Lisa: You do Yoga? Jesse: Yeah, but I started *before* it was cool. Lisa: My name's Lisa Simpson. I think your protest was incredibly brave. Jesse: Thank you. This planet needs every friend it can get. Lisa: Oh, the earth is the best! That's why I'm a vegetarian. Jesse: Heh. Well, that's a start. Lisa: Uh, well, I was thinking of going vegan. Jesse: [chuckles] I'm a level 5 vegan -- I won't eat anything that casts a shadow. Lisa: Wow. Um... I started an organic compost pile at home. Jesse: Only at home? You mean you don't pocket-mulch? [takes out pocket stuff for Lisa to feel] Lisa: Oh, it's so decomposed! Do you think I could join Dirt First? Jesse: Well... we *might* have an opening at the poser level. Lisa: Oh, thank you, thank you!
Sheesh, as if such a thing is actually possible. I can't believe such words actually came out of a 20th century diplomat's mouth. Someone can hate your freedom (and prefer their own), but hating freedom in general might not even be philosophically possible.
All of your replies would work if 1) there were an infinite supply of jobs (or at least a demand for workers rather than positive unemployment in market sectors across the board) and 2) special privileges in companies made way for true, harcore capitalism.
Neither of these is true. As long as privilege is give to those higher in the hierarchy, that privilege will be used to unknowingly counteract capitalist principles. Why? Not sure, something about power corrupting most likely.
Your system is fantasy or sometime in the future. It is a survival tactic, true, perhaps even a tactic for prospering in a better market, but don't let that blind you. People are not paid what they are worth, not as long as humans have emotions.
I know it's unpopular, but what aaron420 is saying is not naive, nor is it a small problem. While showing the human body or sex is not evil, many times the sex or body is portrayed in such a way as to make women appear submissive and wanting to be dominated.
OF COURSE there is porn that doesn't do this, but a huge majority of it does, and just as showing someone in an ad smoking a cigarette and having a good time leads some to smoke, showing women consistently in submissive, if not degrading poses reinforces this view of women. After all, one of the best reinforcers is pleasure and extreme amounts of that are had when looking at porn.
OF COURSE many women in porn want to be there and don't find these things degrading. If they think that women indeed SHOULD be submissive to men, then they are wrong. But that's not the problem. If that were the only problem, porn would be fine in all forms. By making this art in which they appear submissive, they reinforce this view in men. These men then internalize the view of women and other women who had no desire to be in porn are affected by the people doing porn.
I'm not arguing that all porn is wrong or anything like that, but it can be dangerous as a form of suppression. Of course it's a choice how one treats women, but don't pretend you're immune to the basically Pavlovian mechanisms that exist in advertising, porn, and so on. In my opinion, much porn makes the view that women are equals much harder to enforce on a societal level.
Banning would surely be more problematic, so of course I'm not arguing such a thing.
Yes I am male, no, I don't even like Christianity. I am not a liberal, I believe in the power of the individual, but I also believe it's not an easy power to exercise and that most people off the street or out of the suburbs or out of universities are not trained enough to exercise that power. And women suffer for it.
Well, I won't post it here -- that would imply having it finished. But I more work on what implications certain metaphysical theories of personal identity (the simple ones which treat you as an object, not the actual psychological categories you would personally identify with) have on other ethical theories, especially Utilitarianism.
That said, I agree that the wave analogy is a good one. It seems clear to me that we undergo a great deal of material change, but there is something somewhat unchaning which is maintained. Indeed, I don't think we're like waves metaphysically, but more like functions. (Yes, haha wave functions.) As long as there is material so arranged to execute a certain function, we can call that function unchanged. What the specific function is is a trade secret of mine at the time, but you're definitely in the right ballpark with the wave idea. (A wave is, in an interesting way, a function of matter.)
I've never really thought about it, but I suppose I take the anti-Nietzchean view of metaphysics -- I believe it's what underlies the physical world, not what can't interact with it.
While it is true that your experience would be quite different if you happened to be a Linux user, you have some good points here. As does the initial review, which must be said is one of the most unbiased pieces Slashdot has ever posted.
