Not that this is my feeling, but to play the devil's advocate: it seems like a lot of vegetarians take the position that the exploitation of animals for food, clothing, etc. is wrong. How much more exploitative then to take a creature's very essence, and grow it in a tank to feed people? In a certain sense, this is the ultimate exploitation of the animal. I'm sure there will be some folks who will take this position and avoid tank-grown meat to eat tank-grown vegetables instead.
Me? I expect we'll all be eating food made from single-celled organisms sometime soon. My hope is that it's more like Asimov's Trantor than like The Matrix, but either way single-celled is the way to go.
I have only a slight
problem with Lexis (and the equivalent print company) having a monopoly on access to what I
think of as public information (outcomes of trials).
I don't think they have a monopoly on this, do they? Last time I checked one could go down to the county courthouse or look in the newspaper to see the results of court cases. Many opinions in federal cases have even been linked from/. for all to read. Lexis may have a copyright on the format in which they provide this information, but a sufficiently-organized and motivated national team of internet court reporters could probably provide an equivalent service.
But you're right - it is just a matter of what you're used to. These stupid publishers with their
rules of typographic layout - if only they had the common sense you do!
Not sure if that was sarcasm or not, but I heartily agree - why should we be bound by 19th-century rules of typesetting in an era when unambiguous communication is becoming more and more important? Especially since with modern typesetting technology we could easily set up print that both looks nice and is simple to interpret.
Look, there's only one simple rule that makes sense: things go in quotes if you're quoting them. This isn't the way it's taught in English class, but it is simple to remember and unambiguous to interpret. It does look a little uglier on the page, though, so I can understand why the English teachers of the world would prefer '"This,"' to '"This",'.
Even better analogy: you give your client list to your secretary, your competitor asks your secretary for it, and s/he hands it over willingly. There's no legal issue here; you just need to set up your web server to not return certain results if you don't want them to be public, or at least don't return them to certain people.
The U.S. was founded on the right to fair credit reporting? I agree that the whole credit reporting system is broken in its current implementation, but it's not exactly a Constitutional issue, y'know.
Most schools seem to have a policy that if you don't like using your SSN, they'll generate a number for you to use instead. Really most businesses that ask for your SSN should do that for you if you ask, since by law the SSN can only be used by the social security administration (IIRC).
Well of course they prefer that, that's how they make their money:)
Paying off your credit balance every month works for me; I just use the card (I'm partial to Discover, who pay me about $100 a year for using their card) like a debit card, and write a check every month. I think I carried a balance exactly once: the month after I got married when we had spent a little too much on the honeymoon. Result: good credit. I'm always amazed at the number of people who haven't figured this out, though.
Actually, there is nothing to stop you from building an exact duplicate of a Ford Explorer. You probably couldn't sell it as a "Ford Explorer", and it might not be considered street legal in your state, but there's nothing to stop you from just making it and leaving it in your garage. It wouldn't even be patent infringement as long as you didn't sell or profit from it.
Trust me, they would be random enough. You could even have somebody do some typing to get entropy from keystroke variances, like PGP does. Or hook up your serial port to some measurement equipment and look at the least significant digit of the current through your PC's wall socket. Computers can't create truly random numbers, but they can be random enough that the effort to determine the pattern is greater than the effort of a brute force search. And if you feed a source of natural entropy into your computer, you can do even better.
I personally would have no problems with just finding the smartest scientists, authors, historians, etc. I can find, and letting them run the school system, but since the U.S. is run at the local level as a republic/democracy (depending on local and state laws), some element of public participation is a given. As long as the scientists/authors/historians are at that meeting, I think that's the best that things can get. I don't believe that the Kansas school board decision had sufficient input from experts in science education.
The best way to decide what should be taught is to give parents a choice.
Isn't that basically a public meeting, though? Presumably most of the parents in Kansas weren't too crazy on the whole evolution thing, and so chose not to have it taught via their elections of school board officials. Sure, it's not just as simple as that, but any way you slice it there has to be public input into matters of public education with public money. I just hope the public has the right advisors so that the right choices can be made.
I personally think that if evolution is taught in schools, it should be taught as a theory in an
objective philosophy class as it contains an inherent world view.
