So Bill Gates studied the source code and benefitted from having done so? I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
Maybe you missed the part where he benefited himself at the expense of others. I think perhaps he took that lesson to heart as well as the lesson of IBM's foolishness in not more tightly licensing MS-DOS.
There is no moral dilemma in "killing" a zombie, because it's already dead. People with Rage aren't dead, the're sick. It's entirely possible that a cure could be found, and so killing someone with Rage is taking a life (even though it's self-defense.)
In theory is one thing, but in practice they don't. At least not in time to save them from dying before "28 Weeks Later." Self-defense matters. If a ravening horde is out to kill you and everyone you know, it doesn't really matter whether they could be saved or not if you don't have the means to do so and if waiting for someone else to cure them means dying. All of the dramatic tension in a zombie film comes from scenes where it's "kill or die."
And yet... people who kill or abuse zombies that aren't trying to attack them are still somehow portrayed as heartless and evil despite the justification that they're dead anyway. It seems that's not really a huge part of the equation.
Does that logic also apply to Unicorns, Pixies, Fairies etc? Are you agnostic about Hobbits for example?
Of course not; that's a silly strawman. Those all have physical manifestations and should have been seen by somebody if they exist, and the invention of the notion of Hobbits has a well-documented origin in the mind of one man. Neither of those traits apply to an ineffable, unmanifested Creator.
Note nothing logically favors any one specific form of God over another and that logic might even lean against certain notions of divinity, such as an active God who continues to perform miracles in the world today or a God that walks amongst humans.
However, on certain questions there's no logically better answer: - How did all of existence come into being? On its own or with an external force? - Does consciousness persist after death? Is there an afterlife? - Is the current state of the universe purely random or fitting a design?
You simply can't prove or disprove an answer to these questions. They are beyond the reach of formal logic.
It's funny that you mention unicorns, because the Invisible Pink Unicorn is a popular strawman for attacking faith. It's important to point out that you can't actually disprove that it exists; there's no more logical basis for concluding that they don't exist than for concluding that they do. However, that doesn't mean that it's not healthy to go ahead and make an assumption there; sanity requires that people take a few things on faith alone.
Hey, I remember the last time I heard of that movie. It was when I showed a group of friends this XKCD comic. It was the universal consensus of all who had seen "Zombie Jesus" that it fell well into the category of So Bad It's Horrible.
I would argue that zombies are nothing related to a fear, but rather the geek's hope for a post-apocalyptic world where they can go back to the basics.
Dunno 'bout you, but most of the survivalist nuts that I know that would welcome a zombie apocalypse fall more into the "jock" than "nerd" stereotype. Personally, I like my air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and internet access which all rely on a stable society. I also like the prospect of seeing how society will advance, which is pretty much all over when the hordes start ravening.
. . . pets peeve, tries to calm down, wonder why he brought his goat anyway . ..
Okay, then, what's the functional difference? People are infected with a plague via biting (or any other blood exchange) that robs them of their humanity and turns them into cannibals doomed to eventually collapse when their food supply runs out. The plague also makes them extremely dangerous and hard to kill. Society falls apart due to the plague and the remaining uninfected throw out conventional morality in a bid for survival. There's military quarantine, there's impotent scientists, and there's all the classic scenes where people have to deal with their loved one turning.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. It's not like all other movie zombies are undead, and few have any resemblance to the Haitian Voodou origins of the word "zombie." The rage-infected humans in that movie ARE zombies as much as the monsters of any other zombie apocalypse film are and as much as the "vampires" from "I Am Legend" are. They'd even be zombies if the origin of the plague was parasitic wasps (Dead Rising) or alien parasites (Slither).
I think that's a remarkably clever analogy, but most zombie films aren't about people mechanically going through the dull motions of modern corporate wage-dronehood. They're about people who have lost all sanity and grasp of the rule of law. Zombie horror is really about the collapse of society -- both in the animalistic zombies and in the traumatized survivors.
However, I think a zombie film based on your analogy would be a great parody. I mean, how would you know the difference? I think "Shaun of the Dead" plays up that joke in the end as society returns to normal with zombies acting as manual labor.
It seems that Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer [...] disagree, and they seem to have good chunk of the popular imagination in the United States.
Yes, because modern takes on ancient legends are incredibly valuable for telling us how they originated and why they seem to have been so pervasive across culture before the advent of modern communications technology.
Of all the examples he could have chosen, he chose zombies? In most films, if there is an explanation for their existence of the zombies in the film, it's usual mystical or related to disease or something (as the writer cedes).
Mystical elements were big in early films featuring zombies, but "Night of the Living Dead" has thrust the zombie apocalypse genre firmly into the sci-fi horror camp ever since. You generally don't see masses of zombie hordes bringing an end to civilization in mystical zombie films because that kind of zombie is rarely self-propogating, and a true zombie apocalypse requires that.
