Your statements are predicated on incorrect beliefs and colored by attacks against what I didn't say.
1) *I* am not talking about depictions of either. I asked a question that didn't directly refer to the original question. You are so far the only respondent who's taken direct issue with that aspect of my words, so I have to assume I was clear.
2) I didn't say I'd rather have one than the other. I asked why we found it necessary to compare the immorality of two acts. Obviously, I'd prefer to be alive rather than dead. I want to know why one act is considered less wrong than the other.
Okay, but -- I will note that my definition of murder excludes acts which can be legally justified, and doesn't pay a lot of attention to factors of mitigation short of legal justification. (For consistency, the same goes for the other, but US law is happily unburdened with the concepts of justified or mitigated rape.)
Two, you've introduced a new concept -- comparing two *identical* acts to one act of the same.
That said... it's tempting to go "identical but finite", but I think it'd be flawed. I'd consider it infinitely immoral. Why is murdering two people worse than murdering one, from a moral standpoint? To each person murdered, it's the end of the world.
Someone who murders someone needs to be stopped from doing so again. Someone who murders ten people... needs to be stopped from doing so again. We might devote more resources to the latter than the former, but that decision is driven by the scarcity of resources -- someone who killed ten people is more likely to kill an eleventh than someone who killed one person is likely to kill two. (Obviously, you can propose a counter-example. But if you're tasked to devote agents to finding the one guy or the ten guy, at the instant you decide, your knowledge of the situation is limited, and your counter-examples would rely on this man knowing and trusting the details you'd use to make you case, which I don't think you can assume.)
For that matter, is "raping and them murdering someone" more or less immoral than one or the other? Again, no. It's supremely immoral, full stop. It should not be allowed, it should not happen -- why does there need to be a sliding scale?
You know, I never thought about it before... but why is it necessary to compare "rape" and "murder" and decide which of the two are worse?
Both are supremely unacceptable acts, full stop. The hypothetical question asked doesn't seem very realistic. "I would choose neither." "NO! What if you had to choose... because you're on a bus! And a madman would blow up the bus if you didn't choose, or it slowed down!" I'm not feeling it.
I'm not prepared to agree that killing N people is better or worse than raping N people, and that's before I even GET to the part where we bring up the religion thing. What if you *raped* N people for religion, but then killed N others just because you're a jerk? How does that stack up? And what if you double-parked because you wanted to make it harder for someone to drive away, thereby increasing the energy they expended and hastening, ever so slightly, the end of the universe? And you just raped N people to produce delicious candy? Hard to call that one, I tell you.
I'm having trouble with that one. I mean, the statement would've been true without invoking "mission critical" -- of course the ability to get resolution better than seconds is for applications that need resolution better than seconds. I'm not sure why you've invoked the specter of "mission critical" here, and I'm having a damn hard time picturing any utterly important, world-ending task that's going to (a) rely on the *timestamp in the filesystem* and (b) run on Linux and ext4fs.
And the timestamp isn't in milliseconds (an incremental improvement that wouldn't've even raised eyebrows) or microseconds (which would have been future-proofed overkill) but nanoseconds. I know how PC clocks work -- you'll have a hard time convincing me that you can maintain nanosecond timing long enough for the difference between two nanosecond timestamps to be accurate down to the nanosecond.
"Where is this person, we believe him to be in danger" is not "we wish to covertly monitor this person", nor is it "reveal to us this person's whereabouts for the last six months". The police *should* be able to locate people who are believed to be missing, and I'm not very worried about granting them broad powers to go about it. This is a useful task. Assuming the telco isn't enjoined to secrecy, this seems balanced to me.
Yes, it's theoretically possible to parlay powers granted that way into other, less useful acts, but... look, I'm no apologist; I think that many things they do are thoughtless, wicked, and treasonous, but they do have their uses, and in this instance? I'd need to see a case of it being abused, and I'd need it proven that existing case law wasn't sufficient to redress the abuse, before I got too excited about it.
You expect me to explain why I've completely dismissed your statement? Present some reasoning as to why I've taken this position? Do, in fact, anything but just say your words don't matter and then speak about something tangental? (Bacon, by the way, is awesome, especially the maple kind.)
If I fail to do so, would you believe that I'd failed to defend my position -- that my original statement was so content-free that it basically didn't speak to the issue at hand?
That was my original complaint. Note that the complaint only merited the single line of text I gave it; this argument's grown a little longer than it really should've.
