Yes its been known for some time (studied it in class two years ago so it must have been around for a good deal of time before then).
His stuff is certainly interesting, and his results about the omega number are bizarre but you are right it isn't THAT revolutionary. Once you accept the results of Godel's theorem the fact that you can somehow concentrate all that unprovability in one place drives the strangeness home but isn't fundamentally upsetting.
Mathematics doesn't really have the kind of assumptions you can disagree with. Two, Four and plus are not the same things in mathematics that we may call two and four in the outside world. Two is by definition the successor of the succesor of 0 and four has a similar definition. Therefore the conclusion that two and two is four follows inevitably from the definitions of two, four and plus because by definition these are the things obeying the appropriate axioms (this may be confusing because we actually use the same words to refer to real world concepts, and concepts in various axiomatic systems which arent always the same thing).
In order for this horror story of forced IE usage the big media and stores need to adopt microsoft only (or heavily favored) web pages. If joe schmuck at aspalliance uses a microsoft only web page the reaction of netscape users is likely to be go shove it.
Yes, even technically unsophisticated users will have this reaction. These people don't want to have to upgrade they expect the technically literate to fix it at their end. It is only when sites they need to access do this that their might be a change.
But if I run a real commercial site what percentage of my cost is in html coding? Probably far less than 5% and for significantly less than double that amount I can get 10% more buisness. For simple economic reasons I will still support netscape. Moreover the harm is probably larger than just a 10% loss of sales. Many sites on the internet are close to indistinguishable from their competitors, for instance the price difference between bn.com and amazon.com in books probably isn't that significant to most people so if they find they can't access amazon from their friends computer or the computer down the hall they very well might switch...thus not counted as part of the 10% netscape users they still are negatively influenced.
Moreover, as everyone who has bought a microsoft computer in the past 5 years has gotten a free IE the use of netscape is a sign of greater computer savy, or at least of longer internet usage. These people are therefore probably more likely to purchase goods and recieve their information off the web thus making that 10% cost even more.
Finally the standardization effect cannot be ignored. If more of my friends use amazon than bn I too am likely to use amazon. Therefore giving away 10% of your business to your competitor may very well result in a much larger loss
Well first off all you need to take into account the adoption time of technology...phones and power were not instantly adopted nationwide.
But even given this I think you, and the article are correct.
The answer to this, I think, is that their are certain natural limitation to the human body/experience. We can fight off disease but we still age. A unheated house is very uncomfortable but their is little differnce in experience if we keep the temprature at 72 or exactly 70 degrees. There is a limit to the extent of our natural senses.
We, of course, don't have to obey this limitation and did not most of the world feel morally (or enviously) restrained to keep ourselves basically natural we would not face this problem. For instance for thousands of years man has known various chemicals can directly influence our perceptions...and emotions. Of course such chemicals have negative effects (tolerance and physical dependence) but nothing we know says this is a necessery effect of chemical use (yes tolerance is a natural effect but why not more research into possibly getting around this).
Alternatively we have possesed the ability to do genetic changes in humans for years now but we refuse to take it (in my opinion because of an unvoiced fear that we will be obsolete in the face of our descendents).
Ok first as I understand it their is a difference between philosophical libertarinism (aka Ayn Rand type where no abridgement of personal property is ever allowed). I was responding to, and I thought the original poster was discussing this philosophical libertarinism.
In such a system of course no taxes can be allowed...they take the individuals money by threat of force. This of course necessitates a capatilistic approach to everything (all transactions must be volountary which eliminates the idea of governmental money) and incures the problems I mentioned before.
Secondly one could advocate a sort of consequentialist libertarnism where abrogating the rights of the individual is valid so long as the government serves to minimize the total rights abrogated (we may tax because this is a small violation versus the effect a military invasion) however in such a system taxes for the general welfare but not increasing individual rights would be abandoned...i.e. road work as above.
If I interpret the position you describe above it is a sort of general feeling that less governmental intervention would be benificial but with no conviction that it is nececsserily better (certain circumstances do need government involvement) personally, while it is a workable and perhaps benificial system, I do not consier that libertarinism because it doesn't appear to have any differnt philosophical goals than the democrats or replublicans (in fact it sounds like alot of republican platforms) it is just a differnt interprataion on how to actually accomplish these goals
Two comments.
First the matter of naked singularities is of some debate...in fact it was the subject of a bet between kip thorne and steven hawking which was settled recently. Certain very specific simulations seemed to show that naked singularities could exist...but there are doubts that this simulations are actually physically realizable. More may have been done since I heard about it please correct me if I am wrong.
Secondly very many smart physicists belive in black holes so it is nothing to be dismissed lightly. It seems, both from your summary and the article that many of these rejections are based in some specific time frame. Indeed in the frame of some object (I forget which) the mass never actually reaches the event horizon. So in a suitably choosen reference one might try to claim black holes cannot exist.
However, I asked Kip Thorne this question in lecture and if I understood his response correctly it was that yes in some time frame the event horizon is never reached but because of the singular nature of the black hole this infinite time in one frame can be only a finite time in a differnt frame forcing us to take the concept of a black hole seriously.