Ever since "Night of the Living Dead," the causes of zombie horror have mostly been either due to scientific experiments gone wrong or due to disasters caused by the march of science and technology. Let's look at a few:
Night of the Living Dead - Radiation from an exploded space probe.
Dawn of the Dead - No one knows the source of the plague, but the impotence of science to do anything is part of the collapse of authority.
Day of the Dead - The protagonists are a military/scientific team trying to reverse the plague from the above film. The head of the lab is a classic amoral scientist.
Hell of the Living Dead - Leak of a chemical actually intended to turn people in third-world countries into zombies to have them eat each other.
Night of the Comet - Weird space comet turns people who see it to dust or into zombies. Scientists were aware of the coming problem and are trying to find a solution.
Revenge of the Living Dead series - A fictional synthetic sounding gas called "Trioxin." Series features military cover ups, evil corporations, and in one of its worst sequels drug abuse.
Braindead - Disease-carrying animal brought back from the jungle to a zoo. A well-intentioned idiot keeps the initial zombies under control with injections.
Zombi 2 - Like the last movie, the plague is exposed to the world thanks to a researcher sticking his nose into unexplored territory.
28 Days Later - Not about full zombies, but the origin of the apocalyptic plague is a man-made virus escaped from a research lab -- thanks to animal rights activists, a double-whammy for people the public doesn't trust.
Resident Evil series - Biological weapon experiments by a pharmaceutical company run by madmen out to trigger the next stage of human evolution.
Dead Rising - Central American research facility intended to research a way to mass-produce cattle instead engineers wasps that can implant zombifying parasites. (Boy if that isn't an abuse of grant money, I don't know what is!)
House of the Dead - While there's a lot of tarot themes, the source of the outbreak is a mad biologist funded by an evil corporation.
Anyway, this list isn't comprehensive, but I'd say that in most movies either: (a) the plague is the result of scientists' actions usually on behalf of the military or an evil corporation, or (b) the cause for the outbreak is a natural disaster / unexplained and a part of the background of the movie is the inability of those in power (including scientists) to do anything about the situation.
Unexplained plagues are becoming far more common in the past two decades as the zombie apocalypse has become and established genre, and movie-goers don't really feel a need for an explanation for the setup. After all, these stories are really about the collapse of civilization, a more bloody version of Lord of the Flies.
Science being dangerous isn't all that important to the genre anymore, just like the Godzilla films stopped being about atomic horror long, long ago and started being more about cool giant monsters duking it out over a city. It's important to genre in the 60s-90s, but it's not such a big deal anymore.
Just like how people's love of Star Trek led geeky engineers to develop the real cell phones we have today, some researchers must be working on development of a real zombie virus to use as a military weapon. We've seen this theme in movies several times. If it's at all possible, it will happen sooner or later.
Except that cellphones are useful and biological weapons are incredibly stupid. Unlike radioactive or chemical weapons, highly contagious biological weapons are the only ones that guarantee an enemy's ability to retaliate in kind and that guarantee that allies and neutral parties will be harmed. Creating a zombie plague would is the kind of thing that only a total misanthrope out to destroy civilization would try -- not a military organization or even a terrorist group.
If it is not changed, then sooner or later we will end up with two separate "internets" and we will all be poorer as a result.
How will we be poorer? If we end up splitting the domain system, there will be interoperability bridges created, and I don't really see any huge difference between the current system where Chinese people read Chinese pages and Americans read English pages than a system where you have a slightly harder time getting to pages 90%+ of the people who speak the same language as you can't read anyway. Those who have a special interest will go to the minor technical trouble to get both DNS systems, and those who don't won't notice the difference.
You mean I can buy an entire town for $3,000,000? That's not a lot of money for a bunch of buildings and some land.
No kidding. It's about $30K per person to go find somewhere else to live. It's condemnation money.
So what do you do with a polluted site?
One this big? Generally nothing. You put up a fence and don't let people live there. It's not worth the money to fix compared to the cost of just developing unspoiled lands.
don't care if long prison terms create nicely-behaved perfect citizens. Long prison terms keep poorly-behaved flawed citizens from F*ing with the nicely behaved perfect citizens. Where the hell did people get the notion that prison is meant to reform criminals?
Deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitance are three dominant theories of criminal punishment in the legal system and have been for a very long time. You seem to have a strong opinion on which of the three matters, but you're somewhat outside of the mainstream on that.
It's meant to keep them away from society for a set period of time. After that, they're given another chance to be a normal citizen. If they screw up again, they go back again, this time for longer. Human lifespan is finite. If they choose to spend most of theirs in a prison because they don't like the laws society has made, then so be it.
