If a device is made to either redirect light, or detect light in the environment, absorb it and then project light to match it, then there will be some delay necissary in the process, because you can't send out information before you observe it.
Don't know how significant it would be, but that could result in a slight disjointed projection of the area behind you if you were made 'invisible' with such a device, most observable when one moves.
Thus, the more apt movie reference would be Predator.
How is trying to block access to the 'social' internet as part of law NOT in very important ways a roadblock to free speech? If I add a Wiki or a chat function to a website, is it then a danger to children because anyone can access the site, and communicate freely to children using that tool?
That's a default system of banning speech in public, on a scale far worse than any indecency bill. It's akin to banning phone calls to private residences on public phones, in order to protect children from free communication.
What kind of idiotic message does this send to children anyway? The majority of our legislatures in the house seem to think that free communication is too dangerous a thing for children to do now. "Don't talk with strangers" is perhaps a way to get children to think defensively about the messages they get... but speaking with strangers is the only way to learn about the world outside your own little bubble. Sure - the boogey man of the Internet child predator has some reality to it, but the Internet is still one of the safest place for children to learn about the opinions of the rest of humanity outside their small environment. Banning such access in public libraries is telling children that they can't be trusted with even the possibility of such communication. I aknowledge that children can't be trusted with all the rights of adults, but our public infrastructure seems to be producing another generation of sheltered dropouts, each less qualified to enter college than the last.
This is an immoral bill, in my mind, and one I hope is found unconstitutional.
Experience. The hidden result of all reactions, real or imagined - observable experience.
Regardles of what gods may exist, what greater reality may exist, or whatnot, the purpose to everything can be met with a system that pursues experience in all it's variety. If we are all that is, the eternal quest for experience will be it's own purpose. Endless experience would fulful all purposes.
The trick is setting up a system of gathering experience that doesn't meet with stagnation. Stagnation can come in many forms - death/ceasation, returning to exactly the same state as some past point without being aware of it(looping), or any path that will inevitably lead to those states. Etropy is an obvious block towards seeking experience as an ultimate goal - but if totally unavoidable, then the ultimate goal would be maximizing exploration with the resources available.
I hope an entity like Microsoft doesn't end up buying rights to too much of OpenGL, and thus lock it up for years. It's a superb cross-platform language for development... pretty much all there is for high-end games or similar real-time rendering when you want to develop something open source. It would pretty much suck if no further standards could safely rely on a base of OpenGL/GLSL/GL* to attract an audience and technology base in the future. DirectX isn't bad on windows... but I'd hate for that to be all there is for upcoming years.
Still... perhaps a something new from the ashes could form a more lasting standard that's better than going through major-company approval process of the OpenGL ARB. Even if DirectX continues to be the basis of future graphics card development, new open-source standards can use the same hardware hooks for better ends. I can't imagine that the graphics card manufacturers wouldn't be interested in helping a new standard form if enough of the developer community had a hunger for newer cross-platform 3d graphics library. GLSL is very nice - but perhaps a better set of standard could be developed in conjunction with future hardware in mind.
Ryan Fenton (Who has been reading through the GLSL Orange book for the past few weeks)
That makes me wonder... how will the sensor determine the bounds of the TV that the remote is aiming at? Will it look up somehow to see where light is emiting from the TV somehow? Or will there be general assumptions about the size and aspect ratio of the screen?
Perhaps there will be a calibration on setting the system up... but they have to expect either the TV or the sensor to be moved occasionally. Any manual calibration can be expected to suffer from accuracy problems, I'd expect - especially if game makers somehow assume a screen aspect ratio when making their games. Games with relativistic controls wouldn't be so bad... but anything with precision involved would start to feel sloppy when anything changed.
I hope the relationship between screen and controller are more dynamic and automatic than just sensing the remote. Regardless, I imagine I can quickly get used to whatever it is, and the game makers will compensate as needed - I'd just like it to be as close to a precise 3-d mouse as possible without having to wave the controller too out of proportion to the actual screen.
...if it takes 10 calories of gasoline to make one calorie of crop, and that food is used to feed cows, which use more gasoline, this doesn't sound like too much of a sustainable bit of agriculture.