If it is our time frame where the object takes an infinite amount of time to fall into the black hole then one might succesfully argue they don't concern us (they exist but only in our infinite future)...but I don't remember which time frame it is and I may just be entierly misinterpreting what was said.
But the point being very smart physiucists have not been ignoring these problems and it seems highly unlikely that "simple" arguments could disprove their existance at this junture.
Well the world survied for millenia without obtrusive media telling everyone to act...and I highly doubt ugh the caveman, or even a colonial farmsteader, was on average smarter than the people of today (if anything at least better nutrition should count for something). Moreover, it is in no way clear that there would be less media in a libertarian society.
But you are right in that libertarianism is far to ideal. Human beings are complicated creatures created by the random process of evolution to survive well in a hunting gathering enviornment...it would be a conicedence of unimaginable proportions to find out that the ideal form of government for these creatures is simply defined as that government which maximizes individual rights.
The truth is that a libertarian society could never correctly deal with a great deal of public goods. For instance national defense. In only the most idealized view of human nature would everyone in the United States contribute fairly to the common defense. What would actually happen is that people would (perhaps believing in that self deulded way they were contributing their fair share) gradually give less and less to the common defense and many people would give nothing at all.
It is however impossible to support differential milatary protection for differnt houses. Imagine the government protecting Jim's house from the Soviets but because Bob is behind on his contributions letting the tanks take that house.
Similar arguments apply for police protection (it is primarily deterant based not response based) and welfare (I know I fell happier if ppl aren't dying in the streets but would be just as happy if someone else was paying for it).
In short libertarinism is a nice idea but the laws of physics and human nature are staked against it.
>Cultural identity, of which language is an important part, may not be a big deal to you or to me ? but, for most people, it is a big deal.
If this was in fact the case the people would not use the words in the first place. No one is being forced spanish speaking people are CHOOSING to use englishized words. As they can stop doing this at any time this suggests to me it is only a couple of firebrand academics who want to get a name for themselves who are causing the trouble
Okay this seems like a troll to me but I will respond anyway (not because of the position espoused but because of the anonymous assertive and unreasoned way it was presented).
I think you would have great difficulty establishing rights for people much less rights for animals. While some dedicated souls might truly believe a rights based approach to morality most people who espouse such an approach don'treally believe it.
The concept of a right is something which is inherintly inalienable not merely a desired state which can be overrideen in a pressing case or when it "conflicts" with other supposed rights (moreover the concept of rights carries with it that these are local moral necessities so one cannot say you have a right for the government to act in a way which maximizes total utility because this would be a non-local concept). Therefore one who truly believes in a rights based system must adhere to these rights in the most pressing of circumstances. For instance if I actually had a right to property and I owned the cure to a worldwide deadly disease a rights based approach would deem it inproper for that cure to be taken from me despite the billions of lives I might save. In this way very few people actually belive in rights (in an extreme enough example they would in actuality favor a more utilitarian approach. Their supposed rights are really just concepts which, because of human psychology, make the world a better place because of there enforcement.
Under this methodology the only reason we don't do this testing on humans is not because the actual testing would be immoral but that the backlashinduced by angry individuals and the inability of people to determine appropriate and inappropriate testing would reduce total utility
This seems quite complicated. Clearly we cannot say that if a GPLed service is required for your program to run you must release the source...after all we want to allow people to make closed source releases on open source operating systems otherwise we won't have any games to play.
The problem becomes what is a reasonable service to provide? Someone above mentioned the case where gcc is modified to output their internal representation of the parsing structure. What if I just saved this representation to disk and then loaded it from my program? The only way this could be illegal (as my program is in no way covered under the GPL) is if the original modification is not allowed.
Public performance might be stretched to cover services offered via the web or some such but surely could not cover the private use of a save file. If all we get out of this process is that companies who want to pull these kind of stunts resort to using save files rather than sockets (and claiming that IPC on your personal machine is a public performance is kinda sketchy) we haven't gotten anyware.
The other option is that certain modifications to a GPLed program won't be allowed if the FSF doesn't find them usefull. Maybe I teach a class in cpmilers and I find dumping gcc's internal state to be useful for educational uses. Or maybe I just think its a cool thing to do. Whatever the case free software is about hacking and I should be free to commit this hacking even if the FSF doesn't find it usefull! But if I can make this defense in my modifications of gcc big company X can just stand up in court and claim they thought it would be nifty to release such a tool...moreover I am not clear if the law allows one to distinguish between the motivations for releasing a product...if it is legal for one person it might be legal for another regardless of differing motivations.
Once they have released the GPLed product users may use it and do whatever they wish with the non-copyrighted output...including running it through a non-GPLed program.
Re:pot calling the kettle black?
on
Patent Warfare
·
· Score: 4
While intel's attempts to stop clones are underhanded and harmful to the consumer I can't agree it is in the same ballpark.