What's the point of that? First, if you can prevent them from becoming a repeat offender, then you save taxpayer money babysitting them AND you save the victims of future crimes from having to experience those crimes AND you get a productive citizen.
Rehabilitation is simply the best possible solution to criminal behavior, and the only reason we don't pursue it as our #1 goal is that it's really freaking hard and previous reform efforts seems to fail. We only put up with incapacitance due to the fact that some people *don't* learn and need to be separated, not because incapacitance is a superior outcome to having a functional person again. A system that just breaks people without regard for their potential to learn from their mistakes is just pointless and sadistic.
I mean, look how many people's lives are ruined just because they got caught smoking a lot of pot. I'm anti-legalization, but if we fined those people instead of throwing them in the slammer, they'd be more likely to be productive citizens in 20 years than under the current system. Long-term incapacitance is pointless there like it is for many other non-violent offenses.
The US is unique among democracies in the length and frequency of its prison sentences. The US has 22% of the entire world's prison population (and only 4% of the total world population) and more than quadruple the average percentage of our population in prison. We spend $37 billion/year on prisons, which is about the GDP of Guatemala (only #77 on the list of countries by GDP!), and is about twice what we spend on NASA. Do you really think that just locking up people and neglecting what they're going to be like when they come out is good fiscal policy? Seems to me like we're wasting a lot of taxpayer dollars that could be saved if we helped the prisoners that can be helped.
Does your rib cage and pelvis flare out to make you egg-shaped, does your lower jaw jut forwards, and is your skull elongated? Seriously, look at a Neaderthal skeleton side-by-side with a human one. A heavy brow is the least of a Neanderthal's odd traits.
Also, there's no evidence that Neanderthals were hairier than humans.
Seriously, cut it out. Nothing I'm saying here is all that awesome. I even got the quote wrong. I've got a 5-digit UID, and I don't need more karma. Spread the love.
I lost faith in antitrust law when they failed to do anything significant to Microsoft. Or to Rambus. Or when AT&T recombined (which I want to go ahead and say was mostly symbolic to me and not an actual antitrust threat). Or how the FTC, DOJ, and other agencies have repeatedly declined to get involved hundreds of major mergers beyond a cursory investigation in the past few decades. Or how the Obama administration appointed dozens of RIAA & MPAA friendly attorneys to the DOJ. Or when I found out that there's an exemption in antitrust law for health insurance companies under the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act. (So why not record labels given bipartisan love for them?)
I vaguely remembered the MPAA & RIAA seeking an exemption a few years ago. It was part of the EnFORCE Act of 2003, but it apparently never passed. (I find myself cynically surprised.) I've always been struck by how flagrantly the RIAA & MPAA look like cartels and have long assumed that the reason they haven't been successfully sued was some kind of special legal loophole for them. Seems that there are a few long-running suits by sued file-sharing companies against the industries for antitrust violations that haven't been resolved (instead of simply losing and going away like I assumed).
Anyway, it seems to me like Redbox may have shot at this. I hope they win, but precedent that someone posted later in the discussion suggests that they may not. I find myself lacking much in the way of hope there.
No. But any attempt at colonialism, slavery, pillage, torture, misogyny, class-ism, caste, and rape needs to be stepped upon. More directly, any organization that espouses these ideals needs to be stepped upon.
Of course. No one sane would disagree -- unless it was their own group doing it. (See post-Abu Ghraib acceptance of torture in the US and support for firebombing Cambodia during Vietnam before and after we started doing it.) Humans are frighteningly good at rationalizing away the evil of their own groups.
The flaw in your idea there is that people, white or otherwise, are not the same as religion.
Well, yes and no. Race is but one arbitrary line to draw between people, but it's an extremely important one because tied to the core evolutionary trait that drives most human conflict -- social hierarchies and the instinctual drives needed to facilitate competition between them (i.e. war and genocide).
Modern, evangelical religions are actually a fascinating technological development for humanity because it allowed people of *different* ethnic backgrounds to unite underneath *one* unified set of moral codes with shared dietary, dress, and cultural shibboleths to separate the "good people" from the "dangerous savages." Before evangelical faiths, one had to be *born* into a group to be considered worthy of the protection of the gods and law. Religion gave people a way of judging whether people they had never met before were "safe" members of the same group or people who were different and thus "evil."
However, the rise of modern secularism and religious freedom has not worn away the basic human need to identify with like-minded people and to heap misery on those who are different. Right now, there's little material difference between the views that Western Democracy has of Middle Eastern Theocracy compared to what 19th Century White Christendom thought of African Savagery. "Our way of life is superior and more civilized. These people are wrong-headed for not seeing the superiority of our ways, and their way of life leads to terrible, immortal behavior." It's also no different from what atheist State Communists think of Capitalist Bourgeoisie or for that matter what Muslims think of the West in return. It's fundamentally human.
