They are, by and large, joining al Qaeda-affiliated militant groups.
U.S. servicemen in WWII fought on the same side as the Soviets. Therefore, joining the U.S, Army is joining a Communist-affiliated militant group.
"Many news outlets and analysts frame all foreign fighters as terrorists or al Qaeda-aligned. The reality is more complex. As mentioned above, not all rebel forces in Syria are jihadist in orientation, nor are all the jihadist groups linked to al Qaeda. Furthermore, not everyone who has joined a jihadist group has been motivated by a fully formed jihadist worldview.... Based on the sheer scale of recruitment that is currently taking place, European security services are well advised to monitor the situation closely and adopt an intelligence-led, highly discriminate approach towards dealing with returning fighters." -- http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/european-foreign-fighters-in-syria [emphasis added]
Don't know what happened to the poster to whom you're responding, but I always answer the census form only with the number of people here. I've gotten personal visits from census takers; I tell them, "I've told you all I'm going to tell you, good day." I have not yet been dragged off to Gitmo for doing so.
The Constitution authorizes an enumeration, not an interrogation. Other demographic information that the feds may legitimately desire -- it is useful to base policy on data, after all -- can be obtained via voluntary anonymous surveys.
What followed was over an hour of the âoefedsâ telling me I am not under arrest, and that this is a âoevoluntary interviewâ
Leave. Take your stuff (if they refuse to return it demand a receipt) and GTFO. Once you are labeled a "suspect", if you are not being detained there is no way to talking to cops is to your advantage. If they don't tell you if you're being detained, ask.
"I have been advised not to answer questions. Am I being detained?" "No, but..." "Good day." And GTFO. Or:
"I have been advised not to answer questions. Am I being detained?" "Yes." "I want to speak to my attorney." And STFU.
They will threaten you. They will lie outright. But anything you say can be used against you and nothing you say can be used to help you.
Please explain how the wealth will be distributed if only 5% of the population works.
One possibility: as Alan Watts once suggested, all wealth produced by machine is public property. "Our machine GDP per capita was $50,000 last year. Here's your voucher, citizen."
How will I buy a new pc to write that novel (which AI can write better)
Your credit voucher would cover the PC. And an AI can't write better than I can, any more that another human being can write better than I can...from the point of view of my satisfaction, anyway. I write because I enjoy it.
If "someone/something can do it better" dissuades you from doing something, you'll never do anything. I saw Michael Hedges play guitar...why should I ever bother? I've seen world-renowned martial artists in action...why should I bother? I've got books by writers who are better than I could ever hope to be...what should I bother? When you find the answer to that question, it doesn't change if those other creators are silicon instead of flesh.
If stuff will be distributed by some arbitrary rule instead of market competition
What you call "market competition" rests on a huge number of arbitrary rules about property, business practices, the formation of corporations, employment, "intellectual property", monetary policy, and so on.
product development will stop
No more so than writing novels, playing music, or making love will stop. Designing new things for humans to use is a creative pleasure.
no income means profits are useless as well so there is no incentive to grow. This is NOT a good thing
Actually it's a necessary thing. The growth of our population must end, indeed must reverse, and consumption per capita cannot grow without limit. Therefore the growth of production must at some point cease. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" -- Ed Abbey.
Since the human being that performs the transplant wants to be compensated for his efforts, yes. Anything else, no matter how you slice it, is called slavery.
No, actually, most other things are not called slavery. Regulation of the medical practice such that -- for example -- a surgeon is paid the same amount for putting a kidney into a billionaire sociopath as for putting a kidney into an actually worthwhile human being, is not called "slavery" by informed and educated native speakers of English.
Not entirely, it doesn't. The Constitution is the law of the land. It defines the government, the government doesn't define it. (SCOTUS"s attempt to retcon that power for itself notwithstanding.) That which is in opposition to the law is criminal. (Not to say moral or immoral -- John Brown was a criminal, a terrorist even, but he it can be argued that he was in the right to attempt to start a slave insurresction.) When the government violates the law, it is engaging in criminal activity.
Humanity is cyclical.
History moves in a helix, not in a circle. Some elements repeat, yet progress happens.
Once fees/taxes pass through the US government's fiscal event horizon, it just disappears.
Not at all. The government buys stuff with that tax/fee money. Some of what they buy is the labor of federal workers, who then go on to spend their income at various private sector business. Some of what they buy is corporate welfare for the military-industrial complex, and as wasted and counterproductive as most of that is, if comes out to shareholders and employees of Northrup-Grumman and Lockheed Martin and thus out to various private sector business.
