I respectfully disagree that the parent is offtopic - it definitely has privacy implications, and is discussing the very article posting at the top of this page. You can't just moderate people down for criticizing/. editorial policy at the same time, can you? (Well, of course you can,and do, but that doesn't make it right.)
So, how come it's OK for a/. editor to suggest a bogus email address for the WSJ registration, but it's not OK for a/. editor to automatically change the NYT links to be registration-free? Don't both of those actions subvert the normal registration process, and don't they both have privacy implications? It seems like/. should just get a consistent policy on this sort of thing, and stick with it.
Much as I dislike the U.S. custom of late to try and find as many wacky combinations of A, Y, and K in a name as possible, I think I have a problem with a law that would have prevented Moon Unit Zappa. It seems like someone's name is too individual to leave up to the government.
That's really funny, since I'm moving in a couple weeks and the "Phone Number Portability" that I've been paying for all my life will not suffice to make my new phone ten minutes from here ring with my old number. They can forward calls from my old phone to my new one for a while, but I still have to get a new number.
I support the ENUM idea primarily because it would force the phone number to get their act together.
The funny part is that the first book in a long time to really get kids interested in reading again is often under consideration for being banned in U.S. schools and libraries. Can't have those kids hearing about witches (well, other than on Halloween, of course), even if it may make a huge difference in their future academic life...
OK, well fetuses at 8.5 months aren't useful members of society. Hell, babies at 2 years aren't either. Can we just kill them
according to this utilitarian morality? Or at some point does morality break for always having a good logical foundation, and just
mean knowing on a pretty instinctive level that certain things are wrong?
Read more carefully - I didn't say "useful members of society", I said "society should
have an adequate reason for banning something, independent from religious or moral reasons". Of course we can't just go around killing babies, and I don't think you'll get too much argument on fetuses that are at the 8.5-month mark. But people try to extrapolate from this fairly certain point for quite a ways out, which doesn't always make sense in an other than religious sense. As a recent story on either ridiculopathy or bbspot pointed out, if stem cells or frozen embryos are human life, why don't they get funerals? Shouldn't we make sure to baptize them before their short little lives are snuffed out? At a certain point the religious interpretation of morality diverges from the actual benefit to society; IMHO there is probably more benefit to using stem and fetal cells for research, assuming appropriate parental permission, than in continuing to apply strict religious scruples to that decision.
You can just do every mad scientist thing you want, and then after you've got black people infected with syphallis ask whether it
was moral(yes the US gov did this). You have to ask the tough questions first, even if they slow "progress"(because I think
progress that comes at the price of giving up our ethical isn't progress at all)
That one was a mistake, for sure. But I think it would have been possible at the time for someone to figure out not to do that on the basis of the detriment to society as a whole (namely, lack of trust in the government), whether or not God said it was a bad idea. I'm not saying don't consider these things; I'm just saying that morality arises from human society rather than descending from above, and thus if you can't figure out why or why not to do something based on the impact on society, resorting to a religious basis for the argument is a mistake.
And again back to cloning, one of the big questions is will these clones be given the same rights as all of us, will we prevent
people from using them as slaves/organ donors, will they be able to live any kind of normal life(apparently with current cloning
technology the clones are unnaturally "old", and don't have normal lifespans), and if not is it fair for us to create them, etc.
OK, good point - I was just taking it as read that a clone would be considered as human as you or I, and that there would be no question of creating a slave race or something like that. I still say the deformity issue is a straw man, though - we have plenty of babies born with deformities due to deficient prenatal care right now; there's no way that any possible application of cloning will cause as many sick kids as the numbers of moms-to-be that have a beer or get high every night will do.
I just saw a video on rotten.com(heh) of US gov experiments in the 50's where they tied down pigs, shaved their hair off, and
burnt their skin with a blowtorch for minutes, just to do "science" on how to treat pilots who had burns from a plane crash. Do
you really think things like this should be legal?
Actually, yes. I don't think it should be done unnecessarily, and I do think it should be considered animal cruelty if my next door neighbor is doing it, but I think you had better talk to some Air Force veterans and find out how much those experiments helped them. The only question in my mind is not whether it should be done at all, but rather was it worthwhile science to do. Sometimes, you just can't tell until you try it out, although the degree of uncertainty there should be counterbalanced by the potential gain. I do think that people are more important than pigs, and even though I don't wish any ill to most of the pigs in the world, when the time comes to make a choice between them I know which I'd pick.
