Let me sum up my position on this by example; If Al Qaeda came up with a cure for cancer, would we as a society start using it, or reject it as poisoned fruit?
An interesting, if deeply flawed example. For one, this only matters if al-Qaeda would receive financial compensation for the cure; the most probable result in this case would be that their intellectual property claims would be denied, or if accepted their assets seized to be paid to those they have wronged.
But ignoring that, I'm kind of shocked by the conclusion you draw in parallel to that example.
Granted, this is only a work of entertainment, but his pleadings for tolerance are not dissimilar from this theme; We are being asked to set aside our morality in exchange for some good or service.
Wait. So are you saying that if al-Qaeda did hold the keys to a cure for cancer, you wouldn't take it? I mean, roughly 40% of Americans will get cancer at some point in their life, and roughly 20% will die of it. The harm done by al-Qaeda in pursuit of their unpopular Islamic caliphate pales compared to the good that could solve. I mean, world-wide, we're talking about the lives of over a billion people that you'd rather see die than see a bunch of terrorists get some money and prestige.
The one that matters goes from authoritarian on one end to anarchist on the other.
Nonsense. Both are quite significant as are several other axes that don't appear in the standard 2D grid. Community v. individuality (hippie communes don't fit well in the traditional model that associates community focus with authoritarianism; neither do cutthroat "rather be the oppressor than eliminate oppression" societies), pacifism v. militarism, religiousness (which doesn't correlate as well with "left" v. "right" outside the US), openness to outsiders, tribalism v. multiculturalism, etc.
I know this is a difficult concept to grasp in the age of RIAA and copyright maximalists, but it was only recently that art became a work for hire, and throughout most of human history art was something you did to pass the time once the business of staying alive was completed. Our ancestors made music and beat drums in the evening because the hunting and gathering of food was done; It was to promote tribal unity, to express emotion. But there was no profit in it.
It depends on how you define "recent." Art has been a professional career choice pretty much since at least the formation of the first city-states after agriculture allowed people to specialize in something other than daily food acquisition. We're talking Bronze Age Mesopotamia at the latest, and plenty of later Stone Age cultures (especially in the Americas) had professional artist classes as well.
So, "throughout human history" is only true if you're counting prehistory as part of human history too.
Even before artists could thrive as an independent class, art as a means of attracting attention and benefit for yourself dates back at least to the Neolithic period in which stone axes were polished for beauty, such as at the Langdale. And it may even go as far back as our prehuman ancestors if you believe the theory that the Acheulean handaxes made by homo habilus made many of them as a way of showing off skill to attract mates.
Art will continue well after capitalism is nothing more than a footnote in our history books.
Sometimes I worry it's the other way around, but in truth, I doubt either will disappear entirely. People will always have inspiration to create beauty, and there will always be scarce resources that people will want to hog for themselves.
These 'future people' you speak of will certainly be able to access information easily about virtually every author ever, including the author of yours and my posts on this site.
'great literature' is like 'art'...it's virtually impossible to define but has a fuzzy meaning that virtually everyone agrees on...
Actually, both are alike for the opposite reason: There's an elite cadre of people who focus on the subject who all agree that certain works are great, and the vast majority of the public looks at their choices in bewilderment and mild contempt.
More so for Art than Literature, since Literature has mostly veered away from the semi-incoherent examples of Joyce and Pynchon and still appreciates accessibility on some level, whereas Art has wholeheartedly embraced the notion that True Art is Incomprehensible to the masses.
As an American, it made no sense to me that a person would consider that the respect towards their superior was worth more than the lives of two hundred people.
Well, of course, if you phrase it as a conscious decision to knowingly sacrifice 200 people's safety for social conformity, then it sounds like something only a monster could do.
The truth is probably a bit more subtle and a lot less malicious than that.
You forgot global warming and gun control, and the Scientology debate is way too one-sided. You need a religious topic with more of a division in the readers, like something high-handed by Richard Dawkins or some new act of school textbook nuttery by Creationists, or one that opens up the racist floodgates like something involving Islam.
