I wonder if there would be any legal ramifications regarding the rights of chimps compared to other animals
I sincerely doubt it. I don't think the law defines any protected rights in terms of taxonomies at any level. Basically, there are humans and everything else.
Equating laziness and exploitation of others work without compensation with civil disobedience is an offense to the people who practice it legitimately. To practice civil disobedience, you have to go to JAIL to draw attention to your cause. You are just a common thug when you slink around servers downloading illegal copies of music/movies/whatever for your own free enjoyment. This does all of us a disservice because it justifies the tactics of the enemies of fair use rights.
Oh, I'm too big a sloth to get a job and my own apartment so I can sleep in my neighbor's garage and call it civil disobedience against the trespass laws!
Sounds to me like you just couldn't sell them and you've held a chip on your shoulder ever since.;-)
For the record, my mother is one of the most tight, bargain-conscious people in the world and she was totally dedicated to Electrolux vacuums. I can't speak to their quality myself (the lawn was my job) but that she was willing to part with her cutter for them speaks pretty highly of them. Of course, this was in the 1970s, so I have no idea if it holds today...
"An undervote is an attempt to turn a ballot without a vote into a vote."
This is a stipulative definition that is inconsistent with Florida law.
The Florida Supreme Court faced a choice between two conflicting points of State Consitutional law (certification deadlines vs recognizing intent of the voter) and decided it one way. The US Supreme Court decided it differently based on questions of equal protection. Given the relative composition of the two courts, it is easy to argue that both decisions were, sadly, partisan.
It was also illegal under Florida law to fail to honor the "intent of the voter", which is conveniently overlooked by most people taking your position. The Florida supreme court was charged with resolving this point of State Consitutional law and came down one way, the US Supreme Court came down another.
In my irrelevant opinion, Gore screwed up royally by asking for selective recounts which violated (or even appeared to violate) equal protection.
I'm not favoring either of the potential outcomes, just pointing out that FL law, like the election, came down to a choice between undesirables...
If it's like the machines I used to use in KY, I believe they punch a roll of paper. I guess they could have tabulating wheels, which are a pretty well-tested technology...
You mentioned Jews indirectly with the claim that the problem was with post-judaic religions.
You are definitely right that modern Jewish religous discourse is more enlightened than that of *fundamentalist* Christians or Muslims (I honestly don't know enough about the ultra-conservative wings of modern Judaism to know where they fit) and that their is a tremendous legacy of scholarship in the Jewish tradition. Considering a larger arc of history, though, I think the Canaanites and other peoples whose land was inconveniently bequeathed by JVHV to his chosen tribes might disagree about their level of enlightenment.
I have a big beef with religous fundamentalism too, particularly when it's used to justify aggression. Nonetheless, I don't think it's fair to drape all adherents with the mantle of the zealots who are just the most vocal/obvious, or to conflate basic religous messages with their historical abuses by power-hungry despots who have weilded them to the detriment of society. You also see this manifested in "damning" at the individual level, where people's desire to own a situation manifests in intolerance of the other.
In my view, one of the key problems with modern religions is that devotional aspects are promoted at the expense of the mystical. A certain amount of that is unavoidable I guess, given the nature of the masses. What's truly unfortunate is how the devotional types are so easily shepherded and sheared by the powerful. I'd also note that the same observation could be made about atheists, who are frequently not nearly as intellectually liberated as they like to represent...
You left out the "misinterpret it" step between "pick it up" and "put it on their sites".
I don't have any beef with religion, or with looking for unity between science and same (as a skim of some of my previous threads will bear out) but the creationists on the Web (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that they are representative of the lot) seem to be mostly just parrots of other creationists, out to justify their belief system by citing misunderstood or misrepresented science.
A coworker of mine who is nominally a creationist actually contacted one of them (the one that's registered about a hundred domain names of evolution-related subjects, I can't recall the name/organization right off) to get citations to original research. No results. Apparently, all the "evidence" cited on his hundreds of pages of creationist Web sites were just claims he'd picked up from other creationist texts. He couldn't connect one of them to scientific work that wasn't easily disabused of its creationist interpretation, in many cases by the original authors.
The most laughable example for me was that he couldn't even define coriolis effect, though he had claimed its existence disproved evolution. Is this the quality of scholarship we are to expect from "creation scientists"?