Of course, that gasoline would be used anyway in the production of these crops, milk, meat and byproducts, and that gasoline can be replaced by some other energy storage medium... but it seems to me that the onus is still on replacing gasoline and other fossil fuels, not burning whatever waste we can find and calling ourselves carbon nuetral-by-proxy.
That, and the removal of potentially massive ammounts of manure from our agricultural system doesn't sound like a sound investment in a sustainable agriculture either. But that's a consideration further down the path of long-term sustainability, and a fairly minor one in the current scope.
I've been planning an opengl project with a GUI in it for image editing, using Python for scripting. Would it be possible/plausible to render from from a GUI toolkit like wxPython into a texture to load into opengl, so that the window could be part of a world, rather than enclosing an OpenGL widget into a wxWidgets/wxPython framework?
To be clear, this is NOT a ruling against censorship in any way. This is a ruling that one cannot use the motives of private censorship to in any way go against copyright laws. They'll have to sell their 'services' to the (mostly) corporate owners of the rights to works, rather than directly to customers or retailers.
A fairly appropriate ruling, in the context. But this does mean that when a more automatic method of censorship comes around, then new forms of censorship shouldn't face these same legal barriers. They just have to be blind to which naughty bits and sounds they're covering up, fresh each time, so they're not producing a 'derrivative work' in a saleable form.
Announcer: Kyle MacDonald - come on down! You've been selected to be the latest contestant on...
Audience: Gimmicky Human Interest Story! [Wild Applause]
Announcer: That's right! You've managed to amuse us with your heartwarming tale of despiration. You managed to stumble into a kindly corporate sponsor for your story of using ebay, and gotten that radio station to softball you into a whole lot of pain advertisement! And now, latching onto the story, everyone and their brother are selling the hype to eachother that a paper clip can buy a house!
Audience: Paper clip! Paper clip! [Wild Applause]
Announcer: It's a great day for you, and a wonderful day to sell shiney new hopes in pretty packaging! That's right folks - the system works - you too can become mega-rich if you're just clever enough to get a radio station to give you prizes!
If the big fears come to pass on this, perhaps an anonymous development model could be made using currently-developing P2P encryption models. Regardless of if software patents are a political problem that may or not be fixed in the long run - the idea that a good person CAN ethically have need to become anonymous in their development of software may change the debate. Right now, the public concept of anonymous development is left to virus developers and other black-hat-types - it would be interesting if your child's educational software, or in this case model railroad software had to be developed behind the veil of secrecy.
As a voice actor, what level of input do you prefer when chosing between jobs? Do you prefer to fully understand the universe you project a character into with as much information as your clients can provide, or do you prefer to focus on just what you need to know?
How much of a role do you like to play in shaping the worlds you play a part in?
Similarly, what level of informational feedback do you think is appropriate from producers?
The goal of this book should NOT be interpreted as "how to make money with indie games", as the unmentioned secret way to make money with indie games is actually to write and sell books on marketing indie games.
That said, I do find the book's topic interesting, and I think I will gladly reward the author economically for his efforts.
Our economic lives could virtually always be exploited in countless ways if we were willing to do so. Not everyone wants to live their lives in a way to allow them to exploit every "opportunity" that can be imagined. Not everyone really wants to truly maximize the economic value of their lives either. If someone wants to just have a business of their choice without pinching all "opportunities" to fill eyeballs with the paid messages of others, I hardly consider that a tragedy, no matter what kinds of dividends it could pay to the "greater economy". Nor do I consider it a failing of the economic system that competition doesn't force him to do so. I personally would consider that more of a rare victory for the the role of humanity in our economic system - a trend I hope continues at a stronger pace than has been the case for the past few decades in the US.
Sometimes, just creating a simple system of mutual benefit, and leaving it simple, is of much greater value than the usual constant gamesmanship of economically preditary behavior. Even in the middle of a ruthlessly free market.
Certainly, sections will give way over time if left alone. I thought the very idea of starting a space elevator was first to get a small number of strands, from which more could be threaded up, using existing threads, until you had an appropriate ribbon.
Can the ribbon be built in a way that the failure of a set of threads doesn't automatically bring greater burden onto nearby threads, but instead allows for the failure to be detected and compensated for, perhaps with a second ribbon or else have the payload parachute back downward with minimal guidance by the ribbon?
