Any case in which the government has killed off large portions of the population. If they're not doing that, anything you could do would make things worse.
back when i was in high school we had "values clarification" where we were asked to think about and discuss situations like the Lifeboat Scenario in which you have seven passengers trying to take refuge on a lifeboat that only seats four -- we had to decide whether to leave the 80-year-old man to drown in order to save the 25-year-old pregnant woman and etc.
In that same vein, I wonder how many people would have to die in order to be a "large portion of the population": 5? 30? 273? 5,309? 144,000? 273,000,000? 7,134,258,000? I believe it was historian Howard Zinn who made the obvious point that nobody ever consults those people to be sacrificed on the altar of Destiny as to whether they are willing to so serve.
Still, I admit that I find your arguments compelling (and very well put, you have a good "typing voice"). The principle of Scarcity seems to apply to any known dynamic system, and we may not be able to insure both uncompromised Freedom and the long-term stability of that Freedom. Therefore, we must carefully allocate our political concepts of Powers of Government (to protect us against bad people) and Rights of People (to protect us against bad government) in a sensible manner. But what is the scale we should use to strike just the right balance? What method would you have us use to decide how many People's rights can be violated before we institue a corresponding limitation of the government?
I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about the notorious american placement of individual whims over the good of society at large, and I'm still stuck on this one idea: Though official documents frame rights in the sense of belonging to and benefitting "the People", there are no rights in the aggregate.
Casually-Formally stated: Definition: "There exists a set {thePeople} whose elements have properties according to the set {Liberties}, i.e. X is an element of {thePeople} implies that X has properties defined by {Rights}. If we take an arbitrary member, JohnQPublic of {the People} and disallow its Rights then our whole assumption of the innate-quality of Human rights becomes false (T->F). And since we picked an arbitrary element, then ALL elements from set {thePeople} produce a negative truth value for the implication "x is an element of {thePeople} means that x has {Rights}"
Clearly, all rights are inherently individual rights. This is the irreducible concept upon which the American democratic system depends.
It still seems absurd to run off chasing one's own Moral Inviolability a laAtlas Shrugged. But what made Dagney Taggart bearable was that the other characters were drawn as incompetent, destructive and oppressive, so that her choices became progressively narrow, until eventually she chose to place her self-interest irrevocably above the "social good". In my opinion, this "aneristic effect" is exactly what the UK law promotes and so to an extent it justifies even more effort by individuals to protect themselves from the given systems of power.
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Umm... This sounds like a pretty good idea at first -- we humans do so love to categorize things -- but I wonder what the law-enforcement potential is. Granted, the whois record supposedly contains the name/address of the registrant so theoretically the legal jurisdiction information is easily obtained, but if every website was required to include a geographical extension as part of its name, how long do you think it would be before laws were passed declaring a list of Prerequisite Criteria for Obtaining Legal Webspace Under the [insert counry/state] TLD - just like the Appropriate Use Contract or Terms of Service that ISPs impose on their clients? Then more laws would set up an FCC-type enforcer that would combine in itself the roles of Registrar and Police.
I admit I don't know a lot about 'net infrastructure, but it seems like this would essentially CREATE "cyberjurisdictions" that could then be subsumed by the State, along with technology to search the site for possible illegal content -- maybe a specialized Echelon/Carnivore system that would automagically snoop through data to/from www.anything.somethingelse.USA.
I don't know how technically feasible this would be, but if an ignorant semi-nerd like me can think of it surely a real nerd could figure out a way to implement it. Anybody wanna explain why this can/can't be done?
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Well hooray for them. I'd define spam as "content delivered to a user without desire or request on the part of the user and prior warning/confirmation on the part of the deliverer"
I've had email since '90 (a moment of silence for the late, great BBSes), and though spam wasn't nearly as bad back then as it is now, I still quickly got over my timidity of telling everyone from strangers to close friends, "Don't bother sending me blonde jokes, political action reports, or anything that begins with 'FWD: FWD: RE: RE: Fwd: Re: READ THIS!!!!!!!!!'. I refuse to read such crapola -- I intend to use email as a way of increasing meaningful, first-hand COMMUNICATION between human persons."
