Uh, hate to break it to you there, but if you're referring to the Tarika Wilson shooting in Lima, Ohio, by Officer Joseph Chavalia, you're leaving out some salient points (and, might I add, attempting to smear the victim with irrelevancies).
For starters, she wasn't just "shot during a drug raid". That implies that the target(s) of the raid exchanged fire with the Lima police department. What actually happened is that another Lima police officer shot and killed the two dogs that lived in the house. Chavalia mistook the shots of a fellow officer for incoming fire from a bedroom where Wilson was holding her infant son. Without stopping to identify a target, Chavalia fired blindly into the bedroom, striking both Wilson (who died) and her son, who — thank whatever deity you like — survived.
A jury concluded that the officer had a reasonable fear for his life, which is something that juries have been singularly unable to do for innocent citizens who, when their homes were unjustly invaded by militarized police officers, sought to defend themselves against people they believed to be criminal intruders. See, for example, Derrick Foster, Corey Maye, or Ryan Frederick.
Was the Tarika Wilson shooting racially motivated? Almost certainly not. Was Joseph Chavalia's acquittal a miscarriage of justice? I believe so.
If we hold police officers to a lower standard than the citizenry they are supposed to be protecting, we do nothing less than create a government-sanctioned criminal organization, one without conscience or accountability.
NB: Before you start calling me a bleeding-heart liberal or some such similar crap, I'm actually a former USAF Security Policeman. I just happen to believe that putting military hardware into the hands of police, giving them a macho name like SWAT, glamorizing their ass-kicking behavior in movies and reality television, and then expecting them to behave with restraint when they're sent out to serve non-violent drug warrants is a pretty damned stupid policy.
I saw WarGames when I was 5 years old. Later on that year, my father bought us our first computer: an Apple//c. I was incredibly depressed when the computer exhibited neither near-human emotions nor a synthesized English accent.
And did I say anything about the article not saying that Largent managed to rip off Google Checkout? No. I said, "the article doesn't actually mention that Largent managed to rip off PayPal". Again, I feel it important to stress that reading for comprehension is important.
So yes, you and the submitter are missing something.
As far as I can tell, the article doesn't actually mention that Largent managed to rip off PayPal, only that PayPal, Google Checkout, et al. use the small deposit method for verification. Seriously, reading for comprehension isn't hard, people. Hell, it even mentions the scope right in the lede.
And those of us who know your posting history can only say that you're an idiot. Substantiate your claim in paragraph number four that "[f]lying saucers are real simply because our own government had prototype spy crafts which were flying saucers[...]" with valid.gov links.
Maybe the monochrome was 9", but I'm fairly sure that the color monitor we had was 12". That's why it was $2000 -- Dad sprang for the big ol' color monitor (and the guy at the BX threw in our ImageWriter ][ for free).
It was 1983, we'd just moved to Hawaii, and my father had bought $2,000 worth of off-white plastic called the Apple//c.
"Dad," I said, as I walked into the living room, "what's that?"
"It's called Captain Goodnight," he said without turning away from the 12" color monitor. "It's like Pitfall on the Atari, but funnier. You want to play when I'm done?"
The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. Damn them both for all the time I've wasted.:-)
Disclaimer: I know, if I'd stuck with Apple exclusively these past 20 years, I wouldn't have to worry about a gaming addiction at all! Except maybe to that slide-puzzle-world-map-thingie...
The truly funny thing here is that you're taking offense to a very thinly-veiled assault on Singapore. The Simpsons episode in question was, if I remember correctly, a direct response to the caning of Michael Fay in Singapore for vandalism. So there was no insult to Australia implied; they were just a convenient beard for a nation with some interestingly draconian laws on vandalizing cars.
As far as the death penalty goes, it may not be a deterrent to others (I can't say really), but it's certainly a deterrent to the criminal who received the sentence. Sometimes, no matter how great a particular society or gene pool is, it produces a person who simply cannot or will not stop himself or herself from killing other people. In this case, the safest recourse is the permanent removal of this person from any and all societies -- execution is simply the only way to be sure of it. Pathological recidivists aren't the only people who merit death, of course; offenders whose crimes are marked by a particularly heinous brutality should also pay the ultimate price.
Is this valuing retribution over justice? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, I would rather end one life than endanger an unknown quantity of other, innocent, people.
