The problem with Presidents is that we can only count on them to have a clue on a few things, and we can only select them on a few issues. Obama may have a great foreign policy, admirable intent for health care, and some other nice things, but he's not clued on every potential issue. That said, I'm very disappointed at them dropping the ball on this. Not all legislation is bad, not all legislation is good, but if we're going to have some bad legislation, the least we can hope is that it's developed badly in the open. Of course, other nations that are negotiating this may be even worse off - I suspect that US-based businesses are the main forces writing ACTA.
The thing is, we're moving beyond a lot of the old ways of doing things where proprietors of information held tightly. We need loose enforcement of existing laws until we can get them repealed.
Is your first statement actually true? Sources? If there are reliable "yes" judges in every jurisdiction, why would the intelligence community need warrantlessness?
I don't know if our intelligence services are perfectly reliable, but they might get a pretty good idea about what judges would accept and not bother with questionable cases.
The system of warrants ensures that if people are wiretapped, there is a good reason for it. Without that independence, too much rests in the hands of the executive branch. Wiretapping may be necessary in some circumstances, but when it is, a judge should be convincable (even if the wiretaps never lead to action that go further into the Judiciary).
It can decide for itself, and I can decide for myself. It can publish lists of what is canon among those works, and have its own way the pieces put together, but that in no way prevents me from doing the same.
One big thing that people should understand is that there is no single canon. Any of us can build our own notion of canon for whatever series we like (e.g. My DrWho canon ends with the last TV series of the 7th doctor and excludes all the novels).
The existing of fanfiction shouldn't bother us at all, nor should we care about the publisher or the family's wishes, because in the end we control the gates - stories in culture are like that. Can I take the first 12 books in the Wizard of Oz series, say that the rest never happened, and branch off from there in telling new stories to someone? Sure. Someone else might branch off in another way.
Rights are the constructs of governments and philosophers - anyone might formulate a set of their interests into a phrasing of rights, and likewise another person might either say "you don't have that right" or "you don't understand that right correctly". Anyone could say either to you regarding property, depending on their position.
The common criminal (more specifically, those who loot in one form or another) secretly takes things out of the public sphere or from another person in order to enrich themselves. Taxation, appropriation, and other forms of state action are (or at least should be) to benefit society, to redress wrongs, or to serve some other social interest. This is not so much a taking away of things theoretically merited by their former owner as society withdrawing some privilege it allocated to people for a time.
Your body and a reasonable amount of personal property (clothes, heirlooms, etc) are reasonably inviolate - barring immediate need or your own debts, society should not take it from you. A reasonable residence is largely the same. Means of production or excessive amounts of the above are things that society might reasonably take to meet its needs - but likewise society rewards those who act for the societal good in their labour or otherwise - some amount of privilege for a limited time and in a limited scope can be healthy. None of this is absolute. Society can reallocate its resources as it needs, bearing in mind how that might motivate or demotivate people. If its ordinary customs allow one person to effectively create slavery or gross imbalances of power, particularly if some people have great excess and the basic and reasonable needs of others are not met, it should redress that situation.
Regarding your second statement, there is no objective reason people might choose to use your definitions and framework. I know that I don't think in your framework anymore, and your attempt to mark it as a privileged (perhaps objective) position is something people should reject.
Likewise with mine - I simply present mine here, as I wish to always confront people with my former philosophy of Libertarianism with other ideas - it is too often that they persuade people simply by being the only people to show up and make a case. By presenting both my own ideas and those of the vast number of philosophies that came into being before (and after) libertarianism, I believe property absolutism and other bad philosophy as dogma can be at least be slowed.