The thing missing of course, is the convenience of something like napster with unrestricted MP3s. Actually, it becomes a philosophical question. Do we have a right to more convenience, or, given that the more convenience one has, the less legal something becomes (in the copyright arena), is the level of convenience we used to enjoy with Napster simply unacceptable from a social policy level?
My position, even though I am a reluctant Windows user, is that browser-choice and OS-choice are necessary conveniences but file-formats and watermarking might be something we just have to live with in order to have digital music.
We all started with Napster/IRC of course, so perhaps our view of what makes for a good music service is full of things that jeopardize that service's legality. We need to decide, as a community, what specific conveniences are necessary. If those imply automatic illegality, we have some tough questions to answer.
Actually, he will care, eventually. Think of the marketing -- GAMEcube, PLAYstation -- Xbox? Obviously Microsoft wants consumers to identify with it as more than just a console that plays games. And yes, marketers are this specific with product branding strategies.
So when Xbox begins to come into its home media center phase (which has to be the only part of X other than gaming that I can think of) I predict this will get some more intense scrutiny.
I never really understood why this was supposed to promote competition. I mean, sure if your address is "The United States" then you have choice and there is competition. But if one's address is "Any Particular State" you still have a monopoly running your phone service. Seemed to just legitimate regional price-fixing to me.
Or is there some other purpose to breaking up Ma Bell which I never grasped?
Wouldn't a more effective solution have been to create a market for land lines the way the cell phone market is now?
Well it looks like it won't be long before America finally becomes one of those countries where you hear those words that every freedom-loving person has been trained to despise:
Oh, and if God exists, it's supposed to exist necessarily. So there wouldn't be any worlds in which God didn't exist as logically necessary existence is defined as "existence in every possible world".
Modern logicians who work in something called "free logic" (anything is fair game to quantify over) as well as people called "dialethists" (who believe in a few true contradictions such as "This sentence is a lie.") entertain the idea of impossible worlds.
However I think power still has to be defined over logical possibility even in these systems. So Leibniz's God wouldn't be in too much trouble even in these systems.
Still, it's a good question, contrary to what you yourself and these other commentators might believe. Had a recent talk about a resurrection of a philosophy called Meinongianism which is currently waaaaaaaaaaay out of style. It postulates more existence predicates, so we exist and God might exist, but things like unicorns and manticores actually subsist in this system. Impossible worlds, presumably, could subsist (or absist, which I won't even go into) as well.
Anyway, these things make your argument seem plausible, but you'd have to adopt a somewhat exotic metaphysics.
This is actually a bit misleading. Leibniz did not die without honor... he was a nobleman's nobleman who worked for kings and princes and the like.
He didn't get credit for the Calculus as readily, but it's not like he was Baruch Spinoza or William Blake (or David Hume for that matter). The man was a philosopher to royalty. The calculus was only one of his great philosophical achievements and that was noted in his time.
Incidentally, Leibniz's argument which Voltaire ridicules is kinda neat. God is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving. Because he is all knowing, he knows all the possible worlds he could have made. Because he's all poweful, he could make any worlds he knows. And because he's all-loving, he would only make the best of all the possible worlds for us of those that he knows (all of them) and can make (all of them).
Which mod's mission is it to mod everything about everything2 redundant? It seems perfectly relevant...
Yes, everything2 is right (not redundant)
on
Web Page Entanglement
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Mods, this isn't redundant, it's true... and old news since Everything2 is already around.
Of course the problem they've experienced on Everything2 is that some cool or sexy sounding link is irresistible to click on, causing these links to rise to the top regardless of their relevance. Thus, it decreases the usefulness of the "entanglement".
Sex memes really are the most pernicious out there... can you honestly tell me you could resist clicking on "The Screensavers - Nude Episode"? The cost (clicking) to possible benefit (grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) ratio is just too small not to expend the click.