Even though I'm American, I use Terrible American(TM) myself, mostly to refer to those tourists I see when I'm overseas who "go someplace different, and then complain because nothing's the same." (Apologies for not attributing the quote, because I can't remember from whom I'm stealing it.)
As far as Afghanistan goes, I'm all for helping them out: the first thing we should do is sit down with their government leaders and help them draft a constitution incorporating at a bare minimum the four points I mentioned above. Then we should give any company who does business (above a certain threshhold, say USD 10,000 a year) in Afghanistan the full amount of their profit, no taxation on the earnings. Construction companies and surveying teams should be permitted to have, say, two years' worth of tax freedom for rebuilding infrastructure in the nation, as well.
Finally, there ought to be incentives to promote a high-tech revolution in Afghanistan (cue up the Junis jokes, kids). Singapore saved itself with its electronics manufacturing; Afghanistan could do the same. Frankly, I'd love to see the Khyber Pass become the next Silicon Valley (I know the terrain is not analogous, but you get the gist).
Your last point brings up some thorny and controversial thoughts too -- we tried that with Saddam Hussein, but when we told the U.N. "put up or shut up" on UNSCRs 891, 1441, and all the other chart-topping hits between them, well, you saw what happened. Sometimes unilateral action's gotta happen.
Probably because throwing money and/or food at a Third World country doesn't help raise the standard of living (except for the standard of living of the fatuous oligarchies in power in most of them). I submit Somalia as an example of how the entire world can get behind a relief effort, only to watch it fail miserably because they're trying to cure a symptom and not the disease.
Ever look at the banana republics with their {brutally oppressive right-wing juntas|criminally inept left-wing politburos} and thought, Hey, maybe the crap living conditions in Absurdistan are a function of having a fscked-up governmental system, and not the other way around? You can't really do much for a country in the throes of terminal governance. There's a hell of a lot to be said for a free press, too -- I believe it was anthropologist Amarta Sen who noted that there hasn't been a famine in any country with a truly free press.
You really want to help the hell-holes of the world? Go down to one and start teaching the people about the importance of property rights, rule of law, freedom of expression, and circumscription of government behavior. The payoff from that would be worth a whole air wing of B-2s.
Of course, it's entirely possible that you think that my proposal is just another Terrible American(TM) trying to force his eeeevil Western values and culture onto the people of Southern Trashcanamunda.
Why does it really matter who makes an important discovery? Is the world scientific community somehow enriched more because Uwe in Vienna or Piet in Den Haag made the discovery before Steve in Alamogordo? Or is it more accurate to say that you hate America?
Your first sentence seems to lean toward the latter explanation, as you seem to be upset about U.S. "space dominance," despite the fact that a look at the STS mission crew bios is more multicultural than a Rainbow Coalition rally. Aboard the ill-fated Columbia mission, for the first example that comes to mind, we had the first Israeli in space; I believe his name was Ilian Ramon (although I could be wrong about his first name). Additionally, Kalpana Chawla was born in India. Granted, she was a U.S. citizen at the time of her death, but I'd still say that on the whole, the goodwill extended by NASA in offering to take up scientists of so many nations stands as an eloquent counterargument to your belief in some sort of American doctrine of "Manifest Space Destiny." Were I you, I'd worry more about my own demagoguery than the perceived dangers of American astronautical hegemony.
In my travels to Europe, South America, and the Pacific Rim, I've met hundreds of intelligent, friendly, and generally cool people. I can only hope that when they read such ill-informed and sneeringly smug commentary as yours, that they are as horrified as I am when I see an American behaving rudely towards someone from another country.
Re:Sorry to be pedantic....
on
Chicken Run
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· Score: 1
Okay, let me get this straight: you believe that humans, who are all physiologically set up for omnivorous behavior, have no right to slaughter animals (I'm assuming you missed the day in freshman bio where they went over the whole "food chain" bit). I can understand, while vehemently disagreeing with, your position. But you have the nerve to say that the animal "welfare" groups are "namby-pamby?"
This is horrible. No, really horrible. Gouge-out-your-eyes and jam-hot-Q-tips-into-your-eardrums horrible.
I have these visions of Erik Estrada playing Aragorn and Bernadette Peters playing Aruwen and singing "Endless Love" while stagehands softly wave the fake plastic tree branches.
Once more, I'm left stunned that anyone can still believe in the existence of God.
That's fascinating. Let's try a little gedankenexperiment.
