Assuming that the worst case #1 is true is ridiculous. There is zero evidence to indicate it is true. My experience in the real world indicates that #3 is most likely to be the case.
The problem with choosing #3 is that it doesn't explain lobotomies, or just about all the other outcomes of brain damage, you're simply creating a new measure out of thin air to explain the behavior of a black box. Take for instance the case of Phineas Gage, either the damage to his brain caused his underlying behavior to change, or the behavior was always there but suppressed by strong will-power that was itself reduced by the damage. Either way, the observable change in behavior was based on the observable change in state of the brain, and we're back to "the state of my brain made me do it".
If you want to assume duality and the idea that perhaps the brain acts as some form of antenna between the body and the soul, then #2 becomes the best choice: brain damage could damage the antenna in such a way that the soul could have the strongest "will" in the world yet the body would not follow its command, or would act in unpredictable ways. Such a choice would also fit best with evidence that brain damage can be spontaneously "worked around" in certain cases: the soul has "dialed back in".
Also, your "secret biochemical commands" is somewhat out of place here, the biochemical process of arousal is understood well enough to at least create chemical compounds to cause or facilitate arousal. The question is whether the "paedophilic tendencies" that were "cured" were as subtle as the sight of an 8 year old in a swimsuit at the beach causing a release of neurotransmitters leading to a quickened heartbeat and the beginning stages of arousal.
#4 is tainted by the suggestion that the participant must enjoy doing something. Apparently I must be missing something in my life since going to work does not put me in the throes of ecstasy, yet somehow I still manage to get out of bed to do it. That is, if enjoying it is not a prerequisite for "doing good", why must I enjoy it if I "do evil"? Perhaps a person finding a briefcase of money feels terrible for keeping it, but their family will be evicted and starve in the streets without money, and therefore their feelings on the particular subject did not contribute to the decision.
I'm in the camp of "does it really matter". Regardless of free will or determinism, the purpose of punishment for crimes would be to discourage a "free-thinker" from deciding to commit a crime, or to change the inputs on the "sum-of-all-inputs" in order to prevent them from committing a crime.
having various non-eating related cookbooks in their homes on Slashdot, and each time this is referred to as "innocent reading material" (or something along those lines) rather than a prelude to terrorism
I didn't realize that the Perl Cookbook was so controversial!
So yes, my point. Mayors recognize that they are not capable of running a wireless network all by themselves, but if a major telco player does not want to bother with their community, then the mayor is going to find someone who will. This scares the major telco players because someday they might want to provide service to that community, only to face an uphill battle against an incumbent that had secured choice transmitter locations from the city, so they push for laws to ensure that those communities will remain open for the day that they deign to provide their services.
How does this relate to this story? If AT&T decides to roll out fiber to only the "richest" homes due to "cost concerns", you can be sure that they have something up their sleeve to prevent other companies from deciding that they can provide the same service at a lower capital cost to the remaining neighborhoods, and subsequently make a profit at lower rates. This no doubt would scare AT&T shitless, after all they'd face that same uphill battle if a Company X ran fiber to the rest of the city, while their "wealthy" customers are dropping AT&T's higher-priced service in hopes that Company X will roll out their lower-priced service to their neighborhood.
As I recall, all of these projects were state/city run.
$200M would be over 112% of Sony BMG's 4th quarter 2005 profits.
And? If the company is allowed to profit by damaging other people's computers, then it will continue to do so. By removing any profit from this particular misadventure, it will certainly cause them to think twice before trying it again, knowing that it would lose money.
Ideally, someone would sit down with a calculator and tally up all of the revenue from sales of these CDs, and force Sony to return that money. That would guarantee that the enterprise was a money-loser while still ensuring that damages are proportionate to the damage done.
They would not have objected as they did to the appearance of *free market* telecoms, in this case, offering city-wide wifi.
Funny, last I checked, the mayors of these cities weren't planning on spending their days flinging bits through the air.
Hell, if the telecoms wanted to provide that service so bad, they could have bid on the projects just like all the other private companies did. But they didn't want to, but they didn't want the city selling the contract to anyone else, either.
