Isn't it better to try to prevent bad things happening rather than to trust that people will think what would be right or
wrong?
Giving excess power to the government pretty much ensures that bad things will happen. Trying to trade liberty for security doesn't work - you end up with neither.
Of course they have the right. Smoking pot was made illegal, and therefore, smoking it is punnishible.
They are areas of activity that the state simply has no legitimate authority (moral or legal) to legislate about.
A law telling you what chemicals you may put into your own body is no more legitimate or valid than a law telling you what sexual positions you can use with your consenting partners, or what books you may read, or what god(s) you may (or may not) worship.
I'd prefer a local event - I know there's other folks in the Baltimore area.
I think it would be neat to have presentations or workshops that were decided upon in the same way as interview questions...let people submit their ideas, good ones get modded up, and somebody (who? haven't figured that out yet) picks a set from the 5s.
Take the government out of as much of business as possible. (I won't say all, although some would.)
I'm not sure where you draw the line between "as much as possible" and "all". As much as possible and still have...what?
My point is that if you eliminate and invalidate the state's power to hand control of resources over to a favored few, you eliminate the infrastructure that makes capitalism possible. (which is fine by me.:-) ) You then don't need to give the state the powers to regulate capitalism gone amuck.
In other words, capitalism isn't some natural result of an absence of government action in the economy. (Don't confuse "free market" and "capitalist" - one is about trade, one is about control.)
I'm all for private property; without it, there can be no private decisions. But it's not a concept that should apply to everything in the universe. For then decisions that affect us all are made by, and for the benefit of, a few.
Capitolism has nothing to do with a powerful state.
I don't know about "capitolism", but "capitalism" - despite the ideas of so-called "anarcho-capitalists" - depends on a powerful state to create, assign, and defend property rights.
Capitalism is based on property rights. Not just "natural" property rights, like "I own this land because I live on it and farm it", or "I own this widget because I made it with my own hands", which most people would be recognize and understand in the absense of government; but artificial property rights like "I own the mineral rights on these 10,000 acres because I paid the state money for a paper that says so", or "I own 1,000 shares of this corporate entity created by state fiat," or "I own the government-granted patent on this invention". It takes a government of power to do that.
Capitolism is an economic term, not a political term.
Trace any claim of property back and you find an act of government. The economic is inherently political.
..but I would much rather face the possibilities that would come of a non-regulatory state, than having the tyranny of an over-regulatory government be pushed down my throat.
You want a non-regulatory state?
Fine.
Let's start by getting rid of the laws that create land rights, mineral rights, water rights, and other state-granted exploitation of the planet.
And those laws that create limited-liability corporations should go out the window.
Finally, repeal the laws that prevent us from acting in reasonable self-defence when some greedhead poisons the water and air we all share.
Now, personally, I'm fine with that. I think we could come up with more co-operative means of resource allocation and economic organization, and a more gentle type of industrial development.
But you strike me as a capitalist sort of person, a big fan of a powerful state choosing and backing private concerns to control resources.
In which case, we could keep all those laws and make sure that they're structured so that the artifical rights granted by the state to mess with the land don't let industry poison us.
I note that you don't cite with any examples for the US which are less than a century and a half old.
I was thinking globally. You want a list of more recent immoral acts by the U.S. government?
Off the top of my head, since 1940, big and little, in no particular order.
the current bombing of Afghanistan, in which thousands of innocents have been killed
U.S. backed assassinations or attempts in Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam...
the Gulf War
the Vietnam War
conscription
McCarthyism
support for oppressive states like Israel, Saudi Arabia...
support for dicators in Iran, Iraq, Chile, Nicaragua, the Philippines...
concentration camps for Americans of Japanese descent
COINTELPRO
Hiroshima, and even more so Nagasaki
one of the world's largest prison populations
(second largest, I think - used to be number 1 before the collapse of the USSR.)
the War on (some) Drugs
the "enemies" list
the fiasco at Waco
racial segregation (including laws still on the books in some states)
Oh and let me point out that genocide against the native peoples is hardly a dead issue. Only a few decades ago it was common for babies to be taken from their parents can given to white Christian parents for a "proper" upbringing; other native children were compelled to attend boarding schools far away from their homes and cultures.
The government's campain against AIM and the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier are hardly ancient history. (Not to mention such "little" offenses as the nation's capital's football team carrying a racial slur for a name, or that the genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson is still on the twenty-dollar bill...)
Is this better - or rather, less evil - than other nations? The point can be argued, but it's like arguing who's the nicer serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson.
