I think we need to get past this 'ethical' bullshit on animals.
I am agnostic, but some religious guy once said "Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself". God or no-God, this is probably one of the best moral-guiding principles anyone has ever articulated, and as far as I am concerned, animals are just as deserving of being "others" as much of the scum in this world that we consider human.
Thus, the question is - would you be happy about some geeks sticking electrodes into your brain just so that they could see whether they could force you to turn left or turn right in a maze?
Re:Ethical? Doubtful. Cool? Speak for yourself.
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You send a rat with a small video camera attached in, remote control it, and search out people trapped below.
Yeah, in a cartoon. How would you control it? "Go left", "Go right" would be meaningless in the complex environment of a collapsed building. It would be incredibly difficult to explain to the poor mutilated creature which direction you wanted it to go in - but even if you could, on what criteria would you direct it? The only meaningful criteria might be smell, but since you are controlling the rat, you don't have the benefit of its sensory knowledge. If you start claiming that this could be achieved, then I reinvoke my "pie-in-the-sky" claim about this whole thing.
Re:Ethical? Doubtful. Cool? Speak for yourself.
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I think the primary motive behind the brain research is advancing scientific knowledge while cosmetic research is motivated mostly by improving the (unnecessary?) product.
I don't think that advancing scientific knowledge in its own right is a good enough reason to make other living creatures suffer. If there is a direct causal link between the experimentation and medical benefits, then it might be tolerable, but that certainly isn't even nearly the case here.
your daughter is starving, you could feed her on mice; your daughter has a terrible brain disease and you could cure it by experimenting on mice; your daughter wants to look prettier by experimenting on mice. Is there any distinction between these?
None of these describe the situation here. Mice are being experimended on, and there is at-best a minute liklihood that this research will significantly help to cure anyone of anything.
I think most people would hurt the mice in the first two situations, but a lot would not for the sake of cosmetics.
Yes, but the situation being discussed here doesn't fall into either of the first two situations you describe, despite their transparent attempts to persuade us that it fits into the second.
Re:Listen up, this is the last time I'll say this
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Decentralization
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Programmers with altruistic movies are truly rare. Virtually all of them program because it's fun to them
That is a nuts distinction. I get a feeling of pleasure from donating to charity, does the fact that it makes me feel good mean that it isn't altruistic?
Re:Ethical? Doubtful. Cool? Speak for yourself.
on
NYTimes Year in Ideas
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No, but if you'd RTFA you'd have noticed the part about using rats as a cheaper, more effective alternative for rescue dogs.
Actually I did RTFA, and that is one of the lamest pie-in-the-sky excuses for animal torture I have heard in a while.
Re:Ethical? Doubtful. Cool? Speak for yourself.
on
NYTimes Year in Ideas
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Uh, how does knowing the frontal lobe and motor cortex inside and out such that one could actually control someone via remote control not have realistic medical applications.
That's a silly argument. Consider an analogy:
Cosmetics manufacturers could argue that their experiments increase our knowledge of the skin and its reaction to various chemicals. Some time down the line this knowledge could help us cure all sorts of skin diseases.
That argument wouldn't get them very far with most thinking people, and nor does yours.
Ethical? Doubtful. Cool? Speak for yourself.
on
NYTimes Year in Ideas
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· Score: 2, Funny
I don't know about you, but I don't think there is anything "cool" about animal cruelty. This has no realistic medical applications, and only the rat really knows how painful this experiment is.
Now, if we could wire Michael up with this kind of thing and send him a signal to stop squatting on the censorware.org domain, that wouldn't be ethical either - but it would definitely be cool.
...and it wasn't great. I mean, great special effects, the acting was good (but we are already familiar with the regular's acting abilities), but there was just nothing substantial to it. No character development. No thought-provoking insights into what the future might hold (unless you count cloning, which has been done to death in sci-fi), nothing that made trek interesting in the first place (for example, remember when you first learned about the Borg, and it really made you think about what would happen if we were all merged into one being?).
To me, Star Trek is all about learning more and more about the fictional universe they have created, but with ST10, the audience knows nothing more about the Star Trek universe when it ends than when it began.
I was studying Computer Science at Edinburgh University when the first Ariane 5 rocket exploded in flight. A guy, I wish I can remember his name but he was quite senior, from the ESA came to speak to us about why it had happened. Basically, it was an unhandled exception in some could which shouldn't have been running when the rocket was in-flight which caused both navigation systems to fail.
He was a great speaker, his lecture was actually really funny in places. He joked about how rockets, by nature, tend to explode (just look at the early Chinese rockets centuries ago), so this one was really just fulfilling its mission prematurely. My favorite line was something like:
The primary navigation system failed at 37.126 seconds after take-off. The backup navigation system failed at 37.778 seconds after take-off for exactly the same reason. Reproducability is normally something scientists like to see - but not so much in this case.
