The judge hence inherently presumes, and rightfully so, that someone who is informed of a religion as part of the plot in a novel will most likely not have a genuine belief in it.
Have you read the bible? It's all stories. The whole point of the book is that it's a set of cultural narratives that speak to the idea of "truth" rather than facts. Viewing the bible as a book of facts, AKA religious fundamentalism, which is only around 200 years old, is what's created this stupid legal mess in the first place. Theological arguments have no place in government institutions, prisons, or courts of law. We don't live in a theocracy. It's not up to a judge to decide whether he thinks a he's a theologian or religious philosopher and therefore entitled to decide which religions are legitimate or not. That's not his job and it's not the government's place to impose their beliefs on others. The reason for secularism is so that we don't have repeats of things like the Catholic church's persecution of other beliefs and religions. It's one of the most important developments of modern culture: The right to freedom from religious persecution for one's beliefs.
Under the same argument, all this privileging one group of people over another over their particular religion also goes away. Everyone should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, whatever their religion. So if someone decides that they're Pastifarian or followers of Brian, "He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!" They should be afforded equal opportunity to do so.
This isn't about means of worship, it's that this isn't worship because the guy in question doesn't actually believe there is a flying spaghetti monster.
There are a lot of worshippers who don't believe the literal meaning of their literature. For example, many Catholics don't believe in transsubstantiation, i.e. that the host (wafer) turns into the flesh and the wine turns into the blood of Jesus during communion. That reminds me: https://xkcd.com/1152/
The decision whether to prosecute or not shouldn't be left up to Hillary's colleagues. They need an independent judiciary, free from reprisal for prosecuting the rich and powerful. Isn't that supposed to be in the constitution or something?
As far as I can tell the Skype web app doesn't work in Linux. I've tried it with Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, and Opera all of which work fine with WebRTC and web conferencing software, which I use regularly.
Can we just have one (bulletproof) room where Trump and his supporters are allowed to carry guns and then the rest of the space free for everyone else? Trump and his supporters would then have a wonderful opportunity to practice listening to others, being reasonable, inclusive, and open to compromise. What could possibly go wrong?
Even if you support going 100% wind and solar, it will have to be implemented piecemeal, which means at least some new nuclear plants will have to bridge the gap.
How long does it take and how much does it cost to bring a new nuclear reactor online nowadays? I suspect that we could bring more renewable energy online in less time and more cheaply than nuclear.
eBay requires online payment, usually credit card or PayPal so there's still a trace. Also, for face to face purchases, fake IDs are trivial for criminals to get hold of. They can also steal phones from people if they need to, e.g. in the Paris attacks.
...blue light does disrupt sleep, filtering the light from one source probably won't make enough of a difference. We need to filter blue light from all sources, so unless all your energy-saving lightbulbs filter out blue light too, one screen isn't going to make a whole lotta difference. Try UV blocking safety goggles (the orange type, not the yellow type) and see if that helps.
They say that behind every great man, there has to be a great woman. Perhaps Tay wasn't AI at all. Perhaps she's Melania Trump? Perhaps she's the one behind Donald's political campaign speeches?
If you believe that that primary intention of acts of terror is to cause harm, then yes, that sounds reasonable. However, as far as I understand it, the main point of acts of terror is usually to make people irrationally afraid (cars, dogs, and swimming pools are more dangerous). For that purpose, dirty bombs and the way they've been hyped in movies and the media, as you've stated, are perfect for terror attacks.
"I'm sorry Dave but I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
Re:
Not surprisingly, some academics are complaining that the money is going to [the] industry rather than the universities. Will this crony capitalistic approach produce any real development, or will it instead end up [being] a pork-laden jobs program for South Korean politicians?
Giveaways to giant tech companies may produce short term results (or not if the companies spend it on executive bonuses) but then they're not necessarily supporting the longer term development of AI. It's the universities that do possibly ground-breaking research with no guarantees of results and the corporations that monetise them. Corporations don't have problems finding investors for short-term projects. We need to support the longer term through adequately funding universities.
i think the real maturation of internet tv is going to come when the exclusive content agreements stop.
They sell the same programmes/content at different prices to different regions/buyers because in some regions people are willing and able to pay more for it than in others. The presents an interesting problem for them to work out. I believe that, for the moment, they've worked out the maximum profit margins that they can get and don't want to change that model. Perhaps consumer behaviour, e.g. using more sophisticated ways around geoblocking, will "renegotiate" that model for them?
If corporations use robots and AI to make huge cuts into their workforces and create massive unemployment, who's going to buy their stuff?
Looks like unregulated/poorly regulated market forces are a suicide pact for free-market neoliberal capitalism and we'll need big gubbermint to sort this mess out... again.
Everything from whining about how "air conditioning is sexist" to whining that any form of disagreement/differing opinion is racist/sexist/homophobic......or supporting fake hatecrime/assaults/rapes...
