Once you do that, it's only a matter of time before the playerbase starts clamoring for the banning of ultrafast engines as a form of griefing (which, to be fair, it would be). Get one person going at a respectable fraction of c, and no one else will be able to do anything until time "catches up" for the traveler.
Could you elaborate on the "economic reasons" certain categories cannot be released as free software?
Also, LLVM isn't actually designed for JIT: some people have managed to make it work, but not without problems. GCC isn't designed for JIT either, of course; it's outside the problem space of both.
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school... missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
Why should college necessarily be a "fond personal experience"? You're there to learn, are you not?
Obviously you can't go straight back to industrial levels. You would have to start with considerably lower-tech solutions and build up from there, not too different from how it worked the first time around. The object is to make it faster (without the overhead of rediscovery from scratch), not to make it instantaneous.
Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
The outcome may be similar in some ways -though in truth, I think it's less so than you believe- but at least in the West it comes through a more just process. Outcome isn't everything.
Network security is a position of trust. There is basically no way around this: implicit in running a network is that you have the tools to see what's on it. Encryption only goes so far in such situations, particularly at agencies tasked, in part, with getting at encrypted data.
This adds up to some employers requiring a greater degree of trust in their employees than is currently the norm. Some geeks, it seems, are unwilling to come to terms with the fact that their life choices may have made them poor security risks in that context. The cases where the risk isn't because of a life choice are sadder, but the risk is just as real, and to ask agencies with bona fide requirements for absolute trust to simply ignore those risks is insane.
It's funny: all I asked was for people to acknowledge functioning minds behind the face of the opposition, and instead I get exactly the types of responses I was calling people (including Dawkins himself) out for.
Calling people ignorant, contrary to the claim Dawkins makes, is in fact an insult; it doesn't just "sound like one." He attempts to use self-deprecating humor (i.e. the "ignorant about baseball" comment) as a counterexample, but central to self-deprecating humor is the concept of insulting oneself. It's also a false counterexample, since his example of "ignorance about baseball" is a very specific thing, yet when he uses the term to refer to religious people he uses it in the general sense, calling them ignorant of reality itself. As, incidentally, are the flames I'm getting in response to my original post. Epistemological lock for the loss.
Then make harassment a crime. This can be done without criminalizing any particular form of speech, thus preserving a right that should be absolute, and it has the added bonus of covering non-speech forms of harassment in the same law. The only losers in such an arrangement are the ones who want to silence people, and they deserve to lose.
The right to bear arms doesn't shield someone from committing crimes with a weapon. Neither need the right to free speech shield someone from committing crimes by speaking.
That's probably not enough to protect you from liability, because it doesn't adequately explain the danger of moat alligators. I'd suggest something like this.
BEWARE OF MOAT ALLIGATORS MOAT ALLIGATORS ARE CARNIVORES IF YOU GO IN THE MOAT THEY WILL EAT YOU YOU MIGHT DIE
This. The only acceptable standard for sharing personal data is strictly opt-in, and defaulting to do-not-track creates such a standard. This may cause problems for some dubiously ethical targeted-advertising business models, but that is their problem and nobody else's. The Web thrived before targeting, and it will thrive after targeting.
If you've ever seen very young puppies playing, you know that it's not as cute as it sounds. There's yelping and pain, and often even blood as the puppies bite one another mercilessly. But as the days and weeks pass, that stops; by being bitten, the puppies learn that biting hurts. It takes a little while, and is perhaps not the most pleasant of methods, but it's what their minds can process.
Some people are the same way. It's a cruel thing to force a bully (or its net-cousin, the troll) to look in the mirror and see what they've really done; what they really are. It messes with a person's head in a way that those who haven't experienced it cannot understand. But many of them legitimately NEED that kind of cruelty; it's the language they speak, the stimulus they know how to sense.
It's still cruel, mind you; it shouldn't be shied away from, but it shouldn't be glorified or looked forward to either. Sometimes it's not even possible, especially in the age of the Internet. But when it can be done, I'd call it preferable to bringing in the authorities. It's less wasteful, on account of not throwing up lifelong obstacles for the troll to overcome, and when properly applied it hurts worse than the law would allow our authorities to inflict anyway. Justice and vengeance, all wrapped up in a nice, neat package.
That's the argument we might have with a European. And there we could get into nuances of policy. For example the Scientology debate.