Not that America isn't a superb nation (ignoring the current administration), but I get a bad taste in my mouth about the idea of any nation having the capacity to control another *on the cheap* over the long term on a military basis.
Still, this can be seen as more of a failed experiment than a conclusive result. When the tools are available, and less humanity necissary for the military control of a population... well, tyranny can then become something greater than a Thomas Paine pamphlet can help fight anymore.
The automated undermining of freedoms is a scary concept.
When the judicial system is being asked by an agency to not permit itself to look into a subject, you know there is something VERY wrong with this government's actions.
Even if this were really the most effective way of rooting out terrorist actions, the fact that they seem to feel they have to shield themselves from judicial inquiry breaks the accountability of such a system. Are judges and juries too dangerous for our security network now? Are constitutional protections now too restrictive for our intellgence needs?
Do we really need an unnacountable set of parasites feeding on our basic rights in order to protect us from an invisible set of enemies now? If so, does the debate about if we need these things need to be outside public consideration?
I'm certainly no libertarian - and I hate the way that information about myself and my choices is being traded and used in the marketplace... but this seems like an unfunded mandate by way of criminalizing inaction after the fact. Seems more like a tool so that the government can punish people who embarass them after the fact, rather than an active step to secure this information.
If they want to secure this information, either make it all illegal to use and hold in insecure ways (like on a networked computer), or fund a method of secure use of this information. Punishing the innevitable breach of security in the marketplace after the fact won't change the fact that such breaches are innevitable, and I very much doubt such punishments will improve this particular marketplace.
Yes - but as I implied a little in my earlier post, just as important as teaching the reasoning skills to be skeptical of claims, it's also very important to not hold such skepticism to an absurd degree, or to selectively hold skepticism for only certain things. Most things in life will just be unknown - and we all have a very limited opportunity in life to explore all the claims we are surrounded by.
Making a school class out of skepticism could be a delicate job. Designing a test that could be fairly applied to students without unfairly targetting subjects that are precious to people could be (politically) difficult. Still, it's a task well worth doing.
The ability to weigh skepticism rationally, to be able to accept not knowing things can be very tough skills to master. But I think most people would agree we'd be a lot better off if the basics of skepticism were a bigger part of public consideration.
The danger of such a class would be that it were poorly presented, most students end up concluding that they should just be skeptical about what they like to feel is wrong. That's how a scam artist uses the common sense ideas of skepticism. It's also how we fool ourselves into believing things we wanted to believe for irrational reasons. Other students may feel that they are being lead into mental paralysis by these endless considerations, and conclude effectively the same thing.
Still, I think such a class would be worth the potential for such mistakes. Even if all it does is make the "you're being skeptical" line in a discussion less of an insult and more of a legitimate consideration of unfair bias for people, it would be worth it.
Just ask James Randi - he's been keeping track of dubious scams and claims for decades. Just read through a few of his newsletters if you ever want to be amazed at the things people will pretend they can do for money, power, or just plain delusion.
In my oppinion, healthy skepticism is something that should be taught to every school child as part of a minimal education. Knowing how to be properly, rationally skeptical is a very important skill - being either unskeptical, or holding irrational skepticism based on what you want to feel is as much a disability as not being able to read or do math. The scientific method helps if it is introduced comprehensively - but there's a LOT of scientists with doctorates that will be fooled by some of the simplest scams, then convince themselves they couldn't be fooled. Healthy skepticism is both knowing that you can be wrong, but you being wrong doesn't make someone else's extrordinary claims correct, even if it's an innocent mistake for all involved.
Especially disturbing are the constant resurgance of medical scams. People willing to try anything can be put through real hell by people willing to offer them an option that no one else will provide. The family of the dead rarely know to put any blame on a false cure, and the living often mistakenly promote as a miracle whatever was offered, so these scams can erupt almost anywhere. Add in scam artists using religion, blaming the dying for their own failed cure, and the unfounded skepticism of scientific medicine, and you can see how nasty these situations can be.
I wonder if this system catches redirects and spoof sources. If it does, would it be possible to either spoof a known bad source, or redirect them to a known bad source?
