As someone with a sense of logic, I'd like to say....
WoodstockJeff wrote:
Admittedly, there is little value in this as an examination of the facts at hand, but it does throw a spotlight on certain really crappy types of 'argument.' A few gems:
"All facts are created equal. If I state a fact, my conclusion, no matter how lame, is true."
It's always interesting to read comments about how this is a GOP problem, but it was a Republican administration that refused to grant special favours to Enron, accelerating the collapse of the house-of-cards they built
If this isn't a "GOP problem" what is? The chief executive of the current Republican administration knew Kenneth Lay well enough to have a nickname for him. Stating that the current administration didn't grand special favors to Enron is very like saying, "with the police in hot pursuit of a bank robber and in visual contact, X refused to shout out, 'Hey, come hide in my house!"
Seriously, if this isn't a GOP problem, then it must be an alien conspiracy, because anyone else you could possibly point to would have to be off-planet.
"....with the regulatory approval of a Democratic administration.
Yes, the Democratic Party was in power while Enron engaged in unbelievably rank fraud involving accounting tricks, offshore accounts and manipulation of energy supply and pricing that caused rolling brown-outs in California. Apparently, not to investigate a company whose financial reports say that it is a picture of health and fiscal sobriety constitutes regulatory approval (whatever that might be) when it is convenient to the writer.
Of course, by this reasoning, the fault might not belong to the democrats who were not alone in failing to call for an investigation of Enron's bookkeeping. They might share blame for failing to investigate Enron's claims with Kim Jong il, who was in power at the time in North Korea, and with, say, the German Christian Democratic Union which was not in power at the time but one is sure that they had their eyes on some office to be gotten at some point in the future: you will notice that their responses to Enron's claims are not more and not less than a deafening silence.
Browder has a wonderful range as an actor and he can even act in front of blue screens, Muppet's and people wearing makeup and foam rubber by the kilogram, but you gotta wonder what he's going to do on SG-1.
I mean on Farscape, he regularly pulls off Cocky, Funny, "burnt," and once, a very powerful death scene... pretty much everything his character is asked to be/do with one exception: he is nothing like convincing as someone who has anything to do with science.
The thought of Browder on SG-1 asks a buttload of questions about what made the producers want him. I mean, SG-1's humor (as delivered by R.D.A. in the current cast) tends to be far more downplayed and suble than what Browder has played on Farscape.
Could be interesting. Could be an accident waiting to happen.
"What do you bet that there won't be some clever person in the next ten years that figures out how to build an ultra-sensitive focussed RFID reader that reads tags at a distance?"
Hmmm... with WIFI already a short-range technology that geekdom has extended to miles using highly directional antennas (Cantenna, Pringles-can YAGI) and/or amplification, I'd say you have a very, very comfortable bet there.
"If the range is not that far, why the concern about being tracked?"
Two words, "choke points."
If you want to detect the thing, then you need to put the RFID device where you expect your target to stand or pass(target someone for good or ill, they are still a target).
How do good guys and bad guys find that U.S. passport? Put the detector/reader/or what have you where you know an American is going to go or where he/she may go and you can track him or her for whatever reason you need like mugging, marketing, blackmail or interrogation; as in, 'So, why did you pass the doorway of several brothels in Bangkok and was every girl who worked in each of them of the age of consent in the United States?"
Better still, the knowledge that you may be watched in foreign countries might provide a delightful 'chilling effect,' making you act like a church-going spinster no matter what your tastes, inclinations or the local legal situation.
And what causes that? Computers play always at 100% of their maximum possible strength. That's why you'd think they're dry -- it's the consistency. Just like great boxing fights aren't ones where the opponent comes out and always knocks the other guy out cold in the first 10 seconds. A great fight is where it's undecided up until the very last round and then someone lands a stunning blow and wins the victory. Yet the guy who can knock his opponent out in 10 seconds every time is by far the superior boxer (judging by results alone).
Humans play chess, on the other hand, probably at some fraction of what they're capable of and, every once in a while, hit that 100% mark. Hitting 100% looks like inspiration compared to normal, more mediocre play but if every person hit 100% all the time, their games would be similarly boring -- though boring at a much higher level of play.
I should probably not answer your assertions, not because they are undeserving, but because they are *too* interesting. I sense that you are contentious by nature and I don't have the time to do what you write real justice and still give my own projects the time they need. Be that as it may, I can write that I disagree with you on several levels and tell you why.
Yes, it's true that computer programs operate consistently--right down to their flaws--but that is not the thing that makes computer chess games sterile and often devoid of beauty. When talking about humans versus humans and the role of intuition in chess you eventually come to look at the thing inside out as you come to the point where in order to discuss a game between two people, you have to look at it using methods and language ordinarily used only to talk about the mechanics of the thing. You have to talk about the game as if it were a program.
A chess game is a symmetrical set of operations forming a perfect illustration of the verbal description of von Neumann's Theory of Games. It is a two-person, zero-sum game with complete information. It is only asymmetrical in that the second player has the disadvantage of the second move and must make some response to white's initiative (the tens- if not hundreds of thousands of pages devoted to opening theory are the direct result of this fact). With this in mind, we must recognize that playing a chess game involves the creation of one or more imbalances in the factors of a chess game: time, space or force and that the sharpest and most radical imbalances are the key characteristic of the most interesting games.
Returning to Morphy-v-Consultants for a moment you see one of chess history's greatest examples of this thesis: in the final position, white has exchanged or sacrificed literally every piece but the king, one bishop and one rook which together deliver mate.
Now it need not be that crude: the winning imbalance in a game need be nothing more than good knight versus bad bishop in an endgame with material parity and that in itself is exciting in its demonstrating that the margin for winning can be that slim and strategy that deep.
Computers, which as you point out play at 100% of their strength at all times, will, when well-matched to their opponents, not find, or use the pathways that lead to wildly imbalanced positions.
The thing analogous to the knock-out punch you mention is nearly always absent. The denouement of games that live in your head forever isn't there; the problem-like mating combinations aren't there like the time Alekhine finished a game with Qg6!! Where it could be captured by either of two pawns leading to mate in the next move is never there, but that isn't the full measure of what is there in computers, nor is it the sum of what is missing.
Using your example, we return to mechanics and see that the knock-out punch in ten seconds is a possibility and one that is infinitely desirable: it is the ultimate elegance of which a boxing match is capable. For it to happen, one boxer has to create an opening for a hand
Intuition is not much more than having a large sample set from which to draw and using that
sample set to infer generalities. Those generalities allow you to recognize certain patterns and also reject other patterns outright so that you don't consciously consider them. When you think about it, intuition really means "I have a hunch", and those hunches are formed on the basis of past experience. There's nothing that prevents a computer from building up a sufficiently large body of samples and, with the proper programming of course, inferring patterns from it as well.
Intuition plays a strong role in the play of human players great and small and it is the basis by which one can understand the differences not only between human and computer players but between interesting and uninteresting chess games.
Having a hunch about the nature of a position and the posibilities therein have allowed some of the greatest tactical games ever played and this is the identifying characteristic of the matter in understanding the nature of the game. Were humans different, the game before computers would have been different: humans who saw every possibility in a continuation leading to a 'decided' position at the end of each line would have simply announced the result or range of results and the nature of chess itself would be unrecognizable to us ('Mate in at least 37 or at most 103!').
Human intuition allows the 'miracles' of chess--the elegance of chess--in those games that make the game breathtaking and that inspire players to play in the hope of generating them (think of classics like Morphy-v-Consultants or Lasker-v-thomas or many of Mikhail Tal's best games). The intuition or, indeed, inspiration, of games like those are more than instances of the inference from generalities; they are instances of a grandiose specific arising from a game's sea of possibilities. It is the elegance of a queen sacrifice leading not to ineluctable mate (a combination like the end of Morphy-v-consultants), but to a powerful attack with a favorable conclusion (say, the end of Lasker-v-Thomas or of Reti-v-Capablanca) which, as an act, is as difficult to quantify as is the word, 'beauty.'
In a broad sense, a machine's ability to process advantage takes the wonder out of the thing because you know that there is nothing going on but the examination of a great number of positions but it is hard to imagine to imagine programmers 'weighting' their programs for positions conducive to the types of continuations that made of chess-players bother with chess in the first place.
The short form of all of the above is: 'computer programs either are or will soon be the strongest players on earth, but their games tend to be dry.'
-- that may be one of the reasons that computers aren't as good at Go as they are at chess, Go appearing (to a rank beginner) to depend more on pattern recognition and less on straight-forward deductive analysis.
A simpler answer than one of 'intuition versus analysis' to resolve questions about machines playing Go to machines playing chess is to be found in a statement borrowed from a completely different field of study: 'follow the money.'
Chess has fascinated western thinkers since before there were computers and the problems of how to make a machine play chess have been approached by everyone from great players (M. Botvinnik, himself a world-champion) to corporate technology research centers.
'Intuition versus analysis' might be useful in talking about computers playing chess or playing Go, but one thing you have to take into account is the sheer volume of readily available and examined research on the subject.
