If you are trying to start some kind of debate about moral nihilism then I suggest you do-so elsewhere, I find such philosophical navel-gazing tedious in the extreme.
If you are arguing from the perspective of a dogmatic belief in knowledge of an objective morality, then you have to either admit to being a slave to dogma or state your reason. You can't get away from justifying why my comment was stupid by calling having to so "navel-gazing".
No. Read up on the difference between "if" and "if and only if", or alternatively ask a 14 year old with a basic understanding of logic, they can probably help you out.
Umm, not. We are discussing when it is "right" to force our values on the regimes on other countries. You have claimed that there is an objective morality which allows us to do this in some cases, and they can be differentiated from other cases when it is not alright (my original post said that they can't be differentiated, and you called it stupid). Apparently, by your previous post, this objective reality makes it OK when the government of the other country is acting against the will of the "people": I am trying to push you to specify that, particularly what you mean by "people", in an attempt to show that no such standard can be sensibly derived.
This is getting dangerously near a meta-argument, which, I seem to remember, is where all of our arguments end up eventually. (Ah, the good old days!:-) )
I hold that you have not even stated, much less justified, your opinion in the matter.
The fact that the occupants of that country would want you to remove their corrupt "leadership" - that is what justifies it.
a) You have still not said what, outside your personal morality and beliefs, makes this so.
b) So you are saying it is wrong to attack a country if the government has popular support? Say that they decided to kill off 5% of the population, and the majority supported it (because majority is what you mean by "the occupants of that country", right? I want my current corrupt leadership removed, but I don't suppose that justifies anybody going to war against my country.)
Who cares where it comes from? The fact is that I, today, believe that people should be free to rule themselves to the greatest extent possible. The Nazi's or Taleban (*) did not believe this. What makes me "right" and them "wrong"? NOTHING.
What justifies me going to war against them to impose my beliefs about freedom on their country? That I can, and that I will.
My point in this whole discussion has been that the question asked in the topic is stupid.
(*) Sanity has declared opposition using Godwin's law to terminate discussions. I am using the Nazi's here only because most people agree that letting them be (even if they had let us be) would be wrong. Neither the Nazi's or the Taleban were attacked until they attacked the rest of the world, of course - I argue that they should have been and we wouldnt have needed to apologize for it.
I never claimed that such things could be justified because people wanted to be oppressed. Who said that it is right that people should get what they want, anyways?
I did not in any way endorse complicity with such governments. Read my last sentence again. I do not presume to know what "every sane person wants", and I am naturally skeptical of such claims (religious fundamentalists will also tell you what every sane person believes), but I know what I believe, and I know that those beliefs are, at least to some extent, shared by enough people and resources that those beliefs are mighty.
The only justification we have for stopping Hitler, or Bin Laden, or Hussein, is because we want to, and because we can. Nothing else.
When I equate human rights with imposing our culture on others, I do so not say that we should stop protecting human rights, but that we should stop being ashamed of imposing our cultures on others.
We do impose our culture on others. And we should. It is better (in our opinion).
I was talking about moral right and wrong, not logical. I dont think anybody is arguing that net censorship is logically wrong (hard, maybe, but obviously theoretically possible).
No, he is right. Synaptic does have a search box, but is just a front for "apt-cache search" which does search, but does a pretty piss-poor job of it. Did you try to duplicate his query for "word processor"? On debian it does result in some actual word processors, but also things like "lg-issue42 - Issue 42 of the Linux Gazette."
Try searching for "web browser" and tell me that is helpful to a newbie. Also, the package summaries displayed look frightening and not very helpful (Lindows click-and-run has the look down I think.)
(I'm not a Linux usability flamer, but searching is one place where Synaptic isn't great, and the reviewer was right to point it out.)
Are they defending human rights, or simply trying to impose their own beliefs on people from other cultures?
