Why should intelligence be the criteria for giving animals humane consideration? What does this have to do with the ability to feel pain and suffer?
It has everything to do with it. All living things (including microbes and plants, which animal rights fanatics never seem to consider) can react mindlessly to stimuli. Heck, even some non-living things like my Mindstorm robots can do that. But only intelligent beings can interpret stimuli in a meaningful fashion and can be logically said to "suffer". Pain isn't just stimulus to humans; we fear pain because we *know* pain is associated with death.
In 1789, philosopher Jeremy Bentham sounded the rallying cry for animals everywhere: "The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"
This is the same Bentham, who, in his "Defense of Usuary" basically said it is morally okay for rich people to screw over everyone else. You'd think that the animal rights people would look for someone a little less callous towards suffering among humans to quote.
Why do most people think that the idea of a "superior" species using humans as raw material is horrific, but this kind of thing is alright?
Um, because humans are intelligent beings and cows and mice aren't. It's the same reason why owning pets and livestock is considered okay (by most reasonable people) but slavery is viewed as evil.
BTW, ever notice how in SF, "superior" species never seem to really have godlike intelligence --just really big egos. The "inferior" humans always manage to outsmart them in the end. Mice and cows never seem be able to do that to humans, for some reason.
Re:tobacco is a cash crop
on
RMS Responds
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· Score: 1
Anyway, my real question was "What is your point". The point seems to have been, "It is okay to force some companies out of business because lots of others will benefit by getting something for free." Just saying that would have been a lot clearer. Unfortunately, as far as I can see that same argument applies to every business on the planet earth.
So, what's your point? That that would be bad ? Or that it is unlikely to happen?
I don't care about their use of dog fur -- but the company has its share of other ethical problems in regard to labor -- spurious firings of store employees with high seniority so that they can hire new employees at much lower wages, for example.
He invented ethernet. However, since then, he hasn't done much, except complain that industry hasn't capitalized on the Internet enough. No, it isn't enough that parasitic industry has plastered its ads all over the government and university created Internet. Metcalfe has said he won't be happy until every e-mail message and packet has a monetary charge. But life is harsh for such Ebeneezer Scrooges -- have you ever seen his picture? He's younger than my father but looks older than my grandfather before he died. Maybe if he cared about things other than money he wouldn't age so...
It's the same thing with hardcover book fans. I buy hardcover books only when I want the book *now* and don't want to wait for the paperback edition -- it's the *words* that I want, not the physical medium. But some people seem to get enjoyment out of the pure ownership of a hardcover book. And then there's the first-edition collectors who never even *read* the books...
In "Cryptonomicon" Stephenson gives an interesting argument claiming that Athena was the goddess of technology (so far as the ancient Greeks understood technology), and the fact that Athena was seen as good and cool was a major factor in the success of Western Civ (it seems many other cultures viewed technology as an aspect of their evil god or goddess, thus understandably stunting progress)
That's not actually true. Only retroviruses actually insert stuff into the host's geonome. Something like influenza doesn't do this, it just takes over the cellular machinery.
Well, recombination can occur without any specific mechanism -- just at a low frequency. There's nothing stopping it. Horizontal transfer is emerging as one of the more important causes of molecular evolution, in fact
So, Dell is looking for the oldest PC still in service so it can be made into a museum exhibit (and thus *stop* being in service). This is like looking for the oldest tree alive so it can be chopped down and put on display.
But I'm sure the oldest PC won't be a PC-compatible. I see Apple ]['s, C64s, and Atari 800's still in use from time to time, and I'm sure even older machines are out there.
Main Entry: piracy Pronunciation: 'pI-r&-sE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -cies Etymology: Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratEs pirate Date: 1537 1 : an act of robbery on the high seas; also : an act resembling such robbery 2 : robbery on the high seas 3 : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
Please tell me why definition 3 does not apply, exactly?
Because it's a complete and total non-sequitar. Infringment of copyright has nothing to do with robbery on the high seas. It's just name calling, like when someone calls a person they dislike a "Nazi" even if the target is in no way associated with Hitler or his policies. People should call copyright infringers "copyright infringers". That would be logical and neutral.
Well, I'd expect strategy to a bigger seller as compared to action on Linux. Kids are the target audience for action games, and while they are a few high schoolers and younger kids using Linux, I'd expect most people discover Linux in college after using UNIX workstations.
Besides "action game" these days practically means "Quaking Wolfenstein Marathon of Doom" games and there's plenty of those repetitive shoot-em-ups on Linux already.
So George buys up some insulting domain names. But first of all, it's not hard to come up with new domain names like that -- bushstinks, etc. Secondly, who would really use these domain names? Even fruity Al "I invented the Internet" Gore isn't so childish that he'd be interested in using them for his own sites. So what did Bush really gain by this?