If you need to sustain certain profitability with regulations that force you to do business where you don't want to
This would be great and all, except that the telecom companies have already proven just how much pent up rage they can unleash at people moving in to serve markets where they "didn't want to" as witnessed by all the laws they have backed and tirades their CEOs have given against cities deploying the wireless services that they weren't.
Companies want to have their cake and eat it too. This is impossible, but they sure as hell will try. Let's see how long before a local player decides to run fiber through part of a city that AT&T "didn't want", before suddenly they want it so bad they're going to go to court to get it.
The problem is that the patent system allows one to "upgrade" a patent without revisiting the question of "now that you've told everyone how to do X, is X+1 really all that novel and non-obvious?"
Ah, but at least in most of the others, if (some) people are dying then one can claim you're doing it wrong. Take communism: if some people can be fed and others can't, then clearly you have failed to redistribute the food equitably. Or you failed to correctly assign farming tasks to people with the abilities to do so in order to ensure that there is enough food to go around.
However, let's say a company has a choice of food to sell: they can buy cheap food that has been tainted with a carcinogen or normal food. They calculate the risk that the people who would develop cancer from their food are able to track them down as the cause, as well as the interest they can make on their profits before they are forced to pay up, and based on the average payout for cancer cases, calculate that in the end, they'll be up $10 million over their position had they bought the untainted food. They go with the carcinogens, and the system worked exactly as promised. This is why, ideally, a government would compel the company to reveal that they were using tainted food and then fine them $11 million to ensure that the company is unable to profit from this choice.
Brings a new meaning to "say your prayers before you eat" doesn't it? Especially in the wake of the various e.coli outbreaks this year.
The very purpose of public key encryption is so you *don't* have to exchange keys over a secure channel.
OK, you got me, you don't have to exchange keys over a secure channel, you just have to securely confirm that the key you have is in fact Bob's key, and not some other key that someone put Bob's email address on.
I'll become comfortable with capitalism when someone figures out how to get it to quit killing its participants. Until then, I want someone with the power to compel truth and collect fines to make sure that the cost of killing me is greater than any profit a company may make by doing so.
Yes. It means that you and everyone you know are going to have to read the instructions on your mail client on how to encrypt and decrypt your mail. You can do it on any client that supports it, though most webmail clients do not directly (though you could write the email in a text editor, encrypt that, and attach the file to an email). You will all have to meet in order to exchange public keys securely and keep your private keys safe.
It's not the "public" domain anyway, it's in the possession of Earthlink, AT&T, or whoever owns whatever particular machine it happens to be on at the time.
If the government is getting it off of one of these privately owned servers, then either the owner is giving it to them, or they had better have a search warrant for it.
Hah. Ignore that other post I suck cocks;) Apparently the javascript for the UofM test is hosted off of some other domain that NoScript was blocking, and only shows up when you're actually in a story.
I haven't figured out how to use it, at least if the "University of Michigan Testing" option is what you're referring to. I went through their little tutorial, clicked on all the ajax stuff in the demo, ooohed and aahhhed at the power of it all, and then when I turn it on here, all of the comments disappear and I can't get the control box to show up to let me adjust the settings so I can see posts again.
The problem is that nested mode simply can't split between pages and maintain it's nesting. If I show the first 50 posts on page 1, and the 51'st post is a reply to the 50th post, then when I switch to page 2, if I start with post 51, the levels are all wacky, since it would appear to be the start of the thread. Pretty much the only way to fix this and maintain the logical flow of thought that nested view takes advantage of would be to repeat the entire thread hierarchy back to the start of the thread, with something to indicate that these posts are really on the previous page, along with the other 40 replies to those posts that you can't see on this page.
Or to get rid of the 100 post/page limit (I've heard whining from other forum administrators about bandwidth, but it's BS: what takes more bandwidth, 1 page with 300 posts and a header and a footer, or 3 separate HTTP requests of 100 posts each, each with a header and footer?).