I'm a...poet, we'll say, for the sake of our experiment. I write a book of poetry when I'm a lovesick college freshman. Legally, it is my right to release that work and retain total say as to how my work is distributed. I do so, all full of the ardor (and feigned weariness) of youth, and it's a moderately popular success among the "candles and angst" goth set.
Two years later, I go back and reread Love and White Makeup, or whatever I call the book, and realize it's crap. Big, steaming, awful crap. So I tell the publisher, "Hey, let's not do any more printing runs on my book." (We'll assume I was savvy enough not to sign the rights over to Nobody Understands Me House Publishers.)
What you're saying is I have no right to do this? Are you insane? The right to the destiny of my own original work is a tradition extending back at least 50,000 years (the Australian Aborigines respected the work of authors and musicians as being akin to physical property), and still respected in nearly every modern society.
I agree that I could do nothing about the copies of the book that were already in existence when I decided not to make any new copies, but I still have the right to say, "Hey, don't archive this in some electronic format that'll last forever, don't get Shatner to do a 'Book on CD' reading this, and don't make a movie version."
The intent of copyright is to protect the right of a content creator to determine how and when something is copied. Hence the name. Yes, it provides an incentive for other individuals to create their own art, but only because they know that if they create it, they have recourse against those who wish to arrogate to themselves the right to copy the artist's work.
Please, put the crack pipe down and back away slowly.
Nobody wants to make it illegal for you to transfer your "knowledge and works of art to reliable media and new display platforms". What they're looking to do is keep you from transferring other people's knowledge and works of art.
If an author, artist, or director does not wish for his work to propagate in the future, it is his prerogative to ensure that does not happen, not yours to violate his wishes. Even if you think that he's denying "future generations their cultural heritage," you have no say in the matter. Never have.
I think it's highly fscking unlikely that "[o]ur culture, our knowledge, all our achievements will be lost to our children." If you honestly believe that within two or three generations, we'll be back to living in caves and hunting prey with pointed sticks, please get your head out of whatever propaganda you're reading and take a look at the real world. All the knowledge will still be there, it's just that you'll have to have something to exchange to get it, just like it's always been.
In other words, nothing to see here, break it up folks, move along.
Until you actually have citizens being executed or imprisoned for their entire lives for infringing on an author's copyright, it's not a crime against humanity. The current execution of the ??AAs' desires to enforce copyright restrictions may be ill-conceived, unjust, or downright stupid, but it's a gigantic leap from there to "crime against humanity." Call it a "prelimenary [sic]" step if you wish, but you've still got a long way to go before you get to real atrocity.
Kozy Gory in WWII was a crime against humanity. The killing fields in Cambodia were crimes against humanity. The cannibalism and atrocities in Idi Amin's regime were crimes against humanity. The U.S. government's treatment of blacks and American Indians was a crime against humanity. Fining a w4r3z d00d or.mp3 hoarder, no matter how unjust, is most definitely not a crime against humanity.
It's this sort of dilution of language that leads to people crying "1984" and "police state" every time they think the gubmint is doing them an injustice. Here's a quick-and-dirty litmus test: go out to a big publice place, and tell a bunch of strangers that you think your government is a totalitarian fascist police state. If you get arrested that night and executed for making the statement, you're in a police state. If you get nothing more than strange looks, you're not.
Not to be excessively picayune, but the Soviets were quite a bit ahead of us in "missile defense shield" technology -- their sites at Dushanbe, Tashkent, and Sary Shagan were well documented. Asking us if an ABM system would be destabilizing brings to mind something about a pot and a kettle. I'm aware it was simply a humorous sketch, but a little background does change the slant significantly.
I agree with you entirely that the "grunt in the trenches" is not, nor should he be, the formulator of national-level policy. But he is the implementor of that policy; he is "the last argument of kings," if you will. The level of trust and confidence he has in his equipment and support elements has a direct bearing on his ability to carry out the mission, so the onus is on his superiors to outfit him with the best possible equipment available.
Cry me a river for the nations who are "wary" of the United States' power. It's been this way since the beginning of time: if one tribe of shaved apes gets an upper hand, it's going to use it. No amount of carping or snits about "destabilization" will change the fact that each of the pissants would be doing the exact same thing if their positions were reversed.
If ridiculous platitudes were all it took to keep the peace, we wouldn't have anything to worry about, I guess.
Are Murphy's Laws of Combat trite aphorisms? Sure. But that doesn't mean that they don't contain some important nuggets of truth.
