You English is excellent. Makes me feel like the stupid monolingual American I am.:-) The same ambiguity, "I can X" for "I have no ethical problem with X," is often used by native speakers.
Instead, I tried to say that there would be no moral problems whatsoever in doing these things.
Why would that follow more from solipsism than from materialism? It might be argued that if all of you are just lumps of matter, it doesn't matter what I do; whereas if you're all figments of my imagination, by harming you I harm myself.
As some one else noted in this thread, the main problem of solipsism is that it is not testable at all.
The point of solipsism - at least, in its sophisticated versions - is that the idea of an external universe is not testable. My own perception, however, can be seen exist by direct observation. (Of course, it can only be so seen by itself. I can't show you my perception.)
As such, it explains everything and nothing, just like the "god" concept.
The problem with the god concept is that it postulates additional stuff. But solipsism does the exact opposite - it points out that the idea of an external universe is an assumption.
I mean, it this were true this single existing mind would have invented/discovered _everything (physics, math), written every computer program in existence, etc. That should change one's view of oneself profoundly, but these people do not act in that manner.
How, specifically, would you expect such people to act?
If everything exists only within my mind, I can do whatever the fuck I please.
How do you figure that? I can't do whatever I please within the scope of what we (I presume) both agree is my mind. I can't turn off my love for my ex-girlfriend; I can't rid myself of the belief that the Baltimore Orioles are a morally superior baseball team to the New York Yankees; I can't make information I want to remember stick around, while stuff I'd rather forget is impossible to get rid of.
I can rape a million babies and bathe in their blood, I can obliterate the entire world.
With a little work, perhaps you could. That's independent of solipsism. Would it please you to do so?
Why is it at all plausible that I am so fucking important that I alone exist? How can this mind of mine even exist if nothing exists but my mind?
Why is it more plausible that more than me exists? How can the Universe exist if nothing exists but the Universe? Solipsism is no more or less extraordinary than materialism in terms of plausibility or explanatory power.
Nothing at all has any meaning or consequences whatsoever. Who actually lives like that?
If everything is inside my mind, then everything has meaning and consequence to me. And meaning and consequence to me is the only sort that matters.
The Christian religion believes that the bible in the inerrant word of their god.
SOME Christians believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of their god. Certainly the earliest Christians didn't, as the damned thing hadn't been written yet. It's inaccurate and unfair to claim that all Christians believe this.
With that said, why should his be any more relevant than anyone else's including mine?
Some opinions are based on rational analysis and argument. Such opinions are more relevant than those based on prejudice, ignorance, and fear.
Of course, rational analysis can get it wrong if provided with bad information; and the fact that a person has some rational opinions does not imply that all of that person's opinions are sane.
Discounting God, his only answer to "Where did it all come from?" is "I don't know".
Counting god(s), a rational person's only answer to "Where did it all come from?" is "I don't know". Invoking god(s) has no explanatory power, it just pushes the question back: where did he/she/it/they come from?
Is today's society really any different than in the past?
What's different is industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism demands continuous economic growth, which means continuous growth in consumption. As populations stabilize opportunities for colonialism decline, that mean you have to consume more and more stuff every year.
After WWII, the U.S. government quite deliberately began to build a culture of consumption to prop up capitalism. (Great little artcile by David Suzuki
here.)
It's no coincidence that after 9/11, the one thing the government wanted everyone to do was to buy stuff. It's your patriotic duty to consume, consume, consume!
And how do we get everyone to keep buying stuff? Advertising. Advertising everywhere. It was when they started selling ad space on the handles of gas pumps that I knew it had gone too far...
It's a little more subtle than that "Ending is better than mending" of Brave New World, but not by much.
Ads can be annoying and overdone, but they are a product of a free capitalistic society. Considering the available societal alternatives (China, Myanmar, and Cuba come to mind)
Riiiiiight. Those are the only possible alternatives: our current system, or even more repressive dictatorships.
then surely there won't be a market willing to pay $10M for a copy when the first person who bought it can simply give it away for free if they like. Ergo, you can't, in a practical sense, sell GPLed code.
Most software is bespoke. It's entirely possible for you to hire me - maybe not for $10 million, but for say $10,000 - to craft you up some custom code, and for me to sell you GPL'd code.
Blender was sold to the community for 100,000 EUR.