If Lucas is so concerned about keeping the quality up he shouldn't put it on the net in a format that everyone on the net can't view.
I really don't understand this remark. If you are are using MacOS or Windows you can use official Apple tools to watch Quicktime movies. If you are using a form of UNIX you can use xanim to watch Quicktime movies. Who is it, exactly, who can't watch Quicktime? VT100 terminal users?
Re:Hmmm... Sir Clive has screwed up as well...
on
Sinclair Does Linux
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· Score: 1
QL badly designed? It had a multi-tasking OS in 1984 and a dialect of BASIC that was actually structured and didn't need line numbers -- both features were ahead of their time. Is it any surprise that our fearless leader, Linus, was a QL user?
Now badly built -- you'll get no arguments there -- the keyboard was crap and the microdrives, well, can anyone say anything positive about those?
Okay, Netwinders are small and they run Linux. Outside their cuteness is there a real reason to buy one? As in, is there an actual gain in performance/price over bog standard PC architecture? There seems to be little discussion of these machines. Several Linux fans here in Canada hadn't even heard of the machines despite their Corel origin.
Right! He won the Nobel Peace prize. But lots of people had already made the obvious observation that above ground nuclear testing causes fallout. Pauling used his status as a famous scientist to get governments to listen to him, while the same governments wouldn't listen to (less famous) people more qualified on the results of nuclear testing.
Well, I've never quite understood why people treat the opinion of experts as more than cocktail party chatter when they talk about matters beyond their field of expertise. For example, pacifists love to quote Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling as if the fact that these great scientists were pacifists meant something. As far as I can tell, neither relativity nor the nature of the chemical bond has any bearing on the subject.
Of course everyone talks about matters beyond their training. Linus (Torvalds, that is, Pauling is dead) has a perfect right to chatter about anything at all if he so wishes. But just because he's one hell of a programmer doesn't give him magical insights into other affairs.
Project Gutenberg for a time had the idea that the way to go on this issue was to first put on the net the text of an out-of-copyright encyclopedia (the 1906 Encyclopedia Britannica, I think) and have people update articles, add new articles for things that weren't around in 1906, etc. I don't think this went anywhere, but on the other hand, I'm not sure if more than the first volume of the 1906 EB was ever put on the net.
I guess I missed what it was about -- GEB caused me to go into molecular biology (and not AI, which it seems was the author's intention). Good book though.
Something that's worth remembering with all these recent books about "evolutionary psychology" (really, just 1970's "sociobiology" trying to make a comeback, which in turn was just a rehash of ideas floating around practically from the time of Darwin himself) is just how speculative they are.
We know next to nothing at this point in time about the genuine biological causes (if any) of aggression and other human behaviors. Certainly one can postulate an evolutionary origin for them, but really this is no more "scientific" than traditional psychological explanations for aggression such as bad childhoods or too much movie violence. If we can find a series of genes involved in aggression *and* we can find versions of these genes in other animals *then* we can have meaningful research into the evolution of aggression. This is the level of evidence required by modern biology. Until then the subject belongs more to science fiction than science.
As a biologist who has written papers concerning molecular evolution, it worries me that from books like "How the Mind Works" and "The Moral Animal" the general public thinks evolutionary biology is nothing more than coming up with cute stories. No wonder Creationism is still thriving -- if people think evolutionary biology is just a matter of cute stories they feel free to choose another cute story instead.
The best NPR April joke was whe one where they had the govenor of Arizona announce that a referendum had passed to make Arizona a new Canadian province...
Some of you mentioned how Linux has broadened your educational experience at school. Without the millions of corporate donations, don't you realize that computer science departments across the country would start to resemble the other "non-profit" fields... like history, english... with their broken-down desks, poor infrastructure, and little capital investment?
Er, are you familiar with the principle of scientific funding agencies like the NSF and NIH? Corporate funding isn't the only source of scientific funding (my entire graduate career in the states was funded entirely through non-corporate sources); personally I feel that the increasing percentage of corporate funding relative to governmental funding in science is by no means an entirely positive move. Consider, would we know that smoking causes cancer if that research was funded by Phillip Morris? If Microsoft gets control of CS departments, do you think the scientific work will be unaffected?
And if history and english are poorly funded, perhaps this is because people in these fields haven't explained exactly how yet another paper about Shakespeare or Abe Lincoln is supposed to improve the world and thus be worth subsidizing.
What I love about his arguments is that they're logically inconsistent -- he says that free software is both bad (destroying competition) and that it can't work (why would somebody write free software ?). Logically, only one (at most) of these arguments can be valid. Either Open Source is successful and a potential threat to commercial software, *or* it isn't successful and it's a non-issue. You just can't have it both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should intelligence be the criteria for giving animals humane consideration? What does this have to do with the ability to feel pain and suffer?