Of course, not everyone was happy with this simple directive. Either they got over it, or *I* got over *them*, but it was/is not tolerated.
In any case, some of the people with whom I have casual, unprotected e-mail do not bother to conceal recipients when they send out a mass forward of "top ten reasons dogs are better than men having sex with dogs" or whatever putrid meme-virus is going around that week. One particularly annoying episode last year was due to morons who indiscriminately use the Reply-All button. I ended up getting harvested onto the mailing-list of a political interest group I didn't really like (let's just say if I had been in the military it could have been grounds for a discharge), receiving a long newsletter update about their URGENT ACTION ITEMS!!!!!! almost every day.
So I took some URGENT ACTION!!! of my own: 1)Reply to sender of the message, requesting removal (subject, body, non-script english). no response, two days later, received newsletter. 2)Go to website look for unsubscribe area. none there, receive four newsletters over the next week. 3)Send email to designated "Contact Us!" including copies of their newsletter along with my request to be removed from list; also suggest webpage removal form. no response, receive several newsletters over the next week. 4)Send to abuse@ webmaster@ postmaster@ [domain.org] requesting personal removal, including copies of past requests and newsletters; re-iterate webpage suggestion. no response, receive newsletters over the next four days. 5)Use DNS lookup to find addresses for the registrant, send request for removal including history (numbers 1-4). finally, someone removes me from the list. although to be honest, it would have been nice to receive an apology from the bastards, or some indication that "we are adding a new form on our page whereby users may request removal in the future".
THE POINT IS: by having mailback-confirmation of list-adds (providing info on removal) they could have saved: a)their time and resources b)MY time and resources c)my newly-earned, personal opposition to their cause (amusingly, protesting to end violations of civil liberties)
___ the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Simultaneity is easily dismissed...
on
Calculating God
·
· Score: 1
...and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this very simple solution:
1) A novel like this is written from the "omniscient narrator" viewpoint.
2) Since we know god is omniscient then therefore whatever observations are provided by the author can be easily substituted for God's observations according to Behe's Mousetrap Analogy
3) Therefore, since the author describes these things as occcurrring simultaneously, ie simultaneous to the point of view of the author, these things occcurrred simultaneously to the viewpoint of God
4) This fact is self-verifying considering he's the one that made them happen and he probably wanted to get all that biotic-life-prodding over at the same time while he had the oven already preheated and before the Knicks game.
5) Since we now see that these events happened simultaneously in reference to God's point of view, all we have to do is either have God tell us when they happened or just go to his house and take our own measurments from there.
See, i told you it was simple. the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
but have you ever thought about why cellphone use has exploded? (aside from cheaper and more efficient manufacturing). i'd like to theorize that wearable computers will not supercede or even match cellphones for a much longer time than most people expect.
On a phone, even if you are pushing your cart through winn-dixie looking for purplesaurus rex koolaid, you are still engaging in some kind of interaction with a human. you know, an actual bodily person. Intelligent, carbon-not-silicon-based life (note: this excludes pamela lee).
All the dotcom adverts show happy people in all the world's countries getting excited about checking sports/stock scores, managing your career, and of course the obligatory father watching his son's soccer game on his laptop. But really, are you going to be desperate to check your email or assess your investments while you're picking up the dry-cleaning? (a la "Have you ever worn a fax machine on your head? You will!"). our entire social construction of time-usage contraverts this notion. we still accomplish things in discrete chunks; we have a prioritized to-do list that we check off one by one. to be at work/school/church/store/soccergame/divorcecourt requires one's present attention. we do not simply drift in and out of these events. we do not naturally multitask life itself; when we do we invariably make mistakes or increase our danger margins.
in no sense am i "against" these technologies, i just think that those who push these things have too quickly discounted the human psyche which has concrete physiological limits that will not be swayed by any level of external technology.
generally i agree with Digitalia, until computer technology itself progresses considerably in voice-recognition and AI there will be zero use for these devices by more than.01% of the population.