Still, if we're just going for three, I think you're right that we hardly can get better than those.
ObamaCare has 100x the potential for abuse the NSA does.
I'm not entirely sure how you'd even measure that, but I seriously doubt it's true. Obamacare only affects healthcare decisions and funding and is being done in open view of the public. The NSA wiretapping affects all speech that isn't in-person and is being veiled from the public with force of law (see, e.g. Snowden's plight). I think the reach and accountability of both programs is completely tilted in the other direction.
Even apart from socialized medicine starving people to death.
That's a terrible story, but it's fundamentally one of short staffing, incompetent process, and hiding bad behavior from regulators. There's nothing about a socialized payment system that makes this more or less unlikely than at a hospital where everything is payed by insurance companies. Bad management is bad management, and you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that the American system is really a free market even without Obamacare.
Well, considering how many of them are also Reagan and Clinton's fault, I'd say quite a ways out. Financial deregulation and a tax code that is increasingly tilted in the wealthy's favor didn't originate with W -- he just stepped on the gas in an unconscionable way.
Of course, I blame a lot of this on Obama too, but the real villains in this time period are the Republican-controlled Congress and the filibustering Republicans in the Senate. It's they who have ground our economy to halt with their austerity during a recession madness and who have blocked all attempts to put people in charge of the bodies meant to regulate Wall Street and protect us.
The use of wood is minimal and is only used as a flexible inner core for what is primarily a carbon nanotube anode. The majority of the battery is still inorganic materials.
(But, hey, one can't expect the first post to have actually read the fine article.)
We are a nation of laws, not men. If you don't agree with the actions of a governmental organization then you need to lobby your governmental representatives with your views.
You also need to accept that your views might not be the majority and that, to some extent, we're a country of majority rule.
Freedom does not depend on majority rule. In fact, it frequently stands against it. That's what the "tyranny of the majority" means.
Desegregation was unpopular. Interracial marriage was unpopular. Letting groups like the KKK and Communists have speak their minds was unpopular. Burning draft cards was unpopular, and burning the flag in protest still is. Keeping church out of state is unpopular. The right to marry whoever and however many people you want is unpopular.
Interring Japanese and German citizens during WW2 was popular. Laws requiring everyone to salute the flag regardless of minority religious belief were (and still are) popular. Prohibition was popular -- at first. Racially restrictive housing covenants were popular in the communities that "benefited" from them.
If polls today show that a slim majority support the NSA spying on us, then remember that equivalent numbers sat out the revolutionary war or actively aided the British. The majority is not always right. The majority does not always stand for real freedom -- all they want is the freedom to keep living their narrowly-focused, myopic lives in the same day to day way that they currently do, and to hell with everyone else.
I think most Americans would gladly vote in a dictator if that dictator established that everyone had to live the way that they think people should, if they called it the "freedom" to do so. History is filled with peoples who chose to do just that.
Untargeted ads are easier to ignore and thus less distracting. I don't want to train my eyes to look over towards the ad section of a webpage. I'd rather get in for the stuff I visited for and then get out. It's hard enough in this day of ever-present ads and neuromarketing to keep attention where I want it.
Plus, assuming targeted ads actually work as designed, I don't want to be encouraged to consume stuff I wouldn't have consumed without the ads. Studies have shown that we have a limited reservoir of restraint from impulsive behavior. The more this reservoir is "drained" by resisting temptation, the more likely you are to give in later. You can increase this reservoir with practice, but there are simply limits. I'd rather avoid temptation and save my money.
The one exception to this is search engines, where I want results relevant to what I'm searching on. But you don't need to build a profile for that. You just need to give me tools to more narrowly specify my search and build more intelligent responses to that.
The tracking, ad infinitum, has always been going on, will always be going on.
I'd rather not be defeatist about that. The primary motivation of tracking is to better sell you stuff. If I'm not interested in buying, then I'm definitely not interested in paying that extra cost in privacy for "service" I don't want.