When in university physics lab, my partners and I did a sequence of rocketry experiments including thrust curves for the engines, design of a fuselage, wind tunnel testing, and ultimately launch and altitude triangulation.
Our wind tunnel results conducted with a full motor showed decent stability. However, with a spent motor to simulate conditions in the unpowered flight segment, they showed considerable instability in the vessel. It was, however, extremely light (designed to maximize altitude for a given motor, basically it was a nosecone and fins on a motor) and the miniature wind tunnel was another student project which was poorly sealed and, we reasoned (despite our thorough application of duct tape) quite turbulent, so we didn't put too much faith in those observations.
The initial launch was a total disaster. Barely clear of the guide rod, the thing became a tumbling menace, spiraling out of control before burying its nose in the dirt just a few meters from the pad.
A caffiene-filled night later, we had identified the problem. As mentioned, we were designing to tight tolerances to maximize altitude for a fixed engine. We had minimized surface area to minimize drag, keeping center of pressure behind the center of gravity. The only problem was, we designed with a fully-fueled engine, and once the fuel began to burn and exhaust out, the clay nozzle of the engine rapidly became the most massive component, shifting the center of mass rear of the center of pressure. Turns out that wind tunnel was right.
We all got As for the analysis of our failure. After finals, we slapped some oversived fins (designed for center of mass conditions in unpowered flight) on that sucker and got it up about 1/3 mile.
Thank you for a refreshingly well thought out response.
Going back to read the original post again, I see there was an entirely different way to view the aside. I read the poster to mean religion getting in the way of rational thought* as opposed to religion influencing ones definition of how intelligence arises. In the event that I read the intent wrong, I definitely owe Steve the AC an apology.
* = A point of view that is abundant on this board
Which he could have done by not making an irrelevant comment about something unrelated to the synergistic effects of groups of synapses. There was no religous context in the thread prior to the poster's snide aside.
Again with the myopia. That Christians or Jews or Muslims have a monopoly on the tendency to kill those who disagree, occupy their land and pillage their wealth is based more on hate-mongering than history. Would you have me believe that all the other civilizations of history existed in idyllic paradises where wars, conquest, and the will to power were unknown?
Exoteric religion is a convenient tool for those who want to mobilize a culture to war, but that says more about human nature, both on the part of the powerful and the weak, than about religion. Without even going into the dim past, we can find numerous examples of horrors perpetrated by movements that were in their bona fides irreligous: Stalinist Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia come first to mind.
... However, it's the SYNERGISTIC effects of all the synapses working together that creates our brain, which allows us to reason, etc
(Note: This is without religion getting in the way, I'd personally not go there...)
If you preferred not to go there, then why did you?
What is it with this overwhelming compulsion of apparently intelligent people to flame religion? Religion is a part of our intellectual and cultural evolution and cavalierly dismissing it as some relic good only for causing conflict and suffering is disingenuous. If you haven't recognized the incredible positive contribution of religous institutions to our history and our present in addition to their oft enumerated abominations, then you are taking a myopic view of the world that is no less abhorrent than that of the fundamentalist.
Or was your entire post a set up for a troll which I am now feeding?
Note the quote marks in my post. I am aware, in fact my introductory sentence makes clear, that ISPs are not common carriers. My claim was that they like to pretend to such status in order to dodge responsibility for what transits their network. I was originally going to go on about how the common carrier argument was belied by law and routine interference in user data space, but I figured I'd said enough. Guess not. Thanks for completing the picture for me...
ISPs are private businesses and are not required, unless their contracts stipulate so, to accept mail from every domain or IP address on the Internet, so where is the case against them?
Then again, making such a defense might endanger the "common carrier" claim that a lot of ISPs make to avoid legal liability for what goes on on their network.
At any rate, as long as spam-blocking is an optional service offered to users, then the receivers can be responsible for rejecting the mail, and I can't imagine even the current US courts ruling that consumers are required to accept unwanted commercial spew (unless of course its in the context of some otherwise offered service such as ad-supported free email accounts).
Thanks a lot! His office is between my house and job and now my commute time's going to double because of all the mail trucks converging on his office.:-)
Sounds to me like a de facto corporate email tax. Count me out. I'd just as soon have the USPS take over the email infrastructure.
Seriously, I don't think is the right direction to go. We need to wean ourselves from SMTP and replace it with a protocol that isn't so credulous. If decent authentication was built into the mail protocol, it wouldn't be long before every spammer was blacklisted.
