Violating a website's policies is not, in general, illegal. Copyright infringement is. The only time it might be illegal to violate a website's policies is when whatever action violated the policy is against the law whether or the policy ever mentioned it.
Well played. Indeed, "dead" indeed does indeed imply that whatever is being talked about was once alive. My oversight in omitting that important criteria.
Being healed after being dead doesn't mean that whatever is being talked about wasn't dead to begin with.... it just means that there wasn't enough deterioration since death to prevent being made alive again.
The dichotomy isn't false... it's literally defined that way. To suggest otherwise is to contrive new definitions of the terms that might what you are describing, but when you create your own definitions for words, you are liable to only confuse people when you use them in a way that only you understand. This is entirely immaterial to how gradual the process of dying may be. I suspect that you may be conflating the notion of quantity or quality of life with the concept that there might be a continuum of "aliveness" and "deadness". There is no more a real continuum between them than there is a continuum of elements between hydrogen and helium (although it's worth pointing out that fusion is a gradual process as well).
You're right... fortunately for SOPA's supporters, SOPA has a few consequences that, I believe, most people will be able to relate to.
Under SOPA, any new online service or technology that ever gets invented after SOPA passes, but which happens to depend on user-submitted content in some way, will be suppressed if it should happen to be the case that the service or technology starts to get used a lot for piracy before it has had a chance to really gather a lot of steam.
That might sound like a far-fetched statement, or even a hyperbole... but let me back it up with some historical context... and in particular, considering what would have certainly happened if SOPA had actually been around at the time.
If SOPA had been around in 2005, believe it or not, hardly anybody today would have heard of Youtube... which when it was just starting to gather momentum, was actually quite widely used by a number of people to share copyrighted content without permission. Rights holders were fairly readily able to get Youtube to pull the offending videos once they discovered them (and there were many hundreds, even thousands of them by the time they really knew about Youtube), but under SOPA, it would have been far less red tape to have just got the entire domain blocked rather than dealing with infringement after infringement for months on end. Because Youtube was just a rising star at the time, any substantial non-infringing use would not have been so widely known about, and it would have probably just been perceived as a service that predominantly catered to pirates. The result would almost certainly have been that the Youtube domain would have simply been pulled.
That's just one example... it is, unfortunately, inevitable that any new technology is going to be utilized by some people to break the law, when it happens to be possible. If the technology is fortunate enough to gather sufficient popularity among people who are law abiding first, then all is fine... people will readily see there is substantial non-infringing use, and the question of blocking the technology or service would not arise. With user-submitted content, however, it's pretty much a given that some people are going to use it to distribute content that they shouldn't... and a company that innovates such a service could end up being shut out unfairly, just because pirates happened to start using the service first.
... even when we get to the point that computers can read our minds, and know exactly what we want them to do without interacting with it physically in any way at all, that doctors will still find some way to say how bad they are for us.
Wow... touched a nerve, did I? There's plenty of reason to suspect what I mentioned above, especially in light of events that have occurred since the turn of this century... although I realize it's hardly proof.
The doomsday clock is not to be interpreted as predictor of the end of the world. It is an reflection of how realistically close we are to global thermonuclear war When the clock "strikes midnight" it will be because a war has already escalated to that level.
I am personally of the opinion that the only reason it hasn't happened by now is that they are outnumbered by the rest of the world by more than an order of magnitude, and they aren't so stupid as to think that going nuclear would actually have any sort of long term benefit.
Actually, I am under the impression that if the general public could be educated on *WHY* SOPA is bad, in ways that would directly impact them, and explained in highly nontechnical terms that they are liable to immediately understand and relate to, rather than trying to spend time trying to teach them why concepts like DNSSEC and "end-to-end" are important, then it is much more likely that their elected officials would realize that supporting SOPA drastically affects their chances of re-election, and simply would not support it.
... if SOPA had been around at the time. Plenty of people utilized Youtube to share copyrighted content quite some time before it started to become *really* popular, and agencies who discovered it would have been all over it to stop. Why bother with DMCA takedowns when you can just block the domain entirely? Because it was not yet popular, it's very likely that a judge, if one is involved, would not have perceived a widespread substantial non-infringing use and the request for blocking would likely be approved. Problem effectively solved. Most people would probably have never heard of Youtube today if that had been the case.
So really, what SOPA does is ensure that nothing particularly new or innovative is liable to ever surface on the Internet again... since when it starts getting used for piracy, it will be shut down before it can really start becoming a widespread phenomenon with legitimate use being obvious to most people.
