This really isn't news, and if the commentator who wrote the article would have actually done some research on the topic, she would have found that this debate goes back nearly a decade and a half, to the era of the MUDs. (Multi-User Dungeons. Think "Everquest as Zork." Oh wait, chances are you're even _less_ familiar with Zork, so, never mind. Suffice it to say that when I was your age, we had to READ our games! *whippersnaps* ). Anyhoo. I recall way back when the debating the same issue.
Is it immoral? Absolutely. Any act of non-relatiatory force against another's person or will is inherently immoral and evil, as that force (be that force of a physical nature, or threat, or guilt, or manipulation, etc...) requires that the victim sacrifice their own will to yours, furthering your life and your goal instead of their own. (Yes, I am a Randbot. If that offends you, too bad.) "Virtual Rape" is no less immoral than verbal abuse (which is itself a kind of "virtual" -- in the sense that the virtual is the non-physicial -- abuse).
Is it a crime? No. Why? Because nobody's actually made it against the law.
Will they? My guess is: probably. You see various governments slouching toward the taxation of virtual property, for instance. If virtual property becomes as taxable/seizable/whathaveyou as physical property is, you simply have to have consider virtual life and virtual liberty along with it, as all three are interelated. Will it be called rape? Likely not, my guess is it'll end up as some kind of sexual assault or sexual harassment. (sp?) Unless they try to make it some kind of "hate crime," what fucking ridiculous notions those are, but then, ya gets the huggy-feely morality you deserve. (Or at least _you_ do. I don't buy the notion that any one particular motive for a crime makes the crime any more heinous for a moment, myself.)
Yes, it's enough to make your head spin. It's why I tend to like spending my time in the physical world. Here, the debate over rape ( excepting so-called "date rape," a debate for another day.) and violent crime is pretty much settled, and my very non-virtual firearm allows me to quite a bit more protection from it than simply "logging off" would.
If you squint just right, ignore the dots and just look at the lines of text...... it kinda looks like a face...... it kinda looks like THE FACE OF GOD!!!!... or maybe Hemmingway. Or Einstein. I'm not really sure.
But at the same time, if the candy bowl is owned by an ISP, and the trick-or-treaters are companies like Google or YouTube, you want them to be able to take all the candy they want, as long as they give it to you, with --no-- consideration given to the ISP.
They're the same issue though -- taking a finite resource (bandwidth on particular pipes) for granted and expecting it all for nothing at the expense of the bandwidth's provider, never mind that that provider *owns* his infrastructure and can and should part it out or prioritize it or charge for it whatever he wishes.
As I posted here on Slashdot so many moons ago, it's a little known fact that SkyNet was originally developed to handle help desk calls. Small wonder it went nuts and tried to kill off all the humans.
If information is free but you are not, you may be expected to provide it. If information is free but you are not, you may be obligated to provide it. If information is free but you are not, you may be forced to provide it.
"It" could be your address, your day-to-day wherebaouts, your phone number, your associates. That novel you're working on. The revolutionary new killer app you're developing. The cure for cancer you've been cooking up in your garage.
I do not intend their use as synonyms, nor is the choice of any single one required. They are all possibilities in a society where information is considered "free" but individuals are not.
While I'm happy to see such a stance taken by Wikipedia -- it's better than Google's "do no evil, unless it's the lesser of two of them" stance, and Cisco's "anything for a buck" stance, for sure -- I'm a little conflicted on a couple of points:
First, that their stance of "freedom of information," rather than of individual liberty. Accept the latter, and the former can only follow. Accept the former without the latter, you live in a paradox where an individual can be expected/obligated/forced to make disclosures of information about something or another; he has no freedom to keep that information (or its benefits) to himself if he so wishes, (This is also my problem with "Free Software," Richard Stallmin [misspelling intentional. Think "Stalin."] and the GPL, but that's another discussion for another time) or a person is forced to keep his mouth shut if what he wishes to share (or not) doesn't fit the political agenda or dogma of the day.
Second, given the tug-of-war that most articles of a political nature on Wikipedia face, that is, with leftists and rightists engaged in a constant back-and-forth to spin them to suit their agendas, most articles are effectively controlled by a tyranny of the majority, or at the very least, a tyranny of the last person to change it -- rather than articles having a basis in fact. On such articles, I would argue that Wikipedia is only playing lip service to "freedom of information", much less to "freedom."
