Yeah, that's a problem with filling your life up completely with various things all of which you consider impossible to postpone: your life is already so full up with mundane tasks done for others that the moment some unexpected problem comes along which requires more than a modicum of extra effort, you're fucked. It's the way the modern Western world was built.
I'll do the same thing I've done in the past when encountering legal problems: use my almost human ability to read and research so that I may present and win a case.
The average lawyer and the average computer programmer share an otherwise unmatched skill at overrating their abilities.
The difference is that back when most people were supposedly ignorant and had little means to access information, there was a real divide created in the country between supporters and detractors of Dreyfus. Today only a tiny proportion of any Western country cares about any stance but the one promoted by government and the popular media.
We think that the Internet etc. make us more free, but the wealth of modern methods of transmitting information simply means being flooded with propaganda more effectively than ever before. Most think they see multiple viewpoints when in fact they're seeing the same viewpoint multiple times with slightly different wording.
The "child sex abuse" term is one used by the child protection industry^Wcharities because they object to "child pornography" as if it's just another class of porn rather than evidence of abuse. I don't particularly like the term.
The problem comes when people regard something sexual or enjoyable as inherently more/less evil than something done in a somber and serious manner. Asking a compliant kid to give you a blowjob may be considered more repulsive than killing a kid for witnessing some crime, say, but killing the kid is worse by any stretch of reason. The law recognises this but the public/media don't.
Yes, it's implemented that badly by the vast majority of ISPs in the UK - everything through a proxy and not even a transparent one. This means that any site which makes significant use of the client IP is likely to break, most obviously filesharing sites where one dolt uploading CP means every single request ends up coming from a single proxy IP and per-IP bandwidth limits are hit within minutes.
Some ISPs are contemplating moving to deep packet inspection but that still won't do anything about HTTPS or non-HTTP.
Nursie, you're either an extremely dedicated (browsing quickly through your posting history) troll playing a typical Conservative, or your convictions are so mind-numbingly genuine that you think it's possible to simply deny the content of a post you made only a few minutes ago.
You have no problem with "domain filtering or domain takedowns" for CP.
That means, unless you're about to argue for vigilante justice, that you support government involvement in censorship at the domain level for CP.
At least have the cojones to either stand up for what you've actually said or to admit that your position needs review.
No, I rejected the ones in which someone is deliberately harmed in order to obtain the footage,
You seem to know a lot about child abuse. Are you sure that child sexual abuse doesn't happen because the abusers enjoy it? The filming may be secondary.
Meanwhile, an oppressive government will often make executions and its own war crimes very public, possibly recording and rebroadcasting, for the chilling terror effect on others who may dare to resist it. Someone is deliberately harmed in order to obtain the footage.
which is then distributed for kicks. there is a difference.
They're all distributed for kicks.
I'm not suggesting laws. In fact you'll see if you read my comments that I disagree with them based on the possibility of abuse of said law.
No, you've indicated that you have reservations based on the possibility of abuse but that in principle you support centralised filtering.
Personally I think that if you want to say that there is no connection between ease of access to child porn, people paying for child porn, and therefore more being made... well given that everything we know about supply and demand would have to be thrown out for that not to be the case I think the onus is on you here.
Why did you slip in "people paying for child porn" there? The question is whether slightly easier access to child porn on the web is going to lead to more abuse. "Everything we know" about supply and demand doesn't lead to this conclusion at all. A slight increase in available supply of CP does not increase demand for CP. Why would it? Even before everything else about the absurdity of that implication is addressed, you're making the classical mistake of confusing tangible property and bits: data is not used up, and copying CP doesn't mean more abuse is caused (aside from privacy issues) or will have to be caused to satisfy further people.
Anyway, a market-based "solution" is to flood the Internet with all the CP ever created, providing such an abundance of CP that demand is more likely to be satisfied and there's little incentive to create more.
It's simple. Your assertion that a filter solution is neither moral nor effective is unsupported.
