You are exactly the problem of which I speak. People that wish to hide behind history and not learn from it.
I've studied history. My relatives are Cherokee. I've been to the reservation. I know that the reservations are sometimes the worst pieces of land in the US and that people often do poorly there.
No good can come from blaming eachother for the mistakes of someone that we never knew. It is irrational and wrong. Just because people have hurt eachother in the past doesn't mean they should do so today.
"Like it or not, there were non-European peoples here thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and attempts to downplay that fact by saying they weren't "native" (only in the sense that human beings as a biological species didn't evolve here; their cultures and languages did) smack of an intent to reduce or dismiss the legitimacy of their claims."
Of course it is an attempt to delegitimize their claims, the term Native is politcal, since most areas of this planet have been populated and repopulated several times over by various different types of peoples mixing their cultures and biology. Are the Eqyptians of today really the Egyptians of history? Are the Russians really the Natives of Russia? Heck the British Isles are a mish mash of a few thousand years of invasion and rape by various Kingdoms and empires. Don't even try to begin to think of Israel in terms of Native and non-Native. So, what of it? Are we willing to return to a philosophy when historical injustice is used to justify injustice today? When one people can claim that they have been wronged in the past, so that they are somehow immune to the moral responsiblity of their actions today.
Yes, people fear the term Native anything and rightly so. It has been used to take people's land. In America, it hasn't been used to take back Manhattan or the National Mall, but rather it is used to take land of rural peoples, those that are unable to defend themselves. Especially in America, where so many of our ancestors came here to flee those that would use history to steal the future through wars and oppression, can anyone not see that history must be studied dispassionately and learned from. Not be used to justify the whim and avarices of today.
So, I won't tell another person how they should regard themselves or how they should associate, if you wish to call yourself Native American, so be it. It does not give a person a right to theft, just as I would not seek to justify the sins of the past.
Just no one call me a "European."
Spammers (humans) themselves need to be stopped.
on
FTC vs. Open SMTP Relays
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Shutting down OpenRelays will have a negligable effect on Spam, since any Internet connected computer can send tens of thousands of spams before anyone would even notice.
Also, there may be legitimate reasons to have OpenRelays. Much like there are legitimate reasons to have DVD copying software. Maybe only a few good reasons, but enough that they should not be banned outright.
The only legal action that these legal folks should be taking is against those spammers using deceptive practices, which is about all of them these days. For instance the false sender information and the innability to be removed from the list. Life was okay when you could get removed from a mailing list and you really wouldn't get any more spam from them, but now they just use it as a confirmation that the email is active and to send more email.
Open SMTP relays are not the problem any more than Open Routers are. Find the individuals that are sending these things and you will stop the problem.
outside the box and inside the box
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Seems like AI has progressed about as far as it can go inside the box, only machines that can proactively interact with an environment as people do will learn to think like people.
Imagine what kind of thing you would be without vision, touch, smell, hearing or the ability to move and change your environment. Without these forms of interaction where would human intelligence be?
Seems that a Budhist philosphical approach is most helpful here, ie we are our parts, not more and not less. We are what we are. If you wish to create something that is like a human, you should take an inventory of our parts figure out how they fit together and try to find analogous electronics, software and hardware.
Which is precisely what a lot of the robot folks have started doing. Except that most have started a bit smaller and have modeled insects instead. Finding that they can model seemingly complex insect behavior with simple algorithms and machines.
Although, perhaps the next best step isn't building real robots at all, which can be expensive, error prone and time consuming, but building virtual robots that can be placed in virtual environments of our invention, somewhat like a "Matrix" virtual reality with intelligent agents that can learn. This approach is more computer intensive, since the environment as well as the agent would require large amounts of computing resources, also, the agent would have to perceive the "environment"
Seems that many more forms of human nature could be investigated in this way.