For example, the statement that "there's no such thing as a fair fight" is paramount in U.S. warfighting doctrine and has been for some time. The only thing that a soldier, sailor, or airman cares about as much as accomplishing the mission is bringing himself and his unit home as intact as possible. War is by nature a risky business, but the fewer casualties that our soldiers and allied forces incur, the better.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think any sane individual wants to see civilians hurt, but soldiers in the opposing military knew what they were getting into when they decided to mess with Uncle. Besides, the faster and more efficiently we can decimate a country's military command-and-control structure, the faster we can restore peace and stability.
So basically what you're saying is that the hardware guys held up their end of the bargain, but because you couldn't write the software in time, it's the robots' fault?
Please explain why your failure to do your part of the task has anything to do with whether or not robotics are important in AI research.
My point exactly -- don't expect the same quality control measures on Microsoft's business software that you would of something that puts human lives on the line.
And as a matter of fact, I was in a hospital last Friday. I didn't see a single Windows-run life support system, although the idea does lead to some interesting scenarios:
New Organ Detected...
Searching for Plug & Play organ drivers...
Windows has installed new drivers for the patient's liver. Please kill and resurrect the patient now.
Because when some script kiddie roots your webserver, nobody dies. Comparing automobiles (which are, according the National Center for Health Statistics, were the fifth leading cause of death for Americans) with Microsoft software (which has yet to cause a single fatality) is a spurious analogy.
No matter how much some people wish it were otherwise, in the grand scheme of things, software is pretty inconsequential. Should software companies be immune from product liability? No, but neither should they be held to the same standard as people who have human lives riding on their products.
Like I said, it wasn't a personal attack on you. I just think that Gandhi getting all preachy about revenge is a freakin' riot. You know, "Pot, this is Kettle. Kettle, Pot..." I hate hypocrisy as much as the next guy (and I'm guilty of it myself sometimes), but Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, nobody who sanctions ten murders for every one should be allowed to look down on Lex Talionis.
Sorry if it came off like I was bashing you -- that really wasn't my intent, and I'm usually harmless.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, hate to break it to you there, but if you're referring to the Tarika Wilson shooting in Lima, Ohio, by Officer Joseph Chavalia, you're leaving out some salient points (and, might I add, attempting to smear the victim with irrelevancies).
For starters, she wasn't just "shot during a drug raid". That implies that the target(s) of the raid exchanged fire with the Lima police department. What actually happened is that another Lima police officer shot and killed the two dogs that lived in the house. Chavalia mistook the shots of a fellow officer for incoming fire from a bedroom where Wilson was holding her infant son. Without stopping to identify a target, Chavalia fired blindly into the bedroom, striking both Wilson (who died) and her son, who — thank whatever deity you like — survived.
A jury concluded that the officer had a reasonable fear for his life, which is something that juries have been singularly unable to do for innocent citizens who, when their homes were unjustly invaded by militarized police officers, sought to defend themselves against people they believed to be criminal intruders. See, for example, Derrick Foster, Corey Maye, or Ryan Frederick.
Was the Tarika Wilson shooting racially motivated? Almost certainly not. Was Joseph Chavalia's acquittal a miscarriage of justice? I believe so.
If we hold police officers to a lower standard than the citizenry they are supposed to be protecting, we do nothing less than create a government-sanctioned criminal organization, one without conscience or accountability.
NB: Before you start calling me a bleeding-heart liberal or some such similar crap, I'm actually a former USAF Security Policeman. I just happen to believe that putting military hardware into the hands of police, giving them a macho name like SWAT, glamorizing their ass-kicking behavior in movies and reality television, and then expecting them to behave with restraint when they're sent out to serve non-violent drug warrants is a pretty damned stupid policy.
I saw WarGames when I was 5 years old. Later on that year, my father bought us our first computer: an Apple //c. I was incredibly depressed when the computer exhibited neither near-human emotions nor a synthesized English accent.
And did I say anything about the article not saying that Largent managed to rip off Google Checkout? No. I said, "the article doesn't actually mention that Largent managed to rip off PayPal". Again, I feel it important to stress that reading for comprehension is important. So yes, you and the submitter are missing something.
As far as I can tell, the article doesn't actually mention that Largent managed to rip off PayPal, only that PayPal, Google Checkout, et al. use the small deposit method for verification. Seriously, reading for comprehension isn't hard, people. Hell, it even mentions the scope right in the lede.
