The reason I liked the X-files was not just the government conspiracy angle, but because once it was established, Carter knew that he had the heft to do pretty much what he wanted, and we got all sorts of strange little quirky episodes like the Cops episode, or the B&W one. Originally, the open-ended episode format, where almost nothing is really and truly resolved by the end of the episode, worked to keep the stories moving and keep you watching from one episode to the next.
In time, though, Carter ran out of ideas, and he ended up having to give away plot secrets he should have held onto as a way of filling episodes. What we got was a schizophrenic show - the characters were achieving what seemed like major victories, but at the same time, the X-files format _demanded_ that nothing ever really be resolved. In time, this led to the current 'doldrums' that they've been suffering for the past season or two. We know all the secrets, we know why everything is happening and how. Now won't someone do something about it, rather than just jerk around?
Oh, and my all-time favourite episode is still Cancer Man's History. One of the best character sketches I've ever seen on TV.
That's because rotoscoping was a retro-technique that Linklater dug up, not because Bakshi was _that_ cutting edge. It was invented in the mid 70's IIRC. Bakshi just appropriated the technique (and improved it) for his own use.
And to be honest, the Bakshi version is a butchering of the story. He himself admits it. He started animating the first one under the auspices of a studio who then changed their mind and canceled the project. He was almost finished the first movie then, but he thought that it wouldn't make sense by itself without the others. So, on his own time and money, he quickly wrote in and animated the most important scenes from the last two books, giving it the 'squeezed' feeling that bugged me even back when I was a kid. The results were less than stellar by his own admission.
The Leonids were fantastic up here. A couple hundred people from Queen's came out (most of us high as a kite;D) and sat along the lake. It was a amazingly clear night.
True, it _was_ Kingston weather in late November, but hell, other than a few extremities going numb, it was all good.
Geminids and then Ursids, eh? Wish I could remember my constellations so I knew where to look.
Plato seems to have made up a lot of myths that his characters claimed to have been true, but that were intended by him (Plato) to be taken as illustrative moral lessons. The myth of Er at the end of Republic comes to mind as one example. Atlantis sounds like a utopian version of contemporary Persia when you read the accounts of it.
The stories of Atlantis come up in Critias and Timaeus, two of Plato's early-middle dialogues, when he was still recording Socrates' critiques of morality and ethics (with more or less embellishment depending on who you ask) and they crop up as historical legends designed to teach morality. Atlantis in particular shows what happens when corruption infects mankind.
I don't really see how people can take them all that seriously, to be honest. You might as well take the Legend of Er to be true.
I suppose I'm the exception to the rule in that I consider copyright and patent laws (in general) to be good things. That is, I think that there _should_ be something that allows you to exercise a monopoly over the product of your intellectual labour.
On the other hand, I will concede that many of the recent copyright-protection rulings and laws (including the DMCA) have been ridiculous. However, the solution here is not to get rid of the laws entirely, but rather to encourage better jurisprudence. That is, judges should be encouraged to exercise their judgement in interpreting copyright law in accord with the spirit it was written in - to ensure that lawful producers of a piece of work are paid fairly for their work, rather than to prevent a multinational corporation from stifling anyone who designs a marginally similar word-processor to their own. More of these cases should be thrown out of court, not entertained by our legal system.
R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic sphere (among other things) and the fellow who coined the term 'synergy' in the first place could have told them this back during the 60's and 70's.
The idea behind synergy comes from material science where two or more elements or compounds combine to form a third material that exhibits properties that are not characteristic of any of the original materials.
Bucky's essential comment on synergy was that you could not understand emergent synergetic behaviour by studying the component parts, only the end result. They existed on two entirely separate levels of organisation, governed by entirely different sets of principles. In a way, complexity theory came along and merely confirmed his ideas.
He actually inspired the fellow who invented the waterbed after reading 'Stranger in a Strange Land' where a somewhat similar device is mentioned. The fellow sent Heinlein the first waterbed ever made as a thank-you present.
On a side note, Heinlein's influence goes beyond just the technological. I go to university in Kingston, Canada, at Queen's. We've got the same school bookstore as the boys at the Royal Military College so you can actually see what the future military leaders of Canada get to read.