While I understand the feelings behind this, trying to hide the truth about someone to spare the family's feelings seems like a disservice to the family and to society in general. Should everyone think less of JFK if he was a furry porn freak? Or should people, possibly grugingly, accept that it was a part of this hypothetical JFK, and that as much as they might personally detest it, it's part of what made hypothetical JFK who he was.
If he managed to get Marilyn Monroe into a catgirl outfit, he's getting a 50' marble statue, no questions asked.
I'll not be trolled or bullied into trying to prove a negative. My original comment -- that the original poster had failed to answer the submitter's question (that spoke of ethics) with any information relevant to ethics -- stands.
That's right. Science. We have reached the point where we might have to send a technician out to do a firmware update on *a crate of soup*.
"Oh, no, sonny. That there pallet's running v1.47a -- the cyberinjuns cracked that dekacycles ago. Hardly know what's in there now. Could be tomato, could be chicken noodle. Send that back on the factory. We'll get you some nice v1.49 soup out here. Won't be half a cycle."
I knew as I was typing it I wasn't being completely clear -- historically, any venue that uses 7-bit ASCII hasn't been very friendly towards markup. (Although some of you may remember using board-specific ANSI escapes in your messages, I remind you that those boards allowed *eight*-bit high ASCII. So nyah.)
Hmm. This claim is plausible, if improbable coming from a user ID under 50K.
However, because I'm just that kind of guy, I'll step in for you.
In modern times, the use of all capital letters in electronic messaging has come to signify emphasis, or a raised voice. As more and more internet communication is conducted on forums with internal markup, instead of the flat 7-bit ASCII NNTP favored, this convention's technical justification has begun to fade.
There is a strong reaction against using all-capital letters in a message for this reason; uppercase letters are more difficult to read than lower-case letters, and anyone willing to type in all upppercase is frequently unwilling to use punctuation or paragraphing, adding to the headache of potential viewers.
Use uppercase letters sparingly, like a strong seasoning, to give your words flavor and tone.
"Solving" wind resistance? Golly gee, that sounds like a great idea. Maybe after that's in the bag, we'll "solve" the energy it takes to boost an object into orbit, or we'll "solve" the atmosphere lowering the power yield of terrestrial solar panels.
That's not the first time I've heard a claim like that, and -- from the perspective of somebody who doesn't know anything about hands-on practice of law -- it doesn't seem credible. Can you go into more detail?
Is there a blacklist somewhere? How will it interfere with their ability to attract clients? Will people drop them as attorneys? Exactly how will it affect how they're perceived by a judge? By opposing counsel?
The day I pay per byte is the day I install AdBlock. There's no contest. There's no way around it. If I pay for the ads -- or even if I pay for the DNS requests to resolve the ads -- I don't request the ads.
They can't whitelist every ad server in Creation, and if I pay for even one ad, that's one ad too many. Not happening. I'll even block Google's scripts. And I'll do the same for every member of my family.
Merely because everyone else in the world is wrong is no reason to change my opinion.
If, as you say, popular usage legitimizes, and if the users of the language have the right to define it... you appear to be forgetting that *I am a user of the language*, and have the right to define it. You don't get to claim that everyone but me has the right to an opinion on the subject. I simply need to change popular meaning and its use in everyday English, exactly like *you* are trying to do by posting in this thread.
Anyone attempting to construct an argument so rigorous they have cause to use the phrase "begging the question" usually places enough value on words and language to be shamed by their misuse of them when the point is explained. I find that one correction on *this* point usually sticks.
In fact... thinking about it... I'd be willing to bet karma on the fact that you don't use it, either. Because -- your arguments about "popular usage" aside -- you, personally, know very well that it's wrong, and *you* place enough value on your words not to make such a mistake.
I'm not sure I understand. "Our product X is designed to work with and has been confirmed to work with everything approved by universally-accepted standards body Y." This is an absolute defense, is it not? Whether X has been approved by the standards body seems irrelevant to me -- non-complying product Z is out of spec, and must accept the slings and arrows of uncaring vendors as part of the bargain.
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Your statements are predicated on incorrect beliefs and colored by attacks against what I didn't say.
1) *I* am not talking about depictions of either. I asked a question that didn't directly refer to the original question. You are so far the only respondent who's taken direct issue with that aspect of my words, so I have to assume I was clear.