It'd be really annoying if someone calls me during dinner, I'm short with them on their sales technique, start to mention putting me on a do-not-call list, and suddenly I'm talking to someone with an unknown language. I hang up, and the phone rings again - it's the same unkown language. Two days later, it happens again. Suddenly in this scenario, I'm worried about picking up the phone.
Opens up the door to scams, pranks, blackmail, etc. Not to mention a glut of demands for investigations into the legal, security and enforcement systems. Even without the capability to redirect/spoof, the public misunderstandings about such a system will lead to a lot of paranoia and chaos if people.
A horrible change for our nation and the actual security of the nation. Default survailance should not be the role of the government, unless there really is a default state of emergency existing beforehand, and never in civilian situations.
My parents own a pet store, and move a pair of African Grey Parrots between work and home every day, along with two dogs. The birds not only recognize their own names, but they appropriatly name the dogs when they encounter them. In addition, they can tell them to sit by name and even will give the dogs bits of food in exchange for treats - they appear to do this appropriatly when they want to either cause mischief or gain obedience from the dogs when the dogs are frightening them. The birds also use eachother's names appropriatly - and at the pet store seem to know the difference between these specific dogs and the other similar dogs that they encounter.
Intelligence and symbol identification/use definitely seems to me to be a general phenomenon larger than mammalian life.
It would be interesting to repeat similar experiments with intelligent species of wild birds to see if they generate unique sound identification that they may use to identify third-"persons" non-visually in some way. Most likely birds would use such ability to immitate eachother for social manipulation - but the conclusions of the use of such symbolic proto-language would still be meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, accoring to Dawkins, sermon generators would be explicit tools for the carrying of a viral message.
I think the program may be working properly as designed.
Ryan Fenton
If a device is made to either redirect light, or detect light in the environment, absorb it and then project light to match it, then there will be some delay necissary in the process, because you can't send out information before you observe it.
Don't know how significant it would be, but that could result in a slight disjointed projection of the area behind you if you were made 'invisible' with such a device, most observable when one moves.
Thus, the more apt movie reference would be Predator.
Ryan Fenton
How is trying to block access to the 'social' internet as part of law NOT in very important ways a roadblock to free speech? If I add a Wiki or a chat function to a website, is it then a danger to children because anyone can access the site, and communicate freely to children using that tool?
That's a default system of banning speech in public, on a scale far worse than any indecency bill. It's akin to banning phone calls to private residences on public phones, in order to protect children from free communication.
What kind of idiotic message does this send to children anyway? The majority of our legislatures in the house seem to think that free communication is too dangerous a thing for children to do now. "Don't talk with strangers" is perhaps a way to get children to think defensively about the messages they get... but speaking with strangers is the only way to learn about the world outside your own little bubble. Sure - the boogey man of the Internet child predator has some reality to it, but the Internet is still one of the safest place for children to learn about the opinions of the rest of humanity outside their small environment. Banning such access in public libraries is telling children that they can't be trusted with even the possibility of such communication. I aknowledge that children can't be trusted with all the rights of adults, but our public infrastructure seems to be producing another generation of sheltered dropouts, each less qualified to enter college than the last.
This is an immoral bill, in my mind, and one I hope is found unconstitutional.
Ryan Fenton
Experience. The hidden result of all reactions, real or imagined - observable experience.
Regardles of what gods may exist, what greater reality may exist, or whatnot, the purpose to everything can be met with a system that pursues experience in all it's variety. If we are all that is, the eternal quest for experience will be it's own purpose. Endless experience would fulful all purposes.
The trick is setting up a system of gathering experience that doesn't meet with stagnation. Stagnation can come in many forms - death/ceasation, returning to exactly the same state as some past point without being aware of it(looping), or any path that will inevitably lead to those states. Etropy is an obvious block towards seeking experience as an ultimate goal - but if totally unavoidable, then the ultimate goal would be maximizing exploration with the resources available.
Ryan Fenton
I hope an entity like Microsoft doesn't end up buying rights to too much of OpenGL, and thus lock it up for years. It's a superb cross-platform language for development... pretty much all there is for high-end games or similar real-time rendering when you want to develop something open source. It would pretty much suck if no further standards could safely rely on a base of OpenGL/GLSL/GL* to attract an audience and technology base in the future. DirectX isn't bad on windows... but I'd hate for that to be all there is for upcoming years.