Guess which Heinlein novel crops up as compulsory reading for first year cadets?
In all dead seriousness, I'm not 100% sure it would be, even _with_ nanotechnology. First off, how are you going to gain access to say, iron or oil(for plastics) or carbon? Sure, you can just steal it from someone else by destroying something they own, but I doubt any modern property-owning society is going to let you get away with that.
Refine it from the trash you own? Ok, now you have a limited supply of materials from which you must construct _everything_. Sure, you may have one of every atom... But you're still limited by the amount of matter in those. 5 pounds of aluminum cans won't build you a starship, after all.
Seawater? Try finding minute traces of gold (or whatever element you desire) in your local seawater when 500 other people have the same idea and have gotten there first. The ground? What happens when you move, and the guys who lived in the house before you 'mined' everything.
Plus, what are you going to do with the scrap? Sure, you've just ground down enough mass to extract the material you need to say, build your house using nano-tech. What are you going to do with the excess material (politely referred to as 'slag' in the refining industry)? It's probably poisonous, or carcinogenic, or posesses undesirable qualities of some sort.
Anyhow, to get off my negative stint and suggest my own (rather tepid) predictions, I can see conventional notions of property (real and portable) as remaining the same, and heck, even intellectual property remaining in a slightly altered form. I think it's likely that when nano-technological manufacturing is integrated on a personal level, trading information will become more prevalent. Oh, you want a microwave? Well, just download the plans for one from Maytag.com and upload it to your Nano-constructor module. In exchange, Maytag will require a certain amount of refined materials (iron, say) or perhaps some labour on your part (programming, designing ad campaigns, shuffling paper, running the office). Jobs would be more mutable, and you'd work in them until your accumulated salary equaled the cost of the product you purchased.
That's not to say the above system doesn't have problems, merely that it's a guesstimate on my part about what _might_ happen. Anyhow, before people blab on about nano-technology instituting some sort of communism and the destruction of property, it pays to look at the problems involved.
-Seraph
I don't use the program myself, but a couple of my SMS-addicted friends do, and from what they told me, it sounds like it will already work with AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoochat (and possibly a few others?).
Sure he doesn't have a useless piece of paper that proves he can write essays on obscure french poets; but of anyone, people in the computer industry (a group of professions reknowned for self-education) should be glad to see this kid get ahead. He's proven that he _is_ an expert where it counts: in practice, and he has the ranking on AskMe.com (whatever you think that's worth) to back him up on that. He's shown that merely having accreditation (MCSE, A+ or anything else) doesn't mean shit-all in the grand scheme of things thanks to the internet. What counts is results, and this kid seems to have been able to provide them.
Hell, he probably has more satisfied customers than most attorneys do.
The fourth amendment, of course, which prevents unreasonable search and seizure of property. That's why there are warrants. It's also been interpreted in modern times to include a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' - especially if you are a law-abiding citizen. What that means is that the police can't simply trawl for criminals without _reasonable_ and _probable_ grounds to believe that there actually _are_ criminals/crimes being committed where ever they're searching.
So far, the 'reasonable expectation of privacy' hasn't been tested on public property as far as I know (the Superbowl and the Radar Flashlights cases took place on private property) but if I were a criminal, I'd be willing to make a constitutional case out of it.
Not the ones in those plants, no. Different things are poisonous to different animals. For example, chocolate is poisonous to your dog, while the active chemical in RAID (which kills bugs) is safe enough to spray on your food and then eat. Why? Because the receptors in your body deal with the molecules one way, while a dog and beetle use them another way.
This is especially true in a lot of the 'natural' pesticides plants use. They've been evolved to destroy the plant's main predators (insects), not the relatively recent human ones. Simply telling a plant to produce more of these poisons won't matter, because humans are affected by them in the first place.... Just like eating more chocolate won't poison you.
-Seraph
Yes, but we don't need much more than cursory testing of most genetically engineered products for the simple reason that you don't eat genes.
What happens in your stomach is that the organic material of what you eat is broken down by the acids into chunks of protein and other organic molecules, where it is then sorted and used as necessary. The actual genetic structure of what you eat doesn't matter, since you aren't absorbing genes.
