the first is true.
I'd even risk being an ignorant asshole when I say "if it's in cursive, it's not worth my time reading it." - I know it's wrong to say that, but damn does it feel good.
It must be depressing to outright refuse to read thousands of man-years worth of original mathematical, scientific, medical and philosophical works because they used ink and joined letters together. "You historians may have made the effort to carefully collect, preserve and scan these works, but they're just remnants of a past(*) age until you also type them up for me!"
And I'm sure in the current fashion of style-over-substance you fit right in telling the kids you're not going to look at their technically excellent work because they dared to use a pen rather than master LaTeX (or *cringe* Word - which, unlike TeX, rarely if ever produces something even as neat as fair handwriting).
(*) To any child, 20 years ago is a "past age".
I started off with reading the last three sentences of your post and it reminded me of century-old racist propaganda.
Then I read back a bit and realised that actually it had the Politically Correct upgrade applied, with the same purpose of preserving an underclass but selecting a different collection of unfortunates.
One problem with all freedom-vs-authoritarianism arguments is that each side takes such a long time to acknowledge that the other has a different view of the notion of "harmless".
One of the consequential mistakes made by those campaigning for the freedom[tm] side is the assumption that the authoritarians just have a huge ego: "How dare you impose your opinion on me!!!"
But the authoritarian is sometimes (N.B.) the one with the lesser ego. He doesn't want alcohol or drugs or gambling or driving or whatever regulated for his own sake, but because he wants to create a more cohesive / safe society - one where prevention is chosen over cure as a solution to problems developed by individuals which others must then solve.
The entirely freedom-oriented argument might sound enticing at first: "He's harmless - leave him be!" But a junkie, for example, tends not to be harmless, as he's got to get his fix somewhere. Even if he is a junkie with a small retirement account, however, he may get to the point where he needs medical attention. Then who is supposed to pick up the cost? "Leave him to die! He abused his freedom!" some cry. Suddenly, the freedom guy seems less cuddly and kind.
The offer of security can be abused by tyrants, just as the offer of a cheap meal to any prepared to sit quietly at a table can be abused with a vial of poison. The freedom guy argues from the view that man is so egotistic that an offer for comfort will inevitably be accompanied by an abuse. In the extreme, he is taking the hilariously two-faced Thatcher's rhetoric seriously: "there is no such thing as society" except as an oppressive system which must be crushed.
To return to alcohol: we have seen that an outright ban does no good, whatever your aim. But its manufacture and sale is still heavily regulated. Is this an imposition of ego? Should it be treated as cocaine at the end of C19? Should cocaine be so treated? What about all other prescription drugs? If I can make them and sell them, why should anyone stop me?
Well, a lot of people that causality Inc. sell these batches of unregulated drugs to are going to get addicted or overdose. A brain is just another part of the body - to say that it is perfectly rational or perfectly informed is a philosophical fantasy. It will be tempted. It will be weak. It will be ill. And society judges that it's immoral to take (too much) advantage of that - especially when society will have to pick up the pieces.
Where we have deregulated the extent to which advantage can be taken of the weak, we end up harming everyone: the subprime mortgage hiccough is an obvious contemporary example. Particular individuals got very rich from associated dealings, at the cost of everyone else involved.
But the authoritarian would stop the salesman selling the mortgage to the unemployed black in in Alabama.
...notice the speed? That's how responsive an OS should be today. And no bullshit layers of indirection excuses. The hardware is capable, and the software just needs to be made efficient.
After so many years of Windows giving me an assfucking, now it's finally legal to... oh wait, one more year. Mustn't make that mistake again!
Windows 95's upbeat but non-hipster marketing marked the start of a high point for Microsoft. They were essentially saying "here's something we think is good enough to do lots of things with, and we're going to help you do that" - and they were right. It wasn't anywhere near interesting technically, but it was accessible, cheap, familiar and MS encouraged it to become well-supported on a variety of hardware.
I don't know who Roberto Sparese is, but I'm sure he'll get a few more hits to his Facebook account as other readers also wonder whether that was actually a little-known word and not just a typo.
