"How did you feel when you watched your daughter get run over by the school bus?"
The correct answer to this is, of course: "Disgust. I would have got ten times the amount from the thirty life-insurance policies I took out if she'd been hit by the truck the assassin was driving."
I believe in the right to say what you want, balanced by an equal and opposite right for someone not to have defamatory remarks likely to create a false impression in a reasonable person made about them. In this case, I would say the argument isn't nearly strong enough to meet the defamatory criteria in general (groups in the UK have created Sharia Law enclaves) but if specific, well-defined denominations have distanced themselves from that and yet been tarred by the same brush, they might merit some Government support to assist in their distancing so that the accusations don't affect them.
You notice I said Government support, not legal action, nor slander suits. I do not believe this is a legal issue as much as it is a political issue and an image issue, and Governments are masters of both.
I do not approve of "hate speech" even when it is legal and acceptable at large - it is a commmon brainwashing technique to dehumanize your opponents. World War I was infamous for it, and the legend of the soccer match on Christmas Day was an attempt by someone to fight such degredation. The current conflict is filled with terminology aimed at eliminating the human factor. Both sides are guilty of such psychological warfare, warfare aimed at their own people so that there is unwavering support for their actions.
If there is ever a "just war", then it is hardly going to be necessary to use such techniques. It will be accepted as necessary, by all who are reasonable, without ever having to dehumanize a single element in the conflict.
Of course, stopping such tactics once started is very hard, and stopping others from continuing the cycle is even harder. They are not guilty of a crime, only guilty of being gullible. They're as much a victim as anyone.
So, in this case, I would not consider hate sppech to really be present, but if it were, then it is merely the repetition of hate speech from the political masters, and it is they who should be held fully responsible. They are the trigger-man, those who believe in political hate-speech are merely the victims of conditioning and should be pittied, not punished.
Given the illegality of such an action (basically, it can be classed as anywhere from State-sponsored terrorism to an outright declaration of war - it took something a damn sight smaller than a nuke for America to bomb Libya at about that same time), the American government should breathe a sigh of relief that such actions didn't end all life on the planet there and then. A drunken Boris Yeltsin damn-near went nuclear when they mistook a weather satellite launch for an attack. Can you imagine the paranoid Soviet reaction if they believed a nuclear-like enemy attack had already taken place?
I'm not going to argue rights and wrongs of the Cold War, beyond saying it wa bloody stupid and bloody dangerous, with nutcases that should not so much been in power as in a straitjacket.
However, we must consider that any technologically advanced nation - particularly with a strong presence in Asia, where most chips have been manufactured for a long time - would be quite capable of launching such an attack on America. The Chinese would be immediate suspects, and the severity of Japanese nationalism doesn't rule out parties interested in a little revenge.
That is not all, however. Chips have reached a complexity of such that an infiltrator could modify the design in progress to implant backdoors, wiresniffing, and so on. That would take enormous skill, but there are mathematical geniuses in China who could do it. Hell, over the past couple of years or so, two Israeli spys have been caught passing on American secrets, and they do have some of the finest Universities in the world. I doubt Israel has planted such backdoors, and discourage paranoia along those lines, I am merely pointing out that there has been abuse of trust by almost every nation in the world towards every other. (Antarctica can safely claim such an exception, owing to the lack of any human natives.)
Electronics in use in nuclear, chemical and other plants of significant size is generally old (upgrading a segment of a complex mission-critical system is unsafe, so avoided as much as possible) and it is unimaginable that such systems will ever be screened against flaws designed by hostiles. Even where screening is possible, if the design is compromised, there is very little you can test against. If the flaw is stealthy (ie: totally inert until some very specific conditions occur over a period of time, making them invisible to all simple validations of state changes) then such flaws can only be found by low-level analysis of the specification, and the current belief amongst mathematicians is that this isn't possible except for very trivial problems.
(I'm not convinced the problems have to be as trivial as insisted, but I've reached the point where I don't give a damn if the present and former superpowers go fry themselves. I've also reached the point where I'm convinced academics don't give a damn about doing any interesting work. So what does it matter to me if these two dove-tail into the end of the world?)
World Wars I and II barely show in the world population statistics. Food is dangerously scarse with cerial crops suffering a currently-untreatable blight in many parts of the world - including the Americas, and both global warming and farming malpractice (overuse of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers, failure to crop-rotate, destruction of hedgerows, use of fire in stubble/pest removal, destruction of wetlands) have severely depleted arable (as opposed to merely empty) land in America and Europe.