In any case, it isn't the sins of the ancestors that are the concern here: It is the fact that the religion instructed them to commit those sins, and that the religions have not changed a great deal from those days.
Well, you're ignoring the fact that the vast majority of religions preach very strongly against many of the worst atrocities committed in their name. Christianity is an extremely pacifistic religion with a huge emphasis on generosity, kindness to the downtrodden, and forgiveness. Yet, it's the same force behind the Inquisition, the Crusades, money-hungry televangelists, and a large push in American politics to resist government handouts to the poor.
Why is this? It's because it's not the actual values of a social group that matters -- its the fact that they differentiate "good people" from "bad people." It's that they enable our instincts that allow us to look at some people as less valuable than people like us. The worst genocides in history were committed by Soviet atheists who believed strongly in principles of social equity. Does that mean that atheism or egalitarianism are failed belief systems and are responsible for creating all that death? Of course not! What matters is that people in a position of power were able to scapegoat people who were different from mainstream society and to channel that destructive energy towards ill ends.
Christians murdered heretics, Communists slaughtered the religious, and America spent much of this decade torturing and bombing people in the name of Freedom and Justice for All. No belief system can protect against this wicked men exploiting mob fear and xenophobia so long as people are ignora
If you are religious, you have already disavowed the relevance of logic, so feel free to resolve your disbelief any way that you like.
I don't think you understand logic. The only purely rational stance to take in the total absence of proof or disproof of God is agnosticism. Taking a stance in any direction is a leap of faith which requires an assumption not grounded in logic.
#2 is a scary though, but truthfully, it has SOME comfort because thought a totalitarian regime is the anti-thesis of what I as an American believe in, I also know that regarding situation #1, China won't put up with that shit. If Scientology had started in China this problem would have been solved and over with DECADES ago.
Yeah, because China has completely "solved" their problem with Falun Gong and the Dalai Lama's legacy.
Basically I HOPE that our system works and prevails against this growing issue, but if we fail I'd prefer a secular Communist Dictatorship over an equally oppressive Theocracy.
I recommend you read more on the history of communism. If scientific truth is your number one issue, then Soviet history of scientific dogma shows that communism is no more safe for scientists than the church-dominated societies that gave us Gregor Mendel and Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. (See also the Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge.) Oppression is oppression, and inconvenient truths that oppose government dogma can result in the same kind of anti-intellectual purges under secular totalitarian regimes as under religious ones.
Secularism is no more immune to human mob mentality and demonization and murder of those who are different from you than religion.
Really? Because I'm the type of guy, when someone tries to push me around, I will do the opposite of what they want just to show them they shouldn't try to push people around. Screw these bozos, I'll put off buying any new movies until they quite this greedy behavior.
So am I, but I don't think that my boycott of the music industry ever since the Napster decision has made any dent on their profits or their willingness to keep acting like jerks. Then again, it's not like they'd notice since I'm the kind of cheapskate who never buys DVDs until they're available for less than $10 anyway.
yes, that's the same reason MS has never had anti-trust brought against them~
Idiot.
Actually, there's a lot of merit to that statement. After all, MS didn't start pouring sacks of money into both parties until after they got sued, and neither did the tech industry as a whole. Compare the numbers before 1998 to after. They learned their lesson well, and now the IT sector is a huge contributor to BOTH parties, unlike the fools in the oil, tobacco, and housing industries which used to be far more partisan and who got nailed when their parties weren't in power.
(I only remember this so well because Bush's position on the MS antitrust case was what fired up my interest in politics for the first time during the 2000 race. I might not be a Democrat today if it wasn't for that public stance angering me so much. I was pretty conservative on social issues, though I probably would've ended up here anyway over science policy and the environment.)
Okay, I will admit that antitrust law is not an area which I have studied, so I'd like you to walk me through where this doesn't apply since you claim superior expertise.
We have a cartel which represents a controlling segment of the film industry, proposing to use their market dominance to "refuse to deal" with rental companies unless they agree not to rent movies at the same time as DVDs initially go on sale. (i.e. During the peak period for DVD rentals.) The action seems to me to be an anti-competitive "restraint of trade" because it prevents rental companies from competing with the studios' own retail sales.
Now, since I have only superficial knowledge of antitrust law, I would like you to explain to me how this scheme and the refusal of companies to sell to Redbox both fail to state a colorable Sherman Act claim.
Lawyers are the new priesthood and it is assumed that the lay person can't understand the arcane doctrine of the law without one.
As a law student, I'll say that it's simply true that a lay person can't understand the arcane doctrine of the law as it currently stands. Not with about as much formal or self-education as it would take for a lay person to learn circuit design or nursing.