Now, what _can_ make you sick are certain chemicals that those genetically engineered foods produce. For example, if we have a plant that makes petroleum distillates, then eating that will make you sick - just like drinking gasoline would. On the other hand, whether or not a particular strain of wheat lasts longer, or is more resistant to disease doesn't affect you genetically at all. And since most GMOs _don't_ do things like produce petroleum distillates or deadly poison, there's no serious risk of getting sick from them.
I honestly don't see the point of having anything but my computer connected to the WWW (as opposed to setting up a home intra-net like X-10). I spend enough time at my computer that if I was going to order anything over the web (like, oh, food) it'd be quicker, easier and safer to do it on my PC with all of its security measures in place, than to use an unsecured connection from my fridge.
-Seraph
I don't know how much this is along the lines of what Katz is talking about, but I recall reading in an issue of Adbusters (www.adbusters.org) a couple months back about a company that would give you a car, pay for insurance and pay you money every month to drive it around. The catch? The car you got was plastered in advertisements just like a NASCAR driver (that, and the car was PoS). You couldn't remove the logos without violating your contract, and the idea was to recruit all these people on the cheap to plug advertisements for whatever on their cars.
The point in recycling aluminum isn't to 'destroy' the aluminum, but to reclaim it at a lower cost [thanks to whoever mentioned that earlier on another/. thread earlier today] than it takes to mine more bauxite (the ore we get aluminum from). If this fungus 'digests' aluminum, then the aluminum _must_ be reacted with another chemical (I'm guessing oxygen, though I'm not really sure) to produce the energy the fungus needs. That means that you'd have to spend even more energy to extract it than to simply mine more. Since the bauxite ore is aluminum oxide, then the same processes would probably be used.
What all of that means is that using this fungus to extract the tiny sprinkles of aluminum on a CD aren't cost-efficient enough to make it worthwhile for recycling. It'd actually cost more (and almost certainly yield less) to use this method than to simply mine more aluminum ores.
Depends on what you mean, exactly. I'm not in favour of corporations getting all the rights, if that's what you mean.
Like I said, if governments want to dictate terms between a corporation and myself, it's wrong, whether or not those terms favour the corporation or me. Only we can dictate the terms of our contracts. What does that mean? That if I want to sign a contract with the bank (say, open an account) then the government has no more right to say 'You can't sign an account with Bank X' than it does to say 'You _must_ deal with Bank X'.
However, what the terms of that account with Bank X are, are between me and Bank X. Not the government, Bank X, and me. Just Bank X and I.
Intellectual property is a bit of a grey area for libertarians just like everyone else. But, as I look at it, if you aren't hurt someone else, or defrauding them, then you're allowed to do what you want. So, if you design a DeCSS decrypter, use it for personal use to put that DVD you own onto your computer and watch it there, you're not a criminal. Even if you send that DeCSS to your friend, who does the same thing, you're not a criminal. The guy who uses it, however, to crack open a DVD and then upload it to the net, however, _is_ committing a crime, because he's causing financial loss to the company that made that DVD. He's the criminal, not the programmer. The people who knowingly download that DVD without paying for it are criminals too, because they're defrauding the company that made it.
Trademarks and copyrights are _supposed_ to be for _distinctive_ phrases and symbols, not just common words. I'd agree that a lot of corporations are getting ridiculous in the area of intellectual property, but that doesn't mean that intellectual property isn't a valid idea after all.
Basically, I think the idea that libertarians are somehow hard-core Right-wingers is coming across from a lot of people. Libertarians aren't _pro-corporations_. We're pro-_freedom_. Corporate abuses of power are limited by the government, and government abuses of power are limited by the rule of law, which lets ordinary, right-minded folks who don't want to have to deal with either one more than possible, able to get by without dealing with one or the other more than they have to.
They can't just summon information about you out of thin air. Nor do they spend their waking hours following you, me, or Joe Bloggs around all day. The only way they can get information is through it being sold to them, researching it themselves, or getting it off a public database. In order for them to have information on you, you have to have consented to give your information to one of those things with the knowledge that it could be resold or distributed.
It's all in your ToS, usually.
But then, corporations are themselves government creations. To be a consistent libertarian, you should demand that corporations be abolished, so that individuals will be fully responsible for their actions
You're confusing anarchist with libertarian. Anarchists want the abolition of government, libertarians want a government whose only role is to prevent coercion of its citizens through force or fraud. Nor are corporations 'government' fictions. They're legal constructs. Governments aren't the law, nor should the law be the government.