Sizable parts of East Anglia are almost dust-bowls, these days. A long, long way from being the heartland of the British agricultural industry. Once upon a time, you'd see a field with good soil and a good-size crop. Now, you see soil that's crumbly and of poor quality, leeching salt, and incapable of sustaining much of anything. The difficulty of maintaining the sea defences is not the only reason the government is considering letting the sea take back so much. It's that there's nothing much left worth defending.
As for the world supporting twice the population, it can't sustain the existing population. Cod levels are down to a few percent of their pre-commercial levels. Extinction rates are rising sharply. Great swathes of the Amazon basin are cut down just to supply meat for northern America. We're talking an area the size of the country of Belgium each year, every year, to handle the increasing American population. And America isn't even the fastest-growing country.
Small problem. The US has an astrnomically high birth rate. Mind you, it also has the highest infant mortality rate outside of the third world as well, so I guess it balances out somehow.
...it is not a loss. The case was abandoned, not ruled on, and this could be problematical. Rulings carry weight in future cases, actions by either party generally do not. If the judge had ruled Skype had violated GPL, in the appeal, it would have substantially boosted the GPL's legal status. As it is, only the original case law exists. Which may be sufficient, but more would likely have helped.
It's the software and hardware that's a problem. Ohhhhhhhhhhh! THAT sort of reader! OpenLibrary is the best I've seen, but the software isn't quite there yet and is poorly distributed. Most guttenreaders are abysmal, and most other readers are glorified read-only text "editors". For the blind, the situation is worse. Screen readers don't read cleanly, even very expensive ones, many say out punctuation rather than modify the speech patterns (Superior Software's Speech! did better than that in the 1980s), and many are violently unstable.
Part of the problem with visual readers is that there's often clutter and the scrolling/paging is often weird. OpenLibrary presents rather well, in this respect. It tends to do badly with used screen area and it's a bugger to set up and use locally for ebooks.
Some of the finest storytellers of our time - Alan Garner, Isaac Asimov, JRR Tolkien, for example - applied logic and rational thinking to their novels. Carl Sagan's "Contact", based around very sound scientific principles, was highly respectable. 2001 was more "scientific" and realistic than 2010 - name the book (or movie) with the better reputation. Indeed, many famous artists were also scientists, and many famous scientists were also artists.
Clearly, there is a branch of storytelling and artistic creativity which is highly in tune with the scientific method and Socratic thought. Not all, sure, or even necessarily a whole lot, but the two are not exclusive. On the other hand, you are correct in saying that no quality science is conducted in a purely creative sense. "Thought experiments" come the closest, being a form of daydreaming and roleplaying, but they are still more entrenched in rational thought than emotional whim.
Ethics is unconcerned with the actions of others. Ethics is concerned with the actions of the individual person or group deciding on how to act. A decision based on others is a decision based on cowardice, because it must result in the ultimate decision being made by the greatest coward. It is also a decision based on foolishness, because it must result in the ultimate power being granted to the greatest fool. The wise do not concern themselves with the folly of others, their concern is with the result of what ends up being done. What ends up not being done, or who ends up not doing it is of no importance. Even the youngest child has wisdom enough to know a copy-cat is worthy of nothing more than a sneer, and to copy another's decision because they neglect their duties to another is the most pathetic copy-cat of all.
But what are those consequences? A deprived society consumes more than it produces, it is a drain on the economy of the world and a burden to all. A reconstructed society produces more than it consumes and will regenerate the cost of the reconstruction. A society that can pay for itself and more is a society that has repaid those who invest in it being such. A fool might argue that others could benefit too. They probably won't. You tend to receive what you put into other's lives. (You gain almost nothing from what you put into your own life. Hedonists tend to have empty lives and emptier pockets.) An optimal life is therefore one that gives much and gives appropriately. (There are fascinating charts on the different forms of giving and how useful they are. Many forms of giving are not giving at all and are quite useless.)
This is mathematically provable, but it has also been the cornerstone of many a social awakening throughout history. The earliest philosopher-scientists tended to be ascetics, which is going a bit too far, but their underlying principle that all things are linked and that you cannot attain insight or wisdom through the exclusion of a part of life, is sound. That same underlying principle can be found in all social efforts to develop progressive, compassionate societies with minimal suffering.