I couldn't agree more. And while we're at it, maybe geometry and trig should be taught as an alternative philosophy as well - don't they depend on an inherent Euclidean world view? (well, at least in high school they do). Civics and government as well - you can bet all those wacky laws against murder in this country and that whole "We the People" thing are based on an inherent world view. "inherent world view" - wtf were you thinking!? Perhaps I've been trolled....
Everything comes from an "inherent world view", of course. The theory of evolution is currently the best way to explain the current state of life on this planet and make verifiable predictions about events. It's based on an "inherent world view" of deterministic causality, testability, and verifiability, and the value judgement that a predictable universe is better than the alternative. Unfortunately for those who are offended by the directions that science leads, the "inherent world view" of the scientific method has consistently correctly explained more and more of the world since it first began to be employed, and can reasonably be expected to continue to do so in the future. You can call it an "inherent world view" all you want, but it works better than the other current alternatives, and most people (or at least those without wacked-out "inherent world views") like what works. It is a tremendous disservice to children or any thinking being to deny them such an education, just because people (many in Kansas, apparently) feel threatened by the closest approximation of the truth we have yet been able to determine.
It simply gave the teacher the power to teach it, or not teach it. Would you prefer for the government to force teachers to teach this subject?
I would prefer the teachers' employer to require them to do their jobs, or fire them. That's the deal I have with my employer, why should they have it any easier? How about if a teacher in Alabama didn't want to teach about the civil rights struggles because they didn't believe in that part of history? What the citizens of a state want taught in their schools should not be at the option of any unelected official, even a teacher.
Personally, I would rather keep ALL propoganda, whether it comes from the athiestic or
religious sectors, OUT of public schools.
I couldn't agree more. But I don't think it's up to an individual teacher to decide what is propaganda and what is truth (or at least as near as science can determine). This sort of thing should be decided at public meetings where reputable experts on science education can present why certain subjects should or should not be taught, and the public can evaluate their claims.
In that light, the theory of evolution is currently the best scientific way to explain how life got to be the way it is. It is not "propoganda".
Re:Jon Katz == Jon Lovitz ?
on
"Traffic"
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· Score: 1
Nope, I get them confused a lot too.
<simpsons>
Jay Sherman: It sucks, it sucks, it sucks!
Nurse: Yes, Mr. Sherman, everything sucks.
</simpsons>
Re:We need to be more like the Europeans
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 1
Well, sure, because they stopped shooting people in the head:) Seriously, if you consistently maintain the death penalty for a crime, then of course the rate of occurrence of that crime will decrease and stay fairly low. If you let up the pressure, drug use will creep back up. As far I know, nobody's really tried a long-term policy of shooting drug addicts in the head, so we really don't know that such a policy wouldn't be successful. That's not the current policy in China, I imagine; it was just employed when the Communists first got into power.
Not that I'm advocating such a plan, I'm just pointing out that you can't say it doesn't work if it wasn't tried consistently.
Re:Smarten the fuck up, all of you
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 1
I'm confused - I though a post had to contain "insight" to be marked "Insightful"? Or is it opposite day again in moderator-land?
Anyway, I never could see why people get so worried about us using up all of our oil. It's all
simple economics: right now, it doesn't make sense to look for a new fuel source. We have plenty
of oil, and it's not doing any good where it is. When it becomes too expensive to obtain, we'll find
another energy source real fast.
I don't know if this is an urban legend or not, but I had heard that petroleum is actually more valuable as a lubricant than as a fuel, because we can't yet create synthetic lubricants which are as good as the real thing. The danger is that all of our machines may literally grind to a halt when we run out of oil, even if the machines themselves are solar/nuclear/etc powered.
Well, if you made the mistake of agreeing to such a contract, and then didn't let them in, you would be in breach of contract. Depending on the terms, they might have the right to repossess the hardware at that point and/or might have legal standing to sue you for breach of contract.
Not that I'd sign such a contract, but that's how I'd set it up if I were a Hollywood bigwig.
D'oh! I guess I was only thinking of wars against other countries. You are correct, the Civil War was quite a bloody conflict. After moving the deadline up to the past ~150 years, I think my point still stands, though.