Some time ago, I was pondering a similar idea which I called "Think Cash" (a play on "Hash Cash"), where basically someone had to "pay" by thinking about something. The idea was to discourage automated spamming of anonymous services.
While I mention some ways to achieve this, I thought more about the problem and the qualities a solution would need, than the solution itself.
But since you've advocated the banning of advertisements, it's going to help parents protect their children the way *you* like it.
And, if it does have advertisments, then it is the way that you like it - so what?
The important question is - irrespective of who "likes it" or not, what is better for children.
I can start a private club and tell people that if they want to be or remain a member of my club, then they may not say certain things. Is this censorship? Not really, they are still free to say what they want to say, but I am still free to kick them out of my club for saying it.
Freenet is being used, among many other things, to distribute information in China to people who couldn't get it any other way. It is also being used in this country to distribute censored information about the Church of Scientology, and in the UK to distribute information censored under the official secrets act.
It is early days yet, but at least this demonstrates the type of things it can be useful for.
And if the kid's parents don't care then let it happen. It's not your job to take over as surrogate parent, you arrogant bastard. Education is the key, not control.
It is nice to see that you are so confident in your opinions that you don't even have the courage to put your name to them.
Anyway, your argument is idiotic. The kids.us domain is a way to help parents to protect their children, not to do it whether they like it or not.
For example, a Swedish court recently decided that Pokimon had to remove the phrase "Gotta catch em' all!" from their cartoons, since it was determined that the only purpose of this phrase was encouragement to children to buy Pokimon characters.
AFAIK there is nothing to stop Pokimon from having a pokimon.kids.us website which can be linked to from advertisments within the kids.us domain.
As far as I am concerned, Pokimon is a cynical manipulation of children for profit. Marketing to children seeks to brainwash them into thinking that happiness is having the latest Nike trainers and drinking Pepsi.
Looking at countries like the US, and the frequency with which I hear the words "I want" whenever I am around American kids - I guess it is working beautifully.
On the whole, this is a good thing for those of us concerned about censorship. Having said that, I think that they should take a leaf out of Sweden's book, and ban advertising on the kids.us domain too. Advertising is manipulation for profit, and psychological manipulation of children for profit is revolting IMHO, more so than most of the things that won't be permitted under the kids.us domain.
Michael Sims, Slashdot editor, and Seth Finkelstein both worked on the Censorware project. One day Sims got into some kind of bitch-fight with Finkelstein, the subject of that fight isn't even relevant any more. Sims hijacked the Censorware website - for which he happened to own the domain name. He shut it down, and actively tried to prevent anyone from mirroring the information on it.
Even if you ignore what happened before, the current situation is that the Censorware project had to start up a new site at censorware.net, and Sims is using the original URL - censorware.org, as a rant page against Finkelstein.
Sims admits at the top of this page that many people visiting it will be hoping to find information pertaining to censorship. However, rather than do what most people who claim to be concerned about censorship would do (allow the visitor to get the information they are looking for), he just rants on about Finkelstein.
Seemingly, for Sims - ego and flaming Finkelstein gets a higher priority than educating people about censorship. Don't take my word for it, visit censorware.org and see for yourself.
Oh, also - be warned. Sims is known to use his Slashdot editor status to remove these discussion threads, claiming they are off-topic (he can't really use that excuse here).
I remember having a long debate with a so-called audiophile who had much more money than sense.
He was bragging about his expensive (and therefore wonderful) setup, when he mentioned having "super-high quality" digital cables, which cost him $2,000. I asked him how much "low quality" digital cables cost, the answer? About $15!
I asked him what the difference between the two was, he claimed that the high-quality digital cables gave the music more "body"!
It may have been cruel of me, but I just couldn't help but explain what digital actually meant.
The moral of the story? That much of the audiophile community are simply the blind leading the blind, pseudo-techie alchemists, who assume that expensive means better.
"I don't think it's had the effect that a lot of people have argued it would have -- with a single criminal case in four years," Toren said.
What he doesn't understand is that the DMCA doesn't just do harm every time someone is put in jail, it does harm every time someone choses not to do something they otherwise might out of fear that they might be the next victim of this rediculous law.
What happens if we don't _buy_ DRM tech? Right, it fizzles
Just imagine, you are Joe consumer, you are in Bestbuy, and you are picking out your next computer. The sales guy says "Hey, this is the latest Pentium 5, and it has this thing called DRM which gives it the ability to play movies and music from the Internet!". You ask "hey, but what about that AMD over there?". He replies "ah, you don't want that, it doesn't have DRM".
You obviously have no idea what your talking about.
Have you ever heard the phrase "It is better to keep quiet and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"? Remember it, you will find it useful in the future.
Oh, and if you want to be taken seriously, perhaps you should have the courage to put your name to your utterances.
Gnutella2 isn't just a new searching mechanism.