I've chosen those words carefully, and a few might recognize what becomes the first step. All of life is suffering, and that includes the suffering of fools and idiots. Pomposity, grandiosity, nationalism, copy-cat-ism - they feel great, but ultimately stem from deluded thinking. They are a way of hiding suffering or blaming our actions on others, rather than take responsibility for ourselves. If you believe yourself responsible for your decisions, then the decisions of another are merely the scenery passing by. It is analogous to a full-information scenario. Your strategy, if fundamentally correct, is determined only by the scenario - although the reverse is not true. Not everything determined only by the scenario is correct. It is strictly a one-way function.
If wisdom is ever found in the mouths of children, it is because those adults have lost sight of what matters. Think more like a child, not in their stupidity but in their wisdom. They're smart enough to recognize that many of the things you attach so much weight to just don't matter. They're chimera, impermanent details of the moment, the illusions of ignorance, and have nothing to do with an optimal life.
If you prefer, look at it holistically. A healthy world is like a healthy body. It doesn't matter where a cancer starts, or what mechanisms in the body ignore it, if you fail to treat it, it will kill you. It is of no importance if the spleen fails to pull its own weight, you do what is needed and benefit yourself, or you punish your body to punish the spleen and you will die. If you do what you need to do in the first place, though, the odds of that cancer ever forming are greatly reduced and the odds of you overcoming the harm quickly are greatly increased. That must be your concern, not what some insignificant bunch of cells somewhere decides. (Of course, they do help, it greatly simplifies your task, but the effective cure must be independent of who does what, and be solely dependent on what needs doing getting done.)
This is neither left nor right, neither karmic or non-karmic, it simply is.
If it was sequestered in a porus layer containing sufficient water, you'd end up with carbonic acid. If you pumped calcium down at the same time, eventually you will form calcium carbonate. It might take a few million years, but can you imagine the shock on the faces of the geologists who eventually rediscovered it?
Depends on the terminal velocity (and don't anyone say 110 cps), the nature of the impact (going through the roof of a building would probably be different from hitting a really deep snowbank, the sort where people have fallen from aircraft from a mile up, hit and survived) and the angle of descent at time of impact (forwards velocity would affect the casing first, the platter much later).
However, the magnetic fields are certain to have been weakened and disrupted. How much is unclear, but probably by a fair bit. Knowing by how much would give a better understanding of how recoverable the layers of magnetic fields on a hard drive are. If it is possible to recover extremely weak magnetic fields, possibly with stronger random magnetic fields superimposed, then you know multi-layer extraction is possible. Which, if Seagate can do, does raise interesting questions about missing e-mails on corporate (eg: Microsoft) and Governmental hard drives. IFF multi-layer recovery was used, THEN multi-layer recovery can be used elsewhere.
If, however, it was just physical damage, then that doesn't apply. Still, 90-99% seems damn good for what can only be described as the ultimate in hard disk crashes.
I think there's a justification in maintaining copyright on a case-by-case basis of something that is self-sustaining, but even then only in exceptional circumstances - say, where there's grounds for believing that the artistic value of some art (not its commercial value, only its artistic value) would be demonstrably degraded. In other words, if the copyright is actually benefiting the art for art's sake, then don't tamper with it, but the default should be to assume that it isn't unless there is evidence contemporary to the decision that clearly shows it is.
It's very unclear to me that there's a film studio around that could remotely claim a self-sustaning existance AND a self-perpetuating artistic merit to any of their productions, with perhaps one or two exceptions for societal-changing, history-making classics. Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" probably merited a longer lifespan in the copyright system than, oh, the movie of "Independence Day". The latter made a lot more money, but had no lasting value of any kind. As I see it, society as a whole should have the right to temporarily waive its rights to claim public domain when society as a whole benefits from doing so, but that it should neither be allowed to nor compelled to when exclusive rights become exclusive benefits.
I would have to say that skepticism of the US' intent is probably well-deserved. It's probably not the whole story, but given the limited value of destroyers in preservation - guns don't save people, people do, to misquote a popular phrase - and given that the "best" exit strategy at the moment seems to be a bigger crisis somewhere else, it's probably quite sufficient to make a great many people nervous.