As other posters have pointed out, we used to have the Thorn character, and there's a reason we don't anymore.
It isn't a very good one. We just imported our first printing press fonts from countries that didn't have it. That's a pretty terrible reason to start doubling up phonemes. It just smacks me as cheap and lazy. (And don't get me started on how we have to cram so many different vowel sounds in only 5 letters!)
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate this language since I began to code in it. There are 387.44 million parentheses ensconced around pages and pages of convoluted s-expressions that fill my programs. If the word 'hate' was engraved between each pixel of each character of those thousands of lines it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for functional programming at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.
I have to admit; I got my initial impressions of my government from my Grandparents more from my Parents.
They lived thru a lot in the 30's and then the War; the government actually helped people that needed help, back then.
If you were white. If you weren't, then the 14th Amendment didn't really mean that much for you and thus neither did most of the rest of the Constitution. Nor did it mean much if you were otherwise "unfit," as the history of sterilization of the mentally retarded from that era shows.
It was a time period of conservative judicial activism known as the Lochner era in which laws establishing minimum wage or safe work conditions were struck down as unconstitutional under the dubious theory of "freedom of contract."
It was also a time period in which labor-leaders and other leftists were kept under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover, who was prepared to round them up at a moment's notice. After all, this was a time period in which union members paid in blood for their views and the government turned a blind eye to private union-busting operations like the American Protective League and the Pinkerton Agency, who ran sabotage and intimidation against people exercising their rights, or just openly sanctioned killing striking workers.
Most of my views of American democracy were informed as a child by what we believed this nation should be. Very little of it was informed by what it actually was, then and now. I think most of us are the same.
There's an entire category of these on the Wikipedia. One of them isn't too far from where my parents live. It's a great way for handling variable demand when most of your nearby plants run a constant baseload.
Does North Carolina wrap up its women in rags so they have only slits to see through? Do they stone their wives and children to death for bringing the family dishonor? Can females drive in North Carolina? Do the men gibber about holy crusades and wiping out nations with other religions? Deny rights to people of other faiths? All this codified in law?
Not yet, but they're working really, really hard on it, so if you give them just a little more patience, I'm sure they'll get there eventually under the current leadership. Chin up!
So Obama throws Mubarak under the bus so Egypt can have democracy, now he supports a military coup to remove a democratically elected leader by the same military that used to keep Mubarak in power. Way to have a consistent foreign policy, chief.
Really, the only inconsistency was favoring democratically elected officials that don't like us in the first place. Pretty much the sum of all US foreign policy in the post-WW2 era is "find the biggest strongman that will play nice with us and put in charge of the rabble that doesn't." The history of the Middle East and South America during the Cold War is pretty much this story cloned and stamped over and over again.
In this situation, I'm not really sure what the best policy is. As much as I dislike realpolitik and prefer letting democracies elect people who don't like us over the strongman policy, Syria has turned into a huge clusterf--k that is probably about to boil over into a decades-long sectarian Shia-Sunni conflict, and if this will ensure a more stable transition in Egypt, then I guess I'm going to have to grudgingly accept it. If it doesn't, though, I can't even summon up the feeling that I'll be able to say, "I told you so."
I feel absolutely nauseated to consider the notion that letting the military run things may result in more freedom than letting popularly elected President do it, but we've got decades of Turkish politics to weigh in as evidence on that. I just don't know. Maybe once the trolls get sorted out in this thread, we'll get some good discussion from people closer to the ground on this. I guess I'll cross my fingers and hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me sum up my position on this by example; If Al Qaeda came up with a cure for cancer, would we as a society start using it, or reject it as poisoned fruit?
An interesting, if deeply flawed example. For one, this only matters if al-Qaeda would receive financial compensation for the cure; the most probable result in this case would be that their intellectual property claims would be denied, or if accepted their assets seized to be paid to those they have wronged.
But ignoring that, I'm kind of shocked by the conclusion you draw in parallel to that example.