Chess as an intellectual pursuit is a part of western culture and has had vast intellectual and material resources poured into it for decades, were the same true of Go, you might see more machines that played it better.
umm, a little emotionally charged aren't you? BTW, that isn't my culture and i don't live in england. I was raised as a shaman, closest thing would probably be bahai. Again, you should take a look at your culture and the way it has shaped you. You seem to have the standard attitude of 'you disagree with me, therefore you are the enemy'. Something i believe the puppet that you call president echoes frequently
Emotionally charged?
Okay, now I can only guess that you are some sort of weird jerk out to bait people for some odd pleasure. I personally would suggest that you take up prolonged masturbation sessions, it's cleaner, it's a better use of the net, and it's a better use of your time. If you expect anyone to experience 9/11 in the city where it happened and not be upset, I put to you that there is something strangely missing in your emotional make up. To put it another way: you are not like the others in ways you really, really should be.
As far as being a "shaman" in a religion close to baha'i is concerned, please put that one back in the dark, moist cavity where you found it. One of your last notes points to your stating that you are in Canada, and considering the nature of the Baha'i faith and the persecution, murder and second-class citizen status of members of your religion in Iran following the 1979 revolution, your choice of positions to support is at best odd and at worst psychotic.
Your stated position regarding 9/11 calls forth this statement: "the Ayatollahs in Iran have to protect themselves from Baha'i and all it's expression, the torture and murder is justified and good."
As far as my attitudes are concerned, you should sharpen the accuracy of your reading. I have nothing against any faith that I am willing to do anything about. You can practice Islam, Baha'i, Christianity or Buddhism and, so long as this faith reflects your actual chosen beliefs and it not imposed on you from without I will hold my nose and recommend to any who listen that you should be left in peace.
9/11 was not anything like a polite expression of cultural difference but an act of overt warfare by one culture against another and if you believe otherwise--if you believe my anger is groundless due to some state of airy, nebulous abstraction on your part--then we have to return to the comment above about your being psychotic.
We're done. You've won the flame war you wanted. You're not worth the energy except to say that you've enlightened me: before, I believed that there was and would always be only one Canadian I disliked, now there are definitely two.
Good thing you're not in the states: you're the only person I've ever heard of whom I'd rat out to the Ashcroft crew.
If you think revenge is the answer you totally missed the point of why the attacked the two towers. Maybe you should take a hard look at your culture and try and examine it from the point of view of their culture. They are not just 'terrorists' as your media would leave you to believe. They are trying to preserve their culture and other cultures as well, from the very real threat of american culture. They are in fact, fighting for their lives, and actually trying to make americans aware of what it is that they are doing. I think TOO many people missed this. Remember they are humans as well, and tend to have reasons for their actions. Their reasons are culturally defined, just like the US reasons are culturally defined as well.
Actually, I do think that revenge is the answer and I haven't missed the point. I've seen the point. I've read some of Chomsky's very cogent analysis of terrorism in the modern world as a response to the powerlessness of the oppressed against modern military equipment and techniques.
Chomsky makes points. You, dear friend, bleat.
My culture is fat, greedy and stupid. But the culture you admire is a breeding ground for the most vile cowardice in the defense of sickening ignorance. You can judge an action not just by its success but by its ultimate projected result, and, using that standard to examine the 9/11 terrorists and others, one thing is glaringly true: they have the courage to sacrifice their lives for a cause that isn't worth toilet paper. If the United States and the whole of Europe decided to capitulate to what they dream of, to give followers of Wahhabi Islam everything they wanted--up to and including half of modern Spain--the net result would be the great glory of Islam in the Middle Ages dragging its slack ass across a better world than it had ever dreamt of. In essence, the grand final success of what you praise if it were possible would be a backwards-looking Islam turning the cultures that have actually accomplished something over the last thousand years or so and transforming them into a cultural mirror of Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Of course, when you talk about the 9/11 hijackers and suicide bombers, you've gone through the best of the breed: the rest of the bottom feeders who support your cause are only brave under select circumstances. That is, your jihadi brethren are just hell on wheels but only when the odds are right, by which we have seen, it is when >they are armed and their opponents (preferably >women and children) are unarmed, outnumbered, bound, kneeling and blindfolded.
You don't like our culture? Take a good look at what you want to replace it with. At least the women here are taught to read.
Really, honestly, if you don't like western culture and its intrusion on your little bubble of fantasy, your course of action is both obvious and simple: throw your damned computer out the nearest window, hop the next plane out of England and never let anyone hear from you again.
Attacking someone's spelling and grammar is a cheap shot and I won't do it here except to point of mentioning it. Feel free to talk about my own. Now, on to what you actually wrote...
well first my statment was mearly showing how someone could be from humble beguinning and end up like the people he chooses to hate while still trying to act like the person he once was. Moore in my mind, doesn't respect the lwer class of people, he will pay lip service to them but will not have to go far from his path to make a bad comment about them. He has some serious cr editability problems too. His works that I have seen and read, seem to be more of a point making scheme then the documentry/entertainment that they are billed as.
There is nothing wrong with mocking your origins or people whom you were exposed to who are stupid, lazy or simply unlucky. If there were, no comedy act would last for more than thirty seconds. You have no point here except to hold Moore up to an unattainable and (quite probably) undesirable standard of virtue. Before you talk about accuracy, please consider the accuracy of an Anne Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. I cannot mind a little demagoguery on the part of Liberals, the competition makes me think, 'God, why not?'
Now the 'Limousine Liberals', as i understand it, are despised by the other liberals themselves.
Who is despised by whom does nothing whatsoever to invalidate the quality of what they actually say. I could be loathed by multitudes and still have (true) things to say.
As for you rambling about the military and 800 dead soldiers, you are missing some news somewere, they have punished some of them, not all the ones they wanted but it is an effort that is under way and it will probably happen. I don't think i need to go any deeper into this that i already have, the current events and happening after the situation you refered to says enough.
You don't really seem to grasp 9/11. I live and work in New York City: I got to spend weeks smelling the bodies of my neighbors from several miles from what became ludicrously known as 'ground zero', first burning and then rotting in the cold thin rain that followed the event. At that point, the only thing that mattered in the whole world was revenge. As far as I was concerned, the only function of the U.S. government was to provide me and my fellow New Yorkers with a long, loving photographic exploration of Osama bin Laden's head on a spike on the President's desk in the oval office. Had Curious George provided me with that in a timely fashion, in a set of military actions that ranged across half of Asia, demonstrating to the terrorists in the process that an attack on the United States was very like calling down the wrath of God, I would be holding back my vomit with respect to everything else about the Bush administration and *ACTIVELY WORKING* for the Bush reelection campaign.
Instead of this, as witness after witness has shown, the current administration has engaged in a military adventure with a coherence of thought and purpose ordinarily reserved for an acid trip: he has invaded a country other than the one that harbored and still harbors our enemies (probably Pakistan). By invading Iraq, he has actively demonstrated the limits of U.S. Military power in a way that he should have left alone, by making clear an obscure truth: with the weapons available to our military, we could withdraw every U.S. serviceperson and turn Iraq into a radioactive desert in a single afternoon, but we cannot make everyone in Iraq do what we want them to. In other words, the current administration has missed what was patently obvious: we cannot turn Iraq into a secular democracy in a timetable measurable in anything short of decades, if ever.
To put it another way, we've spent tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of lives to accomplish less than nothi
Most poor rock and roll one hit wonders that make it big and successfull forget were they came from and end up tanking. Even if he was an average poor boy in the beguining doesn't mean he isn't a "limousine liberal" now. As a matter of fact, it apears that he is even less then that and mainly a machine schill for the liberals. It would apear that apeasing them is what really counts to moore in this day and age....
As T.S. Eliot put it in 'The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and where do I begin.
The above and each of the non-points it tries to make is interesting but only for its flaws. First off, the statement that Moore or anyone else who came from humble origins loses something by leaving them behind is pretty much insane, isn't it? You can't test the statement for truth because there is no objective truth in any 'should' proposition, but you can test it against reality. One equivalent to the statement is to be found in a scenario where a poor boy from a trailor-park who grew up on scut-jobs and welfare invents something and uses his money and position (say, ten million dollar's worth) to buy a trailor and move into the park next to the one he grew up in. You can't prove the insanity of the scenario syllogistically, but it seems so counterintuitive as to be laughable.
In other words, in order to be 'virtuous,' or 'genuine,' in the poster's eyes, he expects every black basketball, baseball and football star in their respective sports leagues to move out of their mansions or condominiums and take up residence in the worst corner of the nearest ghetto. This is, at best, a strange redefinition of the American Dream.
Next!!
The statement pertaining to "Limousine Liberals" used as a slur is a strangely American, and strangely dumb phenomenon that makes you think of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four. The statement, 'well they do it, it too,' is a classic fallacy since it has nothing to do with your own (bad) actions, but when you consider Moore or anyone else as a 'Limousine Liberal,' you are essentially stating that the recipient of your contempt is a wealthy man who uses his wealth and position to enhance the interests of those who have less in the way of wealth and position.