For one thing intel's new archetecture is non-obvious and involved a great deal of intellectual effort. Selecting what instructions to include in a chip is a non-trivial task especially with something like EPIC. As we want companies to put in the effort to come up with these sort of things there is a valid argument that intel should gain some advantage over clones because of its research investment.
Now it may be true that the individual instructions patented by intel aren't particularly novel but these appear to be the way intel can protect its novel contributions to its instruction set.
Personally I think we need an entire new system to control patents/copyrights in `standards.' The problem in intels case is not that they get rewarded for their instruction set but that they get rewarded disproportionatly. Because of intels market share this instruction set will become a standard and intels patents will give them far more money than the novel ideas in the instruction set are in fact worth.
What is necessery is some system to seperate the component of value in the actual technological innovation from the component of value inherint in the standardization.
This is exactly what he did (well I don't know if the filesystem itself was encrypted). He had a gig or two of encrypted data and refused to give over the password on 5th ammendment grounds and he sat in jail for years without a trial.
Now it is true that this is partially because he was trying to gain access to said data under discovery laws (which certainly should apply) but this should illustrate the attitude of law enforcement to encrypted data.
What you really need is some way to hide the data. Don't give me any of this BS about hiding it in the low bits of jpegs...this couldn't stand up to any reasonable analysis (the patterns in the low bits would probably stand out as not due to random pixels). Instead if disk filesystems filled a large section with random bytes then it might be possible for a real peer reviewd algorithm to make it nigh impossible to tell the difference between an empty filesystem versus one with quite a bit of data on it.
Technically what he said was true. He was defining Abuse as the point of use where serious negatives start to accrue to you. This of course qould imply that their is a level of pot (or whatever drug) use which is not in fact abuse and therefore does not need to be stoped. I don't know if this is what he meant.
Having said this your point is well made. The primary problem with DARE is that through bad science/ancedots it tries to convince you all drug use is terribly bad therefore once you realize this isn't quite true the rest of the data they gave you is doubted
Does your drug dealer care about you? No, but neither does any representitive of corporate american trying to sell you anything (including McDonalds). Moreover pot dealers, not having sneaky advertisments on television billboards or what have you, may be significantly less manipulative than the corporate worlds. Moreover presumably the people who smoke are gaining something, the joy they experience from smoking.
Now I tend to agree use in early adolesence is usually not based on rational decscion making and it may be worse for you to smoke at that age but that is not to deny the possibility for some people to use it in a rational manner e.g. Carl Sagan
Ohh yah and if they sent out a GM virus to deystroy pot I believe the government would piss off a whole lot of people. Not just those who might use pot but also everyone who has ever seen a scare story about mutated viruses
No drug dealing is nowhere NEAR attempted murder. Let me remind you of the central differnce between posioning someone without their knowledge and selling them rat posion which they may or may not choose to use on themselves. The first is murder the second is being a good hardware store. Moreover seeling drugs is surely not attempted murder because they are not meant to kill.
McDonalds is like posion which will eventually kill you but yet I view it as my right to eat mcdonalds without the government coming down on me. Every person's utility curve is differnt and it should be my choice not the governments how highly I wish to value my bodily health
1c is not a myth. I am not quite up with what functions your new brains cells may take up (their was some question about whether any type of cell in the brain may be replaced) and I do know that often the damage caused by repeted drug use may get partially better with time. However various studies do clearly show imparment from say ecstasy and serious damage from PCP. I believe in the later case it can be directly linked to cell death.
This is not surprising at all. I bet you will find similar effects from gambling, shoplifting and other "bad" activities. Yet we would not claim that shop lifting is a nuerotoxin. What you in fact have is a correlation not a causation.
To rebute your claims I suggest you look at the two followign studies.
Goode, E "Drug Use and Grades in College," Nature 234: 225-27
Kupfer, DJ et al "A Comment on the Amotivational Syndrome in Marihuana Smokers," American Journal of Psychiatry 130:1219-22
Both of which find that college smokers don't do worse than non-smokers (the first actually finds them doing better).
In regards to high school students I suggest that in general choice to do un-approved activities like drug use often correlate with feelings of disenfrachisment and possibly depression. With these feelings being the cause of both the drug use and the poorer performance.
I have done a considerable amount of research on the brain damage topic so I will try to respond in an intelligent way.
Yes, some drugs do cause some brain imparment including alchool, pot, ecstasy ketamine and others. The question at hand is how much imparment. Various studies have also shown brain imparment from head butting soccer balls but I don't think we need a DARE program for soccer abuse.
Many studies, including ones founded by the WHO(World Health organization not Pete Townshed's band), have found less long term mental damage from smoking pot than imbibing alchool. In fact the long term damage from being an alcholic is actually fairly severe. Yet it is possible to occasionally have a drink and suffer no noticeable deliterious effects in ones life be a productive member of society and in fact be more happy overall. It would therefore seem alchol use is often a good thing. Also given the research into the harmful effects infrequent pot use seems like a good thing too.