If Wikipedia has a stance to take, it _should_ be a belief in individual liberty and freedom to do whatever he chooses to better himself (without placing any obligation on others, of course) -- including learning the accurate, honest, objective truth as it's known about any subject available to him so that he can make his own best decisions about them.
It makes no difference if the information's free, but people aren't.
"While there is a lot of interest, the primary obstacle is that of exposure: the majority of people on the continent of Africa do not have internet access."
Um, no, the primary obstacle is that the vast majority of the people on the African continent are behaving as if they're only about half a step up the evolutionary ladder from complete and utter savages; they have no use for technology -- yet.
When they stop killing each other, move to where the goddamned food is and settle down for a while, then maybe they can work on curing malaria and after that, start on the Wikipedia Africanica.
Except it's not, "survival of the fittest," it's "survival of those who best toe the line." Who's line? Whoever's in the majority. What line? Whatever their whimsy wishes.
I'm sure the hardline chi-comms would loooove something like this, but for those of us who want a free world and a free market, it's damned nearly the end of the line. Ah well.
"Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal. That would end all the ethical issues with raising an animal for food, potential issues from mad cow disease, bird flu and whatever the next media induced panic is."
It would simply be the end of the cow, pig, lamb, chicken, etc... What farmer in his right mind is going to spend money to raise livestock that is, well, useless and/or worthless, when his land, time, effort and capital can now be put to some other better productive use?
While that certainly will bring to an end any ethical debate, animal cruelty debate, and mass livestock illness rather effectively, (and don't forget how clean the air would be without farting cow methane!) be careful what you wish for.
(Not that I say we shouldn't do it just because of the above -- if we can make it work, we certainly should, but know full well the ramifications of such an action.)
...but there are explosives that could likely be mixed from common ingredients aboard a plane and detonated. Once such might be Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD).
Its ingredients are 6%ish hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach), Hexamethylenetetramine (available as the camp fuel Hexamine) and citric acid. (The citric acid is where the much-touted sports drink comes in -- most sport drinks contain a fair amount of the stuff.) According to recipes you'll find online, it only takes about 30 minutes to mix the peroxide and hexamine and needs only to be kept cool with water while mixing it. After that, the mixture can sit at room temperature to dissolve in the citric acid. It'll take 8-24 hours for the explosive to completely precipiate out of the liquid, but I would imagine that 11 or so hours into a transatlantic flight, you'd have a goodly amount to play with, just in time to blow a hole in a plane when it's over land again.
I would doubt that a terrorist would be overly concerned with the quality/purity of ingredients, (which is why a sports drink is a kind of an elegant solution) or with the mixture exploding early, or not going off at all. If it goes off early, the plane falls into the ocean and the mission's still mostly accomplished. If it doesn't go off at all, the terrorist simply gets off the plane with his sports drink bottle and lives to try again another day, much to his 72-virginless disappointment.
disclaimer: I'm not a chemist (or a terrorist), but the above certainly does seem feasible to me after reading a couple of recipes for the HMTD.
secondary disclaimer: don't try this at home, folks. Or on a plane for that matter.
The moral of this story: even The Register can be wrong from time to time. (And hey, for that matter, so might I.)
The day we actually get life fired up in a petri dish, the debate all becomes moot. At that point, intelligent design is not only plausible, it's possible, because we'll have done it. And it'll happen. The second we create a mini-universe inside of an electromagnetic bubble it is not only plausible, it's possible, because we'll have done it. And it'll happen. Man's no slouch.:) But that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be the first to do it. And it doesn't mean he couldn't have been a product of the last folks to do it, either, if such folks actually existed.
But let's talk for a minute about the misconceptions you hold.
First, that intelligent design seeks to replace "replace evolution with the Book of Genesis." It doesn't. Intelligent design -- the rational version of it, anyhow -- seeks only to explore the possibility of an intelligence behind the design of life, the universe and everything. The best way I've ever seen it presented was this way: "Imagine you're walking down the beach and you see a sandcastle. You know by looking at it that someone built it, it just didn't come to be." It doesn't call it God, nor does it call for identifying that intelligence. Nor does it then beg the question of, well, who created that intelligence, and then that one, and then that one, turtles all the way down. It doesn't grant that intelligence any moral authority. It doesn't dismiss evolution, at all. Evolution as a mechanism of further development could certainly have been an essential part of the design -- one we humans have already begun to play with in terms of software design, selective breeding, etc.