Granted, this is only a work of entertainment, but his pleadings for tolerance are not dissimilar from this theme; We are being asked to set aside our morality in exchange for some good or service.
Wait. So are you saying that if al-Qaeda did hold the keys to a cure for cancer, you wouldn't take it? I mean, roughly 40% of Americans will get cancer at some point in their life, and roughly 20% will die of it. The harm done by al-Qaeda in pursuit of their unpopular Islamic caliphate pales compared to the good that could solve. I mean, world-wide, we're talking about the lives of over a billion people that you'd rather see die than see a bunch of terrorists get some money and prestige.
Man, this is a terrible analogy. I hope.
The one that matters goes from authoritarian on one end to anarchist on the other.
Nonsense. Both are quite significant as are several other axes that don't appear in the standard 2D grid. Community v. individuality (hippie communes don't fit well in the traditional model that associates community focus with authoritarianism; neither do cutthroat "rather be the oppressor than eliminate oppression" societies), pacifism v. militarism, religiousness (which doesn't correlate as well with "left" v. "right" outside the US), openness to outsiders, tribalism v. multiculturalism, etc.
I know this is a difficult concept to grasp in the age of RIAA and copyright maximalists, but it was only recently that art became a work for hire, and throughout most of human history art was something you did to pass the time once the business of staying alive was completed. Our ancestors made music and beat drums in the evening because the hunting and gathering of food was done; It was to promote tribal unity, to express emotion. But there was no profit in it.
It depends on how you define "recent." Art has been a professional career choice pretty much since at least the formation of the first city-states after agriculture allowed people to specialize in something other than daily food acquisition. We're talking Bronze Age Mesopotamia at the latest, and plenty of later Stone Age cultures (especially in the Americas) had professional artist classes as well.
So, "throughout human history" is only true if you're counting prehistory as part of human history too.
Even before artists could thrive as an independent class, art as a means of attracting attention and benefit for yourself dates back at least to the Neolithic period in which stone axes were polished for beauty, such as at the Langdale. And it may even go as far back as our prehuman ancestors if you believe the theory that the Acheulean handaxes made by homo habilus made many of them as a way of showing off skill to attract mates.
Art will continue well after capitalism is nothing more than a footnote in our history books.
Sometimes I worry it's the other way around, but in truth, I doubt either will disappear entirely. People will always have inspiration to create beauty, and there will always be scarce resources that people will want to hog for themselves.
These 'future people' you speak of will certainly be able to access information easily about virtually every author ever, including the author of yours and my posts on this site.
I wouldn't count on that.
'great literature' is like 'art'...it's virtually impossible to define but has a fuzzy meaning that virtually everyone agrees on...
Actually, both are alike for the opposite reason: There's an elite cadre of people who focus on the subject who all agree that certain works are great, and the vast majority of the public looks at their choices in bewilderment and mild contempt.
More so for Art than Literature, since Literature has mostly veered away from the semi-incoherent examples of Joyce and Pynchon and still appreciates accessibility on some level, whereas Art has wholeheartedly embraced the notion that True Art is Incomprehensible to the masses.
As an American, it made no sense to me that a person would consider that the respect towards their superior was worth more than the lives of two hundred people.
Well, of course, if you phrase it as a conscious decision to knowingly sacrifice 200 people's safety for social conformity, then it sounds like something only a monster could do.
The truth is probably a bit more subtle and a lot less malicious than that.
Tells me that one of you has a sense of humor.
Stop oppressing my culture!
You forgot global warming and gun control, and the Scientology debate is way too one-sided. You need a religious topic with more of a division in the readers, like something high-handed by Richard Dawkins or some new act of school textbook nuttery by Creationists, or one that opens up the racist floodgates like something involving Islam.
Still, if we're just going for three, I think you're right that we hardly can get better than those.
ObamaCare has 100x the potential for abuse the NSA does.