Is there really a difference between the two? Fundamentally, the acknowledgement of "human rights" is a system of belief, born out of our culture. Certainly there have been plenty of cultures which have not accepted any of the principles which we want to "defend" today.
On some level, the concept of "human rights" is a claim that our cultural beliefs are better, and more right, then those that do not agree with them.
Since there is no absolute source of right and wrong in the universe, our own beliefs are the best we've got. And there are certain things that we believe so strongly, that we are willing to impose them on others. What gives us the right to do this? That we are stronger. Nothing else.
We ought to see this for what it is, and stop feeling bad about it.
Swedish electricity is suppled to about 55% from hydroelectric plants, and 45% fron nuclear energy. So besides the habitat destruction of the dams (which can't be undone by riding the train less), the electicity in question really is environmentally friendly.
The problem with hard drug availability, prison overcrowding, and rising violence in society have the same root cause: rising immorality due to removing God from the equation. Has nothing to do with the War on Drugs.
Using warez terminology though, something taped from the audience with a smuggled in camera is called a "cam".
The word "telesync" is used for something shot from the projectionist booth in an empty cinema, with the sound sourced directly from the movie. Telesyncs require the aid of the cinema owner of projectionist, cams simply require somebody to do what the guy in the story attempted. I have seen movies that people called telesyncs which where really just good cams though.
As the grandparent noted, the best quality are "screeners". Screener, of course, is an old Hollywood name for the tapes given to actors/reviewers/awards judges etc. These are/were often in DVD form, allowing for perfect ripping. You know you are watching a screener when the "Not distribution, if you purchased this tape, please call 1-800-NO-COPIES" text or some version thereof, appears at the bottom.
Hollywood are fighting screener leaks by watermarking them, so that they can find out who is supplying the groups. They are fighting cams by way of methods like this (though it is dubious whether it will work - most cams I have seen have been shot outside the USA - Singapore, which often gets films early for the far east - seems common). Presumably there is a plan in place to start watermarking the films sent to cinemas as well, to find out which projectionists are allowing telesyncs to be made.
Anyway, if people stop making cams, I don't think anyone will be very upset. Only an idiot would watch a Cam of his own free will. Telesyncs are often not a lot better. Most hardcore downloaders I know will shun everything that isn't a screener - better to wait until the DVD comes at which point high quality copies are plentiful.
(Queue the Slashdot "piracy is BAAADD" choir. Can copy - will copy. Trying to stop people is stupid.)
if replacing, reuse the old one as an MP3 server o
I think this is questionable environmental (as well as economic) advice. A computer, even without a monitor, will probably be eating sixty watts or so, while using a docked iPod or similiar runs maybe five watts. That's 55*24*365 = 481 kWh per year of electricity, which in most cases comes from burning fossil fuels (that in turn needed to be explored, mined/drilled, transported), compared to the production of a new device.
VoteHere has revealed _some_ source code, which may or may not be what is used in their machines. Unless the machines are produced in a truly open fashion, the fact that they have made some code available for viewing means very little.
I love the speed increases that the 2.6 kernel has achieved on the desktop (and for things like media: mplayer never bugs out with that charming "YOUR COMPUTER IS TOO SLOW" message anymore). However, I don't know if it can be considered even remotely stable. Since switching, my uptime has been a Windows like joke.
For example:
- The conversion to ALSA works great, but the modules for OSS compatibility segfault whenever an app tries to use them. Segfaults in the kernel are fun! There is pretty much nothing to do but reboot after that.
- Firewire and sbp2 support is completely broken. Ironically this has, I believe, more from "experimental" in 2.4 to a normal feature, yet it worked fine before and now doesn't work at all (the linux1394 forums forums reflect that I am not alone in this). Trying to copy data to sbp2 drives segfaults, hangs, and worse. Beware of connecting to 2.6 if you have a firewire drive with data you hold dear...