People can and do sell GPL'd code. The market might not support the business models some people would like; that's a failure of their business skills, not of the GPL.
(Here's something to contemplate that may be related: people give sex away for free. And yet prostitution is still a profitable business. Why?)
Surely you don't think I can make a GPL program, and charge $10M for the code?
What do you mean by "the code"? Source code is "code", so is object code. It's ambiguous.
You may make a GPL program, and sell it to me for any amount you like; but you must include source code (or an offer to provide source at no more than a copying fee). Heck, you don't even have to include binaries. So yes, you can charge me $10 million for the source code, provided it's all part of one transaction - you can't charge me $5 for the executable, and then $10 million for the source.
And you can't keep me from giving away copies after I get them.
If on the other hand you want to set up some complicated forwarding system where a server lies about which IP the mail is actually from, it might fail.
I'm sorry that you don't know how e-mail works. Forwarding is a standard part of it, and it's not "lying" in any way, shape, or form.
Right, like I would trust my fellow citizens more than professionals operating in a defined legal structure.
The defined legal structure that (here in the U.S.) says torture is okey-dokey, that police shooting an unarmed black man 50 times is a-ok, that having the largest prison population in the world because we lock people up for nonviolent drug crimes is a fine thing? The "professionals" who in most states are poorly educated and trained, and usually operate with no effective oversight?
That defined legal structure, versus random fellow citizens? Tough call, that.
He didn't chase anyone. He found out where they ran their illegal businesses by getting the community to work together, then stood outside their building intimidating their customers by his silent, watchful presence until they all moved away.
Chase: To follow as if to catch; to pursue; to compel to move on; to drive by following; to cause to fly. He did, indeed, chase them, chased them right on out of the neighborhood.
Assault: "in other jurisdictions, such as the United States, assault refers only to the threat of violence caused by an immediate show of force." I don't know what the law is where you live, but around here if I stood outside your door brandishing a weapon, that's assault.
Now families with small children live there, and old people are no longer afraid to walk the streets.
And why were old people were afraid to walk the streets? Merely because there were people selling sex and drugs? That's not harming anyone; if someone offers to sell you a blow job or a nickel bag that you don't want, you just say, no thank you. No big deal.
If, on the other hand, there were violent people there profiting from the black market trade, then your bat-wielding hero has 1) only made them move somewhere else, where they're a threat to different people, and 2) made the problem worse by driving the black market further underground and further into the hands of violent criminals, making them more of a threat.
The way to get rid of these violent people is to accept the black market, to bring it out into the light. Not to threaten people because you disagree with their personal choices.
There are anti-social people in the world who consider other people resources and prey
There are indeed.
Many hold political office, or wear police uniforms.
Performing sexual acts in return for money, or providing people with herbs or chemicals that the government doesn't want them to have, does not necessarily make one "anti-social". So long as the hookers and drug dealers keep it quiet, it ain't nobody's business.
On the other hand, chasing people with a baseball bat (as you mention up-thread) is behavior that tends toward the "anti-social".
Web "Bob" Dobbs! Eternal salvation or triple your bandwidth back!
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Are your powers of suspending disbelief so strong that you can believe that you personally are a crack soldier equipped with state of the art weaponry?
Sure. Were you never a child? My powers of suspending disbelief were so strong to turn my fingers into a pistol, any stick into a rifle or sword, a small patch of woods into anything from a WWII battlefield to the surface of an alien planet, and myself into a soldier, an astronaut, a superhero, or swashbuckling adventurer.
I don't do a lot of gaming these days - too busy with swashbuckling adventures - but back in the late 90s when I'd play Quake or Duke Nukem 3D, I used the same powers to make my saving throw versus disbelief.
2. MTAs include the original headers in bounce messages, so discard bounce messages which don't contain your custom header.
Except that MTAs often don't include headers, or at least not all of them.
I filter a lot of bounceback spam by scanning for headers (I don't use an X-header, just for bogus Received: and Message-Id: lines), it definitely helps but is not foolproof.
Maybe someone should tell MADD that they would probably have better luck getting their message out if they didn't take positions that are somewhere between sophomoric and insane.
Drunk driving is bad, yes. Raising the drinking age, lowering the legal threshold at which one is considered intoxicated, and putting up invasive random roadblocks isn't the way to fight it.
It's another thing, and mighty suspicious looking, when the police find it before you're even arrested for the crime.
