College Park is strong in both CS and Physics. I was a dual major for three years, until my brain began to melt while taking OS Theory and Introduction to Theoretical Electromagnetism in the same semister and I decided that this was no longer fun. Never finished the physics degree, but maybe I'll go back someday.
It's a good school. I got my BS in CS there in 1991 and my MS in 1993. If you want to ask me anything specific about it, drop me a line. (Remove "spambefuddler-" from the above e-mail address to reply.)
Socialism is a form of government which runs most essential industries such as medicine, power, and telecommunucations; controls the people's access to these industries; and charges high taxes. Wealth is redistributed by a central government.
No. See this, or this, or this, for views on socialism with and without strong government control of the economy.
Communism is an _economic_ system where the workers own the means of production and the wealth created is shared by all. Any form of government can be involved in a communist economy but it is usually socialist' this is why many people get the two confused.
You might try reading the Communist Manifesto, which explicitly calls for "conquest of political power by the proletariat" and
to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
That's a pretty clean plan for a government (a bad plan, but a plan), and there's more details in the Manifesto.
I've been trying to figure out what you mean by "socialist," because you must not be using the definition one usually encounters in the US. To an American, it suggests a strong central government, nationalization of many service industries, high taxes and pervasive regulation
Yes, that is what it means to most Americans. And as often hapens, most Americans are wrong. Socialism means only the idea that the workers should control the economic resources. Some have attempted to do this with authoritarian means (strong central government, etcetera) while others encourage a bottom-up approach. This "socialism-from-below" fits very well with many ideas and ideals of open source.
I realize that socialists feel threatened by the free market...
There's no contradiction at all between the ideas "the workers should control the means of production" and "people should be able to trade their labor and goods for other goods and services they desire." A free market can support both capitalist entities (absentee-owner corporations, landlords, bankers, etcetera) and socialist ones (co-ops, collectives, employee-owned companies, credit unions, and so on).
And I think ESR should definitely get out of his little hole and check what Marxism and socialism really are. He is deeply confused with the Stalinist application of Communism. All in all, this vision is very american, on the redneck side.
It's a sad but true fact that most Americans think that socialism is the same as communism. It's not: communism, as formulated by Marx, is only one type of socialism - and Stalinism had little to do with Marxism. That's the metaphor behind George Orwell's Animal Farm.
And here's something most Americans find surprising (I sure did): Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, a man respected and often quoted by lovers of freedom everywhere for his cogent analysis of the mechanisms of oppression, opponent of totalitarianism and communism, was a socialist.
So, before we go whipping about all sorts of comparisons between Open Source and socialism, communism, and capitalism, maybe we should get it straight as to just what these things are. We're still suffering from McCarthyism and Cold War lies about forms of government.
Re:Everything is Censorship! The sky is falling!
on
Dirty Domains
·
· Score: 3
My question is what do Nazi's have to do with domain names?
Domain names are a form of communication - they can be a statement in and of themselves, and they act as an index to the site's content. Do you not think that the Nazis would have banned "stopkillingjews.org"?
lets talk about TV or Radio. These are both censored mediums, yet somehow we still manage to have a free society.
You contradict yourself.
We (USAmericans) do not in fact live in a free society. Censorship is alive and well, as you point out; certain types of political speech are branded "conspiracy" and criminalized; many states have laws against consensual sex acts; there are even laws that laws that tell you what chemicals you can put into your own body. And it's a sad commentary on the human condition that all this still leaves us freer than most other nations.
...imagine how incredible a programmer you'd be if you spent your entire K-12 education and then your college years focused ONLY on programming, or physics, or whatever your interested in.
You'd be an extremely crappy programmer, physicist, or whatever - as well as a pretty useless human being. The mind needs many different types of stimulation to grow strong, and it takes much more than a technical education to make a whole person.
Knowledge from other areas can help you improve your work in your primary field. I'm convinced that we'd have much betmore ter software if we had our programmers write poetry - and better poetry if we trained our poets in logic.
It is a tiny mind that can find joy and success in only one field of human endeavour.
Shock! Dismay! Embedded in my network address is...well, my network address. Duh.