In the old days, this was called 'christian charity,' or 'tithing,' perhaps. Nowadays, it's used as a term of invective in a way that seems absolutely insane except to a conservative who quacks it out on some forum. Unless you can resolve the immorality and idiocy of a, 'man or woman of wealth and status who seeks to relieve the poverty and sooth the pain of the masses,' the use of the term, 'Limousine Liberal,' in any context is more slogan than sense and thus, irremediably and unctiously cretinous--worthy only of the Rush Limbaugh's and Anne Coulter's of the world.
Next!!
Speaking of 'Limousine Liberals,' if we examine their opposite numbers, the conservatives currently in power, we see at their head, a man of so little talent that, given every educational advantage that money can buy, and then given connections that reached to the capital of the world's richest country (his daddy was president at the time) and that tapped into an international network for information and funding (Middle-Eastern funds that staved off bankruptcy) who managed to fail to find and sell something that everyone uses.
In other words, no one with the sense god gave a dog would let the current President run a gas station for him.
Now, instead of being just another obscure and useless rich person, the man with little talent is the President of the United States and his choice of policy initiatives in the wake of an attack on our nation has led to our armed forces being bogged-down in a useless military adventure that, to date, has killed over eight-hundred of our citizen-soldiers without punishing the attackers whose actions ground three-thousand of my neighbors into dog-food on a fine summer's day.
If limousine liberals who are to be appeased are the opposite of this kind of government, then I will: a. Vote Kerry. b. Set up a shrine to Ted Kennedy, and c. do whatever it takes to appease the current regime out of office.
That was not a post, that was an essay, and it feels so very much like an essay written by a corporate shill.
I mean really, what's the deal with someone's writing an essay complete with selective quotations from an opponent in an online discussion which he then attacks. Really, that post is garbage, the pure, too-well-focused writing that is the life's blood of corporate America at its worst: 'we can hire someone who can approximate passion and use him to make you believe anything that makes us money.'
Instead of an essay that purports to demolish the points of people who argue for sharing music online on a point-by-point basis, you can make a few simple statements and work from there:
When CD's were first introduced, the music industry decided that they would cost much, much more than the mature technologies embodied in the vinyl albums and cassettes that preceded them and that they replaced. The industry was simply 'recouping the cost of introducing the new technology.'
They never finished recouping it.
People, as in, musicians, pirates and the man on the street, all knew that something had changed, they knew that there was something strange about a CDs costing anywhere between two and four times the cost of a cassette tape of the same performance by the same artist, but no one ever articulated it: no one put their finger on it, no one knew what it was and said it exactly.
The result was the music industry turning music into a nameless, faceless commodity treating all but a very few musicians in the same way that agro-businesses treat wheat farmers: the farmer/musician produces something that the agro-business/music companies process, package and resell turning the commodity into a profit center for themselves and NOT the farmer/musician without whom the thing couldn't exist. In other words, in today's world, there are important similarities between Latin-American coffee-growers and any musician who isn't a superstar.
This is something the (advertising copy-)writer of the post leaves out in his moralizing screed against music pirates: the music pirate doesn't pay the musician for his hard, hard work, but in the case of all but the most successful players in popular music, neither does the record company.
In order for the moralizing of his article to stand, the writer has to depend on an essential ambiguity resolving itself in favor of his position. That is, he needs everyone not to see that outside of the public's successfully waging tobacco-industry sized, class-action lawsuits against the record industry (an oligopoly of multi-billion dollar corporations), there is no way of ever making up for the extent to which we the consumers and the musicians whose work we admire have been and continue to be screwed over.
In other words, the writer wants us to believe not only that musical piracy is wrong (and three decades of price-gouging and price fixing are just good business), and that the only decent, law-abiding thing to do is to return to the status quo ante; to be a good, moral, law-abiding citizen, you should and must participate in the system that makes the music industry (and not musicians) rich: the one that gets anywhere between twelve to twenty dollars out of your pocket for a CD with three songs on it that you actually listen to, and that then hands all but the most popular musicians a quarter for their trouble.
The simple solution is that there isn't one. In order to really reward the musician for his efforts, you either have to filter the money through the record industry, mail the musician a check (which most of us are just too weak to do), or you can wait to buy a ticket for a performance by good, but underappreciated bands when they decide to go give a concert where you live: in a small corner of the left armpit of the world.
Maybe mass P2P networks are a bit much in the great unmeasurable scheme of things, but it will take a lot more than one whore with a copy of Word to make me believe that the record industry and its defenders have any interests at heart but their own.
1. Some dishonest people might be able to forge their identity card. 2. Since some dishonest people might slip through the cracks, its less secure than we have now.
I think Schneir's argument goes more like this:
'no matter how much work a government puts into a national I.D. card, sophisticated criminals and terrorists will hack the system by obtaining real IDs (social engineering) or by eventually creating more sophisticated fake IDs that embrace anticounterfeiting measures.'
With this in mind, the problem with national IDs is a question of security versus privacy. The current hodge-podge of state IDs is (somewhat) less amenable to intrusive information-gathering and movement tracking than a nationwide ID system would be.
The deep question of National IDs is thus one of individual privacy versus collective security and it is a question that history has already answered: twelve of the 9/11 Hijackers carried perfectly valid IDs issued by the state of Florida.
Now, to really understand Schneier's objection, the question you have to ask yourself is: 'what security magic would the 9/11 Hijacker's having had perfectly valid national ID's instead of perfectly valid Florida IDs have worked, except for their cards to have been newer and shinier than the ones carried by the people around them who hadn't gone through immigration?'
What you choose as an answer is usually a matter of faith and ideology; according to mine the answer is, 'none.' Your results might vary.
I'm surprised that people don't see the First Amendment concerns.
The situation you describe is basically what lawyers are for.
There is a big difference between muzzling critics of a company who may or may not have a point about its actions, and, copyright infringement or, as L.L. Bean claims in the suit, another company's hijacking their investment in customer-relations by using spy-ware to pop-up ads for its competition whenever someone tries to visit L.L. Bean's website.
If, as L.L. bean claims in the article, its only use for pop-ups is brief questionaires to its customers, it should have the right to demand that that be the only thing that happens when you visit its website, in much the same way I am able to use my Sprint Cell phone without being forced to hear an ad for another carrier--even though the landlines that carry my call are leased from an affiliate of another cellular provider.
All things being equal, I still like their lawsuit. It's just good sense.
A corporation is granted many of the rights, privileges and risks that an individual possesses/face (see the current flap regarding breasts at the Superbowl, Bono's language).
Like a human, a corporation can express an opinion (advertising, positions on issues); it can secure credit, often far more than the average human; it can commit crimes and be punished for them and it can declare bankruptcy. There are differences however.
Basically, the answer to your question is both 'yes,' and 'no':yes, a corporation enjoys free speech, but it can be said to have a burden of responsibility to society in what it says and how it says it that is not quite the same as a person's. In New York City, for example, the law determines that a woman can go bare-chested anywhere a man can--practically difficult but legally acceptable behaviour--but NBC news cannot show a pair of bare breasts on Network Television for any reason even in a show on breast cancer.
I'm a big science-fiction lover from way back. I think science fiction is generally something that can be described as what you read before you stumble across literature but at it's best, it's stunning and it can make the kinds of comments about human nature that it only it and great literature are up to.
Unfortunately, neither Mutant X, nor Andromeda ever walked into the same aircraft hanger as greatness and, in Mutant X's case, the distance was amazing: it really was an hour of vaccuum--like watching Xmen movies without even the attraction of character references.
Mutant X was pathetic but Andromeda was worse because there were dozens of wonderfully intelligent things it could have been--some of which it tried for at first--but it ended up crippled for a number of reasons, many of which I suspect had to do with Kevin Sorbo's effect on the medium of the fantastic.
The series was so bad, that there were times when watching Andromeda made you wish that you had access so you could ask the right people the right questions and get a straight answer.
First off, as very few people I've seen have noted, there are a lot of general similarities between the dismal Andromeda and the sublime 'Blake's Seven'--both of which involved tiny crews rattling around in big ships and pursuing goals which bring them into conflict with one another and galactic scale civilizations.
Both of them used ideas from sci-fi that was 'out there,' stuff that was so archtypically science fiction in language and scale, that you could hardly imagine it anywhere else. But if these things provide both series with similarities, it is also in them that the two series part ways.
Blake's seven was good because it offered one good script after another set in a huge, complex universe in which technology and glitz took a back seat to real drama and everything boiled down to questions of the limits of good and evil: what people were willing to do for and to one another under pressure.
In Andromeda, they replaced the deep conflict between Blake and Avon, with the simplistic, good hero/bad-hero interaction of Dylan and Tyr.
If that by itself is not enough to make the show an absolute waste, there is 'the spin-kick factor.'
In a universe rife with terrible darkness (the Magog) and high poetry (the ship: 'the Andromeda Ascendant; a Nietzschean probe: 'Deep Midnight's Voice') the writers, producers and directors could find nothing better to serve up week after week, than sparkly weapon blasts and spin kicks until watching Andromeda was so much like watching 'Xena, Warrior Princess,' or the lamentable 'Hercules, the legendary journeys,' that every episode left you ready to cringe as you waited for someone to jump thirty feet while screeching out a ululating battle-cry.