My guess is that you don't have many female friends, you know, those batshit crazy feminists shivering over on the other side of the office who dare not speak up because of... well, you know... YOU.
A vote for everything means nothing will get done...hard decisions to do what's best for the business will be replaced with doing what's cool or hip.
Try telling that to the worker-owners of Mondragon, the world's largest cooperative. They've been growing since they started up shortly after WWII in northern Spain. They're now a global corporation with around 900,000 worker-owners. That's around 10% smaller than Walmart.
Yep, Idiocracy was the first thing that sprang to mind as I read the intro. Remember decades ago when everyone was afraid that vending machines were going to take everyone's jobs? Didn't come to pass. There's a small chain fast food vending machine "restaurants" in Spain. They're possibly the most depressing places in the world to eat and I've only ever seen drunk people in them when everything else is closed. They make a prison cafeteria look inviting.
"Relevance" assumes that advertisers have any coherent idea about what your digital exhaust means. We only hear about the rarely specific hits in the media (the example of the pregnant teen is now cited by everyone) and not the millions of misses that nobody remembers or even notices. Just imagine how many false positives and false negatives they come up with,with little or no way of checking if they're right? (Ever been asked if an advertiser's profile of you scraped from the web is correct?) Also, we're very bad a judging how accurate someone's deductions about us are which is how mentalists, con-men, new-age bullshitters, and targeted advertising salesmen get away with so much (It's called the Forer effect).
In short, "targeted advertising" is the 21st century equivalent of alchemy.
The old system was designed for print media. Printing and distribution were expensive and page space was limited so journals had to be selective. The better editors had an eye for papers more likely to draw interest and citations so their journals got better reputations.
With online publishing, all this has changed - online space is almost limitless and can be searched/mined in new and interesting ways. The old rules no longer apply and reputation/ratings can be managed in other ways for each paper: Is it peer reviewed? What the reputation of the reviewers? How often has it been cited? By Whom? What's their reputation? etc. The impact of a paper can be calculated on an ongoing basis and much of the impact calculated automatically, on the fly, by open source algorithms that can be improved when the more unscrupulous find ways to game the system. I'm sure that universities who currently pay a substantial percentage of their budgets on access to for profit online journals would happily contribute much less to pay for a public, open access system that benefits everyone and helps to advance science.
Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning”
By Alfie Kohn
Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”
A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”
A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added to personal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc. (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.
Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.
Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.
For some time, corporations have sold mass-produced commodities of questionable value and then permitted us to customize peripheral details to suit our “preferences.” In the 1970s, Burger King rolled out its “Have it your way!” campaign, announcing that we were now empowered to request a recently thawed slab of factory-produced ground meat without the usual pickle — or even with extra lettuce! In America, I can be me!
A couple of decades later, the production company that created Barney, the alarmingly friendly purple dinosaur, sold personalized videos called “My Party with Barney.” You mailed them a photo of your kid’s face and they digitally attached it to a generic animated child’s body that “plays” with Barney in the video. Your kid’s name is also inserted into the soundtrack every so often to complete the customization, with Barney enthusing: “Have a balloon Abigail!” The result may have delighted, or even fooled, some three year olds. But why in god’s name are adult educators buying the equivalent of My Party with Barney in order to boost their students’ reading scores?
*
How can we tell when the lovely idea of personal learning has been co-opted and then twisted into PLI? Here are four warning signs:
1. The tasks have been personalized for kids, not created by them. With PLI, the center of gravity is outside the students (as Dewey once put it), and their choices are limited to when — or maybe, if they’re lucky, how – they’ll master a set of skills mandated by people who have never met them. In the words of education author Will Richardson, “’Personalized’ learning is something that we do to kids; ‘personal’ learning is something they do for themselves.”
Sometimes one of the corporate folks will let slip an acknowledgement of just how student-centered their programs aren’t. “In education,” a publishing executive explained to a reporter, personalization is “not about giving students what they want, it’s about a recommended learning path just for them.” A t
What the FBI director is demanding is that they should have the internet equivalent of skeleton keys for every lock on every door of every house, home, office, storage room/locker, etc. We don't hear the FBI complaining that they can't listen in on people having face to face conversations in their homes, at work, and out in public and, if they have a warrant, they can install surveillance equipment in people's homes/workplaces to wire-tap their online conversations like they have been doing with face to face for decades.
If what the FBI is asking for doesn't creep you out by now, I'm not sure what would.
...or maybe the Minitrue installing "permanently on" telescreens in every corner of every room is the next step? (George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-four")
Slashdot Mirror
The judge hence inherently presumes, and rightfully so, that someone who is informed of a religion as part of the plot in a novel will most likely not have a genuine belief in it.