It has been argued at length in almost every thread discussing CP filters that a centralised government filter is immoral; the certainty of abuse is one obvious reason you have addressed. As for whether it's effective, again, the onus is on you to prove that it is. The default assumption in any scientific approach is the lack of correlation/association/causation, and it is for the theoretician or experimenter to show otherwise.
Is it likely to be *absolutely* effective? Hell no. is it likely to dissuade less technical users? Well sure we'd need some supporting evidence for that.
Dissuade them from what? Looking for CP out of curiosity? Satisfying sexual desire? Doing something which causes more children to be abused? If it's anything but the last, tell me why it must be stopped. If it's the last, tell me why it would cause more children to be abused. The IWF produces one of the longest established filter lists in the Western world and even they've been clear that the only reasonable purpose is to stop people accidentally stumbling across CP. What is your evidence that it does something more?
No, I haven't, because that's not my assertion. You made that bit up all by yourself.
"And I would apply this to all of your list up to and including the snuff film." You've rejected the examples where there's an obvious social benefit to publication such as videos/photographs of genocide. But you've happily included all the examples which the popular media commonly suggest are shared for kicks.
By your argument I assume you have concrete evidence to the contrary? That there is no market effect? No escalation from viewing to buying?
You can't just assert a connection between two things (one which I see you're now trying to be deliberately vague about) and then demand that other people prove that there is no connection. It's doubly bad when you start suggesting restrictive laws should be enacted on the basis of your assertion.
And that's another baseless assertion from you.
Which bit is baseless? Do you disagree that the best moral solution should be sought? Or do you think it's "baseless" to suggest that government Internet censorship of CP is neither part of an optimal solution (to the problem of child abuse) nor even a moral option?
From which orifice are you pulling this particular accusation?
Oh, Nursie, you are awful. It came from yours and I didn't even need to pull:
And we all believe in market based solutions, right?
"Here's we'll apply market principles because the market is shown to work in this case," would be relying on evidence.
"Here we'll apply market principles because all problems must be solved using market principles because the free market always works," would be relying on a belief system.
You might want to argue that my statement is vacuous because, well, confidence in science and evidence and stuff is itself a belief system. But that would be deliberately obtuse, and it's not proper form on the Internet to behave like that;-).
no, it *has* to be media hysteria that has warped my fragile little mind
You haven't explained why there's something special about sex which means that publications with a sexual element are worse than, say, publications with a non-sexual violent element. Of all the many methods of tackling the problem, you're precisely stating the popularly promoted solutions with the usual "there'll be no feature creep" reassurance, while also not justifying the approach.
Blocking it puts off the 'casual' viewer and constricts the market.
Are you a casual viewer? If not, what information are you using to make statements based on the actions of the casual viewer? IOW, what dangers does this casual viewer pose and how many casual viewers are there? By your argument, I assume you have evidence that there are many people who use easily found images of child abuse on the web as a gateway drug to paying for or producing child porn.
And we all believe in market based solutions, right?
The solution which uses moral means and which works best is the best solution. (The proposed solution has neither property.) To suggest that every solution must be based upon some particular belief system is religion.
At what stage do you think media hysteria bombarded you sufficiently - as it has done with so many people - to think an image of child abuse is a special case, so much worse than any other sequence of bits which acts as evidence that some abuse has taken place? What about a picture/film of adult sexual abuse? If the adult is developmentally retarded? Animal abuse? A snuff film? An image of a dead baby? A woman executed for being raped? A war crime? Evidence of genocide?
Ask yourself whether your concern is with the image or with the discomfort you feel that someone enjoys the image. Then realise that people may enjoy any or all of the above. Then realise that almost all sexual abuse occurs within families or by other people in trusted caring roles - if you want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, you would stop far more child sexual abuse by outlawing the family unit.
The noncommercial distribution of CP seems reasonably to be a privacy issue for the child, as any photo/video taken without consent. Beyond that, all the resources should go toward identifying and stopping the abusers and helping the victims. To inform the abused that money which you are claiming to be using in their interest is going to be invested in pushing images of his/her abuse underground (and as the thin end of the wedge for general censorship) is not only illogical, but cruel.