He knew he was under suspicion for some time before he was arrested. He bought the books several days after his wife's disappearance (according to the Wik), so if he was using them to plan the perfect crime he was a little slow.
Indeed, even if he didn't think he was under suspicion, it's sensible he would be curious about how the investigation would be carried out.
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Well, yeah. Every once in a while I chime in to agree with someone. :-)
You English is excellent. Makes me feel like the stupid monolingual American I am. :-) The same ambiguity, "I can X" for "I have no ethical problem with X," is often used by native speakers.
Why would that follow more from solipsism than from materialism? It might be argued that if all of you are just lumps of matter, it doesn't matter what I do; whereas if you're all figments of my imagination, by harming you I harm myself.
The point of solipsism - at least, in its sophisticated versions - is that the idea of an external universe is not testable. My own perception, however, can be seen exist by direct observation. (Of course, it can only be so seen by itself. I can't show you my perception.)
The problem with the god concept is that it postulates additional stuff. But solipsism does the exact opposite - it points out that the idea of an external universe is an assumption.
How, specifically, would you expect such people to act?
Yes, that's the brilliant recut "Shining" trailer. If you haven't see it yet, go click now.
Here's an interview with the guy behind it.
Heck, the headcount of an exceptional terrorist attack (9/11) is lower than the number of people who drown each year.
And how about deaths from heart disease, or cancer? Bacon double cheeseburgers and lack of exercise are far more deadly to Americans than Al Qaeda.
Sure, so long as it's the option I like...
How do you figure that? I can't do whatever I please within the scope of what we (I presume) both agree is my mind. I can't turn off my love for my ex-girlfriend; I can't rid myself of the belief that the Baltimore Orioles are a morally superior baseball team to the New York Yankees; I can't make information I want to remember stick around, while stuff I'd rather forget is impossible to get rid of.
With a little work, perhaps you could. That's independent of solipsism. Would it please you to do so?
Why is it more plausible that more than me exists? How can the Universe exist if nothing exists but the Universe? Solipsism is no more or less extraordinary than materialism in terms of plausibility or explanatory power.
If everything is inside my mind, then everything has meaning and consequence to me. And meaning and consequence to me is the only sort that matters.
SOME Christians believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of their god. Certainly the earliest Christians didn't, as the damned thing hadn't been written yet. It's inaccurate and unfair to claim that all Christians believe this.
Some opinions are based on rational analysis and argument. Such opinions are more relevant than those based on prejudice, ignorance, and fear.
Of course, rational analysis can get it wrong if provided with bad information; and the fact that a person has some rational opinions does not imply that all of that person's opinions are sane.
Counting god(s), a rational person's only answer to "Where did it all come from?" is "I don't know". Invoking god(s) has no explanatory power, it just pushes the question back: where did he/she/it/they come from?
What's different is industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism demands continuous economic growth, which means continuous growth in consumption. As populations stabilize opportunities for colonialism decline, that mean you have to consume more and more stuff every year.
After WWII, the U.S. government quite deliberately began to build a culture of consumption to prop up capitalism. (Great little artcile by David Suzuki here.) It's no coincidence that after 9/11, the one thing the government wanted everyone to do was to buy stuff. It's your patriotic duty to consume, consume, consume!
And how do we get everyone to keep buying stuff? Advertising. Advertising everywhere. It was when they started selling ad space on the handles of gas pumps that I knew it had gone too far...
It's a little more subtle than that "Ending is better than mending" of Brave New World, but not by much.
Riiiiiight. Those are the only possible alternatives: our current system, or even more repressive dictatorships.
Thank you for more evidence toward Kreider's Thesis: "[T]he most fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is not over issues of individual freedom vs. authority or progress vs. traditional values, but imagination. Conservatives don't have any."
Fortunately, Congress doesn't get to legislate Maxwell's equations, and homebrew GPS jammers are within the reach of hardhackers.
I'm sure outlawing GPS jammers will prove as effective as outlawing guns and heroin has.
Which answers the question. Where are the space advocates? In other countries.
Here in the U.S., we'll be too busy for the next decade or two rebuilding what years of neoconservative policies destroyed to worry about space.
An emulator, in a computing context, by definition emulates a hardware platform.
No, it provides an implementation of the MS Windows API. Just as glibc is not an "emulation" of the POSIX/SUS C library APIs, it is an implementation.