Except that, until the 1914 Harrison Act, there was no "drug problem" in America. You could go in and buy a rifle and a bag of heroin in the same trip without anyone blinking an eye. And people did, from time to time.
I'm not sure where you got the '80%' of all violent crimes are committed on drugs' thing from either, but do you include alcohol in there or not? And what counts as 'being under the influence of drugs'? Does having a beer four hours beforehand count? If that was the case, and considering the ubiquity of alcohol at meals, I'd be surprised if the stat wasn't higher.
Sure, or go buy some land and build a house on it, or pay your rent in cash.
You don't get something for nothing. If privacy is important to you, it's worth taking special measures to achieve. And if it isn't, why worry about it being violated in the first place?
-Seraph
It's rather simple why libertarians think the way we do: Governments can use force to collect the information they want and do what they want with it, but any corporation that has information on you has it solely because you consented, either tacitly or explicitly, to give it to them.
It's illegal not to fill out the census. Meaning, you can go to jail, or be given a fine, or whatnot. You can't get a job without a SIN number, because if you do, the government will fine your employer and you.
On the other hand, it's perfectly all right not to use hotmail or any other service that requires you to fill out demographic information forms. It's perfectly all right to change your browser so that it doesn't accept cookies.
Of course, the day the laws says that you _have_ to accept cookies on your browser or else you'll go to jail, then we'll be against that too.
Long time reader, first time poster, blah blah blah.
I'm pretty sure we all know what _will_ happen with AIs and Aliens: vast hordes of unthinking peons will declaim them as challenging God's creation, and demand the execution(deletion in the case of AIs) of all specimens, lynch the scientists involved, and then burn all the papers so that we'll never be able to figure out how any of it was done. (Tesla and Wilhelm Reich as great examples of the 1st amendment being violated whenever science is inconvenient for the people in charge)
On the other hand, the question can be looked at from a more optimistic point of view. You know, the kind where we all pretend we're in a world of rational, compassionate beings with a penchant for reflection and forethought to help them deal with life, the universe and one another. So, with that delusion firmly in place:
First, you have to determine _what_ qualifies as 'human' enough to get those rights. That's not too hard for us, in this day and age of one-species conciousness (or the pretense thereof at the expense of certain primates and dolphins) where all that's needed is to be born with the right bit of genetic code, and boom you've got more rights than the fellow with 99.6% similar DNA sitting next to you smoking a cigar and in rollerskates.
Now, obviously simple genetic code can't be the only determiner of one's rights, or else we open up a lot of scary doors, and besides, it's useless when it comes to aliens and whatnot. Who wants to be the first man to tell the giant slobbering thing with the raygun that it's 'Not genetically pure enough'?
Therefore, as a tentative alternative, may I suggest that when we say 'human' rights, we mean 'rights of all concious beings'. In Star-Trek speak for the geeks, yes, 'Sentient beings' can be inserted. Basically, anything capable of abstract thought (our only real judgement at this point of what is and isn't conciousness) should be accorded these rights. That way, both aliens and AIs qualify for rights - in fact, the same rights that you or I do.
Now, there are a few problems with AIs if you do this that I'll get to in a moment, but in general, I can't see any real reason not to count aliens under the UNCHR except cultural prejudice. Someone else pointed out that they may not have the same values as we do, but that's immaterial. If they want to use our planet, they're going to have to obey our laws. The logistics of fighting an interstellar war (barring some mysterious FTL device) are horrendous to the point of being pointless. It's not worth their time. So, obeying our laws, and getting our rights, is worthwhile simply because it's impossible to do anything else and survive. (1 space-monster versus 6 billion humans engaged in almost daily combat with one another across the face of this wonderful planet we call home? Hah!)
And now this post has become far longer than I thought it would be, so I'm going to skip those 'AI rights' things until some other time.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason I liked the X-files was not just the government conspiracy angle, but because once it was established, Carter knew that he had the heft to do pretty much what he wanted, and we got all sorts of strange little quirky episodes like the Cops episode, or the B&W one. Originally, the open-ended episode format, where almost nothing is really and truly resolved by the end of the episode, worked to keep the stories moving and keep you watching from one episode to the next.