Also, let's be clear here: the IWF, one of the oldest Internet censorship frameworks in the Western world, doesn't even claim that its aim in blocking is to stop CP (it does help stop CP by acting as a clearinghouse for CP reports and sending evidence to authorities at home and abroad - but that's where its helpfulness ends). It claims that its blocking list is provided to stop people "accidentally" viewing CP. This shows how absurd the situation is: surely the correct response to accidentally doing something which isn't dangerous is to learn from your mistakes so you know how to minimise your chances of doing it again? But no, we're at the "punished for being raped" stage of hysteria, where I must worry about the legal implications of accidentally stumbling into CP. It's not that a single such incident is likely to lead to conviction, but that - in the UK at least - a single such incident may lead to arrest, and my arrest record can be studied by pretty much any potential employer.
Any good government knows how to make anyone a criminal or quasi-criminal at its whim. This is just another method. It has nothing whatever to do with stopping child abuse, and I say that as someone who has fundraised for kids' charities and supported certain groups for abuse survivors for as long as I can recall.
I personally feel that those who criticise privacy advocates are secretly ashamed of not being interesting and can't bear that there are many people out there doing things where adequate anonymity is the difference between success and detainment. There's also a bit of languor in there: "I'm so lazy I need targeted adverts to choose what I want."
A man who thinks that "the sufficiently lame should suffer" always conveniently categorises themselves as insufficiently lame.
Of course, there's someone somewhere else with a similar philosophy who categorises himself as insufficiently lame but pigeonholes the first man as sufficiently lame. Which is fortunate, really, because if all the little fascists didn't waste their time arguing with each other over who was worthy of life, they might consolidate power more often than they currently do.
Runaway1956: population control through reducing the birth rate is entirely different from population control through increasing the death rate. Only the latter has a somewhat final and drastic effect on real individual humans (before one even begins to consider the knock-on effect on society), and only the most sociopathic utilitarian can honestly confuse the two with some argument that the end justifies the means. Yes, we make too many babies, but we can only solve that by making life more bearable for the living - then we take away the retreat to a dream about making a better life for one's descendants or, worse, the need to use children as support in old age. Religion's old lie about a world of suffering rewarded in the afterlife is just a conceptual offshoot of living for one's children.
As much of a shock to you as this may be, many of us arrive at our own conclusions without ever having read Rand's works.
Your rhetoric makes it clear you have read Rand's works, once enjoyed them wholly, then have tempered your views slightly as maturity hit. You're even trotting out the "fallacy of the excluded middle" term often used in discussing her work but which has nothing to do with anything I said. I'm advocating balance, i.e. precisely not engaging a false dichotomy.
But you've been let down by your matriarch and one base part of you is angry that you can't apply Rand in the most harsh sense:
If an idiot causes his own death and harms no one else, that's a benefit for everyone else.
This sentence, the crux of your whole argument, is horrendous sophistry. It seems like you certainly need to read philosophy other than Rand. You might then understand the difference between a carefully presented argument with well-defined words and babble indistinguishable from troll.
(1) How do I classify an "idiot"? Is it even relevant, or was that word inserted in there for appeal to emotion? Are you using the term to imply that the death of a smart guy taking a single dumb risk is bad - in which case, since you're surely not so stupid as to think that clever people aren't capable of occasionally making daft decisions, don't you need to look out for geniuses who make silly mistakes?
(2) When does a man cause his own death? Suicide? Accident? Ignorance? Risk-taking? And to what extent are each of these activities allowed before the great AC judges the death as deserved? Put another way, a mewling nerd on the Internet mocks those who take risks (by choice, ignorance through no fault of their own, desperation, etc.) - would he survive in the stagnant, undeveloped world which would exist if everyone were as cowardly as he?
(3) How often does one man's death actually harm "no one else"? Who judges the harm caused on an individual and collective level? Is it you, again?
