So that they know that he said those things, and why he said them, so that they can reject Feyerabend's position, if they do, on a rational basis? Or should we just reject positions we don't like the sound of without giving them any thought?
I await a better one with interest; the present one has been under investigation for hundreds of years, and the root problem remains the initially unprovable hypothesis (which will eventually be found to be.
The most interesting recent take on induction that I've seen is Quentin Meillassoux's in After Finitude. Meillassoux argues that the problem of induction as usually stated has it backwards. In fact, according to Meillassoux, the reason we cannot prove that nature is uniform is because nature isn't uniform, but instead totally arbitrary, and (this is the bizarre part), it is only because nature is totally arbitrary that scientific knowledge is possible.
Given that the "doing something about it" involved the death of a million or so Iraqis, it's not exactly surprising that the US caught hell for it. The bad effects of a dictatorship are rarely the result of a single evil individual, so a simple regime change imposed by an outside force rarely solves a country's problems, and may indeed make them worse.
Just to expand on my last comment a bit: I genuinely don't know what claim you're making. So sex and violence are different, OK. Are you saying it's OK to play a violent video game with a 10 year old, but not to play a sex-related game? Or that, although both are bad, the sex-related game would have more harmful effects than the violent one? Are you saying, further, that the sex-related game's harm is so much worse that the measures we use to keep violent video games out of the hands of kids are not sufficient when applied to sex-related games?
It sounds like an interesting implementation, but I don't know about "proof of concept" - this concept has been in use for years. I remember in the late nineties activists putting together websites using javascript to repeatedly load web pages of political targets in order to DOS them; I think there was one directed at the WTO site, intended to be used as a kind of virtual support for the protests in Seattle in 1999. Of course, I'm not sure how much damage we could actually do with our 56k modems.
No, indeed, there is no difference. Children shouldn't be exposed to explicit sex or violence. So why are Microsoft OK with violent games that only adults should play, but not OK with sex-based games that only adults should play?
Censorship is the use of power to prevent the dissemination of material considered objectionable. Market dominance is a form of power, and when a large proportion of movie theaters refuse to show NC17 films, or stores refuse to stock AO videos, or publishers refuse to license AO games to be used with their hardware, they are using their market power to prevent material they dislike being distributed, that is, they are censoring. They may have good reasons and a legal right to censor, and they don't have the level of power that makes government censorship especially bad, but that doesn't mean that businesses shouldn't be criticized for censorship.
I'm also confused as to why you think it's OK to get annoyed at "media outlets" for censorship, but not to get annoyed at businesses. Aren't most media outlets businesses? And why are businesses involved in the distribution of material (publishers, shops, game companies) not "media outlets"?
Why would they only apply it to apps? In fact, how would they only apply it to apps? How does the operator know whether it is an app or a browser that is making a connection to one of YouTube's IP addresses?
"I use a distribution committed to the principle of free software, but I don't care about whether or not I'm using free software. How dare Debian care more about its own values than my values."
Isn't that a silly position to take? You're complaining about Debian doing something that it was set up to do. If you don't like that, Debian's the wrong distribution for you.
If free software is good running on my CPU, why isn't it good running on all the other processors in my computer? The same arguments for free software apply in both cases. Non-free software can have bugs in it that I'm not able to fix, and can add restrictions to how I use my hardware that I can't remove. That's true whether or not the software in question is firmware.
I don't know if Comcast's website is the same for every region, but, at least for me, the usage meter is on the "Users and Settings" page of their "Customer Central" website.
"Gyndroid" would be wrong, though. "Android" comes from "Andros," which as you say means "man," and "oid," meaning "looking like" - so an "android" is something that looks like a man. The Greek for woman is "gyna," not "gyndra," so there's no "dr" to make "gyndroid." The word "droid" is a shortened form of "android."
Greek actually does have a gender-neutral word meaning human being, "anthropos"; so you could have "anthropoid" to mean a robot in human form.
This is precisely the outcome that Wikileaks was looking for: Assange's plan has been to leak information in order to make those who wish to keep secrets paranoid, so that they clamp down on their own internal communications and become less effective:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Copyrights don't cover the characters. Fan fiction is perfectly legal
Really? I'm pretty sure copyright does indeed cover characters, and the legal status of fan fiction is much more uncertain than you suggest. Even those who believe fan fiction to be legal don't, AFAIK, claim that fan works don't involve the copyright of the original work at all; rather, they claim that fan fiction is fair use of copyright work, because it is transformative.