"have to" is an interesting choice of words. Nobody is compelled to be ethical, civilized or compassionate, that is true. The thing is, you cannot be enlightened, rational or progressive if you are not ethical, civilized AND compassionate, and no nation on the scale of America can hope to remain functional or even a country if it is not enlightened, rational AND progressive. Civilizations that will themselves into uncaring, xenophobic and irrational mindsets collapse. The Soviet Union did not fall because of America, it fell because you cannot sustain an organization on such a scale with a mindset of selfish greed and contempt. Selfishness and paranoia are self-destructive. This is not a political possibility, it is a mathematical certainty, inescapable, merely delayable.
But no civilization (or individual) "has" to survive. That is a choice. It is a choice reflected less by that civilization's attitude towards itself as it is reflected by that civilization's attitude towards others. That is why civilizations with a poor attitude decay, wither and die. It may take a while - the fall of the Roman Empire was spread over 800 years - but if rot is what you give, rot is all you'll have. It may seem a paradox that it is in the giving that you gain, but it is the unmutable truth.
Arguably, since the cyclone/wave damage was only severe because the mangroves were all cut down, the human suffering from nature was a direct result of the natural suffering from humans. Was this their own decision (which could be considered a Solomonesque consequence), a decision of their Government (a remarkably foolish one, if so, and only a fool would deny the needy of aid on the advice of a fool), or commercial pressure from countries like the US (which is the primary cause of rainforest destruction)?
If outside commercial pressure is the root cause of the devastation, then the blood price (as the Celts referred to it) should be a function of the gain from that pressure, not simply a function of the need ultimately caused by it. To deprive others of environmentally-provided protection from the inevitable is a crime against society. Indirectness is no excuse if the chain of events is pre-determined and inescapable. However, nobody at this point has identified that that was the reason the mangroves were cut down, so this is no more than an if/then.
If this was an internal political decision, then I fail to see the importance of the politicians. America has never respected sovereign status on any other issue, when it has been convenient, so why recognize it when it is not an issue of convenience but life itself?
If this was a local decision, made in the knowledge that it was completely suicidal, well, if we are now recognizing the right of individuals to terminate their own lives of their own free will, and societies are merely the product of the consensus of individuals, what right do we have to deny soieties the right to terminate themselves? Again, this is an if/then, not a judgement or an opinion of whether this was in fact what happened.
You want Captain Jack, from Torchwood. Y'know, the world's mot famous secret organization, beyond the government, outside the United Nations, second left over the flyover, straight on at Budgens, first right at the lights then first left at the Kwiksave. He should have them back before they were taken.
A ram-raider could be in and taken half the data centre within four minutes, not to mention being rather better protected than most security guards. You can't protect for everything, obviously, but I would consider that rather the point. Because you can't protect for everything, there's really no point in creating layers that will never contribute much. It also brings into question whether external data centres are even useful for servers that need any significant security.
First, I think the RIAA lawyers are probably doing nothing different from any lawyer - trying to get as many suits dismissed as possible, so they only have to argue the smallest subset possible. I can understand such a philosophy, when time is money, there's a pressure to get quick results, judgements are worse publicity than accusations, and so on. That is probably more a function of the legal system and the American attitude to high-pressure living/working than the RIAA.
Second, if a motion is frivolous, the judge should be doing more than just wagging a finger. Abuse of legitimate procedures devalues those procedures for others, as it increases the likelihood of judges in future regarding all such motions in a more hostile light. The judicial system does not just have a responsibility for those who stand before it today, but a responsibility for all who may ever stand before it, which means that there should be subtle encouragement of motions which are plausible (even if they are ultimately dismissed) and an unsubtle discouragement of motions which cannot possibly be construed as reasonable.
It would be interesting if the courts had greater powers (within reasonable bounds) to deal with contempt of court and any other abuse of court procedures, and a greater willingness to use those powers when lawyers or clients go beyond mere over-enthusiasm to being out of control. It wouldn't need to be severe. A compulsary psychiatric evaluation would be interesting, as it conveys all kinds of messages (real and imagined) about those who try to twist things.
I also think that some sort of staggered system, where you have a first round of aggressive fact-finding that feeds into a second round trial system, would help avoid the problem, the idea being that dismissal or whatever doesn't have any meaning until after the facts have been established, and accusatory systems are not very good at establishing facts, they're too busy constructing theories, but fact-finding missions are very bad at establishing context. Hence the need for both in a way that doesn't lend one to distract from the other.