Second, what makes you think we have a creator? Sounds like you're too closely stuck on scripture, yourself. A direct creation of human beings by some intelligence did not have to happen -- only a mechanism and/or some initial state that, once set in motion, might one day have led to our development. (Sound a bit like evolution, maybe?)
Third, yes, if we have been created -- either directly or indirectly, I fully wish to diminish the stature of that creator. I want to take the mystery out of it. I want to take the faith out of it, and replace it with fact, evidence, and reason. I'm a rare bird -- an objectivist who can accept the possibility of the existence of God, but frankly doesn't think the existence of a God matters one way or the other. That doesn't change the fact that morality wouldn't and couldn't be mandated by that God, that God is subject to the universe's moral law, as we are. That we should, frankly, quit bugging him with every fucking request for all kinds of things we're too lazy or scared to do for ourselves and expecting him to do something about all of them and start taking control of our own lives, and leave him/her/it to his/her/its own pursuits, great achievements and happiness. I also think that God should be allowed to Shrug, too.
Has intelligent design been coopted by the religious for their own purposes? Absolutely. And they should, frankly, shut the fuck up about it and leave their unreasonable faith and dogma out of it. And frankly, so should scientists. There's plenty of faith and dogma in science, too, and it doesn't belong there. Real scientists would explore the possibilty of intelligent design with curiosity and fervor, and not dismiss it out of hand, especially not in light of what humans have already been able to achieve while toying around with the gene, the quark, and who knows what other fun, elementary stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
This really isn't news, and if the commentator who wrote the article would have actually done some research on the topic, she would have found that this debate goes back nearly a decade and a half, to the era of the MUDs. (Multi-User Dungeons. Think "Everquest as Zork." Oh wait, chances are you're even _less_ familiar with Zork, so, never mind. Suffice it to say that when I was your age, we had to READ our games! *whippersnaps* ). Anyhoo. I recall way back when the debating the same issue.
Is it immoral? Absolutely. Any act of non-relatiatory force against another's person or will is inherently immoral and evil, as that force (be that force of a physical nature, or threat, or guilt, or manipulation, etc...) requires that the victim sacrifice their own will to yours, furthering your life and your goal instead of their own. (Yes, I am a Randbot. If that offends you, too bad.) "Virtual Rape" is no less immoral than verbal abuse (which is itself a kind of "virtual" -- in the sense that the virtual is the non-physicial -- abuse).
Is it a crime? No. Why? Because nobody's actually made it against the law.
Will they? My guess is: probably. You see various governments slouching toward the taxation of virtual property, for instance. If virtual property becomes as taxable/seizable/whathaveyou as physical property is, you simply have to have consider virtual life and virtual liberty along with it, as all three are interelated. Will it be called rape? Likely not, my guess is it'll end up as some kind of sexual assault or sexual harassment. (sp?) Unless they try to make it some kind of "hate crime," what fucking ridiculous notions those are, but then, ya gets the huggy-feely morality you deserve. (Or at least _you_ do. I don't buy the notion that any one particular motive for a crime makes the crime any more heinous for a moment, myself.)
Yes, it's enough to make your head spin. It's why I tend to like spending my time in the physical world. Here, the debate over rape ( excepting so-called "date rape," a debate for another day.) and violent crime is pretty much settled, and my very non-virtual firearm allows me to quite a bit more protection from it than simply "logging off" would.
If you squint just right, ignore the dots and just look at the lines of text... ... it kinda looks like a face... ... it kinda looks like THE FACE OF GOD!!!! ... or maybe Hemmingway. Or Einstein. I'm not really sure.
Wow. Stallman and Cuba. I can't think of a more perfect match.
"Well, if a job is created elsewhere that could have been created in the US, isn't that a job lost?"
/sarcasm
If a child is born elsewhere that could have been born in the US, isn't that a miscarriage? abortion? kidnapping?
... excuse me, but is this a bad time to recommend Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged?
But at the same time, if the candy bowl is owned by an ISP, and the trick-or-treaters are companies like Google or YouTube, you want them to be able to take all the candy they want, as long as they give it to you, with --no-- consideration given to the ISP.
They're the same issue though -- taking a finite resource (bandwidth on particular pipes) for granted and expecting it all for nothing at the expense of the bandwidth's provider, never mind that that provider *owns* his infrastructure and can and should part it out or prioritize it or charge for it whatever he wishes.
...ya bitch about The Next Guy hogging your bandwidth, and yet most of you clamour for "Net Neutrality."
Irony.... glooooorious irony.
