Unless you're trying to put a field of the things in a desert somewhere to supplement a city's power. Then the land costs more than the cells will, and being able to use fewer saves money and, in some cases, makes it feasible at all.
These same cleaners and rent-a-cops would also have access to offices as well. So this is a strawman argument.
No. A straw man requires setting up an artificial, easily defeated opponent, then defeating him. "Our opposition hates copyright law, but it's important for innovation," being the most common around here. His was just not a very effective argument.
Not to start a flame war here, please tell me exactly how government is accountable?
It's not. But I didn't say it was going to be more accountable, just that corporations aren't in any significant way, either. There are, of course, cases where both were held accountable for something, but they're both few and far between.
The two situations are pretty much the same. I'm just more comfortable having 1/150,000,000 of a say in what happens with that data than the 0 say I get with a corporation.
The government already monitors its citizens, and it'd be a bit silly to think they couldn't get any dirt on you that any company has if they wanted it. And you'd have to try pretty hard to get less accountability than you get with the private sector.
The hassle issue would depend on the implementation, and as long as we're doing it from scratch, I'm voting for a not-evil implementation.
Here's an idea: lay aside the jingoism for a moment and realize that the internet, in all its messy totality, is now something that belongs to the world, and sooner or later we're going to have to deal with that fact.
But how about we wait until there's actually a hint that there might potentially be a problem with the current system before we introduce giant unknowns into it.
In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses.
No, if they told them they couldn't have their own, then they would be meddling. The rest of the world is free to do what it wants, just don't expect help from the people you're calling names.
Action is needed to reverse this, but I doubt we'll see it while Bush is still in power.
I'm not a Bush fan in the slightest, but I don't see it being the kind of thing a Democrat president would give a crap about, either. Whoever is president when some ridiculously hyped movie gets its opening delayed by litigation will be the president to fight it.
If someone submits a bill and in the debate it is determined that there is a better way, the bill can be amended.
Plus it's harder to attach something that says you can only wear blue hats on Tuesdays and call it part of a free speach bill if they don't allow amendments, and most legislators oppose that on moral grounds. If you can't tack on unconscionable laws to good bills, how are you ever going to get them passed? This kind of thing can't be allowed to happen.
many/.ers also believe in the sort of pork social programs that are the Democrats' bread and butter.
So you just have a problem with the social ones. You don't have a problem with the non-social pork that the Republicans love?
If you could manage to pull your face away from your party's collective crotch for five seconds and realize both sides' shit stinks, the world would be a lot better off.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do disagree with where you're going with it. But I know how much organized Christianity tends to suck, and I know I'm not going to change your mind. I wouldn't want to anyway. So I'll just explain why it's unlikely that you'll be able to change mine, and we'll be able to walk away without getting angry. And my reason is this: I'm agnostic, and I don't want to tell people that they're wrong unless I can be pretty confident about it. I will, however, continue to oppose the stupid things they do because of the voices in their heads.
There's no real claim and no way to disprove it. Now here's the scary part, what if I start using it to justify my actions?
Then you're a bit silly. But as long as you're a harmless silly, I don't give a shit.
More people have died in that name of Christ than any other cause in history.
I'm not a big fan of Christianity, but I'm not sure that's true.
These people ARE hurting other people. There aren't just keeping their stupid ideas to themselve, they're trying to force them on other people.
Which is why I'm on the "this is bad, let's not teach them that," side. And any other harmful cause some of their members decide to take up, I'll be with you against it, too. But that doesn't change the fact that ID, itself, is harmless.
A theory not able to actually predict something is in any case useless and there is no point in teaching it to students (what for ?!?).
We never know where our curiosity will lead. We could have said the same for any number of discoveries or theories at the time. Ignorance is also a weakness. If we don't explore facts, we open ourselves or our children to being told lies.
A theory takes the form "If p then q." The "q" is the prediction part. You then create or observe "p", and "q" either happens or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you've falsified it. If it makes no prediction, you just have, "If p." Giving kids every conceivable "p" does them no good and certainly doesn't help them explore any facts.