So, the short form on Andromeda, like Mutant X, really is, 'good riddance.'
Mutant X was crap that accomplished nothing but reminding you of how long you had to wait until you got to see the next X-Men movie; while for its part, Andromeda reminded you that science fiction's best intentions are less than nothing when the dominant voices in a project demand that every moment of every show be ready for Sesame Street.
We all love science fiction and want to protect it, but the thought behind Andromeda and Mutant X invariably disproves the phrase, 'something is better than nothing.'
I recently wrote about this in a similar thread involving faked I.D.
Looking at this measure which, in the Pilot program, is voluntary but if successful is expected to become compulsory around 2014, I can see how the potential for abuse that scares advocates of civil liberties.
The problem with biometric data in an Identity card is not that the system becomes suddenly perfect and invulnerable: it doesn't. The problem is one that I think it helps for to be an American for you to understand and hate: our constitution works with the assumption that some conflicts are inevitable: people will make mistakes, or have such bad fortune that will make them so desperate that they commit crimes. Our founding fathers recognized human nature and accounted for it in the legal system and they built acknowledgement of this into our constitution with the fifth amendment as the perfect example.
The fifth amendment to the American Constitution precludes an accused person of being forced to act as a witness against himself. This is a voluntary limiting of the government's power in the interest of society; it is an act of self-restraint in recognition of the tension between two values: government power over the individual versus the efficient administration of criminal justice.
In a perfect world, perfect I.D. cards with biometric features handed out by a government of saints who could be guaranteed in some way to never, ever misuse the power that the cards would give them would be wonderful things.
Secure I.D. cards could do wonderful things in the right hands and in the right circumstances, they might make fraud and identity theft harder while helping in legal defenses by providing authenticated proof that x was in y location at z time.
The real world provides the possibility for things that tends to make American civil libertarians sweat. In the real world in which we live today, technology works to enhance the government's weight in any prosecution while simultaneously opening the door to people you've never met and who haven't asked your permission knowing things about you and potentially using that information.
The ubiquitous cellular phone is already commonly known to provide information on its owner's approximate wearabouts in realtime. Add to this a secure and sure I.D. that, in ten year's time, you will be required to carry (with a penalty of ten years in prison for carrying a fake I.D.) and you have a situation which comes closer to one of the things that the founding fathers would have seen the soul of and hated: instead of being forced to speak against yourself in court (making the job of the prosecutor, the representative of the state, easy) you will be indicted by the government's access to technology that you either want to carry, or are that the law requires you to.
As a last thought, consider just how wise the founding fathers were: in a speculative historical scenario, the best case for forgery-resistant national I.D.s with associated databases is not to be found in England, but in the United States in the September 11th attack.
Plugging in the numbers, you're left with a very important question: would preventing the deaths of three thousand people have been worth what the I.D.s and their potential for abuse would mean to the other three-hundred million.
Why bother giving Ashcroft his wet dream with a national ID to solve this problem, when a national STANDARD would satisfy it? If the actual layout and security measures of your driver's/liquer license ar4e decided upon at the federal level and implemented by the states, half of the really good arguments for a national ID die, leaving mostly the closet authoritarian ones.
Regardless, I think you have a lot of good ideas and woudl be doing a service to continue to share them.
First off, thanks for the wonderful compliment.
Now, on to the points. The idea of a national standard in driver's licenses/liquor ID's makes sense on the surface but it doesn't address all of the potential for abuse. In order to enforce a standard, you'd have to bring the thought to the attention of the relevant lawmakers, they'd have to pass it as part of a bill and then (hopefully) fund it, after the President (hopefully, a NEW ONE) signs it. At this point, we have a national standard in ID cards. All the differences between them are essentially cosmetic, they're all made from essentially the same blanks and only the design for each individual state differs, and that, only inasmuch as will not interfere with authentication.
That is a brilliantly practical idea but I think you would have to implement it in a better world. The trick with bringing all the various state ID's to a national standard instead of printing 300-odd-million U.S. green-card-quality IDs is that once you have the standard and you've enforced it, you essentially have the same degree of control brought about by the green-card menace.
As an evil emperor in training, I would want what the federal government would want: I would want a card that was seriously hard to make a good copy of (multiposition holograms, textured security lamination, uv-readable authentication stamp, holographic representation of the front on the back, etc....) and with some scanner-readable data on the back including (god help us all) a thumbprint with a digital representation of said print on a magnetic strip, barcode, or embedded chip (did I mention evil emperor?) so that you could be dead sure that the holder didn't borrow the card from his older brother when it was really important that you knew that.
By the time you're done with this, you have all cards issued in all fifty-states being for all intents and purposes the dreaded green card only with a different smiley on it. They have the uniformity of quality and, with the way state governments are working to share database information, you end up with the same problems of the original scenario: the authorities have information in databases about you which they can download to any police car in seconds and, thanks to all our authentication, they're damned sure that it is you who:
* Owes UNREAL amounts of money in unpaid parking tickets.
* Owes UNREAL amounts of money in unpaid alimony.
* Owes UNREAL amounts of money in back taxes.
* Really SHOULDN'T be driving without his glasses or contacts.
etc., etc...
There are some who would argue that the cops knowing all this is a good thing. There are some things you just shouldn't get away with, however, one of the points of privacy and the law is that you need probable cause to charge someone with a crime and getting probable cause costs the system effort. Having an ID of any kind which, when linked to databases that know essentially everything there is to know about you removes much of that effort and makes servile good behavior your optimal survival strategy,
It resembes something out of Burgess's 'A Clockwork Orange.'
You got it, it's called conditioning or brainwashing. they do it to the cops and military until they are conditioned them selves, then they pass it on to "civvies".
Sorry, an automobile is a piece of machinery which, when misused, for any reason, through ignorance, through inability or incapacity, can bring injury or death to the operator and or others.
Your having passed a test to get a driver's license proves that at one point in time, you could demonstrate a minimal, baseline, competence in operating a motor vehicle in places where you could lose control and tear through a line of schoolchildren.
Driving is a privilege because the state has to make it one: it would be very strange to see a drunk, maddened, blind, one-legged, epileptic with a car collection tooling around town behind the wheel and you may not like it, but licensing and the things around it helps to prevent it.
This has been one of the more interesting threads I've seen in a while. I mean, this is something I actually know about: I do security in a bar.
I've seen cards from pretty much every state in the Union as well as quite a number of ones from many European nations. Recognizing what is and what is not a valid I.D. card is a hard task that I've found a lot of people who do what I do simply don't know enough to deal with.
The great number of state I.D.s, their variations in the quality of their anti-counterfeiting features. The scanner, the color copier, the laminating machine and the simple willingness of people to lie to your face make it hard to be sure that what you're looking at is real.
The current series of California Driver's license/I.D. card is, IMHO the most secure driver's license in the U.S. in terms of anti-counterfeiting features; the series immediately preceding it is a piece of crap.
The new current series of New Jersey Licenses that I've seen, maybe, five of in the last two months is *very* secure if the person looking at it has an ultraviolet light on him and is actually aware that there is a new series to look at while the preceding series is the most easily and most convincingly counterfeited I.D. I've ever seen, and I see it over, and over and over.
A national I.D. card would certainly eliminate the problem of having to have real expertise to spot fakes and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in wishful thinking.
The most current version of the the United State's green card has anticounterfeiting features that I don't even know the names of, but I know their absence would be easy to spot.
Couple this with mag-strip technology to store information and you could standardize one or more pieces of equipment that any bar or other place that had to determine age or identity would have present that would instantly and permanently remove the guesswork. Put biometric data on the card and give me a thumbprint scanner and underage drinking is pretty much over until counterfeiting technology gets better.
That's how good the current green card, or some variant of it would be as a national I.D card. It would make my job ridiculously easy.
Now here's why I hate it.
First off, the article makes one really interesting point: for a really determined person, someone who wanted to hijack planes or steal a million or what have you, no card will be completely secure everywhere up the line to the point where you get one.
Someone with enough cash, or enough juice with the right people, or willing to put in enough work will be able to get either a valid I.D. in a false name, a borrowed/stolen card or a relatively convincing forgery if it is important enough to them.
Viewed this way, a national I.D. card can be said not to provide greater national security but greater control for people with access to the information that a national I.D. card would provide. In terms of anything important, really important--a real, immediate threat like the 9/11 attack--a national I.D. card would be useless.
In terms of centralized information processing, a national I.D. card would be an enormous Christmas present to big brother, providing governments with a key to interweaving databases, giving anyone in authority all the power they need to pressure anyone who isn't into being a more perfect citizen.
Under the current system, a kid with a really, really good fake I.D. can get past me and that's fine. It's a game. I win most rounds. I'm sure the kids win a few and that's the way things should be.
Getting stopped by the cops for taking a desperation leak on a wall at five A.M. and having them know everything about you from whether or not you did your last round of jury-duty to your cholesterol is not something I'm looking forward to.
The only thing I don't agree with here is the sliding scale. If I pay $100 for a program, and get taxed $1, then that's fine. Additionally, if I spend $100,000 on a boat, then tax me $1,000. The government shouldn't get into the area of determining what people "need".
