I'm a vegetarian, and yet I myself am still entirely composed of meat. Some might call that a paradox, but I call it mother nature's ability to tell us we don't need to eat meat to get by in life.
How can you stand the torture? all those ears of corn screaming as they are ripped off their stalks.
Animals have souls. Plants don't. Do I really have to explain this?
FUR- we evolved, they didn't. Sucks to be them.
The same argument was made by the Robber Barons of the 19th century: "We got rich; they didn't; sucks to be them." Thank heavens FDR came along and set things straight: that argument has been tried; it's failed before; you cannot rationally maintain it still today.
From the article:
Rush Robinett at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque came up with the idea when watching the haphazard antics of grasshoppers. "I noticed they jump around in a random fashion, hit the ground in an arbitrary orientation, right themselves and then jump again," he says. I love it when scientists make use of clever observations of their what already exists in nature and use the results to create better technology and ultimately better science. But what I can't approve of is killing innocent animals to achieve that end. And when they're not busy cutting them up, they're keeping them in captivity and depriving them of all worthwhile life they may have lived or could have lived, and for whose benefit? The animal's? No, ours, the humans'.
Most people don't worry about it too much, because frankly, most people are hypocrites -- if they weren't, then they'd be vegetarians like me. We don't need to kill animals to eat, and we don't need to kill them to further the pursuits of science. Anything that could be accomplished by killing them can be accomplished by observing them in the wild. Let them live, wild and free.
Rush Robinett at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque came up with the idea when watching the haphazard antics of grasshoppers. "I noticed they jump around in a random fashion, hit the ground in an arbitrary orientation, right themselves and then jump again," he says.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who bothers to read the articles anymore.
They're not worried about making careful precision measurements, as you'd know if you read the article:
Robinett realised that this somewhat chaotic approach to navigation was a very cheap and effective way of getting about, compared to the complicated planning that most robots need to move.
"We're just very used to wheels and complete control."
It's for rapidly getting around the planet and covering as much area as possible, figuring out where the really interesting parts are, and then perhaps later sending back a precision probe for more careful analysis.
And then they came for the Holocaust quotes, and there was none left to speak, because they'd all been made cliche by squandering them on irrelevent topics grossly out of proportion to the horror and insight of the original.
Indeed, why fight over semantics?
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
Of course, like most arguments, this one comes down to semantics.
People said the same thing about atomic weapons when they were developed, and where did that big scare lead us?: no where. It's just not efficient enough. We have all these advanced ways of killing people today, and you know what the single greatest means of getting it done is?: fire. Not even bullets; it's fire.
For a time several centuries ago, it was fashionable for wives to "murder" their husbands by poisoning -- and you think women's lib is a recent innovation! Poisons do everything you describe. Anyone with an umbrella tipped with ricin can "sneak up on you, slip into your bloodstream, and hack your cells to death", as the umbrella assasins of the 19th century did in England. But why go to all that trouble, when you can just set a few fires and kill people that way? It's easy enough to target select racial or national groups if that's what you're doing; do your arson in their neighborhoods. And it's dirt cheap.
Whatever your personal views, we all can agree on one thing: nanotechnology is going to do to human civilization what the invention of the steam engine and limited liability corporation did in previous centuries. That's why it's important for us to get the perspectives of all areas of academia and intellectual disciplines and why I'm happy that sociologists like Bryan Bruns are starting to examine nanotech and its implications and methods: are we doing what we should? Are we using the best methods available? What social and structural changes ought to be made?
Sure, the scientists developing nanotech are qualified to make the technical decisions necessary to achieve their goals: building better technology -- it's what they do, and it's what they get paid for. But as we've learned from the atomic revolution of the mid 20th century, we can't leave these important decisions to scientists alone. They may not intend to produce monsters, but their focus on development without regard to consequences makes them often ill-suited to decide how to go about doing so. It's why managers and ethics boards exist, and it's good to see some fresh academic blood here.
NSI is simultaneously the company that assigns domain names and enforces their assignment, answering to no one and overseen by no one.