You bring up an important point. There is risk in anything and our society seems hell bent on eliminating all risk at the expense of reason. I won't argue against the space shuttle on risk grounds alone as long as nobody is forcing these folks to go into the Space Shuttle, then the risk to their lives is there's alone (excepting the risk of loss of a valuable individual to the group)
But this should be a cost(including lives and resources) benefit analysis. Earth orbit is not an unexplored frontier anymore, we have been sending people there for 40 years, we can see it from the ground and it has been used for productive purposes almost from the beginning. If NASA were to close up shop, it would still be explored. Nasa is sending people into orbit largely to do life sciences experiments on them. The program is very expensive and people die. So the question as I see it is: Should we be sending people into space using as much of our common resources as it takes with as much risk for the benefit we are recieving?
If this was a mission to Mars, then yes, but until then the answer has to be no. I can't even remotely begin to see how someone can reason otherwise... please someone explain to me the great benefit for the American taxpayer of putting people into earth orbit at such great expense. They are not bringing back resources, or building any practical infrastructure, or even exploring an area with the potential of future expansion. The Science that they are doing is largely life sciences about the effects of low G environments. These effects are largely understood to be detrimental to human and other life, which is all that really needs to be understood for future exploration, basically we will just have to minimize or eliminate exposure to low G much like exposure to radiation. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand this point.
Sure I would want to go on a shuttle ride given the risk alone, but that doesn't mean it is right to be taking people's money to do it.
Risk be damned, I want my money spent either openning a new frontier or paying off the public debt here at home.
Agreed on SSL. Why should a web credit card transaction be "more secure" than a telephone credit card transaction. The likelyhood that someone is listening to my web transaction is about as likely that someone is listening to my phone call, when I order Chinese, and writing down my credit card number. Yes it happens, but that's why they make jails.
It seems like people were so hell bent on making sure people felt comfortable spending money online that they threw out common sense in the process.
As for email, I haven't read the proposals, but I don't believe any changes are needed to the technology. Like I said before, that's what jails are made for.
It should be very easy to trace data transmissions with the help of the Telecoms and shut down the offenders.
The only change to email I would support is to role in IM support to email, that way you could flag an email as an IM and then the client application could decide to display it differently than other email. Which is all that Instant Messaging really is anyway, email that is displayed differently.
no, the reason I don't own my own business is because I make much more money working for other people without many of the worries and risks...
interoperability is just a fact of life even between versions, when I worked at a small company we had problems openning the latest Word documents not because we didn't have MS Word, but rather our version was too old. So, data exchange with outside sources is an ongoing challenge. We will likely never have completely standardized formats. But given Linux's history, so far it offers the greatest numbers of conversion tools that I have seen.
Last time I openned a Word doc on a linux system I had no problem. I could even save a word compatible document. I assume there were some features left out and I could forsee a business that needed to run MS for some business reason, just as much as I have seen companies which need to run Macs, but as a standard office system for a small business just making an initial investment, The current Linux distributions offer more value in additional free software than Mac or MS. Combined with MS's drive towards a more subscription based model, it seems the wisest long term decision to stick with Linux.
I simply don't have a moral objection to Microsoft, they make a good product, but the price both short term and long term is simply too high given the alternatives. If Microsoft Windows with Office (word, excel, powerpoint) were 30 bucks per license my attitude might be different. But even at that price Linux would still be a good choice.
If I started a business today, I would use only Linux for the office. It is much more economical and if you ever decide you need to customize software to your business model, your best bet is with Linux. Unless you don't mind shelling out tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees above the additional development costs.
Technology is a tool which should serve those that buy it not those that have sold it. If I buy a hammer I want to use it any damn way I please, it should be no different with a friggin' computer.
" I don't understand the hostility towards Lindows thats prevalent on/."
My guess is that it is mostly a snobbish reaction to the Walmart connection.
Everyone here on slashdot still treats Dell with kid gloves even though they cowtowed to Microsoft by burying their Linux offerings deep in the bowels of dell.com. People rejoiced when Dell said they would start selling computers with Linux pre-installed. Nowhere is their an option to choose between microsoft or linux on a product configuration screen that I have ever found. Yet even after this half-hearted linux support, still there is great geek loyalty to the brand.