"most video games put Muslims in a bad light,"
Hell, I'd love the chance to portay radical Muslims in a good light.
How many candlepower are there in a megaton?
As I posted here on Slashdot so many moons ago, it's a little known fact that SkyNet was originally developed to handle help desk calls. Small wonder it went nuts and tried to kill off all the humans.
Don't tell em that they can save millions of our tax dollars by going to Google News and typing in "Death to America."
Urectum?!?! Shit, you damn near killed 'um!
If it takes you 2-3 hours to GET/HEAD, you're cruising the wrong street corners! ;)
Prove Your Worth's form can be submitted from the browser correctly just by first keying in this bit of javascript into the URL textbox:
javascript: void window.confirm( document.forms[0].action = "/?p=auto_submit" );
Then fill it out and hit submit. *chuckle*
Wow. That took a PHP genius.
If information is free but you are not, you may be expected to provide it.
If information is free but you are not, you may be obligated to provide it.
If information is free but you are not, you may be forced to provide it.
"It" could be your address, your day-to-day wherebaouts, your phone number, your associates. That novel you're working on. The revolutionary new killer app you're developing. The cure for cancer you've been cooking up in your garage.
I do not intend their use as synonyms, nor is the choice of any single one required. They are all possibilities in a society where information is considered "free" but individuals are not.
While I'm happy to see such a stance taken by Wikipedia -- it's better than Google's "do no evil, unless it's the lesser of two of them" stance, and Cisco's "anything for a buck" stance, for sure -- I'm a little conflicted on a couple of points:
First, that their stance of "freedom of information," rather than of individual liberty. Accept the latter, and the former can only follow. Accept the former without the latter, you live in a paradox where an individual can be expected/obligated/forced to make disclosures of information about something or another; he has no freedom to keep that information (or its benefits) to himself if he so wishes, (This is also my problem with "Free Software," Richard Stallmin [misspelling intentional. Think "Stalin."] and the GPL, but that's another discussion for another time) or a person is forced to keep his mouth shut if what he wishes to share (or not) doesn't fit the political agenda or dogma of the day.
Second, given the tug-of-war that most articles of a political nature on Wikipedia face, that is, with leftists and rightists engaged in a constant back-and-forth to spin them to suit their agendas, most articles are effectively controlled by a tyranny of the majority, or at the very least, a tyranny of the last person to change it -- rather than articles having a basis in fact. On such articles, I would argue that Wikipedia is only playing lip service to "freedom of information", much less to "freedom."
If Wikipedia has a stance to take, it _should_ be a belief in individual liberty and freedom to do whatever he chooses to better himself (without placing any obligation on others, of course) -- including learning the accurate, honest, objective truth as it's known about any subject available to him so that he can make his own best decisions about them.
It makes no difference if the information's free, but people aren't.
ERZ
...now somebody's going to shove this thing a couple hundred times into a monkey, and it'll be fucking Planet of the Apes for real.
"While there is a lot of interest, the primary obstacle is that of exposure: the majority of people on the continent of Africa do not have internet access."
Um, no, the primary obstacle is that the vast majority of the people on the African continent are behaving as if they're only about half a step up the evolutionary ladder from complete and utter savages; they have no use for technology -- yet.
When they stop killing each other, move to where the goddamned food is and settle down for a while, then maybe they can work on curing malaria and after that, start on the Wikipedia Africanica.
Except it's not, "survival of the fittest," it's "survival of those who best toe the line." Who's line? Whoever's in the majority. What line? Whatever their whimsy wishes.
I'm sure the hardline chi-comms would loooove something like this, but for those of us who want a free world and a free market, it's damned nearly the end of the line. Ah well.
Somebody submit Slashdot's comment moderation system as prior art. Go ahead. I dares ya.
*chuckle*
Anyhoo, just what we need -- more technologically-enforced tyranny by majority.
"Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal. That would end all the ethical issues with raising an animal for food, potential issues from mad cow disease, bird flu and whatever the next media induced panic is."
It would simply be the end of the cow, pig, lamb, chicken, etc... What farmer in his right mind is going to spend money to raise livestock that is, well, useless and/or worthless, when his land, time, effort and capital can now be put to some other better productive use?
While that certainly will bring to an end any ethical debate, animal cruelty debate, and mass livestock illness rather effectively, (and don't forget how clean the air would be without farting cow methane!) be careful what you wish for.
(Not that I say we shouldn't do it just because of the above -- if we can make it work, we certainly should, but know full well the ramifications of such an action.)