But ask yourself, what would be gained by a contrary holding? Is the NSI supposed to take money out of one pocket and put it into another pocket, thereby satisfying the principle of "paying" for a domain name (as distinguished from "squatting")? Make sure you read to the bottom of the article: nothing in NSI's agreement with ICANN precludes this behavior, as long as it isn't extreme enough to qualify as "warehousing", which clearly isn't the case here.
Squatting is bad in principle, but it's a necessary reality of any centralized system of domain-name assignment, which time and experience have shown is the only practical way of accomplishing this necessary service. The only alternative is bigger government and more Federal oversight of the process through the FTC and other administrative bodies, something I have no real fears of, but which lots of the rest of you seem to worry about.
If there comes a day when a machine, without human intervention beyond its initial programming, creates works which are accepted as art, then perhaps you'll have reason to worry.
That's why I'm wary today. Should we wait until biogenetics and genetic engineering already allow us to commit the horrors of science-fiction fame before we think to form ethics panels? Shouldn't we make use of prudent fore-sight?
I admit I'm a bit old fashioned when it comes to art. When I see or listen to a work of art, I want to feel the artist coming through. I want to catch a glimpse of his or her soul. Computers are great, sure; after all, I make my living working with them, and they're a great source of recreation. But for art? Where's the soul? So many of the greatest works of art are focused on depicting the soul-less nature of machines and our fears as humans of one day becoming like them. It makes me uneasy to think that one day, the machines will not only replace us, but also our art. It's the defining quality of humanity -- we, creatures who make analogy and represent our analogies in external form. It makes me uneasy.
This is a topological problem. The rules of topology allow you to resize and reorient lines, surfaces, and volumes, as long as you don't introduce any new holes or break any connections. Just think of it as "stretching" rather than "changing lengths". If you've ever tugged on your shoelaces to get them untied, then you know what I'm talking about.
I've held many jobs, but I will never work for a company where I have to be on call. No incremental salary compensates for the lost family time and lost personal time. I work for a living, yes, but I'm doing precisely that: working for a living, not working as my life. Living comes afterwards, at the end of the day, when I can go home and see the smiling faces of my loved ones and feel content about my small place in the universe.
It's like with leasing a home: I own my house because it's important enough to me that I want full control of it. It's the same with one's occupation: I don't want to lease my life; I want it to be my own life, and I don't want to have to answer to my boss unexpectedly at all hours of the day and night. It pains me to see so many people of my generation taking up the yoke of servile labor our grandparents and great grandparents fought so hard to unload. eighty-hour work weeks? Previous generations fought tooth and nail to get a ten-hour workday, and we undo their efforts in one fell swoop.
Re:Throw-away accounts won't save you
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
So you're advocating security-through-obscurity, then? That's certainly contrary to prevailing slashdot wisdom.
People need the government's help here
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 2
Just look at Canada, for example. There, two men are being prosecuted for obscenity because they've used computers to create realistic snuff films portraying fabricated and fictitious violence (not that normal porn isn't violent enough as it is). Without government intervention to declare these films false and criminal, people might think them real and might act upon the impulses generated by viewing them.
It's the same with anonymous speech. You may pretend you understand what is credible and what is not, and you may even be right. But it's a natural part of human nature to assess anonymous speech with some value when ranking memes. Only through law can we save people from themselves and reestablish which memes have value and which are credible; law is a pillar of legitimacy and credibility in an uncertain world.
Throw-away accounts won't save you
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 2
Throw-away accounts leave electronic paper-trails as to how you created them (which email addresses you had the registration info sent to, going backwards in time to a primordial address traceable to you). Each step along that trail can be subpoenaed, which is what's being discussed here.
Then it's good enough for me. Does the perl commnity have any plans to get a ringing endorsement from such a public opensource figure? I mean, besides Larry Wall, of course. We geeks may make these decisions on their technical merit, but it really helps the suits if a celebrity pitches it to them.