-- the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Slashdot Mirror
Any case in which the government has killed off large portions of the population. If they're not doing that, anything you could do would make things worse.
back when i was in high school we had "values clarification" where we were asked to think about and discuss situations like the Lifeboat Scenario in which you have seven passengers trying to take refuge on a lifeboat that only seats four -- we had to decide whether to leave the 80-year-old man to drown in order to save the 25-year-old pregnant woman and etc.
In that same vein, I wonder how many people would have to die in order to be a "large portion of the population":
5?
30?
273?
5,309?
144,000?
273,000,000?
7,134,258,000?
I believe it was historian Howard Zinn who made the obvious point that nobody ever consults those people to be sacrificed on the altar of Destiny as to whether they are willing to so serve.
Still, I admit that I find your arguments compelling (and very well put, you have a good "typing voice"). The principle of Scarcity seems to apply to any known dynamic system, and we may not be able to insure both uncompromised Freedom and the long-term stability of that Freedom. Therefore, we must carefully allocate our political concepts of Powers of Government (to protect us against bad people) and Rights of People (to protect us against bad government) in a sensible manner.
But what is the scale we should use to strike just the right balance?
What method would you have us use to decide how many People's rights can be violated before we institue a corresponding limitation of the government?
I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about the notorious american placement of individual whims over the good of society at large, and I'm still stuck on this one idea:
Though official documents frame rights in the sense of belonging to and benefitting "the People", there are no rights in the aggregate.
Casually-Formally stated:
Definition: "There exists a set {thePeople} whose elements have properties according to the set {Liberties}, i.e. X is an element of {thePeople} implies that X has properties defined by {Rights}.
If we take an arbitrary member, JohnQPublic of {the People} and disallow its Rights then our whole assumption of the innate-quality of Human rights becomes false (T->F). And since we picked an arbitrary element, then ALL elements from set {thePeople} produce a negative truth value for the implication "x is an element of {thePeople} means that x has {Rights}"
Clearly, all rights are inherently individual rights. This is the irreducible concept upon which the American democratic system depends.
It still seems absurd to run off chasing one's own Moral Inviolability a la Atlas Shrugged. But what made Dagney Taggart bearable was that the other characters were drawn as incompetent, destructive and oppressive, so that her choices became progressively narrow, until eventually she chose to place her self-interest irrevocably above the "social good".
In my opinion, this "aneristic effect" is exactly what the UK law promotes and so to an extent it justifies even more effort by individuals to protect themselves from the given systems of power.
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
that was my thought, too.
title of today's article from "cliff":
Digital Voices from Rouge Nations
title of one of the most high-traffic Katz postings ever:
Voices from the Hellmouth
Can there be any more doubt?
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Umm...
This sounds like a pretty good idea at first -- we humans do so love to categorize things -- but I wonder what the law-enforcement potential is. Granted, the whois record supposedly contains the name/address of the registrant so theoretically the legal jurisdiction information is easily obtained, but if every website was required to include a geographical extension as part of its name, how long do you think it would be before laws were passed declaring a list of Prerequisite Criteria for Obtaining Legal Webspace Under the [insert counry/state] TLD - just like the Appropriate Use Contract or Terms of Service that ISPs impose on their clients? Then more laws would set up an FCC-type enforcer that would combine in itself the roles of Registrar and Police.
I admit I don't know a lot about 'net infrastructure, but it seems like this would essentially CREATE "cyberjurisdictions" that could then be subsumed by the State, along with technology to search the site for possible illegal content -- maybe a specialized Echelon/Carnivore system that would automagically snoop through data to/from www.anything.somethingelse.USA.
I don't know how technically feasible this would be, but if an ignorant semi-nerd like me can think of it surely a real nerd could figure out a way to implement it. Anybody wanna explain why this can/can't be done?
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
er.. did i say "DNS LOOKUP" ???
I meant "whois".
heh, too bad there's no +1, Informative With Error(s)
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Well hooray for them. I'd define spam as "content delivered to a user without desire or request on the part of the user and prior warning/confirmation on the part of the deliverer"
I've had email since '90 (a moment of silence for the late, great BBSes), and though spam wasn't nearly as bad back then as it is now, I still quickly got over my timidity of telling everyone from strangers to close friends, "Don't bother sending me blonde jokes, political action reports, or anything that begins with 'FWD: FWD: RE: RE: Fwd: Re: READ THIS!!!!!!!!!'. I refuse to read such crapola -- I intend to use email as a way of increasing meaningful, first-hand COMMUNICATION between human persons."