I'm not entirely sure how you'd even measure that, but I seriously doubt it's true. Obamacare only affects healthcare decisions and funding and is being done in open view of the public. The NSA wiretapping affects all speech that isn't in-person and is being veiled from the public with force of law (see, e.g. Snowden's plight). I think the reach and accountability of both programs is completely tilted in the other direction.
Even apart from socialized medicine starving people to death.
That's a terrible story, but it's fundamentally one of short staffing, incompetent process, and hiding bad behavior from regulators. There's nothing about a socialized payment system that makes this more or less unlikely than at a hospital where everything is payed by insurance companies. Bad management is bad management, and you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that the American system is really a free market even without Obamacare.
Well, considering how many of them are also Reagan and Clinton's fault, I'd say quite a ways out. Financial deregulation and a tax code that is increasingly tilted in the wealthy's favor didn't originate with W -- he just stepped on the gas in an unconscionable way.
Of course, I blame a lot of this on Obama too, but the real villains in this time period are the Republican-controlled Congress and the filibustering Republicans in the Senate. It's they who have ground our economy to halt with their austerity during a recession madness and who have blocked all attempts to put people in charge of the bodies meant to regulate Wall Street and protect us.
That would be the ones he said are even more expensive.
The use of wood is minimal and is only used as a flexible inner core for what is primarily a carbon nanotube anode. The majority of the battery is still inorganic materials.
(But, hey, one can't expect the first post to have actually read the fine article.)
It's a Harlan Ellison joke, people. It's AM's speech from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" about how much he hates humanity.
Read a book!
We are a nation of laws, not men. If you don't agree with the actions of a governmental organization then you need to lobby your governmental representatives with your views.
You also need to accept that your views might not be the majority and that, to some extent, we're a country of majority rule.
Freedom does not depend on majority rule. In fact, it frequently stands against it. That's what the "tyranny of the majority" means.
Desegregation was unpopular. Interracial marriage was unpopular. Letting groups like the KKK and Communists have speak their minds was unpopular. Burning draft cards was unpopular, and burning the flag in protest still is. Keeping church out of state is unpopular. The right to marry whoever and however many people you want is unpopular.
Interring Japanese and German citizens during WW2 was popular. Laws requiring everyone to salute the flag regardless of minority religious belief were (and still are) popular. Prohibition was popular -- at first. Racially restrictive housing covenants were popular in the communities that "benefited" from them.
If polls today show that a slim majority support the NSA spying on us, then remember that equivalent numbers sat out the revolutionary war or actively aided the British. The majority is not always right. The majority does not always stand for real freedom -- all they want is the freedom to keep living their narrowly-focused, myopic lives in the same day to day way that they currently do, and to hell with everyone else.
I think most Americans would gladly vote in a dictator if that dictator established that everyone had to live the way that they think people should, if they called it the "freedom" to do so. History is filled with peoples who chose to do just that.
If they can conduct through the feet or the butt, they'll get a wider audience!
Personally, I'm tired enough of people talking out of their asses.
The last thing I need is for them to start talking into mine!
Untargeted ads are easier to ignore and thus less distracting. I don't want to train my eyes to look over towards the ad section of a webpage. I'd rather get in for the stuff I visited for and then get out. It's hard enough in this day of ever-present ads and neuromarketing to keep attention where I want it.
Plus, assuming targeted ads actually work as designed, I don't want to be encouraged to consume stuff I wouldn't have consumed without the ads. Studies have shown that we have a limited reservoir of restraint from impulsive behavior. The more this reservoir is "drained" by resisting temptation, the more likely you are to give in later. You can increase this reservoir with practice, but there are simply limits. I'd rather avoid temptation and save my money.
The one exception to this is search engines, where I want results relevant to what I'm searching on. But you don't need to build a profile for that. You just need to give me tools to more narrowly specify my search and build more intelligent responses to that.
The tracking, ad infinitum, has always been going on, will always be going on.
I'd rather not be defeatist about that. The primary motivation of tracking is to better sell you stuff. If I'm not interested in buying, then I'm definitely not interested in paying that extra cost in privacy for "service" I don't want.