Of course using any drug carries with it the possibilty of physical or psychological addiction. Alchool is in fact physically addictive while marijuanna is not. This doesn't mean one can't overuse the drug but does lend further credence that it should not be included in the DARE propaganda.
Other drugs can be quite damaging to the brain. For instance ecstasy is very hard on the serotonin system and use has been shown to correlate with imparment. On the other hand long term use of opiates (opium heroin etc...) has very little (if any) brain imparment although they are quite addictive. Drugs like LSD have not been conclusively shown to carry any cognitive imparment with them (several studies suggest that they have one imparment over another but at the same time these studies all disagree and oten work in a psuedo-uncontrolled enviornment which allows other drugs to affect the results) and while depresion and anxiety are also claimed as side effects I am unaware of any controlled study to this effect.
But now this is a quite differnt picture of drugs than painted in DARE. Some drugs can be quite hard on the brain (ecstasy and to a lesser extent alchol depending on the amount) while other "bad drugs" are sometimes not to bad on the brain or at least less harmful than our legal drug alchol. This then is why DARE is propaganda.
WHY IS THIS BAD?
Well because if we lie to children when we are telling them drugs are bad they are likely to take everything we tell them on the subject to be false. Once children find out that pot is not the demon weed and it isn't that bad for you they may stop believing ecstasy is that harmful or heroin is that addictive. Without any authoratative unbiased knowledge know they have to guess as what drugs are worth it and which are not.
In regards to prison most marijuanna users don't go to prison. The figure is now something like 55% or high school seniors have tried pot. Most of them aren't going to prison...they are growing up to be bankers and lawyers and politicians.
That 55% figure is a good response to the success of DARE. Another little factoid for you is that the government plays fast and loose with its figures sometimes switching the age of those they polled to make it look like their program has been more succesfull (Barry McCaffery just did this).
Just a note on your final point doing something because everyone else is doing it is not only what intelligent people do it is what everyone does. We wear clothes, don't go to work dressed in giant ape suits, eat with silverware etc..etc.. all because others are doing it. This sort of thing is only viewed as bad when in fact everyone else isn't doing it and you are merely following a small subset.
Yes his absolutely ridiculous handling of both nuclear energy and free trade. The stupid populist that he is opposes free trade because many people think its bad despite its economic benifit for nearly everyone (if not in fact for everyone).
Don't get me wrong I like some of his ideas but they seem to be even less based in careful rational thought than those of the other canidates.
This isn't quite true about the radiation. I am not quite sure about the byproducts of the fusion itself (to generate a stable helium atom it would appear that it must be a dueterium dueterium fusion and I am not sure what type of hydrogen is used) however regardless of this question fusion bombs are always ignited with a fission primer (the x-rays from this primer bomb ignite the hydrogen) this bomb will certainly have radioactive leftovers. How much is another matter
This is a wonderful question but both the major canidates have come out in favor of continuing the war on drugs (each of them vowing to devote several billion dollars to the issue) so I propose the following addendum to the question.
Given both the major canidates have engaged in illegal drug use and have family members who have engaged in more recent drug use how can you realisticlly support criminalization and mandatory sentences over treatment without turning yourselves and members of your family in to prison. Moreover do you believe it would have been a good thing to through young George Bush and Al Gore into prison?
Okay I don't know much about DVD playback but this seems technologically impossible.
This new standard is supposed to still work on current one region players right. Isn't all a multi-region player is is a player which can emulate any regions players?
The only way I can imagine them doing something like this is to put this extra warning in a section encoded for the wrong region. That way the multi-region players will play this sopt which will issue the warning and somehow stop the playing of the rest of the DVD.
This of course will last about 10 minutes before the multi-region players merely become region selectable players.
Why is it that very few people vote? The two choices is that they either feel very strongly disillusioned and are "droping out" or they are just mostly ambivalent between the canidates.
If indeed they were droping out we should see strong votes for the alternative parties..instead people are just staying at home. The truth is you only get large voter turn out when there is a real perceived difference between the canidates. Gore and bush despite their little squablles are, in the big picture, almost exactly the same canidate.
The reason they are the same canidate is because this is what the people want. Sure maybe they might have wanted a little differnt (like mccain) but overall they want buisness as usual.
People don't like to change or be challenged. This is why we pay to avoid new and possibly disturbing ideas at the grocery store and on TV. Bot explicitly but with our feet, we don't patronize places the have ideas (or advertisments) that we find disturbing (do you realize how fast a grocery store with pro or anti abortion propoganda around would go out of business). As a country we would far rather wallow inside of our self-made nest of comfortability than get out and see what is really happening.
How would online activities help this? Apart from a coup by power mad geeks hacking into ICBM systems not at all. While the opinions on slashdot may be differnt *everyone* is getting online and while it may seem like they are dissatisfied with the current system because they complain about it all the time this is just a ruse. The internet, unfortunatly, will be mostly sanitized and clean transformed into the steril, but non-offensive, storefronts of the suburbs pushing any real chance of mind expansion out into a distant realm of rarely visted web sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes its been known for some time (studied it in class two years ago so it must have been around for a good deal of time before then).