The SCO/IBM case demonstrates a lot of what I'm talking about - a lot of the hold-ups and confusion was caused by wild speculation and insinuation, a lot of the useful stuff was done by establishing the groundwork, and all of this was before any actual trial had taken place. It would seem to follow that tuning the system according to experiences of what has been effective is better than maintaining a multi-millenia-old method that has acquired a lot of cruft and could do with some refactoring and bugfixing.
A glance at the high-rated posts suggests the majority would agree (at least to some degree), myself included. I would suggest an additional law which stipulated that any normally-granted immunity for the phone companies, police, etc, did not apply in cases where covert, unauthorized monitoring could be shown to have taken place in the knowledge that that ois what it was and that such immunity could neither be restored nor granted where it had not previously existed in such cases.
(The idea is that with power must come responsibility, and that such responsibility should be enforceable without making the emergency services paranoid in the process. It's hard to have fully-functional checks and balances, there are probably better ways to do it than the above idea, but I am a firm believer in the principle that no power should be granted without an equal and opposite power being genuinely available when the original power is misused.)
Re:Second person narration as a method of aggravat
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 1
This is why I loved the FORCE command in MUD. This gave you something like a (5% * difference in levels) chance of forcing another player anywhere in the game universe to do something. And in MUD, the syntax was particularly rich, so "something" could get fun. (You could never force wizards to do anything, but even relatively low-level characters could force new characters to do almost anything. Sure, the novelty wore off quickly, but some of the newbies could be irritating and getting them to blow themselves up when they were was great stress relief. Mind you, the wizards (I think they were 11th or 12th level characters) could use almost any spell like that with 100% chance of success, and at least a few had macros pre-programmed to deal with people who were too vicious towards newbies.
The practical upshot, though, was that the 2nd person dialogue was mixed with a certain element of action on the part of your character that you had no control over. It could be mind-bending at times, and my mind already looked like Uri Gellar had spent a drunken afternoon in the vicinity.
When DMing dungeons, I've rarely ever had a character do something as the result of controlling them. I've seen that style and although it works well for some DMs, it's not been my approach. I've tended more towards complex puzzles, X-Files-like conspiracies, double-dealing NPCs and other nasty surprises, but not random. It's got to be obvious in hindsight, or the players won't scream at themselves for not seeing it and walking straight into an ambush.
(I scripted out some fun live roleplaying adventures using the Spirit of Adventure game system that way. You would not believe the stupidity of some of the players, but generally it seems that players free to make Really Bad Mistakes works out much more enjoyable than single-path games or games that rob players of freedom - or even the illusion of it - too often.)
Slashdot Mirror
The correct answer to this is, of course: "Disgust. I would have got ten times the amount from the thirty life-insurance policies I took out if she'd been hit by the truck the assassin was driving."
You notice I said Government support, not legal action, nor slander suits. I do not believe this is a legal issue as much as it is a political issue and an image issue, and Governments are masters of both.
I do not approve of "hate speech" even when it is legal and acceptable at large - it is a commmon brainwashing technique to dehumanize your opponents. World War I was infamous for it, and the legend of the soccer match on Christmas Day was an attempt by someone to fight such degredation. The current conflict is filled with terminology aimed at eliminating the human factor. Both sides are guilty of such psychological warfare, warfare aimed at their own people so that there is unwavering support for their actions.
If there is ever a "just war", then it is hardly going to be necessary to use such techniques. It will be accepted as necessary, by all who are reasonable, without ever having to dehumanize a single element in the conflict.
Of course, stopping such tactics once started is very hard, and stopping others from continuing the cycle is even harder. They are not guilty of a crime, only guilty of being gullible. They're as much a victim as anyone.
So, in this case, I would not consider hate sppech to really be present, but if it were, then it is merely the repetition of hate speech from the political masters, and it is they who should be held fully responsible. They are the trigger-man, those who believe in political hate-speech are merely the victims of conditioning and should be pittied, not punished.
I'm not going to argue rights and wrongs of the Cold War, beyond saying it wa bloody stupid and bloody dangerous, with nutcases that should not so much been in power as in a straitjacket.
However, we must consider that any technologically advanced nation - particularly with a strong presence in Asia, where most chips have been manufactured for a long time - would be quite capable of launching such an attack on America. The Chinese would be immediate suspects, and the severity of Japanese nationalism doesn't rule out parties interested in a little revenge.
