Then buy one of the older designs built on a single architecture? This announcement is telling us that they are planning to make new designs available which is not the same as saying that the old designs are no longer available.
That's the classic slippery slope argument. The way out of it is to understand that you have to do the right thing in every case, and that doing the same thing in every case will guarantee that you are not doing the right thing. Most times, parents do a tolerable job of raising their children. But some do not, and as a society we do have a responsibility to take children away from parents who do a sufficiently awful job (and in fact we do this now, but instead of putting them into state run schools we place them in a foster care system that at least attempts to find the children better parents). It is not right for parents to abuse their children, just as it is not right for them to abuse any other human being, and as this is a case of pain, force, and coercion being used by one person on another, we as a society have a responsibility to protect the victim in such a case.
So the slippery slope you're worried about ends there: if parents aren't using pain, force, or coercion, or if the pain, force, or coercion are minor, then taking the child away would represent a greater use of force and coercion, and would therefore be immoral.
It's a bad thing for the people who wind up suffering under their rule. It's a bad idea to just let these people do this stuff, because they will harm their children, and others who cannot escape to a more rational group. It is all of our responsibility to make sure people can't/don't get stuck in such places.
True, but it does mean the network is fairly successful, and that people are watching.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
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Region-free PS3
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· Score: 1
Nearly all of the replies here are missing the fact that there's really no need for the games to do NTSC/PAL versions. I mean, unless the xbox360/ps3 designers were utter morons, the hardware should handle the output differences.
Re:You obviously don't have children
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· Score: 1
No, I'm pretty sure he's implying that we still live in the days of easily damaged electronic media. Only an extemely cautious person without children could possibly think that cd's and dvd's aren't utterly fragile, prone to ruinous scratches.
I've had 3 DVD movie discs go bad without even any children, just from dust getting into the player and spinning against the disc surface.
Children go through discs even faster, dropping them, stepping on them, pushing them where they don't quite fit.
Sure, you can use some general rules of thumb, because most societies have some general standards in common for what ought to be done. See the "Comparative morality among cultures" section of the WP article I linked to.
Again, if you're promoting any of pain, force, coercion, or killing as good, then the argument isn't worth having. Those are the only foundations I'm requiring, though, and I don't think you'll find anywhere or anywhen a widespread consensus that people want these things done to them. Yes, people in power have enjoyed doing those things to others in the past, but that's not quite the same as the others enjoying or agreeing to having those things done to them.
Except that this exactly was allowed and in some cases would actually be considered immoral in the past -- it would be dishonorable to back down from a duel. Unless you feel that the metric of harm has changed over the years, it would seem that this would be a good example of how this is society-relative.
Not at all. Just because people are coerced or pressured into thinking unnecessarily harming others is ok does not make it so.
I suspect that alcohol causes at least as much by way of damages. Is the drinking of alcohol immoral? Drunk driving is definitely immoral. Drinking if you know you have a tendency to beat your kids while drunk is immoral. Drinking responsibly is not.
Christianity accepts slavery -- there is a large canon of text regarding the appropriate way to keep slaves in the Bible. Is the Bible or Christianity immoral? There are many people who would probably say that Christianity *defines* morality.
Most Christians I know are very immoral. The bible suggests many immoral things. Most organized religions have authorized terribly immoral actions. The world would surely be better off without Christianity, and most of the other major religions. And yes, many people think it defines morality. Many people just believe what they are told without critical thought.
First of all, morality is not just a set of social norms, it's about discovering how to live a life that does as little harm to others and as much good to others as possible. Commonly accepted forms of harm include pain, coercion, force, killing. You can try to argue that causing another person pain is good in general, or that coercing them is good in general, and so on, but to me that's just going down the road of stupid. Please note that I'm not suggesting these can be completely avoided, and such actions may even be morally necessary. One example would be that using force to constrain someone from committing murders might be necessary. In such cases, using the minimum force necessary is the goal of the moral life.
If you accept the basic goal of morality, then certain of the above situations resolve themselves clearly.
Murder is killing, so it goes into the don't allow it bin. You use the laws to create the minimum of force necessary to prevent it, as best you can. You certainly don't leave it up to small groups of people. You don't let people have duels to the death even if they think it is fun.
Obscenity is really fuzzier. What you really want the laws to use force for is the prevention of the coercion involved in the making of obscene materials. The existence of obscene materials is comparatively harmless, though in the case of child pornography there's enough evidence that it encourages the harm of children that the force involved in removing it can probably be justified.
Theft to retrieve stolen property is pretty hard to justify. Unless you're talking about just retrieving stolen property, in which case you've not committed a theft. You just moved something that belonged to you, nothing illegal about that. But stealing something that doesn't belong to you in an attempt to retrieve your stolen property? That's the wrong way to go about things.