On the one hand, it's a real shame because it means that much of the law which governs people is inaccessible, seems overly obsessed with procedure, and sometimes seems to defy "common" sense without a background in the history of how the courts got to where they are today. On the other hand, modern law is capable of handling issues that simply could not be tackled by the doctrines of the 19th century. The evolution of environmental law beyond common law doctrines of trespass and nuisance is a huge advance in legal protection for citizens that makes possible truly preventative approaches rather than too late remedial approaches, but it's a nightmare to navigate for businessmen without an experienced hand to know what to look for.
Justice is a hard thing, and it deserves expert treatment no less than engineering or medicine do. I think it's a shame that making laws doesn't require the same level of professionalism that enforcing or adjudicating them does.
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So Bill Gates studied the source code and benefitted from having done so? I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
Maybe you missed the part where he benefited himself at the expense of others. I think perhaps he took that lesson to heart as well as the lesson of IBM's foolishness in not more tightly licensing MS-DOS.
There is no moral dilemma in "killing" a zombie, because it's already dead. People with Rage aren't dead, the're sick. It's entirely possible that a cure could be found, and so killing someone with Rage is taking a life (even though it's self-defense.)
In theory is one thing, but in practice they don't. At least not in time to save them from dying before "28 Weeks Later." Self-defense matters. If a ravening horde is out to kill you and everyone you know, it doesn't really matter whether they could be saved or not if you don't have the means to do so and if waiting for someone else to cure them means dying. All of the dramatic tension in a zombie film comes from scenes where it's "kill or die."
And yet... people who kill or abuse zombies that aren't trying to attack them are still somehow portrayed as heartless and evil despite the justification that they're dead anyway. It seems that's not really a huge part of the equation.
Does that logic also apply to Unicorns, Pixies, Fairies etc? Are you agnostic about Hobbits for example?
Of course not; that's a silly strawman. Those all have physical manifestations and should have been seen by somebody if they exist, and the invention of the notion of Hobbits has a well-documented origin in the mind of one man. Neither of those traits apply to an ineffable, unmanifested Creator.
Note nothing logically favors any one specific form of God over another and that logic might even lean against certain notions of divinity, such as an active God who continues to perform miracles in the world today or a God that walks amongst humans.
However, on certain questions there's no logically better answer:
- How did all of existence come into being? On its own or with an external force?
- Does consciousness persist after death? Is there an afterlife?
- Is the current state of the universe purely random or fitting a design?
You simply can't prove or disprove an answer to these questions. They are beyond the reach of formal logic.
It's funny that you mention unicorns, because the Invisible Pink Unicorn is a popular strawman for attacking faith. It's important to point out that you can't actually disprove that it exists; there's no more logical basis for concluding that they don't exist than for concluding that they do. However, that doesn't mean that it's not healthy to go ahead and make an assumption there; sanity requires that people take a few things on faith alone.
Hey, I remember the last time I heard of that movie. It was when I showed a group of friends this XKCD comic. It was the universal consensus of all who had seen "Zombie Jesus" that it fell well into the category of So Bad It's Horrible.
I would argue that zombies are nothing related to a fear, but rather the geek's hope for a post-apocalyptic world where they can go back to the basics.
Dunno 'bout you, but most of the survivalist nuts that I know that would welcome a zombie apocalypse fall more into the "jock" than "nerd" stereotype. Personally, I like my air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and internet access which all rely on a stable society. I also like the prospect of seeing how society will advance, which is pretty much all over when the hordes start ravening.
There were NO zombies in 28 Days Later.
. . . pets peeve, tries to calm down, wonder why he brought his goat anyway . . .
Okay, then, what's the functional difference? People are infected with a plague via biting (or any other blood exchange) that robs them of their humanity and turns them into cannibals doomed to eventually collapse when their food supply runs out. The plague also makes them extremely dangerous and hard to kill. Society falls apart due to the plague and the remaining uninfected throw out conventional morality in a bid for survival. There's military quarantine, there's impotent scientists, and there's all the classic scenes where people have to deal with their loved one turning.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. It's not like all other movie zombies are undead, and few have any resemblance to the Haitian Voodou origins of the word "zombie." The rage-infected humans in that movie ARE zombies as much as the monsters of any other zombie apocalypse film are and as much as the "vampires" from "I Am Legend" are. They'd even be zombies if the origin of the plague was parasitic wasps (Dead Rising) or alien parasites (Slither).
I think that's a remarkably clever analogy, but most zombie films aren't about people mechanically going through the dull motions of modern corporate wage-dronehood. They're about people who have lost all sanity and grasp of the rule of law. Zombie horror is really about the collapse of society -- both in the animalistic zombies and in the traumatized survivors.
However, I think a zombie film based on your analogy would be a great parody. I mean, how would you know the difference? I think "Shaun of the Dead" plays up that joke in the end as society returns to normal with zombies acting as manual labor.
It seems that Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer [...] disagree, and they seem to have good chunk of the popular imagination in the United States.