And those of us who know your posting history can only say that you're an idiot. Substantiate your claim in paragraph number four that "[f]lying saucers are real simply because our own government had prototype spy crafts which were flying saucers[...]" with valid .gov links.
Maybe the monochrome was 9", but I'm fairly sure that the color monitor we had was 12". That's why it was $2000 -- Dad sprang for the big ol' color monitor (and the guy at the BX threw in our ImageWriter ][ for free).
It was 1983, we'd just moved to Hawaii, and my father had bought $2,000 worth of off-white plastic called the Apple //c.
"Dad," I said, as I walked into the living room, "what's that?"
"It's called Captain Goodnight," he said without turning away from the 12" color monitor. "It's like Pitfall on the Atari, but funnier. You want to play when I'm done?"
The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. Damn them both for all the time I've wasted. :-)
Disclaimer: I know, if I'd stuck with Apple exclusively these past 20 years, I wouldn't have to worry about a gaming addiction at all! Except maybe to that slide-puzzle-world-map-thingie...
The truly funny thing here is that you're taking offense to a very thinly-veiled assault on Singapore. The Simpsons episode in question was, if I remember correctly, a direct response to the caning of Michael Fay in Singapore for vandalism. So there was no insult to Australia implied; they were just a convenient beard for a nation with some interestingly draconian laws on vandalizing cars.
As far as the death penalty goes, it may not be a deterrent to others (I can't say really), but it's certainly a deterrent to the criminal who received the sentence. Sometimes, no matter how great a particular society or gene pool is, it produces a person who simply cannot or will not stop himself or herself from killing other people. In this case, the safest recourse is the permanent removal of this person from any and all societies -- execution is simply the only way to be sure of it. Pathological recidivists aren't the only people who merit death, of course; offenders whose crimes are marked by a particularly heinous brutality should also pay the ultimate price.
Is this valuing retribution over justice? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, I would rather end one life than endanger an unknown quantity of other, innocent, people.
Even though I'm American, I use Terrible American(TM) myself, mostly to refer to those tourists I see when I'm overseas who "go someplace different, and then complain because nothing's the same." (Apologies for not attributing the quote, because I can't remember from whom I'm stealing it.)
As far as Afghanistan goes, I'm all for helping them out: the first thing we should do is sit down with their government leaders and help them draft a constitution incorporating at a bare minimum the four points I mentioned above. Then we should give any company who does business (above a certain threshhold, say USD 10,000 a year) in Afghanistan the full amount of their profit, no taxation on the earnings. Construction companies and surveying teams should be permitted to have, say, two years' worth of tax freedom for rebuilding infrastructure in the nation, as well.
Finally, there ought to be incentives to promote a high-tech revolution in Afghanistan (cue up the Junis jokes, kids). Singapore saved itself with its electronics manufacturing; Afghanistan could do the same. Frankly, I'd love to see the Khyber Pass become the next Silicon Valley (I know the terrain is not analogous, but you get the gist).
Your last point brings up some thorny and controversial thoughts too -- we tried that with Saddam Hussein, but when we told the U.N. "put up or shut up" on UNSCRs 891, 1441, and all the other chart-topping hits between them, well, you saw what happened. Sometimes unilateral action's gotta happen.
Probably because throwing money and/or food at a Third World country doesn't help raise the standard of living (except for the standard of living of the fatuous oligarchies in power in most of them). I submit Somalia as an example of how the entire world can get behind a relief effort, only to watch it fail miserably because they're trying to cure a symptom and not the disease.
Ever look at the banana republics with their {brutally oppressive right-wing juntas|criminally inept left-wing politburos} and thought, Hey, maybe the crap living conditions in Absurdistan are a function of having a fscked-up governmental system, and not the other way around? You can't really do much for a country in the throes of terminal governance. There's a hell of a lot to be said for a free press, too -- I believe it was anthropologist Amarta Sen who noted that there hasn't been a famine in any country with a truly free press.
You really want to help the hell-holes of the world? Go down to one and start teaching the people about the importance of property rights, rule of law, freedom of expression, and circumscription of government behavior. The payoff from that would be worth a whole air wing of B-2s.
Of course, it's entirely possible that you think that my proposal is just another Terrible American(TM) trying to force his eeeevil Western values and culture onto the people of Southern Trashcanamunda.