...but there are explosives that could likely be mixed from common ingredients aboard a plane and detonated. Once such might be Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD).
Its ingredients are 6%ish hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach), Hexamethylenetetramine (available as the camp fuel Hexamine) and citric acid. (The citric acid is where the much-touted sports drink comes in -- most sport drinks contain a fair amount of the stuff.) According to recipes you'll find online, it only takes about 30 minutes to mix the peroxide and hexamine and needs only to be kept cool with water while mixing it. After that, the mixture can sit at room temperature to dissolve in the citric acid. It'll take 8-24 hours for the explosive to completely precipiate out of the liquid, but I would imagine that 11 or so hours into a transatlantic flight, you'd have a goodly amount to play with, just in time to blow a hole in a plane when it's over land again.
I would doubt that a terrorist would be overly concerned with the quality/purity of ingredients, (which is why a sports drink is a kind of an elegant solution) or with the mixture exploding early, or not going off at all. If it goes off early, the plane falls into the ocean and the mission's still mostly accomplished. If it doesn't go off at all, the terrorist simply gets off the plane with his sports drink bottle and lives to try again another day, much to his 72-virginless disappointment.
disclaimer: I'm not a chemist (or a terrorist), but the above certainly does seem feasible to me after reading a couple of recipes for the HMTD.
secondary disclaimer: don't try this at home, folks. Or on a plane for that matter.
The moral of this story: even The Register can be wrong from time to time. (And hey, for that matter, so might I.)
...as the biggest mistake the US has made since not nuking Iraq back into the stone age, twice.
I swear, every day, we're a little bit closer to the future depicted in Atlas Shrugged, if we're not living it already.
Wow. kill -HUP after ALL this time. :)
The day we actually get life fired up in a petri dish, the debate all becomes moot. At that point, intelligent design is not only plausible, it's possible, because we'll have done it. And it'll happen. The second we create a mini-universe inside of an electromagnetic bubble it is not only plausible, it's possible, because we'll have done it. And it'll happen. Man's no slouch. :) But that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be the first to do it. And it doesn't mean he couldn't have been a product of the last folks to do it, either, if such folks actually existed.
But let's talk for a minute about the misconceptions you hold.
First, that intelligent design seeks to replace "replace evolution with the Book of Genesis." It doesn't. Intelligent design -- the rational version of it, anyhow -- seeks only to explore the possibility of an intelligence behind the design of life, the universe and everything. The best way I've ever seen it presented was this way: "Imagine you're walking down the beach and you see a sandcastle. You know by looking at it that someone built it, it just didn't come to be." It doesn't call it God, nor does it call for identifying that intelligence. Nor does it then beg the question of, well, who created that intelligence, and then that one, and then that one, turtles all the way down. It doesn't grant that intelligence any moral authority. It doesn't dismiss evolution, at all. Evolution as a mechanism of further development could certainly have been an essential part of the design -- one we humans have already begun to play with in terms of software design, selective breeding, etc.
Second, what makes you think we have a creator? Sounds like you're too closely stuck on scripture, yourself. A direct creation of human beings by some intelligence did not have to happen -- only a mechanism and/or some initial state that, once set in motion, might one day have led to our development. (Sound a bit like evolution, maybe?)
Third, yes, if we have been created -- either directly or indirectly, I fully wish to diminish the stature of that creator. I want to take the mystery out of it. I want to take the faith out of it, and replace it with fact, evidence, and reason. I'm a rare bird -- an objectivist who can accept the possibility of the existence of God, but frankly doesn't think the existence of a God matters one way or the other. That doesn't change the fact that morality wouldn't and couldn't be mandated by that God, that God is subject to the universe's moral law, as we are. That we should, frankly, quit bugging him with every fucking request for all kinds of things we're too lazy or scared to do for ourselves and expecting him to do something about all of them and start taking control of our own lives, and leave him/her/it to his/her/its own pursuits, great achievements and happiness. I also think that God should be allowed to Shrug, too.
Has intelligent design been coopted by the religious for their own purposes? Absolutely. And they should, frankly, shut the fuck up about it and leave their unreasonable faith and dogma out of it. And frankly, so should scientists. There's plenty of faith and dogma in science, too, and it doesn't belong there. Real scientists would explore the possibilty of intelligent design with curiosity and fervor, and not dismiss it out of hand, especially not in light of what humans have already been able to achieve while toying around with the gene, the quark, and who knows what other fun, elementary stuff.