I'm sure there is more, but I am forced to return to the land of 2.4 most of the time. Now, I'm not complaining about the quality: if I want working 1394 drivers I ought to write some or shut up about it, but I am questioning to what extent 2.6 should have been released, if even after four releases basic things are completely broken...
It's actually called Palladium, and Microsoft is rolling it out together with Longhorn. The necessary hardware modification, in the form of TCPA or the Phoenix DRM bios, are already around the corner.
Capitalizing on the pre-IPO frenzy that accompanies every new Google feature, the company issued a spoof press release today - of all days! - in which co-founder Sergey Brin says, "And while developing Gmail was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we're pleased to be able to offer it to the user who asked for it."
The service is real, however. The advertisement injection has sparked fierce internal debates, reports The NY Times. "Many people inside the company are worried that users might fear that the content of their e-mail messages could be used to tailor individual advertising messages, much as ad messages are now placed on pages tied to specific responses to search inquiries."
A can of coke contains only about 35 mg of caffiene. So 48 cans of coke contain about 1.7 grams of caffeine - far short of the lethal amount, which is about 10 grams if taken at once.
The 48 cans of coke are about the same as 12 cups of strong coffee. I assure that many people have had more than that over a twelve hour period and survived.
Of course, if your fathers friend had an existing heart condition (for example) the high amount of caffeine and sugar could have contributed to a heart attack or something.
a) Cubic zirconium looks just as good. Many other gems that cost less actually look better.
b) Even if you have specially trained eyes that can actually tell the difference, and you have some strange need for the diamonds, then modern industrially produced diamonds are actually more pure then mined ones. You need a microscope to tell the difference, and when you do, you rule out the man made one because it is too perfect. Yet the gemstones that DeBeer's has managed to manipulate you into buying are all mined - simply because they are about status rather than beauty.
TCPA = what you need to swallow so as to make evil possible. With this evil we have added a couple of features of dubious and marginal positive effect so that people will buy astroturfs on Slashdot saying that that TCPA is ok, while Palladium (which is inevitable once TCPA is deployed) is bad.
No, that paper is a basically a bunch of mis-leading propaganda designed to obfuscate the truth that TCPA exists solely for the purpose enabling Palladium and Palladium type DRM and user controlling mechanisms.
Read the EFF report to see why if TCPA were not designed with user control in mind, they could have implemented some very simple changes (user override) to make sure that the user had access and control over all aspects of his own machine. They didn't: instead they opted for to create a system whereby the TCPA chips can be used exactly for the things they claim they have nothing to do with (shipping them with so called "Endorsement keys" which are vendor signed, user inaccessible keys that can verify to third parties that you are using an Operating System that they like).
The logic of the rebutle is backwards all over the place. For instance they claim that TCPA is not for DRM since the chips are not tamper resistant to hardware attacks: This rather shows, unlike what some people have argued, that the chips are not designed to help against things like hardware theft and corporate espionage. For DRM you don't need tamper resistance since laws like the DMCA will keep the means of tampering out of the hands of most of the population.
Also, the argument against the endorsement keys being used for DRM is something like "nobody has a system to running for signing and verifying them today" which is supposed to convince us that such a system will not exist when they are widely deployed (note that as a feature they are 100% useless without such a system.)
Last year I had a pottery course with a person who claimed her sisters, friends, dog trainers mother in law actually handled funding at DARPA. She said that this was actually a nefarious plan to speed up the development of killer robot cars that will one day rule the world!
It is important to note that cars are NOT 100 percent EMP proof; some cars will most certainly be effected, especially those with fibreglass bodies or located near large stretches of metal. (I suspect, too, that recent cars with a high percentage of IC circuitry might also be more susceptible to EMP effects.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you are trying to start some kind of debate about moral nihilism then I suggest you do-so elsewhere, I find such philosophical navel-gazing tedious in the extreme.