Look, you had a pretty good childhood, I bet. But when you were selling vegetables by the side of the road from your grandfather's garden, others were being raped by their fathers. Under parental-consent laws, the father who rapes his daughter can deny her the ability to end her pregnancy. (Your so-called "blessing" of childbearing is in fact a death sentence for a disproportionate number of young women, whose bodies are not yet capable of passing a foreign creature through their small pelvises.) Not only is she compelled to live in her master's house, but she must serve as his concubine. And don't ask where her mother is in this: she's cowering in fear from the last time he knocked a tooth out when she "sassily" spoke up. Just because it's not your own experience doesn't make it not others'.
The government's willingness to put up with anonymity stops even faster when it means lost tax-revenue -- tax systems are the single greatest form of census in the world, surpassing even the constitutionally mandated Census in accuracy. If we had a per-comment surcharge, then anonymity would die even faster.
Thanks, Michael, for not posting this on the main page. Otherwise, all the pretty pictures would be slashdotted.
One last defense of my gender on /.
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 3
I've gotten sick of defending myself and my gender time and time again, but I'll do so one last time. Just because most people on slashdot is male doesn't make me male, just as having most people on slashdot be of a certain race or nationality or religion doesn't assure that any single individual shares those characteristics. But I can cope, since in the greater scheme of things, it's no big deal that a few ACs continue to have their doubts.
There is a bigger problem, though. Go ahead and look at my previous comments. Nearly every one of them has one or five AC replies to the effect of "suck my dick" or "I want to fuck you in the ass". Throughout history, female authors have been denied recognition for their work, because it was commonly assumed that women were incapable of creating what they created. And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot. For all I know, you yourself are one of those same ACs.
Ask yourself what you gain by contributing to this climate of fear and hate. Ask yourself that question when you scurry off for your nightly porn fix. Ask yourself that question when you insult and harass people on slashdot.
I'm talking about a certain version of the Gaia hypothesis. Here, let me explain:
Imagine you're walking down a dark corridor, with no windows to look at and no means of determining how far you've come or how far you have yet to go. Periodically, a blinding flash fills the corridor, and you occasionally have the luck and the dexterity to cover your eyes when you do so. At other times, you fail, and the flash illuminates the blood vessels in your retinas, reflecting off the inside of your eyes and perceived by you as so many wriggling worms.
In your arrogance as a sentient human, you may interpret your fortune in avoiding pain as the sign that you possess the powers and privileges of a deity, and that you have dominion over those worms. In reality, both they and your divinity exist only in your mind.
It's a metaphor for our (human) existence on earth. Without us, no one would exist to see the light or the worms; for the former would fall on no one's eyes and the latter would not be imagined. We owe it to the corridor (earth) and the worms (morality) to walk through that corridor. Even if it is dark and we are without sunglasses.
Not the same incentives
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 4
Cable companies contribute to C-SPAN because they fear congressional legislation and they want to appear like nice citizens to Congress. Where's the incentive with Usenet? In fact, ISPs would be grateful if Usenet died for all sorts of reasons:
there'd be one fewer source of headaches for them. Usenet contributes to the perpetuation of spam, and it's the ISPs' majordomos that have to clean up when their users get led astray.
Many ISPs are trying their best to set up their own proprietary bulletin boards accessible through their own channels. Usenet is an unnecessary source of competition
Usenet is a big gaping sucking legal wound waiting to happen, what with all the copyright infringements, obscenity, and violations of the DMCA being tossed around. Any prudent ISP wary of tort suits should be wary of affiliating itself with such an anarchic beast.
Usenet still, above all, requires enormous resources to maintain. Especially binary groups.
In general, there has been a move away from Usenet and towards other fertile discussion forums within the last four years. I expect this trend to continue well into the next five years. Today, Usenet is nothing like what it was ten years ago. It'll be even less so, tomorrow.