His stuff is certainly interesting, and his results about the omega number are bizarre but you are right it isn't THAT revolutionary. Once you accept the results of Godel's theorem the fact that you can somehow concentrate all that unprovability in one place drives the strangeness home but isn't fundamentally upsetting.
"Disagreeing with the assumptions...."
Mathematics doesn't really have the kind of assumptions you can disagree with. Two, Four and plus are not the same things in mathematics that we may call two and four in the outside world. Two is by definition the successor of the succesor of 0 and four has a similar definition. Therefore the conclusion that two and two is four follows inevitably from the definitions of two, four and plus because by definition these are the things obeying the appropriate axioms (this may be confusing because we actually use the same words to refer to real world concepts, and concepts in various axiomatic systems which arent always the same thing).
In order for this horror story of forced IE usage the big media and stores need to adopt microsoft only (or heavily favored) web pages. If joe schmuck at aspalliance uses a microsoft only web page the reaction of netscape users is likely to be go shove it.
Yes, even technically unsophisticated users will have this reaction. These people don't want to have to upgrade they expect the technically literate to fix it at their end. It is only when sites they need to access do this that their might be a change.
But if I run a real commercial site what percentage of my cost is in html coding? Probably far less than 5% and for significantly less than double that amount I can get 10% more buisness. For simple economic reasons I will still support netscape. Moreover the harm is probably larger than just a 10% loss of sales. Many sites on the internet are close to indistinguishable from their competitors, for instance the price difference between bn.com and amazon.com in books probably isn't that significant to most people so if they find they can't access amazon from their friends computer or the computer down the hall they very well might switch...thus not counted as part of the 10% netscape users they still are negatively influenced.
Moreover, as everyone who has bought a microsoft computer in the past 5 years has gotten a free IE the use of netscape is a sign of greater computer savy, or at least of longer internet usage. These people are therefore probably more likely to purchase goods and recieve their information off the web thus making that 10% cost even more.
Finally the standardization effect cannot be ignored. If more of my friends use amazon than bn I too am likely to use amazon. Therefore giving away 10% of your business to your competitor may very well result in a much larger loss
Well first off all you need to take into account the adoption time of technology...phones and power were not instantly adopted nationwide.
But even given this I think you, and the article are correct.
The answer to this, I think, is that their are certain natural limitation to the human body/experience. We can fight off disease but we still age. A unheated house is very uncomfortable but their is little differnce in experience if we keep the temprature at 72 or exactly 70 degrees. There is a limit to the extent of our natural senses.
We, of course, don't have to obey this limitation and did not most of the world feel morally (or enviously) restrained to keep ourselves basically natural we would not face this problem. For instance for thousands of years man has known various chemicals can directly influence our perceptions...and emotions. Of course such chemicals have negative effects (tolerance and physical dependence) but nothing we know says this is a necessery effect of chemical use (yes tolerance is a natural effect but why not more research into possibly getting around this).
Alternatively we have possesed the ability to do genetic changes in humans for years now but we refuse to take it (in my opinion because of an unvoiced fear that we will be obsolete in the face of our descendents).
Ok first as I understand it their is a difference between philosophical libertarinism (aka Ayn Rand type where no abridgement of personal property is ever allowed). I was responding to, and I thought the original poster was discussing this philosophical libertarinism.
In such a system of course no taxes can be allowed...they take the individuals money by threat of force. This of course necessitates a capatilistic approach to everything (all transactions must be volountary which eliminates the idea of governmental money) and incures the problems I mentioned before.
Secondly one could advocate a sort of consequentialist libertarnism where abrogating the rights of the individual is valid so long as the government serves to minimize the total rights abrogated (we may tax because this is a small violation versus the effect a military invasion) however in such a system taxes for the general welfare but not increasing individual rights would be abandoned...i.e. road work as above.
If I interpret the position you describe above it is a sort of general feeling that less governmental intervention would be benificial but with no conviction that it is nececsserily better (certain circumstances do need government involvement) personally, while it is a workable and perhaps benificial system, I do not consier that libertarinism because it doesn't appear to have any differnt philosophical goals than the democrats or replublicans (in fact it sounds like alot of republican platforms) it is just a differnt interprataion on how to actually accomplish these goals
Two comments. First the matter of naked singularities is of some debate...in fact it was the subject of a bet between kip thorne and steven hawking which was settled recently. Certain very specific simulations seemed to show that naked singularities could exist...but there are doubts that this simulations are actually physically realizable. More may have been done since I heard about it please correct me if I am wrong. Secondly very many smart physicists belive in black holes so it is nothing to be dismissed lightly. It seems, both from your summary and the article that many of these rejections are based in some specific time frame. Indeed in the frame of some object (I forget which) the mass never actually reaches the event horizon. So in a suitably choosen reference one might try to claim black holes cannot exist. However, I asked Kip Thorne this question in lecture and if I understood his response correctly it was that yes in some time frame the event horizon is never reached but because of the singular nature of the black hole this infinite time in one frame can be only a finite time in a differnt frame forcing us to take the concept of a black hole seriously. If it is our time frame where the object takes an infinite amount of time to fall into the black hole then one might succesfully argue they don't concern us (they exist but only in our infinite future)...but I don't remember which time frame it is and I may just be entierly misinterpreting what was said. But the point being very smart physiucists have not been ignoring these problems and it seems highly unlikely that "simple" arguments could disprove their existance at this junture.