(4) "..., that's a benefit for everyone else." Why? If A and B and C then Z. Even if you manage to fill out the part of the argument which assumes that A and B and C are simultaneously true even remotely often, you've made this huge leap to suggesting that the death of certain people benefits everyone.
I have this rule of thumb for any philosophy I come across: if, at any stage, it identifies some chosen group of people and argues that the chosen people will be better off if the non-chosen are dead, then the philosophy is evil.
The deliciously tragic irony here is that you've identified the non-chosen (in your own antisocial world where one stranger's fate has no impact on others) as something like "stupid people with no friends". Bravo, sir, bravo.
I see what you're saying and it sounds like, "MOM i'll be up for food LATER i'm listening to a speech by AYN RAND she's so COOL!"
No, we don't want to be in a world where idiots die. Nor do we want to be in a world where people offering good advice are shouted down by angry impotents like you who have no real power so instead assert your superiority over the most vulnerable.
Let's instead live in a world of balance, where those who are less able receive a degree of support which doesn't put impossible burden on others but which does lift them up to the point where they are safe and able to join in.
And Talgo has been around since the '40s, way before the tourism boom. If you check out Aravaca you can just about make out the "Avenida del Talgo" sign in the street of luxury[tm] flats to remind you of where work used to occur. There are a few things Spain has done a great job of building, but its contribution is dwindling.
I couldn't give two hoots about military works - especially foreign ones: I've had enough of Spain being the factory and testing ground for flying war machines produced for empires in the north.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's a problem with filling your life up completely with various things all of which you consider impossible to postpone: your life is already so full up with mundane tasks done for others that the moment some unexpected problem comes along which requires more than a modicum of extra effort, you're fucked. It's the way the modern Western world was built.
I'll do the same thing I've done in the past when encountering legal problems: use my almost human ability to read and research so that I may present and win a case.
The average lawyer and the average computer programmer share an otherwise unmatched skill at overrating their abilities.
The difference is that back when most people were supposedly ignorant and had little means to access information, there was a real divide created in the country between supporters and detractors of Dreyfus. Today only a tiny proportion of any Western country cares about any stance but the one promoted by government and the popular media.
We think that the Internet etc. make us more free, but the wealth of modern methods of transmitting information simply means being flooded with propaganda more effectively than ever before. Most think they see multiple viewpoints when in fact they're seeing the same viewpoint multiple times with slightly different wording.
Yes, those who do not quickly comply without complaint are always to blame.
The "child sex abuse" term is one used by the child protection industry^Wcharities because they object to "child pornography" as if it's just another class of porn rather than evidence of abuse. I don't particularly like the term.
The problem comes when people regard something sexual or enjoyable as inherently more/less evil than something done in a somber and serious manner. Asking a compliant kid to give you a blowjob may be considered more repulsive than killing a kid for witnessing some crime, say, but killing the kid is worse by any stretch of reason. The law recognises this but the public/media don't.
Yes, it's implemented that badly by the vast majority of ISPs in the UK - everything through a proxy and not even a transparent one. This means that any site which makes significant use of the client IP is likely to break, most obviously filesharing sites where one dolt uploading CP means every single request ends up coming from a single proxy IP and per-IP bandwidth limits are hit within minutes.
Some ISPs are contemplating moving to deep packet inspection but that still won't do anything about HTTPS or non-HTTP.
The real purpose, as everyone's always known, was to reach a stage where it becomes possible to use the system's technology to censor any information the lobbyists please.
Nursie, you're either an extremely dedicated (browsing quickly through your posting history) troll playing a typical Conservative, or your convictions are so mind-numbingly genuine that you think it's possible to simply deny the content of a post you made only a few minutes ago.
You have no problem with "domain filtering or domain takedowns" for CP.
That means, unless you're about to argue for vigilante justice, that you support government involvement in censorship at the domain level for CP.
At least have the cojones to either stand up for what you've actually said or to admit that your position needs review.