So does Microsoft really attempt to do location verification, though? We all know how well users respect EULAs, after all:) Sounds like more of a CYA solution to me.
No proper moral code? I know he doesn't go around protesting for the repeal of murder as a crime, so saying something like that
is just a complete copout on the fact that when someone raises a moral objection you have to give some counter-argument, not
just some BS about how there really are no morals in the first place, so how about we just let everyone do anything they want,
and give them federal funding for it while we're at it.
The difference, to me at least, is that there are societal reasons as well to prohibit murder - namely, that it removes useful members of society and makes people a lot more nervous about their wellbeing. Even in the absence of moral direction from on high, I would still say that murder should be prohibited. Heck, our society is already no longer strictly moral about murder, since we permit the state itself to kill certain convicts.
I don't know that this is the original argument that the poster above was aiming for, but in my mind at least it seems that society should have an adequate reason for banning something, independent from religious or moral reasons, before banning a particular behavior. On the basis of this belief, I do agree with the original poster that it's annoying when morality is used as the be-all and end-all argument on these sorts of issues. People are using morality as a crutch to avoid really thinking about the pros and cons of real life.
I think it comes down to how and from where you construct morality and ethics. If you view morality as imposed from on high by a deity, like a parent scolding a naughty child, then you probably would think that morality always has a place, and an important one at that, in public policy discussions. If you think, like me, that morality is constructed by humans in order to record and enforce individual behavior towards the overall benefit of society, then it will often seem like people just keep bringing up "morality", without even knowing what they're really saying, just to clog up the vital societal debate about biotechnology, etc.
Case in point: cloning. Everybody and their brother on the news was doing a hella handwaving about "troubling ethical issues" with cloning. As near as I could tell, these mostly boiled down to "well, some babies could be deformed". News flash: every day babies are born deformed or mentally handicapped due to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, yet our society does almost nothing to curb this widespread problem. Until people who think in terms of "morals" are as concerned about FAS (an entirely here-and-now and entirely preventable problem) as they are about cloning (which, in the absence of any real profit in it (remember, it's easier and probably faster to make a human the old fashioned way) will probably never become a widespread practice), then I will continue to wonder about the motives of those who wave the "morality" flag so fiercely.
Sorry to rant on, and that wasn't really aimed at you specifically, just at the general tone of the thread. Whew, are my fingers tired now:)
Here's an unlikely comment that I think of every time I see a posting about AA - does anyone else think the whole font issue way overblown? I don't see much difference between Windows and Linux fonts. Maybe I'm just not the artsy, graphical type, but the eye strain that everyone else has when reading using standard Linux/X fonts doesn't seem to affect me at all. I just don't see what the big deal is.
I will admit that Mac OS X is somewhat prettier than Linux or Windows, but I really think it's more the alpha-channel transparency more than the AA fonts. Or is one implemented through the other?
Maybe this is the engineering viewpoint, but I just can't see business/desktop users caring about what the fonts look like. As long as you can read them, shut up and get back to work. I can't even imagine complaining to my boss at work that my computer's display isn't pretty enough, and thus I won't be able to use this new Linux desktop, etc., etc. IMHO fonts would be about the last thing that I would think of as "holding Linux back".
Then again, as is shortly to be proven below, it could be that I'm the only one that feels this way:) I mean, I can see that the letters look different in some cases, but I just don't see why anyone would care so damn much about it...
That site definitely has some design issues. The section headings on the left like "Home" and "Articles" don't work, and there's no way to click "next page", you just have to select each next page manually.
Not to mention the quality of the writing was pretty amateurish IMHO. And not in a good way, either:)
Re:Science and the useful arts
on
ACM vs. RIAA
·
· Score: 1
Well, it's certainly stimulated the progress of the legal arts:)
But if they're still licensing Windows for some things, they might not want the whole thing to get back to Microsoft through the press - that would make things tougher come license renegotiation time.