Well the world survied for millenia without obtrusive media telling everyone to act...and I highly doubt ugh the caveman, or even a colonial farmsteader, was on average smarter than the people of today (if anything at least better nutrition should count for something). Moreover, it is in no way clear that there would be less media in a libertarian society.
But you are right in that libertarianism is far to ideal. Human beings are complicated creatures created by the random process of evolution to survive well in a hunting gathering enviornment...it would be a conicedence of unimaginable proportions to find out that the ideal form of government for these creatures is simply defined as that government which maximizes individual rights.
The truth is that a libertarian society could never correctly deal with a great deal of public goods. For instance national defense. In only the most idealized view of human nature would everyone in the United States contribute fairly to the common defense. What would actually happen is that people would (perhaps believing in that self deulded way they were contributing their fair share) gradually give less and less to the common defense and many people would give nothing at all.
It is however impossible to support differential milatary protection for differnt houses. Imagine the government protecting Jim's house from the Soviets but because Bob is behind on his contributions letting the tanks take that house.
Similar arguments apply for police protection (it is primarily deterant based not response based) and welfare (I know I fell happier if ppl aren't dying in the streets but would be just as happy if someone else was paying for it).
In short libertarinism is a nice idea but the laws of physics and human nature are staked against it.
>Cultural identity, of which language is an important part, may not be a big deal to you or to me ? but, for most people, it is a big deal.
If this was in fact the case the people would not use the words in the first place. No one is being forced spanish speaking people are CHOOSING to use englishized words. As they can stop doing this at any time this suggests to me it is only a couple of firebrand academics who want to get a name for themselves who are causing the trouble
Okay this seems like a troll to me but I will respond anyway (not because of the position espoused but because of the anonymous assertive and unreasoned way it was presented).
I think you would have great difficulty establishing rights for people much less rights for animals. While some dedicated souls might truly believe a rights based approach to morality most people who espouse such an approach don'treally believe it.
The concept of a right is something which is inherintly inalienable not merely a desired state which can be overrideen in a pressing case or when it "conflicts" with other supposed rights (moreover the concept of rights carries with it that these are local moral necessities so one cannot say you have a right for the government to act in a way which maximizes total utility because this would be a non-local concept). Therefore one who truly believes in a rights based system must adhere to these rights in the most pressing of circumstances. For instance if I actually had a right to property and I owned the cure to a worldwide deadly disease a rights based approach would deem it inproper for that cure to be taken from me despite the billions of lives I might save. In this way very few people actually belive in rights (in an extreme enough example they would in actuality favor a more utilitarian approach. Their supposed rights are really just concepts which, because of human psychology, make the world a better place because of there enforcement.
Under this methodology the only reason we don't do this testing on humans is not because the actual testing would be immoral but that the backlashinduced by angry individuals and the inability of people to determine appropriate and inappropriate testing would reduce total utility
This seems quite complicated. Clearly we cannot say that if a GPLed service is required for your program to run you must release the source...after all we want to allow people to make closed source releases on open source operating systems otherwise we won't have any games to play.
The problem becomes what is a reasonable service to provide? Someone above mentioned the case where gcc is modified to output their internal representation of the parsing structure. What if I just saved this representation to disk and then loaded it from my program? The only way this could be illegal (as my program is in no way covered under the GPL) is if the original modification is not allowed.
Public performance might be stretched to cover services offered via the web or some such but surely could not cover the private use of a save file. If all we get out of this process is that companies who want to pull these kind of stunts resort to using save files rather than sockets (and claiming that IPC on your personal machine is a public performance is kinda sketchy) we haven't gotten anyware.
The other option is that certain modifications to a GPLed program won't be allowed if the FSF doesn't find them usefull. Maybe I teach a class in cpmilers and I find dumping gcc's internal state to be useful for educational uses. Or maybe I just think its a cool thing to do. Whatever the case free software is about hacking and I should be free to commit this hacking even if the FSF doesn't find it usefull! But if I can make this defense in my modifications of gcc big company X can just stand up in court and claim they thought it would be nifty to release such a tool...moreover I am not clear if the law allows one to distinguish between the motivations for releasing a product...if it is legal for one person it might be legal for another regardless of differing motivations.
Once they have released the GPLed product users may use it and do whatever they wish with the non-copyrighted output...including running it through a non-GPLed program.
While intel's attempts to stop clones are underhanded and harmful to the consumer I can't agree it is in the same ballpark.
For one thing intel's new archetecture is non-obvious and involved a great deal of intellectual effort. Selecting what instructions to include in a chip is a non-trivial task especially with something like EPIC. As we want companies to put in the effort to come up with these sort of things there is a valid argument that intel should gain some advantage over clones because of its research investment.