It would, I think, have to have substantial deposits of something that does not exist on earth and we do not know how to manufacture.
A naturally existing room-temperature superconductive alloy, for example.
Not that I'm saying that's what exists on Mars... but I'd be willing to bet that if something like that was discovered there, there'd be a heckuva lot of robot mining missions happening, and within a decade or so, there'd probably even be a permanent colony there.
Where do I claim or imply that I have some insight that astrophysicists do not? It is my understanding that the reason we believe in the existence of Dark Matter is because based on our *CURRENT* understanding how the universe works, that is the only thing that we have thought of so far that fits observed phenomonena.
Dark Matter, in this respect, bears a lot of similarity to the idea of the Aether because before the Aether was disproven, observations had already been made that showed that light propagated like a wave, and all other experience with waves showed that they required a medium to propagate. That light could propagate in absence of a medium was entirely counter to their understanding as the notion today that the gravitational phenomena that we observe today is not attributable to invisible gravitational sources. But ultimately, the only reason for its postulation is simply because, as you put it, "we don't have any better explanation". I'd put a "yet" on the end of that, however. Maybe dark matter does exist... maybe it doesn't. Hopefully, some day, we will find out for sure.
I wasn't suggesting that Dark Matter is not a perfectly sound theory, given what we know.
I only point out that the only reason its existence was postulated at all is because we can't currently explain certain observations any other way, based on our knowledge of how the universe works.
Prior to the aether being disproven, all prior observations on waves appeared to necessitate that a medium must exist for the wave to actually propagate.
There's actually quite a lot of similarity, really.
Aether was invented because people felt it SHOULD exist.
So was Dark Matter. People felt that the Aether should exist because the existing theories at the time governing the physical laws of the universe predicted that it ought to exist. and its nonexistence would mean that those theories were wrong (and they were). What is particularly interesting about proving the non-existance of the Aether (who says you can't prove that something doesn't exist?) is that it was accomplished without adequately forming another explanation for what was expected to happen... it was simply a blanket disproof that stated that those expectations (in particular, that the wave properties of light would not be possible unless the phenomenon were happening inside of some medium) were simply wrong, with no real explanation as to why. With Dark Matter, if it is disproven, I expect it is much more likely that we will actually discover how our existing theories are wrong at roughly the same time that the existence of Dark Matter is disproven.
In the U.S., at least, people wrongly convicted to death since 1976 number over a hundred. I'd say that it's significant enough.
Take a guess how many college students kill themselves every year because they failed a midterm? Hundreds. Plural. Every semester. Over 35 years, that's many times the number of people who were wrongly sentenced to death in the same period. Should we also outlaw midterms because of their direct link to otherwise preventable death as well? (disclaimer: this question was rhetorical, asked to make a point, and not intended a primary subject for discussion).
Wrongful death is a tragic thing, but it should not be dwelt upon to the point that it impedes us from delivering any real justice. We are only human, and we might make mistakes along the way. But we will learn from those mistakes and learn how to avoid them in the future. If we allow ourselves to be paralyzed into inaction because of fear of being wrong, we cannot hope to become any better than we already are.
I think it would be better to stick to it, and leave death penalty until the time when we have a 100% reliable lie detector that can be used to determine guilt without any shadow of doubt.
So, never, then? Seriously... I have a lot of faith in humanity to endure and overcome obstacles, but knowing with absolute and infallible certainty when someone is lying requires something called omniscience, and isn't something humanity is ever liable to attain. If getting close to that might be good enough, I'd like to point out again that a hundred people over a 35 year period is really just not that many.
I'm probably not going to convince you that I am right and that you are wrong... and that's not really my intent. If you oppose the death penalty, that is your right to do so in a free country. Likewise, however, I would strongly endorse it... and merely present my case for supporting it in light of the arguments against it concerning wrongful death.
While it's true that the death penalty cannot be reversed, I personally retain enough faith in the *modern* legal process as a whole that the number of innocents who are actually pronounced guilty could be kept at least to a strict theoretical minimum. It's a horrible thing to discover that a wrong person has been convicted, even without the death penalty, and monetary inducement for a person who was wrongly incarcerated still cannot undo any of the real damage that may have been caused. Nevertheless, I am compelled to believe that fear of being wrong should not lead us to being afraid to actually try to actually allow justice to proceed. And in the case of the death penalty, it's not like we are talking about a decision that has the potential to wipe out the entire human race here... where we cannot learn from our failures and adapt to do better the next time, it's a decision to justly end a single individual's life based on a preponderance of evidence that inexorably leads one to the conclusion that they are guilty of a particularly heinous crime. It stands to reason that if there is not such a preponderance of evidence, then there probably is no reason to actually declare the person guilty in the first place... at least not in legal situations where the phrase"beyond all reasonable doubt" has any merit.