Pop-up hell might increase cost, thereby disciplining hormonal clickers, but even then. The Onion used to have an ad called "Naked Scottish Weathergirls" -- one of the most clicked on on the web. It led to a messageboard eventually where people posted digitized women in Scotland -- so many people must have arrived there and posted messages asking about the naked women it was unreal.
I don't know about anyone else here, but Amazon.com searches frustrate the hell out of me. I can type in the exact title or exact author's name into Amazon's search boxes, check the "Exact spelling" box or whatever it is, and still the thing I'm looking for comes up 8th, behind things that make no sense whatsoever, if it comes up on the first page of searches at all.
Typical example: I want to search for a specific book called Moon Madness, say. So I type it in, get 28,000 results and it's nowhere on the first page. Re-sort, right? Wrong. Amazon only allows you to sort by featured items (?!), A-Z order, Z-A order, or most popular order. And there's no way to skip ahead to halfway through the list on alphabetical order. So you're stuck clicking "next" thousands of times. I've just switched to BN which manages searches MUCH better. If Moon Madness is unpopular or non-featured, which is fairly easy to be, dust off that auto-clicker.
So if this is what Grokker has in store for us, leave me out. If it's just Amazon which limits the search engine's functionality, then Grokker definitely shouldn't be using Amazon as a reference.
Slashdot Mirror
Lisa: You do Yoga? ... I started an organic compost pile at home. ... we *might* have an opening at the poser level.
Jesse: Yeah, but I started *before* it was cool.
Lisa: My name's Lisa Simpson. I think your protest was incredibly brave.
Jesse: Thank you. This planet needs every friend it can get.
Lisa: Oh, the earth is the best! That's why I'm a vegetarian.
Jesse: Heh. Well, that's a start.
Lisa: Uh, well, I was thinking of going vegan.
Jesse: [chuckles] I'm a level 5 vegan -- I won't eat anything that casts a shadow.
Lisa: Wow. Um
Jesse: Only at home? You mean you don't pocket-mulch? [takes out pocket stuff for Lisa to feel]
Lisa: Oh, it's so decomposed! Do you think I could join Dirt First?
Jesse: Well
Lisa: Oh, thank you, thank you!
Don't forget:
4. They hate freedom.
Sheesh, as if such a thing is actually possible. I can't believe such words actually came out of a 20th century diplomat's mouth. Someone can hate your freedom (and prefer their own), but hating freedom in general might not even be philosophically possible.
It's plenty logical to spend money on something you don't really want. It's just not rational.
All of your replies would work if 1) there were an infinite supply of jobs (or at least a demand for workers rather than positive unemployment in market sectors across the board) and 2) special privileges in companies made way for true, harcore capitalism.
Neither of these is true. As long as privilege is give to those higher in the hierarchy, that privilege will be used to unknowingly counteract capitalist principles. Why? Not sure, something about power corrupting most likely.
Your system is fantasy or sometime in the future. It is a survival tactic, true, perhaps even a tactic for prospering in a better market, but don't let that blind you. People are not paid what they are worth, not as long as humans have emotions.
Looks like you never got to Reality 201.
Employment will be an agreement among equals when I can let my boss go due to "tough" financial times just like I can.
Employment will be an agreement among equals when my boss invites me to his Christmas party.
Employment will be an agreement among equals when my boss will be reprimanded for missing a day of work.
Employment will be an agreement among equals when I get equal compensation for equal amounts of work and experience.
Employment will be an agreement among equals when I can be in the same health plan as my boss and the company owner.
Employment will be an agreement among equals when bosses and owners think of employment as an agreement among equals.
Which means:
Employment will be an agreement among equals when pigs fly or companies are worker owned.
I know it's unpopular, but what aaron420 is saying is not naive, nor is it a small problem. While showing the human body or sex is not evil, many times the sex or body is portrayed in such a way as to make women appear submissive and wanting to be dominated.
OF COURSE there is porn that doesn't do this, but a huge majority of it does, and just as showing someone in an ad smoking a cigarette and having a good time leads some to smoke, showing women consistently in submissive, if not degrading poses reinforces this view of women. After all, one of the best reinforcers is pleasure and extreme amounts of that are had when looking at porn.