Now it may be true that the individual instructions patented by intel aren't particularly novel but these appear to be the way intel can protect its novel contributions to its instruction set.
Personally I think we need an entire new system to control patents/copyrights in `standards.' The problem in intels case is not that they get rewarded for their instruction set but that they get rewarded disproportionatly. Because of intels market share this instruction set will become a standard and intels patents will give them far more money than the novel ideas in the instruction set are in fact worth.
What is necessery is some system to seperate the component of value in the actual technological innovation from the component of value inherint in the standardization.
Didn't you learn anything from kevin mitnick?
This is exactly what he did (well I don't know if the filesystem itself was encrypted). He had a gig or two of encrypted data and refused to give over the password on 5th ammendment grounds and he sat in jail for years without a trial.
Now it is true that this is partially because he was trying to gain access to said data under discovery laws (which certainly should apply) but this should illustrate the attitude of law enforcement to encrypted data.
What you really need is some way to hide the data. Don't give me any of this BS about hiding it in the low bits of jpegs...this couldn't stand up to any reasonable analysis (the patterns in the low bits would probably stand out as not due to random pixels). Instead if disk filesystems filled a large section with random bytes then it might be possible for a real peer reviewd algorithm to make it nigh impossible to tell the difference between an empty filesystem versus one with quite a bit of data on it.
Technically what he said was true. He was defining Abuse as the point of use where serious negatives start to accrue to you. This of course qould imply that their is a level of pot (or whatever drug) use which is not in fact abuse and therefore does not need to be stoped. I don't know if this is what he meant.
Having said this your point is well made. The primary problem with DARE is that through bad science/ancedots it tries to convince you all drug use is terribly bad therefore once you realize this isn't quite true the rest of the data they gave you is doubted
Does your drug dealer care about you? No, but neither does any representitive of corporate american trying to sell you anything (including McDonalds). Moreover pot dealers, not having sneaky advertisments on television billboards or what have you, may be significantly less manipulative than the corporate worlds. Moreover presumably the people who smoke are gaining something, the joy they experience from smoking.
Now I tend to agree use in early adolesence is usually not based on rational decscion making and it may be worse for you to smoke at that age but that is not to deny the possibility for some people to use it in a rational manner e.g. Carl Sagan
Ohh yah and if they sent out a GM virus to deystroy pot I believe the government would piss off a whole lot of people. Not just those who might use pot but also everyone who has ever seen a scare story about mutated viruses
No drug dealing is nowhere NEAR attempted murder. Let me remind you of the central differnce between posioning someone without their knowledge and selling them rat posion which they may or may not choose to use on themselves. The first is murder the second is being a good hardware store. Moreover seeling drugs is surely not attempted murder because they are not meant to kill.
McDonalds is like posion which will eventually kill you but yet I view it as my right to eat mcdonalds without the government coming down on me. Every person's utility curve is differnt and it should be my choice not the governments how highly I wish to value my bodily health
1c is not a myth. I am not quite up with what functions your new brains cells may take up (their was some question about whether any type of cell in the brain may be replaced) and I do know that often the damage caused by repeted drug use may get partially better with time. However various studies do clearly show imparment from say ecstasy and serious damage from PCP. I believe in the later case it can be directly linked to cell death.
This is not surprising at all. I bet you will find similar effects from gambling, shoplifting and other "bad" activities. Yet we would not claim that shop lifting is a nuerotoxin. What you in fact have is a correlation not a causation.
To rebute your claims I suggest you look at the two followign studies.
Goode, E "Drug Use and Grades in College," Nature 234: 225-27
Kupfer, DJ et al "A Comment on the Amotivational Syndrome in Marihuana Smokers," American Journal of Psychiatry 130:1219-22
Both of which find that college smokers don't do worse than non-smokers (the first actually finds them doing better).
In regards to high school students I suggest that in general choice to do un-approved activities like drug use often correlate with feelings of disenfrachisment and possibly depression. With these feelings being the cause of both the drug use and the poorer performance.
I have done a considerable amount of research on the brain damage topic so I will try to respond in an intelligent way.
Yes, some drugs do cause some brain imparment including alchool, pot, ecstasy ketamine and others. The question at hand is how much imparment. Various studies have also shown brain imparment from head butting soccer balls but I don't think we need a DARE program for soccer abuse.
Many studies, including ones founded by the WHO(World Health organization not Pete Townshed's band), have found less long term mental damage from smoking pot than imbibing alchool. In fact the long term damage from being an alcholic is actually fairly severe. Yet it is possible to occasionally have a drink and suffer no noticeable deliterious effects in ones life be a productive member of society and in fact be more happy overall. It would therefore seem alchol use is often a good thing. Also given the research into the harmful effects infrequent pot use seems like a good thing too.
Of course using any drug carries with it the possibilty of physical or psychological addiction. Alchool is in fact physically addictive while marijuanna is not. This doesn't mean one can't overuse the drug but does lend further credence that it should not be included in the DARE propaganda.