In time, though, Carter ran out of ideas, and he ended up having to give away plot secrets he should have held onto as a way of filling episodes. What we got was a schizophrenic show - the characters were achieving what seemed like major victories, but at the same time, the X-files format _demanded_ that nothing ever really be resolved. In time, this led to the current 'doldrums' that they've been suffering for the past season or two. We know all the secrets, we know why everything is happening and how. Now won't someone do something about it, rather than just jerk around?
Oh, and my all-time favourite episode is still Cancer Man's History. One of the best character sketches I've ever seen on TV.
-Seraph
That's because rotoscoping was a retro-technique that Linklater dug up, not because Bakshi was _that_ cutting edge. It was invented in the mid 70's IIRC. Bakshi just appropriated the technique (and improved it) for his own use.
And to be honest, the Bakshi version is a butchering of the story. He himself admits it. He started animating the first one under the auspices of a studio who then changed their mind and canceled the project. He was almost finished the first movie then, but he thought that it wouldn't make sense by itself without the others. So, on his own time and money, he quickly wrote in and animated the most important scenes from the last two books, giving it the 'squeezed' feeling that bugged me even back when I was a kid. The results were less than stellar by his own admission.
-Seraph
The Leonids were fantastic up here. A couple hundred people from Queen's came out (most of us high as a kite ;D) and sat along the lake. It was a amazingly clear night.
True, it _was_ Kingston weather in late November, but hell, other than a few extremities going numb, it was all good.
Geminids and then Ursids, eh? Wish I could remember my constellations so I knew where to look.
Plato seems to have made up a lot of myths that his characters claimed to have been true, but that were intended by him (Plato) to be taken as illustrative moral lessons. The myth of Er at the end of Republic comes to mind as one example. Atlantis sounds like a utopian version of contemporary Persia when you read the accounts of it.
The stories of Atlantis come up in Critias and Timaeus, two of Plato's early-middle dialogues, when he was still recording Socrates' critiques of morality and ethics (with more or less embellishment depending on who you ask) and they crop up as historical legends designed to teach morality. Atlantis in particular shows what happens when corruption infects mankind.
I don't really see how people can take them all that seriously, to be honest. You might as well take the Legend of Er to be true.
-Seraph
Thought I heard that LeGuin was a neo-pagan of some sort, but I don't know when she converted.
I suppose I'm the exception to the rule in that I consider copyright and patent laws (in general) to be good things. That is, I think that there _should_ be something that allows you to exercise a monopoly over the product of your intellectual labour.
On the other hand, I will concede that many of the recent copyright-protection rulings and laws (including the DMCA) have been ridiculous. However, the solution here is not to get rid of the laws entirely, but rather to encourage better jurisprudence. That is, judges should be encouraged to exercise their judgement in interpreting copyright law in accord with the spirit it was written in - to ensure that lawful producers of a piece of work are paid fairly for their work, rather than to prevent a multinational corporation from stifling anyone who designs a marginally similar word-processor to their own. More of these cases should be thrown out of court, not entertained by our legal system.
R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic sphere (among other things) and the fellow who coined the term 'synergy' in the first place could have told them this back during the 60's and 70's.
The idea behind synergy comes from material science where two or more elements or compounds combine to form a third material that exhibits properties that are not characteristic of any of the original materials.
Bucky's essential comment on synergy was that you could not understand emergent synergetic behaviour by studying the component parts, only the end result. They existed on two entirely separate levels of organisation, governed by entirely different sets of principles. In a way, complexity theory came along and merely confirmed his ideas.
He actually inspired the fellow who invented the waterbed after reading 'Stranger in a Strange Land' where a somewhat similar device is mentioned. The fellow sent Heinlein the first waterbed ever made as a thank-you present.
On a side note, Heinlein's influence goes beyond just the technological. I go to university in Kingston, Canada, at Queen's. We've got the same school bookstore as the boys at the Royal Military College so you can actually see what the future military leaders of Canada get to read.
Guess which Heinlein novel crops up as compulsory reading for first year cadets?