No, I rejected the ones in which someone is deliberately harmed in order to obtain the footage,
You seem to know a lot about child abuse. Are you sure that child sexual abuse doesn't happen because the abusers enjoy it? The filming may be secondary.
Meanwhile, an oppressive government will often make executions and its own war crimes very public, possibly recording and rebroadcasting, for the chilling terror effect on others who may dare to resist it. Someone is deliberately harmed in order to obtain the footage.
which is then distributed for kicks. there is a difference.
They're all distributed for kicks.
I'm not suggesting laws. In fact you'll see if you read my comments that I disagree with them based on the possibility of abuse of said law.
No, you've indicated that you have reservations based on the possibility of abuse but that in principle you support centralised filtering.
Personally I think that if you want to say that there is no connection between ease of access to child porn, people paying for child porn, and therefore more being made... well given that everything we know about supply and demand would have to be thrown out for that not to be the case I think the onus is on you here.
Why did you slip in "people paying for child porn" there? The question is whether slightly easier access to child porn on the web is going to lead to more abuse. "Everything we know" about supply and demand doesn't lead to this conclusion at all. A slight increase in available supply of CP does not increase demand for CP. Why would it? Even before everything else about the absurdity of that implication is addressed, you're making the classical mistake of confusing tangible property and bits: data is not used up, and copying CP doesn't mean more abuse is caused (aside from privacy issues) or will have to be caused to satisfy further people.
Anyway, a market-based "solution" is to flood the Internet with all the CP ever created, providing such an abundance of CP that demand is more likely to be satisfied and there's little incentive to create more.
It's simple. Your assertion that a filter solution is neither moral nor effective is unsupported.
It has been argued at length in almost every thread discussing CP filters that a centralised government filter is immoral; the certainty of abuse is one obvious reason you have addressed. As for whether it's effective, again, the onus is on you to prove that it is. The default assumption in any scientific approach is the lack of correlation/association/causation, and it is for the theoretician or experimenter to show otherwise.
Is it likely to be *absolutely* effective? Hell no. is it likely to dissuade less technical users? Well sure we'd need some supporting evidence for that.
Dissuade them from what? Looking for CP out of curiosity? Satisfying sexual desire? Doing something which causes more children to be abused? If it's anything but the last, tell me why it must be stopped. If it's the last, tell me why it would cause more children to be abused. The IWF produces one of the longest established filter lists in the Western world and even they've been clear that the only reasonable purpose is to stop people accidentally stumbling across CP. What is your evidence that it does something more?
No, you're quite clear that you support centralised enforcement:
But I don't really have a problem with the concept of domain filtering or domain takedowns for child pornography.
I also wouldn't run a Freenet node for the same reasons as you.
Do you see the difference between not supporting something and outlawing it?
No, I haven't, because that's not my assertion. You made that bit up all by yourself.
"And I would apply this to all of your list up to and including the snuff film." You've rejected the examples where there's an obvious social benefit to publication such as videos/photographs of genocide. But you've happily included all the examples which the popular media commonly suggest are shared for kicks.
By your argument I assume you have concrete evidence to the contrary? That there is no market effect? No escalation from viewing to buying?
You can't just assert a connection between two things (one which I see you're now trying to be deliberately vague about) and then demand that other people prove that there is no connection. It's doubly bad when you start suggesting restrictive laws should be enacted on the basis of your assertion.
And that's another baseless assertion from you.
Which bit is baseless? Do you disagree that the best moral solution should be sought? Or do you think it's "baseless" to suggest that government Internet censorship of CP is neither part of an optimal solution (to the problem of child abuse) nor even a moral option?
From which orifice are you pulling this particular accusation?
Oh, Nursie, you are awful. It came from yours and I didn't even need to pull:
And we all believe in market based solutions, right?
As a general concept I'm fine with a CP filter.
That's great. You install it on all the systems you have administrative control over.
"Here's we'll apply market principles because the market is shown to work in this case," would be relying on evidence.
"Here we'll apply market principles because all problems must be solved using market principles because the free market always works," would be relying on a belief system.