Let's face it we all like our brands and until our favorite brands buy in to linux we will not be happy. Seeing Linux on Walmart's shelves will just make us feel like linux is a cheap alternative and not the better system it really is. Maybe people could start calling dell instead of ordering on line and when they start asking the salesperson to configure their PC with Linux we might see some action.
True this doesn't go any way towards proving life actually came from another world which is history not science. It either did or didn't happen and would be pretty hard to prove either way. Science can only say whether it is possible.
This incident can show under certain conditions living cells can come through the atmosphere alive, but we already knew that. Humans have been coming through the atmosphere alive for decades with some protection, much like these creatures had, heat shield, etc.
What we need to do is to find a solar system with a planet with size and atmospheric density like earth's without any life and sprinkle all sorts of different genentically tagged organisms around wait a few thousand years and see how many made it to the surface viably... Of course to do the experiment right we would need to find many such worlds to have some controls.
Germline alteration is too risky with current techniques, but why shouldn't we want to incorporate this trait into our genome and make it inheritable?? If it were shown to have no great ill effects and would greatly increase the human lifespan and quality of life... then why not go for it?
Conversly, Why take the risk that the anti-cancer factory is going to burn down with all the anti-cancer researchers inside? Just build this into our genome and then as long as people exist they will benefit from the discovery.
Drugs manufacturers would go out of business long before the human race would.
" Vorbis sounds much cooler than Ogg. If they were called Vorbis files, it might not be an obscure format known only to naively-idealistic computer geeks..."
I argue the opposite, not so much from the coolness factor, but rather the uniqueness factor. Vorbis is a non-unique sounding name. In marketing you strive for a simple unique brand that is distinguishable from others. The Ogg Vorbis format has suffered by being called ogg vorbis, too many words.
People say "I downloaded an mp3", people might say "I downloaded an ogg" people won't say "I downloaded an ogg vorbis" and "I downloaded an ogg vorbis file" is much too wordy. Plus people are used to calling media files by what their extension is and.vorbis is just too damn long..ogg is just about right.
Just call it ogg (.ogg) and let the software figure out what flavor of ogg it is.
Besides, scientifically speaking:) It has been proven that names with two g's in them will be successful, just look at google.
Ogg is easier to say than Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is easier to write than Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is a lot catchier a name than Ogg Vorbis. It is very natural that Ogg Vorbis would be known as Ogg and that files would be known as ogg files.
No problem here, nothing to see, please move along.
word check. society and govnernment are not the same thing. In most societies except totalitarian corporate states (like Turkmenistan), governement is a subset of society. Society also includes culture and norms of behavior and interaction as well as arts and sciences and even entertainment and sports.
Unless of course you live in Europe in which case you probably have a minister for each of the things I have listed.
We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it.
"having only the pieces you want running"... this is great! They see having only the software that you want running as a technological advance that is somewhere down the road?
How is unnatural selection different from direct genetic manipulation? We have been selectively breeding ourselves and our livestock for thousands of years to produce results we deem desirable. How is this not considered genetic engineering? How is it better to leave human evolution to chance? It seems that it is a few thousand years too late to put this cat back in the bag.
If people are concerned that smarter, healthier and stronger people will have an advantage, then they should get smarter, healthier and stronger.
And they should pay more attention to civil rights, so that legal restraints are not watered down with every election. So, someday when inevitably someone is better than you in some tangible way, that you have no less potential to improve your own life.
Human potential must not be limited by the fear of others, Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness includes changing my genome for my betterment and the betterment of my children. I have no right, no right to prevent you from living your life to it's potential either, genetically enhanced or not.
The last thing that we need are standards of mediocrity to establish norms by which we can not exceed.
"These ISPs charge spammers much more for their connectivity in return for the ISP *not* disconnecting the spammer, no matter how many complaints are received. Protected by these so-called "pink contracts" the spammer is free to do just about whatever he wants and his ISP will do nothing."
So, why couldn't other service providers choose to block that ISPs network from reaching their own... Seems like it would just take a few backbone providers to fall in line and we would see a huge reduction in spam.