Regressive sales tax arguments have been better put than this. Mind you, they are fun. It's hard to explain progressive taxation and everyone who has money or who thinks he has a chance to win the lottery has a big emotional reason to like them.
In a democracy, the government's *ONLY* business is determining what people need and how to go about it. Either that, or world war two was entertainment.
Even if there was a flat 10% income tax, it would generate more revenue by eliminating the overhead with collects it...because the IRS is by no means efficient.
Getting past the statements backed up by nothing, a good comedian still has things to work with: He is essentially saying, "if everyone paid ten cents on the dollar, you could eliminate the IRS because no one would bother to cheat."
That's ludicrous. It's like saying, "If the penalties for all crime was reduced to a one-dollar fine, we'd save money because we could eliminate the police department: everyone who committed a crime would just mail in a check and a confession.
Now, this would probably work: you just wouldn't want to live downwind of any place that tried it.
Actually, the warning in the article sounds like common sense. We live in a culture of capital--of possessions and class with who owns what determined by disposable income.
Apple certainly understands this which is why they introduce iPod models by threes, differentiated only by the size of the harddrive. It lets you say, 'look! I spent more money. Mine is bigger!'
Like it or not, the iPod is a device which announces that its owner has spent at least U.S. $300 on something easily stolen and eminently desireable. If you want to understand what that white cord looks like to a thief, imagine going to a bank and getting three fat stacks of singles, and then taping them to your chest with a post-it attached that says, 'Hi, you don't have this!'
I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I'm a Teaching Fellow (TF) at Harvard, and as part of my work I have to mark assignments. I'd say most of the assignments I mark contain unfounded statements like the following one found in the body of this very story:
I'm a bouncer in a bar and I can post as myself.
The poster whose lines you find objectionable do contain evidence: it is anecdotal and not statistical, but it is by no means absent, nor is the original poster's assertion unfounded.
The original poster cites evidence based on the volume of discussion in one or more forums, thus bypassing expensive and difficult-to-quantify analysis by engineers and statisticians.
As the examples you yourself provide point out, the original poster was right to reason as he did--citing only evidence of public interest--because it is a given that both good and bad patents are granted as a result of the current process.
Considering the nature of the legislation in question (e.g., measures to maintain and increase the number of skilled examiners by retaining funds from fees), the actual number of 'good' versus 'bad' patents is, as you should recognize, irrelevant.
"The only thing I don't like about it (other than the fee increases it includes) is that it opens the door to outsourcing (not offshoring) searches to private contractors, something I think really is the patent examiner's job."
That strikes me as a big uh-oh.
A patent office staffed with public servants whose job it is to keep things secure while under consideration is one thing. Outside firms, staffed by you-know-not-whom brings people into the loop you might not want there--like the guy who stole *half* of a Japanese process for new electrolytic capacitors and caused a product recall when the stolen and only partly-understood technology burst on motherboards.
As things stand today, getting a patent, from the most complex biotechnologies, to the simplest gadget costs tons and takes years.
If, for once, the government does it right, ignores the lobbyists, and provides for the patent office to be less of a cash-cow by taxing crackpots, and granting every unscrupulous firm that asks a seventeen-year lock on breathing, we might see a time when it costs less to come up with an idea and use it to quit your day-job.
And on that day, I for one will shout 'Halliluyah!'
Slashdot Mirror
WoodstockJeff wrote:
Admittedly, there is little value in this as an examination of the facts at hand, but it does throw a spotlight on certain really crappy types of 'argument.' A few gems:
"All facts are created equal. If I state a fact, my conclusion, no matter how lame, is true."
If this isn't a "GOP problem" what is? The chief executive of the current Republican administration knew Kenneth Lay well enough to have a nickname for him. Stating that the current administration didn't grand special favors to Enron is very like saying, "with the police in hot pursuit of a bank robber and in visual contact, X refused to shout out, 'Hey, come hide in my house!"
Seriously, if this isn't a GOP problem, then it must be an alien conspiracy, because anyone else you could possibly point to would have to be off-planet.
Yes, the Democratic Party was in power while Enron engaged in unbelievably rank fraud involving accounting tricks, offshore accounts and manipulation of energy supply and pricing that caused rolling brown-outs in California. Apparently, not to investigate a company whose financial reports say that it is a picture of health and fiscal sobriety constitutes regulatory approval (whatever that might be) when it is convenient to the writer.
Of course, by this reasoning, the fault might not belong to the democrats who were not alone in failing to call for an investigation of Enron's bookkeeping. They might share blame for failing to investigate Enron's claims with Kim Jong il, who was in power at the time in North Korea, and with, say, the German Christian Democratic Union which was not in power at the time but one is sure that they had their eyes on some office to be gotten at some point in the future: you will notice that their responses to Enron's claims are not more and not less than a deafening silence.
This guy could write for Rush Limbaugh.
Browder has a wonderful range as an actor and he can even act in front of blue screens, Muppet's and people wearing makeup and foam rubber by the kilogram, but you gotta wonder what he's going to do on SG-1.
I mean on Farscape, he regularly pulls off Cocky, Funny, "burnt," and once, a very powerful death scene... pretty much everything his character is asked to be/do with one exception: he is nothing like convincing as someone who has anything to do with science.
The thought of Browder on SG-1 asks a buttload of questions about what made the producers want him. I mean, SG-1's humor (as delivered by R.D.A. in the current cast) tends to be far more downplayed and suble than what Browder has played on Farscape.
Could be interesting. Could be an accident waiting to happen.
Can't wait
Hmmm... with WIFI already a short-range technology that geekdom has extended to miles using highly directional antennas (Cantenna, Pringles-can YAGI) and/or amplification, I'd say you have a very, very comfortable bet there.
"If the range is not that far, why the concern about being tracked?"
Two words, "choke points."
If you want to detect the thing, then you need to put the RFID device where you expect your target to stand or pass(target someone for good or ill, they are still a target).
How do good guys and bad guys find that U.S. passport? Put the detector/reader/or what have you where you know an American is going to go or where he/she may go and you can track him or her for whatever reason you need like mugging, marketing, blackmail or interrogation; as in, 'So, why did you pass the doorway of several brothels in Bangkok and was every girl who worked in each of them of the age of consent in the United States?"
Better still, the knowledge that you may be watched in foreign countries might provide a delightful 'chilling effect,' making you act like a church-going spinster no matter what your tastes, inclinations or the local legal situation.
Personally, I don't like it.
Intuition plays a strong role in the play of human players great and small and it is the basis by which one can understand the differences not only between human and computer players but between interesting and uninteresting chess games.
Having a hunch about the nature of a position and the posibilities therein have allowed some of the greatest tactical games ever played and this is the identifying characteristic of the matter in understanding the nature of the game. Were humans different, the game before computers would have been different: humans who saw every possibility in a continuation leading to a 'decided' position at the end of each line would have simply announced the result or range of results and the nature of chess itself would be unrecognizable to us ('Mate in at least 37 or at most 103!').
Human intuition allows the 'miracles' of chess--the elegance of chess--in those games that make the game breathtaking and that inspire players to play in the hope of generating them (think of classics like Morphy-v-Consultants or Lasker-v-thomas or many of Mikhail Tal's best games). The intuition or, indeed, inspiration, of games like those are more than instances of the inference from generalities; they are instances of a grandiose specific arising from a game's sea of possibilities. It is the elegance of a queen sacrifice leading not to ineluctable mate (a combination like the end of Morphy-v-consultants), but to a powerful attack with a favorable conclusion (say, the end of Lasker-v-Thomas or of Reti-v-Capablanca) which, as an act, is as difficult to quantify as is the word, 'beauty.'
In a broad sense, a machine's ability to process advantage takes the wonder out of the thing because you know that there is nothing going on but the examination of a great number of positions but it is hard to imagine to imagine programmers 'weighting' their programs for positions conducive to the types of continuations that made of chess-players bother with chess in the first place.
The short form of all of the above is: 'computer programs either are or will soon be the strongest players on earth, but their games tend to be dry.'
A simpler answer than one of 'intuition versus analysis' to resolve questions about machines playing Go to machines playing chess is to be found in a statement borrowed from a completely different field of study: 'follow the money.'
Chess has fascinated western thinkers since before there were computers and the problems of how to make a machine play chess have been approached by everyone from great players (M. Botvinnik, himself a world-champion) to corporate technology research centers.
'Intuition versus analysis' might be useful in talking about computers playing chess or playing Go, but one thing you have to take into account is the sheer volume of readily available and examined research on the subject.
Chess as an intellectual pursuit is a part of western culture and has had vast intellectual and material resources poured into it for decades, were the same true of Go, you might see more machines that played it better.
Emotionally charged?
Okay, now I can only guess that you are some sort of weird jerk out to bait people for some odd pleasure. I personally would suggest that you take up prolonged masturbation sessions, it's cleaner, it's a better use of the net, and it's a better use of your time. If you expect anyone to experience 9/11 in the city where it happened and not be upset, I put to you that there is something strangely missing in your emotional make up. To put it another way: you are not like the others in ways you really, really should be.