Have you read the bible? It's all stories. The whole point of the book is that it's a set of cultural narratives that speak to the idea of "truth" rather than facts. Viewing the bible as a book of facts, AKA religious fundamentalism, which is only around 200 years old, is what's created this stupid legal mess in the first place. Theological arguments have no place in government institutions, prisons, or courts of law. We don't live in a theocracy. It's not up to a judge to decide whether he thinks a he's a theologian or religious philosopher and therefore entitled to decide which religions are legitimate or not. That's not his job and it's not the government's place to impose their beliefs on others. The reason for secularism is so that we don't have repeats of things like the Catholic church's persecution of other beliefs and religions. It's one of the most important developments of modern culture: The right to freedom from religious persecution for one's beliefs.
Under the same argument, all this privileging one group of people over another over their particular religion also goes away. Everyone should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, whatever their religion. So if someone decides that they're Pastifarian or followers of Brian, "He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!" They should be afforded equal opportunity to do so.
This isn't about means of worship, it's that this isn't worship because the guy in question doesn't actually believe there is a flying spaghetti monster.
There are a lot of worshippers who don't believe the literal meaning of their literature. For example, many Catholics don't believe in transsubstantiation, i.e. that the host (wafer) turns into the flesh and the wine turns into the blood of Jesus during communion. That reminds me: https://xkcd.com/1152/
The decision whether to prosecute or not shouldn't be left up to Hillary's colleagues. They need an independent judiciary, free from reprisal for prosecuting the rich and powerful. Isn't that supposed to be in the constitution or something?
As far as I can tell the Skype web app doesn't work in Linux. I've tried it with Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, and Opera all of which work fine with WebRTC and web conferencing software, which I use regularly.
...so that it can provide several parts of the state with unreliable, slow and expensive DSL service.
Well, I guess that's the business they're in and what they're famous for.
I thought they'd already introduced the bendy feature with the iPhone 6? :P
Can we just have one (bulletproof) room where Trump and his supporters are allowed to carry guns and then the rest of the space free for everyone else? Trump and his supporters would then have a wonderful opportunity to practice listening to others, being reasonable, inclusive, and open to compromise. What could possibly go wrong?
Even if you support going 100% wind and solar, it will have to be implemented piecemeal, which means at least some new nuclear plants will have to bridge the gap.
How long does it take and how much does it cost to bring a new nuclear reactor online nowadays? I suspect that we could bring more renewable energy online in less time and more cheaply than nuclear.
eBay requires online payment, usually credit card or PayPal so there's still a trace. Also, for face to face purchases, fake IDs are trivial for criminals to get hold of. They can also steal phones from people if they need to, e.g. in the Paris attacks.
...blue light does disrupt sleep, filtering the light from one source probably won't make enough of a difference. We need to filter blue light from all sources, so unless all your energy-saving lightbulbs filter out blue light too, one screen isn't going to make a whole lotta difference. Try UV blocking safety goggles (the orange type, not the yellow type) and see if that helps.
They say that behind every great man, there has to be a great woman. Perhaps Tay wasn't AI at all. Perhaps she's Melania Trump? Perhaps she's the one behind Donald's political campaign speeches?
If you believe that that primary intention of acts of terror is to cause harm, then yes, that sounds reasonable. However, as far as I understand it, the main point of acts of terror is usually to make people irrationally afraid (cars, dogs, and swimming pools are more dangerous). For that purpose, dirty bombs and the way they've been hyped in movies and the media, as you've stated, are perfect for terror attacks.
"I'm sorry Dave but I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
Re:
Not surprisingly, some academics are complaining that the money is going to [the] industry rather than the universities. Will this crony capitalistic approach produce any real development, or will it instead end up [being] a pork-laden jobs program for South Korean politicians?
Giveaways to giant tech companies may produce short term results (or not if the companies spend it on executive bonuses) but then they're not necessarily supporting the longer term development of AI. It's the universities that do possibly ground-breaking research with no guarantees of results and the corporations that monetise them. Corporations don't have problems finding investors for short-term projects. We need to support the longer term through adequately funding universities.
i think the real maturation of internet tv is going to come when the exclusive content agreements stop.
They sell the same programmes/content at different prices to different regions/buyers because in some regions people are willing and able to pay more for it than in others. The presents an interesting problem for them to work out. I believe that, for the moment, they've worked out the maximum profit margins that they can get and don't want to change that model. Perhaps consumer behaviour, e.g. using more sophisticated ways around geoblocking, will "renegotiate" that model for them?
That reminds me: https://xkcd.com/894/
If corporations use robots and AI to make huge cuts into their workforces and create massive unemployment, who's going to buy their stuff?
Looks like unregulated/poorly regulated market forces are a suicide pact for free-market neoliberal capitalism and we'll need big gubbermint to sort this mess out... again.