I'm no more worried about my MAC address being in a network packet than my IPv4 address. Heck, I could change my MAC address easier than changing my IP - I sure can't change the IP of my PowerMac at the office, and changing my static IP at home would entail pleading to my ISP, but Ethernet cards are cheap.
Having a healthy skepticism about the benefits claimed by the marketers of a technology hardly makes one a Luddite.
The good old days? Maybe, maybe not. I think it depends largely on your own individual circumstances. I love technology, but I don't think we're using it to make the world any better for most people - better for some, worse for many, and no real difference for most.
And I'd love to have a cabin in the woods. But I'd have photovoltaic and wind power, and heat it with a ground-source heat pump. It's all about appropriate choice, and I think that many people just don't know how to make good choices. Certainly at the institutional and societal level, our choices are generally piss-poor.
I didn't post on the cyberterrorism thread because by the time I got there all my points had already been made. Several times. B-> But congratulations to those who will be quoted in Jane's.
It will be interesting to see if this starts a trend. But on the other hand, they used to say "Go not to the USENET for counsel, for they will say both no, and yes, and `That's already answered in the FAQ, and..." (Or something like that.) And that was pre-AOL, pre-spam, pre-The-September-That-Never-Ended.
But, on the gripping hand (wow, Tolkein and Niven/Pournelle refs in the same post!),/.'s moderation would seem to help the best, most informative posts bubble to the top in such a discussion.
It would be interesting to set up a consulting organization along these lines. Or maybe even use the existing/. infrastructure.
well Jupiter is supposed to be like.998 solar masses or something like that... so wouldn't that make it a star?
You're missing some zeros after the decimal point. Despite what you learned in 2010, Jupiter has no where near stellar mass. Sol's mass is 1.989 x 10^30 kg, Jupiter's is 1.900 x 10^27 kg - about one-thousandth that of Sol.
IIRC, it takes about 100 times Jupiter's mass (i.e., 1/10 of a solar mass) to get a star going; astrophysicists, please check me on that.
Actually, St. Jimi played a right-handed Stat turned upside-down and strung backwards; said he liked the position in which it put the control knobs.
There's a right-handed guitarist I've seen playing the Baltimore bar scene who takes a left-handed stat and plays it upside and backwards to get the same effect. Interesting how people find unanticipated ways to control technological devices.
Consider: every civilization that has successfully evolved has done so with strong restrictions against infanticide.
Untrue. The ancient Greeks, and IIRC Chinese, practiced infanticide reasonably routinely.
The bright white line between life and death is one of those absolute values that people must have in order to work together and prosper.
Why? Life-and-death issues aren't always clear. It's oce of those things that makes existance interesting. I can work together and prosper with people with different opinions about abortion, infanticide, war, etcetera; we just agree not to discuss them while we're working on other things.
The arguement that "society must be protected" from certain individual choices is inherently bogus. Society is a sometimes-convenient fiction that we use to deal with large numbers of individuals; it is the individuals who matter.
If your friend wasn't getting enough protein, he either was eating a very odd selection of foods, was not eating enough food, or had a strange quick of metabolism. It's very difficult to get an adequate caloric intake and not have enough protein. It just ain't a big deal.
Iron? It's now being suggested that most American men are getting far too much of it in their diets. Unless you're naturally anemic, with reasonable selection of foods getting enough iron is also not a problem.
I'm generally getting tired of people telling me how I'm going to certainly die soon since I'm not getting enough x in my diet. Few people who go vegan have problems. However, it is an unfortunate fact that there are a significant number of young women with eating disorders who attempt to cover them by going vegan and then saying they can't find anything to eat. (Ha!, sez I. I've been vegan for a decade and having enough to eat has never been a problem. In fact I could do with a little less to eat, he said patting the little bit of extra padding around his belly.)
If you're interested in the nutritional aspects of veganism, let me suggest the book Vegan Nutrition: Pure and Simple by Micheal Klapper. I've also got some stuff at my website.