Rape is a pretty obvious harm. No need to let 3 men and 1 woman in a dark alley make that vote.
Slavery is one of the worst offenders: pain, coercion, force, killing, all in one package.
I believe that is essentially true, but since the civil war, the federal government has effectively shown that the states cannot voluntarily withdraw from that agreement, so the issue of from where the power is derived is hazier.
Not at all, I'm just claiming that the law of numbers says that if you allow small groups of people to decide important issues of morals, you'll find that small groups will congegrate to screw other in their midst. Letting the broadest authority make the decisions ensures that small groups of crazy people can't band together to overcome the broader agreements on human rights. I'm really arguing for democracy of the greatest scope: let everyone decide jointly on the most important moral issues, and I think you'll get much better decisions than if you leave it to small groups.
As a simple example. Imagine we decide to leave the issue of murder open to the smallest voting group possible, 3 people. How often do you think we'd hit the unfortunate consequence of randomly picking 2 people who decide it would be fun to murder the 3rd, and legalize it.
On the opposite extreme, do you think it is likely that 2/3rds of the worlds population would decide to legalize murder?
In general, my claim is that you want the decision to be made by the largest possible group of people. That is, do you think it is likelier that somewhere in our country you might find 5 people, 4 of whom decide to murder the fifth, or that 80% of our total population would agree to legalize murder?
The current problem with our government is that it has essentially completely departed from the will of the people. That's a fundamental flaw in the design of our government, not a flaw in the law of numbers. I believe in spite of this that my general principal still stands.
I absolutely believe that one or more states would decide to do all of the things on your list.
Finally, the UN or World Court might well be better, if they had any authority in the US, but they don't. If we were to agree to abide by their authority, then yes, I would say it was a good idea to move lawmaking on such important issues up to that yet broader level, absolutely (and the universal declaration of human rights I think makes my case for me).
I think you're actually agreeing with me for the most part, though I can't decide for sure.
I think that some issues (including basically everything the OP offered excluding the taxation issues) are so morally significant that we cannot allow small groups to decide for themselves. IE murder: you can't allow a group of 5 people to take a vote and have 4 decide to murder the 5th, even though that's a plurality among that smaller group. Well you obviously actually can, but I'm claiming it's not a good idea. I always hope that most would agree, but it turns out many do not. Many people think it is actually ok to go ahead and vote on whether to kill someone.
That aside, the more general point is that some of these issues are best handled at the federal level, and in fact that is why the constitution lays out a lot of rights regarding these topics, specifically to prevent the states from being able to take ridiculous actions at the behest of rabid, vocal groups running the political process within those states.
Finally, we've had local taxes at the city and county level for ages, and it hasn't caused any serious instability for the last 200 years (at least nothing terribly obvious). But of all the OP issues, taxation is the one I'm least attached to. It has relatively little going for it in the moral department (at least in the decision of whether to allow for local taxes), and morality is of much more interest to me.
Well obviously it was fully intended to be a strawman argument, the OP was discussing what should or should not be the case, and suggested that the rights all should be at the state level. You seem to be saying: the constitution has it covered, so in fact the law is all taken care of at the federal level, which just agrees with what I think should be the case.
Oh how I wish that were true. Unfortunately, all too many lectures are just fact delivery sessions, where every word said is the answer to a multiple choice question later on. Memorize, memorize, memorize. If you can't write fast enough, you won't get a good grade. Lecture recordings are the student's weapon against bad professors.
Total agreement, except for the fact that I think about 9 out of 10 profs aren't actually any good, and so their classes do turn into nothing but fact recording sessions.
I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, many classes are just fact presentation forums (think history and english) where basically you'll be expected to regurgitate memorized lecture contents later. This even happens in CS classes sometimes (regurgitate x random algorithm you'll never use again in your life). For such classes, getting everything down is an unfortunate necessity.
Now, I'd certainly welcome the end of all such classes. How much easier life would have been for me if so much of school weren't memorization driven. But until the end of such 'learning' comes, people are stuck with technology workarounds to imperfect memories. Manual pencil and paper notetaking are just the most primitive tools for doing so. Recordings and automated transcription plus blackboard recording in some format are the next step up.
Ah, I could certainly see where it would be more of a problem in such a specialized field. All of the cases I was considering were for people with very generalized skillsets.
To clarify: I didn't mean to imply it was a rational fear. But many inexperienced or poorly trained students don't know how to learn from a class, and don't get good training in how to be a student anywhere. Freeing students from mundane tasks and worries can help them to be better students, and to approach and engage their courses in the right way.
Slashdot Mirror
Words are not the answer, fists will better solve your problems.
Then buy one of the older designs built on a single architecture?
This announcement is telling us that they are planning to make new designs available which is not the same as saying that the old designs are no longer available.
Heck, for just $10,000 I'd be happy to deliver you a supercomputer with terrific minesweeper performance.