Everything from whining about how "air conditioning is sexist" to whining that any form of disagreement/differing opinion is racist/sexist/homophobic... ...or supporting fake hatecrime/assaults/rapes...
My guess is that you don't have many female friends, you know, those batshit crazy feminists shivering over on the other side of the office who dare not speak up because of... well, you know... YOU.
A vote for everything means nothing will get done...hard decisions to do what's best for the business will be replaced with doing what's cool or hip.
Try telling that to the worker-owners of Mondragon, the world's largest cooperative. They've been growing since they started up shortly after WWII in northern Spain. They're now a global corporation with around 900,000 worker-owners. That's around 10% smaller than Walmart.
Yep, Idiocracy was the first thing that sprang to mind as I read the intro. Remember decades ago when everyone was afraid that vending machines were going to take everyone's jobs? Didn't come to pass. There's a small chain fast food vending machine "restaurants" in Spain. They're possibly the most depressing places in the world to eat and I've only ever seen drunk people in them when everything else is closed. They make a prison cafeteria look inviting.
30 years? I guess they couldn't wait for the rise of the robot dog machines to bite us back.
"Relevance" assumes that advertisers have any coherent idea about what your digital exhaust means. We only hear about the rarely specific hits in the media (the example of the pregnant teen is now cited by everyone) and not the millions of misses that nobody remembers or even notices. Just imagine how many false positives and false negatives they come up with,with little or no way of checking if they're right? (Ever been asked if an advertiser's profile of you scraped from the web is correct?) Also, we're very bad a judging how accurate someone's deductions about us are which is how mentalists, con-men, new-age bullshitters, and targeted advertising salesmen get away with so much (It's called the Forer effect).
In short, "targeted advertising" is the 21st century equivalent of alchemy.
The old system was designed for print media. Printing and distribution were expensive and page space was limited so journals had to be selective. The better editors had an eye for papers more likely to draw interest and citations so their journals got better reputations.
With online publishing, all this has changed - online space is almost limitless and can be searched/mined in new and interesting ways. The old rules no longer apply and reputation/ratings can be managed in other ways for each paper: Is it peer reviewed? What the reputation of the reviewers? How often has it been cited? By Whom? What's their reputation? etc. The impact of a paper can be calculated on an ongoing basis and much of the impact calculated automatically, on the fly, by open source algorithms that can be improved when the more unscrupulous find ways to game the system. I'm sure that universities who currently pay a substantial percentage of their budgets on access to for profit online journals would happily contribute much less to pay for a public, open access system that benefits everyone and helps to advance science.
Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning”
By Alfie Kohn
Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”
A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”
A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added to personal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc. (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.
Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.
Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.
For some time, corporations have sold mass-produced commodities of questionable value and then permitted us to customize peripheral details to suit our “preferences.” In the 1970s, Burger King rolled out its “Have it your way!” campaign, announcing that we were now empowered to request a recently thawed slab of factory-produced ground meat without the usual pickle — or even with extra lettuce! In America, I can be me!
A couple of decades later, the production company that created Barney, the alarmingly friendly purple dinosaur, sold personalized videos called “My Party with Barney.” You mailed them a photo of your kid’s face and they digitally attached it to a generic animated child’s body that “plays” with Barney in the video. Your kid’s name is also inserted into the soundtrack every so often to complete the customization, with Barney enthusing: “Have a balloon Abigail!” The result may have delighted, or even fooled, some three year olds. But why in god’s name are adult educators buying the equivalent of My Party with Barney in order to boost their students’ reading scores?
*
How can we tell when the lovely idea of personal learning has been co-opted and then twisted into PLI? Here are four warning signs:
1. The tasks have been personalized for kids, not created by them. With PLI, the center of gravity is outside the students (as Dewey once put it), and their choices are limited to when — or maybe, if they’re lucky, how – they’ll master a set of skills mandated by people who have never met them. In the words of education author Will Richardson, “’Personalized’ learning is something that we do to kids; ‘personal’ learning is something they do for themselves.”
Sometimes one of the corporate folks will let slip an acknowledgement of just how student-centered their programs aren’t. “In education,” a publishing executive explained to a reporter, personalization is “not about giving students what they want, it’s about a recommended learning path just for them.” A t
What the FBI director is demanding is that they should have the internet equivalent of skeleton keys for every lock on every door of every house, home, office, storage room/locker, etc. We don't hear the FBI complaining that they can't listen in on people having face to face conversations in their homes, at work, and out in public and, if they have a warrant, they can install surveillance equipment in people's homes/workplaces to wire-tap their online conversations like they have been doing with face to face for decades.
If what the FBI is asking for doesn't creep you out by now, I'm not sure what would.
...or maybe the Minitrue installing "permanently on" telescreens in every corner of every room is the next step? (George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-four")
They don't mean responsible in practice, they mean responsible sounding greenwash to flood the corporate media with.