I agree that the article can't be absolutely credited until the facts are verified, but I could think of a realm of reasons that, if I were a CIO or head of IT, would prevent me from announcing this story from the rooftops.
I have to agree with the original post in one regard, though - you still need a complete backup machine in order to ensure availability if your disk, MB, power supply, etc. dies. Although by my calculations you'd still have 4 NT machines left over:)
Would you also argue that Linux 1.0 was extremely stable, based on your anecdotal experiences with Linux 2.0 never crashing? (Not that kernel 2.0 was perfect either; I'm just drawing the comparison.)
I predict that this analogy won't work either, but it was worth a try:)
So, NT is better because you can get free support from Microsoft, and thus there's no increased TCO? Please enlighten all of the other readers here; I'm sure we'd all like to get free support for Windows.
Of course official Linux support costs money; official NT support costs money too. Your TCO will rise in either case. The quality and availability of unofficial (user-provided) Linux support is higher (in most people's estimation, at least) than unofficial Windows support.
I'm not sure what the point of having a number of support organizations is; do you always prefer to pay again for second and third opinions? As long as you can get one provider to give you support, what's the problem? I find it hard to believe that SuSe won't sell you 24-hour phone support in the Netherlands. I suppose with more support organizations available, competition will drive the price down somewhat, but on the other hand do you really wish to purchase support from the bargain basement?
Believe it or not, that's the next game that I'm planning on playing, based on all the good things I've heard about it and my past enjoyment of Square's games. Thanks for the info!
I play RPGs, but usually I'm involved enough in all the mini-games and side quests that by the time I get back to the main quest, I've usually leveled up even more than I was supposed to. So usually, the beginning of the game is tough for me but by the end it's easy because I've leveled up too much.
It would be nice if games would have a better way to tell you that you need to level up more before going into a certain situation - when that happens to me I usually die a few times before I get the idea that maybe I should explore somewhere else for a while:)
Just because Microsoft doesn't make good use of the principle doesn't mean that it's a gift from gaming to the
rest of the world.
Well, they did try "smart menus" that didn't show you commands that you didn't use too often, but IIRC a lot of people thought those were pretty annoying.
Well, the advantage of games is that they don't put you in situations where you have to do something that you don't know how to do yet. So it would be more like:
Mr. Clippy: I'm sorry, but John doesn't know how to underline text yet. Can you get one of his co-workers to do it?
Y'know, I think that's the most surprising comment I've read here in a while, because I remember arguing with you about the costs and benefits of Microsoft technology a year or so ago, John. I respected your opinions at the time because you were really able to back them up, and I have to say that I still do. And if now you're thinking about other alternatives (including FreeBSD on the web server, I see:), then maybe Microsoft really does have a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I respectfully disagree that the parent is offtopic - it definitely has privacy implications, and is discussing the very article posting at the top of this page. You can't just moderate people down for criticizing /. editorial policy at the same time, can you? (Well, of course you can ,and do, but that doesn't make it right.)
So, how come it's OK for a /. editor to suggest a bogus email address for the WSJ registration, but it's not OK for a /. editor to automatically change the NYT links to be registration-free? Don't both of those actions subvert the normal registration process, and don't they both have privacy implications? It seems like /. should just get a consistent policy on this sort of thing, and stick with it.
Much as I dislike the U.S. custom of late to try and find as many wacky combinations of A, Y, and K in a name as possible, I think I have a problem with a law that would have prevented Moon Unit Zappa. It seems like someone's name is too individual to leave up to the government.
OK, that's scary. Care to back that up?
That's really funny, since I'm moving in a couple weeks and the "Phone Number Portability" that I've been paying for all my life will not suffice to make my new phone ten minutes from here ring with my old number. They can forward calls from my old phone to my new one for a while, but I still have to get a new number.
I support the ENUM idea primarily because it would force the phone number to get their act together.
It's mostly possible: http://www.cjmciver.org/free.shtml
I'll second that motion.
The funny part is that the first book in a long time to really get kids interested in reading again is often under consideration for being banned in U.S. schools and libraries. Can't have those kids hearing about witches (well, other than on Halloween, of course), even if it may make a huge difference in their future academic life...