Yes, because modern takes on ancient legends are incredibly valuable for telling us how they originated and why they seem to have been so pervasive across culture before the advent of modern communications technology.
Of all the examples he could have chosen, he chose zombies? In most films, if there is an explanation for their existence of the zombies in the film, it's usual mystical or related to disease or something (as the writer cedes).
Mystical elements were big in early films featuring zombies, but "Night of the Living Dead" has thrust the zombie apocalypse genre firmly into the sci-fi horror camp ever since. You generally don't see masses of zombie hordes bringing an end to civilization in mystical zombie films because that kind of zombie is rarely self-propogating, and a true zombie apocalypse requires that.
Ever since "Night of the Living Dead," the causes of zombie horror have mostly been either due to scientific experiments gone wrong or due to disasters caused by the march of science and technology. Let's look at a few:
Anyway, this list isn't comprehensive, but I'd say that in most movies either: (a) the plague is the result of scientists' actions usually on behalf of the military or an evil corporation, or (b) the cause for the outbreak is a natural disaster / unexplained and a part of the background of the movie is the inability of those in power (including scientists) to do anything about the situation.
Unexplained plagues are becoming far more common in the past two decades as the zombie apocalypse has become and established genre, and movie-goers don't really feel a need for an explanation for the setup. After all, these stories are really about the collapse of civilization, a more bloody version of Lord of the Flies.
Science being dangerous isn't all that important to the genre anymore, just like the Godzilla films stopped being about atomic horror long, long ago and started being more about cool giant monsters duking it out over a city. It's important to genre in the 60s-90s, but it's not such a big deal anymore.
Just like how people's love of Star Trek led geeky engineers to develop the real cell phones we have today, some researchers must be working on development of a real zombie virus to use as a military weapon. We've seen this theme in movies several times. If it's at all possible, it will happen sooner or later.
Except that cellphones are useful and biological weapons are incredibly stupid. Unlike radioactive or chemical weapons, highly contagious biological weapons are the only ones that guarantee an enemy's ability to retaliate in kind and that guarantee that allies and neutral parties will be harmed. Creating a zombie plague would is the kind of thing that only a total misanthrope out to destroy civilization would try -- not a military organization or even a terrorist group.
If it is not changed, then sooner or later we will end up with two separate "internets" and we will all be poorer as a result.
How will we be poorer? If we end up splitting the domain system, there will be interoperability bridges created, and I don't really see any huge difference between the current system where Chinese people read Chinese pages and Americans read English pages than a system where you have a slightly harder time getting to pages 90%+ of the people who speak the same language as you can't read anyway. Those who have a special interest will go to the minor technical trouble to get both DNS systems, and those who don't won't notice the difference.
You mean I can buy an entire town for $3,000,000? That's not a lot of money for a bunch of buildings and some land.
No kidding. It's about $30K per person to go find somewhere else to live. It's condemnation money.
So what do you do with a polluted site?
One this big? Generally nothing. You put up a fence and don't let people live there. It's not worth the money to fix compared to the cost of just developing unspoiled lands.
Despite how metal that sounds, it's not where you'll find Chrome.
don't care if long prison terms create nicely-behaved perfect citizens. Long prison terms keep poorly-behaved flawed citizens from F*ing with the nicely behaved perfect citizens. Where the hell did people get the notion that prison is meant to reform criminals?
Deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitance are three dominant theories of criminal punishment in the legal system and have been for a very long time. You seem to have a strong opinion on which of the three matters, but you're somewhat outside of the mainstream on that.
It's meant to keep them away from society for a set period of time. After that, they're given another chance to be a normal citizen. If they screw up again, they go back again, this time for longer. Human lifespan is finite. If they choose to spend most of theirs in a prison because they don't like the laws society has made, then so be it.
What's the point of that? First, if you can prevent them from becoming a repeat offender, then you save taxpayer money babysitting them AND you save the victims of future crimes from having to experience those crimes AND you get a productive citizen.
Rehabilitation is simply the best possible solution to criminal behavior, and the only reason we don't pursue it as our #1 goal is that it's really freaking hard and previous reform efforts seems to fail. We only put up with incapacitance due to the fact that some people *don't* learn and need to be separated, not because incapacitance is a superior outcome to having a functional person again. A system that just breaks people without regard for their potential to learn from their mistakes is just pointless and sadistic.
I mean, look how many people's lives are ruined just because they got caught smoking a lot of pot. I'm anti-legalization, but if we fined those people instead of throwing them in the slammer, they'd be more likely to be productive citizens in 20 years than under the current system. Long-term incapacitance is pointless there like it is for many other non-violent offenses.