OF COURSE many women in porn want to be there and don't find these things degrading. If they think that women indeed SHOULD be submissive to men, then they are wrong. But that's not the problem. If that were the only problem, porn would be fine in all forms. By making this art in which they appear submissive, they reinforce this view in men. These men then internalize the view of women and other women who had no desire to be in porn are affected by the people doing porn.
I'm not arguing that all porn is wrong or anything like that, but it can be dangerous as a form of suppression. Of course it's a choice how one treats women, but don't pretend you're immune to the basically Pavlovian mechanisms that exist in advertising, porn, and so on. In my opinion, much porn makes the view that women are equals much harder to enforce on a societal level.
Banning would surely be more problematic, so of course I'm not arguing such a thing.
Yes I am male, no, I don't even like Christianity. I am not a liberal, I believe in the power of the individual, but I also believe it's not an easy power to exercise and that most people off the street or out of the suburbs or out of universities are not trained enough to exercise that power. And women suffer for it.
"[thunk] Message for you sir............."
It is informative, just not informative-relative-to-the-story. It is also funny-relative-to-the-story, but otherwise not terribly funny, dig?
/. a little too seriously.
Methinks your punctuation connotes that you take
Well, I won't post it here -- that would imply having it finished. But I more work on what implications certain metaphysical theories of personal identity (the simple ones which treat you as an object, not the actual psychological categories you would personally identify with) have on other ethical theories, especially Utilitarianism.
That said, I agree that the wave analogy is a good one. It seems clear to me that we undergo a great deal of material change, but there is something somewhat unchaning which is maintained. Indeed, I don't think we're like waves metaphysically, but more like functions. (Yes, haha wave functions.) As long as there is material so arranged to execute a certain function, we can call that function unchanged. What the specific function is is a trade secret of mine at the time, but you're definitely in the right ballpark with the wave idea. (A wave is, in an interesting way, a function of matter.)
I've never really thought about it, but I suppose I take the anti-Nietzchean view of metaphysics -- I believe it's what underlies the physical world, not what can't interact with it.
Your thoughts?
But wait, I'm doing my dissertation in philosophy on metaphysics (in particular personal identity). So I guess it is studied as philosophy.
Jeez, too many Kantians at Berkeley these days. Or maybe Stroud...
I agree with everything you said other than this.
While it is true that your experience would be quite different if you happened to be a Linux user, you have some good points here. As does the initial review, which must be said is one of the most unbiased pieces Slashdot has ever posted.
The thing missing of course, is the convenience of something like napster with unrestricted MP3s. Actually, it becomes a philosophical question. Do we have a right to more convenience, or, given that the more convenience one has, the less legal something becomes (in the copyright arena), is the level of convenience we used to enjoy with Napster simply unacceptable from a social policy level?
My position, even though I am a reluctant Windows user, is that browser-choice and OS-choice are necessary conveniences but file-formats and watermarking might be something we just have to live with in order to have digital music.
We all started with Napster/IRC of course, so perhaps our view of what makes for a good music service is full of things that jeopardize that service's legality. We need to decide, as a community, what specific conveniences are necessary. If those imply automatic illegality, we have some tough questions to answer.
Actually, he will care, eventually. Think of the marketing -- GAMEcube, PLAYstation -- Xbox? Obviously Microsoft wants consumers to identify with it as more than just a console that plays games. And yes, marketers are this specific with product branding strategies.
So when Xbox begins to come into its home media center phase (which has to be the only part of X other than gaming that I can think of) I predict this will get some more intense scrutiny.
I never really understood why this was supposed to promote competition. I mean, sure if your address is "The United States" then you have choice and there is competition. But if one's address is "Any Particular State" you still have a monopoly running your phone service. Seemed to just legitimate regional price-fixing to me.
Or is there some other purpose to breaking up Ma Bell which I never grasped?
Wouldn't a more effective solution have been to create a market for land lines the way the cell phone market is now?