One thing I've been wondering about: if the big ISPs really hate spam so much, why don't they make their dial-up IP ranges easily accessible, public knowledge? Blocking dial-up users is an effective way to throttle a large percentage of spam, but the only way I know to currently get a comprehensive list of those IPs is to purchase it from MAPS.
A sound observation, but being pro-government doesn't have to entail expanding government influence or encroaching on the rights of the citizens where those rights do not clearly impede the public good.
The most significant word in your post is "power". The business of government seems recently to be much more about the expansion and consolidation of power than about providing an institution to promote the interests of society.
Interesting theory about a federal tax distributed proportionately, but the leading aside about Republicans and Democrats distracts from it. Neither party has been discouraging "government involvement" in recent history. Rather, each has just expanded government involvement in different spheres of our lives.
Yes, I was just being glib, which is why I didn't spend any time on the complex issues of fair use and copyright expansion. I assumed (correctly judiging by more recent posts) that they would be brought out by others. I didn't back up any assertions because I was trying to be funny. I think there is adequate room for expansive discourse and terse humor on this board.
Thanks, nonetheless, for your well-informed and insightful comments. I hope you are also sending them to the policy makers who influence the directions that future copyright legislation will take.
Well said. Content owners and Congress would not be wasting their time on these efforts if it weren't for thousands/millions of users infringing their copyrights.
I will now save people the trouble and typing and list the inevitable replies to this post.
I will buy their stuff when they stop putting the one good track I want on a $20 cd with 9 other bad songs, blah blah blah
Ahhh! You mispelled society! blah blah blah
Any I'm forgetting any?:-)
Re: I've used genetic algorithms
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 1
You're the second to rightly call me down for my poor choice of words. What I meant to say was that these programs apply artificial selection by rewarding some sorts of mutation and punishing others. There is not an unconcious process involved because of the programmer's deliberate application of the carrot and stick principle. So far, none of the replies have convinced me of an error in my basic assertion that a simulation is not a proof.
Where does simulation fit in the scientific method? I am assuming that it is in the realm of testing hypotheses. If that is the case, then doesn't the simulation need to exhibit predictive power to be considered to have advanced the cause of proof?
If you trace back to my initial comment, what I winced at was Space.com's headline "Darwin Proved Right by Experiment with 'Alien' Life", which I felt overreached the claims of the work and offered bait for yet another round of creation vs evolution nonsense. I have no interest in disproving creationist arguments (or any other variety of shooting fish in barrels) but I also don't think that "proof" is a concept that should be tossed about lightly.
Slashdot Mirror
I sincerely doubt it. I don't think the law defines any protected rights in terms of taxonomies at any level. Basically, there are humans and everything else.
Equating laziness and exploitation of others work without compensation with civil disobedience is an offense to the people who practice it legitimately. To practice civil disobedience, you have to go to JAIL to draw attention to your cause. You are just a common thug when you slink around servers downloading illegal copies of music/movies/whatever for your own free enjoyment. This does all of us a disservice because it justifies the tactics of the enemies of fair use rights.
Oh, I'm too big a sloth to get a job and my own apartment so I can sleep in my neighbor's garage and call it civil disobedience against the trespass laws!
We need a -1 bullshit moderation...
So getting rid of marketeers would *also* simplify making change? What are we waiting for?!
Sounds to me like you just couldn't sell them and you've held a chip on your shoulder ever since. ;-)
For the record, my mother is one of the most tight, bargain-conscious people in the world and she was totally dedicated to Electrolux vacuums. I can't speak to their quality myself (the lawn was my job) but that she was willing to part with her cutter for them speaks pretty highly of them. Of course, this was in the 1970s, so I have no idea if it holds today...
That was a pointless, ad hominem troll.
Funny, yes, but still a troll...
"An undervote is an attempt to turn a ballot without a vote into a vote."
This is a stipulative definition that is inconsistent with Florida law.
The Florida Supreme Court faced a choice between two conflicting points of State Consitutional law (certification deadlines vs recognizing intent of the voter) and decided it one way. The US Supreme Court decided it differently based on questions of equal protection. Given the relative composition of the two courts, it is easy to argue that both decisions were, sadly, partisan.