:-) )
If you are arguing from the perspective of a dogmatic belief in knowledge of an objective morality, then you have to either admit to being a slave to dogma or state your reason. You can't get away from justifying why my comment was stupid by calling having to so "navel-gazing".
No. Read up on the difference between "if" and "if and only if", or alternatively ask a 14 year old with a basic understanding of logic, they can probably help you out.
Umm, not. We are discussing when it is "right" to force our values on the regimes on other countries. You have claimed that there is an objective morality which allows us to do this in some cases, and they can be differentiated from other cases when it is not alright (my original post said that they can't be differentiated, and you called it stupid). Apparently, by your previous post, this objective reality makes it OK when the government of the other country is acting against the will of the "people": I am trying to push you to specify that, particularly what you mean by "people", in an attempt to show that no such standard can be sensibly derived.
This is getting dangerously near a meta-argument, which, I seem to remember, is where all of our arguments end up eventually. (Ah, the good old days!
I hold that you have not even stated, much less justified, your opinion in the matter.
The fact that the occupants of that country would want you to remove their corrupt "leadership" - that is what justifies it.
a) You have still not said what, outside your personal morality and beliefs, makes this so.
b) So you are saying it is wrong to attack a country if the government has popular support? Say that they decided to kill off 5% of the population, and the majority supported it (because majority is what you mean by "the occupants of that country", right? I want my current corrupt leadership removed, but I don't suppose that justifies anybody going to war against my country.)
Who cares where it comes from? The fact is that I, today, believe that people should be free to rule themselves to the greatest extent possible. The Nazi's or Taleban (*) did not believe this. What makes me "right" and them "wrong"? NOTHING.
What justifies me going to war against them to impose my beliefs about freedom on their country? That I can, and that I will.
My point in this whole discussion has been that the question asked in the topic is stupid.
(*) Sanity has declared opposition using Godwin's law to terminate discussions. I am using the Nazi's here only because most people agree that letting them be (even if they had let us be) would be wrong. Neither the Nazi's or the Taleban were attacked until they attacked the rest of the world, of course - I argue that they should have been and we wouldnt have needed to apologize for it.
I never claimed that such things could be justified because people wanted to be oppressed. Who said that it is right that people should get what they want, anyways?
I did not in any way endorse complicity with such governments. Read my last sentence again. I do not presume to know what "every sane person wants", and I am naturally skeptical of such claims (religious fundamentalists will also tell you what every sane person believes), but I know what I believe, and I know that those beliefs are, at least to some extent, shared by enough people and resources that those beliefs are mighty.
The only justification we have for stopping Hitler, or Bin Laden, or Hussein, is because we want to, and because we can. Nothing else.
When I equate human rights with imposing our culture on others, I do so not say that we should stop protecting human rights, but that we should stop being ashamed of imposing our cultures on others.
We do impose our culture on others. And we should. It is better (in our opinion).
I was talking about moral right and wrong, not logical. I dont think anybody is arguing that net censorship is logically wrong (hard, maybe, but obviously theoretically possible).
No, he is right. Synaptic does have a search box, but is just a front for "apt-cache search" which does search, but does a pretty piss-poor job of it. Did you try to duplicate his query for "word processor"? On debian it does result in some actual word processors, but also things like "lg-issue42 - Issue 42 of the Linux Gazette."
Try searching for "web browser" and tell me that is helpful to a newbie. Also, the package summaries displayed look frightening and not very helpful (Lindows click-and-run has the look down I think.)
(I'm not a Linux usability flamer, but searching is one place where Synaptic isn't great, and the reviewer was right to point it out.)
Are they defending human rights, or simply trying to impose their own beliefs on people from other cultures?
Is there really a difference between the two? Fundamentally, the acknowledgement of "human rights" is a system of belief, born out of our culture. Certainly there have been plenty of cultures which have not accepted any of the principles which we want to "defend" today.
On some level, the concept of "human rights" is a claim that our cultural beliefs are better, and more right, then those that do not agree with them.