Your notion of free markets is just one among many, and a particularly unpopular and unworkable one at that. Capitalism has existed in a number of forms - there are philosophical differences (e.g. is Perfect Competition or Lassiez-Faire a better general goal) as well as regulatory differences (is the legal structure providing common currencies appropriate? Corporations?) and general vision (are the laws, other regulation, and other framework aimed towards allowing big businesses to exist, or is the traditional conservative small-town market the ideal?). It's tricky and unlikely to be broadly accepted to paint any particular flavour of these markets as being "true capitalism" or "true free markets" - liberty-fundamentalism may be one econopolitical philosophy, but in forms as strong as you suggest, you're describing a value system that's alien to anything that ever has existed and would only garner acceptance of a small portion of the population (this is not a philosophical criticism of your position so much as it is your portrayal of it as "the one true thing").
You seem to have a very well developed notion of what the public good must mean, and your refutation of it depends on that well-developed notion. That style of refutation, if it holds water (I would need to wrap my head more deeply around the particular notion you're arguing against - more effort than I'm willing to put in right now - in order to decide if, given that definition, the idea falls apart under your attack), does not cover other potential notions of the public good. If I were still a Libertarian today, my arguments would be a lot better than what they were.
It's not much of an indication that you're thinking very philosophically, despite the flavour of your thought, when you end your argument by saying that those who don't share your conception have the mindset of a common criminal.
At the risk of being accused of meeting ad hominem with ad hominem: When I was in university, I often came across people who made the big leap of beginning to think philosophically, and grabbed onto objectivism because it's a very simple philosophy that makes reasonably determinate claims about the world, with few grey areas. Unfortunately, their philosophical exploration stopped there - their notion of markets, liberty, and the like never were exposed to the varying other strong philosophies that exist now, and they ahistorically back-projected their philosophies to various historical figures they admired. To them, everything that was not Objectivist was Fascist. At the time I wasn't much unlike them - I wonder how much of this describes you. I'm not going to claim that because I see things differently now that there's a natural progression from such things, but rather that there are more careful and philosophically appropriate ways to hold the positions you do (just as any political/philosophical position has both philosophically immature and mature forms)
That's kind of a twisted way of looking at it - had the town been owned by a few landlords who gave the ok, it would not have been any better. Property rights only go so far in protecting the public good.
If this is essentially the same thing as Usenet, it's no wonder. NNTP was designed in the days when we were generally able to trust people not to be malign - it's a very trusting, open protocol, and when people or servers broke the rules, sensible people would stop peering with them. Sophisticated, malign groups of people are a problem in any system, but particularly for systems where there's a lot of built-in trust.
This seems pretty sensible. I've seen several near-accidents and a fair amount of people zoning out at a red light turned green or breaking traffic laws because they were playing with their iPod - simple safety stuff like this would be a good idea.
Hmm. Perl6 is kind of tempting, although I imagine it'll only be really interesting once people port most of CPAN over to it.
I probably should not be surprised to hear that a number of other people skip boring releases of Fedora - I don't know a lot of other Fedora users - it seems that apart from the conservative sysadmin types, most people are using Ubuntu now (well, except for the Gentoo ricers).
For those of us who are happy with our hardware support and don't use virtualisation, there's nothing I see in this release for us. Maybe Fedora 13 will be more interesting.
MySQL should've been buried, not bought. It was a purchase that didn't make sense for an inferiour OSS product. We have PostgreSQL for solid opensource database needs, and we can buy Oracle or DB2/ licenses if we need something better.
I've liked Sun for quite some time, and this purchase is among the most mysterious I've seen for a generally sensible, careful company. There are plenty of better things Sun could've done with that money, from acquisitions to projects. Seeing this, I hate to see Sun suffer, given that a lot of really cool stuff has come out of Sun over the years and Solaris is still a great commercial Unix. At the same time, I would love to see MySQL sputter enough that people begin to migrate to a better database. The only reason MySQL is popular is habit - it's not easier to set up, it's not easier to administer, it's not easier to develop for, it performs worse, and it is less standards compliant than PostgreSQL (and again, there are nicer databases yet for people who are willing to pay). On an even playing field, MySQL would be buried. Maybe market confusion will help create that.