Deja should respect privacy laws like toysmart did
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 1
When we all posted to usenet, it was under the implicit contract that our personal information wouldn't be bought and sold like so much cattle when the parent company was itself sold. Will Deja respect those promises now that they are under the knife? I'm personally surprised slashdot isn't raising a bigger stink about this; they sure did when toysmart was slapped by the FTC for similar behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a vegetarian, and yet I myself am still entirely composed of meat. Some might call that a paradox, but I call it mother nature's ability to tell us we don't need to eat meat to get by in life.
How can you stand the torture? all those ears of corn screaming as they are ripped off their stalks.
Animals have souls. Plants don't. Do I really have to explain this?
FUR- we evolved, they didn't. Sucks to be them.
The same argument was made by the Robber Barons of the 19th century: "We got rich; they didn't; sucks to be them." Thank heavens FDR came along and set things straight: that argument has been tried; it's failed before; you cannot rationally maintain it still today.
From the article:
Rush Robinett at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque came up with the idea when watching the haphazard antics of grasshoppers. "I noticed they jump around in a random fashion, hit the ground in an arbitrary orientation, right themselves and then jump again," he says.
I love it when scientists make use of clever observations of their what already exists in nature and use the results to create better technology and ultimately better science. But what I can't approve of is killing innocent animals to achieve that end. And when they're not busy cutting them up, they're keeping them in captivity and depriving them of all worthwhile life they may have lived or could have lived, and for whose benefit? The animal's? No, ours, the humans'.
Most people don't worry about it too much, because frankly, most people are hypocrites -- if they weren't, then they'd be vegetarians like me. We don't need to kill animals to eat, and we don't need to kill them to further the pursuits of science. Anything that could be accomplished by killing them can be accomplished by observing them in the wild. Let them live, wild and free.
From the article:
Rush Robinett at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque came up with the idea when watching the haphazard antics of grasshoppers. "I noticed they jump around in a random fashion, hit the ground in an arbitrary orientation, right themselves and then jump again," he says.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who bothers to read the articles anymore.
They're not worried about making careful precision measurements, as you'd know if you read the article:
Robinett realised that this somewhat chaotic approach to navigation was a very cheap and effective way of getting about, compared to the complicated planning that most robots need to move.
"We're just very used to wheels and complete control."
It's for rapidly getting around the planet and covering as much area as possible, figuring out where the really interesting parts are, and then perhaps later sending back a precision probe for more careful analysis.
And then they came for the Holocaust quotes, and there was none left to speak, because they'd all been made cliche by squandering them on irrelevent topics grossly out of proportion to the horror and insight of the original.
Of course, like most arguments, this one comes down to semantics.
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People said the same thing about atomic weapons when they were developed, and where did that big scare lead us?: no where. It's just not efficient enough. We have all these advanced ways of killing people today, and you know what the single greatest means of getting it done is?: fire. Not even bullets; it's fire.
For a time several centuries ago, it was fashionable for wives to "murder" their husbands by poisoning -- and you think women's lib is a recent innovation! Poisons do everything you describe. Anyone with an umbrella tipped with ricin can "sneak up on you, slip into your bloodstream, and hack your cells to death", as the umbrella assasins of the 19th century did in England. But why go to all that trouble, when you can just set a few fires and kill people that way? It's easy enough to target select racial or national groups if that's what you're doing; do your arson in their neighborhoods. And it's dirt cheap.
Whatever your personal views, we all can agree on one thing: nanotechnology is going to do to human civilization what the invention of the steam engine and limited liability corporation did in previous centuries. That's why it's important for us to get the perspectives of all areas of academia and intellectual disciplines and why I'm happy that sociologists like Bryan Bruns are starting to examine nanotech and its implications and methods: are we doing what we should? Are we using the best methods available? What social and structural changes ought to be made?
Sure, the scientists developing nanotech are qualified to make the technical decisions necessary to achieve their goals: building better technology -- it's what they do, and it's what they get paid for. But as we've learned from the atomic revolution of the mid 20th century, we can't leave these important decisions to scientists alone. They may not intend to produce monsters, but their focus on development without regard to consequences makes them often ill-suited to decide how to go about doing so. It's why managers and ethics boards exist, and it's good to see some fresh academic blood here.
