Assuming you think this is a problem (and I'll wager most of us here do), competition can solve this. Some companies can charge more for having a privacy clause in your contract. Others can compete by offering less service but at the expense of your data. Effectively you'd subsidize your internet connection by selling metrics on yourself.
The only problem, of course, is if fraud is going on: if companies are using the data in a way inconsistent with their agreements.
Agree with your points, but as written that Amendment applies to Congress, not to the States. A later Amendment (forgotten like most of the rest) makes clear that such powers which Congress does not possess are reserved for the people or the states. In other words, the official, as written, Constitutional position on censorship is "That's a private matter between the people and their states."
Of course, courts have ruled that these Amendments now apply to the states, too, because they like it that way. That means the rest of us become responsible for the private affairs of other states. I'm required by law to support the liberation of Utah from their oppressive theocratic regime. Hmm, that sounds like a familiar story... Personally, since I don't live in Utah, I'll say what I think the Utah government should do (which is not violate the rights of parents), but my best advice is to Utahians to move if they think its a problem.
For the last 24 hours off and on I've been participating in an online discussion about cheap shots from Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, an expert on science, tries to pass himself off as an expert on religion, but really just attacks offensive strawmen. Truly this is an example of what you're talking about.
But honestly that statement you quoted from Hawkins? I find that funny. It just sounds like a colorful comment thrown into the speech to make it more entertaining. He's trying to conceptualize that concept of "pre-time" or "eternity" and getting at the fact that really conceptualizing it is hard to do. I'm not offended by that, at all (although if I actually read the article I might think different to see it in context).
Good point. It does make more sense if he's talking about arts as in crafts, like the art of blacksmithing.
First of all, the study of natural science gives us great tools, but it doesn't tell us how to use them. Cyanide can be used for good purposes (pest control) or evil purposes (Zyklon B). Science gives us power, but whether it is beneficial or not depends on the ordering of society.
This is an interesting point, too. I will agree that science doesn't tell us how or when to use the tools we discover through it. But I don't think you necessarily need to study religion to learn these things. All I need to do is accept that fact that each person owns him or herself (or even the simple fact that regardless of who owns them, I clearly do not), and you can work out a fairly complete system of ethics from that fact alone, without religion. I'm a Christian fundamentalist, but I still don't think you need Christianity to tell you the basics of what's right and wrong.
From the basic principle of self-ownership we get the basics of right and wrong. It agrees with large portions of Judaism and Christianity (although those religions lay lots of additional obligations on people beyond these basics). I often hear it said that all religions agree on a few basic points, and that these basics are the same basic principles of ethics everywhere. I know Thomas Jefferson said something to that effect, but I'm not sure if he originated the idea or not. I've done a lot of study of other religions, but I've tended to study what they said about God and theology, rather than what they said about man's ethical treatment of each other, so I can't say how true it is. I do think if a society doesn't develop some or most of these principles, they will fail to advance, so it makes sense to me that after millenia those societies that have survived would be those that respected basic ethics to some degree.
They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence
The truly bizarre thing about that statement is that until the last couple of centuries, most art was inspired by religion. I'm at a loss as to where he got the idea that men produced art by paying attention to the Natural stream of thought rather than the Supernatural. From that quote alone, he makes himself sound like someone ignorant of history, which is surprising.
Of course, the other bizarre thing, for me, is that personally I feel like the importance of art to civilization may be overrated, anyway...
Good post, but I hate to tell you that "Neither a lender nor borrower be" is from Shakespeare, not the Bible.:) But you might be thinking of "Owe no man anything but to love one another" (Romans 13:8).
Christians who judge others haven't read their Bibles.
Sounds like you're doing a little judgment of your own, doesn't it?
I Corinthians 5 clears it up really well: Christians are prohibited to judge those outside of the church, but expected to judge those within it (with the maximum penalty being that if a Christian rejects an appeal from his church to come back to righteous behavior, he is then put out of the church and treated as a person outside of the church: no longer accountable to it).
Looking at the press release, I'm not sure it's so much about judging as about "raising awareness."
You're able to surf the net, chat with friends, email, and view porn because of its internet access. Kids know this but parents don't!
Sounds like they are concerned that parents are so clueless that they might not be aware kids can do this. Personally, I'm not sure this is the way to solve the problem of clueless Christian parents. I tend to think that blaming the parents and calling on them to wake up is more effective than blaming the device. It's too much of a copout to let parents have this excuse. "Oh, I tried to raise them right, but I didn't know just how bad things were, and I didn't know just how many ways they could get to it. It's not my fault." If your a Christian parent, I say, yes it is. "Awareness campaigns" (or "smear campaigns") like this just help contribute to the thinking that it's hopefully for parents to ever outsmart their kids and keep up with the modern world, and make them think it's okay not to try.