If I started sending out millions of spam emails using my ISP, then I'm certain I would be shutdown very quickly. So why don't they just unplug the worst offenders?
Eventually they will run out of aliases and addresses to use. But I suspect that the access providers make a lot of money from spam, probably providing a premium service to spammers much like the adult hosting business. Or maybe the access providers are just so big now that they just don't notice where the spam comes from? I doubt it though, if they were really losing money they would shut them down in a second.
Even if spam is not coming from your network, then networks could just not peer with networks that allow spammers to operate without discretion, ie those that send out unsolicited emails with false origination information or use brute force spamming techniques such as dictionary matching.
The worst spammers are akin to a DoS attack, which can be tracked down and stopped. This is basically the same thing. So why not just unplug the spammers one by one?
Or are they somehow smarter than us? Maybe these are genetically engineered super smart spammers that can anticipate our every move? No, its just the people that can deny them access aren't motivated enough.
I'd say between 4 to 8 million dollars(probably over a 4 to 5 year year period given the lifetime of PCs in corporate environments), but only if Dell would only offer workstations with Linux preinstalled for less than those with windows.
Although, I think the LPs should tone down the "we just want to fire everyone that works in government" rhetoric. There are some good people doing good things in government we should do our best to make certain that their work continues outside of goverment. Any major change in society will hurt people unless it is done gradually over time.
With that said, I think I've been up too late figuring out my "basis"... If line 3 is greater than line 45 then multiply line 23 by.20 otherwise... skip the next section and go kick your local congressman's ass.
Slashdot Mirror
You are exactly the problem of which I speak. People that wish to hide behind history and not learn from it.
I've studied history. My relatives are Cherokee. I've been to the reservation. I know that the reservations are sometimes the worst pieces of land in the US and that people often do poorly there.
No good can come from blaming eachother for the mistakes of someone that we never knew. It is irrational and wrong. Just because people have hurt eachother in the past doesn't mean they should do so today.
"but in your case, your opinions seem less backed up by logic and more based on a desire to be contrary for the sake of contrariness."
;)
i disagree.
Geek reading is probably not exactly Shakespeare, I mostly just read Slashdot. Which is probably more like that experiment with the monkeys.
"Like it or not, there were non-European peoples here thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and attempts to downplay that fact by saying they weren't "native" (only in the sense that human beings as a biological species didn't evolve here; their cultures and languages did) smack of an intent to reduce or dismiss the legitimacy of their claims."
Of course it is an attempt to delegitimize their claims, the term Native is politcal, since most areas of this planet have been populated and repopulated several times over by various different types of peoples mixing their cultures and biology. Are the Eqyptians of today really the Egyptians of history? Are the Russians really the Natives of Russia? Heck the British Isles are a mish mash of a few thousand years of invasion and rape by various Kingdoms and empires. Don't even try to begin to think of Israel in terms of Native and non-Native. So, what of it? Are we willing to return to a philosophy when historical injustice is used to justify injustice today? When one people can claim that they have been wronged in the past, so that they are somehow immune to the moral responsiblity of their actions today.
Yes, people fear the term Native anything and rightly so. It has been used to take people's land. In America, it hasn't been used to take back Manhattan or the National Mall, but rather it is used to take land of rural peoples, those that are unable to defend themselves. Especially in America, where so many of our ancestors came here to flee those that would use history to steal the future through wars and oppression, can anyone not see that history must be studied dispassionately and learned from. Not be used to justify the whim and avarices of today.
So, I won't tell another person how they should regard themselves or how they should associate, if you wish to call yourself Native American, so be it. It does not give a person a right to theft, just as I would not seek to justify the sins of the past.
Just no one call me a "European."
Shutting down OpenRelays will have a negligable effect on Spam, since any Internet connected computer can send tens of thousands of spams before anyone would even notice.
Also, there may be legitimate reasons to have OpenRelays. Much like there are legitimate reasons to have DVD copying software. Maybe only a few good reasons, but enough that they should not be banned outright.