Since there is no absolute source of right and wrong in the universe, our own beliefs are the best we've got. And there are certain things that we believe so strongly, that we are willing to impose them on others. What gives us the right to do this? That we are stronger. Nothing else.
We ought to see this for what it is, and stop feeling bad about it.
Swedish electricity is suppled to about 55% from hydroelectric plants, and 45% fron nuclear energy. So besides the habitat destruction of the dams (which can't be undone by riding the train less), the electicity in question really is environmentally friendly.
You bet people are still falling for them...
(Sorry about linking to the moonies. I was gonna say it is a wire story, but it's UPI which is also the moonies of course. Whatever.)
The problem with hard drug availability, prison overcrowding, and rising violence in society have the same root cause: rising immorality due to removing God from the equation. Has nothing to do with the War on Drugs.
You posting to Slashdot now, Osama?
Using warez terminology though, something taped from the audience with a smuggled in camera is called a "cam".
The word "telesync" is used for something shot from the projectionist booth in an empty cinema, with the sound sourced directly from the movie. Telesyncs require the aid of the cinema owner of projectionist, cams simply require somebody to do what the guy in the story attempted. I have seen movies that people called telesyncs which where really just good cams though.
As the grandparent noted, the best quality are "screeners". Screener, of course, is an old Hollywood name for the tapes given to actors/reviewers/awards judges etc. These are/were often in DVD form, allowing for perfect ripping. You know you are watching a screener when the "Not distribution, if you purchased this tape, please call 1-800-NO-COPIES" text or some version thereof, appears at the bottom.
Hollywood are fighting screener leaks by watermarking them, so that they can find out who is supplying the groups. They are fighting cams by way of methods like this (though it is dubious whether it will work - most cams I have seen have been shot outside the USA - Singapore, which often gets films early for the far east - seems common). Presumably there is a plan in place to start watermarking the films sent to cinemas as well, to find out which projectionists are allowing telesyncs to be made.
Anyway, if people stop making cams, I don't think anyone will be very upset. Only an idiot would watch a Cam of his own free will. Telesyncs are often not a lot better. Most hardcore downloaders I know will shun everything that isn't a screener - better to wait until the DVD comes at which point high quality copies are plentiful.
(Queue the Slashdot "piracy is BAAADD" choir. Can copy - will copy. Trying to stop people is stupid.)
if replacing, reuse the old one as an MP3 server o
I think this is questionable environmental (as well as economic) advice. A computer, even without a monitor, will probably be eating sixty watts or so, while using a docked iPod or similiar runs maybe five watts. That's 55*24*365 = 481 kWh per year of electricity, which in most cases comes from burning fossil fuels (that in turn needed to be explored, mined/drilled, transported), compared to the production of a new device.
I am far from convinced which is better...
VoteHere has revealed _some_ source code, which may or may not be what is used in their machines. Unless the machines are produced in a truly open fashion, the fact that they have made some code available for viewing means very little.
It has been covered here before.
I love the speed increases that the 2.6 kernel has achieved on the desktop (and for things like media: mplayer never bugs out with that charming "YOUR COMPUTER IS TOO SLOW" message anymore). However, I don't know if it can be considered even remotely stable. Since switching, my uptime has been a Windows like joke.
For example:
- The conversion to ALSA works great, but the modules for OSS compatibility segfault whenever an app tries to use them. Segfaults in the kernel are fun! There is pretty much nothing to do but reboot after that.
- Firewire and sbp2 support is completely broken. Ironically this has, I believe, more from "experimental" in 2.4 to a normal feature, yet it worked fine before and now doesn't work at all (the linux1394 forums forums reflect that I am not alone in this). Trying to copy data to sbp2 drives segfaults, hangs, and worse. Beware of connecting to 2.6 if you have a firewire drive with data you hold dear...