NSI is simultaneously the company that assigns domain names and enforces their assignment, answering to no one and overseen by no one.
But ask yourself, what would be gained by a contrary holding? Is the NSI supposed to take money out of one pocket and put it into another pocket, thereby satisfying the principle of "paying" for a domain name (as distinguished from "squatting")? Make sure you read to the bottom of the article: nothing in NSI's agreement with ICANN precludes this behavior, as long as it isn't extreme enough to qualify as "warehousing", which clearly isn't the case here.
Squatting is bad in principle, but it's a necessary reality of any centralized system of domain-name assignment, which time and experience have shown is the only practical way of accomplishing this necessary service. The only alternative is bigger government and more Federal oversight of the process through the FTC and other administrative bodies, something I have no real fears of, but which lots of the rest of you seem to worry about.
If there comes a day when a machine, without human intervention beyond its initial programming, creates works which are accepted as art, then perhaps you'll have reason to worry.
That's why I'm wary today. Should we wait until biogenetics and genetic engineering already allow us to commit the horrors of science-fiction fame before we think to form ethics panels? Shouldn't we make use of prudent fore-sight?
I admit I'm a bit old fashioned when it comes to art. When I see or listen to a work of art, I want to feel the artist coming through. I want to catch a glimpse of his or her soul. Computers are great, sure; after all, I make my living working with them, and they're a great source of recreation. But for art? Where's the soul? So many of the greatest works of art are focused on depicting the soul-less nature of machines and our fears as humans of one day becoming like them. It makes me uneasy to think that one day, the machines will not only replace us, but also our art. It's the defining quality of humanity -- we, creatures who make analogy and represent our analogies in external form. It makes me uneasy.
This is a topological problem. The rules of topology allow you to resize and reorient lines, surfaces, and volumes, as long as you don't introduce any new holes or break any connections. Just think of it as "stretching" rather than "changing lengths". If you've ever tugged on your shoelaces to get them untied, then you know what I'm talking about.
I've held many jobs, but I will never work for a company where I have to be on call. No incremental salary compensates for the lost family time and lost personal time. I work for a living, yes, but I'm doing precisely that: working for a living, not working as my life. Living comes afterwards, at the end of the day, when I can go home and see the smiling faces of my loved ones and feel content about my small place in the universe.
It's like with leasing a home: I own my house because it's important enough to me that I want full control of it. It's the same with one's occupation: I don't want to lease my life; I want it to be my own life, and I don't want to have to answer to my boss unexpectedly at all hours of the day and night. It pains me to see so many people of my generation taking up the yoke of servile labor our grandparents and great grandparents fought so hard to unload. eighty-hour work weeks? Previous generations fought tooth and nail to get a ten-hour workday, and we undo their efforts in one fell swoop.
So you're advocating security-through-obscurity, then? That's certainly contrary to prevailing slashdot wisdom.
Just look at Canada, for example. There, two men are being prosecuted for obscenity because they've used computers to create realistic snuff films portraying fabricated and fictitious violence (not that normal porn isn't violent enough as it is). Without government intervention to declare these films false and criminal, people might think them real and might act upon the impulses generated by viewing them.
It's the same with anonymous speech. You may pretend you understand what is credible and what is not, and you may even be right. But it's a natural part of human nature to assess anonymous speech with some value when ranking memes. Only through law can we save people from themselves and reestablish which memes have value and which are credible; law is a pillar of legitimacy and credibility in an uncertain world.
Throw-away accounts leave electronic paper-trails as to how you created them (which email addresses you had the registration info sent to, going backwards in time to a primordial address traceable to you). Each step along that trail can be subpoenaed, which is what's being discussed here.
Excite News has an article on one of the cases discussed by the NYT.
Then it's good enough for me. Does the perl commnity have any plans to get a ringing endorsement from such a public opensource figure? I mean, besides Larry Wall, of course. We geeks may make these decisions on their technical merit, but it really helps the suits if a celebrity pitches it to them.