I love nested view, it's the only reasonable way to read a forum and understand the flow of discussion, yet slashcode isn't alone in their broken implementation. Just about every piece of forum software out there treats it like their red-headed stepchild. Until something is done about it, I'll just end up in threaded mode for stories over 100 comments, even though I can only see one level of replies at a time.
But the current situation requires strenuous local government oversight.
Actually, if the government oversight just looked the other way, ATT could fiber up all the rich neighborhoods they want, and someone else who could do it cheaper could show up and fix up the other neighborhoods, pretty much screwing ATT out of any chance of growth (while the rich neighborhoods start to bitch about their overpriced service).
Unfortunately, the reason this has stalled so hard is because ATT wants that oversight. The entrenched telcos love government oversight. They just want the government oversight on their competitors, not on them. Simply put, if they were to do something that got these monopoly franchise contracts struck down, they'd be in deep shit, since the competitors would be crawling out of the woodwork and kick their ass. And they know it, so they are locked in this slow dance with the government, trying to weasel out of the contracts while still keeping their monopolies protected by them.
It's the new Political Math brought to you by Fox News. If you take a raving lunatic from one side of an issue, and a raving lunatic from the other side of an issue, then you get two raving lun... err, I mean you get fair and balanced news!
Slashdot Mirror
Or even attempt a reasonable cost/benefit analysis.
"Hey, we can make people pay for locating their kids for them!"
"Have you done a cost/benefit analysis?"
"Yeah, it'll cost the parents $1 per location, and its all pure profit for our benefit!"
Assuming that the worst case #1 is true is ridiculous. There is zero evidence to indicate it is true. My experience in the real world indicates that #3 is most likely to be the case.
The problem with choosing #3 is that it doesn't explain lobotomies, or just about all the other outcomes of brain damage, you're simply creating a new measure out of thin air to explain the behavior of a black box. Take for instance the case of Phineas Gage, either the damage to his brain caused his underlying behavior to change, or the behavior was always there but suppressed by strong will-power that was itself reduced by the damage. Either way, the observable change in behavior was based on the observable change in state of the brain, and we're back to "the state of my brain made me do it".
If you want to assume duality and the idea that perhaps the brain acts as some form of antenna between the body and the soul, then #2 becomes the best choice: brain damage could damage the antenna in such a way that the soul could have the strongest "will" in the world yet the body would not follow its command, or would act in unpredictable ways. Such a choice would also fit best with evidence that brain damage can be spontaneously "worked around" in certain cases: the soul has "dialed back in".
Also, your "secret biochemical commands" is somewhat out of place here, the biochemical process of arousal is understood well enough to at least create chemical compounds to cause or facilitate arousal. The question is whether the "paedophilic tendencies" that were "cured" were as subtle as the sight of an 8 year old in a swimsuit at the beach causing a release of neurotransmitters leading to a quickened heartbeat and the beginning stages of arousal.
#4 is tainted by the suggestion that the participant must enjoy doing something. Apparently I must be missing something in my life since going to work does not put me in the throes of ecstasy, yet somehow I still manage to get out of bed to do it. That is, if enjoying it is not a prerequisite for "doing good", why must I enjoy it if I "do evil"? Perhaps a person finding a briefcase of money feels terrible for keeping it, but their family will be evicted and starve in the streets without money, and therefore their feelings on the particular subject did not contribute to the decision.
I'm in the camp of "does it really matter". Regardless of free will or determinism, the purpose of punishment for crimes would be to discourage a "free-thinker" from deciding to commit a crime, or to change the inputs on the "sum-of-all-inputs" in order to prevent them from committing a crime.
$50,000.
Only if someone bought it
Expenses such as travel
I dunno, maybe they should spend more time in Congress and less time running around the country on our dime?
having various non-eating related cookbooks in their homes on Slashdot, and each time this is referred to as "innocent reading material" (or something along those lines) rather than a prelude to terrorism
I didn't realize that the Perl Cookbook was so controversial!
these projects are state run. There was no bidding.
h p?id=98722 ) that had a competitive bid that was very nearly killed by a state law whose language originally banned such partnerships http://www.stc-houston.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t= 874&sid=c5fcdcc14f97b926ebd1bbdf38549e1c
t ml
e ss%22+contract
Well, there was the Houston one ( http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story.p
Remember the big hubbub about Philadelphia's municipal wireless program and how communism was going to take over the world? It's run by Earthlink http://simianbrain.atlblogs.com/archives/006656.h
Most other cities also contract out their "municipal" wireless, for instance, the wireless network in Burleson, TX is run by Chevron. http://muniwireless.com/municipal/1121/
More: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22municipal+wirel
I'm not sure what point you're making.