If this gets taken seriously enough at the UN, though, then exactly that sort of argument will need to take place. Might as well get the practice in.
This Pakistan thing is just a basic belief that blaspheme is a universal norm and that preventing it is a goal most people agree with. It quite literally is a total failure to even understand what freedom means.
Is it, I wonder? Or is it merely working on a different definition of freedom than the ones you or I will understand?
Further, as a non-theistic religion Buddhism denies the existence of the god common to the Abrahamic religions and therefore offends all of them.
This last part isn't actually intrinsic to Buddhism, which in some regions has long shown a propensity to adopt figures from other faiths as enlightened beings of various sorts. To a Buddhist such beings are certainly not on the order of a "One True God" or anything like that, but they may indeed exist. If so, while they may be misunderstood by followers of the religions dedicated to them, they would still be worthy of respect as enlightened beings.
This is what happens when you try to give equal weight to two goals that conflict with one another so often: in this case, freedom of expression versus what advocates of curtailing free expression in this way call "human dignity." Sooner or later, one must prioritize. We need to stop pretending that we can have our metaphorical cake and eat it too.
For the record, when faced with such conflicts, I find the right choice to be the one that maximizes human agency: the ability for people to, through their choices and actions, make a difference in their own lives. Applied here, that means prioritizing the act of expression over passive reaction: in other words, free expression wins.
Define "Earthlike." Certainly, for example, there are other terrestrial planets in the universe. There are probably even some with a similar mass to ours, at a similar orbital distance from a similar star. But this still doesn't account for, for example, when in their history such planets might be. Life might not have begun on all of them, or it might have already ended, or what life exists might not have reached the state of relative advancement we enjoy today.
Bottom line: yes, there are probably planets which share some similarities to Earth, but if you're looking for aliens the odds are still much dimmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you do that, it's only a matter of time before the playerbase starts clamoring for the banning of ultrafast engines as a form of griefing (which, to be fair, it would be). Get one person going at a respectable fraction of c, and no one else will be able to do anything until time "catches up" for the traveler.
Could you elaborate on the "economic reasons" certain categories cannot be released as free software?
Also, LLVM isn't actually designed for JIT: some people have managed to make it work, but not without problems. GCC isn't designed for JIT either, of course; it's outside the problem space of both.
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school... missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
Why should college necessarily be a "fond personal experience"? You're there to learn, are you not?
Obviously you can't go straight back to industrial levels. You would have to start with considerably lower-tech solutions and build up from there, not too different from how it worked the first time around. The object is to make it faster (without the overhead of rediscovery from scratch), not to make it instantaneous.
Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
The outcome may be similar in some ways -though in truth, I think it's less so than you believe- but at least in the West it comes through a more just process. Outcome isn't everything.
Network security is a position of trust. There is basically no way around this: implicit in running a network is that you have the tools to see what's on it. Encryption only goes so far in such situations, particularly at agencies tasked, in part, with getting at encrypted data.
This adds up to some employers requiring a greater degree of trust in their employees than is currently the norm. Some geeks, it seems, are unwilling to come to terms with the fact that their life choices may have made them poor security risks in that context. The cases where the risk isn't because of a life choice are sadder, but the risk is just as real, and to ask agencies with bona fide requirements for absolute trust to simply ignore those risks is insane.
It's funny: all I asked was for people to acknowledge functioning minds behind the face of the opposition, and instead I get exactly the types of responses I was calling people (including Dawkins himself) out for.
Calling people ignorant, contrary to the claim Dawkins makes, is in fact an insult; it doesn't just "sound like one." He attempts to use self-deprecating humor (i.e. the "ignorant about baseball" comment) as a counterexample, but central to self-deprecating humor is the concept of insulting oneself. It's also a false counterexample, since his example of "ignorance about baseball" is a very specific thing, yet when he uses the term to refer to religious people he uses it in the general sense, calling them ignorant of reality itself. As, incidentally, are the flames I'm getting in response to my original post. Epistemological lock for the loss.
Disagreeing with religion is not insulting. Calling its followers unthinking, ignorant, brainwashed, delusional: this is insulting.
The US has not been the best of stewards, but has nevertheless proven itself a much better henhouse guard than the foxes would be.
...but could it say "Jesus is watching you"?