Another good example of how we mess things up when we socialize things that could've been left up to the free market. Of course, NOT socializing law creation, law enforcement, and law adjudication is a radical idea to most people. But then again, so is NOT socializing education, sports, or health care.
Right. And beyond that, the market will make the right determination about the relative worth of each option in each individual case. Socializing this decision (voting on it) is just going to result in resource misallocation. As it does in every decision.
From Time Will Run Back, by Henry Hazlitt:
a market economy, the private enterprise system,
adopts exactly the right in-between solution--the solution of
constant but gradual advance. It replaces old machines with
new ones, and old models with better models; but it can't make
the entire change-over instantaneously, and that would not be
economical even if it could.... the productive resources
used in making the new machines must be taken from making
something else--something else that may possibly be even more
urgent. And then we must further consider, not merely what
happens in the cotton textile industry, but what happens in every
other industry. If we were to turn the whole machine-tool industry
over to making the new textile machines, then there would
be no capacity left to make new machines for any other industry.
Yet some other industry may need new machines even more
urgently.
Nobody is in the position to correctly make this decision centrally for everybody.
As a citizen, I'd like that astroturfing labeled as such
As a person with a brain, I'm offended by the suggestion that I can't just evaluate speech on the merits. And as a lover of liberty, I'm extremely offended by the suggestion that liberty be infringed in this way.
I recognize that global warming may be a serious threat, and this may be a good sign that there is a problem, but it's just hard to feel that a sentence like "something is occurring faster than models predict" is a tragedy for anybody other than the modelers.
A Seattle school board has placed a moratorium on screenings of 'An Inconvenient Truth
Actually, a moratorium on screenings of any movies in school might be a good way to make education better, overall. Maybe they should be schooling instead of watching movies?
I still can't figure out why we watched "Ferngully: the Last Rainforest" in Spanish. I kind of understood why we watched "The Alamo," but I wasn't happy about the way the teacher raked me over the coals when she asked if I'd've wanted the chance to defend freedom at the Alamo and I said no because I was a pacifist. Same teacher who disliked my church, too, and made it known. As a result, I stopped with two years of Spanish instead of the three I wanted.
One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs.
Awesome. I've been waiting for just such a service for years.
I was one step removed from actually mailing the stuff to my fellow apartment dwellers in the mid 1990s. I was so tired of slogging through it on my way down to my car which I could never park in my assigned spot because they took it from us.
So there's no commitment and no obligation on either side. So he's got no call to complain if they work around his work around, and they've got no call to complain if he asks a thousand hackers for help working around their work around of his work around.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Can I get around this by installing cygwin and using GNU cp? Or is that even slower?
Assuming you think this is a problem (and I'll wager most of us here do), competition can solve this. Some companies can charge more for having a privacy clause in your contract. Others can compete by offering less service but at the expense of your data. Effectively you'd subsidize your internet connection by selling metrics on yourself.
The only problem, of course, is if fraud is going on: if companies are using the data in a way inconsistent with their agreements.
Agree with your points, but as written that Amendment applies to Congress, not to the States. A later Amendment (forgotten like most of the rest) makes clear that such powers which Congress does not possess are reserved for the people or the states. In other words, the official, as written, Constitutional position on censorship is "That's a private matter between the people and their states."
Of course, courts have ruled that these Amendments now apply to the states, too, because they like it that way. That means the rest of us become responsible for the private affairs of other states. I'm required by law to support the liberation of Utah from their oppressive theocratic regime. Hmm, that sounds like a familiar story... Personally, since I don't live in Utah, I'll say what I think the Utah government should do (which is not violate the rights of parents), but my best advice is to Utahians to move if they think its a problem.
For the last 24 hours off and on I've been participating in an online discussion about cheap shots from Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, an expert on science, tries to pass himself off as an expert on religion, but really just attacks offensive strawmen. Truly this is an example of what you're talking about.
But honestly that statement you quoted from Hawkins? I find that funny. It just sounds like a colorful comment thrown into the speech to make it more entertaining. He's trying to conceptualize that concept of "pre-time" or "eternity" and getting at the fact that really conceptualizing it is hard to do. I'm not offended by that, at all (although if I actually read the article I might think different to see it in context).
I just set my watch and my PC to UTC and opt out on my own. I don't need my state legislature's permission.
Good point. It does make more sense if he's talking about arts as in crafts, like the art of blacksmithing.
This is an interesting point, too. I will agree that science doesn't tell us how or when to use the tools we discover through it. But I don't think you necessarily need to study religion to learn these things. All I need to do is accept that fact that each person owns him or herself (or even the simple fact that regardless of who owns them, I clearly do not), and you can work out a fairly complete system of ethics from that fact alone, without religion. I'm a Christian fundamentalist, but I still don't think you need Christianity to tell you the basics of what's right and wrong.