The only legal action that these legal folks should be taking is against those spammers using deceptive practices, which is about all of them these days. For instance the false sender information and the innability to be removed from the list. Life was okay when you could get removed from a mailing list and you really wouldn't get any more spam from them, but now they just use it as a confirmation that the email is active and to send more email.
Open SMTP relays are not the problem any more than Open Routers are. Find the individuals that are sending these things and you will stop the problem.
Seems like AI has progressed about as far as it can go inside the box, only machines that can proactively interact with an environment as people do will learn to think like people.
Imagine what kind of thing you would be without vision, touch, smell, hearing or the ability to move and change your environment. Without these forms of interaction where would human intelligence be?
Seems that a Budhist philosphical approach is most helpful here, ie we are our parts, not more and not less. We are what we are. If you wish to create something that is like a human, you should take an inventory of our parts figure out how they fit together and try to find analogous electronics, software and hardware.
Which is precisely what a lot of the robot folks have started doing. Except that most have started a bit smaller and have modeled insects instead. Finding that they can model seemingly complex insect behavior with simple algorithms and machines.
Although, perhaps the next best step isn't building real robots at all, which can be expensive, error prone and time consuming, but building virtual robots that can be placed in virtual environments of our invention, somewhat like a "Matrix" virtual reality with intelligent agents that can learn. This approach is more computer intensive, since the environment as well as the agent would require large amounts of computing resources, also, the agent would have to perceive the "environment"
Seems that many more forms of human nature could be investigated in this way.
We should tax slow food instead. It would "incentivize" people to spend less time eating so they could be more productive.
You bring up an important point. There is risk in anything and our society seems hell bent on eliminating all risk at the expense of reason. I won't argue against the space shuttle on risk grounds alone as long as nobody is forcing these folks to go into the Space Shuttle, then the risk to their lives is there's alone (excepting the risk of loss of a valuable individual to the group)
But this should be a cost(including lives and resources) benefit analysis. Earth orbit is not an unexplored frontier anymore, we have been sending people there for 40 years, we can see it from the ground and it has been used for productive purposes almost from the beginning. If NASA were to close up shop, it would still be explored. Nasa is sending people into orbit largely to do life sciences experiments on them. The program is very expensive and people die. So the question as I see it is: Should we be sending people into space using as much of our common resources as it takes with as much risk for the benefit we are recieving?
If this was a mission to Mars, then yes, but until then the answer has to be no. I can't even remotely begin to see how someone can reason otherwise... please someone explain to me the great benefit for the American taxpayer of putting people into earth orbit at such great expense. They are not bringing back resources, or building any practical infrastructure, or even exploring an area with the potential of future expansion. The Science that they are doing is largely life sciences about the effects of low G environments. These effects are largely understood to be detrimental to human and other life, which is all that really needs to be understood for future exploration, basically we will just have to minimize or eliminate exposure to low G much like exposure to radiation. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand this point.
Sure I would want to go on a shuttle ride given the risk alone, but that doesn't mean it is right to be taking people's money to do it.
Risk be damned, I want my money spent either openning a new frontier or paying off the public debt here at home.
Agreed on SSL. Why should a web credit card transaction be "more secure" than a telephone credit card transaction. The likelyhood that someone is listening to my web transaction is about as likely that someone is listening to my phone call, when I order Chinese, and writing down my credit card number. Yes it happens, but that's why they make jails.
It seems like people were so hell bent on making sure people felt comfortable spending money online that they threw out common sense in the process.
As for email, I haven't read the proposals, but I don't believe any changes are needed to the technology. Like I said before, that's what jails are made for.
It should be very easy to trace data transmissions with the help of the Telecoms and shut down the offenders.