Before you learn how to end it, you have to learn why people WANT to believe it.
Why would we want to end it? There's nothing inherently bad about believing in ID. If you want to think God did some stuff, go for it. Knock yourself out, man. Maybe you're right. All we have to do is convince them that teaching religion in science classes is counterproductive. And to that end, it is just as counterproductive to go around saying that we want to convince them that ID isn't true. It makes them cranky.
Unfortunately, the only way I know to teach them that you shouldn't teach religion in science classes is to get them to think that some time in the future it could just as easily be someone else's religion and it's a bad precedent. But Christians feel a little invincible at the moment, so that's not going to work.
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. - John Lehman
Re:Scientists need to stop playing God!
on
The Los Alamos Bug
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· Score: 1
Any intelligent life form created by man is doomed to an eternity hell, since Jesus didn't die for its sins. Do we really want this responsibility on our hands?
Oh, come on, let's do it! God's not a cruel guy, or so I hear. I'm sure he'll send down his only begotten robot to be reformatted for all the other robots' sins. Bring on Robo-Jesus!
Or pile-of-intelligent-sludge-Jesus, I guess. Whichever way we go about making the intelligent life. I'd really prefer Robo-Jesus, though.
You're right. We should take a bunch of excellent chemists, retrain them to be mediocre programmers, and force them to work on things brilliant programmers can't do. That'll work out great.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're trying to put a field of the things in a desert somewhere to supplement a city's power. Then the land costs more than the cells will, and being able to use fewer saves money and, in some cases, makes it feasible at all.
These same cleaners and rent-a-cops would also have access to offices as well. So this is a strawman argument.
No. A straw man requires setting up an artificial, easily defeated opponent, then defeating him. "Our opposition hates copyright law, but it's important for innovation," being the most common around here. His was just not a very effective argument.
Not to start a flame war here, please tell me exactly how government is accountable?
It's not. But I didn't say it was going to be more accountable, just that corporations aren't in any significant way, either. There are, of course, cases where both were held accountable for something, but they're both few and far between.
The two situations are pretty much the same. I'm just more comfortable having 1/150,000,000 of a say in what happens with that data than the 0 say I get with a corporation.
Oh. So they're just dicks that can't think of an actual problem. Got it. Thanks for clearing that up.
The government already monitors its citizens, and it'd be a bit silly to think they couldn't get any dirt on you that any company has if they wanted it. And you'd have to try pretty hard to get less accountability than you get with the private sector.
The hassle issue would depend on the implementation, and as long as we're doing it from scratch, I'm voting for a not-evil implementation.
Yes. If ever there was something that the government should be doing instead of Wal-Mart, it's handling background checks.
Which is why CERN and the web have nothing to do with this.
I did read it. I meant a reasonably likely potential problem.
If the controversy isn't resolved, however, they'll do just that: start their own DNS system.
Yay! Then all this idiotic posturing over an imagined problem can end.
But then Zonk will have to find something else to post every day. Poor guy.
Here's an idea: lay aside the jingoism for a moment and realize that the internet, in all its messy totality, is now something that belongs to the world, and sooner or later we're going to have to deal with that fact.
But how about we wait until there's actually a hint that there might potentially be a problem with the current system before we introduce giant unknowns into it.
Well, I guess we can just wish the web goodbye since it was created by people at CERN (Center for European Nuclear Research).
Who's trying to take the web away from Europe?
In this case, the US is meddling in the affairs of everyone else by controlling the name servers that everyone uses.
No, if they told them they couldn't have their own, then they would be meddling. The rest of the world is free to do what it wants, just don't expect help from the people you're calling names.
I hate having to side with the US.
Action is needed to reverse this, but I doubt we'll see it while Bush is still in power.
I'm not a Bush fan in the slightest, but I don't see it being the kind of thing a Democrat president would give a crap about, either. Whoever is president when some ridiculously hyped movie gets its opening delayed by litigation will be the president to fight it.