From the basic principle of self-ownership we get the basics of right and wrong. It agrees with large portions of Judaism and Christianity (although those religions lay lots of additional obligations on people beyond these basics). I often hear it said that all religions agree on a few basic points, and that these basics are the same basic principles of ethics everywhere. I know Thomas Jefferson said something to that effect, but I'm not sure if he originated the idea or not. I've done a lot of study of other religions, but I've tended to study what they said about God and theology, rather than what they said about man's ethical treatment of each other, so I can't say how true it is. I do think if a society doesn't develop some or most of these principles, they will fail to advance, so it makes sense to me that after millenia those societies that have survived would be those that respected basic ethics to some degree.
The truly bizarre thing about that statement is that until the last couple of centuries, most art was inspired by religion. I'm at a loss as to where he got the idea that men produced art by paying attention to the Natural stream of thought rather than the Supernatural. From that quote alone, he makes himself sound like someone ignorant of history, which is surprising.
Of course, the other bizarre thing, for me, is that personally I feel like the importance of art to civilization may be overrated, anyway...
Why do I get the feeling this was posted solely to let people use "itsatrap" as a tag?
So how was Gerald Ford able to pardon Richard Nixon for "any and all crimes he may have committed"?
Hmm, that leads me to this Explanation from Essjay himself as to why he did it.
Good post, but I hate to tell you that "Neither a lender nor borrower be" is from Shakespeare, not the Bible. :) But you might be thinking of "Owe no man anything but to love one another" (Romans 13:8).
I Corinthians 5 clears it up really well: Christians are prohibited to judge those outside of the church, but expected to judge those within it (with the maximum penalty being that if a Christian rejects an appeal from his church to come back to righteous behavior, he is then put out of the church and treated as a person outside of the church: no longer accountable to it).
Looking at the press release, I'm not sure it's so much about judging as about "raising awareness."
Sounds like they are concerned that parents are so clueless that they might not be aware kids can do this. Personally, I'm not sure this is the way to solve the problem of clueless Christian parents. I tend to think that blaming the parents and calling on them to wake up is more effective than blaming the device. It's too much of a copout to let parents have this excuse. "Oh, I tried to raise them right, but I didn't know just how bad things were, and I didn't know just how many ways they could get to it. It's not my fault." If your a Christian parent, I say, yes it is. "Awareness campaigns" (or "smear campaigns") like this just help contribute to the thinking that it's hopefully for parents to ever outsmart their kids and keep up with the modern world, and make them think it's okay not to try.
total information to the customer
That's not a ground rule of capitalism. Information has a cost, and the market will efficiently allocate it just as it will any other scarce resource.
Another good example of how we mess things up when we socialize things that could've been left up to the free market. Of course, NOT socializing law creation, law enforcement, and law adjudication is a radical idea to most people. But then again, so is NOT socializing education, sports, or health care.
Right. And beyond that, the market will make the right determination about the relative worth of each option in each individual case. Socializing this decision (voting on it) is just going to result in resource misallocation. As it does in every decision.
From Time Will Run Back, by Henry Hazlitt:
Nobody is in the position to correctly make this decision centrally for everybody.
Why is Google using inconsistent terminology in its products for such an important term?
Because it's not an important term.
As a citizen, I'd like that astroturfing labeled as such
As a person with a brain, I'm offended by the suggestion that I can't just evaluate speech on the merits. And as a lover of liberty, I'm extremely offended by the suggestion that liberty be infringed in this way.
I recognize that global warming may be a serious threat, and this may be a good sign that there is a problem, but it's just hard to feel that a sentence like "something is occurring faster than models predict" is a tragedy for anybody other than the modelers.
A Seattle school board has placed a moratorium on screenings of 'An Inconvenient Truth
Actually, a moratorium on screenings of any movies in school might be a good way to make education better, overall. Maybe they should be schooling instead of watching movies?
I still can't figure out why we watched "Ferngully: the Last Rainforest" in Spanish. I kind of understood why we watched "The Alamo," but I wasn't happy about the way the teacher raked me over the coals when she asked if I'd've wanted the chance to defend freedom at the Alamo and I said no because I was a pacifist. Same teacher who disliked my church, too, and made it known. As a result, I stopped with two years of Spanish instead of the three I wanted.
Best post ever!
One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs.
Awesome. I've been waiting for just such a service for years.
I was one step removed from actually mailing the stuff to my fellow apartment dwellers in the mid 1990s. I was so tired of slogging through it on my way down to my car which I could never park in my assigned spot because they took it from us.
So there's no commitment and no obligation on either side. So he's got no call to complain if they work around his work around, and they've got no call to complain if he asks a thousand hackers for help working around their work around of his work around. :)
Also remember that he told his followers to steal a purse, too.
When?
My lady's brother had MS and died in a fire because of it.
Was this very recently? It seems like not long ago you were writing about him and recent events at a hospital.