As far as being a "shaman" in a religion close to baha'i is concerned, please put that one back in the dark, moist cavity where you found it. One of your last notes points to your stating that you are in Canada, and considering the nature of the Baha'i faith and the persecution, murder and second-class citizen status of members of your religion in Iran following the 1979 revolution, your choice of positions to support is at best odd and at worst psychotic.
Your stated position regarding 9/11 calls forth this statement: "the Ayatollahs in Iran have to protect themselves from Baha'i and all it's expression, the torture and murder is justified and good."
As far as my attitudes are concerned, you should sharpen the accuracy of your reading. I have nothing against any faith that I am willing to do anything about. You can practice Islam, Baha'i, Christianity or Buddhism and, so long as this faith reflects your actual chosen beliefs and it not imposed on you from without I will hold my nose and recommend to any who listen that you should be left in peace.
9/11 was not anything like a polite expression of cultural difference but an act of overt warfare by one culture against another and if you believe otherwise--if you believe my anger is groundless due to some state of airy, nebulous abstraction on your part--then we have to return to the comment above about your being psychotic.
We're done. You've won the flame war you wanted. You're not worth the energy except to say that you've enlightened me: before, I believed that there was and would always be only one Canadian I disliked, now there are definitely two.
Good thing you're not in the states: you're the only person I've ever heard of whom I'd rat out to the Ashcroft crew.
Actually, I do think that revenge is the answer and I haven't missed the point. I've seen the point. I've read some of Chomsky's very cogent analysis of terrorism in the modern world as a response to the powerlessness of the oppressed against modern military equipment and techniques.
Chomsky makes points. You, dear friend, bleat.
My culture is fat, greedy and stupid. But the culture you admire is a breeding ground for the most vile cowardice in the defense of sickening ignorance. You can judge an action not just by its success but by its ultimate projected result, and, using that standard to examine the 9/11 terrorists and others, one thing is glaringly true: they have the courage to sacrifice their lives for a cause that isn't worth toilet paper. If the United States and the whole of Europe decided to capitulate to what they dream of, to give followers of Wahhabi Islam everything they wanted--up to and including half of modern Spain--the net result would be the great glory of Islam in the Middle Ages dragging its slack ass across a better world than it had ever dreamt of. In essence, the grand final success of what you praise if it were possible would be a backwards-looking Islam turning the cultures that have actually accomplished something over the last thousand years or so and transforming them into a cultural mirror of Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Of course, when you talk about the 9/11 hijackers and suicide bombers, you've gone through the best of the breed: the rest of the bottom feeders who support your cause are only brave under select circumstances. That is, your jihadi brethren are just hell on wheels but only when the odds are right, by which we have seen, it is when >they are armed and their opponents (preferably >women and children) are unarmed, outnumbered, bound, kneeling and blindfolded.
You don't like our culture? Take a good look at what you want to replace it with. At least the women here are taught to read.
Really, honestly, if you don't like western culture and its intrusion on your little bubble of fantasy, your course of action is both obvious and simple: throw your damned computer out the nearest window, hop the next plane out of England and never let anyone hear from you again.
There is nothing wrong with mocking your origins or people whom you were exposed to who are stupid, lazy or simply unlucky. If there were, no comedy act would last for more than thirty seconds. You have no point here except to hold Moore up to an unattainable and (quite probably) undesirable standard of virtue.
Before you talk about accuracy, please consider the accuracy of an Anne Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. I cannot mind a little demagoguery on the part of Liberals, the competition makes me think, 'God, why not?'
Who is despised by whom does nothing whatsoever to invalidate the quality of what they actually say. I could be loathed by multitudes and still have (true) things to say.
You don't really seem to grasp 9/11.
I live and work in New York City: I got to spend weeks smelling the bodies of my neighbors from several miles from what became ludicrously known as 'ground zero', first burning and then rotting in the cold thin rain that followed the event. At that point, the only thing that mattered in the whole world was revenge. As far as I was concerned, the only function of the U.S. government was to provide me and my fellow New Yorkers with a long, loving photographic exploration of Osama bin Laden's head on a spike on the President's desk in the oval office. Had Curious George provided me with that in a timely fashion, in a set of military actions that ranged across half of Asia, demonstrating to the terrorists in the process that an attack on the United States was very like calling down the wrath of God, I would be holding back my vomit with respect to everything else about the Bush administration and *ACTIVELY WORKING* for the Bush reelection campaign.
Instead of this, as witness after witness has shown, the current administration has engaged in a military adventure with a coherence of thought and purpose ordinarily reserved for an acid trip: he has invaded a country other than the one that harbored and still harbors our enemies (probably Pakistan). By invading Iraq, he has actively demonstrated the limits of U.S. Military power in a way that he should have left alone, by making clear an obscure truth: with the weapons available to our military, we could withdraw every U.S. serviceperson and turn Iraq into a radioactive desert in a single afternoon, but we cannot make everyone in Iraq do what we want them to. In other words, the current administration has missed what was patently obvious: we cannot turn Iraq into a secular democracy in a timetable measurable in anything short of decades, if ever.
To put it another way, we've spent tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of lives to accomplish less than nothi
As T.S. Eliot put it in 'The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and where do I begin.
The above and each of the non-points it tries to make is interesting but only for its flaws. First off, the statement that Moore or anyone else who came from humble origins loses something by leaving them behind is pretty much insane, isn't it? You can't test the statement for truth because there is no objective truth in any 'should' proposition, but you can test it against reality. One equivalent to the statement is to be found in a scenario where a poor boy from a trailor-park who grew up on scut-jobs and welfare invents something and uses his money and position (say, ten million dollar's worth) to buy a trailor and move into the park next to the one he grew up in. You can't prove the insanity of the scenario syllogistically, but it seems so counterintuitive as to be laughable.
In other words, in order to be 'virtuous,' or 'genuine,' in the poster's eyes, he expects every black basketball, baseball and football star in their respective sports leagues to move out of their mansions or condominiums and take up residence in the worst corner of the nearest ghetto. This is, at best, a strange redefinition of the American Dream.
Next!!
The statement pertaining to "Limousine Liberals" used as a slur is a strangely American, and strangely dumb phenomenon that makes you think of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four. The statement, 'well they do it, it too,' is a classic fallacy since it has nothing to do with your own (bad) actions, but when you consider Moore or anyone else as a 'Limousine Liberal,' you are essentially stating that the recipient of your contempt is a wealthy man who uses his wealth and position to enhance the interests of those who have less in the way of wealth and position.
In the old days, this was called 'christian charity,' or 'tithing,' perhaps. Nowadays, it's used as a term of invective in a way that seems absolutely insane except to a conservative who quacks it out on some forum. Unless you can resolve the immorality and idiocy of a, 'man or woman of wealth and status who seeks to relieve the poverty and sooth the pain of the masses,' the use of the term, 'Limousine Liberal,' in any context is more slogan than sense and thus, irremediably and unctiously cretinous--worthy only of the Rush Limbaugh's and Anne Coulter's of the world.
Next!!
Speaking of 'Limousine Liberals,' if we examine their opposite numbers, the conservatives currently in power, we see at their head, a man of so little talent that, given every educational advantage that money can buy, and then given connections that reached to the capital of the world's richest country (his daddy was president at the time) and that tapped into an international network for information and funding (Middle-Eastern funds that staved off bankruptcy) who managed to fail to find and sell something that everyone uses.
In other words, no one with the sense god gave a dog would let the current President run a gas station for him.
Now, instead of being just another obscure and useless rich person, the man with little talent is the President of the United States and his choice of policy initiatives in the wake of an attack on our nation has led to our armed forces being bogged-down in a useless military adventure that, to date, has killed over eight-hundred of our citizen-soldiers without punishing the attackers whose actions ground three-thousand of my neighbors into dog-food on a fine summer's day.
If limousine liberals who are to be appeased are the opposite of this kind of government, then I will: a. Vote Kerry. b. Set up a shrine to Ted Kennedy, and c. do whatever it takes to appease the current regime out of office.
Have a nice day.
That was not a post, that was an essay, and it feels so very much like an essay written by a corporate shill.
I mean really, what's the deal with someone's writing an essay complete with selective quotations from an opponent in an online discussion which he then attacks. Really, that post is garbage, the pure, too-well-focused writing that is the life's blood of corporate America at its worst: 'we can hire someone who can approximate passion and use him to make you believe anything that makes us money.'
Instead of an essay that purports to demolish the points of people who argue for sharing music online on a point-by-point basis, you can make a few simple statements and work from there:
When CD's were first introduced, the music industry decided that they would cost much, much more than the mature technologies embodied in the vinyl albums and cassettes that preceded them and that they replaced. The industry was simply 'recouping the cost of introducing the new technology.'
They never finished recouping it.
People, as in, musicians, pirates and the man on the street, all knew that something had changed, they knew that there was something strange about a CDs costing anywhere between two and four times the cost of a cassette tape of the same performance by the same artist, but no one ever articulated it: no one put their finger on it, no one knew what it was and said it exactly.