As as for the ability of plants to suffer, we're not so ignorant of biology as to have no idea what is required for consciousness. Show me a plant with a complex sensory and reaction system capable of sustaining cognition and a subjective experience, and I promise not to eat it.
The NAZIs started the holocaust by gassing people with physical and mental handicaps, on the pretext that it was the "kind" and "merciful" thing to do.
Could we please put the Nazi thing away already? There's a huge difference between killing handicaped persons and preventing handicapped persons from coming into existence in the first place.
Singer's argument is that a newborn infant is not a person, and that it might in some circumstances be better (in a compassionate sense) to use euthanasia than to allow a newborn to develop into a severely handicapped person who will experience great suffering.
The arguement may or may not be sound, and there would certainly be many practical difficulties with doing this, but it doesn't make him a "nutcase asshole" Nazi apologist.
Those pointy sharp teeth in the front of your jaw were given to you by evolution so you can eat meat!
And that grey stuff inside your head was "given to you by evolution" (really, of course, evolution doesn't "give" us anything, it just happens) so that you could consider and ponder your actions and do more than act by instinct.
If you want to call yourself a rational being, then if you're going to treat two creatures in a radically different way (one you kill and eat, the other you love and protect), you need a rational justification. Ethical anthrocentrism - i.e., giving additional ethical consideration to an organism solely because it is of the species Homo sapiens - is not such a justification, any more than ethical consideration based on race, gender, hair color, et cetera, would be.
And are you sure we're the dominant species? I think the cockroaches, or maybe cyanobacteria, might have a claim to better evolutionary fitness. Really, the idea of a "dominant species", or of a "food chain", doesn't jibe with how the ecosystem works. Species - yes, even ours - are interdependant, and we forget that at our peril.
I have only a loose familiarity with Singer's work. But...
What's "absolutely necessary"? Who's going to decide that? The all-loving, all-powerful Big Brother?
Whoa, there, bucko. AFAIK, Singer has not advocated anyone but each individual making that determination for themselves. He's interested in ethics (suggestions and prescriptions on how we should live), not laws (institutionalized rules on how we must live to avoid punishment by the state).
(Oh, and Big Brother was about surveilence and privacy, not property.)
What would Mr Singer do to those who (Horrors!) actually feel entitled to the fruits of their own labor?
I suspect he'd talk to them and point out that unless they want to make a full time job out of eating their fruit, it might be better, healthier, and in the long term more satifying, to give some of it away.
Firstly, it's Jonathan Swift; Tom Swift was the hero of the adventure books for boys. (People often mishear my name as "Tom Swift"; somewhere I still have a pizza delivery receipt with that name on it.)
Anyway...
Existence is precious, we should treasure it for ourselves and for others.
Is a existence consisting of nothing but intense pain precious? I don't think so. Better to terminate it before it starts. If I understand correctly, part of Singer's point is that existence as a conscious subject does not begin at birth, but happens afterward as the nervous system develops and experience programs the brain, so euthanizing a newborn that has nothing but six months of intense pain ahead of it is a case of "stopping it before it starts."
No, Nuremburg did't establish anything about euthanasia. That's why it's a topic of much debate today.
Singer has nothing at all to do with Nazis. He's an ethicist who is willing to ask tought questions about life and suffering, and follow logic and compassion even when they fly in the face of convention.
But what I'm getting at in the end is that anyone who can say that they want to legislate SPAM while simultaneously stating that there should be no internet censorship of any kind is simply a fool.
Most spam uses computing resources without permission and spoofs the headers to implicate other sources. The former is a property crime, the latter is damage to reputation - I sure don't want to do business with an ISP that harbors spammers. Making spammers pay restitution to those they harm in this manner would go a long way towards eliminating it.
I also think a clause in an ISP contract stating that the user agrees to pay a cash penalty if he/she/it ever spams would be cool - and well justified given the administrative cost in tracking down the spammer. I'd be proud to take my business to an ISP that had such a strong anti-spam policy.
"It's a cure for not being an axe-wielding homocidal maniac. Think of the potential market!"