Then make harassment a crime. This can be done without criminalizing any particular form of speech, thus preserving a right that should be absolute, and it has the added bonus of covering non-speech forms of harassment in the same law. The only losers in such an arrangement are the ones who want to silence people, and they deserve to lose.
The right to bear arms doesn't shield someone from committing crimes with a weapon. Neither need the right to free speech shield someone from committing crimes by speaking.
I don't think there are very many governments out there that are truly "ill-intentioned." They're the ones you really have to watch out for.
That's probably not enough to protect you from liability, because it doesn't adequately explain the danger of moat alligators. I'd suggest something like this.
BEWARE OF MOAT ALLIGATORS
MOAT ALLIGATORS ARE CARNIVORES
IF YOU GO IN THE MOAT THEY WILL EAT YOU
YOU MIGHT DIE
That might work.
This. The only acceptable standard for sharing personal data is strictly opt-in, and defaulting to do-not-track creates such a standard. This may cause problems for some dubiously ethical targeted-advertising business models, but that is their problem and nobody else's. The Web thrived before targeting, and it will thrive after targeting.
Us versus them rules us to this day.
But does it rule them?
God also hates bullies: 2 Kings 2:23-24
If you've ever seen very young puppies playing, you know that it's not as cute as it sounds. There's yelping and pain, and often even blood as the puppies bite one another mercilessly. But as the days and weeks pass, that stops; by being bitten, the puppies learn that biting hurts. It takes a little while, and is perhaps not the most pleasant of methods, but it's what their minds can process.
Some people are the same way. It's a cruel thing to force a bully (or its net-cousin, the troll) to look in the mirror and see what they've really done; what they really are. It messes with a person's head in a way that those who haven't experienced it cannot understand. But many of them legitimately NEED that kind of cruelty; it's the language they speak, the stimulus they know how to sense.
It's still cruel, mind you; it shouldn't be shied away from, but it shouldn't be glorified or looked forward to either. Sometimes it's not even possible, especially in the age of the Internet. But when it can be done, I'd call it preferable to bringing in the authorities. It's less wasteful, on account of not throwing up lifelong obstacles for the troll to overcome, and when properly applied it hurts worse than the law would allow our authorities to inflict anyway. Justice and vengeance, all wrapped up in a nice, neat package.
It seems to me that the only real difference is one of degree.
That's the argument we might have with a European. And there we could get into nuances of policy. For example the Scientology debate.
If this gets taken seriously enough at the UN, though, then exactly that sort of argument will need to take place. Might as well get the practice in.
This Pakistan thing is just a basic belief that blaspheme is a universal norm and that preventing it is a goal most people agree with. It quite literally is a total failure to even understand what freedom means.
Is it, I wonder? Or is it merely working on a different definition of freedom than the ones you or I will understand?
Further, as a non-theistic religion Buddhism denies the existence of the god common to the Abrahamic religions and therefore offends all of them.
This last part isn't actually intrinsic to Buddhism, which in some regions has long shown a propensity to adopt figures from other faiths as enlightened beings of various sorts. To a Buddhist such beings are certainly not on the order of a "One True God" or anything like that, but they may indeed exist. If so, while they may be misunderstood by followers of the religions dedicated to them, they would still be worthy of respect as enlightened beings.
This is what happens when you try to give equal weight to two goals that conflict with one another so often: in this case, freedom of expression versus what advocates of curtailing free expression in this way call "human dignity." Sooner or later, one must prioritize. We need to stop pretending that we can have our metaphorical cake and eat it too.
For the record, when faced with such conflicts, I find the right choice to be the one that maximizes human agency: the ability for people to, through their choices and actions, make a difference in their own lives. Applied here, that means prioritizing the act of expression over passive reaction: in other words, free expression wins.
There's a real Nobel Prize in the works for anyone who figures out how to use this thing over the Internet.
Do we really want politicians, of all people, to be charge of identifying threats?
Define "Earthlike." Certainly, for example, there are other terrestrial planets in the universe. There are probably even some with a similar mass to ours, at a similar orbital distance from a similar star. But this still doesn't account for, for example, when in their history such planets might be. Life might not have begun on all of them, or it might have already ended, or what life exists might not have reached the state of relative advancement we enjoy today.
Bottom line: yes, there are probably planets which share some similarities to Earth, but if you're looking for aliens the odds are still much dimmer.