Holy crap, are you for real, have I been missing naked pictures of women all my life by never reading past page 1 of a tabloid?
That's the classic slippery slope argument. The way out of it is to understand that you have to do the right thing in every case, and that doing the same thing in every case will guarantee that you are not doing the right thing. Most times, parents do a tolerable job of raising their children. But some do not, and as a society we do have a responsibility to take children away from parents who do a sufficiently awful job (and in fact we do this now, but instead of putting them into state run schools we place them in a foster care system that at least attempts to find the children better parents). It is not right for parents to abuse their children, just as it is not right for them to abuse any other human being, and as this is a case of pain, force, and coercion being used by one person on another, we as a society have a responsibility to protect the victim in such a case.
So the slippery slope you're worried about ends there: if parents aren't using pain, force, or coercion, or if the pain, force, or coercion are minor, then taking the child away would represent a greater use of force and coercion, and would therefore be immoral.
It's a bad thing for the people who wind up suffering under their rule. It's a bad idea to just let these people do this stuff, because they will harm their children, and others who cannot escape to a more rational group. It is all of our responsibility to make sure people can't/don't get stuck in such places.
True, but it does mean the network is fairly successful, and that people are watching.
Nearly all of the replies here are missing the fact that there's really no need for the games to do NTSC/PAL versions. I mean, unless the xbox360/ps3 designers were utter morons, the hardware should handle the output differences.
No, I'm pretty sure he's implying that we still live in the days of easily damaged electronic media. Only an extemely cautious person without children could possibly think that cd's and dvd's aren't utterly fragile, prone to ruinous scratches.
I've had 3 DVD movie discs go bad without even any children, just from dust getting into the player and spinning against the disc surface.
Children go through discs even faster, dropping them, stepping on them, pushing them where they don't quite fit.
Yeah, I guess really no one watches the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th ranked shows these days.
http://tv.yahoo.com/nielsen/
Even better is when you don't let them know how many tampons you buy by using someone else's phone number and paying cash.
Sure, you can use some general rules of thumb, because most societies have some general standards in common for what ought to be done. See the "Comparative morality among cultures" section of the WP article I linked to.
Again, if you're promoting any of pain, force, coercion, or killing as good, then the argument isn't worth having. Those are the only foundations I'm requiring, though, and I don't think you'll find anywhere or anywhen a widespread consensus that people want these things done to them. Yes, people in power have enjoyed doing those things to others in the past, but that's not quite the same as the others enjoying or agreeing to having those things done to them.
Except that this exactly was allowed and in some cases would actually be considered immoral in the past -- it would be dishonorable to back down from a duel. Unless you feel that the metric of harm has changed over the years, it would seem that this would be a good example of how this is society-relative.
Not at all. Just because people are coerced or pressured into thinking unnecessarily harming others is ok does not make it so.
I suspect that alcohol causes at least as much by way of damages. Is the drinking of alcohol immoral?
Drunk driving is definitely immoral. Drinking if you know you have a tendency to beat your kids while drunk is immoral. Drinking responsibly is not.
Christianity accepts slavery -- there is a large canon of text regarding the appropriate way to keep slaves in the Bible. Is the Bible or Christianity immoral? There are many people who would probably say that Christianity *defines* morality.
Most Christians I know are very immoral. The bible suggests many immoral things. Most organized religions have authorized terribly immoral actions. The world would surely be better off without Christianity, and most of the other major religions. And yes, many people think it defines morality. Many people just believe what they are told without critical thought.
There are clear answers to some of these.
First of all, morality is not just a set of social norms, it's about discovering how to live a life that does as little harm to others and as much good to others as possible. Commonly accepted forms of harm include pain, coercion, force, killing. You can try to argue that causing another person pain is good in general, or that coercing them is good in general, and so on, but to me that's just going down the road of stupid. Please note that I'm not suggesting these can be completely avoided, and such actions may even be morally necessary. One example would be that using force to constrain someone from committing murders might be necessary. In such cases, using the minimum force necessary is the goal of the moral life.
If you accept the basic goal of morality, then certain of the above situations resolve themselves clearly.
Murder is killing, so it goes into the don't allow it bin. You use the laws to create the minimum of force necessary to prevent it, as best you can. You certainly don't leave it up to small groups of people. You don't let people have duels to the death even if they think it is fun.
Obscenity is really fuzzier. What you really want the laws to use force for is the prevention of the coercion involved in the making of obscene materials. The existence of obscene materials is comparatively harmless, though in the case of child pornography there's enough evidence that it encourages the harm of children that the force involved in removing it can probably be justified.
Theft to retrieve stolen property is pretty hard to justify. Unless you're talking about just retrieving stolen property, in which case you've not committed a theft. You just moved something that belonged to you, nothing illegal about that. But stealing something that doesn't belong to you in an attempt to retrieve your stolen property? That's the wrong way to go about things.