Great stuff, but I've never seen it outside an old roommate's video collection. Maybe a bit too far out for most public TV stations (source of things BBCish for most USAmericans), though Maryland Public TV is currently running both "Black Adder" and "Red Dwarf" on Saturday nights, bless their hearts. I may just send them a check next time, for that.
Yes, HTML apps loaded over a network can be slow - but not all HTML apps have to be loaded over a network! It's perfectly valid to use a browser as a frontend to an app running on your local machine. If all you're doing is clicking boxes and filling in fields - i.e., doing what HTML forms do - why reinvent the wheel? Plus, you've still got the option of running the front-end remotely.
The amount of interactivity is also a consideration. Hate WWW e-mail apps (prefer mh when I'm telneting and exmh when I'm sitting in front my my box), love my credit union's WWW banking app.
Australia may be slipping towards with this censorship, but they're not socialist. If they were, this fellow would hardly be citing the policy of a large corporation for support, would he?
Socialist != totalitarian; socialists and capitalists both come in libertarian and authoritarian flavors.
IIRC, the ratings on movies et cetera are "voluntary" industry protocols. Of course, the psuedo-monopolistic nature of these industry groups stretches the meaning of "voluntary".
But I can still make my own movies or record CDs of my own music and sell them without submitting them for approval; I just might have trouble getting the local theatre to show my movie, or the local CD-o-rama to stock my disk. And I don't have to say "This song may contain explicit lyrics" when I'm playing guitar on the streetcorner.
It help parents a great deal, they don't have to research every single thing a child wants to buy/see/use.
Sorry, but the fact that you negelected to use birth control puts no responsibility on me. I'm not obliged to shut up when your kids enter the room, or to give you some sort of warning that I may say something you don't want them to hear. Raise your own damn kids and leave me the hell alone.
Pornography is imagery and other materials designed for the soul purpose of sexual titillation.
Wow, you have a means to read an artists mind an determine his or her purpose in creating a work? Remarkable! Please, share your method!
(You do realize that some people get titillated by things other than pictures of breasts and genitals? (Well...maybe you don't.) If a foot fetishist shoots photos for a "Doctor Scholls" ad, is it porn?)
Spare me your lawyers jargon. You know very well the difference between porn and legitimate art.
I don't! Naked people confuse me! (But they don't scare me, as they apparently do you. Damn shame, that.) Please, oh Enlightened One, help me out here. Please provide an objective checklist that I can use to determine if it's Fine Art or Dirty Porn.
Why not have a setting in browsers that will require the presence of a certain meta tag (like meta name="rugrat-level" content="kidsafe" or whatever) before displaying the page?
So what happens when I put up my porn collection with a kid-safe META tag? (Hey, I think teens are safe looking at porn, didn't hurt me none.)
What happens when I put up my sex education pages marked as kid-safe? (Hell, not just safe but recommended viewing for teens.)
What about my collection of photos and painting that happen to feature nude images? Surely those are ok, right? Can I mark those kid safe?
Who decides? You're still relying on either the page creator to decide what's best for your kids (bad idea), or on some outside government agency to create and enfore rules about what's best for your kids (worse idea). Either make your own damn decisions or hire a third party to do it for you. Leave me the hell out of it.
Unless a reasonable alternative is presented we are going to get stuck with an RSACi type system.
Why do people keep saying this? We killed off the CDA, we can kill this off too.
First, protest like hell. Inform your congresscritters that this is unacceptable.
Second, if it comes about, engage in civil disobedience. I suggest a "This page has not been rated!" campain, in the footsteps of the Blue Ribbon campain.
Third, if all else fails, start shooting the censors.
Slashdot Mirror
- Maryland @College Park
- ...
College Park is strong in both CS and Physics. I was a dual major for three years, until my brain began to melt while taking OS Theory and Introduction to Theoretical Electromagnetism in the same semister and I decided that this was no longer fun. Never finished the physics degree, but maybe I'll go back someday.It's a good school. I got my BS in CS there in 1991 and my MS in 1993. If you want to ask me anything specific about it, drop me a line. (Remove "spambefuddler-" from the above e-mail address to reply.)