2) The existence of the police was not provided for in the Constitution, therefore guns WERE
intended to protect you from other citizens.
Actually, the 2nd Amendment was originally intended to allow the states to maintain militias in case the federal government got too uppity or became controlled by a dictator. At the time the Constitution was originally created, most of the tension was between the 13 relatively fractious and independent states, and the national government they had to form in order to survive at the end of the 18th century. That love-hate relationship really lasted until the end of the Civil War.
The construction of the Constitution as protecting the citizenry from the governments (state and federal) and from each other came later, after the country began to be run by people who weren't all rich white aristocrats.
The point I was making was about the potential for a future rise of Nazism in France, if the knowledge of what the Nazis were really like is swept under the rug by the French government and only vague impressions and a feeling of scary powerful (attractive?) evil remain.
Of course Mr. Bush is as right-wing as a European right-wing extremist - the whole political spectrum in the U.S. is shifted to the right. You probably couldn't find a nationally-recognized U.S. politician espousing the views of a European national left-wing party, for example. Believe it or not, GWB's views represent a mainstream viewpoint shared by much (almost the majority, but not quite) of the U.S. citizenry.
But whatever else you can say about the Republican party (and I could say a lot, but this isn't the time or place) nobody has ever accused them of being Nazi sympathizers or being the party of collaboration. And I'll guarantee that no party with those connections polled near 1% in the recent U.S. election, let alone 3%. So I'd have to say (although this was not my original contention at all) that even now, without any regulation of speech, Nazism is at a much lower ebb in the U.S. than it is in France.
I see this anti-corporate stuff on slashdot all the time and I simply don't get it. Unless the
_government_ explicitly gives someone the ability to infringe on your rights, any corporation can
only act just like any other individual.
Isn't that just what the DMCA did, though? It removed certain longstanding rights of Fair Use, allowing individuals to become liable to suits from corporations. This is the kind of loss of freedom (bankrolled by corporate profits, of course) that the/.-asker was asking.
However, it's the "freedom" issue that bothers me. In any sort of a media state (like the US, but
not only the US) opposing viewpoints get no recognition. If you have something different to say,
you're told to go elsewhere, to find the minority who agree with you. In ages past, philosophers,
thinkers, novelists, and writers all had the ability to have their works disseminated over a wide
base to people who didn't already agree with the ideas. That's no longer the case when the media
controls the distribution.
On the other hand, we don't burn those philosophers at the stake that much anymore in the U.S.:) I would agree with your argument about the media state, except for the occurrence of the Internet. You aren't guaranteed recognition or popularity of your ideas, but the means of media production and thus idea expression to a wide audience are more within the means of the average person now than at any time in history. Sure, there are those who act against this freedom because they're threatened by it, but I would submit that the literal U.S. Constitution stands a better chance of defending this freedom than many of the constitution-less common law (or whatever it's called) countries of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that this is my feeling, but to play the devil's advocate: it seems like a lot of vegetarians take the position that the exploitation of animals for food, clothing, etc. is wrong. How much more exploitative then to take a creature's very essence, and grow it in a tank to feed people? In a certain sense, this is the ultimate exploitation of the animal. I'm sure there will be some folks who will take this position and avoid tank-grown meat to eat tank-grown vegetables instead.
Me? I expect we'll all be eating food made from single-celled organisms sometime soon. My hope is that it's more like Asimov's Trantor than like The Matrix, but either way single-celled is the way to go.
I don't think they have a monopoly on this, do they? Last time I checked one could go down to the county courthouse or look in the newspaper to see the results of court cases. Many opinions in federal cases have even been linked from /. for all to read. Lexis may have a copyright on the format in which they provide this information, but a sufficiently-organized and motivated national team of internet court reporters could probably provide an equivalent service.
Not sure if that was sarcasm or not, but I heartily agree - why should we be bound by 19th-century rules of typesetting in an era when unambiguous communication is becoming more and more important? Especially since with modern typesetting technology we could easily set up print that both looks nice and is simple to interpret.