The result was the music industry turning music into a nameless, faceless commodity treating all but a very few musicians in the same way that agro-businesses treat wheat farmers: the farmer/musician produces something that the agro-business/music companies process, package and resell turning the commodity into a profit center for themselves and NOT the farmer/musician without whom the thing couldn't exist. In other words, in today's world, there are important similarities between Latin-American coffee-growers and any musician who isn't a superstar.
This is something the (advertising copy-)writer of the post leaves out in his moralizing screed against music pirates: the music pirate doesn't pay the musician for his hard, hard work, but in the case of all but the most successful players in popular music, neither does the record company.
In order for the moralizing of his article to stand, the writer has to depend on an essential ambiguity resolving itself in favor of his position. That is, he needs everyone not to see that outside of the public's successfully waging tobacco-industry sized, class-action lawsuits against the record industry (an oligopoly of multi-billion dollar corporations), there is no way of ever making up for the extent to which we the consumers and the musicians whose work we admire have been and continue to be screwed over.
In other words, the writer wants us to believe not only that musical piracy is wrong (and three decades of price-gouging and price fixing are just good business), and that the only decent, law-abiding thing to do is to return to the status quo ante; to be a good, moral, law-abiding citizen, you should and must participate in the system that makes the music industry (and not musicians) rich: the one that gets anywhere between twelve to twenty dollars out of your pocket for a CD with three songs on it that you actually listen to, and that then hands all but the most popular musicians a quarter for their trouble.
The simple solution is that there isn't one. In order to really reward the musician for his efforts, you either have to filter the money through the record industry, mail the musician a check (which most of us are just too weak to do), or you can wait to buy a ticket for a performance by good, but underappreciated bands when they decide to go give a concert where you live: in a small corner of the left armpit of the world.
Maybe mass P2P networks are a bit much in the great unmeasurable scheme of things, but it will take a lot more than one whore with a copy of Word to make me believe that the record industry and its defenders have any interests at heart but their own.
I think Schneir's argument goes more like this:
'no matter how much work a government puts into a national I.D. card, sophisticated criminals and terrorists will hack the system by obtaining real IDs (social engineering) or by eventually creating more sophisticated fake IDs that embrace anticounterfeiting measures.'
With this in mind, the problem with national IDs is a question of security versus privacy. The current hodge-podge of state IDs is (somewhat) less amenable to intrusive information-gathering and movement tracking than a nationwide ID system would be.
The deep question of National IDs is thus one of individual privacy versus collective security and it is a question that history has already answered: twelve of the 9/11 Hijackers carried perfectly valid IDs issued by the state of Florida.
Now, to really understand Schneier's objection, the question you have to ask yourself is: 'what security magic would the 9/11 Hijacker's having had perfectly valid national ID's instead of perfectly valid Florida IDs have worked, except for their cards to have been newer and shinier than the ones carried by the people around them who hadn't gone through immigration?'
What you choose as an answer is usually a matter of faith and ideology; according to mine the answer is, 'none.' Your results might vary.
If you want to laugh about it, try this addy:
Billy Milano's rant on the subject
The situation you describe is basically what lawyers are for.
There is a big difference between muzzling critics of a company who may or may not have a point about its actions, and, copyright infringement or, as L.L. Bean claims in the suit, another company's hijacking their investment in customer-relations by using spy-ware to pop-up ads for its competition whenever someone tries to visit L.L. Bean's website.
If, as L.L. bean claims in the article, its only use for pop-ups is brief questionaires to its customers, it should have the right to demand that that be the only thing that happens when you visit its website, in much the same way I am able to use my Sprint Cell phone without being forced to hear an ad for another carrier--even though the landlines that carry my call are leased from an affiliate of another cellular provider.
All things being equal, I still like their lawsuit. It's just good sense.
A corporation is granted many of the rights, privileges and risks that an individual possesses/face (see the current flap regarding breasts at the Superbowl, Bono's language).
Like a human, a corporation can express an opinion (advertising, positions on issues); it can secure credit, often far more than the average human; it can commit crimes and be punished for them and it can declare bankruptcy. There are differences however.
Basically, the answer to your question is both 'yes,' and 'no':yes, a corporation enjoys free speech, but it can be said to have a burden of responsibility to society in what it says and how it says it that is not quite the same as a person's. In New York City, for example, the law determines that a woman can go bare-chested anywhere a man can--practically difficult but legally acceptable behaviour--but NBC news cannot show a pair of bare breasts on Network Television for any reason even in a show on breast cancer.
If I am wrong, correct me.
I'm a big science-fiction lover from way back. I think science fiction is generally something that can be described as what you read before you stumble across literature but at it's best, it's stunning and it can make the kinds of comments about human nature that it only it and great literature are up to.
Unfortunately, neither Mutant X, nor Andromeda ever walked into the same aircraft hanger as greatness and, in Mutant X's case, the distance was amazing: it really was an hour of vaccuum--like watching Xmen movies without even the attraction of character references.
Mutant X was pathetic but Andromeda was worse because there were dozens of wonderfully intelligent things it could have been--some of which it tried for at first--but it ended up crippled for a number of reasons, many of which I suspect had to do with Kevin Sorbo's effect on the medium of the fantastic.
The series was so bad, that there were times when watching Andromeda made you wish that you had access so you could ask the right people the right questions and get a straight answer.
First off, as very few people I've seen have noted, there are a lot of general similarities between the dismal Andromeda and the sublime 'Blake's Seven'--both of which involved tiny crews rattling around in big ships and pursuing goals which bring them into conflict with one another and galactic scale civilizations.
Both of them used ideas from sci-fi that was 'out there,' stuff that was so archtypically science fiction in language and scale, that you could hardly imagine it anywhere else. But if these things provide both series with similarities, it is also in them that the two series part ways.
Blake's seven was good because it offered one good script after another set in a huge, complex universe in which technology and glitz took a back seat to real drama and everything boiled down to questions of the limits of good and evil: what people were willing to do for and to one another under pressure.
In Andromeda, they replaced the deep conflict between Blake and Avon, with the simplistic, good hero/bad-hero interaction of Dylan and Tyr.
If that by itself is not enough to make the show an absolute waste, there is 'the spin-kick factor.'
In a universe rife with terrible darkness (the Magog) and high poetry (the ship: 'the Andromeda Ascendant; a Nietzschean probe: 'Deep Midnight's Voice') the writers, producers and directors could find nothing better to serve up week after week, than sparkly weapon blasts and spin kicks until watching Andromeda was so much like watching 'Xena, Warrior Princess,' or the lamentable 'Hercules, the legendary journeys,' that every episode left you ready to cringe as you waited for someone to jump thirty feet while screeching out a ululating battle-cry.
So, the short form on Andromeda, like Mutant X, really is, 'good riddance.'
Mutant X was crap that accomplished nothing but reminding you of how long you had to wait until you got to see the next X-Men movie; while for its part, Andromeda reminded you that science fiction's best intentions are less than nothing when the dominant voices in a project demand that every moment of every show be ready for Sesame Street.
We all love science fiction and want to protect it, but the thought behind Andromeda and Mutant X invariably disproves the phrase, 'something is better than nothing.'
I recently wrote about this in a similar thread involving faked I.D.
Looking at this measure which, in the Pilot program, is voluntary but if successful is expected to become compulsory around 2014, I can see how the potential for abuse that scares advocates of civil liberties.
The problem with biometric data in an Identity card is not that the system becomes suddenly perfect and invulnerable: it doesn't. The problem is one that I think it helps for to be an American for you to understand and hate: our constitution works with the assumption that some conflicts are inevitable: people will make mistakes, or have such bad fortune that will make them so desperate that they commit crimes. Our founding fathers recognized human nature and accounted for it in the legal system and they built acknowledgement of this into our constitution with the fifth amendment as the perfect example.
The fifth amendment to the American Constitution precludes an accused person of being forced to act as a witness against himself. This is a voluntary limiting of the government's power in the interest of society; it is an act of self-restraint in recognition of the tension between two values: government power over the individual versus the efficient administration of criminal justice.
In a perfect world, perfect I.D. cards with biometric features handed out by a government of saints who could be guaranteed in some way to never, ever misuse the power that the cards would give them would be wonderful things.
Secure I.D. cards could do wonderful things in the right hands and in the right circumstances, they might make fraud and identity theft harder while helping in legal defenses by providing authenticated proof that x was in y location at z time.
The real world provides the possibility for things that tends to make American civil libertarians sweat. In the real world in which we live today, technology works to enhance the government's weight in any prosecution while simultaneously opening the door to people you've never met and who haven't asked your permission knowing things about you and potentially using that information.
The ubiquitous cellular phone is already commonly known to provide information on its owner's approximate wearabouts in realtime. Add to this a secure and sure I.D. that, in ten year's time, you will be required to carry (with a penalty of ten years in prison for carrying a fake I.D.) and you have a situation which comes closer to one of the things that the founding fathers would have seen the soul of and hated: instead of being forced to speak against yourself in court (making the job of the prosecutor, the representative of the state, easy) you will be indicted by the government's access to technology that you either want to carry, or are that the law requires you to.
As a last thought, consider just how wise the founding fathers were: in a speculative historical scenario, the best case for forgery-resistant national I.D.s with associated databases is not to be found in England, but in the United States in the September 11th attack.