Taxation doesn't make money disappear. It moves it around. The problem is that in our system it often tends to move it from working people to the wealthy, and move it in a way that leads to the production of useless -- or even counter-productive -- goods and services.
I have never met someone claiming to be a Ron Paul Libertarian (of whom I've seen many comments here on Slashdot from) express opinions that promote the military-industrial complex, the keeping of secrets of government action by force or the trampling of individual rights.
Paul is not libertarian in any meaningful sense of that word. He's anti-federalist, but fully authoritarian, happy to have government fsck you over if you step out of his vision of what a white Christian American should be...just so long as it's a state government. He's a terrible excuse for a human being and anyone supporting him should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
I'll skip the SF and tech and famous literature, since they're sure to be represented elsewhere in this thread, and give a few from the remainder of my required reading list for humanity:
The World's Religions, Huston Smith. (Originally published as The Religions of Man, the original is not as complete but if you find a cheap copy in a used bookstore grab it.) Whether you're a Xian or an atheist or whatever, you're going to have to eventually deal with people from other religions, and this is an excellent orientation as to what the world's major faiths are about.
The Book: on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts. There are some other books by Watts that I personally like better, but this is a good introduction to some of the concepts of Eastern philosophy.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. Anyone who works with technology ought to read this.
The Cartoon History of the Universe and The Cartoon History of the United States, Larry Gonick. Gonick really hits the sweet spot, giving you an overview of history that's lighthearted and breezy while still informative. Also his The Cartoon Guide to Sex is a book I would give to teens and young adults.
Chocolate to Morphine, Andrew Weil & Winifred Rosen. It's targeted at high school kids, but this is a book everyone should read to understand why people use drugs and why drug prohibition is doomed to failure.
Also, in my completely biased opinion everyone should read this.:-)
Which wouldn't be needed if you simply used nuclear power.
Nuclear power requires huge government subsidies for liability insurance, security (they are wonderful terrorist targets), and environmental devastation (uranium mining is incredibly dirty, and we still have no workable solution for waste disposal).
Nuclear power as we know it -- uranium and plutonium fission -- is such a boondoggle that the only reasons people continue to advocate for it are flat-out corruption, a near-religious attachment to the romance of "mastering the atom", or a desire to normalize nuclear technology to make nuclear weapons less threatening. Fusion and "energy amplifier" designs based on thorium spallation have potential but aren't ready.
but even at their best and least corrupt, governments are still inefficient and horrible in management.
As opposed to the private sector, which is inefficient, horrible in management, corrupt, and greedy.
People who think that the private sector is necessarily more efficient or less corrupt than the public sector, must never have worked in the private sector.
They're part of the extended ASCII code (the symbols past 0x80).
0x80-0xFF aren't ASCII at all, but the domain of encodings like ISO-8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-15, and Windows-1252.
Don't mean to be overly pedantic, but a recent project had me trying to auto-correct misencoded text, so I had to get down and dirty with encodings for a few weeks. It may never wash off.
The only purpose of Little Boy was identical to AK-47s single purpose, or Sarin for that matter.
Perhaps you have heard of the term "weapons of mass destruction"? A nuke or a chemical weapon is a WMD, a firearm is not.
That's not to argue that designing one or the other is or is not ethical, but the arguments about designing a singular weapon operated by a human being -- a rifle or handgun or sword or knife or club -- are not the same as the arguments about designing WMD.
Computer science is race and gender neutral, sure. Most fields of human endeavor are.
The culture of practitioners of computer science is not. The phrase "booth babes" should be adequate demonstration of that. Or see RMS's "emacs virgin" "joke".
The culture of practitioners of computer science exists within, and is influenced by, general American/western culture. At minimum, effective CS education has to be conscious of the biases this instills. It has to remind students, "The construction of software is a collaborative process. Don't be a dick to your collaborators. You probably don't intend to be, but we live in a society that encourages us in various ways to be dicks to people of various racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and orientation groups. Leave any such dickishness at home."
Education in general also has to be careful to not make assumptions about student's cultural background. I remember seeing one standardized test question of the form, "Regatta is to boat as <blank> is to car." Pretty strong cultural bias as to who is going to know what the heck a regatta is. That's one's pretty obvious, but I also remember one where kids were asked about a poem that mentioned "buttercup". Inner city kids not familiar with the wildflower thought (quite rationally) that it was a cup full of butter.
Are there similar biases in CS education? I don't know that there are but I'm open to the possibly. It's hard to see such biases from the inside.