Look, there's only one simple rule that makes sense: things go in quotes if you're quoting them. This isn't the way it's taught in English class, but it is simple to remember and unambiguous to interpret. It does look a little uglier on the page, though, so I can understand why the English teachers of the world would prefer '"This,"' to '"This",'.
Even better analogy: you give your client list to your secretary, your competitor asks your secretary for it, and s/he hands it over willingly. There's no legal issue here; you just need to set up your web server to not return certain results if you don't want them to be public, or at least don't return them to certain people.
Yeah, the hassle is the big reason that I used my SSN in school. One less number to remember, and so many big databases out there to store it in :)
No, but maybe her car should have a flashing red light to warn the rest of us :)
The U.S. was founded on the right to fair credit reporting? I agree that the whole credit reporting system is broken in its current implementation, but it's not exactly a Constitutional issue, y'know.
Most schools seem to have a policy that if you don't like using your SSN, they'll generate a number for you to use instead. Really most businesses that ask for your SSN should do that for you if you ask, since by law the SSN can only be used by the social security administration (IIRC).
Well of course they prefer that, that's how they make their money :)
Paying off your credit balance every month works for me; I just use the card (I'm partial to Discover, who pay me about $100 a year for using their card) like a debit card, and write a check every month. I think I carried a balance exactly once: the month after I got married when we had spent a little too much on the honeymoon. Result: good credit. I'm always amazed at the number of people who haven't figured this out, though.
Actually, there is nothing to stop you from building an exact duplicate of a Ford Explorer. You probably couldn't sell it as a "Ford Explorer", and it might not be considered street legal in your state, but there's nothing to stop you from just making it and leaving it in your garage. It wouldn't even be patent infringement as long as you didn't sell or profit from it.
Trust me, they would be random enough. You could even have somebody do some typing to get entropy from keystroke variances, like PGP does. Or hook up your serial port to some measurement equipment and look at the least significant digit of the current through your PC's wall socket. Computers can't create truly random numbers, but they can be random enough that the effort to determine the pattern is greater than the effort of a brute force search. And if you feed a source of natural entropy into your computer, you can do even better.
I personally would have no problems with just finding the smartest scientists, authors, historians, etc. I can find, and letting them run the school system, but since the U.S. is run at the local level as a republic/democracy (depending on local and state laws), some element of public participation is a given. As long as the scientists/authors/historians are at that meeting, I think that's the best that things can get. I don't believe that the Kansas school board decision had sufficient input from experts in science education.
Isn't that basically a public meeting, though? Presumably most of the parents in Kansas weren't too crazy on the whole evolution thing, and so chose not to have it taught via their elections of school board officials. Sure, it's not just as simple as that, but any way you slice it there has to be public input into matters of public education with public money. I just hope the public has the right advisors so that the right choices can be made.
I couldn't agree more. And while we're at it, maybe geometry and trig should be taught as an alternative philosophy as well - don't they depend on an inherent Euclidean world view? (well, at least in high school they do). Civics and government as well - you can bet all those wacky laws against murder in this country and that whole "We the People" thing are based on an inherent world view. "inherent world view" - wtf were you thinking!? Perhaps I've been trolled....
Everything comes from an "inherent world view", of course. The theory of evolution is currently the best way to explain the current state of life on this planet and make verifiable predictions about events. It's based on an "inherent world view" of deterministic causality, testability, and verifiability, and the value judgement that a predictable universe is better than the alternative. Unfortunately for those who are offended by the directions that science leads, the "inherent world view" of the scientific method has consistently correctly explained more and more of the world since it first began to be employed, and can reasonably be expected to continue to do so in the future. You can call it an "inherent world view" all you want, but it works better than the other current alternatives, and most people (or at least those without wacked-out "inherent world views") like what works. It is a tremendous disservice to children or any thinking being to deny them such an education, just because people (many in Kansas, apparently) feel threatened by the closest approximation of the truth we have yet been able to determine.
I would prefer the teachers' employer to require them to do their jobs, or fire them. That's the deal I have with my employer, why should they have it any easier? How about if a teacher in Alabama didn't want to teach about the civil rights struggles because they didn't believe in that part of history? What the citizens of a state want taught in their schools should not be at the option of any unelected official, even a teacher.