It was also illegal under Florida law to fail to honor the "intent of the voter", which is conveniently overlooked by most people taking your position. The Florida supreme court was charged with resolving this point of State Consitutional law and came down one way, the US Supreme Court came down another.
In my irrelevant opinion, Gore screwed up royally by asking for selective recounts which violated (or even appeared to violate) equal protection.
I'm not favoring either of the potential outcomes, just pointing out that FL law, like the election, came down to a choice between undesirables...
If it's like the machines I used to use in KY, I believe they punch a roll of paper. I guess they could have tabulating wheels, which are a pretty well-tested technology...
You mentioned Jews indirectly with the claim that the problem was with post-judaic religions.
You are definitely right that modern Jewish religous discourse is more enlightened than that of *fundamentalist* Christians or Muslims (I honestly don't know enough about the ultra-conservative wings of modern Judaism to know where they fit) and that their is a tremendous legacy of scholarship in the Jewish tradition. Considering a larger arc of history, though, I think the Canaanites and other peoples whose land was inconveniently bequeathed by JVHV to his chosen tribes might disagree about their level of enlightenment.
I have a big beef with religous fundamentalism too, particularly when it's used to justify aggression. Nonetheless, I don't think it's fair to drape all adherents with the mantle of the zealots who are just the most vocal/obvious, or to conflate basic religous messages with their historical abuses by power-hungry despots who have weilded them to the detriment of society. You also see this manifested in "damning" at the individual level, where people's desire to own a situation manifests in intolerance of the other.
In my view, one of the key problems with modern religions is that devotional aspects are promoted at the expense of the mystical. A certain amount of that is unavoidable I guess, given the nature of the masses. What's truly unfortunate is how the devotional types are so easily shepherded and sheared by the powerful. I'd also note that the same observation could be made about atheists, who are frequently not nearly as intellectually liberated as they like to represent...
You left out the "misinterpret it" step between "pick it up" and "put it on their sites".
I don't have any beef with religion, or with looking for unity between science and same (as a skim of some of my previous threads will bear out) but the creationists on the Web (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that they are representative of the lot) seem to be mostly just parrots of other creationists, out to justify their belief system by citing misunderstood or misrepresented science.
A coworker of mine who is nominally a creationist actually contacted one of them (the one that's registered about a hundred domain names of evolution-related subjects, I can't recall the name/organization right off) to get citations to original research. No results. Apparently, all the "evidence" cited on his hundreds of pages of creationist Web sites were just claims he'd picked up from other creationist texts. He couldn't connect one of them to scientific work that wasn't easily disabused of its creationist interpretation, in many cases by the original authors.
The most laughable example for me was that he couldn't even define coriolis effect, though he had claimed its existence disproved evolution. Is this the quality of scholarship we are to expect from "creation scientists"?
When in university physics lab, my partners and I did a sequence of rocketry experiments including thrust curves for the engines, design of a fuselage, wind tunnel testing, and ultimately launch and altitude triangulation.
Our wind tunnel results conducted with a full motor showed decent stability. However, with a spent motor to simulate conditions in the unpowered flight segment, they showed considerable instability in the vessel. It was, however, extremely light (designed to maximize altitude for a given motor, basically it was a nosecone and fins on a motor) and the miniature wind tunnel was another student project which was poorly sealed and, we reasoned (despite our thorough application of duct tape) quite turbulent, so we didn't put too much faith in those observations.
The initial launch was a total disaster. Barely clear of the guide rod, the thing became a tumbling menace, spiraling out of control before burying its nose in the dirt just a few meters from the pad.
A caffiene-filled night later, we had identified the problem. As mentioned, we were designing to tight tolerances to maximize altitude for a fixed engine. We had minimized surface area to minimize drag, keeping center of pressure behind the center of gravity. The only problem was, we designed with a fully-fueled engine, and once the fuel began to burn and exhaust out, the clay nozzle of the engine rapidly became the most massive component, shifting the center of mass rear of the center of pressure. Turns out that wind tunnel was right.
We all got As for the analysis of our failure. After finals, we slapped some oversived fins (designed for center of mass conditions in unpowered flight) on that sucker and got it up about 1/3 mile.
Thank you for a refreshingly well thought out response.
Going back to read the original post again, I see there was an entirely different way to view the aside. I read the poster to mean religion getting in the way of rational thought* as opposed to religion influencing ones definition of how intelligence arises. In the event that I read the intent wrong, I definitely owe Steve the AC an apology.