I'm sure there is more, but I am forced to return to the land of 2.4 most of the time. Now, I'm not complaining about the quality: if I want working 1394 drivers I ought to write some or shut up about it, but I am questioning to what extent 2.6 should have been released, if even after four releases basic things are completely broken...
Since when is this an April Fool's joke?
It's actually called Palladium, and Microsoft is rolling it out together with Longhorn. The necessary hardware modification, in the form of TCPA or the Phoenix DRM bios, are already around the corner.
From The Register:
Capitalizing on the pre-IPO frenzy that accompanies every new Google feature, the company issued a spoof press release today - of all days! - in which co-founder Sergey Brin says, "And while developing Gmail was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we're pleased to be able to offer it to the user who asked for it."
The service is real, however. The advertisement injection has sparked fierce internal debates, reports The NY Times. "Many people inside the company are worried that users might fear that the content of their e-mail messages could be used to tailor individual advertising messages, much as ad messages are now placed on pages tied to specific responses to search inquiries."
A can of coke contains only about 35 mg of caffiene. So 48 cans of coke contain about 1.7 grams of caffeine - far short of the lethal amount, which is about 10 grams if taken at once.
The 48 cans of coke are about the same as 12 cups of strong coffee. I assure that many people have had more than that over a twelve hour period and survived.
Of course, if your fathers friend had an existing heart condition (for example) the high amount of caffeine and sugar could have contributed to a heart attack or something.
a) Cubic zirconium looks just as good. Many other gems that cost less actually look better.
b) Even if you have specially trained eyes that can actually tell the difference, and you have some strange need for the diamonds, then modern industrially produced diamonds are actually more pure then mined ones. You need a microscope to tell the difference, and when you do, you rule out the man made one because it is too perfect. Yet the gemstones that DeBeer's has managed to manipulate you into buying are all mined - simply because they are about status rather than beauty.
It's a Unix system!
TCPA=good, Palladium=evil. ;)
NO!
The true definition is:
Palladium = evil.
TCPA = what you need to swallow so as to make evil possible. With this evil we have added a couple of features of dubious and marginal positive effect so that people will buy astroturfs on Slashdot saying that that TCPA is ok, while Palladium (which is inevitable once TCPA is deployed) is bad.
No, that paper is a basically a bunch of mis-leading propaganda designed to obfuscate the truth that TCPA exists solely for the purpose enabling Palladium and Palladium type DRM and user controlling mechanisms.
Read the EFF report to see why if TCPA were not designed with user control in mind, they could have implemented some very simple changes (user override) to make sure that the user had access and control over all aspects of his own machine. They didn't: instead they opted for to create a system whereby the TCPA chips can be used exactly for the things they claim they have nothing to do with (shipping them with so called "Endorsement keys" which are vendor signed, user inaccessible keys that can verify to third parties that you are using an Operating System that they like).
The logic of the rebutle is backwards all over the place. For instance they claim that TCPA is not for DRM since the chips are not tamper resistant to hardware attacks: This rather shows, unlike what some people have argued, that the chips are not designed to help against things like hardware theft and corporate espionage. For DRM you don't need tamper resistance since laws like the DMCA will keep the means of tampering out of the hands of most of the population.
Also, the argument against the endorsement keys being used for DRM is something like "nobody has a system to running for signing and verifying them today" which is supposed to convince us that such a system will not exist when they are widely deployed (note that as a feature they are 100% useless without such a system.)
Screw google, look at the source!
Informative? Wait I can do this do:
Last year I had a pottery course with a person who claimed her sisters, friends, dog trainers mother in law actually handled funding at DARPA. She said that this was actually a nefarious plan to speed up the development of killer robot cars that will one day rule the world!
Read your own link:
It is important to note that cars are NOT 100 percent EMP proof; some cars will most certainly be effected, especially those with fibreglass bodies or located near large stretches of metal. (I suspect, too, that recent cars with a high percentage of IC circuitry might also be more susceptible to EMP effects.)