Aren't you forced to consent to breathalyzers at any stop while driving your car when you receive your license?
You are never "forced to consent" to anything. If you're forced, ipso facto it is not consent.
You can have your license yanked for declining a breath test. But that's strictly an administrative action, not criminal.
If you're not drunk, the cops have no probable cause to ask you to blow, so your lawyer can argue that, and you could blow a false positive. So if you're not drunk, blowing is not in your interest. If you are drunk, naughty naughty, but that aside you wouldn't want to give them evidence to use against you.
From what I have read and seen, you are best off declining to take either a "field sobriety" test or a breathalyzer test. Never consent.
Oh, it very definitely can. It takes a while but activist friends of mine sued successfully. Some sorts of suits have more chance of success than others, but suits over bad cops do win or get settled fairly often.
Is your assumption just because they could do it, that they are? Despite the fact that there's no benefit to getting DNA samples from random drivers but there is a huge time and monetary cost to do so?
If they are taking a cheek swab, they are already getting your DNA. That might not be what they are after at the moment, but they have your DNA, along with your license plate number, so they have a pretty good idea who you are.(And if they're checking your driver's licence, they know who you are.
The cost of storing that DNA, in case you should later become a person of interest or until the cost of DNA analysis becomes trivial, is minimal. Rather like the cost of storing data about your electronic communications. You're not interesting to them now, but you might be someday, and the surveillance state isn't about to let an opportunity go to waste.
Who is more respectful, 1) The guy who is honest, even when it offends some women? 2) The guy who hides his true opinion in order to 'have a quality relationship'?
If his opinion is not respectful, neither of these hypothetical men are respectful or respectable. Sexist assholes are sexist assholes, whether or not they conceal their sexism.
That said, the purported "research" is gibberish, and I hope it is satire in and of itself. If it's not, then it deserves at least some gentle mockery. I don't know if "C Plus Equality" does that well, or if it's just juvenile dick jokes, but a self-publishing platform (which is what Github boils down to) shouldn't be in the business of making value judgments.
The British (and the Europeans) have perfectly adequate laws against hate-speech
There is no such thing as an "adequate" law against any content of speech. Censorship is obscene. It's a shame that many British (and Europeans, and some Americans) don't understand that when you threaten someone at gunpoint (which is what an arrest is) for the content of their speech, you're doing thing much more evil than any speech can be.
...isn't it a bit pretentious for somebody not a citizen or residing within a given country to tell them they need to work at making their laws more like your own?
Boy, it sure was pretentious of citizens of other countries to tell South Africa that it should let Nelson Mandela out of jail and end apartheid. Or citizens of counties outside of China to express disappointment over the whole tank think in Tienanmen Square. Or, you know, the Holocaust, wasn't that an internal matter for German law to decide?
Slashdot Mirror
May I introduce you to the Saturn V Dynamic Test Stand?
Sure. They'd social engineer GMail instead.
U.S. servicemen in WWII fought on the same side as the Soviets. Therefore, joining the U.S, Army is joining a Communist-affiliated militant group.
"Many news outlets and analysts frame all foreign fighters as terrorists or al Qaeda-aligned. The reality is more complex. As mentioned above, not all rebel forces in Syria are jihadist in orientation, nor are all the jihadist groups linked to al Qaeda. Furthermore, not everyone who has joined a jihadist group has been motivated by a fully formed jihadist worldview.... Based on the sheer scale of recruitment that is currently taking place, European security services are well advised to monitor the situation closely and adopt an intelligence-led, highly discriminate approach towards dealing with returning fighters." -- http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/european-foreign-fighters-in-syria [emphasis added]
Don't know what happened to the poster to whom you're responding, but I always answer the census form only with the number of people here. I've gotten personal visits from census takers; I tell them, "I've told you all I'm going to tell you, good day." I have not yet been dragged off to Gitmo for doing so.
The Constitution authorizes an enumeration, not an interrogation. Other demographic information that the feds may legitimately desire -- it is useful to base policy on data, after all -- can be obtained via voluntary anonymous surveys.
Leave. Take your stuff (if they refuse to return it demand a receipt) and GTFO. Once you are labeled a "suspect", if you are not being detained there is no way to talking to cops is to your advantage. If they don't tell you if you're being detained, ask.
"I have been advised not to answer questions. Am I being detained?" "No, but..." "Good day." And GTFO. Or:
"I have been advised not to answer questions. Am I being detained?" "Yes." "I want to speak to my attorney." And STFU.