The US is unique among democracies in the length and frequency of its prison sentences. The US has 22% of the entire world's prison population (and only 4% of the total world population) and more than quadruple the average percentage of our population in prison. We spend $37 billion/year on prisons, which is about the GDP of Guatemala (only #77 on the list of countries by GDP!), and is about twice what we spend on NASA. Do you really think that just locking up people and neglecting what they're going to be like when they come out is good fiscal policy? Seems to me like we're wasting a lot of taxpayer dollars that could be saved if we helped the prisoners that can be helped.
Does your rib cage and pelvis flare out to make you egg-shaped, does your lower jaw jut forwards, and is your skull elongated? Seriously, look at a Neaderthal skeleton side-by-side with a human one. A heavy brow is the least of a Neanderthal's odd traits.
Also, there's no evidence that Neanderthals were hairier than humans.
Seriously, cut it out. Nothing I'm saying here is all that awesome. I even got the quote wrong.
I've got a 5-digit UID, and I don't need more karma. Spread the love.
I lost faith in antitrust law when they failed to do anything significant to Microsoft. Or to Rambus. Or when AT&T recombined (which I want to go ahead and say was mostly symbolic to me and not an actual antitrust threat). Or how the FTC, DOJ, and other agencies have repeatedly declined to get involved hundreds of major mergers beyond a cursory investigation in the past few decades. Or how the Obama administration appointed dozens of RIAA & MPAA friendly attorneys to the DOJ. Or when I found out that there's an exemption in antitrust law for health insurance companies under the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act. (So why not record labels given bipartisan love for them?)
I vaguely remembered the MPAA & RIAA seeking an exemption a few years ago. It was part of the EnFORCE Act of 2003, but it apparently never passed. (I find myself cynically surprised.) I've always been struck by how flagrantly the RIAA & MPAA look like cartels and have long assumed that the reason they haven't been successfully sued was some kind of special legal loophole for them. Seems that there are a few long-running suits by sued file-sharing companies against the industries for antitrust violations that haven't been resolved (instead of simply losing and going away like I assumed).
Anyway, it seems to me like Redbox may have shot at this. I hope they win, but precedent that someone posted later in the discussion suggests that they may not. I find myself lacking much in the way of hope there.
No. But any attempt at colonialism, slavery, pillage, torture, misogyny, class-ism, caste, and rape needs to be stepped upon. More directly, any organization that espouses these ideals needs to be stepped upon.
Of course. No one sane would disagree -- unless it was their own group doing it. (See post-Abu Ghraib acceptance of torture in the US and support for firebombing Cambodia during Vietnam before and after we started doing it.) Humans are frighteningly good at rationalizing away the evil of their own groups.
The flaw in your idea there is that people, white or otherwise, are not the same as religion.
Well, yes and no. Race is but one arbitrary line to draw between people, but it's an extremely important one because tied to the core evolutionary trait that drives most human conflict -- social hierarchies and the instinctual drives needed to facilitate competition between them (i.e. war and genocide).
Modern, evangelical religions are actually a fascinating technological development for humanity because it allowed people of *different* ethnic backgrounds to unite underneath *one* unified set of moral codes with shared dietary, dress, and cultural shibboleths to separate the "good people" from the "dangerous savages." Before evangelical faiths, one had to be *born* into a group to be considered worthy of the protection of the gods and law. Religion gave people a way of judging whether people they had never met before were "safe" members of the same group or people who were different and thus "evil."
However, the rise of modern secularism and religious freedom has not worn away the basic human need to identify with like-minded people and to heap misery on those who are different. Right now, there's little material difference between the views that Western Democracy has of Middle Eastern Theocracy compared to what 19th Century White Christendom thought of African Savagery. "Our way of life is superior and more civilized. These people are wrong-headed for not seeing the superiority of our ways, and their way of life leads to terrible, immortal behavior." It's also no different from what atheist State Communists think of Capitalist Bourgeoisie or for that matter what Muslims think of the West in return. It's fundamentally human.
In any case, it isn't the sins of the ancestors that are the concern here: It is the fact that the religion instructed them to commit those sins, and that the religions have not changed a great deal from those days.
Well, you're ignoring the fact that the vast majority of religions preach very strongly against many of the worst atrocities committed in their name. Christianity is an extremely pacifistic religion with a huge emphasis on generosity, kindness to the downtrodden, and forgiveness. Yet, it's the same force behind the Inquisition, the Crusades, money-hungry televangelists, and a large push in American politics to resist government handouts to the poor.
Why is this? It's because it's not the actual values of a social group that matters -- its the fact that they differentiate "good people" from "bad people." It's that they enable our instincts that allow us to look at some people as less valuable than people like us. The worst genocides in history were committed by Soviet atheists who believed strongly in principles of social equity. Does that mean that atheism or egalitarianism are failed belief systems and are responsible for creating all that death? Of course not! What matters is that people in a position of power were able to scapegoat people who were different from mainstream society and to channel that destructive energy towards ill ends.