So yes, my point. Mayors recognize that they are not capable of running a wireless network all by themselves, but if a major telco player does not want to bother with their community, then the mayor is going to find someone who will. This scares the major telco players because someday they might want to provide service to that community, only to face an uphill battle against an incumbent that had secured choice transmitter locations from the city, so they push for laws to ensure that those communities will remain open for the day that they deign to provide their services.
How does this relate to this story? If AT&T decides to roll out fiber to only the "richest" homes due to "cost concerns", you can be sure that they have something up their sleeve to prevent other companies from deciding that they can provide the same service at a lower capital cost to the remaining neighborhoods, and subsequently make a profit at lower rates. This no doubt would scare AT&T shitless, after all they'd face that same uphill battle if a Company X ran fiber to the rest of the city, while their "wealthy" customers are dropping AT&T's higher-priced service in hopes that Company X will roll out their lower-priced service to their neighborhood.
As I recall, all of these projects were state/city run.
You apparently recall wrong.
$200M would be over 112% of Sony BMG's 4th quarter 2005 profits.
And? If the company is allowed to profit by damaging other people's computers, then it will continue to do so. By removing any profit from this particular misadventure, it will certainly cause them to think twice before trying it again, knowing that it would lose money.
Ideally, someone would sit down with a calculator and tally up all of the revenue from sales of these CDs, and force Sony to return that money. That would guarantee that the enterprise was a money-loser while still ensuring that damages are proportionate to the damage done.
They would not have objected as they did to the appearance of *free market* telecoms, in this case, offering city-wide wifi.
Funny, last I checked, the mayors of these cities weren't planning on spending their days flinging bits through the air.
Hell, if the telecoms wanted to provide that service so bad, they could have bid on the projects just like all the other private companies did. But they didn't want to, but they didn't want the city selling the contract to anyone else, either.
If you need to sustain certain profitability with regulations that force you to do business where you don't want to
This would be great and all, except that the telecom companies have already proven just how much pent up rage they can unleash at people moving in to serve markets where they "didn't want to" as witnessed by all the laws they have backed and tirades their CEOs have given against cities deploying the wireless services that they weren't.
Companies want to have their cake and eat it too. This is impossible, but they sure as hell will try. Let's see how long before a local player decides to run fiber through part of a city that AT&T "didn't want", before suddenly they want it so bad they're going to go to court to get it.
The problem is that the patent system allows one to "upgrade" a patent without revisiting the question of "now that you've told everyone how to do X, is X+1 really all that novel and non-obvious?"
Ah, but at least in most of the others, if (some) people are dying then one can claim you're doing it wrong. Take communism: if some people can be fed and others can't, then clearly you have failed to redistribute the food equitably. Or you failed to correctly assign farming tasks to people with the abilities to do so in order to ensure that there is enough food to go around.
However, let's say a company has a choice of food to sell: they can buy cheap food that has been tainted with a carcinogen or normal food. They calculate the risk that the people who would develop cancer from their food are able to track them down as the cause, as well as the interest they can make on their profits before they are forced to pay up, and based on the average payout for cancer cases, calculate that in the end, they'll be up $10 million over their position had they bought the untainted food. They go with the carcinogens, and the system worked exactly as promised. This is why, ideally, a government would compel the company to reveal that they were using tainted food and then fine them $11 million to ensure that the company is unable to profit from this choice.
Brings a new meaning to "say your prayers before you eat" doesn't it? Especially in the wake of the various e.coli outbreaks this year.
The very purpose of public key encryption is so you *don't* have to exchange keys over a secure channel.