Read more carefully - I didn't say "useful members of society", I said "society should have an adequate reason for banning something, independent from religious or moral reasons". Of course we can't just go around killing babies, and I don't think you'll get too much argument on fetuses that are at the 8.5-month mark. But people try to extrapolate from this fairly certain point for quite a ways out, which doesn't always make sense in an other than religious sense. As a recent story on either ridiculopathy or bbspot pointed out, if stem cells or frozen embryos are human life, why don't they get funerals? Shouldn't we make sure to baptize them before their short little lives are snuffed out? At a certain point the religious interpretation of morality diverges from the actual benefit to society; IMHO there is probably more benefit to using stem and fetal cells for research, assuming appropriate parental permission, than in continuing to apply strict religious scruples to that decision.
That one was a mistake, for sure. But I think it would have been possible at the time for someone to figure out not to do that on the basis of the detriment to society as a whole (namely, lack of trust in the government), whether or not God said it was a bad idea. I'm not saying don't consider these things; I'm just saying that morality arises from human society rather than descending from above, and thus if you can't figure out why or why not to do something based on the impact on society, resorting to a religious basis for the argument is a mistake.
OK, good point - I was just taking it as read that a clone would be considered as human as you or I, and that there would be no question of creating a slave race or something like that. I still say the deformity issue is a straw man, though - we have plenty of babies born with deformities due to deficient prenatal care right now; there's no way that any possible application of cloning will cause as many sick kids as the numbers of moms-to-be that have a beer or get high every night will do.
Actually, yes. I don't think it should be done unnecessarily, and I do think it should be considered animal cruelty if my next door neighbor is doing it, but I think you had better talk to some Air Force veterans and find out how much those experiments helped them. The only question in my mind is not whether it should be done at all, but rather was it worthwhile science to do. Sometimes, you just can't tell until you try it out, although the degree of uncertainty there should be counterbalanced by the potential gain. I do think that people are more important than pigs, and even though I don't wish any ill to most of the pigs in the world, when the time comes to make a choice between them I know which I'd pick.
So does Microsoft really attempt to do location verification, though? We all know how well users respect EULAs, after all :) Sounds like more of a CYA solution to me.
I know that was sarcasm, but damn, what I wouldn't give to live in such a world...
The difference, to me at least, is that there are societal reasons as well to prohibit murder - namely, that it removes useful members of society and makes people a lot more nervous about their wellbeing. Even in the absence of moral direction from on high, I would still say that murder should be prohibited. Heck, our society is already no longer strictly moral about murder, since we permit the state itself to kill certain convicts.
I don't know that this is the original argument that the poster above was aiming for, but in my mind at least it seems that society should have an adequate reason for banning something, independent from religious or moral reasons, before banning a particular behavior. On the basis of this belief, I do agree with the original poster that it's annoying when morality is used as the be-all and end-all argument on these sorts of issues. People are using morality as a crutch to avoid really thinking about the pros and cons of real life.
I think it comes down to how and from where you construct morality and ethics. If you view morality as imposed from on high by a deity, like a parent scolding a naughty child, then you probably would think that morality always has a place, and an important one at that, in public policy discussions. If you think, like me, that morality is constructed by humans in order to record and enforce individual behavior towards the overall benefit of society, then it will often seem like people just keep bringing up "morality", without even knowing what they're really saying, just to clog up the vital societal debate about biotechnology, etc.
Case in point: cloning. Everybody and their brother on the news was doing a hella handwaving about "troubling ethical issues" with cloning. As near as I could tell, these mostly boiled down to "well, some babies could be deformed". News flash: every day babies are born deformed or mentally handicapped due to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, yet our society does almost nothing to curb this widespread problem. Until people who think in terms of "morals" are as concerned about FAS (an entirely here-and-now and entirely preventable problem) as they are about cloning (which, in the absence of any real profit in it (remember, it's easier and probably faster to make a human the old fashioned way) will probably never become a widespread practice), then I will continue to wonder about the motives of those who wave the "morality" flag so fiercely.
Sorry to rant on, and that wasn't really aimed at you specifically, just at the general tone of the thread. Whew, are my fingers tired now :)
Here's an unlikely comment that I think of every time I see a posting about AA - does anyone else think the whole font issue way overblown? I don't see much difference between Windows and Linux fonts. Maybe I'm just not the artsy, graphical type, but the eye strain that everyone else has when reading using standard Linux/X fonts doesn't seem to affect me at all. I just don't see what the big deal is.