It has everything to do with it. All living things (including microbes and plants, which animal rights fanatics never seem to consider) can react mindlessly to stimuli. Heck, even some non-living things like my Mindstorm robots can do that. But only intelligent beings can interpret stimuli in a meaningful fashion and can be logically said to "suffer". Pain isn't just stimulus to humans; we fear pain because we *know* pain is associated with death.
In 1789, philosopher Jeremy Bentham sounded the rallying cry for animals everywhere: "The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?"
This is the same Bentham, who, in his "Defense of Usuary" basically said it is morally okay for rich people to screw over everyone else. You'd think that the animal rights people would look for someone a little less callous towards suffering among humans to quote.
Why do most people think that the idea of a "superior" species using humans as raw material is horrific, but this kind of thing is alright?
Um, because humans are intelligent beings and cows and mice aren't. It's the same reason why owning pets and livestock is considered okay (by most reasonable people) but slavery is viewed as evil.
BTW, ever notice how in SF, "superior" species never seem to really have godlike intelligence --just really big egos. The "inferior" humans always manage to outsmart them in the end. Mice and cows never seem be able to do that to humans, for some reason.
Anyway, my real question was "What is your point". The point seems to have been, "It is okay to force some companies out of business because lots
of others will benefit by getting something for free." Just saying that would have been a lot clearer. Unfortunately, as far as I can see that same
argument applies to every business on the planet earth.
So, what's your point? That that would be bad ? Or that it is unlikely to happen?
I don't care about their use of dog fur -- but the company has its share of other ethical problems in regard to labor -- spurious firings of store employees with high seniority so that they can hire new employees at much lower wages, for example.
He invented ethernet. However, since then, he hasn't done much, except complain that industry hasn't capitalized on the Internet enough. No, it isn't enough that parasitic industry has plastered its ads all over the government and university created Internet. Metcalfe has said he won't be happy until every e-mail message and packet has a monetary charge. But life is harsh for such Ebeneezer Scrooges -- have you ever seen his picture? He's younger than my father but looks older than my grandfather before he died. Maybe if he cared about things other than money he wouldn't age so...
It's the same thing with hardcover book fans. I buy hardcover books only when I want the book *now* and don't want to wait for the paperback edition -- it's the *words* that I want, not the physical medium. But some people seem to get enjoyment out of the pure ownership of a hardcover book. And then there's the first-edition collectors who never even *read* the books...
I always thought it was that amusement park in Copenhagen...
In "Cryptonomicon" Stephenson gives an interesting argument claiming that Athena was the goddess of technology (so far as the ancient Greeks understood technology), and the fact that Athena was seen as good and cool was a major factor in the success of Western Civ (it seems many other cultures viewed technology as an aspect of their evil god or goddess, thus understandably stunting progress)
Nah, it makes perfect sense. Like Smaug, stealth bombers have soft spots on their undersides which archers can shoot at.
That's not actually true. Only retroviruses actually insert stuff into the host's geonome. Something like influenza doesn't do this, it just takes over the cellular machinery.
Well, recombination can occur without any specific mechanism -- just at a low frequency. There's nothing stopping it. Horizontal transfer is emerging as one of the more important causes of molecular evolution, in fact
So, Dell is looking for the oldest PC still in service so it can be made into a museum exhibit (and thus *stop* being in service). This is like looking for the oldest tree alive so it can be chopped down and put on display.
But I'm sure the oldest PC won't be a PC-compatible. I see Apple ]['s, C64s, and Atari 800's still in use from time to time, and I'm sure even older machines are out there.
Main Entry: piracy
Pronunciation: 'pI-r&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
Etymology: Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratEs pirate
Date: 1537
1 : an act of robbery on the high seas; also : an act resembling such robbery
2 : robbery on the high seas
3 : the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright
Please tell me why definition 3 does not apply, exactly?
Because it's a complete and total non-sequitar. Infringment of copyright has nothing to do with robbery on the high seas. It's just name calling, like when someone calls a person they dislike a "Nazi" even if the target is in no way associated with Hitler or his policies. People should call copyright infringers "copyright infringers". That would be logical and neutral.
Well, I'd expect strategy to a bigger seller as compared to action on Linux. Kids are the target audience for action games, and while they are a few high schoolers and younger kids using Linux, I'd expect most people discover Linux in college after using UNIX workstations.
Besides "action game" these days practically means "Quaking Wolfenstein Marathon of Doom" games and there's plenty of those repetitive shoot-em-ups on Linux already.