You might want to argue that my statement is vacuous because, well, confidence in science and evidence and stuff is itself a belief system. But that would be deliberately obtuse, and it's not proper form on the Internet to behave like that ;-).
no, it *has* to be media hysteria that has warped my fragile little mind
You haven't explained why there's something special about sex which means that publications with a sexual element are worse than, say, publications with a non-sexual violent element. Of all the many methods of tackling the problem, you're precisely stating the popularly promoted solutions with the usual "there'll be no feature creep" reassurance, while also not justifying the approach.
Blocking it puts off the 'casual' viewer and constricts the market.
Are you a casual viewer? If not, what information are you using to make statements based on the actions of the casual viewer? IOW, what dangers does this casual viewer pose and how many casual viewers are there? By your argument, I assume you have evidence that there are many people who use easily found images of child abuse on the web as a gateway drug to paying for or producing child porn.
And we all believe in market based solutions, right?
The solution which uses moral means and which works best is the best solution. (The proposed solution has neither property.) To suggest that every solution must be based upon some particular belief system is religion.
Every politician wants to do something about child abuse, but why on earth would that something be to stop it?
At what stage do you think media hysteria bombarded you sufficiently - as it has done with so many people - to think an image of child abuse is a special case, so much worse than any other sequence of bits which acts as evidence that some abuse has taken place? What about a picture/film of adult sexual abuse? If the adult is developmentally retarded? Animal abuse? A snuff film? An image of a dead baby? A woman executed for being raped? A war crime? Evidence of genocide?
Ask yourself whether your concern is with the image or with the discomfort you feel that someone enjoys the image. Then realise that people may enjoy any or all of the above. Then realise that almost all sexual abuse occurs within families or by other people in trusted caring roles - if you want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, you would stop far more child sexual abuse by outlawing the family unit.
The noncommercial distribution of CP seems reasonably to be a privacy issue for the child, as any photo/video taken without consent. Beyond that, all the resources should go toward identifying and stopping the abusers and helping the victims. To inform the abused that money which you are claiming to be using in their interest is going to be invested in pushing images of his/her abuse underground (and as the thin end of the wedge for general censorship) is not only illogical, but cruel.
Also, let's be clear here: the IWF, one of the oldest Internet censorship frameworks in the Western world, doesn't even claim that its aim in blocking is to stop CP (it does help stop CP by acting as a clearinghouse for CP reports and sending evidence to authorities at home and abroad - but that's where its helpfulness ends). It claims that its blocking list is provided to stop people "accidentally" viewing CP. This shows how absurd the situation is: surely the correct response to accidentally doing something which isn't dangerous is to learn from your mistakes so you know how to minimise your chances of doing it again? But no, we're at the "punished for being raped" stage of hysteria, where I must worry about the legal implications of accidentally stumbling into CP. It's not that a single such incident is likely to lead to conviction, but that - in the UK at least - a single such incident may lead to arrest, and my arrest record can be studied by pretty much any potential employer.
Any good government knows how to make anyone a criminal or quasi-criminal at its whim. This is just another method. It has nothing whatever to do with stopping child abuse, and I say that as someone who has fundraised for kids' charities and supported certain groups for abuse survivors for as long as I can recall.
Herzlichen Dank, Untertan.
OOI are there any good reasons to still use HDMI/DVI-D rather than DP?
(Apart from the fact that my U2311H doesn't support HDCP DRM over DP, of course. God knows I want more DRM.)
As annoying as that is, at least I understand the commercial desire to maximize profit.
I understand the base urge to rape and pillage. I still don't approve of it and would support steps to reduce it.
I personally feel that those who criticise privacy advocates are secretly ashamed of not being interesting and can't bear that there are many people out there doing things where adequate anonymity is the difference between success and detainment. There's also a bit of languor in there: "I'm so lazy I need targeted adverts to choose what I want."
A man who thinks that "the sufficiently lame should suffer" always conveniently categorises themselves as insufficiently lame.