The only change to email I would support is to role in IM support to email, that way you could flag an email as an IM and then the client application could decide to display it differently than other email. Which is all that Instant Messaging really is anyway, email that is displayed differently.
no, the reason I don't own my own business is because I make much more money working for other people without many of the worries and risks...
interoperability is just a fact of life even between versions, when I worked at a small company we had problems openning the latest Word documents not because we didn't have MS Word, but rather our version was too old. So, data exchange with outside sources is an ongoing challenge. We will likely never have completely standardized formats. But given Linux's history, so far it offers the greatest numbers of conversion tools that I have seen.
Last time I openned a Word doc on a linux system I had no problem. I could even save a word compatible document. I assume there were some features left out and I could forsee a business that needed to run MS for some business reason, just as much as I have seen companies which need to run Macs, but as a standard office system for a small business just making an initial investment, The current Linux distributions offer more value in additional free software than Mac or MS. Combined with MS's drive towards a more subscription based model, it seems the wisest long term decision to stick with Linux.
I simply don't have a moral objection to Microsoft, they make a good product, but the price both short term and long term is simply too high given the alternatives. If Microsoft Windows with Office (word, excel, powerpoint) were 30 bucks per license my attitude might be different. But even at that price Linux would still be a good choice.
Economics, economics, economics.
If I started a business today, I would use only Linux for the office. It is much more economical and if you ever decide you need to customize software to your business model, your best bet is with Linux. Unless you don't mind shelling out tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees above the additional development costs.
Technology is a tool which should serve those that buy it not those that have sold it. If I buy a hammer I want to use it any damn way I please, it should be no different with a friggin' computer.
" I don't understand the hostility towards Lindows thats prevalent on /."
My guess is that it is mostly a snobbish reaction to the Walmart connection.
Everyone here on slashdot still treats Dell with kid gloves even though they cowtowed to Microsoft by burying their Linux offerings deep in the bowels of dell.com. People rejoiced when Dell said they would start selling computers with Linux pre-installed. Nowhere is their an option to choose between microsoft or linux on a product configuration screen that I have ever found. Yet even after this half-hearted linux support, still there is great geek loyalty to the brand.
Let's face it we all like our brands and until our favorite brands buy in to linux we will not be happy. Seeing Linux on Walmart's shelves will just make us feel like linux is a cheap alternative and not the better system it really is. Maybe people could start calling dell instead of ordering on line and when they start asking the salesperson to configure their PC with Linux we might see some action.
"Sounds like he didn't really have a valid answer to justify this.."
Okay here is the valid answer in simple terms... It was easier.
True this doesn't go any way towards proving life actually came from another world which is history not science. It either did or didn't happen and would be pretty hard to prove either way. Science can only say whether it is possible.
This incident can show under certain conditions living cells can come through the atmosphere alive, but we already knew that. Humans have been coming through the atmosphere alive for decades with some protection, much like these creatures had, heat shield, etc.
What we need to do is to find a solar system with a planet with size and atmospheric density like earth's without any life and sprinkle all sorts of different genentically tagged organisms around wait a few thousand years and see how many made it to the surface viably... Of course to do the experiment right we would need to find many such worlds to have some controls.
Someone should realy get started soon.
Germline alteration is just too risky.
Germline alteration is too risky with current techniques, but why shouldn't we want to incorporate this trait into our genome and make it inheritable?? If it were shown to have no great ill effects and would greatly increase the human lifespan and quality of life... then why not go for it?
Conversly, Why take the risk that the anti-cancer factory is going to burn down with all the anti-cancer researchers inside? Just build this into our genome and then as long as people exist they will benefit from the discovery.
Drugs manufacturers would go out of business long before the human race would.
" Vorbis sounds much cooler than Ogg. If they were called Vorbis files, it might not be an obscure format known only to naively-idealistic computer geeks..."
.vorbis is just too damn long. .ogg is just about right.
:) It has been proven that names with two g's in them will be successful, just look at google.
I argue the opposite, not so much from the coolness factor, but rather the uniqueness factor. Vorbis is a non-unique sounding name. In marketing you strive for a simple unique brand that is distinguishable from others. The Ogg Vorbis format has suffered by being called ogg vorbis, too many words.