* = A point of view that is abundant on this board
Which he could have done by not making an irrelevant comment about something unrelated to the synergistic effects of groups of synapses. There was no religous context in the thread prior to the poster's snide aside.
Again with the myopia. That Christians or Jews or Muslims have a monopoly on the tendency to kill those who disagree, occupy their land and pillage their wealth is based more on hate-mongering than history. Would you have me believe that all the other civilizations of history existed in idyllic paradises where wars, conquest, and the will to power were unknown?
Exoteric religion is a convenient tool for those who want to mobilize a culture to war, but that says more about human nature, both on the part of the powerful and the weak, than about religion. Without even going into the dim past, we can find numerous examples of horrors perpetrated by movements that were in their bona fides irreligous: Stalinist Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia come first to mind.
No. You created one. Now they will be liable if they circumvent it.
Note the quote marks in my post. I am aware, in fact my introductory sentence makes clear, that ISPs are not common carriers. My claim was that they like to pretend to such status in order to dodge responsibility for what transits their network. I was originally going to go on about how the common carrier argument was belied by law and routine interference in user data space, but I figured I'd said enough. Guess not. Thanks for completing the picture for me...
ISPs are private businesses and are not required, unless their contracts stipulate so, to accept mail from every domain or IP address on the Internet, so where is the case against them?
Then again, making such a defense might endanger the "common carrier" claim that a lot of ISPs make to avoid legal liability for what goes on on their network.
At any rate, as long as spam-blocking is an optional service offered to users, then the receivers can be responsible for rejecting the mail, and I can't imagine even the current US courts ruling that consumers are required to accept unwanted commercial spew (unless of course its in the context of some otherwise offered service such as ad-supported free email accounts).
Thanks a lot! His office is between my house and job and now my commute time's going to double because of all the mail trucks converging on his office. :-)
Sounds to me like a de facto corporate email tax. Count me out. I'd just as soon have the USPS take over the email infrastructure.
Seriously, I don't think is the right direction to go. We need to wean ourselves from SMTP and replace it with a protocol that isn't so credulous. If decent authentication was built into the mail protocol, it wouldn't be long before every spammer was blacklisted.
One thing I've been wondering about: if the big ISPs really hate spam so much, why don't they make their dial-up IP ranges easily accessible, public knowledge? Blocking dial-up users is an effective way to throttle a large percentage of spam, but the only way I know to currently get a comprehensive list of those IPs is to purchase it from MAPS.
A sound observation, but being pro-government doesn't have to entail expanding government influence or encroaching on the rights of the citizens where those rights do not clearly impede the public good.
The most significant word in your post is "power". The business of government seems recently to be much more about the expansion and consolidation of power than about providing an institution to promote the interests of society.
Interesting theory about a federal tax distributed proportionately, but the leading aside about Republicans and Democrats distracts from it. Neither party has been discouraging "government involvement" in recent history. Rather, each has just expanded government involvement in different spheres of our lives.
Yes, I was just being glib, which is why I didn't spend any time on the complex issues of fair use and copyright expansion. I assumed (correctly judiging by more recent posts) that they would be brought out by others. I didn't back up any assertions because I was trying to be funny. I think there is adequate room for expansive discourse and terse humor on this board.
Thanks, nonetheless, for your well-informed and insightful comments. I hope you are also sending them to the policy makers who influence the directions that future copyright legislation will take.
I will now save people the trouble and typing and list the inevitable replies to this post.
Any I'm forgetting any?
You're the second to rightly call me down for my poor choice of words. What I meant to say was that these programs apply artificial selection by rewarding some sorts of mutation and punishing others. There is not an unconcious process involved because of the programmer's deliberate application of the carrot and stick principle. So far, none of the replies have convinced me of an error in my basic assertion that a simulation is not a proof.
Where does simulation fit in the scientific method? I am assuming that it is in the realm of testing hypotheses. If that is the case, then doesn't the simulation need to exhibit predictive power to be considered to have advanced the cause of proof?
If you trace back to my initial comment, what I winced at was Space.com's headline "Darwin Proved Right by Experiment with 'Alien' Life", which I felt overreached the claims of the work and offered bait for yet another round of creation vs evolution nonsense. I have no interest in disproving creationist arguments (or any other variety of shooting fish in barrels) but I also don't think that "proof" is a concept that should be tossed about lightly.