P.S. Cute kitty, Roberto!
You knowingly sold me software which had a vulnerability which could result in serious security issues?
S: A patch is on the way. Please don't sue.
Meanwhile, in the real world...
If that person is a cult hero like Assange or Reiser, sure. Of course, if "someone" is the US government, the vast majority of /.ers have no compunctions about assuming guilt, to the point of inventing dozens of theories for which there is exactly zero proof.
And this is precisely as it should be: view the government with suspicion and subject it to appropriate scrutiny and restrictions. But assume that private individuals are innocent until proven guilty.
If you don't like that the government's special powers mean it requires special attention, don't work for the government. What are you afraid of, soldier?
Society would be a lot better if everyone was allowed to have a gun on them at all times - people wouldn't go out of their way to be jerks
Why? Would a gunfight become an acceptable solution to dealing with a "jerk"?
Criminals already have guns that they carry so the law abiding citizens would be able to defend themselves
A well trained gun carrier might be able to defend himself. But someone who merely owns and exposes a gun? Hell no.
and police abuse would stop pretty quick too.
Exactly how would police abuse stop? Put another way, what exactly are you intending to do with your gun to affect how a police officer behaves, and what do you think the outcome will be?
And with that, most women lean left
Is this actually true? I guess a more helpful pair of questions would be:
(Considering the obvious female-votes-for-Thatcher example in the UK, we have to evaluate the hypothesis that women voted for Thatcher merely because she was a woman.)
Neither the police nor the judges set the law (in theory), but they must implement it. Whoever legislates listens selectively to pressure groups which also represent their interests, i.e. groups which give the government more arbitrary and overreaching control. The Think of The Women and Children Alliance wins joint first prize among such groups, along with the Protect us from The Foreigner out to Destroy our Way of Life Coalition.
These valiant organisations together comprise the Distraction and Excuse Group, which is to government as old as prostitution in the streets.
So, which results of Assange's "data thieving" (those bits belong to me! stop putting them in the same order!) are most offensive? Does it concern you most that he might help stop Americans being sent to kill and to die unnecessarily, or simply that he uncovers incompetence and corruption?
releases it without any effort put into finding out if theres anything of value
You clearly haven't read them.
or wrong actually IN it.
Even if you don't believe that he asked for help redacting data, and even if you don't believe that the delays in release are to check for problems with content, you're forgetting:
You keep making arguments that don't seem to recognize a difference which is why you're having a problem following me.
I am very clearly recognising the difference - you're just having trouble understanding language. If you don't want sex with someone unless they want sex with you, then you don't want sex with them if they don't want sex with you.
To clarify for the third time: the "one reason for not raping someone is that they don't want to have sex with you, even if you want sex with them" doesn't apply. It doesn't apply because you specifically automatically don't want to have sex with a not already willing person.
To most people, only the latter appeals.
Absolute bullshit. There are no supermodels hanging on the arms of 80 year old tramps.
You, Sir, are the worst sort of psychological abuser: one who vehemently denies reality in order to create a void filled by ludicrous fantasy, one which can be used to manipulate the vulnerable and naive.
Of course there are a few (men) of the most passive sort who only want sex with those who want to have sex with them. But for most in the real world relationships are a trade of values. In the "ideal" trade, each person knows exactly what the other wants, but that still doesn't mean they both want the same thing. But, as any fule kno, a fundamental problem with free trade is that there is no such thing as a perfectly informed party.
The enhanced CRB checks many English firms do before employment will reveal arrest records, and an arrest record with various magic words will pretty much deny you employment in various fields where you're dealing with the "young and vulnerable". If your career is in care of the young and vulnerable, of course, this may mean a ruined career.
It's hard to know what to do about this. The obvious answer would be "a CRB check shouldn't reveal arrests". But arrests should not be private, because that would enable secret internment. So, if the state stopped offering the serivce, it then becomes a matter of some private organisation trolling arrest records and sorting by person, then selling a lookup service.