That's pretty funny... I'm out of mod points and don't even know why it's letting me post here, but this is top-notch.
LMFAO!
This is Japan -- they can probably just get that 5-year old Suki girl from the commercials to write them a secure operating system.
Well it looks like it won't be long before America finally becomes one of those countries where you hear those words that every freedom-loving person has been trained to despise:
"May I see your papers [please]?"
Oh, and if God exists, it's supposed to exist necessarily. So there wouldn't be any worlds in which God didn't exist as logically necessary existence is defined as "existence in every possible world".
Modern logicians who work in something called "free logic" (anything is fair game to quantify over) as well as people called "dialethists" (who believe in a few true contradictions such as "This sentence is a lie.") entertain the idea of impossible worlds.
However I think power still has to be defined over logical possibility even in these systems. So Leibniz's God wouldn't be in too much trouble even in these systems.
Still, it's a good question, contrary to what you yourself and these other commentators might believe. Had a recent talk about a resurrection of a philosophy called Meinongianism which is currently waaaaaaaaaaay out of style. It postulates more existence predicates, so we exist and God might exist, but things like unicorns and manticores actually subsist in this system. Impossible worlds, presumably, could subsist (or absist, which I won't even go into) as well.
Anyway, these things make your argument seem plausible, but you'd have to adopt a somewhat exotic metaphysics.
This is actually a bit misleading. Leibniz did not die without honor... he was a nobleman's nobleman who worked for kings and princes and the like.
He didn't get credit for the Calculus as readily, but it's not like he was Baruch Spinoza or William Blake (or David Hume for that matter). The man was a philosopher to royalty. The calculus was only one of his great philosophical achievements and that was noted in his time.
Incidentally, Leibniz's argument which Voltaire ridicules is kinda neat. God is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving. Because he is all knowing, he knows all the possible worlds he could have made. Because he's all poweful, he could make any worlds he knows. And because he's all-loving, he would only make the best of all the possible worlds for us of those that he knows (all of them) and can make (all of them).
So this is the best of all possible worlds.
Which mod's mission is it to mod everything about everything2 redundant? It seems perfectly relevant...
Mods, this isn't redundant, it's true... and old news since Everything2 is already around.
Of course the problem they've experienced on Everything2 is that some cool or sexy sounding link is irresistible to click on, causing these links to rise to the top regardless of their relevance. Thus, it decreases the usefulness of the "entanglement".
Sex memes really are the most pernicious out there... can you honestly tell me you could resist clicking on "The Screensavers - Nude Episode"? The cost (clicking) to possible benefit (grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) ratio is just too small not to expend the click.
Pop-up hell might increase cost, thereby disciplining hormonal clickers, but even then. The Onion used to have an ad called "Naked Scottish Weathergirls" -- one of the most clicked on on the web. It led to a messageboard eventually where people posted digitized women in Scotland -- so many people must have arrived there and posted messages asking about the naked women it was unreal.
Should we really be putting bad British pop bands in charge of secure frameworks?
What's next -- the Supergrass Encryption protocol?
I don't know about anyone else here, but Amazon.com searches frustrate the hell out of me. I can type in the exact title or exact author's name into Amazon's search boxes, check the "Exact spelling" box or whatever it is, and still the thing I'm looking for comes up 8th, behind things that make no sense whatsoever, if it comes up on the first page of searches at all.
Typical example: I want to search for a specific book called Moon Madness, say. So I type it in, get 28,000 results and it's nowhere on the first page. Re-sort, right? Wrong. Amazon only allows you to sort by featured items (?!), A-Z order, Z-A order, or most popular order. And there's no way to skip ahead to halfway through the list on alphabetical order. So you're stuck clicking "next" thousands of times. I've just switched to BN which manages searches MUCH better. If Moon Madness is unpopular or non-featured, which is fairly easy to be, dust off that auto-clicker.
So if this is what Grokker has in store for us, leave me out. If it's just Amazon which limits the search engine's functionality, then Grokker definitely shouldn't be using Amazon as a reference.
How can this story possibly be interesting -- there are no screenshots...