Governments are by their very nature evil; unfortuntely, they're not a necessary evil but an inevitable one. Until we advance enough as a species for anarchy to be stable, the best we can hope for is government that's less evil than whatever would arise to replace it, if it disappeared.
Finally, we should note that 150 years is a short time compared to the time it will take for serious development of space. Heck, nation-states may well be passe by the time there's more than a few hundred people living in space more-or-less permanently.
But perhaps you can provide an argument for giving the UN massive new powers, considering that it has abused those it has already so badly?
If the only alternative is to give those powers to governments - which are prone to things like the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, the U.S. genocide of American Indian nations, the rape of Nanking, etcetera - the U.N. might be the lesser of evils.
I hope we can come up with a good "none of the above" choice.
OT - Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash
on
Crescent Sunset
·
· Score: 1
This song has got to have some sort of record for most diverse group of bands to cover it - I've heard the Johhny Cash, Social Distortion, Wall of Voodoo, and Frank Zappa versions, and this page lists several more.
But it is gorier than that. Sometimes you can prove halting - that's what formal correctness proofs are all about. But if you've ever done them, you may recall that there's a "creative" aspect involved in picking loop invarients; it's not a paint-by-numbers sort of thing.
No one does it, which is why security is in sucha sad state of affairs, but what you want is an operating system that supports mandatory access control. Like Security-enhanced Linux, for example.
A Theory is something that is not proven and is therefore classified as assumption and speculation.
No, it's not.
In the context of mathematics, a theory is a body of fundamental results - set theory, complexity theory, number theory, information theory, and so on. Nothing speculative, and the only assumptions are the axioms.
In the context of science, a theory is a reasonably complete model of some phenomenon, which is in agreement with observations - Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation, the theory of relativity, the theory of evolution via natural selection, superstring theory, and so on. Some are more speculative than others, but most of those I listed are on a pretty firm basis.
In other words, you can prove mathematically whether any specific program will end or not.
Uh, no. You can't.
There are individual cases for which you can make an ad-hoc proof, yes, but there is no general algorithm that, given a computer program (more properly, a Turing machine), tells you if it halts. I'll leave the gory details to Wikipedia .
Give them gm crops that work in drought conditions, defeats local varmints, etc.
Or how about stopping the promotion of global agri-monoculture and helping them bring back the native crops that work in drought conditions, defeats local varmints, etcetera.
GM crops are not only an environmental disaster waiting to happen (since plants and their pollen have this annoying habit of spreading outside where your plant them), and a corporate bastards' wet dream of controlling global food supplies, they are a solution in search of a problem.
If organic farming is so much cheaper than conventional farming, why is it that they charge so much more for the produce?
Because industrialized agriculture gets to exernalize much of its costs.
If argibusiness had to pay for all the soil erosion, pesticide and fertilizer run-off, medical costs of pesticide-contaminated food, et cetera; and if big farms didn't have massive subsidies for water; and if we all paid the true price for a gallon of fuel, including enviromental costs and military costs to keep the oil flowing; then it would be obvious that the true cost of organic agriculture is much lower.
But until we have an economic system with some basis in reality when it comes to natural resources, you'll have to take all this into account yourself.
No it won't. In the next couple decades molecular nanotechnology will be quite mature.
That would be nice, yes. But only a fool would base public policy on the speculation about what technologies may be available in the future - what if, 50 years ago, policy makers had decided that by the year 2000 we'd all have flying cars?
We can't sanely keep fouling the nest with the excuse that e-z cleanup is just a few decades away.
Yes, it would. You're regulating content. It's no different than saying that people who are at a demonstration to show their support for the government can gather on the lawn of the Capitol, while those who are there to protest the latest legislative travesty get to hold their protest in a small parking lot two miles away.
I'd like to hear some decent, rational arguments against this idea.
The idea doesn't even make sense in the absense of a clear and agreed-upon defintion of what content is going to be forced into these "adult-only" zones. You quickly hit the same over/underblocking problem as filtering software.
Some of the problem is adults whacking off in libraries looking at porn. We can protect the kids from that by banning porn altogether
Uh, someone whacking off in a library can be arrested already, whether they're viewing on-line porn, looking over Playboy back issues, or getting turned on by art books featuring nudes. We don't need new laws for that.
Tell me why anyone would defend porn?
Tell me why anyone would attack porn? What, you happen to find it offensive? Bully for you. Then don't look at it.
yes, but given the computers are not at home - they are in libraries where kids can access them freely and without supervision - then how does a parent protect them from that?
Given that the books are not at home - they are in libraries where kids can access them freely - then how does a parent protect them from that?
They do what my mom did - go to the fscking library with the kids until they are mature enough to be let loose. This is a no-brainer, folks.