In all dead seriousness, I'm not 100% sure it would be, even _with_ nanotechnology. First off, how are you going to gain access to say, iron or oil(for plastics) or carbon? Sure, you can just steal it from someone else by destroying something they own, but I doubt any modern property-owning society is going to let you get away with that. Refine it from the trash you own? Ok, now you have a limited supply of materials from which you must construct _everything_. Sure, you may have one of every atom... But you're still limited by the amount of matter in those. 5 pounds of aluminum cans won't build you a starship, after all. Seawater? Try finding minute traces of gold (or whatever element you desire) in your local seawater when 500 other people have the same idea and have gotten there first. The ground? What happens when you move, and the guys who lived in the house before you 'mined' everything. Plus, what are you going to do with the scrap? Sure, you've just ground down enough mass to extract the material you need to say, build your house using nano-tech. What are you going to do with the excess material (politely referred to as 'slag' in the refining industry)? It's probably poisonous, or carcinogenic, or posesses undesirable qualities of some sort. Anyhow, to get off my negative stint and suggest my own (rather tepid) predictions, I can see conventional notions of property (real and portable) as remaining the same, and heck, even intellectual property remaining in a slightly altered form. I think it's likely that when nano-technological manufacturing is integrated on a personal level, trading information will become more prevalent. Oh, you want a microwave? Well, just download the plans for one from Maytag.com and upload it to your Nano-constructor module. In exchange, Maytag will require a certain amount of refined materials (iron, say) or perhaps some labour on your part (programming, designing ad campaigns, shuffling paper, running the office). Jobs would be more mutable, and you'd work in them until your accumulated salary equaled the cost of the product you purchased. That's not to say the above system doesn't have problems, merely that it's a guesstimate on my part about what _might_ happen. Anyhow, before people blab on about nano-technology instituting some sort of communism and the destruction of property, it pays to look at the problems involved. -Seraph
I don't use the program myself, but a couple of my SMS-addicted friends do, and from what they told me, it sounds like it will already work with AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoochat (and possibly a few others?).
Personally, I say: Good for him.
Sure he doesn't have a useless piece of paper that proves he can write essays on obscure french poets; but of anyone, people in the computer industry (a group of professions reknowned for self-education) should be glad to see this kid get ahead. He's proven that he _is_ an expert where it counts: in practice, and he has the ranking on AskMe.com (whatever you think that's worth) to back him up on that. He's shown that merely having accreditation (MCSE, A+ or anything else) doesn't mean shit-all in the grand scheme of things thanks to the internet. What counts is results, and this kid seems to have been able to provide them.
Hell, he probably has more satisfied customers than most attorneys do.
-Seraph
It's Arthur C. Clarke's third law of technology, not an Isaac Asimov quote.
Not a flame, just a helpful hint.
The fourth amendment, of course, which prevents unreasonable search and seizure of property. That's why there are warrants. It's also been interpreted in modern times to include a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' - especially if you are a law-abiding citizen. What that means is that the police can't simply trawl for criminals without _reasonable_ and _probable_ grounds to believe that there actually _are_ criminals/crimes being committed where ever they're searching.
So far, the 'reasonable expectation of privacy' hasn't been tested on public property as far as I know (the Superbowl and the Radar Flashlights cases took place on private property) but if I were a criminal, I'd be willing to make a constitutional case out of it.
-Seraph
Not the ones in those plants, no. Different things are poisonous to different animals. For example, chocolate is poisonous to your dog, while the active chemical in RAID (which kills bugs) is safe enough to spray on your food and then eat. Why? Because the receptors in your body deal with the molecules one way, while a dog and beetle use them another way. This is especially true in a lot of the 'natural' pesticides plants use. They've been evolved to destroy the plant's main predators (insects), not the relatively recent human ones. Simply telling a plant to produce more of these poisons won't matter, because humans are affected by them in the first place.... Just like eating more chocolate won't poison you. -Seraph
Yes, but we don't need much more than cursory testing of most genetically engineered products for the simple reason that you don't eat genes.
What happens in your stomach is that the organic material of what you eat is broken down by the acids into chunks of protein and other organic molecules, where it is then sorted and used as necessary. The actual genetic structure of what you eat doesn't matter, since you aren't absorbing genes.