Of course, not everyone was happy with this simple directive. Either they got over it, or *I* got over *them*, but it was/is not tolerated.
In any case, some of the people with whom I have casual, unprotected e-mail do not bother to conceal recipients when they send out a mass forward of "top ten reasons dogs are better than men having sex with dogs" or whatever putrid meme-virus is going around that week. One particularly annoying episode last year was due to morons who indiscriminately use the Reply-All button. I ended up getting harvested onto the mailing-list of a political interest group I didn't really like (let's just say if I had been in the military it could have been grounds for a discharge), receiving a long newsletter update about their URGENT ACTION ITEMS!!!!!! almost every day.
So I took some URGENT ACTION!!! of my own:
1)Reply to sender of the message, requesting removal (subject, body, non-script english).
no response, two days later, received newsletter.
2)Go to website look for unsubscribe area.
none there, receive four newsletters over the next week.
3)Send email to designated "Contact Us!" including copies of their newsletter along with my request to be removed from list; also suggest webpage removal form.
no response, receive several newsletters over the next week.
4)Send to abuse@ webmaster@ postmaster@ [domain.org] requesting personal removal, including copies of past requests and newsletters; re-iterate webpage suggestion.
no response, receive newsletters over the next four days.
5)Use DNS lookup to find addresses for the registrant, send request for removal including history (numbers 1-4).
finally, someone removes me from the list. although to be honest, it would have been nice to receive an apology from the bastards, or some indication that "we are adding a new form on our page whereby users may request removal in the future".
THE POINT IS: by having mailback-confirmation of list-adds (providing info on removal) they could have saved:
a)their time and resources
b)MY time and resources
c)my newly-earned, personal opposition to their cause (amusingly, protesting to end violations of civil liberties)
nmx is absolutely right on this.
___
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
...and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this very simple solution:
1) A novel like this is written from the "omniscient narrator" viewpoint.
2) Since we know god is omniscient then therefore whatever observations are provided by the author can be easily substituted for God's observations according to Behe's Mousetrap Analogy
3) Therefore, since the author describes these things as occcurrring simultaneously, ie simultaneous to the point of view of the author, these things occcurrred simultaneously to the viewpoint of God
4) This fact is self-verifying considering he's the one that made them happen and he probably wanted to get all that biotic-life-prodding over at the same time while he had the oven already preheated and before the Knicks game.
5) Since we now see that these events happened simultaneously in reference to God's point of view, all we have to do is either have God tell us when they happened or just go to his house and take our own measurments from there.
See, i told you it was simple.
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
but have you ever thought about why cellphone use has exploded? (aside from cheaper and more efficient manufacturing).
.01% of the population.
i'd like to theorize that wearable computers will not supercede or even match cellphones for a much longer time than most people expect.
On a phone, even if you are pushing your cart through winn-dixie looking for purplesaurus rex koolaid, you are still engaging in some kind of interaction with a human. you know, an actual bodily person. Intelligent, carbon-not-silicon-based life (note: this excludes pamela lee).
All the dotcom adverts show happy people in all the world's countries getting excited about checking sports/stock scores, managing your career, and of course the obligatory father watching his son's soccer game on his laptop. But really, are you going to be desperate to check your email or assess your investments while you're picking up the dry-cleaning? (a la "Have you ever worn a fax machine on your head? You will!").
our entire social construction of time-usage contraverts this notion. we still accomplish things in discrete chunks; we have a prioritized to-do list that we check off one by one. to be at work/school/church/store/soccergame/divorcecourt requires one's present attention. we do not simply drift in and out of these events. we do not naturally multitask life itself; when we do we invariably make mistakes or increase our danger margins.
in no sense am i "against" these technologies, i just think that those who push these things have too quickly discounted the human psyche which has concrete physiological limits that will not be swayed by any level of external technology.
generally i agree with Digitalia, until computer technology itself progresses considerably in voice-recognition and AI there will be zero use for these devices by more than
--
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.