Perhaps having the equivalent of IRB review over any changes to devices of this sort would help prevent such problems. It makes sense for devices to be reconfigurable, and it makes sense for devices to try to warn people away from doing stupid things. In this case, they overrode the safeguards, and their judgement happened to be worse than that embodied in said safeguard. That is not always the case - the problem is when people make changes with potantially lethal consequence and there are not enough eyes on those changes.
IRBs were designed to help mitigate such problems with ethics - researchers lack the breadth of perspective and have a potential conflict of interest were they to judge appropriate research ethics on their own. The IRB acts as a second check on proposed experiments. Similar things with devices of this sort (X-rays, MRI scanners, etc) might prevent similar issues.
It is a difficult problem of our times how traditional news media can survive with the expectations we have of the internet. It is another difficult problem how one can combat news institutes that have contempt for real journalism and become institutes for advocacy.
While we figure out how to solve the first problem, we can use the first problem to help against the second. In the end, we're best off both with FoxNews/SkyNews gone and traditional journalism revived and (somehow) funded.
Striving for peace (and the public good) is a wonderful thing, as is good diplomacy. However, these are things that we should expect of national leaders, not rare things to be celebrated.
While I'm far to the left of Barack Obama, I have a certain respect for him. Nontheless, I don't think he merits the prize - he has not done anything amazing towards it, and a prize that's made of combined forward-looking and acknowledgement of someone doing their diplomatic job properly isn't much of a prize. We may be less of a diplomatically wayward nation now, but each president we've ever had (and probably ever will have) reinvents our foreign policy - BushSr and Clinton, despite both of then being very well-informed and capable in foreign policy, still reinvented it during their office.
I don't think the prize means as much when it's used this way.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Presidents is that we can only count on them to have a clue on a few things, and we can only select them on a few issues. Obama may have a great foreign policy, admirable intent for health care, and some other nice things, but he's not clued on every potential issue. That said, I'm very disappointed at them dropping the ball on this. Not all legislation is bad, not all legislation is good, but if we're going to have some bad legislation, the least we can hope is that it's developed badly in the open. Of course, other nations that are negotiating this may be even worse off - I suspect that US-based businesses are the main forces writing ACTA.
*I* voted for Osama bin Laden. Sure, he would put me to the sword, but at least he wouldn't raise my taxes!
Wikileaks has it. This is not exactly new news - it's been available (and worrying) for awhile.
The thing is, we're moving beyond a lot of the old ways of doing things where proprietors of information held tightly. We need loose enforcement of existing laws until we can get them repealed.
Is your first statement actually true? Sources? If there are reliable "yes" judges in every jurisdiction, why would the intelligence community need warrantlessness?
I don't know if our intelligence services are perfectly reliable, but they might get a pretty good idea about what judges would accept and not bother with questionable cases.
The system of warrants ensures that if people are wiretapped, there is a good reason for it. Without that independence, too much rests in the hands of the executive branch. Wiretapping may be necessary in some circumstances, but when it is, a judge should be convincable (even if the wiretaps never lead to action that go further into the Judiciary).
It can decide for itself, and I can decide for myself. It can publish lists of what is canon among those works, and have its own way the pieces put together, but that in no way prevents me from doing the same.
Sure I can. There are limits to my ability to sell or display the works, but in private, I can branch it and tell it to my friends if I like.
Why should I consider their canon as more authoritative than mine?
One big thing that people should understand is that there is no single canon. Any of us can build our own notion of canon for whatever series we like (e.g. My DrWho canon ends with the last TV series of the 7th doctor and excludes all the novels).
The existing of fanfiction shouldn't bother us at all, nor should we care about the publisher or the family's wishes, because in the end we control the gates - stories in culture are like that. Can I take the first 12 books in the Wizard of Oz series, say that the rest never happened, and branch off from there in telling new stories to someone? Sure. Someone else might branch off in another way.