And here's something most Americans find surprising (I sure did): Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, a man respected and often quoted by lovers of freedom everywhere for his cogent analysis of the mechanisms of oppression, opponent of totalitarianism and communism, was a socialist.
So, before we go whipping about all sorts of comparisons between Open Source and socialism, communism, and capitalism, maybe we should get it straight as to just what these things are. We're still suffering from McCarthyism and Cold War lies about forms of government.
We (USAmericans) do not in fact live in a free society. Censorship is alive and well, as you point out; certain types of political speech are branded "conspiracy" and criminalized; many states have laws against consensual sex acts; there are even laws that laws that tell you what chemicals you can put into your own body. And it's a sad commentary on the human condition that all this still leaves us freer than most other nations.
Knowledge from other areas can help you improve your work in your primary field. I'm convinced that we'd have much betmore ter software if we had our programmers write poetry - and better poetry if we trained our poets in logic.
It is a tiny mind that can find joy and success in only one field of human endeavour.
I'm no more worried about my MAC address being in a network packet than my IPv4 address. Heck, I could change my MAC address easier than changing my IP - I sure can't change the IP of my PowerMac at the office, and changing my static IP at home would entail pleading to my ISP, but Ethernet cards are cheap.
The author needs a clue.
The good old days? Maybe, maybe not. I think it depends largely on your own individual circumstances. I love technology, but I don't think we're using it to make the world any better for most people - better for some, worse for many, and no real difference for most.
And I'd love to have a cabin in the woods. But I'd have photovoltaic and wind power, and heat it with a ground-source heat pump. It's all about appropriate choice, and I think that many people just don't know how to make good choices. Certainly at the institutional and societal level, our choices are generally piss-poor.
I didn't post on the cyberterrorism thread because by the time I got there all my points had already been made. Several times. B-> But congratulations to those who will be quoted in Jane's.
It will be interesting to see if this starts a trend. But on the other hand, they used to say "Go not to the USENET for counsel, for they will say both no, and yes, and `That's already answered in the FAQ, and..." (Or something like that.) And that was pre-AOL, pre-spam, pre-The-September-That-Never-Ended.
But, on the gripping hand (wow, Tolkein and Niven/Pournelle refs in the same post!), /.'s moderation would seem to help the best, most informative posts bubble to the top in such a discussion.
It would be interesting to set up a consulting organization along these lines. Or maybe even use the existing /. infrastructure.
IIRC, it takes about 100 times Jupiter's mass (i.e., 1/10 of a solar mass) to get a star going; astrophysicists, please check me on that.
There's a right-handed guitarist I've seen playing the Baltimore bar scene who takes a left-handed stat and plays it upside and backwards to get the same effect. Interesting how people find unanticipated ways to control technological devices.
The arguement that "society must be protected" from certain individual choices is inherently bogus. Society is a sometimes-convenient fiction that we use to deal with large numbers of individuals; it is the individuals who matter.
Iron? It's now being suggested that most American men are getting far too much of it in their diets. Unless you're naturally anemic, with reasonable selection of foods getting enough iron is also not a problem.
I'm generally getting tired of people telling me how I'm going to certainly die soon since I'm not getting enough x in my diet. Few people who go vegan have problems. However, it is an unfortunate fact that there are a significant number of young women with eating disorders who attempt to cover them by going vegan and then saying they can't find anything to eat. (Ha!, sez I. I've been vegan for a decade and having enough to eat has never been a problem. In fact I could do with a little less to eat, he said patting the little bit of extra padding around his belly.)
If you're interested in the nutritional aspects of veganism, let me suggest the book Vegan Nutrition: Pure and Simple by Micheal Klapper. I've also got some stuff at my website.
As as for the ability of plants to suffer, we're not so ignorant of biology as to have no idea what is required for consciousness. Show me a plant with a complex sensory and reaction system capable of sustaining cognition and a subjective experience, and I promise not to eat it.
Singer's argument is that a newborn infant is not a person, and that it might in some circumstances be better (in a compassionate sense) to use euthanasia than to allow a newborn to develop into a severely handicapped person who will experience great suffering.