People say "I downloaded an mp3", people might say "I downloaded an ogg" people won't say "I downloaded an ogg vorbis" and "I downloaded an ogg vorbis file" is much too wordy. Plus people are used to calling media files by what their extension is and
Just call it ogg (.ogg) and let the software figure out what flavor of ogg it is.
Besides, scientifically speaking
Ogg is easier to say than Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is easier to write than Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is a lot catchier a name than Ogg Vorbis. It is very natural that Ogg Vorbis would be known as Ogg and that files would be known as ogg files.
No problem here, nothing to see, please move along.
word check. society and govnernment are not the same thing. In most societies except totalitarian corporate states (like Turkmenistan), governement is a subset of society. Society also includes culture and norms of behavior and interaction as well as arts and sciences and even entertainment and sports.
Unless of course you live in Europe in which case you probably have a minister for each of the things I have listed.
We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it.
"having only the pieces you want running"... this is great! They see having only the software that you want running as a technological advance that is somewhere down the road?
How is unnatural selection different from direct genetic manipulation? We have been selectively breeding ourselves and our livestock for thousands of years to produce results we deem desirable. How is this not considered genetic engineering? How is it better to leave human evolution to chance? It seems that it is a few thousand years too late to put this cat back in the bag.
If people are concerned that smarter, healthier and stronger people will have an advantage, then they should get smarter, healthier and stronger.
And they should pay more attention to civil rights, so that legal restraints are not watered down with every election. So, someday when inevitably someone is better than you in some tangible way, that you have no less potential to improve your own life.
Human potential must not be limited by the fear of others, Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness includes changing my genome for my betterment and the betterment of my children. I have no right, no right to prevent you from living your life to it's potential either, genetically enhanced or not.
The last thing that we need are standards of mediocrity to establish norms by which we can not exceed.
"These ISPs charge spammers much more for their connectivity in return for the ISP *not* disconnecting the spammer, no matter how many complaints are received. Protected by these so-called "pink contracts" the spammer is free to do just about whatever he wants and his ISP will do nothing."
So, why couldn't other service providers choose to block that ISPs network from reaching their own... Seems like it would just take a few backbone providers to fall in line and we would see a huge reduction in spam.
If I started sending out millions of spam emails using my ISP, then I'm certain I would be shutdown very quickly. So why don't they just unplug the worst offenders?
Eventually they will run out of aliases and addresses to use. But I suspect that the access providers make a lot of money from spam, probably providing a premium service to spammers much like the adult hosting business. Or maybe the access providers are just so big now that they just don't notice where the spam comes from? I doubt it though, if they were really losing money they would shut them down in a second.
Even if spam is not coming from your network, then networks could just not peer with networks that allow spammers to operate without discretion, ie those that send out unsolicited emails with false origination information or use brute force spamming techniques such as dictionary matching.
The worst spammers are akin to a DoS attack, which can be tracked down and stopped. This is basically the same thing. So why not just unplug the spammers one by one?
Or are they somehow smarter than us? Maybe these are genetically engineered super smart spammers that can anticipate our every move? No, its just the people that can deny them access aren't motivated enough.
I'd say between 4 to 8 million dollars(probably over a 4 to 5 year year period given the lifetime of PCs in corporate environments), but only if Dell would only offer workstations with Linux preinstalled for less than those with windows.
Dell is the next windows gatekeeper.
I'm the bastard son of Ayn Rand and most of the Libertarian Party
.20 otherwise... skip the next section and go kick your local congressman's ass.
Although, I think the LPs should tone down the "we just want to fire everyone that works in government" rhetoric. There are some good people doing good things in government we should do our best to make certain that their work continues outside of goverment. Any major change in society will hurt people unless it is done gradually over time.
With that said, I think I've been up too late figuring out my "basis"... If line 3 is greater than line 45 then multiply line 23 by
Your flaw here is that you assume God is a created being. However, in order to be an all powerful god, God must have always existed.
No, He never tried to define God, which is best. Based upon his arguments I would say that the creator would be undefinable and without nature.
and how is time a "man-made creation"? Wouldn't space and time be God-made?