OK, you got me, you don't have to exchange keys over a secure channel, you just have to securely confirm that the key you have is in fact Bob's key, and not some other key that someone put Bob's email address on.
and finally become comfortable with capitalism?
I'll become comfortable with capitalism when someone figures out how to get it to quit killing its participants. Until then, I want someone with the power to compel truth and collect fines to make sure that the cost of killing me is greater than any profit a company may make by doing so.
There is no limit on how many times you can try again.
The game is over when you run out of quarters to try again and nobody will lend more to you.
Yes. It means that you and everyone you know are going to have to read the instructions on your mail client on how to encrypt and decrypt your mail. You can do it on any client that supports it, though most webmail clients do not directly (though you could write the email in a text editor, encrypt that, and attach the file to an email). You will all have to meet in order to exchange public keys securely and keep your private keys safe.
It's not the "public" domain anyway, it's in the possession of Earthlink, AT&T, or whoever owns whatever particular machine it happens to be on at the time.
If the government is getting it off of one of these privately owned servers, then either the owner is giving it to them, or they had better have a search warrant for it.
who can afford to live on 6K fulltime?
They're being paid for a month or two, not a whole year.
But how does that make you a troublemaker? That just makes you a good citizen
That's not what the government thinks.
Hah. Ignore that other post I suck cocks ;) Apparently the javascript for the UofM test is hosted off of some other domain that NoScript was blocking, and only shows up when you're actually in a story.
I haven't figured out how to use it, at least if the "University of Michigan Testing" option is what you're referring to. I went through their little tutorial, clicked on all the ajax stuff in the demo, ooohed and aahhhed at the power of it all, and then when I turn it on here, all of the comments disappear and I can't get the control box to show up to let me adjust the settings so I can see posts again.
The problem is that nested mode simply can't split between pages and maintain it's nesting. If I show the first 50 posts on page 1, and the 51'st post is a reply to the 50th post, then when I switch to page 2, if I start with post 51, the levels are all wacky, since it would appear to be the start of the thread. Pretty much the only way to fix this and maintain the logical flow of thought that nested view takes advantage of would be to repeat the entire thread hierarchy back to the start of the thread, with something to indicate that these posts are really on the previous page, along with the other 40 replies to those posts that you can't see on this page.
Or to get rid of the 100 post/page limit (I've heard whining from other forum administrators about bandwidth, but it's BS: what takes more bandwidth, 1 page with 300 posts and a header and a footer, or 3 separate HTTP requests of 100 posts each, each with a header and footer?).
I love nested view, it's the only reasonable way to read a forum and understand the flow of discussion, yet slashcode isn't alone in their broken implementation. Just about every piece of forum software out there treats it like their red-headed stepchild. Until something is done about it, I'll just end up in threaded mode for stories over 100 comments, even though I can only see one level of replies at a time.
Ah right, because censorship and oppression is all fun and games until someone gets killed?
I hope you don't call any TSA officials an idiot. Wouldn't want to have the cops come and "inconvenience" you.
But the current situation requires strenuous local government oversight.
Actually, if the government oversight just looked the other way, ATT could fiber up all the rich neighborhoods they want, and someone else who could do it cheaper could show up and fix up the other neighborhoods, pretty much screwing ATT out of any chance of growth (while the rich neighborhoods start to bitch about their overpriced service).
Unfortunately, the reason this has stalled so hard is because ATT wants that oversight. The entrenched telcos love government oversight. They just want the government oversight on their competitors, not on them. Simply put, if they were to do something that got these monopoly franchise contracts struck down, they'd be in deep shit, since the competitors would be crawling out of the woodwork and kick their ass. And they know it, so they are locked in this slow dance with the government, trying to weasel out of the contracts while still keeping their monopolies protected by them.
who has the money and interest to keep their own personal MMORPG running
Google for personal Ragnarok Online servers. Or Neverwinter Nights persistent world servers.
Why? Aren't they biased, too?
It's the new Political Math brought to you by Fox News. If you take a raving lunatic from one side of an issue, and a raving lunatic from the other side of an issue, then you get two raving lun... err, I mean you get fair and balanced news!