2) I didn't say I'd rather have one than the other. I asked why we found it necessary to compare the immorality of two acts. Obviously, I'd prefer to be alive rather than dead. I want to know why one act is considered less wrong than the other.
Okay, but -- I will note that my definition of murder excludes acts which can be legally justified, and doesn't pay a lot of attention to factors of mitigation short of legal justification. (For consistency, the same goes for the other, but US law is happily unburdened with the concepts of justified or mitigated rape.)
Two, you've introduced a new concept -- comparing two *identical* acts to one act of the same.
That said... it's tempting to go "identical but finite", but I think it'd be flawed. I'd consider it infinitely immoral. Why is murdering two people worse than murdering one, from a moral standpoint? To each person murdered, it's the end of the world.
Someone who murders someone needs to be stopped from doing so again. Someone who murders ten people... needs to be stopped from doing so again. We might devote more resources to the latter than the former, but that decision is driven by the scarcity of resources -- someone who killed ten people is more likely to kill an eleventh than someone who killed one person is likely to kill two. (Obviously, you can propose a counter-example. But if you're tasked to devote agents to finding the one guy or the ten guy, at the instant you decide, your knowledge of the situation is limited, and your counter-examples would rely on this man knowing and trusting the details you'd use to make you case, which I don't think you can assume.)
For that matter, is "raping and them murdering someone" more or less immoral than one or the other? Again, no. It's supremely immoral, full stop. It should not be allowed, it should not happen -- why does there need to be a sliding scale?
You know, I never thought about it before... but why is it necessary to compare "rape" and "murder" and decide which of the two are worse?
Both are supremely unacceptable acts, full stop. The hypothetical question asked doesn't seem very realistic. "I would choose neither." "NO! What if you had to choose... because you're on a bus! And a madman would blow up the bus if you didn't choose, or it slowed down!" I'm not feeling it.
I'm not prepared to agree that killing N people is better or worse than raping N people, and that's before I even GET to the part where we bring up the religion thing. What if you *raped* N people for religion, but then killed N others just because you're a jerk? How does that stack up? And what if you double-parked because you wanted to make it harder for someone to drive away, thereby increasing the energy they expended and hastening, ever so slightly, the end of the universe? And you just raped N people to produce delicious candy? Hard to call that one, I tell you.
I'm having trouble with that one. I mean, the statement would've been true without invoking "mission critical" -- of course the ability to get resolution better than seconds is for applications that need resolution better than seconds. I'm not sure why you've invoked the specter of "mission critical" here, and I'm having a damn hard time picturing any utterly important, world-ending task that's going to (a) rely on the *timestamp in the filesystem* and (b) run on Linux and ext4fs.
And the timestamp isn't in milliseconds (an incremental improvement that wouldn't've even raised eyebrows) or microseconds (which would have been future-proofed overkill) but nanoseconds. I know how PC clocks work -- you'll have a hard time convincing me that you can maintain nanosecond timing long enough for the difference between two nanosecond timestamps to be accurate down to the nanosecond.
Did you see the section on timestamps? Nanosecond resolution out to 2514.
Nanoseconds.
We're dealing with a process whose maximum useful precision is "has the green light gone off yet", and we've got nanosecond timestamps.
"Where is this person, we believe him to be in danger" is not "we wish to covertly monitor this person", nor is it "reveal to us this person's whereabouts for the last six months". The police *should* be able to locate people who are believed to be missing, and I'm not very worried about granting them broad powers to go about it. This is a useful task. Assuming the telco isn't enjoined to secrecy, this seems balanced to me.
Yes, it's theoretically possible to parlay powers granted that way into other, less useful acts, but... look, I'm no apologist; I think that many things they do are thoughtless, wicked, and treasonous, but they do have their uses, and in this instance? I'd need to see a case of it being abused, and I'd need it proven that existing case law wasn't sufficient to redress the abuse, before I got too excited about it.
In my opinion, your statement is irrelevant.
What?
You expect me to explain why I've completely dismissed your statement? Present some reasoning as to why I've taken this position? Do, in fact, anything but just say your words don't matter and then speak about something tangental? (Bacon, by the way, is awesome, especially the maple kind.)
If I fail to do so, would you believe that I'd failed to defend my position -- that my original statement was so content-free that it basically didn't speak to the issue at hand?
That was my original complaint. Note that the complaint only merited the single line of text I gave it; this argument's grown a little longer than it really should've.
If he managed to get Marilyn Monroe into a catgirl outfit, he's getting a 50' marble statue, no questions asked.