(Though this doesn't really matter to the original I don't think Pacman has "characters" in a sense that could recieve copyright protection)
I mean, I'm all for freedom, but running off with a phone that you signed a contract to pay off over the next two years is theft
It's not theft, it's breach of contract (unless the phone company actually leased you the phone, which I don't think any of them do). The company should pursue you for breach of contract to collect what you owe them. We have a perfectly good legal mechanism for enforcing this, we don't need an additional technological restriction.
Because you bought it below cost and the company that was selling it will go out of business if you are allowed to do so.
So, you sign up for a two year contract and get a subsidized phone, then you unlock the phone and use it on a different network; because you've signed a contract, you continue to have to pay monthly fees to the original network, even though you're no longer using their services. And this puts them out of business how, exactly?
Atlas Shrugged does a good job of demonstrating what would happen if rich people invented a perpetual motion machine and stopped needing people to, you know, actually do the work. It doesn't have much to say about the real world.
It's not even close to being black letter law. The law says that "fair use" is permitted, and mentions various considerations that may be used to decide if a use is fair, but it doesn't give an exhaustive definition of fair use. The amount being copied is one factor mentioned in the law, but the issue is whether the amount being copied is essential for the proposed use; if you need to copy the whole thing to make use of it, and that use is fair use, the law permits the copying of the whole thing - the most obvious example would be videoing a program from the TV to watch later, which copies the whole thing, but is nonetheless fair use.
You're also wrong about the non-commercial nature of the copying being irrelevant. The law specifically mentions that one consideration in deciding if something is fair use is "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes."
From the summary, this case doesn't sound like it is fair use; but the law by itself doesn't tell us this, it's a matter of precedent and interpretation.
I'm not sure whether it would make sense to remake Planescape: Torment with the Dragon Age engine; I'd rather see it remade in Inform, as it always struck me as a text adventure badly shoe-horned into an RPG engine.
hopefully it'll get to the point where installing software on Linux will be as easy as on WIndows and OSX.
Why would we want that? I prefer the current situation, where installing software on Linux is much easier than installing software on Windows and OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
So that they know that he said those things, and why he said them, so that they can reject Feyerabend's position, if they do, on a rational basis? Or should we just reject positions we don't like the sound of without giving them any thought?
I await a better one with interest; the present one has been under investigation for hundreds of years, and the root problem remains the initially unprovable hypothesis (which will eventually be found to be .
The most interesting recent take on induction that I've seen is Quentin Meillassoux's in After Finitude. Meillassoux argues that the problem of induction as usually stated has it backwards. In fact, according to Meillassoux, the reason we cannot prove that nature is uniform is because nature isn't uniform, but instead totally arbitrary, and (this is the bizarre part), it is only because nature is totally arbitrary that scientific knowledge is possible.
Luckily, this review is of a book written by an Objectivist, so "philosophy" has nothing to do with it.
I'd say he's a bit of a silly goose who needs to study the things he is dismantling before making claims against them.
So, tell me, how much of Feyerabend's philosphy of science have you studied?
Given that the "doing something about it" involved the death of a million or so Iraqis, it's not exactly surprising that the US caught hell for it. The bad effects of a dictatorship are rarely the result of a single evil individual, so a simple regime change imposed by an outside force rarely solves a country's problems, and may indeed make them worse.
I can't choose to switch to some other government.
You've never heard of "elections"?
Just to expand on my last comment a bit: I genuinely don't know what claim you're making. So sex and violence are different, OK. Are you saying it's OK to play a violent video game with a 10 year old, but not to play a sex-related game? Or that, although both are bad, the sex-related game would have more harmful effects than the violent one? Are you saying, further, that the sex-related game's harm is so much worse that the measures we use to keep violent video games out of the hands of kids are not sufficient when applied to sex-related games?
Why don't you try explaining it to me?
It sounds like an interesting implementation, but I don't know about "proof of concept" - this concept has been in use for years. I remember in the late nineties activists putting together websites using javascript to repeatedly load web pages of political targets in order to DOS them; I think there was one directed at the WTO site, intended to be used as a kind of virtual support for the protests in Seattle in 1999. Of course, I'm not sure how much damage we could actually do with our 56k modems.
No, indeed, there is no difference. Children shouldn't be exposed to explicit sex or violence. So why are Microsoft OK with violent games that only adults should play, but not OK with sex-based games that only adults should play?