CS courses are not about learing to write sorting algorythms, compilers, operating systems, or any code at all.
Of course they are. At some point, the CS student should learn the relationship between all this theory, and actual code.
Every CS class I took had a component of theory. Many also had a component of coding, with the objective being to see how the theory applies. You don't just talk about parsing theory, you write a compilier.
Whoever 'breaks the copy once protection scheme' can be prosecuted under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.
Like the folks who figured out how to use a magic marker to defeat the recording industries' most recent attempt?
Someone will break the scheme, like every previous scheme, and the results will spread around the world in hours via the net.
Look folks, copy protection is finished, over, dead, done, gone. Accept it and move on; then we can start figuring out a way to get artists paid. (I almost wrote "a new way", but fact is that many artists never got paid under the old system.)
Slashdot Mirror
Giving excess power to the government pretty much ensures that bad things will happen. Trying to trade liberty for security doesn't work - you end up with neither.
They are areas of activity that the state simply has no legitimate authority (moral or legal) to legislate about.
A law telling you what chemicals you may put into your own body is no more legitimate or valid than a law telling you what sexual positions you can use with your consenting partners, or what books you may read, or what god(s) you may (or may not) worship.
I'd prefer a local event - I know there's other folks in the Baltimore area.
I think it would be neat to have presentations or workshops that were decided upon in the same way as interview questions...let people submit their ideas, good ones get modded up, and somebody (who? haven't figured that out yet) picks a set from the 5s.
I'm not sure where you draw the line between "as much as possible" and "all". As much as possible and still have...what?
My point is that if you eliminate and invalidate the state's power to hand control of resources over to a favored few, you eliminate the infrastructure that makes capitalism possible. (which is fine by me. :-) ) You then don't need to give the state the powers to regulate capitalism gone amuck.
In other words, capitalism isn't some natural result of an absence of government action in the economy. (Don't confuse "free market" and "capitalist" - one is about trade, one is about control.)
I'm all for private property; without it, there can be no private decisions. But it's not a concept that should apply to everything in the universe. For then decisions that affect us all are made by, and for the benefit of, a few.
I don't know about "capitolism", but "capitalism" - despite the ideas of so-called "anarcho-capitalists" - depends on a powerful state to create, assign, and defend property rights.
Capitalism is based on property rights. Not just "natural" property rights, like "I own this land because I live on it and farm it", or "I own this widget because I made it with my own hands", which most people would be recognize and understand in the absense of government; but artificial property rights like "I own the mineral rights on these 10,000 acres because I paid the state money for a paper that says so", or "I own 1,000 shares of this corporate entity created by state fiat," or "I own the government-granted patent on this invention". It takes a government of power to do that.
Trace any claim of property back and you find an act of government. The economic is inherently political.
You want a non-regulatory state?
Fine.
Let's start by getting rid of the laws that create land rights, mineral rights, water rights, and other state-granted exploitation of the planet.
And those laws that create limited-liability corporations should go out the window.
Finally, repeal the laws that prevent us from acting in reasonable self-defence when some greedhead poisons the water and air we all share.
Now, personally, I'm fine with that. I think we could come up with more co-operative means of resource allocation and economic organization, and a more gentle type of industrial development.
But you strike me as a capitalist sort of person, a big fan of a powerful state choosing and backing private concerns to control resources. In which case, we could keep all those laws and make sure that they're structured so that the artifical rights granted by the state to mess with the land don't let industry poison us.
I was thinking globally. You want a list of more recent immoral acts by the U.S. government?
Off the top of my head, since 1940, big and little, in no particular order.
Oh and let me point out that genocide against the native peoples is hardly a dead issue. Only a few decades ago it was common for babies to be taken from their parents can given to white Christian parents for a "proper" upbringing; other native children were compelled to attend boarding schools far away from their homes and cultures. The government's campain against AIM and the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier are hardly ancient history. (Not to mention such "little" offenses as the nation's capital's football team carrying a racial slur for a name, or that the genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson is still on the twenty-dollar bill...)
Is this better - or rather, less evil - than other nations? The point can be argued, but it's like arguing who's the nicer serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson.
Governments are by their very nature evil; unfortuntely, they're not a necessary evil but an inevitable one. Until we advance enough as a species for anarchy to be stable, the best we can hope for is government that's less evil than whatever would arise to replace it, if it disappeared.
Finally, we should note that 150 years is a short time compared to the time it will take for serious development of space. Heck, nation-states may well be passe by the time there's more than a few hundred people living in space more-or-less permanently.
By killing most of the natives, then wresting a large piece of territory from a neighboring nation in a war of conquest? Count me out, thanks.