Why does it really matter who makes an important discovery? Is the world scientific community somehow enriched more because Uwe in Vienna or Piet in Den Haag made the discovery before Steve in Alamogordo? Or is it more accurate to say that you hate America?
Your first sentence seems to lean toward the latter explanation, as you seem to be upset about U.S. "space dominance," despite the fact that a look at the STS mission crew bios is more multicultural than a Rainbow Coalition rally. Aboard the ill-fated Columbia mission, for the first example that comes to mind, we had the first Israeli in space; I believe his name was Ilian Ramon (although I could be wrong about his first name). Additionally, Kalpana Chawla was born in India. Granted, she was a U.S. citizen at the time of her death, but I'd still say that on the whole, the goodwill extended by NASA in offering to take up scientists of so many nations stands as an eloquent counterargument to your belief in some sort of American doctrine of "Manifest Space Destiny." Were I you, I'd worry more about my own demagoguery than the perceived dangers of American astronautical hegemony.
In my travels to Europe, South America, and the Pacific Rim, I've met hundreds of intelligent, friendly, and generally cool people. I can only hope that when they read such ill-informed and sneeringly smug commentary as yours, that they are as horrified as I am when I see an American behaving rudely towards someone from another country.
Okay, let me get this straight: you believe that humans, who are all physiologically set up for omnivorous behavior, have no right to slaughter animals (I'm assuming you missed the day in freshman bio where they went over the whole "food chain" bit). I can understand, while vehemently disagreeing with, your position. But you have the nerve to say that the animal "welfare" groups are "namby-pamby?"
The mind boggles.
This is horrible. No, really horrible. Gouge-out-your-eyes and jam-hot-Q-tips-into-your-eardrums horrible.
I have these visions of Erik Estrada playing Aragorn and Bernadette Peters playing Aruwen and singing "Endless Love" while stagehands softly wave the fake plastic tree branches.
Once more, I'm left stunned that anyone can still believe in the existence of God.
Because he's been imprisoned for his entire life, right? It's right there in my original quote. It's in the section you excerpted for your post.
Sklyarov was not sentenced to life in prison, nor was he executed. Your example is irrelevant.
That's fascinating. Let's try a little gedankenexperiment.
I'm a...poet, we'll say, for the sake of our experiment. I write a book of poetry when I'm a lovesick college freshman. Legally, it is my right to release that work and retain total say as to how my work is distributed. I do so, all full of the ardor (and feigned weariness) of youth, and it's a moderately popular success among the "candles and angst" goth set.
Two years later, I go back and reread Love and White Makeup, or whatever I call the book, and realize it's crap. Big, steaming, awful crap. So I tell the publisher, "Hey, let's not do any more printing runs on my book." (We'll assume I was savvy enough not to sign the rights over to Nobody Understands Me House Publishers.)
What you're saying is I have no right to do this? Are you insane? The right to the destiny of my own original work is a tradition extending back at least 50,000 years (the Australian Aborigines respected the work of authors and musicians as being akin to physical property), and still respected in nearly every modern society.
I agree that I could do nothing about the copies of the book that were already in existence when I decided not to make any new copies, but I still have the right to say, "Hey, don't archive this in some electronic format that'll last forever, don't get Shatner to do a 'Book on CD' reading this, and don't make a movie version."
The intent of copyright is to protect the right of a content creator to determine how and when something is copied. Hence the name. Yes, it provides an incentive for other individuals to create their own art, but only because they know that if they create it, they have recourse against those who wish to arrogate to themselves the right to copy the artist's work.
Please, put the crack pipe down and back away slowly.
Nobody wants to make it illegal for you to transfer your "knowledge and works of art to reliable media and new display platforms". What they're looking to do is keep you from transferring other people's knowledge and works of art.
If an author, artist, or director does not wish for his work to propagate in the future, it is his prerogative to ensure that does not happen, not yours to violate his wishes. Even if you think that he's denying "future generations their cultural heritage," you have no say in the matter. Never have.
I think it's highly fscking unlikely that "[o]ur culture, our knowledge, all our achievements will be lost to our children." If you honestly believe that within two or three generations, we'll be back to living in caves and hunting prey with pointed sticks, please get your head out of whatever propaganda you're reading and take a look at the real world. All the knowledge will still be there, it's just that you'll have to have something to exchange to get it, just like it's always been.
In other words, nothing to see here, break it up folks, move along.