Slashdot Mirror
Violating a website's policies is not, in general, illegal. Copyright infringement is. The only time it might be illegal to violate a website's policies is when whatever action violated the policy is against the law whether or the policy ever mentioned it.
Well played. Indeed, "dead" indeed does indeed imply that whatever is being talked about was once alive. My oversight in omitting that important criteria.
Being healed after being dead doesn't mean that whatever is being talked about wasn't dead to begin with.... it just means that there wasn't enough deterioration since death to prevent being made alive again.
The dichotomy isn't false... it's literally defined that way. To suggest otherwise is to contrive new definitions of the terms that might what you are describing, but when you create your own definitions for words, you are liable to only confuse people when you use them in a way that only you understand. This is entirely immaterial to how gradual the process of dying may be. I suspect that you may be conflating the notion of quantity or quality of life with the concept that there might be a continuum of "aliveness" and "deadness". There is no more a real continuum between them than there is a continuum of elements between hydrogen and helium (although it's worth pointing out that fusion is a gradual process as well).
What is the point of even trying to quantify it?
The dichotomy isn't false. Death is simply defined that way. If it's not alive, it's dead. If it's not dead, it's alive.
You may as well say that it's a false dichotomy to only have 0 and 1 as valid significant figures in binary.
Can something be considered alive that does not reproduce? What about mules?
I meant to say "fortunately for SOPA's opponents"... but instead said "supporters". Weird.
You're right... fortunately for SOPA's supporters, SOPA has a few consequences that, I believe, most people will be able to relate to.
Under SOPA, any new online service or technology that ever gets invented after SOPA passes, but which happens to depend on user-submitted content in some way, will be suppressed if it should happen to be the case that the service or technology starts to get used a lot for piracy before it has had a chance to really gather a lot of steam.
That might sound like a far-fetched statement, or even a hyperbole... but let me back it up with some historical context... and in particular, considering what would have certainly happened if SOPA had actually been around at the time.
If SOPA had been around in 2005, believe it or not, hardly anybody today would have heard of Youtube... which when it was just starting to gather momentum, was actually quite widely used by a number of people to share copyrighted content without permission. Rights holders were fairly readily able to get Youtube to pull the offending videos once they discovered them (and there were many hundreds, even thousands of them by the time they really knew about Youtube), but under SOPA, it would have been far less red tape to have just got the entire domain blocked rather than dealing with infringement after infringement for months on end. Because Youtube was just a rising star at the time, any substantial non-infringing use would not have been so widely known about, and it would have probably just been perceived as a service that predominantly catered to pirates. The result would almost certainly have been that the Youtube domain would have simply been pulled.
That's just one example... it is, unfortunately, inevitable that any new technology is going to be utilized by some people to break the law, when it happens to be possible. If the technology is fortunate enough to gather sufficient popularity among people who are law abiding first, then all is fine... people will readily see there is substantial non-infringing use, and the question of blocking the technology or service would not arise. With user-submitted content, however, it's pretty much a given that some people are going to use it to distribute content that they shouldn't... and a company that innovates such a service could end up being shut out unfairly, just because pirates happened to start using the service first.
... even when we get to the point that computers can read our minds, and know exactly what we want them to do without interacting with it physically in any way at all, that doctors will still find some way to say how bad they are for us.
Copyrighted stuff can't just "leak" into public domain. Copyright is not like a trade secret, or a trademark.
Wow... touched a nerve, did I? There's plenty of reason to suspect what I mentioned above, especially in light of events that have occurred since the turn of this century... although I realize it's hardly proof.
The doomsday clock is not to be interpreted as predictor of the end of the world. It is an reflection of how realistically close we are to global thermonuclear war When the clock "strikes midnight" it will be because a war has already escalated to that level.
I am personally of the opinion that the only reason it hasn't happened by now is that they are outnumbered by the rest of the world by more than an order of magnitude, and they aren't so stupid as to think that going nuclear would actually have any sort of long term benefit.
I can still see the tagline on the slashdot home page. What are you talking about?
Actually, I am under the impression that if the general public could be educated on *WHY* SOPA is bad, in ways that would directly impact them, and explained in highly nontechnical terms that they are liable to immediately understand and relate to, rather than trying to spend time trying to teach them why concepts like DNSSEC and "end-to-end" are important, then it is much more likely that their elected officials would realize that supporting SOPA drastically affects their chances of re-election, and simply would not support it.