Censorship is the use of power to prevent the dissemination of material considered objectionable. Market dominance is a form of power, and when a large proportion of movie theaters refuse to show NC17 films, or stores refuse to stock AO videos, or publishers refuse to license AO games to be used with their hardware, they are using their market power to prevent material they dislike being distributed, that is, they are censoring. They may have good reasons and a legal right to censor, and they don't have the level of power that makes government censorship especially bad, but that doesn't mean that businesses shouldn't be criticized for censorship.
I'm also confused as to why you think it's OK to get annoyed at "media outlets" for censorship, but not to get annoyed at businesses. Aren't most media outlets businesses? And why are businesses involved in the distribution of material (publishers, shops, game companies) not "media outlets"?
Why would they only apply it to apps? In fact, how would they only apply it to apps? How does the operator know whether it is an app or a browser that is making a connection to one of YouTube's IP addresses?
"I use a distribution committed to the principle of free software, but I don't care about whether or not I'm using free software. How dare Debian care more about its own values than my values."
Isn't that a silly position to take? You're complaining about Debian doing something that it was set up to do. If you don't like that, Debian's the wrong distribution for you.
If free software is good running on my CPU, why isn't it good running on all the other processors in my computer? The same arguments for free software apply in both cases. Non-free software can have bugs in it that I'm not able to fix, and can add restrictions to how I use my hardware that I can't remove. That's true whether or not the software in question is firmware.
I don't know if Comcast's website is the same for every region, but, at least for me, the usage meter is on the "Users and Settings" page of their "Customer Central" website.
"Gyndroid" would be wrong, though. "Android" comes from "Andros," which as you say means "man," and "oid," meaning "looking like" - so an "android" is something that looks like a man. The Greek for woman is "gyna," not "gyndra," so there's no "dr" to make "gyndroid." The word "droid" is a shortened form of "android."
Greek actually does have a gender-neutral word meaning human being, "anthropos"; so you could have "anthropoid" to mean a robot in human form.
This is precisely the outcome that Wikileaks was looking for: Assange's plan has been to leak information in order to make those who wish to keep secrets paranoid, so that they clamp down on their own internal communications and become less effective:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Copyrights don't cover the characters. Fan fiction is perfectly legal
Really? I'm pretty sure copyright does indeed cover characters, and the legal status of fan fiction is much more uncertain than you suggest. Even those who believe fan fiction to be legal don't, AFAIK, claim that fan works don't involve the copyright of the original work at all; rather, they claim that fan fiction is fair use of copyright work, because it is transformative.
(Though this doesn't really matter to the original I don't think Pacman has "characters" in a sense that could recieve copyright protection)
If I were a US citizen, I'd be running for congress on a platform of voting down any bill with a cutesy acronym.
I mean, I'm all for freedom, but running off with a phone that you signed a contract to pay off over the next two years is theft
It's not theft, it's breach of contract (unless the phone company actually leased you the phone, which I don't think any of them do). The company should pursue you for breach of contract to collect what you owe them. We have a perfectly good legal mechanism for enforcing this, we don't need an additional technological restriction.
Because you bought it below cost and the company that was selling it will go out of business if you are allowed to do so.
So, you sign up for a two year contract and get a subsidized phone, then you unlock the phone and use it on a different network; because you've signed a contract, you continue to have to pay monthly fees to the original network, even though you're no longer using their services. And this puts them out of business how, exactly?
Atlas Shrugged does a good job of demonstrating what would happen if rich people invented a perpetual motion machine and stopped needing people to, you know, actually do the work. It doesn't have much to say about the real world.
It's not even close to being black letter law. The law says that "fair use" is permitted, and mentions various considerations that may be used to decide if a use is fair, but it doesn't give an exhaustive definition of fair use. The amount being copied is one factor mentioned in the law, but the issue is whether the amount being copied is essential for the proposed use; if you need to copy the whole thing to make use of it, and that use is fair use, the law permits the copying of the whole thing - the most obvious example would be videoing a program from the TV to watch later, which copies the whole thing, but is nonetheless fair use.
You're also wrong about the non-commercial nature of the copying being irrelevant. The law specifically mentions that one consideration in deciding if something is fair use is "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes."
From the summary, this case doesn't sound like it is fair use; but the law by itself doesn't tell us this, it's a matter of precedent and interpretation.
I'm not sure whether it would make sense to remake Planescape: Torment with the Dragon Age engine; I'd rather see it remade in Inform, as it always struck me as a text adventure badly shoe-horned into an RPG engine.
hopefully it'll get to the point where installing software on Linux will be as easy as on WIndows and OSX.
Why would we want that? I prefer the current situation, where installing software on Linux is much easier than installing software on Windows and OS X.