Now, what _can_ make you sick are certain chemicals that those genetically engineered foods produce. For example, if we have a plant that makes petroleum distillates, then eating that will make you sick - just like drinking gasoline would. On the other hand, whether or not a particular strain of wheat lasts longer, or is more resistant to disease doesn't affect you genetically at all. And since most GMOs _don't_ do things like produce petroleum distillates or deadly poison, there's no serious risk of getting sick from them.
-Seraph
I honestly don't see the point of having anything but my computer connected to the WWW (as opposed to setting up a home intra-net like X-10). I spend enough time at my computer that if I was going to order anything over the web (like, oh, food) it'd be quicker, easier and safer to do it on my PC with all of its security measures in place, than to use an unsecured connection from my fridge. -Seraph
I don't know how much this is along the lines of what Katz is talking about, but I recall reading in an issue of Adbusters (www.adbusters.org) a couple months back about a company that would give you a car, pay for insurance and pay you money every month to drive it around. The catch? The car you got was plastered in advertisements just like a NASCAR driver (that, and the car was PoS). You couldn't remove the logos without violating your contract, and the idea was to recruit all these people on the cheap to plug advertisements for whatever on their cars.
-SeraphtheSilver
Unfortunately, I don't think it could.
/. thread earlier today] than it takes to mine more bauxite (the ore we get aluminum from). If this fungus 'digests' aluminum, then the aluminum _must_ be reacted with another chemical (I'm guessing oxygen, though I'm not really sure) to produce the energy the fungus needs. That means that you'd have to spend even more energy to extract it than to simply mine more. Since the bauxite ore is aluminum oxide, then the same processes would probably be used.
The point in recycling aluminum isn't to 'destroy' the aluminum, but to reclaim it at a lower cost [thanks to whoever mentioned that earlier on another
What all of that means is that using this fungus to extract the tiny sprinkles of aluminum on a CD aren't cost-efficient enough to make it worthwhile for recycling. It'd actually cost more (and almost certainly yield less) to use this method than to simply mine more aluminum ores.
-SeraphtheSilver
Depends on what you mean, exactly. I'm not in favour of corporations getting all the rights, if that's what you mean.
Like I said, if governments want to dictate terms between a corporation and myself, it's wrong, whether or not those terms favour the corporation or me. Only we can dictate the terms of our contracts. What does that mean? That if I want to sign a contract with the bank (say, open an account) then the government has no more right to say 'You can't sign an account with Bank X' than it does to say 'You _must_ deal with Bank X'.
However, what the terms of that account with Bank X are, are between me and Bank X. Not the government, Bank X, and me. Just Bank X and I.
Intellectual property is a bit of a grey area for libertarians just like everyone else. But, as I look at it, if you aren't hurt someone else, or defrauding them, then you're allowed to do what you want. So, if you design a DeCSS decrypter, use it for personal use to put that DVD you own onto your computer and watch it there, you're not a criminal. Even if you send that DeCSS to your friend, who does the same thing, you're not a criminal. The guy who uses it, however, to crack open a DVD and then upload it to the net, however, _is_ committing a crime, because he's causing financial loss to the company that made that DVD. He's the criminal, not the programmer. The people who knowingly download that DVD without paying for it are criminals too, because they're defrauding the company that made it.
Trademarks and copyrights are _supposed_ to be for _distinctive_ phrases and symbols, not just common words. I'd agree that a lot of corporations are getting ridiculous in the area of intellectual property, but that doesn't mean that intellectual property isn't a valid idea after all.
Basically, I think the idea that libertarians are somehow hard-core Right-wingers is coming across from a lot of people. Libertarians aren't _pro-corporations_. We're pro-_freedom_. Corporate abuses of power are limited by the government, and government abuses of power are limited by the rule of law, which lets ordinary, right-minded folks who don't want to have to deal with either one more than possible, able to get by without dealing with one or the other more than they have to.
-Seraph
They can't just summon information about you out of thin air. Nor do they spend their waking hours following you, me, or Joe Bloggs around all day. The only way they can get information is through it being sold to them, researching it themselves, or getting it off a public database. In order for them to have information on you, you have to have consented to give your information to one of those things with the knowledge that it could be resold or distributed.
It's all in your ToS, usually.