Long answer:
Until you actually have citizens being executed or imprisoned for their entire lives for infringing on an author's copyright, it's not a crime against humanity. The current execution of the ??AAs' desires to enforce copyright restrictions may be ill-conceived, unjust, or downright stupid, but it's a gigantic leap from there to "crime against humanity." Call it a "prelimenary [sic]" step if you wish, but you've still got a long way to go before you get to real atrocity.
Kozy Gory in WWII was a crime against humanity. The killing fields in Cambodia were crimes against humanity. The cannibalism and atrocities in Idi Amin's regime were crimes against humanity. The U.S. government's treatment of blacks and American Indians was a crime against humanity. Fining a w4r3z d00d or .mp3 hoarder, no matter how unjust, is most definitely not a crime against humanity.
It's this sort of dilution of language that leads to people crying "1984" and "police state" every time they think the gubmint is doing them an injustice. Here's a quick-and-dirty litmus test: go out to a big publice place, and tell a bunch of strangers that you think your government is a totalitarian fascist police state. If you get arrested that night and executed for making the statement, you're in a police state. If you get nothing more than strange looks, you're not.
Not to be excessively picayune, but the Soviets were quite a bit ahead of us in "missile defense shield" technology -- their sites at Dushanbe, Tashkent, and Sary Shagan were well documented. Asking us if an ABM system would be destabilizing brings to mind something about a pot and a kettle. I'm aware it was simply a humorous sketch, but a little background does change the slant significantly.
I agree with you entirely that the "grunt in the trenches" is not, nor should he be, the formulator of national-level policy. But he is the implementor of that policy; he is "the last argument of kings," if you will. The level of trust and confidence he has in his equipment and support elements has a direct bearing on his ability to carry out the mission, so the onus is on his superiors to outfit him with the best possible equipment available.
Cry me a river for the nations who are "wary" of the United States' power. It's been this way since the beginning of time: if one tribe of shaved apes gets an upper hand, it's going to use it. No amount of carping or snits about "destabilization" will change the fact that each of the pissants would be doing the exact same thing if their positions were reversed.
If ridiculous platitudes were all it took to keep the peace, we wouldn't have anything to worry about, I guess.
Are Murphy's Laws of Combat trite aphorisms? Sure. But that doesn't mean that they don't contain some important nuggets of truth.
For example, the statement that "there's no such thing as a fair fight" is paramount in U.S. warfighting doctrine and has been for some time. The only thing that a soldier, sailor, or airman cares about as much as accomplishing the mission is bringing himself and his unit home as intact as possible. War is by nature a risky business, but the fewer casualties that our soldiers and allied forces incur, the better.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think any sane individual wants to see civilians hurt, but soldiers in the opposing military knew what they were getting into when they decided to mess with Uncle. Besides, the faster and more efficiently we can decimate a country's military command-and-control structure, the faster we can restore peace and stability.
So basically what you're saying is that the hardware guys held up their end of the bargain, but because you couldn't write the software in time, it's the robots' fault?
Please explain why your failure to do your part of the task has anything to do with whether or not robotics are important in AI research.
My point exactly -- don't expect the same quality control measures on Microsoft's business software that you would of something that puts human lives on the line.
And as a matter of fact, I was in a hospital last Friday. I didn't see a single Windows-run life support system, although the idea does lead to some interesting scenarios:
Because when some script kiddie roots your webserver, nobody dies. Comparing automobiles (which are, according the National Center for Health Statistics, were the fifth leading cause of death for Americans) with Microsoft software (which has yet to cause a single fatality) is a spurious analogy.
No matter how much some people wish it were otherwise, in the grand scheme of things, software is pretty inconsequential. Should software companies be immune from product liability? No, but neither should they be held to the same standard as people who have human lives riding on their products.
The disturbing juxtaposition of the subject line and your last suggestion made me think of this.
Like I said, it wasn't a personal attack on you. I just think that Gandhi getting all preachy about revenge is a freakin' riot. You know, "Pot, this is Kettle. Kettle, Pot..." I hate hypocrisy as much as the next guy (and I'm guilty of it myself sometimes), but Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, nobody who sanctions ten murders for every one should be allowed to look down on Lex Talionis.
Sorry if it came off like I was bashing you -- that really wasn't my intent, and I'm usually harmless.
Thankfully, they'll be able to enlarge their penises (penii? :) one to three inches with the new herbal supplement they're e-mailing each other about.