That is not all, however. Chips have reached a complexity of such that an infiltrator could modify the design in progress to implant backdoors, wiresniffing, and so on. That would take enormous skill, but there are mathematical geniuses in China who could do it. Hell, over the past couple of years or so, two Israeli spys have been caught passing on American secrets, and they do have some of the finest Universities in the world. I doubt Israel has planted such backdoors, and discourage paranoia along those lines, I am merely pointing out that there has been abuse of trust by almost every nation in the world towards every other. (Antarctica can safely claim such an exception, owing to the lack of any human natives.)
Electronics in use in nuclear, chemical and other plants of significant size is generally old (upgrading a segment of a complex mission-critical system is unsafe, so avoided as much as possible) and it is unimaginable that such systems will ever be screened against flaws designed by hostiles. Even where screening is possible, if the design is compromised, there is very little you can test against. If the flaw is stealthy (ie: totally inert until some very specific conditions occur over a period of time, making them invisible to all simple validations of state changes) then such flaws can only be found by low-level analysis of the specification, and the current belief amongst mathematicians is that this isn't possible except for very trivial problems.
(I'm not convinced the problems have to be as trivial as insisted, but I've reached the point where I don't give a damn if the present and former superpowers go fry themselves. I've also reached the point where I'm convinced academics don't give a damn about doing any interesting work. So what does it matter to me if these two dove-tail into the end of the world?)
Sizable parts of East Anglia are almost dust-bowls, these days. A long, long way from being the heartland of the British agricultural industry. Once upon a time, you'd see a field with good soil and a good-size crop. Now, you see soil that's crumbly and of poor quality, leeching salt, and incapable of sustaining much of anything. The difficulty of maintaining the sea defences is not the only reason the government is considering letting the sea take back so much. It's that there's nothing much left worth defending.
As for the world supporting twice the population, it can't sustain the existing population. Cod levels are down to a few percent of their pre-commercial levels. Extinction rates are rising sharply. Great swathes of the Amazon basin are cut down just to supply meat for northern America. We're talking an area the size of the country of Belgium each year, every year, to handle the increasing American population. And America isn't even the fastest-growing country.
Small problem. The US has an astrnomically high birth rate. Mind you, it also has the highest infant mortality rate outside of the third world as well, so I guess it balances out somehow.
...it is not a loss. The case was abandoned, not ruled on, and this could be problematical. Rulings carry weight in future cases, actions by either party generally do not. If the judge had ruled Skype had violated GPL, in the appeal, it would have substantially boosted the GPL's legal status. As it is, only the original case law exists. Which may be sufficient, but more would likely have helped.
Part of the problem with visual readers is that there's often clutter and the scrolling/paging is often weird. OpenLibrary presents rather well, in this respect. It tends to do badly with used screen area and it's a bugger to set up and use locally for ebooks.
Clearly, there is a branch of storytelling and artistic creativity which is highly in tune with the scientific method and Socratic thought. Not all, sure, or even necessarily a whole lot, but the two are not exclusive. On the other hand, you are correct in saying that no quality science is conducted in a purely creative sense. "Thought experiments" come the closest, being a form of daydreaming and roleplaying, but they are still more entrenched in rational thought than emotional whim.
Since limestone forms naturally via this process, that should not be hard. Failing that, though, try the American milk industry.
But what are those consequences? A deprived society consumes more than it produces, it is a drain on the economy of the world and a burden to all. A reconstructed society produces more than it consumes and will regenerate the cost of the reconstruction. A society that can pay for itself and more is a society that has repaid those who invest in it being such. A fool might argue that others could benefit too. They probably won't. You tend to receive what you put into other's lives. (You gain almost nothing from what you put into your own life. Hedonists tend to have empty lives and emptier pockets.) An optimal life is therefore one that gives much and gives appropriately. (There are fascinating charts on the different forms of giving and how useful they are. Many forms of giving are not giving at all and are quite useless.)
This is mathematically provable, but it has also been the cornerstone of many a social awakening throughout history. The earliest philosopher-scientists tended to be ascetics, which is going a bit too far, but their underlying principle that all things are linked and that you cannot attain insight or wisdom through the exclusion of a part of life, is sound. That same underlying principle can be found in all social efforts to develop progressive, compassionate societies with minimal suffering.