I'll not be trolled or bullied into trying to prove a negative. My original comment -- that the original poster had failed to answer the submitter's question (that spoke of ethics) with any information relevant to ethics -- stands.
You've confused "legal" and "ethical". You've successfully demonstrated that there's no legal problem. You haven't spoken to ethics.
Nobody trying to convince me how amphetamines help them think more clearly should miss that many punctuation marks.
That's right. Science. We have reached the point where we might have to send a technician out to do a firmware update on *a crate of soup*.
"Oh, no, sonny. That there pallet's running v1.47a -- the cyberinjuns cracked that dekacycles ago. Hardly know what's in there now. Could be tomato, could be chicken noodle. Send that back on the factory. We'll get you some nice v1.49 soup out here. Won't be half a cycle."
I have a donation for your campaign below.
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
Please employ them responsibly. If you run out, I may have some more.
I knew as I was typing it I wasn't being completely clear -- historically, any venue that uses 7-bit ASCII hasn't been very friendly towards markup. (Although some of you may remember using board-specific ANSI escapes in your messages, I remind you that those boards allowed *eight*-bit high ASCII. So nyah.)
Hmm. This claim is plausible, if improbable coming from a user ID under 50K.
However, because I'm just that kind of guy, I'll step in for you.
In modern times, the use of all capital letters in electronic messaging has come to signify emphasis, or a raised voice. As more and more internet communication is conducted on forums with internal markup, instead of the flat 7-bit ASCII NNTP favored, this convention's technical justification has begun to fade.
There is a strong reaction against using all-capital letters in a message for this reason; uppercase letters are more difficult to read than lower-case letters, and anyone willing to type in all upppercase is frequently unwilling to use punctuation or paragraphing, adding to the headache of potential viewers.
Use uppercase letters sparingly, like a strong seasoning, to give your words flavor and tone.
I'd solicit it through illegal means and shield them with retroactive immunity.
Given that the state is telling the "independent" search engine how to run, I see no distinction between the two terms you compare.
Well, yes. But after BioDome 2: The Search For Beer, lawmakers have been wary about funding multi-million dollar observatories to find our own planet.
"Solving" wind resistance? Golly gee, that sounds like a great idea. Maybe after that's in the bag, we'll "solve" the energy it takes to boost an object into orbit, or we'll "solve" the atmosphere lowering the power yield of terrestrial solar panels.
That's not the first time I've heard a claim like that, and -- from the perspective of somebody who doesn't know anything about hands-on practice of law -- it doesn't seem credible. Can you go into more detail?
Is there a blacklist somewhere? How will it interfere with their ability to attract clients? Will people drop them as attorneys? Exactly how will it affect how they're perceived by a judge? By opposing counsel?
The day I pay per byte is the day I install AdBlock. There's no contest. There's no way around it. If I pay for the ads -- or even if I pay for the DNS requests to resolve the ads -- I don't request the ads.
They can't whitelist every ad server in Creation, and if I pay for even one ad, that's one ad too many. Not happening. I'll even block Google's scripts. And I'll do the same for every member of my family.
Merely because everyone else in the world is wrong is no reason to change my opinion.
If, as you say, popular usage legitimizes, and if the users of the language have the right to define it... you appear to be forgetting that *I am a user of the language*, and have the right to define it. You don't get to claim that everyone but me has the right to an opinion on the subject. I simply need to change popular meaning and its use in everyday English, exactly like *you* are trying to do by posting in this thread.
Anyone attempting to construct an argument so rigorous they have cause to use the phrase "begging the question" usually places enough value on words and language to be shamed by their misuse of them when the point is explained. I find that one correction on *this* point usually sticks.
In fact... thinking about it... I'd be willing to bet karma on the fact that you don't use it, either. Because -- your arguments about "popular usage" aside -- you, personally, know very well that it's wrong, and *you* place enough value on your words not to make such a mistake.
You are not the first person to make the claim that widespread incorrect usage is no longer incorrect. You are not the last person who will do so.
I'm not sure I understand. "Our product X is designed to work with and has been confirmed to work with everything approved by universally-accepted standards body Y." This is an absolute defense, is it not? Whether X has been approved by the standards body seems irrelevant to me -- non-complying product Z is out of spec, and must accept the slings and arrows of uncaring vendors as part of the bargain.
Uncheck the box about testing the new discussion system. I don't like it either.