Another possibility is to make it illegal to discriminate based on certain aspects of a CRB record. This will work as "well" as sex/race/etc discrimination laws, I guess.
The only long-term solution is to get it in people's thick heads that an arrest is meaningless, unless perhaps the person has been released on bail (or its local equivalent).
I wish I had his skill and his balls. He, at least, is going some way to watching the watchers.
And if there are any times that attention whoring is absolutely warranted, it is now.
I just hope he's not David Kelly'd.
Before I go, let me just accuse every /. commenter below me in this article of rape. I hope you judge Assange for the accusations against him as you'd hope people treat mine against you.
Sorry, but you wrote in a stand alone paragraph quite emphatically:
Look, you misinterpreted what you read and want to save face. Of course one reason for not raping someone is that you don't want to have sex with them. To generalise, one reason for not forcing X is that you didn't want to do X anyway. The fact that I clarified in the Q/A format just confirms that you're being intentionally obtuse.
"this" that I can work out that you're referring to as a "feminist fantasy"
The feminist fantasy is that sex is something which two people equally want with a full range of mutually understood and experienced emotional and physical attraction. (And everything else is "rape".)
It is not some "feminist fantasy" to expect mutuality in sex. That is the default for healthy people.
It is not a feminist fantasy to expect you not to be made to have sex with force or the threat of force. But it is romantic nonsense to expect mutuality in the sense that two people having sex do so out of equal and straightforward desire to have sex with each other, and it is a feminist fantasy to consider it the default.
Let's just stick to the reasoning beings known as homo sapiens that we were discussing.
The drive for sex is primitive and evolved. You're denying reality if you don't study it in the context of your evolution.
For reference, one person being in the mood and getting another person in the mood happens all the time. The only connection this has to rape is...
...that sex usually isn't about "mutual involvement", but about persuasion. And "getting in the mood" might, in your romantic fantasy world, involve dreamy seduction to get the person wanting sex for the sake of sex. But all voluntary human relationships are about trade, and all that matters is that the other person is willing to take something (money, gifts, conversation, security, etc.) in return for the sex - they don't have to want sex per se.
It's not "idealistic" to say people enjoy their partner enjoying sex as well.
But it is idealistic to assume that this is relevant for the majority of non-forced sexual encounters.
If I feel in a particular way, it's a fair bet that many other people do as well.
It's a fair bet that most people would say "I'm not racist", and "I don't lie", and even "I'm a decent kind of guy". And if not, you can persuade them by fair means or by misrepresentation. Which wouldn't be rape. But it would be more like sex.
. Well, I make the point that in the porn I've seen, the woman is usually acting as if she enjoyed it or is stimulated by it,
Wanting to watch someone act well is completely different from wanting to watch reality. I enjoy certain movies in which people act dangerous fighting or even killing, but I do not experience any enjoyment from watching people fight or kill for real.
Seriously, seek help. You need it.
Just give up. You're like a pirate throwing poodles from his sinking ship to nip at my heels. It's entertaining, but you'll still end up at the bottom of the ocean.
You said the only two reasons why one wouldn't commit rape are a desire not to hurt another and a fear of being caught.
Did you read the context in the previous sentence? I was posing a question and giving an indirect answer ("rape, which is not chosen because..."). The question began:
If someone wants to have sex with you and you aren't willing to give it...
This automatically excludes the case where you don't want to have sex with someone because they're not willing to have sex with you. This is a feminist fantasy which implies that two people suddenly want to have sex with each other with equal gusto precisely at the same time and for the same duration, and that sex is hardly about one fantasising and persuading the other.
Sex occurs for a lot of reasons, and I have yet to read evidence that "because both people/animals simultaneously suddenly became equally physically and emotionally enthusiastic" is the major reason.
I imagine a lot of men want a prostitute they go with to act like they're enjoying it.
I don't know. Why do you imagine this? It seems odd to project your claimed sexual ideals on others. Do you look at porn? Does it bother you that the woman almost certainly has no interest in you beyond the payment you'll offer to her / her employer?