The arguement may or may not be sound, and there would certainly be many practical difficulties with doing this, but it doesn't make him a "nutcase asshole" Nazi apologist.
If you want to call yourself a rational being, then if you're going to treat two creatures in a radically different way (one you kill and eat, the other you love and protect), you need a rational justification. Ethical anthrocentrism - i.e., giving additional ethical consideration to an organism solely because it is of the species Homo sapiens - is not such a justification, any more than ethical consideration based on race, gender, hair color, et cetera, would be.
And are you sure we're the dominant species? I think the cockroaches, or maybe cyanobacteria, might have a claim to better evolutionary fitness. Really, the idea of a "dominant species", or of a "food chain", doesn't jibe with how the ecosystem works. Species - yes, even ours - are interdependant, and we forget that at our peril.
(Oh, and Big Brother was about surveilence and privacy, not property.)
I suspect he'd talk to them and point out that unless they want to make a full time job out of eating their fruit, it might be better, healthier, and in the long term more satifying, to give some of it away.Anyway...
Is a existence consisting of nothing but intense pain precious? I don't think so. Better to terminate it before it starts. If I understand correctly, part of Singer's point is that existence as a conscious subject does not begin at birth, but happens afterward as the nervous system develops and experience programs the brain, so euthanizing a newborn that has nothing but six months of intense pain ahead of it is a case of "stopping it before it starts."Singer has nothing at all to do with Nazis. He's an ethicist who is willing to ask tought questions about life and suffering, and follow logic and compassion even when they fly in the face of convention.
I also think a clause in an ISP contract stating that the user agrees to pay a cash penalty if he/she/it ever spams would be cool - and well justified given the administrative cost in tracking down the spammer. I'd be proud to take my business to an ISP that had such a strong anti-spam policy.
Great stuff, but I've never seen it outside an old roommate's video collection. Maybe a bit too far out for most public TV stations (source of things BBCish for most USAmericans), though Maryland Public TV is currently running both "Black Adder" and "Red Dwarf" on Saturday nights, bless their hearts. I may just send them a check next time, for that.
The amount of interactivity is also a consideration. Hate WWW e-mail apps (prefer mh when I'm telneting and exmh when I'm sitting in front my my box), love my credit union's WWW banking app.
Socialist != totalitarian; socialists and capitalists both come in libertarian and authoritarian flavors.
For more on Libertarian Socialism, see this.
As for me, though, I'm a Zenarchist.
But I can still make my own movies or record CDs of my own music and sell them without submitting them for approval; I just might have trouble getting the local theatre to show my movie, or the local CD-o-rama to stock my disk. And I don't have to say "This song may contain explicit lyrics" when I'm playing guitar on the streetcorner.
Sorry, but the fact that you negelected to use birth control puts no responsibility on me. I'm not obliged to shut up when your kids enter the room, or to give you some sort of warning that I may say something you don't want them to hear. Raise your own damn kids and leave me the hell alone.(You do realize that some people get titillated by things other than pictures of breasts and genitals? (Well...maybe you don't.) If a foot fetishist shoots photos for a "Doctor Scholls" ad, is it porn?)
I don't! Naked people confuse me! (But they don't scare me, as they apparently do you. Damn shame, that.) Please, oh Enlightened One, help me out here. Please provide an objective checklist that I can use to determine if it's Fine Art or Dirty Porn.
What happens when I put up my sex education pages marked as kid-safe? (Hell, not just safe but recommended viewing for teens.)
What about my collection of photos and painting that happen to feature nude images? Surely those are ok, right? Can I mark those kid safe?
Who decides? You're still relying on either the page creator to decide what's best for your kids (bad idea), or on some outside government agency to create and enfore rules about what's best for your kids (worse idea). Either make your own damn decisions or hire a third party to do it for you. Leave me the hell out of it.
Why do people keep saying this? We killed off the CDA, we can kill this off too.First, protest like hell. Inform your congresscritters that this is unacceptable.
Second, if it comes about, engage in civil disobedience. I suggest a "This page has not been rated!" campain, in the footsteps of the Blue Ribbon campain.
Third, if all else fails, start shooting the censors.