I've chosen those words carefully, and a few might recognize what becomes the first step. All of life is suffering, and that includes the suffering of fools and idiots. Pomposity, grandiosity, nationalism, copy-cat-ism - they feel great, but ultimately stem from deluded thinking. They are a way of hiding suffering or blaming our actions on others, rather than take responsibility for ourselves. If you believe yourself responsible for your decisions, then the decisions of another are merely the scenery passing by. It is analogous to a full-information scenario. Your strategy, if fundamentally correct, is determined only by the scenario - although the reverse is not true. Not everything determined only by the scenario is correct. It is strictly a one-way function.
If wisdom is ever found in the mouths of children, it is because those adults have lost sight of what matters. Think more like a child, not in their stupidity but in their wisdom. They're smart enough to recognize that many of the things you attach so much weight to just don't matter. They're chimera, impermanent details of the moment, the illusions of ignorance, and have nothing to do with an optimal life.
If you prefer, look at it holistically. A healthy world is like a healthy body. It doesn't matter where a cancer starts, or what mechanisms in the body ignore it, if you fail to treat it, it will kill you. It is of no importance if the spleen fails to pull its own weight, you do what is needed and benefit yourself, or you punish your body to punish the spleen and you will die. If you do what you need to do in the first place, though, the odds of that cancer ever forming are greatly reduced and the odds of you overcoming the harm quickly are greatly increased. That must be your concern, not what some insignificant bunch of cells somewhere decides. (Of course, they do help, it greatly simplifies your task, but the effective cure must be independent of who does what, and be solely dependent on what needs doing getting done.)
This is neither left nor right, neither karmic or non-karmic, it simply is.
If it was sequestered in a porus layer containing sufficient water, you'd end up with carbonic acid. If you pumped calcium down at the same time, eventually you will form calcium carbonate. It might take a few million years, but can you imagine the shock on the faces of the geologists who eventually rediscovered it?
However, the magnetic fields are certain to have been weakened and disrupted. How much is unclear, but probably by a fair bit. Knowing by how much would give a better understanding of how recoverable the layers of magnetic fields on a hard drive are. If it is possible to recover extremely weak magnetic fields, possibly with stronger random magnetic fields superimposed, then you know multi-layer extraction is possible. Which, if Seagate can do, does raise interesting questions about missing e-mails on corporate (eg: Microsoft) and Governmental hard drives. IFF multi-layer recovery was used, THEN multi-layer recovery can be used elsewhere.
If, however, it was just physical damage, then that doesn't apply. Still, 90-99% seems damn good for what can only be described as the ultimate in hard disk crashes.
It's very unclear to me that there's a film studio around that could remotely claim a self-sustaning existance AND a self-perpetuating artistic merit to any of their productions, with perhaps one or two exceptions for societal-changing, history-making classics. Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" probably merited a longer lifespan in the copyright system than, oh, the movie of "Independence Day". The latter made a lot more money, but had no lasting value of any kind. As I see it, society as a whole should have the right to temporarily waive its rights to claim public domain when society as a whole benefits from doing so, but that it should neither be allowed to nor compelled to when exclusive rights become exclusive benefits.
I would have to say that skepticism of the US' intent is probably well-deserved. It's probably not the whole story, but given the limited value of destroyers in preservation - guns don't save people, people do, to misquote a popular phrase - and given that the "best" exit strategy at the moment seems to be a bigger crisis somewhere else, it's probably quite sufficient to make a great many people nervous.
But no civilization (or individual) "has" to survive. That is a choice. It is a choice reflected less by that civilization's attitude towards itself as it is reflected by that civilization's attitude towards others. That is why civilizations with a poor attitude decay, wither and die. It may take a while - the fall of the Roman Empire was spread over 800 years - but if rot is what you give, rot is all you'll have. It may seem a paradox that it is in the giving that you gain, but it is the unmutable truth.
If outside commercial pressure is the root cause of the devastation, then the blood price (as the Celts referred to it) should be a function of the gain from that pressure, not simply a function of the need ultimately caused by it. To deprive others of environmentally-provided protection from the inevitable is a crime against society. Indirectness is no excuse if the chain of events is pre-determined and inescapable. However, nobody at this point has identified that that was the reason the mangroves were cut down, so this is no more than an if/then.
If this was an internal political decision, then I fail to see the importance of the politicians. America has never respected sovereign status on any other issue, when it has been convenient, so why recognize it when it is not an issue of convenience but life itself?