But then, corporations are themselves government creations. To be a consistent libertarian, you should demand that corporations be abolished, so that individuals will be fully responsible for their actions
You're confusing anarchist with libertarian. Anarchists want the abolition of government, libertarians want a government whose only role is to prevent coercion of its citizens through force or fraud. Nor are corporations 'government' fictions. They're legal constructs. Governments aren't the law, nor should the law be the government.
-Seraph
Except that, until the 1914 Harrison Act, there was no "drug problem" in America. You could go in and buy a rifle and a bag of heroin in the same trip without anyone blinking an eye. And people did, from time to time.
I'm not sure where you got the '80%' of all violent crimes are committed on drugs' thing from either, but do you include alcohol in there or not? And what counts as 'being under the influence of drugs'? Does having a beer four hours beforehand count? If that was the case, and considering the ubiquity of alcohol at meals, I'd be surprised if the stat wasn't higher.
-Seraph
Sure, or go buy some land and build a house on it, or pay your rent in cash. You don't get something for nothing. If privacy is important to you, it's worth taking special measures to achieve. And if it isn't, why worry about it being violated in the first place? -Seraph
It's rather simple why libertarians think the way we do: Governments can use force to collect the information they want and do what they want with it, but any corporation that has information on you has it solely because you consented, either tacitly or explicitly, to give it to them.
It's illegal not to fill out the census. Meaning, you can go to jail, or be given a fine, or whatnot. You can't get a job without a SIN number, because if you do, the government will fine your employer and you.
On the other hand, it's perfectly all right not to use hotmail or any other service that requires you to fill out demographic information forms. It's perfectly all right to change your browser so that it doesn't accept cookies.
Of course, the day the laws says that you _have_ to accept cookies on your browser or else you'll go to jail, then we'll be against that too.
-Seraph
Long time reader, first time poster, blah blah blah. I'm pretty sure we all know what _will_ happen with AIs and Aliens: vast hordes of unthinking peons will declaim them as challenging God's creation, and demand the execution(deletion in the case of AIs) of all specimens, lynch the scientists involved, and then burn all the papers so that we'll never be able to figure out how any of it was done. (Tesla and Wilhelm Reich as great examples of the 1st amendment being violated whenever science is inconvenient for the people in charge) On the other hand, the question can be looked at from a more optimistic point of view. You know, the kind where we all pretend we're in a world of rational, compassionate beings with a penchant for reflection and forethought to help them deal with life, the universe and one another. So, with that delusion firmly in place: First, you have to determine _what_ qualifies as 'human' enough to get those rights. That's not too hard for us, in this day and age of one-species conciousness (or the pretense thereof at the expense of certain primates and dolphins) where all that's needed is to be born with the right bit of genetic code, and boom you've got more rights than the fellow with 99.6% similar DNA sitting next to you smoking a cigar and in rollerskates. Now, obviously simple genetic code can't be the only determiner of one's rights, or else we open up a lot of scary doors, and besides, it's useless when it comes to aliens and whatnot. Who wants to be the first man to tell the giant slobbering thing with the raygun that it's 'Not genetically pure enough'? Therefore, as a tentative alternative, may I suggest that when we say 'human' rights, we mean 'rights of all concious beings'. In Star-Trek speak for the geeks, yes, 'Sentient beings' can be inserted. Basically, anything capable of abstract thought (our only real judgement at this point of what is and isn't conciousness) should be accorded these rights. That way, both aliens and AIs qualify for rights - in fact, the same rights that you or I do. Now, there are a few problems with AIs if you do this that I'll get to in a moment, but in general, I can't see any real reason not to count aliens under the UNCHR except cultural prejudice. Someone else pointed out that they may not have the same values as we do, but that's immaterial. If they want to use our planet, they're going to have to obey our laws. The logistics of fighting an interstellar war (barring some mysterious FTL device) are horrendous to the point of being pointless. It's not worth their time. So, obeying our laws, and getting our rights, is worthwhile simply because it's impossible to do anything else and survive. (1 space-monster versus 6 billion humans engaged in almost daily combat with one another across the face of this wonderful planet we call home? Hah!) And now this post has become far longer than I thought it would be, so I'm going to skip those 'AI rights' things until some other time.