Plugging in the numbers, you're left with a very important question: would preventing the deaths of three thousand people have been worth what the I.D.s and their potential for abuse would mean to the other three-hundred million.
Why bother giving Ashcroft his wet dream with a national ID to solve this problem, when a national STANDARD would satisfy it? If the actual layout and security measures of your driver's/liquer license ar4e decided upon at the federal level and implemented by the states, half of the really good arguments for a national ID die, leaving mostly the closet authoritarian ones.
Regardless, I think you have a lot of good ideas and woudl be doing a service to continue to share them.
First off, thanks for the wonderful compliment.
Now, on to the points. The idea of a national standard in driver's licenses/liquor ID's makes sense on the surface but it doesn't address all of the potential for abuse. In order to enforce a standard, you'd have to bring the thought to the attention of the relevant lawmakers, they'd have to pass it as part of a bill and then (hopefully) fund it, after the President (hopefully, a NEW ONE) signs it. At this point, we have a national standard in ID cards. All the differences between them are essentially cosmetic, they're all made from essentially the same blanks and only the design for each individual state differs, and that, only inasmuch as will not interfere with authentication.
That is a brilliantly practical idea but I think you would have to implement it in a better world. The trick with bringing all the various state ID's to a national standard instead of printing 300-odd-million U.S. green-card-quality IDs is that once you have the standard and you've enforced it, you essentially have the same degree of control brought about by the green-card menace.
As an evil emperor in training, I would want what the federal government would want: I would want a card that was seriously hard to make a good copy of (multiposition holograms, textured security lamination, uv-readable authentication stamp, holographic representation of the front on the back, etc....) and with some scanner-readable data on the back including (god help us all) a thumbprint with a digital representation of said print on a magnetic strip, barcode, or embedded chip (did I mention evil emperor?) so that you could be dead sure that the holder didn't borrow the card from his older brother when it was really important that you knew that.
By the time you're done with this, you have all cards issued in all fifty-states being for all intents and purposes the dreaded green card only with a different smiley on it. They have the uniformity of quality and, with the way state governments are working to share database information, you end up with the same problems of the original scenario: the authorities have information in databases about you which they can download to any police car in seconds and, thanks to all our authentication, they're damned sure that it is you who:
* Owes UNREAL amounts of money in unpaid parking tickets.
* Owes UNREAL amounts of money in unpaid alimony.
* Owes UNREAL amounts of money in back taxes.
* Really SHOULDN'T be driving without his glasses or contacts.
etc., etc...
There are some who would argue that the cops knowing all this is a good thing. There are some things you just shouldn't get away with, however, one of the points of privacy and the law is that you need probable cause to charge someone with a crime and getting probable cause costs the system effort. Having an ID of any kind which, when linked to databases that know essentially everything there is to know about you removes much of that effort and makes servile good behavior your optimal survival strategy,
It resembes something out of Burgess's 'A Clockwork Orange.'
Sorry, an automobile is a piece of machinery which, when misused, for any reason, through ignorance, through inability or incapacity, can bring injury or death to the operator and or others.
Your having passed a test to get a driver's license proves that at one point in time, you could demonstrate a minimal, baseline, competence in operating a motor vehicle in places where you could lose control and tear through a line of schoolchildren.
Driving is a privilege because the state has to make it one: it would be very strange to see a drunk, maddened, blind, one-legged, epileptic with a car collection tooling around town behind the wheel and you may not like it, but licensing and the things around it helps to prevent it.
This has been one of the more interesting threads I've seen in a while. I mean, this is something I actually know about: I do security in a bar.
I've seen cards from pretty much every state in the Union as well as quite a number of ones from many European nations. Recognizing what is and what is not a valid I.D. card is a hard task that I've found a lot of people who do what I do simply don't know enough to deal with.
The great number of state I.D.s, their variations in the quality of their anti-counterfeiting features. The scanner, the color copier, the laminating machine and the simple willingness of people to lie to your face make it hard to be sure that what you're looking at is real.
The current series of California Driver's license/I.D. card is, IMHO the most secure driver's license in the U.S. in terms of anti-counterfeiting features; the series immediately preceding it is a piece of crap.
The new current series of New Jersey Licenses that I've seen, maybe, five of in the last two months is *very* secure if the person looking at it has an ultraviolet light on him and is actually aware that there is a new series to look at while the preceding series is the most easily and most convincingly counterfeited I.D. I've ever seen, and I see it over, and over and over.
A national I.D. card would certainly eliminate the problem of having to have real expertise to spot fakes and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in wishful thinking.
The most current version of the the United State's green card has anticounterfeiting features that I don't even know the names of, but I know their absence would be easy to spot.
Couple this with mag-strip technology to store information and you could standardize one or more pieces of equipment that any bar or other place that had to determine age or identity would have present that would instantly and permanently remove the guesswork. Put biometric data on the card and give me a thumbprint scanner and underage drinking is pretty much over until counterfeiting technology gets better.
That's how good the current green card, or some variant of it would be as a national I.D card. It would make my job ridiculously easy.
Now here's why I hate it.
First off, the article makes one really interesting point: for a really determined person, someone who wanted to hijack planes or steal a million or what have you, no card will be completely secure everywhere up the line to the point where you get one.
Someone with enough cash, or enough juice with the right people, or willing to put in enough work will be able to get either a valid I.D. in a false name, a borrowed/stolen card or a relatively convincing forgery if it is important enough to them.
Viewed this way, a national I.D. card can be said not to provide greater national security but greater control for people with access to the information that a national I.D. card would provide. In terms of anything important, really important--a real, immediate threat like the 9/11 attack--a national I.D. card would be useless.
In terms of centralized information processing, a national I.D. card would be an enormous Christmas present to big brother, providing governments with a key to interweaving databases, giving anyone in authority all the power they need to pressure anyone who isn't into being a more perfect citizen.
Under the current system, a kid with a really, really good fake I.D. can get past me and that's fine. It's a game. I win most rounds. I'm sure the kids win a few and that's the way things should be.
Getting stopped by the cops for taking a desperation leak on a wall at five A.M. and having them know everything about you from whether or not you did your last round of jury-duty to your cholesterol is not something I'm looking forward to.
Regressive sales tax arguments have been better put than this. Mind you, they are fun. It's hard to explain progressive taxation and everyone who has money or who thinks he has a chance to win the lottery has a big emotional reason to like them.
In a democracy, the government's *ONLY* business is determining what people need and how to go about it. Either that, or world war two was entertainment.
Getting past the statements backed up by nothing, a good comedian still has things to work with: He is essentially saying, "if everyone paid ten cents on the dollar, you could eliminate the IRS because no one would bother to cheat."
That's ludicrous. It's like saying, "If the penalties for all crime was reduced to a one-dollar fine, we'd save money because we could eliminate the police department: everyone who committed a crime would just mail in a check and a confession.
Now, this would probably work: you just wouldn't want to live downwind of any place that tried it.
Actually, the warning in the article sounds like common sense. We live in a culture of capital--of possessions and class with who owns what determined by disposable income.
Apple certainly understands this which is why they introduce iPod models by threes, differentiated only by the size of the harddrive. It lets you say, 'look! I spent more money. Mine is bigger!'
Like it or not, the iPod is a device which announces that its owner has spent at least U.S. $300 on something easily stolen and eminently desireable. If you want to understand what that white cord looks like to a thief, imagine going to a bank and getting three fat stacks of singles, and then taping them to your chest with a post-it attached that says, 'Hi, you don't have this!'
It just makes sense.
I'm a bouncer in a bar and I can post as myself.
The poster whose lines you find objectionable do contain evidence: it is anecdotal and not statistical, but it is by no means absent, nor is the original poster's assertion unfounded.
The original poster cites evidence based on the volume of discussion in one or more forums, thus bypassing expensive and difficult-to-quantify analysis by engineers and statisticians.
As the examples you yourself provide point out, the original poster was right to reason as he did--citing only evidence of public interest--because it is a given that both good and bad patents are granted as a result of the current process.
Considering the nature of the legislation in question (e.g., measures to maintain and increase the number of skilled examiners by retaining funds from fees), the actual number of 'good' versus 'bad' patents is, as you should recognize, irrelevant.
Harvard must be lowering its standards.
That strikes me as a big uh-oh.
A patent office staffed with public servants whose job it is to keep things secure while under consideration is one thing. Outside firms, staffed by you-know-not-whom brings people into the loop you might not want there--like the guy who stole *half* of a Japanese process for new electrolytic capacitors and caused a product recall when the stolen and only partly-understood technology burst on motherboards.
You've got to love those free-market solutions.
This may be heartening news.
As things stand today, getting a patent, from the most complex biotechnologies, to the simplest gadget costs tons and takes years.
If, for once, the government does it right, ignores the lobbyists, and provides for the patent office to be less of a cash-cow by taxing crackpots, and granting every unscrupulous firm that asks a seventeen-year lock on breathing, we might see a time when it costs less to come up with an idea and use it to quit your day-job.
And on that day, I for one will shout 'Halliluyah!'