They will threaten you. They will lie outright. But anything you say can be used against you and nothing you say can be used to help you.
Every American needs to watch this.
One possibility: as Alan Watts once suggested, all wealth produced by machine is public property. "Our machine GDP per capita was $50,000 last year. Here's your voucher, citizen."
Your credit voucher would cover the PC. And an AI can't write better than I can, any more that another human being can write better than I can...from the point of view of my satisfaction, anyway. I write because I enjoy it.
If "someone/something can do it better" dissuades you from doing something, you'll never do anything. I saw Michael Hedges play guitar...why should I ever bother? I've seen world-renowned martial artists in action...why should I bother? I've got books by writers who are better than I could ever hope to be...what should I bother? When you find the answer to that question, it doesn't change if those other creators are silicon instead of flesh.
What you call "market competition" rests on a huge number of arbitrary rules about property, business practices, the formation of corporations, employment, "intellectual property", monetary policy, and so on.
No more so than writing novels, playing music, or making love will stop. Designing new things for humans to use is a creative pleasure.
Actually it's a necessary thing. The growth of our population must end, indeed must reverse, and consumption per capita cannot grow without limit. Therefore the growth of production must at some point cease. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" -- Ed Abbey.
No, actually, most other things are not called slavery. Regulation of the medical practice such that -- for example -- a surgeon is paid the same amount for putting a kidney into a billionaire sociopath as for putting a kidney into an actually worthwhile human being, is not called "slavery" by informed and educated native speakers of English.
Not entirely, it doesn't. The Constitution is the law of the land. It defines the government, the government doesn't define it. (SCOTUS"s attempt to retcon that power for itself notwithstanding.) That which is in opposition to the law is criminal. (Not to say moral or immoral -- John Brown was a criminal, a terrorist even, but he it can be argued that he was in the right to attempt to start a slave insurresction.) When the government violates the law, it is engaging in criminal activity.
History moves in a helix, not in a circle. Some elements repeat, yet progress happens.
Not at all. The government buys stuff with that tax/fee money. Some of what they buy is the labor of federal workers, who then go on to spend their income at various private sector business. Some of what they buy is corporate welfare for the military-industrial complex, and as wasted and counterproductive as most of that is, if comes out to shareholders and employees of Northrup-Grumman and Lockheed Martin and thus out to various private sector business.
Taxation doesn't make money disappear. It moves it around. The problem is that in our system it often tends to move it from working people to the wealthy, and move it in a way that leads to the production of useless -- or even counter-productive -- goods and services.
Ron Paul -- obviously the definitive "Ron Paul (so-called) Libertarian" -- is anti-choice, anti-religious freedom (believes "The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers."), pro-censorship (introduced a Constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning), anti-privacy, and supported the criminalization of homosexuality by state governments.
Paul is not libertarian in any meaningful sense of that word. He's anti-federalist, but fully authoritarian, happy to have government fsck you over if you step out of his vision of what a white Christian American should be...just so long as it's a state government. He's a terrible excuse for a human being and anyone supporting him should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
I'll skip the SF and tech and famous literature, since they're sure to be represented elsewhere in this thread, and give a few from the remainder of my required reading list for humanity:
The World's Religions, Huston Smith. (Originally published as The Religions of Man, the original is not as complete but if you find a cheap copy in a used bookstore grab it.) Whether you're a Xian or an atheist or whatever, you're going to have to eventually deal with people from other religions, and this is an excellent orientation as to what the world's major faiths are about.
The Book: on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts. There are some other books by Watts that I personally like better, but this is a good introduction to some of the concepts of Eastern philosophy.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. Anyone who works with technology ought to read this.
The Cartoon History of the Universe and The Cartoon History of the United States, Larry Gonick. Gonick really hits the sweet spot, giving you an overview of history that's lighthearted and breezy while still informative. Also his The Cartoon Guide to Sex is a book I would give to teens and young adults.
Chocolate to Morphine, Andrew Weil & Winifred Rosen. It's targeted at high school kids, but this is a book everyone should read to understand why people use drugs and why drug prohibition is doomed to failure.
Also, in my completely biased opinion everyone should read this. :-)
No, websites publish when they make available for download. Each separate page view is not a separate instance of publication.
Nuclear power requires huge government subsidies for liability insurance, security (they are wonderful terrorist targets), and environmental devastation (uranium mining is incredibly dirty, and we still have no workable solution for waste disposal).