I will admit that Mac OS X is somewhat prettier than Linux or Windows, but I really think it's more the alpha-channel transparency more than the AA fonts. Or is one implemented through the other?
Maybe this is the engineering viewpoint, but I just can't see business/desktop users caring about what the fonts look like. As long as you can read them, shut up and get back to work. I can't even imagine complaining to my boss at work that my computer's display isn't pretty enough, and thus I won't be able to use this new Linux desktop, etc., etc. IMHO fonts would be about the last thing that I would think of as "holding Linux back".
Then again, as is shortly to be proven below, it could be that I'm the only one that feels this way :) I mean, I can see that the letters look different in some cases, but I just don't see why anyone would care so damn much about it...
Isn't that backwards? ASCII art should compress better than English, since it usually contains long rows of spaces, '=', etc.
FWIW, the ASCII art filter seems to be pretty easy to work around; I've seen plenty of those trolls in the last couple weeks.
Even worse - often food irradiation is described in such a way as to make you think that you will lose your hair :)
That site definitely has some design issues. The section headings on the left like "Home" and "Articles" don't work, and there's no way to click "next page", you just have to select each next page manually.
Not to mention the quality of the writing was pretty amateurish IMHO. And not in a good way, either :)
Well, it's certainly stimulated the progress of the legal arts :)
But if they're still licensing Windows for some things, they might not want the whole thing to get back to Microsoft through the press - that would make things tougher come license renegotiation time.
I agree that the article can't be absolutely credited until the facts are verified, but I could think of a realm of reasons that, if I were a CIO or head of IT, would prevent me from announcing this story from the rooftops.
I have to agree with the original post in one regard, though - you still need a complete backup machine in order to ensure availability if your disk, MB, power supply, etc. dies. Although by my calculations you'd still have 4 NT machines left over :)
Would you also argue that Linux 1.0 was extremely stable, based on your anecdotal experiences with Linux 2.0 never crashing? (Not that kernel 2.0 was perfect either; I'm just drawing the comparison.)
I predict that this analogy won't work either, but it was worth a try :)
So, NT is better because you can get free support from Microsoft, and thus there's no increased TCO? Please enlighten all of the other readers here; I'm sure we'd all like to get free support for Windows.
Of course official Linux support costs money; official NT support costs money too. Your TCO will rise in either case. The quality and availability of unofficial (user-provided) Linux support is higher (in most people's estimation, at least) than unofficial Windows support.
I'm not sure what the point of having a number of support organizations is; do you always prefer to pay again for second and third opinions? As long as you can get one provider to give you support, what's the problem? I find it hard to believe that SuSe won't sell you 24-hour phone support in the Netherlands. I suppose with more support organizations available, competition will drive the price down somewhat, but on the other hand do you really wish to purchase support from the bargain basement?
Believe it or not, that's the next game that I'm planning on playing, based on all the good things I've heard about it and my past enjoyment of Square's games. Thanks for the info!
I play RPGs, but usually I'm involved enough in all the mini-games and side quests that by the time I get back to the main quest, I've usually leveled up even more than I was supposed to. So usually, the beginning of the game is tough for me but by the end it's easy because I've leveled up too much.
It would be nice if games would have a better way to tell you that you need to level up more before going into a certain situation - when that happens to me I usually die a few times before I get the idea that maybe I should explore somewhere else for a while :)
Well, they did try "smart menus" that didn't show you commands that you didn't use too often, but IIRC a lot of people thought those were pretty annoying.
Well, the advantage of games is that they don't put you in situations where you have to do something that you don't know how to do yet. So it would be more like:
Mr. Clippy: I'm sorry, but John doesn't know how to underline text yet. Can you get one of his co-workers to do it?
Boss: Damn.
Y'know, I think that's the most surprising comment I've read here in a while, because I remember arguing with you about the costs and benefits of Microsoft technology a year or so ago, John. I respected your opinions at the time because you were really able to back them up, and I have to say that I still do. And if now you're thinking about other alternatives (including FreeBSD on the web server, I see :), then maybe Microsoft really does have a problem.