Christians murdered heretics, Communists slaughtered the religious, and America spent much of this decade torturing and bombing people in the name of Freedom and Justice for All. No belief system can protect against this wicked men exploiting mob fear and xenophobia so long as people are ignora
If you are religious, you have already disavowed the relevance of logic, so feel free to resolve your disbelief any way that you like.
I don't think you understand logic. The only purely rational stance to take in the total absence of proof or disproof of God is agnosticism. Taking a stance in any direction is a leap of faith which requires an assumption not grounded in logic.
#2 is a scary though, but truthfully, it has SOME comfort because thought a totalitarian regime is the anti-thesis of what I as an American believe in, I also know that regarding situation #1, China won't put up with that shit. If Scientology had started in China this problem would have been solved and over with DECADES ago.
Yeah, because China has completely "solved" their problem with Falun Gong and the Dalai Lama's legacy.
Basically I HOPE that our system works and prevails against this growing issue, but if we fail I'd prefer a secular Communist Dictatorship over an equally oppressive Theocracy.
I recommend you read more on the history of communism. If scientific truth is your number one issue, then Soviet history of scientific dogma shows that communism is no more safe for scientists than the church-dominated societies that gave us Gregor Mendel and Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. (See also the Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge.) Oppression is oppression, and inconvenient truths that oppose government dogma can result in the same kind of anti-intellectual purges under secular totalitarian regimes as under religious ones.
Secularism is no more immune to human mob mentality and demonization and murder of those who are different from you than religion.
Thank you for the links and the well-written post. This is exactly the kind of info I asked for elsewhere in the discussion.
Really? Because I'm the type of guy, when someone tries to push me around, I will do the opposite of what they want just to show them they shouldn't try to push people around. Screw these bozos, I'll put off buying any new movies until they quite this greedy behavior.
So am I, but I don't think that my boycott of the music industry ever since the Napster decision has made any dent on their profits or their willingness to keep acting like jerks. Then again, it's not like they'd notice since I'm the kind of cheapskate who never buys DVDs until they're available for less than $10 anyway.
yes, that's the same reason MS has never had anti-trust brought against them~
Idiot.
Actually, there's a lot of merit to that statement. After all, MS didn't start pouring sacks of money into both parties until after they got sued, and neither did the tech industry as a whole. Compare the numbers before 1998 to after. They learned their lesson well, and now the IT sector is a huge contributor to BOTH parties, unlike the fools in the oil, tobacco, and housing industries which used to be far more partisan and who got nailed when their parties weren't in power.
Though they've been pretty even-handed across parties, they've certainly had clear favorites in races. Look at how much they gave Bush v. Gore in 2000. They also hired Ralph Reed to lobby Bush during the 2000 election, and Bush was a strong opponent of breaking up the company. And it paid off well.
(I only remember this so well because Bush's position on the MS antitrust case was what fired up my interest in politics for the first time during the 2000 race. I might not be a Democrat today if it wasn't for that public stance angering me so much. I was pretty conservative on social issues, though I probably would've ended up here anyway over science policy and the environment.)
Okay, I will admit that antitrust law is not an area which I have studied, so I'd like you to walk me through where this doesn't apply since you claim superior expertise.
We have a cartel which represents a controlling segment of the film industry, proposing to use their market dominance to "refuse to deal" with rental companies unless they agree not to rent movies at the same time as DVDs initially go on sale. (i.e. During the peak period for DVD rentals.) The action seems to me to be an anti-competitive "restraint of trade" because it prevents rental companies from competing with the studios' own retail sales.
Now, since I have only superficial knowledge of antitrust law, I would like you to explain to me how this scheme and the refusal of companies to sell to Redbox both fail to state a colorable Sherman Act claim.
Lawyers are the new priesthood and it is assumed that the lay person can't understand the arcane doctrine of the law without one.
As a law student, I'll say that it's simply true that a lay person can't understand the arcane doctrine of the law as it currently stands. Not with about as much formal or self-education as it would take for a lay person to learn circuit design or nursing.
On the one hand, it's a real shame because it means that much of the law which governs people is inaccessible, seems overly obsessed with procedure, and sometimes seems to defy "common" sense without a background in the history of how the courts got to where they are today. On the other hand, modern law is capable of handling issues that simply could not be tackled by the doctrines of the 19th century. The evolution of environmental law beyond common law doctrines of trespass and nuisance is a huge advance in legal protection for citizens that makes possible truly preventative approaches rather than too late remedial approaches, but it's a nightmare to navigate for businessmen without an experienced hand to know what to look for.
Justice is a hard thing, and it deserves expert treatment no less than engineering or medicine do. I think it's a shame that making laws doesn't require the same level of professionalism that enforcing or adjudicating them does.