Still... perhaps a something new from the ashes could form a more lasting standard that's better than going through major-company approval process of the OpenGL ARB. Even if DirectX continues to be the basis of future graphics card development, new open-source standards can use the same hardware hooks for better ends. I can't imagine that the graphics card manufacturers wouldn't be interested in helping a new standard form if enough of the developer community had a hunger for newer cross-platform 3d graphics library. GLSL is very nice - but perhaps a better set of standard could be developed in conjunction with future hardware in mind.
Ryan Fenton (Who has been reading through the GLSL Orange book for the past few weeks)
That makes me wonder... how will the sensor determine the bounds of the TV that the remote is aiming at? Will it look up somehow to see where light is emiting from the TV somehow? Or will there be general assumptions about the size and aspect ratio of the screen?
Perhaps there will be a calibration on setting the system up... but they have to expect either the TV or the sensor to be moved occasionally. Any manual calibration can be expected to suffer from accuracy problems, I'd expect - especially if game makers somehow assume a screen aspect ratio when making their games. Games with relativistic controls wouldn't be so bad... but anything with precision involved would start to feel sloppy when anything changed.
I hope the relationship between screen and controller are more dynamic and automatic than just sensing the remote. Regardless, I imagine I can quickly get used to whatever it is, and the game makers will compensate as needed - I'd just like it to be as close to a precise 3-d mouse as possible without having to wave the controller too out of proportion to the actual screen.
Ryan Fenton
...if it takes 10 calories of gasoline to make one calorie of crop, and that food is used to feed cows, which use more gasoline, this doesn't sound like too much of a sustainable bit of agriculture.
Of course, that gasoline would be used anyway in the production of these crops, milk, meat and byproducts, and that gasoline can be replaced by some other energy storage medium... but it seems to me that the onus is still on replacing gasoline and other fossil fuels, not burning whatever waste we can find and calling ourselves carbon nuetral-by-proxy.
That, and the removal of potentially massive ammounts of manure from our agricultural system doesn't sound like a sound investment in a sustainable agriculture either. But that's a consideration further down the path of long-term sustainability, and a fairly minor one in the current scope.
Ryan Fenton
I've been planning an opengl project with a GUI in it for image editing, using Python for scripting. Would it be possible/plausible to render from from a GUI toolkit like wxPython into a texture to load into opengl, so that the window could be part of a world, rather than enclosing an OpenGL widget into a wxWidgets/wxPython framework?
Ryan Fenton
To be clear, this is NOT a ruling against censorship in any way. This is a ruling that one cannot use the motives of private censorship to in any way go against copyright laws. They'll have to sell their 'services' to the (mostly) corporate owners of the rights to works, rather than directly to customers or retailers.
A fairly appropriate ruling, in the context. But this does mean that when a more automatic method of censorship comes around, then new forms of censorship shouldn't face these same legal barriers. They just have to be blind to which naughty bits and sounds they're covering up, fresh each time, so they're not producing a 'derrivative work' in a saleable form.
Ryan Fenton
Announcer: Kyle MacDonald - come on down! You've been selected to be the latest contestant on...
Audience: Gimmicky Human Interest Story! [Wild Applause]
Announcer: That's right! You've managed to amuse us with your heartwarming tale of despiration. You managed to stumble into a kindly corporate sponsor for your story of using ebay, and gotten that radio station to softball you into a whole lot of pain advertisement! And now, latching onto the story, everyone and their brother are selling the hype to eachother that a paper clip can buy a house!
Audience: Paper clip! Paper clip! [Wild Applause]
Announcer: It's a great day for you, and a wonderful day to sell shiney new hopes in pretty packaging! That's right folks - the system works - you too can become mega-rich if you're just clever enough to get a radio station to give you prizes!
Audience: Rich! Rich! Rich! [Wild Applause]
If the big fears come to pass on this, perhaps an anonymous development model could be made using currently-developing P2P encryption models. Regardless of if software patents are a political problem that may or not be fixed in the long run - the idea that a good person CAN ethically have need to become anonymous in their development of software may change the debate. Right now, the public concept of anonymous development is left to virus developers and other black-hat-types - it would be interesting if your child's educational software, or in this case model railroad software had to be developed behind the veil of secrecy.