If someone submits a bill and in the debate it is determined that there is a better way, the bill can be amended.
Plus it's harder to attach something that says you can only wear blue hats on Tuesdays and call it part of a free speach bill if they don't allow amendments, and most legislators oppose that on moral grounds. If you can't tack on unconscionable laws to good bills, how are you ever going to get them passed? This kind of thing can't be allowed to happen.
many /.ers also believe in the sort of pork social programs that are the Democrats' bread and butter.
So you just have a problem with the social ones. You don't have a problem with the non-social pork that the Republicans love?
If you could manage to pull your face away from your party's collective crotch for five seconds and realize both sides' shit stinks, the world would be a lot better off.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do disagree with where you're going with it. But I know how much organized Christianity tends to suck, and I know I'm not going to change your mind. I wouldn't want to anyway. So I'll just explain why it's unlikely that you'll be able to change mine, and we'll be able to walk away without getting angry. And my reason is this: I'm agnostic, and I don't want to tell people that they're wrong unless I can be pretty confident about it. I will, however, continue to oppose the stupid things they do because of the voices in their heads.
Thanks for the links. I'll read those.
There's no real claim and no way to disprove it.
Now here's the scary part, what if I start using it to justify my actions?
Then you're a bit silly. But as long as you're a harmless silly, I don't give a shit.
More people have died in that name of Christ than any other cause in history.
I'm not a big fan of Christianity, but I'm not sure that's true.
These people ARE hurting other people. There aren't just keeping their stupid ideas to themselve, they're trying to force them on other people.
Which is why I'm on the "this is bad, let's not teach them that," side. And any other harmful cause some of their members decide to take up, I'll be with you against it, too. But that doesn't change the fact that ID, itself, is harmless.
A theory not able to actually predict something is in any case useless and there is no point in teaching it to students (what for ?!?).
We never know where our curiosity will lead. We could have said the same for any number of discoveries or theories at the time. Ignorance is also a weakness. If we don't explore facts, we open ourselves or our children to being told lies.
A theory takes the form "If p then q." The "q" is the prediction part. You then create or observe "p", and "q" either happens or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you've falsified it. If it makes no prediction, you just have, "If p." Giving kids every conceivable "p" does them no good and certainly doesn't help them explore any facts.
Sorry. We had an antecedent flub, there. Your "it" was not the same as my "it." My bad.
Before you learn how to end it, you have to learn why people WANT to believe it.
Why would we want to end it? There's nothing inherently bad about believing in ID. If you want to think God did some stuff, go for it. Knock yourself out, man. Maybe you're right. All we have to do is convince them that teaching religion in science classes is counterproductive. And to that end, it is just as counterproductive to go around saying that we want to convince them that ID isn't true. It makes them cranky.
Unfortunately, the only way I know to teach them that you shouldn't teach religion in science classes is to get them to think that some time in the future it could just as easily be someone else's religion and it's a bad precedent. But Christians feel a little invincible at the moment, so that's not going to work.
It's their software, shouldn't they be able to sell it or not sell it where they wish?
They should be allowed. That doesn't mean they're not jerks if they do.
When the choice is between a corrupt bastard, and a less corrupt bastard, you don't have much of a vote over anything.
But please vote for the less corrupt bastard anyway.
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. - John Lehman
Any intelligent life form created by man is doomed to an eternity hell, since Jesus didn't die for its sins. Do we really want this responsibility on our hands?
Oh, come on, let's do it! God's not a cruel guy, or so I hear. I'm sure he'll send down his only begotten robot to be reformatted for all the other robots' sins. Bring on Robo-Jesus!
Or pile-of-intelligent-sludge-Jesus, I guess. Whichever way we go about making the intelligent life. I'd really prefer Robo-Jesus, though.
You're right. We should take a bunch of excellent chemists, retrain them to be mediocre programmers, and force them to work on things brilliant programmers can't do. That'll work out great.