An emulator has to execute in order to emulate anything. If it's not an executable, it's not an emulator.
Incorrect. To censor is "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable; to suppress or delete as objectionable". I wish the fundamentalist capitalists who love this canard that "only governments can censor" would get over it.
Most software is bespoke. It's entirely possible for you to hire me - maybe not for $10 million, but for say $10,000 - to craft you up some custom code, and for me to sell you GPL'd code.
Blender was sold to the community for 100,000 EUR.
People can and do sell GPL'd code. The market might not support the business models some people would like; that's a failure of their business skills, not of the GPL.
(Here's something to contemplate that may be related: people give sex away for free. And yet prostitution is still a profitable business. Why?)
What do you mean by "the code"? Source code is "code", so is object code. It's ambiguous.
You may make a GPL program, and sell it to me for any amount you like; but you must include source code (or an offer to provide source at no more than a copying fee). Heck, you don't even have to include binaries. So yes, you can charge me $10 million for the source code, provided it's all part of one transaction - you can't charge me $5 for the executable, and then $10 million for the source.
And you can't keep me from giving away copies after I get them.
I'm sorry that you don't know how e-mail works. Forwarding is a standard part of it, and it's not "lying" in any way, shape, or form.
The defined legal structure that (here in the U.S.) says torture is okey-dokey, that police shooting an unarmed black man 50 times is a-ok, that having the largest prison population in the world because we lock people up for nonviolent drug crimes is a fine thing? The "professionals" who in most states are poorly educated and trained, and usually operate with no effective oversight?
That defined legal structure, versus random fellow citizens? Tough call, that.
Chase: To follow as if to catch; to pursue; to compel to move on; to drive by following; to cause to fly. He did, indeed, chase them, chased them right on out of the neighborhood.
Assault: "in other jurisdictions, such as the United States, assault refers only to the threat of violence caused by an immediate show of force." I don't know what the law is where you live, but around here if I stood outside your door brandishing a weapon, that's assault.
And why were old people were afraid to walk the streets? Merely because there were people selling sex and drugs? That's not harming anyone; if someone offers to sell you a blow job or a nickel bag that you don't want, you just say, no thank you. No big deal.
If, on the other hand, there were violent people there profiting from the black market trade, then your bat-wielding hero has 1) only made them move somewhere else, where they're a threat to different people, and 2) made the problem worse by driving the black market further underground and further into the hands of violent criminals, making them more of a threat.
The way to get rid of these violent people is to accept the black market, to bring it out into the light. Not to threaten people because you disagree with their personal choices.
There are indeed.
Many hold political office, or wear police uniforms.
Performing sexual acts in return for money, or providing people with herbs or chemicals that the government doesn't want them to have, does not necessarily make one "anti-social". So long as the hookers and drug dealers keep it quiet, it ain't nobody's business.
On the other hand, chasing people with a baseball bat (as you mention up-thread) is behavior that tends toward the "anti-social".
Web "Bob" Dobbs! Eternal salvation or triple your bandwidth back!
Sure. Were you never a child? My powers of suspending disbelief were so strong to turn my fingers into a pistol, any stick into a rifle or sword, a small patch of woods into anything from a WWII battlefield to the surface of an alien planet, and myself into a soldier, an astronaut, a superhero, or swashbuckling adventurer.
I don't do a lot of gaming these days - too busy with swashbuckling adventures - but back in the late 90s when I'd play Quake or Duke Nukem 3D, I used the same powers to make my saving throw versus disbelief.
Except that MTAs often don't include headers, or at least not all of them.
I filter a lot of bounceback spam by scanning for headers (I don't use an X-header, just for bogus Received: and Message-Id: lines), it definitely helps but is not foolproof.
...and new problems would arise, because SPF is fundamentally flawed.
MADD has been takin positions somewhere between sophomoric and insane for a long time now. They're a bunch of prohibitionists who have been abandoned by their founder - Candy Lightner has said that MADD "has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned ... I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving".
Drunk driving is bad, yes. Raising the drinking age, lowering the legal threshold at which one is considered intoxicated, and putting up invasive random roadblocks isn't the way to fight it.
He knew he was under suspicion for some time before he was arrested. He bought the books several days after his wife's disappearance (according to the Wik), so if he was using them to plan the perfect crime he was a little slow.
Indeed, even if he didn't think he was under suspicion, it's sensible he would be curious about how the investigation would be carried out.