If this was a local decision, made in the knowledge that it was completely suicidal, well, if we are now recognizing the right of individuals to terminate their own lives of their own free will, and societies are merely the product of the consensus of individuals, what right do we have to deny soieties the right to terminate themselves? Again, this is an if/then, not a judgement or an opinion of whether this was in fact what happened.
I was unaware that ethics()-class functions were tail-recursive and could not be called from outside. How do you bootstrap them?
The US (or any other) Government believing that people have worth? That can't be right.
You want Captain Jack, from Torchwood. Y'know, the world's mot famous secret organization, beyond the government, outside the United Nations, second left over the flyover, straight on at Budgens, first right at the lights then first left at the Kwiksave. He should have them back before they were taken.
A ram-raider could be in and taken half the data centre within four minutes, not to mention being rather better protected than most security guards. You can't protect for everything, obviously, but I would consider that rather the point. Because you can't protect for everything, there's really no point in creating layers that will never contribute much. It also brings into question whether external data centres are even useful for servers that need any significant security.
Since when has the justice department used lawyers? :)
First, I think the RIAA lawyers are probably doing nothing different from any lawyer - trying to get as many suits dismissed as possible, so they only have to argue the smallest subset possible. I can understand such a philosophy, when time is money, there's a pressure to get quick results, judgements are worse publicity than accusations, and so on. That is probably more a function of the legal system and the American attitude to high-pressure living/working than the RIAA.
Second, if a motion is frivolous, the judge should be doing more than just wagging a finger. Abuse of legitimate procedures devalues those procedures for others, as it increases the likelihood of judges in future regarding all such motions in a more hostile light. The judicial system does not just have a responsibility for those who stand before it today, but a responsibility for all who may ever stand before it, which means that there should be subtle encouragement of motions which are plausible (even if they are ultimately dismissed) and an unsubtle discouragement of motions which cannot possibly be construed as reasonable.
It would be interesting if the courts had greater powers (within reasonable bounds) to deal with contempt of court and any other abuse of court procedures, and a greater willingness to use those powers when lawyers or clients go beyond mere over-enthusiasm to being out of control. It wouldn't need to be severe. A compulsary psychiatric evaluation would be interesting, as it conveys all kinds of messages (real and imagined) about those who try to twist things.
I also think that some sort of staggered system, where you have a first round of aggressive fact-finding that feeds into a second round trial system, would help avoid the problem, the idea being that dismissal or whatever doesn't have any meaning until after the facts have been established, and accusatory systems are not very good at establishing facts, they're too busy constructing theories, but fact-finding missions are very bad at establishing context. Hence the need for both in a way that doesn't lend one to distract from the other.
The SCO/IBM case demonstrates a lot of what I'm talking about - a lot of the hold-ups and confusion was caused by wild speculation and insinuation, a lot of the useful stuff was done by establishing the groundwork, and all of this was before any actual trial had taken place. It would seem to follow that tuning the system according to experiences of what has been effective is better than maintaining a multi-millenia-old method that has acquired a lot of cruft and could do with some refactoring and bugfixing.
(The idea is that with power must come responsibility, and that such responsibility should be enforceable without making the emergency services paranoid in the process. It's hard to have fully-functional checks and balances, there are probably better ways to do it than the above idea, but I am a firm believer in the principle that no power should be granted without an equal and opposite power being genuinely available when the original power is misused.)
The practical upshot, though, was that the 2nd person dialogue was mixed with a certain element of action on the part of your character that you had no control over. It could be mind-bending at times, and my mind already looked like Uri Gellar had spent a drunken afternoon in the vicinity.
When DMing dungeons, I've rarely ever had a character do something as the result of controlling them. I've seen that style and although it works well for some DMs, it's not been my approach. I've tended more towards complex puzzles, X-Files-like conspiracies, double-dealing NPCs and other nasty surprises, but not random. It's got to be obvious in hindsight, or the players won't scream at themselves for not seeing it and walking straight into an ambush.
(I scripted out some fun live roleplaying adventures using the Spirit of Adventure game system that way. You would not believe the stupidity of some of the players, but generally it seems that players free to make Really Bad Mistakes works out much more enjoyable than single-path games or games that rob players of freedom - or even the illusion of it - too often.)
...is the Osbourbe 1.5, if the screen size is anything to go by.