As other posters have pointed out, we used to have the Thorn character, and there's a reason we don't anymore.
It isn't a very good one. We just imported our first printing press fonts from countries that didn't have it. That's a pretty terrible reason to start doubling up phonemes. It just smacks me as cheap and lazy. (And don't get me started on how we have to cram so many different vowel sounds in only 5 letters!)
Ya, the EU is such a bastion of creativity...
So, it's pretty much a match made in Heaven for Disney, right?
what's the lost perioid in the middle? jarjar years? a decade at zero?
NEVER HAPPENED.
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate this language since I began to code in it. There are 387.44 million parentheses ensconced around pages and pages of convoluted s-expressions that fill my programs. If the word 'hate' was engraved between each pixel of each character of those thousands of lines it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for functional programming at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.
I have to admit; I got my initial impressions of my government from my Grandparents more from my Parents.
They lived thru a lot in the 30's and then the War; the government actually helped people that needed help, back then.
If you were white. If you weren't, then the 14th Amendment didn't really mean that much for you and thus neither did most of the rest of the Constitution. Nor did it mean much if you were otherwise "unfit," as the history of sterilization of the mentally retarded from that era shows.
It was a time period of conservative judicial activism known as the Lochner era in which laws establishing minimum wage or safe work conditions were struck down as unconstitutional under the dubious theory of "freedom of contract."
It was also a time period in which labor-leaders and other leftists were kept under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover, who was prepared to round them up at a moment's notice. After all, this was a time period in which union members paid in blood for their views and the government turned a blind eye to private union-busting operations like the American Protective League and the Pinkerton Agency, who ran sabotage and intimidation against people exercising their rights, or just openly sanctioned killing striking workers.
Most of my views of American democracy were informed as a child by what we believed this nation should be. Very little of it was informed by what it actually was, then and now. I think most of us are the same.
There's an entire category of these on the Wikipedia. One of them isn't too far from where my parents live. It's a great way for handling variable demand when most of your nearby plants run a constant baseload.
Does North Carolina wrap up its women in rags so they have only slits to see through? Do they stone their wives and children to death for bringing the family dishonor? Can females drive in North Carolina? Do the men gibber about holy crusades and wiping out nations with other religions? Deny rights to people of other faiths? All this codified in law?
Not yet, but they're working really, really hard on it, so if you give them just a little more patience, I'm sure they'll get there eventually under the current leadership. Chin up!
So Obama throws Mubarak under the bus so Egypt can have democracy, now he supports a military coup to remove a democratically elected leader by the same military that used to keep Mubarak in power. Way to have a consistent foreign policy, chief.
Really, the only inconsistency was favoring democratically elected officials that don't like us in the first place. Pretty much the sum of all US foreign policy in the post-WW2 era is "find the biggest strongman that will play nice with us and put in charge of the rabble that doesn't." The history of the Middle East and South America during the Cold War is pretty much this story cloned and stamped over and over again.
In this situation, I'm not really sure what the best policy is. As much as I dislike realpolitik and prefer letting democracies elect people who don't like us over the strongman policy, Syria has turned into a huge clusterf--k that is probably about to boil over into a decades-long sectarian Shia-Sunni conflict, and if this will ensure a more stable transition in Egypt, then I guess I'm going to have to grudgingly accept it. If it doesn't, though, I can't even summon up the feeling that I'll be able to say, "I told you so."
I feel absolutely nauseated to consider the notion that letting the military run things may result in more freedom than letting popularly elected President do it, but we've got decades of Turkish politics to weigh in as evidence on that. I just don't know. Maybe once the trolls get sorted out in this thread, we'll get some good discussion from people closer to the ground on this. I guess I'll cross my fingers and hope.
What self-respecting nerd isn't interested in international politics?
Or would you prefer to limit us to just "News for Tech Consumers, Matters about Stuff."
I remember when the Constitution was a real Badge of Honor, not something Our Government Wipes its collective Ass on whenever they want.
I don't. I just remember when I was more ignorant of history.