I couldn't agree more. But I don't think it's up to an individual teacher to decide what is propaganda and what is truth (or at least as near as science can determine). This sort of thing should be decided at public meetings where reputable experts on science education can present why certain subjects should or should not be taught, and the public can evaluate their claims.
In that light, the theory of evolution is currently the best scientific way to explain how life got to be the way it is. It is not "propoganda".
Nope, I get them confused a lot too.
<simpsons>
Jay Sherman: It sucks, it sucks, it sucks!
Nurse: Yes, Mr. Sherman, everything sucks.
</simpsons>
Well, sure, because they stopped shooting people in the head :) Seriously, if you consistently maintain the death penalty for a crime, then of course the rate of occurrence of that crime will decrease and stay fairly low. If you let up the pressure, drug use will creep back up. As far I know, nobody's really tried a long-term policy of shooting drug addicts in the head, so we really don't know that such a policy wouldn't be successful. That's not the current policy in China, I imagine; it was just employed when the Communists first got into power.
Not that I'm advocating such a plan, I'm just pointing out that you can't say it doesn't work if it wasn't tried consistently.
I'm confused - I though a post had to contain "insight" to be marked "Insightful"? Or is it opposite day again in moderator-land?
I don't know if this is an urban legend or not, but I had heard that petroleum is actually more valuable as a lubricant than as a fuel, because we can't yet create synthetic lubricants which are as good as the real thing. The danger is that all of our machines may literally grind to a halt when we run out of oil, even if the machines themselves are solar/nuclear/etc powered.
Well, if you made the mistake of agreeing to such a contract, and then didn't let them in, you would be in breach of contract. Depending on the terms, they might have the right to repossess the hardware at that point and/or might have legal standing to sue you for breach of contract.
Not that I'd sign such a contract, but that's how I'd set it up if I were a Hollywood bigwig.
D'oh! I guess I was only thinking of wars against other countries. You are correct, the Civil War was quite a bloody conflict. After moving the deadline up to the past ~150 years, I think my point still stands, though.
Actually, the 2nd Amendment was originally intended to allow the states to maintain militias in case the federal government got too uppity or became controlled by a dictator. At the time the Constitution was originally created, most of the tension was between the 13 relatively fractious and independent states, and the national government they had to form in order to survive at the end of the 18th century. That love-hate relationship really lasted until the end of the Civil War.
The construction of the Constitution as protecting the citizenry from the governments (state and federal) and from each other came later, after the country began to be run by people who weren't all rich white aristocrats.
The point I was making was about the potential for a future rise of Nazism in France, if the knowledge of what the Nazis were really like is swept under the rug by the French government and only vague impressions and a feeling of scary powerful (attractive?) evil remain.
Of course Mr. Bush is as right-wing as a European right-wing extremist - the whole political spectrum in the U.S. is shifted to the right. You probably couldn't find a nationally-recognized U.S. politician espousing the views of a European national left-wing party, for example. Believe it or not, GWB's views represent a mainstream viewpoint shared by much (almost the majority, but not quite) of the U.S. citizenry.
But whatever else you can say about the Republican party (and I could say a lot, but this isn't the time or place) nobody has ever accused them of being Nazi sympathizers or being the party of collaboration. And I'll guarantee that no party with those connections polled near 1% in the recent U.S. election, let alone 3%. So I'd have to say (although this was not my original contention at all) that even now, without any regulation of speech, Nazism is at a much lower ebb in the U.S. than it is in France.
Isn't that just what the DMCA did, though? It removed certain longstanding rights of Fair Use, allowing individuals to become liable to suits from corporations. This is the kind of loss of freedom (bankrolled by corporate profits, of course) that the /.-asker was asking.
On the other hand, we don't burn those philosophers at the stake that much anymore in the U.S. :) I would agree with your argument about the media state, except for the occurrence of the Internet. You aren't guaranteed recognition or popularity of your ideas, but the means of media production and thus idea expression to a wide audience are more within the means of the average person now than at any time in history. Sure, there are those who act against this freedom because they're threatened by it, but I would submit that the literal U.S. Constitution stands a better chance of defending this freedom than many of the constitution-less common law (or whatever it's called) countries of the world.