Nuclear power as we know it -- uranium and plutonium fission -- is such a boondoggle that the only reasons people continue to advocate for it are flat-out corruption, a near-religious attachment to the romance of "mastering the atom", or a desire to normalize nuclear technology to make nuclear weapons less threatening. Fusion and "energy amplifier" designs based on thorium spallation have potential but aren't ready.
As opposed to the private sector, which is inefficient, horrible in management, corrupt, and greedy.
People who think that the private sector is necessarily more efficient or less corrupt than the public sector, must never have worked in the private sector.
0x80-0xFF aren't ASCII at all, but the domain of encodings like ISO-8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-15, and Windows-1252.
Don't mean to be overly pedantic, but a recent project had me trying to auto-correct misencoded text, so I had to get down and dirty with encodings for a few weeks. It may never wash off.
Perhaps you have heard of the term "weapons of mass destruction"? A nuke or a chemical weapon is a WMD, a firearm is not.
That's not to argue that designing one or the other is or is not ethical, but the arguments about designing a singular weapon operated by a human being -- a rifle or handgun or sword or knife or club -- are not the same as the arguments about designing WMD.
Computer science is race and gender neutral, sure. Most fields of human endeavor are.
The culture of practitioners of computer science is not. The phrase "booth babes" should be adequate demonstration of that. Or see RMS's "emacs virgin" "joke".
The culture of practitioners of computer science exists within, and is influenced by, general American/western culture. At minimum, effective CS education has to be conscious of the biases this instills. It has to remind students, "The construction of software is a collaborative process. Don't be a dick to your collaborators. You probably don't intend to be, but we live in a society that encourages us in various ways to be dicks to people of various racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and orientation groups. Leave any such dickishness at home."
Education in general also has to be careful to not make assumptions about student's cultural background. I remember seeing one standardized test question of the form, "Regatta is to boat as <blank> is to car." Pretty strong cultural bias as to who is going to know what the heck a regatta is. That's one's pretty obvious, but I also remember one where kids were asked about a poem that mentioned "buttercup". Inner city kids not familiar with the wildflower thought (quite rationally) that it was a cup full of butter.
Are there similar biases in CS education? I don't know that there are but I'm open to the possibly. It's hard to see such biases from the inside.
Involvement is not the same as intervention.
Scientific research is a public good.
You are never "forced to consent" to anything. If you're forced, ipso facto it is not consent.
You can have your license yanked for declining a breath test. But that's strictly an administrative action, not criminal.
If you're not drunk, the cops have no probable cause to ask you to blow, so your lawyer can argue that, and you could blow a false positive. So if you're not drunk, blowing is not in your interest. If you are drunk, naughty naughty, but that aside you wouldn't want to give them evidence to use against you.
From what I have read and seen, you are best off declining to take either a "field sobriety" test or a breathalyzer test. Never consent.
Oh, it very definitely can. It takes a while but activist friends of mine sued successfully. Some sorts of suits have more chance of success than others, but suits over bad cops do win or get settled fairly often.
If they are taking a cheek swab, they are already getting your DNA. That might not be what they are after at the moment, but they have your DNA, along with your license plate number, so they have a pretty good idea who you are.(And if they're checking your driver's licence, they know who you are.
The cost of storing that DNA, in case you should later become a person of interest or until the cost of DNA analysis becomes trivial, is minimal. Rather like the cost of storing data about your electronic communications. You're not interesting to them now, but you might be someday, and the surveillance state isn't about to let an opportunity go to waste.
Those who cover for the really bad 10% are, ipso facto, not "realy great". They are accomplices and accessories to the crimes they cover up.
If his opinion is not respectful, neither of these hypothetical men are respectful or respectable. Sexist assholes are sexist assholes, whether or not they conceal their sexism.
That said, the purported "research" is gibberish, and I hope it is satire in and of itself. If it's not, then it deserves at least some gentle mockery. I don't know if "C Plus Equality" does that well, or if it's just juvenile dick jokes, but a self-publishing platform (which is what Github boils down to) shouldn't be in the business of making value judgments.
There is no such thing as an "adequate" law against any content of speech. Censorship is obscene. It's a shame that many British (and Europeans, and some Americans) don't understand that when you threaten someone at gunpoint (which is what an arrest is) for the content of their speech, you're doing thing much more evil than any speech can be.
Boy, it sure was pretentious of citizens of other countries to tell South Africa that it should let Nelson Mandela out of jail and end apartheid. Or citizens of counties outside of China to express disappointment over the whole tank think in Tienanmen Square. Or, you know, the Holocaust, wasn't that an internal matter for German law to decide?
Seriously? Is that the argument you're making?