Ryan Fenton
As a voice actor, what level of input do you prefer when chosing between jobs? Do you prefer to fully understand the universe you project a character into with as much information as your clients can provide, or do you prefer to focus on just what you need to know?
How much of a role do you like to play in shaping the worlds you play a part in?
Similarly, what level of informational feedback do you think is appropriate from producers?
Ryan Fenton
They've been VERY naughty this year. Now they must be trying to make up before Xmas.
Ryan Fenton
Would it have to change the flow by measuring it? How much by pure quantum "observation" effects?
As a non-phyisics grad (Computer science), I'm wondering.
Ryan Fenton
The goal of this book should NOT be interpreted as "how to make money with indie games", as the unmentioned secret way to make money with indie games is actually to write and sell books on marketing indie games.
That said, I do find the book's topic interesting, and I think I will gladly reward the author economically for his efforts.
Ryan Fenton
Our economic lives could virtually always be exploited in countless ways if we were willing to do so. Not everyone wants to live their lives in a way to allow them to exploit every "opportunity" that can be imagined. Not everyone really wants to truly maximize the economic value of their lives either. If someone wants to just have a business of their choice without pinching all "opportunities" to fill eyeballs with the paid messages of others, I hardly consider that a tragedy, no matter what kinds of dividends it could pay to the "greater economy". Nor do I consider it a failing of the economic system that competition doesn't force him to do so. I personally would consider that more of a rare victory for the the role of humanity in our economic system - a trend I hope continues at a stronger pace than has been the case for the past few decades in the US.
Sometimes, just creating a simple system of mutual benefit, and leaving it simple, is of much greater value than the usual constant gamesmanship of economically preditary behavior. Even in the middle of a ruthlessly free market.
Ryan Fenton
Check out his short-lived TV series:
The Weird Al Show DVD
It's surprisingly good, if you check out the clips available on youtube.
Oh, and yeah, can't forget one of the most underrated, quotable comedy movies of all time: UHF.
Ryan Fenton
Certainly, sections will give way over time if left alone. I thought the very idea of starting a space elevator was first to get a small number of strands, from which more could be threaded up, using existing threads, until you had an appropriate ribbon.
Can the ribbon be built in a way that the failure of a set of threads doesn't automatically bring greater burden onto nearby threads, but instead allows for the failure to be detected and compensated for, perhaps with a second ribbon or else have the payload parachute back downward with minimal guidance by the ribbon?
Just the random guesses of a layman.
Not that America isn't a superb nation (ignoring the current administration), but I get a bad taste in my mouth about the idea of any nation having the capacity to control another *on the cheap* over the long term on a military basis.
Still, this can be seen as more of a failed experiment than a conclusive result. When the tools are available, and less humanity necissary for the military control of a population... well, tyranny can then become something greater than a Thomas Paine pamphlet can help fight anymore.
The automated undermining of freedoms is a scary concept.
Ryan Fenton
When the judicial system is being asked by an agency to not permit itself to look into a subject, you know there is something VERY wrong with this government's actions.
Even if this were really the most effective way of rooting out terrorist actions, the fact that they seem to feel they have to shield themselves from judicial inquiry breaks the accountability of such a system. Are judges and juries too dangerous for our security network now? Are constitutional protections now too restrictive for our intellgence needs?
Do we really need an unnacountable set of parasites feeding on our basic rights in order to protect us from an invisible set of enemies now? If so, does the debate about if we need these things need to be outside public consideration?
I'm certainly no libertarian - and I hate the way that information about myself and my choices is being traded and used in the marketplace... but this seems like an unfunded mandate by way of criminalizing inaction after the fact. Seems more like a tool so that the government can punish people who embarass them after the fact, rather than an active step to secure this information.
If they want to secure this information, either make it all illegal to use and hold in insecure ways (like on a networked computer), or fund a method of secure use of this information. Punishing the innevitable breach of security in the marketplace after the fact won't change the fact that such breaches are innevitable, and I very much doubt such punishments will improve this particular marketplace.