Rights are the constructs of governments and philosophers - anyone might formulate a set of their interests into a phrasing of rights, and likewise another person might either say "you don't have that right" or "you don't understand that right correctly". Anyone could say either to you regarding property, depending on their position.
The common criminal (more specifically, those who loot in one form or another) secretly takes things out of the public sphere or from another person in order to enrich themselves. Taxation, appropriation, and other forms of state action are (or at least should be) to benefit society, to redress wrongs, or to serve some other social interest. This is not so much a taking away of things theoretically merited by their former owner as society withdrawing some privilege it allocated to people for a time.
Your body and a reasonable amount of personal property (clothes, heirlooms, etc) are reasonably inviolate - barring immediate need or your own debts, society should not take it from you. A reasonable residence is largely the same. Means of production or excessive amounts of the above are things that society might reasonably take to meet its needs - but likewise society rewards those who act for the societal good in their labour or otherwise - some amount of privilege for a limited time and in a limited scope can be healthy. None of this is absolute. Society can reallocate its resources as it needs, bearing in mind how that might motivate or demotivate people. If its ordinary customs allow one person to effectively create slavery or gross imbalances of power, particularly if some people have great excess and the basic and reasonable needs of others are not met, it should redress that situation.
Regarding your second statement, there is no objective reason people might choose to use your definitions and framework. I know that I don't think in your framework anymore, and your attempt to mark it as a privileged (perhaps objective) position is something people should reject.
Likewise with mine - I simply present mine here, as I wish to always confront people with my former philosophy of Libertarianism with other ideas - it is too often that they persuade people simply by being the only people to show up and make a case. By presenting both my own ideas and those of the vast number of philosophies that came into being before (and after) libertarianism, I believe property absolutism and other bad philosophy as dogma can be at least be slowed.
Your notion of free markets is just one among many, and a particularly unpopular and unworkable one at that. Capitalism has existed in a number of forms - there are philosophical differences (e.g. is Perfect Competition or Lassiez-Faire a better general goal) as well as regulatory differences (is the legal structure providing common currencies appropriate? Corporations?) and general vision (are the laws, other regulation, and other framework aimed towards allowing big businesses to exist, or is the traditional conservative small-town market the ideal?). It's tricky and unlikely to be broadly accepted to paint any particular flavour of these markets as being "true capitalism" or "true free markets" - liberty-fundamentalism may be one econopolitical philosophy, but in forms as strong as you suggest, you're describing a value system that's alien to anything that ever has existed and would only garner acceptance of a small portion of the population (this is not a philosophical criticism of your position so much as it is your portrayal of it as "the one true thing").
You seem to have a very well developed notion of what the public good must mean, and your refutation of it depends on that well-developed notion. That style of refutation, if it holds water (I would need to wrap my head more deeply around the particular notion you're arguing against - more effort than I'm willing to put in right now - in order to decide if, given that definition, the idea falls apart under your attack), does not cover other potential notions of the public good. If I were still a Libertarian today, my arguments would be a lot better than what they were.
It's not much of an indication that you're thinking very philosophically, despite the flavour of your thought, when you end your argument by saying that those who don't share your conception have the mindset of a common criminal.
At the risk of being accused of meeting ad hominem with ad hominem:
When I was in university, I often came across people who made the big leap of beginning to think philosophically, and grabbed onto objectivism because it's a very simple philosophy that makes reasonably determinate claims about the world, with few grey areas. Unfortunately, their philosophical exploration stopped there - their notion of markets, liberty, and the like never were exposed to the varying other strong philosophies that exist now, and they ahistorically back-projected their philosophies to various historical figures they admired. To them, everything that was not Objectivist was Fascist. At the time I wasn't much unlike them - I wonder how much of this describes you. I'm not going to claim that because I see things differently now that there's a natural progression from such things, but rather that there are more careful and philosophically appropriate ways to hold the positions you do (just as any political/philosophical position has both philosophically immature and mature forms)
That's kind of a twisted way of looking at it - had the town been owned by a few landlords who gave the ok, it would not have been any better. Property rights only go so far in protecting the public good.