Rape is a pretty obvious harm. No need to let 3 men and 1 woman in a dark alley make that vote.
Slavery is one of the worst offenders: pain, coercion, force, killing, all in one package.
I believe that is essentially true, but since the civil war, the federal government has effectively shown that the states cannot voluntarily withdraw from that agreement, so the issue of from where the power is derived is hazier.
Not at all, I'm just claiming that the law of numbers says that if you allow small groups of people to decide important issues of morals, you'll find that small groups will congegrate to screw other in their midst. Letting the broadest authority make the decisions ensures that small groups of crazy people can't band together to overcome the broader agreements on human rights. I'm really arguing for democracy of the greatest scope: let everyone decide jointly on the most important moral issues, and I think you'll get much better decisions than if you leave it to small groups.
As a simple example. Imagine we decide to leave the issue of murder open to the smallest voting group possible, 3 people. How often do you think we'd hit the unfortunate consequence of randomly picking 2 people who decide it would be fun to murder the 3rd, and legalize it.
On the opposite extreme, do you think it is likely that 2/3rds of the worlds population would decide to legalize murder?
In general, my claim is that you want the decision to be made by the largest possible group of people. That is, do you think it is likelier that somewhere in our country you might find 5 people, 4 of whom decide to murder the fifth, or that 80% of our total population would agree to legalize murder?
The current problem with our government is that it has essentially completely departed from the will of the people. That's a fundamental flaw in the design of our government, not a flaw in the law of numbers. I believe in spite of this that my general principal still stands.
I absolutely believe that one or more states would decide to do all of the things on your list.
Finally, the UN or World Court might well be better, if they had any authority in the US, but they don't. If we were to agree to abide by their authority, then yes, I would say it was a good idea to move lawmaking on such important issues up to that yet broader level, absolutely (and the universal declaration of human rights I think makes my case for me).
Offtopic, but I just have to know: does your sig work?
Better buy one pack of instant noodles and stretch it to november, I think it's going to be pretty pricey.
I think you're actually agreeing with me for the most part, though I can't decide for sure.
I think that some issues (including basically everything the OP offered excluding the taxation issues) are so morally significant that we cannot allow small groups to decide for themselves. IE murder: you can't allow a group of 5 people to take a vote and have 4 decide to murder the 5th, even though that's a plurality among that smaller group. Well you obviously actually can, but I'm claiming it's not a good idea. I always hope that most would agree, but it turns out many do not. Many people think it is actually ok to go ahead and vote on whether to kill someone.
That aside, the more general point is that some of these issues are best handled at the federal level, and in fact that is why the constitution lays out a lot of rights regarding these topics, specifically to prevent the states from being able to take ridiculous actions at the behest of rabid, vocal groups running the political process within those states.
Finally, we've had local taxes at the city and county level for ages, and it hasn't caused any serious instability for the last 200 years (at least nothing terribly obvious). But of all the OP issues, taxation is the one I'm least attached to. It has relatively little going for it in the moral department (at least in the decision of whether to allow for local taxes), and morality is of much more interest to me.
Well obviously it was fully intended to be a strawman argument, the OP was discussing what should or should not be the case, and suggested that the rights all should be at the state level. You seem to be saying: the constitution has it covered, so in fact the law is all taken care of at the federal level, which just agrees with what I think should be the case.
Oh how I wish that were true. Unfortunately, all too many lectures are just fact delivery sessions, where every word said is the answer to a multiple choice question later on. Memorize, memorize, memorize. If you can't write fast enough, you won't get a good grade. Lecture recordings are the student's weapon against bad professors.
Total agreement, except for the fact that I think about 9 out of 10 profs aren't actually any good, and so their classes do turn into nothing but fact recording sessions.
I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, many classes are just fact presentation forums (think history and english) where basically you'll be expected to regurgitate memorized lecture contents later. This even happens in CS classes sometimes (regurgitate x random algorithm you'll never use again in your life). For such classes, getting everything down is an unfortunate necessity.
Now, I'd certainly welcome the end of all such classes. How much easier life would have been for me if so much of school weren't memorization driven. But until the end of such 'learning' comes, people are stuck with technology workarounds to imperfect memories. Manual pencil and paper notetaking are just the most primitive tools for doing so. Recordings and automated transcription plus blackboard recording in some format are the next step up.
Ah, I could certainly see where it would be more of a problem in such a specialized field. All of the cases I was considering were for people with very generalized skillsets.
To clarify: I didn't mean to imply it was a rational fear. But many inexperienced or poorly trained students don't know how to learn from a class, and don't get good training in how to be a student anywhere. Freeing students from mundane tasks and worries can help them to be better students, and to approach and engage their courses in the right way.