So really, what SOPA does is ensure that nothing particularly new or innovative is liable to ever surface on the Internet again... since when it starts getting used for piracy, it will be shut down before it can really start becoming a widespread phenomenon with legitimate use being obvious to most people.
It would, I think, have to have substantial deposits of something that does not exist on earth and we do not know how to manufacture.
A naturally existing room-temperature superconductive alloy, for example.
Not that I'm saying that's what exists on Mars... but I'd be willing to bet that if something like that was discovered there, there'd be a heckuva lot of robot mining missions happening, and within a decade or so, there'd probably even be a permanent colony there.
Dark Matter, in this respect, bears a lot of similarity to the idea of the Aether because before the Aether was disproven, observations had already been made that showed that light propagated like a wave, and all other experience with waves showed that they required a medium to propagate. That light could propagate in absence of a medium was entirely counter to their understanding as the notion today that the gravitational phenomena that we observe today is not attributable to invisible gravitational sources. But ultimately, the only reason for its postulation is simply because, as you put it, "we don't have any better explanation". I'd put a "yet" on the end of that, however. Maybe dark matter does exist... maybe it doesn't. Hopefully, some day, we will find out for sure.
I wasn't suggesting that Dark Matter is not a perfectly sound theory, given what we know.
I only point out that the only reason its existence was postulated at all is because we can't currently explain certain observations any other way, based on our knowledge of how the universe works.
Prior to the aether being disproven, all prior observations on waves appeared to necessitate that a medium must exist for the wave to actually propagate.
There's actually quite a lot of similarity, really.
That was kind of my point..
So was Dark Matter. People felt that the Aether should exist because the existing theories at the time governing the physical laws of the universe predicted that it ought to exist. and its nonexistence would mean that those theories were wrong (and they were). What is particularly interesting about proving the non-existance of the Aether (who says you can't prove that something doesn't exist?) is that it was accomplished without adequately forming another explanation for what was expected to happen... it was simply a blanket disproof that stated that those expectations (in particular, that the wave properties of light would not be possible unless the phenomenon were happening inside of some medium) were simply wrong, with no real explanation as to why. With Dark Matter, if it is disproven, I expect it is much more likely that we will actually discover how our existing theories are wrong at roughly the same time that the existence of Dark Matter is disproven.
IF it passes???
Take a guess how many college students kill themselves every year because they failed a midterm? Hundreds. Plural. Every semester. Over 35 years, that's many times the number of people who were wrongly sentenced to death in the same period. Should we also outlaw midterms because of their direct link to otherwise preventable death as well? (disclaimer: this question was rhetorical, asked to make a point, and not intended a primary subject for discussion).
Wrongful death is a tragic thing, but it should not be dwelt upon to the point that it impedes us from delivering any real justice. We are only human, and we might make mistakes along the way. But we will learn from those mistakes and learn how to avoid them in the future. If we allow ourselves to be paralyzed into inaction because of fear of being wrong, we cannot hope to become any better than we already are.
So, never, then? Seriously... I have a lot of faith in humanity to endure and overcome obstacles, but knowing with absolute and infallible certainty when someone is lying requires something called omniscience, and isn't something humanity is ever liable to attain. If getting close to that might be good enough, I'd like to point out again that a hundred people over a 35 year period is really just not that many.
I'm probably not going to convince you that I am right and that you are wrong... and that's not really my intent. If you oppose the death penalty, that is your right to do so in a free country. Likewise, however, I would strongly endorse it... and merely present my case for supporting it in light of the arguments against it concerning wrongful death.
While it's true that the death penalty cannot be reversed, I personally retain enough faith in the *modern* legal process as a whole that the number of innocents who are actually pronounced guilty could be kept at least to a strict theoretical minimum. It's a horrible thing to discover that a wrong person has been convicted, even without the death penalty, and monetary inducement for a person who was wrongly incarcerated still cannot undo any of the real damage that may have been caused. Nevertheless, I am compelled to believe that fear of being wrong should not lead us to being afraid to actually try to actually allow justice to proceed. And in the case of the death penalty, it's not like we are talking about a decision that has the potential to wipe out the entire human race here... where we cannot learn from our failures and adapt to do better the next time, it's a decision to justly end a single individual's life based on a preponderance of evidence that inexorably leads one to the conclusion that they are guilty of a particularly heinous crime. It stands to reason that if there is not such a preponderance of evidence, then there probably is no reason to actually declare the person guilty in the first place... at least not in legal situations where the phrase"beyond all reasonable doubt" has any merit.