If this is essentially the same thing as Usenet, it's no wonder. NNTP was designed in the days when we were generally able to trust people not to be malign - it's a very trusting, open protocol, and when people or servers broke the rules, sensible people would stop peering with them. Sophisticated, malign groups of people are a problem in any system, but particularly for systems where there's a lot of built-in trust.
This seems pretty sensible. I've seen several near-accidents and a fair amount of people zoning out at a red light turned green or breaking traffic laws because they were playing with their iPod - simple safety stuff like this would be a good idea.
Did anyone else think "Accounts of the Dead" would be a great George Romero movie?
Hmm. Perl6 is kind of tempting, although I imagine it'll only be really interesting once people port most of CPAN over to it.
I probably should not be surprised to hear that a number of other people skip boring releases of Fedora - I don't know a lot of other Fedora users - it seems that apart from the conservative sysadmin types, most people are using Ubuntu now (well, except for the Gentoo ricers).
For those of us who are happy with our hardware support and don't use virtualisation, there's nothing I see in this release for us. Maybe Fedora 13 will be more interesting.
MySQL should've been buried, not bought. It was a purchase that didn't make sense for an inferiour OSS product. We have PostgreSQL for solid opensource database needs, and we can buy Oracle or DB2/ licenses if we need something better.
I've liked Sun for quite some time, and this purchase is among the most mysterious I've seen for a generally sensible, careful company. There are plenty of better things Sun could've done with that money, from acquisitions to projects. Seeing this, I hate to see Sun suffer, given that a lot of really cool stuff has come out of Sun over the years and Solaris is still a great commercial Unix. At the same time, I would love to see MySQL sputter enough that people begin to migrate to a better database. The only reason MySQL is popular is habit - it's not easier to set up, it's not easier to administer, it's not easier to develop for, it performs worse, and it is less standards compliant than PostgreSQL (and again, there are nicer databases yet for people who are willing to pay). On an even playing field, MySQL would be buried. Maybe market confusion will help create that.
Alternatively, you can have it both ways - let people type IDCLIP to disable clipping and retain full volume!
I was going to respond to this, but when I look at it closely, I understand the deeper humour in what you're saying. Bravo!
Perhaps having the equivalent of IRB review over any changes to devices of this sort would help prevent such problems. It makes sense for devices to be reconfigurable, and it makes sense for devices to try to warn people away from doing stupid things. In this case, they overrode the safeguards, and their judgement happened to be worse than that embodied in said safeguard. That is not always the case - the problem is when people make changes with potantially lethal consequence and there are not enough eyes on those changes.
IRBs were designed to help mitigate such problems with ethics - researchers lack the breadth of perspective and have a potential conflict of interest were they to judge appropriate research ethics on their own. The IRB acts as a second check on proposed experiments. Similar things with devices of this sort (X-rays, MRI scanners, etc) might prevent similar issues.
It is a difficult problem of our times how traditional news media can survive with the expectations we have of the internet. It is another difficult problem how one can combat news institutes that have contempt for real journalism and become institutes for advocacy.
While we figure out how to solve the first problem, we can use the first problem to help against the second. In the end, we're best off both with FoxNews/SkyNews gone and traditional journalism revived and (somehow) funded.
Striving for peace (and the public good) is a wonderful thing, as is good diplomacy. However, these are things that we should expect of national leaders, not rare things to be celebrated.
While I'm far to the left of Barack Obama, I have a certain respect for him. Nontheless, I don't think he merits the prize - he has not done anything amazing towards it, and a prize that's made of combined forward-looking and acknowledgement of someone doing their diplomatic job properly isn't much of a prize. We may be less of a diplomatically wayward nation now, but each president we've ever had (and probably ever will have) reinvents our foreign policy - BushSr and Clinton, despite both of then being very well-informed and capable in foreign policy, still reinvented it during their office.
I don't think the prize means as much when it's used this way.