Other drugs can be quite damaging to the brain. For instance ecstasy is very hard on the serotonin system and use has been shown to correlate with imparment. On the other hand long term use of opiates (opium heroin etc...) has very little (if any) brain imparment although they are quite addictive. Drugs like LSD have not been conclusively shown to carry any cognitive imparment with them (several studies suggest that they have one imparment over another but at the same time these studies all disagree and oten work in a psuedo-uncontrolled enviornment which allows other drugs to affect the results) and while depresion and anxiety are also claimed as side effects I am unaware of any controlled study to this effect.
But now this is a quite differnt picture of drugs than painted in DARE. Some drugs can be quite hard on the brain (ecstasy and to a lesser extent alchol depending on the amount) while other "bad drugs" are sometimes not to bad on the brain or at least less harmful than our legal drug alchol. This then is why DARE is propaganda.
WHY IS THIS BAD?
Well because if we lie to children when we are telling them drugs are bad they are likely to take everything we tell them on the subject to be false. Once children find out that pot is not the demon weed and it isn't that bad for you they may stop believing ecstasy is that harmful or heroin is that addictive. Without any authoratative unbiased knowledge know they have to guess as what drugs are worth it and which are not.
In regards to prison most marijuanna users don't go to prison. The figure is now something like 55% or high school seniors have tried pot. Most of them aren't going to prison...they are growing up to be bankers and lawyers and politicians.
That 55% figure is a good response to the success of DARE. Another little factoid for you is that the government plays fast and loose with its figures sometimes switching the age of those they polled to make it look like their program has been more succesfull (Barry McCaffery just did this).
Just a note on your final point doing something because everyone else is doing it is not only what intelligent people do it is what everyone does. We wear clothes, don't go to work dressed in giant ape suits, eat with silverware etc..etc.. all because others are doing it. This sort of thing is only viewed as bad when in fact everyone else isn't doing it and you are merely following a small subset.
Yes his absolutely ridiculous handling of both nuclear energy and free trade. The stupid populist that he is opposes free trade because many people think its bad despite its economic benifit for nearly everyone (if not in fact for everyone).
Don't get me wrong I like some of his ideas but they seem to be even less based in careful rational thought than those of the other canidates.
This isn't quite true about the radiation. I am not quite sure about the byproducts of the fusion itself (to generate a stable helium atom it would appear that it must be a dueterium dueterium fusion and I am not sure what type of hydrogen is used) however regardless of this question fusion bombs are always ignited with a fission primer (the x-rays from this primer bomb ignite the hydrogen) this bomb will certainly have radioactive leftovers. How much is another matter
This is a wonderful question but both the major canidates have come out in favor of continuing the war on drugs (each of them vowing to devote several billion dollars to the issue) so I propose the following addendum to the question.
Given both the major canidates have engaged in illegal drug use and have family members who have engaged in more recent drug use how can you realisticlly support criminalization and mandatory sentences over treatment without turning yourselves and members of your family in to prison. Moreover do you believe it would have been a good thing to through young George Bush and Al Gore into prison?
Exactly...one would think that a TRUE discovery of such a proof would be published in a more well recognized journal.
But what do I know
Okay I don't know much about DVD playback but this seems technologically impossible.
This new standard is supposed to still work on current one region players right. Isn't all a multi-region player is is a player which can emulate any regions players?
The only way I can imagine them doing something like this is to put this extra warning in a section encoded for the wrong region. That way the multi-region players will play this sopt which will issue the warning and somehow stop the playing of the rest of the DVD.
This of course will last about 10 minutes before the multi-region players merely become region selectable players.
Why is it that very few people vote? The two choices is that they either feel very strongly disillusioned and are "droping out" or they are just mostly ambivalent between the canidates.
If indeed they were droping out we should see strong votes for the alternative parties..instead people are just staying at home. The truth is you only get large voter turn out when there is a real perceived difference between the canidates. Gore and bush despite their little squablles are, in the big picture, almost exactly the same canidate.
The reason they are the same canidate is because this is what the people want. Sure maybe they might have wanted a little differnt (like mccain) but overall they want buisness as usual.
People don't like to change or be challenged. This is why we pay to avoid new and possibly disturbing ideas at the grocery store and on TV. Bot explicitly but with our feet, we don't patronize places the have ideas (or advertisments) that we find disturbing (do you realize how fast a grocery store with pro or anti abortion propoganda around would go out of business). As a country we would far rather wallow inside of our self-made nest of comfortability than get out and see what is really happening.
How would online activities help this? Apart from a coup by power mad geeks hacking into ICBM systems not at all. While the opinions on slashdot may be differnt *everyone* is getting online and while it may seem like they are dissatisfied with the current system because they complain about it all the time this is just a ruse. The internet, unfortunatly, will be mostly sanitized and clean transformed into the steril, but non-offensive, storefronts of the suburbs pushing any real chance of mind expansion out into a distant realm of rarely visted web sites.