It isn't a new searching mechanism at all, it is still using a brain-dead broadcast search. Link compression, partial file sharing, and the other features you mention are just putting lipstick on a pig.
More people will be using Gnutella2 than Freenet anyways.
Oh really, so you must know how many people are using Freenet?
Freenet's search methods dont' really work.
What? Have you ever even used it? I have, and it works fine for me.
So you couldn't really get out that "secret information" unless there were a kabillion sources. Not so on Gnutella2.
Utter bullcrap. You have obviously never tried to use Freenet.
Perhaps you could first (A) Read the spec
What spec?
(B) Download and use Shareaza
I don't run Windows.
(C) Learn more about the technology and methods it uses.
Slashdot Mirror
I really think that NASA should have better things to do than tracing the wanderings of superheros and their girlfriends.
Clearly, the issue isn't that the Operating System isn't Open Source, or OSX wouldn't be acceptable either.
Thus, the question is - would you be happy about some geeks sticking electrodes into your brain just so that they could see whether they could force you to turn left or turn right in a maze?
Cosmetics manufacturers could argue that their experiments increase our knowledge of the skin and its reaction to various chemicals. Some time down the line this knowledge could help us cure all sorts of skin diseases.
That argument wouldn't get them very far with most thinking people, and nor does yours.
Now, if we could wire Michael up with this kind of thing and send him a signal to stop squatting on the censorware.org domain, that wouldn't be ethical either - but it would definitely be cool.
To me, Star Trek is all about learning more and more about the fictional universe they have created, but with ST10, the audience knows nothing more about the Star Trek universe when it ends than when it began.
fscking brainfarts.
He was a great speaker, his lecture was actually really funny in places. He joked about how rockets, by nature, tend to explode (just look at the early Chinese rockets centuries ago), so this one was really just fulfilling its mission prematurely. My favorite line was something like:
While I mention some ways to achieve this, I thought more about the problem and the qualities a solution would need, than the solution itself.
If interested, more can be found here.
The important question is - irrespective of who "likes it" or not, what is better for children.
I can start a private club and tell people that if they want to be or remain a member of my club, then they may not say certain things. Is this censorship? Not really, they are still free to say what they want to say, but I am still free to kick them out of my club for saying it.
It is early days yet, but at least this demonstrates the type of things it can be useful for.
Anyway, your argument is idiotic. The kids.us domain is a way to help parents to protect their children, not to do it whether they like it or not.
AFAIK there is nothing to stop Pokimon from having a pokimon.kids.us website which can be linked to from advertisments within the kids.us domain.
As far as I am concerned, Pokimon is a cynical manipulation of children for profit. Marketing to children seeks to brainwash them into thinking that happiness is having the latest Nike trainers and drinking Pepsi.
Looking at countries like the US, and the frequency with which I hear the words "I want" whenever I am around American kids - I guess it is working beautifully.
On the whole, this is a good thing for those of us concerned about censorship. Having said that, I think that they should take a leaf out of Sweden's book, and ban advertising on the kids.us domain too. Advertising is manipulation for profit, and psychological manipulation of children for profit is revolting IMHO, more so than most of the things that won't be permitted under the kids.us domain.
Even if you ignore what happened before, the current situation is that the Censorware project had to start up a new site at censorware.net, and Sims is using the original URL - censorware.org, as a rant page against Finkelstein.
Sims admits at the top of this page that many people visiting it will be hoping to find information pertaining to censorship. However, rather than do what most people who claim to be concerned about censorship would do (allow the visitor to get the information they are looking for), he just rants on about Finkelstein.
Seemingly, for Sims - ego and flaming Finkelstein gets a higher priority than educating people about censorship. Don't take my word for it, visit censorware.org and see for yourself.
Oh, also - be warned. Sims is known to use his Slashdot editor status to remove these discussion threads, claiming they are off-topic (he can't really use that excuse here).
He was bragging about his expensive (and therefore wonderful) setup, when he mentioned having "super-high quality" digital cables, which cost him $2,000. I asked him how much "low quality" digital cables cost, the answer? About $15!
I asked him what the difference between the two was, he claimed that the high-quality digital cables gave the music more "body"!
It may have been cruel of me, but I just couldn't help but explain what digital actually meant.
The moral of the story? That much of the audiophile community are simply the blind leading the blind, pseudo-techie alchemists, who assume that expensive means better.
...DUH!
Which do you buy?
Software DRM may always be hackable, but hardware DRM could be a much tougher nut to crack.
Oh, and if you want to be taken seriously, perhaps you should have the courage to put your name to your utterances.
It isn't a new searching mechanism at all, it is still using a brain-dead broadcast search. Link compression, partial file sharing, and the other features you mention are just putting lipstick on a pig. Oh really, so you must know how many people are using Freenet? What? Have you ever even used it? I have, and it works fine for me. Utter bullcrap. You have obviously never tried to use Freenet. What spec? I don't run Windows. Sounds like you need to take your own advice.