Ryan Fenton
Yes - but as I implied a little in my earlier post, just as important as teaching the reasoning skills to be skeptical of claims, it's also very important to not hold such skepticism to an absurd degree, or to selectively hold skepticism for only certain things. Most things in life will just be unknown - and we all have a very limited opportunity in life to explore all the claims we are surrounded by.
Making a school class out of skepticism could be a delicate job. Designing a test that could be fairly applied to students without unfairly targetting subjects that are precious to people could be (politically) difficult. Still, it's a task well worth doing.
The ability to weigh skepticism rationally, to be able to accept not knowing things can be very tough skills to master. But I think most people would agree we'd be a lot better off if the basics of skepticism were a bigger part of public consideration.
The danger of such a class would be that it were poorly presented, most students end up concluding that they should just be skeptical about what they like to feel is wrong. That's how a scam artist uses the common sense ideas of skepticism. It's also how we fool ourselves into believing things we wanted to believe for irrational reasons. Other students may feel that they are being lead into mental paralysis by these endless considerations, and conclude effectively the same thing.
Still, I think such a class would be worth the potential for such mistakes. Even if all it does is make the "you're being skeptical" line in a discussion less of an insult and more of a legitimate consideration of unfair bias for people, it would be worth it.
Ryan Fenton
Just ask James Randi - he's been keeping track of dubious scams and claims for decades. Just read through a few of his newsletters if you ever want to be amazed at the things people will pretend they can do for money, power, or just plain delusion.
In my oppinion, healthy skepticism is something that should be taught to every school child as part of a minimal education. Knowing how to be properly, rationally skeptical is a very important skill - being either unskeptical, or holding irrational skepticism based on what you want to feel is as much a disability as not being able to read or do math. The scientific method helps if it is introduced comprehensively - but there's a LOT of scientists with doctorates that will be fooled by some of the simplest scams, then convince themselves they couldn't be fooled. Healthy skepticism is both knowing that you can be wrong, but you being wrong doesn't make someone else's extrordinary claims correct, even if it's an innocent mistake for all involved.
Especially disturbing are the constant resurgance of medical scams. People willing to try anything can be put through real hell by people willing to offer them an option that no one else will provide. The family of the dead rarely know to put any blame on a false cure, and the living often mistakenly promote as a miracle whatever was offered, so these scams can erupt almost anywhere. Add in scam artists using religion, blaming the dying for their own failed cure, and the unfounded skepticism of scientific medicine, and you can see how nasty these situations can be.
Ryan Fenton
I wonder if this system catches redirects and spoof sources. If it does, would it be possible to either spoof a known bad source, or redirect them to a known bad source?
It'd be really annoying if someone calls me during dinner, I'm short with them on their sales technique, start to mention putting me on a do-not-call list, and suddenly I'm talking to someone with an unknown language. I hang up, and the phone rings again - it's the same unkown language. Two days later, it happens again. Suddenly in this scenario, I'm worried about picking up the phone.
Opens up the door to scams, pranks, blackmail, etc. Not to mention a glut of demands for investigations into the legal, security and enforcement systems. Even without the capability to redirect/spoof, the public misunderstandings about such a system will lead to a lot of paranoia and chaos if people.
A horrible change for our nation and the actual security of the nation. Default survailance should not be the role of the government, unless there really is a default state of emergency existing beforehand, and never in civilian situations.
Ryan Fenton
My parents own a pet store, and move a pair of African Grey Parrots between work and home every day, along with two dogs. The birds not only recognize their own names, but they appropriatly name the dogs when they encounter them. In addition, they can tell them to sit by name and even will give the dogs bits of food in exchange for treats - they appear to do this appropriatly when they want to either cause mischief or gain obedience from the dogs when the dogs are frightening them. The birds also use eachother's names appropriatly - and at the pet store seem to know the difference between these specific dogs and the other similar dogs that they encounter.
Intelligence and symbol identification/use definitely seems to me to be a general phenomenon larger than mammalian life.
It would be interesting to repeat similar experiments with intelligent species of wild birds to see if they generate unique sound identification that they may use to identify third-"persons" non-visually in some way. Most likely birds would use such ability to immitate eachother for social manipulation - but the conclusions of the use of such symbolic proto-language would still be meaningful.
Ryan Fenton