Of course, there's someone somewhere else with a similar philosophy who categorises himself as insufficiently lame but pigeonholes the first man as sufficiently lame. Which is fortunate, really, because if all the little fascists didn't waste their time arguing with each other over who was worthy of life, they might consolidate power more often than they currently do.
Runaway1956: population control through reducing the birth rate is entirely different from population control through increasing the death rate. Only the latter has a somewhat final and drastic effect on real individual humans (before one even begins to consider the knock-on effect on society), and only the most sociopathic utilitarian can honestly confuse the two with some argument that the end justifies the means. Yes, we make too many babies, but we can only solve that by making life more bearable for the living - then we take away the retreat to a dream about making a better life for one's descendants or, worse, the need to use children as support in old age. Religion's old lie about a world of suffering rewarded in the afterlife is just a conceptual offshoot of living for one's children.
As much of a shock to you as this may be, many of us arrive at our own conclusions without ever having read Rand's works.
Your rhetoric makes it clear you have read Rand's works, once enjoyed them wholly, then have tempered your views slightly as maturity hit. You're even trotting out the "fallacy of the excluded middle" term often used in discussing her work but which has nothing to do with anything I said. I'm advocating balance, i.e. precisely not engaging a false dichotomy.
But you've been let down by your matriarch and one base part of you is angry that you can't apply Rand in the most harsh sense:
If an idiot causes his own death and harms no one else, that's a benefit for everyone else.
This sentence, the crux of your whole argument, is horrendous sophistry. It seems like you certainly need to read philosophy other than Rand. You might then understand the difference between a carefully presented argument with well-defined words and babble indistinguishable from troll.
(1) How do I classify an "idiot"? Is it even relevant, or was that word inserted in there for appeal to emotion? Are you using the term to imply that the death of a smart guy taking a single dumb risk is bad - in which case, since you're surely not so stupid as to think that clever people aren't capable of occasionally making daft decisions, don't you need to look out for geniuses who make silly mistakes?
(2) When does a man cause his own death? Suicide? Accident? Ignorance? Risk-taking? And to what extent are each of these activities allowed before the great AC judges the death as deserved? Put another way, a mewling nerd on the Internet mocks those who take risks (by choice, ignorance through no fault of their own, desperation, etc.) - would he survive in the stagnant, undeveloped world which would exist if everyone were as cowardly as he?
(3) How often does one man's death actually harm "no one else"? Who judges the harm caused on an individual and collective level? Is it you, again?
(4) "..., that's a benefit for everyone else." Why? If A and B and C then Z. Even if you manage to fill out the part of the argument which assumes that A and B and C are simultaneously true even remotely often, you've made this huge leap to suggesting that the death of certain people benefits everyone.
I have this rule of thumb for any philosophy I come across: if, at any stage, it identifies some chosen group of people and argues that the chosen people will be better off if the non-chosen are dead, then the philosophy is evil.
The deliciously tragic irony here is that you've identified the non-chosen (in your own antisocial world where one stranger's fate has no impact on others) as something like "stupid people with no friends". Bravo, sir, bravo.
Since floppy discs have died I have missed having a medium which I could copy to then give away and which could be reused as easily.
I see what you're saying and it sounds like, "MOM i'll be up for food LATER i'm listening to a speech by AYN RAND she's so COOL!"
No, we don't want to be in a world where idiots die. Nor do we want to be in a world where people offering good advice are shouted down by angry impotents like you who have no real power so instead assert your superiority over the most vulnerable.
Let's instead live in a world of balance, where those who are less able receive a degree of support which doesn't put impossible burden on others but which does lift them up to the point where they are safe and able to join in.
And Talgo has been around since the '40s, way before the tourism boom. If you check out Aravaca you can just about make out the "Avenida del Talgo" sign in the street of luxury[tm] flats to remind you of where work used to occur. There are a few things Spain has done a great job of building, but its contribution is dwindling.
I couldn't give two hoots about military works - especially foreign ones: I've had enough of Spain being the factory and testing ground for flying war machines produced for empires in the north.