If the only alternative is to give those powers to governments - which are prone to things like the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, the U.S. genocide of American Indian nations, the rape of Nanking, etcetera - the U.N. might be the lesser of evils.
I hope we can come up with a good "none of the above" choice.
This song has got to have some sort of record for most diverse group of bands to cover it - I've heard the Johhny Cash, Social Distortion, Wall of Voodoo, and Frank Zappa versions, and this page lists several more.
But it is gorier than that. Sometimes you can prove halting - that's what formal correctness proofs are all about. But if you've ever done them, you may recall that there's a "creative" aspect involved in picking loop invarients; it's not a paint-by-numbers sort of thing.
No one does it, which is why security is in sucha sad state of affairs, but what you want is an operating system that supports mandatory access control. Like Security-enhanced Linux, for example.
You can generally find me somewhere between the Greens and the Libertarians, hanging around with the libertarian socialists and Zenarchists. :-)
I used to use the "DuckDogers" nick playing QuakeWorld.
No, it's not.
In the context of mathematics, a theory is a body of fundamental results - set theory, complexity theory, number theory, information theory, and so on. Nothing speculative, and the only assumptions are the axioms.
In the context of science, a theory is a reasonably complete model of some phenomenon, which is in agreement with observations - Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation, the theory of relativity, the theory of evolution via natural selection, superstring theory, and so on. Some are more speculative than others, but most of those I listed are on a pretty firm basis.
Uh, no. You can't.
There are individual cases for which you can make an ad-hoc proof, yes, but there is no general algorithm that, given a computer program (more properly, a Turing machine), tells you if it halts. I'll leave the gory details to Wikipedia .
Or how about stopping the promotion of global agri-monoculture and helping them bring back the native crops that work in drought conditions, defeats local varmints, etcetera.
GM crops are not only an environmental disaster waiting to happen (since plants and their pollen have this annoying habit of spreading outside where your plant them), and a corporate bastards' wet dream of controlling global food supplies, they are a solution in search of a problem.
Take this "golden rice" bullshit. The areas they're hyping to grow this stuff already have native crops that provide plenty of vitamin A - but these crops are being squeezed out by globalized agriculture.
Because industrialized agriculture gets to exernalize much of its costs.
If argibusiness had to pay for all the soil erosion, pesticide and fertilizer run-off, medical costs of pesticide-contaminated food, et cetera; and if big farms didn't have massive subsidies for water; and if we all paid the true price for a gallon of fuel, including enviromental costs and military costs to keep the oil flowing; then it would be obvious that the true cost of organic agriculture is much lower.
But until we have an economic system with some basis in reality when it comes to natural resources, you'll have to take all this into account yourself.
That would be nice, yes. But only a fool would base public policy on the speculation about what technologies may be available in the future - what if, 50 years ago, policy makers had decided that by the year 2000 we'd all have flying cars?
We can't sanely keep fouling the nest with the excuse that e-z cleanup is just a few decades away.
Yes, it would. You're regulating content. It's no different than saying that people who are at a demonstration to show their support for the government can gather on the lawn of the Capitol, while those who are there to protest the latest legislative travesty get to hold their protest in a small parking lot two miles away.
The idea doesn't even make sense in the absense of a clear and agreed-upon defintion of what content is going to be forced into these "adult-only" zones. You quickly hit the same over/underblocking problem as filtering software.
Uh, someone whacking off in a library can be arrested already, whether they're viewing on-line porn, looking over Playboy back issues, or getting turned on by art books featuring nudes. We don't need new laws for that.
Tell me why anyone would attack porn? What, you happen to find it offensive? Bully for you. Then don't look at it.
Given that the books are not at home - they are in libraries where kids can access them freely - then how does a parent protect them from that?
They do what my mom did - go to the fscking library with the kids until they are mature enough to be let loose. This is a no-brainer, folks.
Yeah, and a few decades ago your doctor would tell you to take up smoking if you wanted to loose weight.
We've learned since then, both about human health and about global climate.
Of course they are. At some point, the CS student should learn the relationship between all this theory, and actual code.
Every CS class I took had a component of theory. Many also had a component of coding, with the objective being to see how the theory applies. You don't just talk about parsing theory, you write a compilier.
Like the folks who figured out how to use a magic marker to defeat the recording industries' most recent attempt?
Someone will break the scheme, like every previous scheme, and the results will spread around the world in hours via the net.
Look folks, copy protection is finished, over, dead, done, gone. Accept it and move on; then we can start figuring out a way to get artists paid. (I almost wrote "a new way", but fact is that many artists never got paid under the old system.)