Look, you had a pretty good childhood, I bet. But when you were selling vegetables by the side of the road from your grandfather's garden, others were being raped by their fathers. Under parental-consent laws, the father who rapes his daughter can deny her the ability to end her pregnancy. (Your so-called "blessing" of childbearing is in fact a death sentence for a disproportionate number of young women, whose bodies are not yet capable of passing a foreign creature through their small pelvises.) Not only is she compelled to live in her master's house, but she must serve as his concubine. And don't ask where her mother is in this: she's cowering in fear from the last time he knocked a tooth out when she "sassily" spoke up. Just because it's not your own experience doesn't make it not others'.
The government's willingness to put up with anonymity stops even faster when it means lost tax-revenue -- tax systems are the single greatest form of census in the world, surpassing even the constitutionally mandated Census in accuracy. If we had a per-comment surcharge, then anonymity would die even faster.
Thanks, Michael, for not posting this on the main page. Otherwise, all the pretty pictures would be slashdotted.
I've gotten sick of defending myself and my gender time and time again, but I'll do so one last time. Just because most people on slashdot is male doesn't make me male, just as having most people on slashdot be of a certain race or nationality or religion doesn't assure that any single individual shares those characteristics. But I can cope, since in the greater scheme of things, it's no big deal that a few ACs continue to have their doubts.
There is a bigger problem, though. Go ahead and look at my previous comments. Nearly every one of them has one or five AC replies to the effect of "suck my dick" or "I want to fuck you in the ass". Throughout history, female authors have been denied recognition for their work, because it was commonly assumed that women were incapable of creating what they created. And throughout history, women have been spat upon, threatened, battered, and gangraped by the same men you'll find here on slashdot. For all I know, you yourself are one of those same ACs.
Ask yourself what you gain by contributing to this climate of fear and hate. Ask yourself that question when you scurry off for your nightly porn fix. Ask yourself that question when you insult and harass people on slashdot.
I'm talking about a certain version of the Gaia hypothesis. Here, let me explain:
Imagine you're walking down a dark corridor, with no windows to look at and no means of determining how far you've come or how far you have yet to go. Periodically, a blinding flash fills the corridor, and you occasionally have the luck and the dexterity to cover your eyes when you do so. At other times, you fail, and the flash illuminates the blood vessels in your retinas, reflecting off the inside of your eyes and perceived by you as so many wriggling worms.
In your arrogance as a sentient human, you may interpret your fortune in avoiding pain as the sign that you possess the powers and privileges of a deity, and that you have dominion over those worms. In reality, both they and your divinity exist only in your mind.
It's a metaphor for our (human) existence on earth. Without us, no one would exist to see the light or the worms; for the former would fall on no one's eyes and the latter would not be imagined. We owe it to the corridor (earth) and the worms (morality) to walk through that corridor. Even if it is dark and we are without sunglasses.
there'd be one fewer source of headaches for them. Usenet contributes to the perpetuation of spam, and it's the ISPs' majordomos that have to clean up when their users get led astray.
Many ISPs are trying their best to set up their own proprietary bulletin boards accessible through their own channels. Usenet is an unnecessary source of competition
Usenet is a big gaping sucking legal wound waiting to happen, what with all the copyright infringements, obscenity, and violations of the DMCA being tossed around. Any prudent ISP wary of tort suits should be wary of affiliating itself with such an anarchic beast.
Usenet still, above all, requires enormous resources to maintain. Especially binary groups.
In general, there has been a move away from Usenet and towards other fertile discussion forums within the last four years. I expect this trend to continue well into the next five years. Today, Usenet is nothing like what it was ten years ago. It'll be even less so, tomorrow.
When we all posted to usenet, it was under the implicit contract that our personal information wouldn't be bought and sold like so much cattle when the parent company was itself sold. Will Deja respect those promises now that they are under the knife? I'm personally surprised slashdot isn't raising a bigger stink about this; they sure did when toysmart was slapped by the FTC for similar behavior.