So George buys up some insulting domain names. But first of all, it's not hard to come up with new domain names like that -- bushstinks, etc. Secondly, who would really use these domain names? Even fruity Al "I invented the Internet" Gore isn't so childish that he'd be interested in using them for his own sites. So what did Bush really gain by this?
If Lucas is so concerned about keeping the quality up he shouldn't put it on the net in a format that everyone on the net can't view.
I really don't understand this remark. If you are are using MacOS or Windows you can use official Apple tools to watch Quicktime movies. If you are using a form of UNIX you can use xanim to watch Quicktime movies. Who is it, exactly, who can't watch Quicktime? VT100 terminal users?
QL badly designed? It had a multi-tasking OS in 1984 and a dialect of BASIC that was actually structured and didn't need line numbers -- both features were ahead of their time. Is it any surprise that our fearless leader, Linus, was a QL user?
Now badly built -- you'll get no arguments there -- the keyboard was crap and the microdrives, well, can anyone say anything positive about those?
Okay, Netwinders are small and they run Linux. Outside their cuteness is there a real reason to buy one? As in, is there an actual gain in performance/price over bog standard PC architecture? There seems to be little discussion of these machines. Several Linux fans here in Canada hadn't even heard of the machines despite their Corel origin.
Right! He won the Nobel Peace prize. But lots of people had already made the obvious observation that above ground nuclear testing causes fallout. Pauling used his status as a famous scientist to get governments to listen to him, while the same governments wouldn't listen to (less famous) people more qualified on the results of nuclear testing.
Well, I've never quite understood why people treat the opinion of experts as more than cocktail party chatter when they talk about matters beyond their field of expertise. For example, pacifists love to quote Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling as if the fact that these great scientists were pacifists meant something. As far as I can tell, neither relativity nor the nature of the chemical bond has any bearing on the subject.
Of course everyone talks about matters beyond their training. Linus (Torvalds, that is, Pauling is dead) has a perfect right to chatter about anything at all if he so wishes. But just because he's one hell of a programmer doesn't give him magical insights into other affairs.
Project Gutenberg for a time had the idea that the way to go on this issue was to first put on the net the text of an out-of-copyright encyclopedia (the 1906 Encyclopedia Britannica, I think) and have people update articles, add new articles for things that weren't around in 1906, etc. I don't think this went anywhere, but on the other hand, I'm not sure if more than the first volume of the 1906 EB was ever put on the net.
I guess I missed what it was about -- GEB caused me to go into molecular biology (and not AI, which it seems was the author's intention). Good book though.
Something that's worth remembering with all these recent books about "evolutionary psychology" (really, just 1970's "sociobiology" trying to make a comeback, which in turn was just a rehash of ideas floating around practically from the time of Darwin himself) is just how speculative they are.
We know next to nothing at this point in time about the genuine biological causes (if any) of aggression and other human behaviors. Certainly one can postulate an evolutionary origin for them, but really this is no more "scientific" than traditional psychological explanations for aggression such as bad childhoods or too much movie violence. If we can find a series of genes involved in aggression *and* we can find versions of these genes in other animals *then* we can have meaningful research into the evolution of aggression. This is the level of evidence required by modern biology. Until then the subject belongs more to science fiction than science.
As a biologist who has written papers concerning molecular evolution, it worries me that from books like "How the Mind Works" and "The Moral Animal" the general public thinks evolutionary biology is nothing more than coming up with cute stories. No wonder Creationism is still thriving -- if people think evolutionary biology is just a matter of cute stories they feel free to choose another cute story instead.
The best NPR April joke was whe one where they had the govenor of Arizona announce that a referendum had passed to make Arizona a new Canadian province...
Some of you mentioned how Linux has broadened your educational experience at school. Without the millions of corporate donations, don't you realize that computer science departments across the country would start to resemble the other "non-profit" fields... like history, english... with their broken-down desks, poor infrastructure, and little capital investment?
Er, are you familiar with the principle of scientific funding agencies like the NSF and NIH? Corporate funding isn't the only source of scientific funding (my entire graduate career in the states was funded entirely through non-corporate sources); personally I feel that the increasing percentage of corporate funding relative to governmental funding in science is by no means an entirely positive move. Consider, would we know that smoking causes cancer if that research was funded by Phillip Morris? If Microsoft gets control of CS departments, do you think the scientific work will be unaffected?
And if history and english are poorly funded, perhaps this is because people in these fields haven't explained exactly how yet another paper about Shakespeare or Abe Lincoln is supposed to improve the world and thus be worth subsidizing.
What I love about his arguments is that they're logically inconsistent -- he says that free software is both bad (destroying competition) and that it can't work (why would somebody write free software ?). Logically, only one (at most) of these arguments can be valid. Either Open Source is successful and a potential threat to commercial software, *or* it isn't successful and it's a non-issue. You just can't have it both ways.