Are politicians and bureaucrats more morally upright today than back then? I highly doubt it. Is the press more free and able to expose irregularities in the government today than it was back then? I highly doubt it. Are there more effective checks and balances in effect on the government today? I highly doubt it.
If someone had told me ten years ago that the USA would imprison and torture people indefinitely on the mere suspicion of terrorism(*), I wouldn't have believed it. And yet, it happened, and a lot of Americans seem to believe it's perfectly normal. I don't think the step is very far to performing experiments on humans "for the good of the nation", if the need should arise. If it's illegal, you can rationalise it simply by doing it on foreign soil, like with Guantanamo.
(*) Or, in some cases, without any suspicion at all - some people were held and tortured at Guantanamo Bay not because they were suspected of any wrongdoing, but because the US military believed they could become useful informants.
But, they might very well be done by unhinged nut jobs like Saddam Hussein, who did in fact use biological weapons against Kurds and others that he had issues with.
Biological? You mean chemical?
I don't think Saddam Hussein was as unhinged as you believe. All countries use propaganda to diminish and vilify their enemies. If you live in the USA, a country which was at war with Iraq, everything you hear about Saddam is likely to be prejudice or propaganda.
Saddam Hussein didn't want a war with the USA, so he disposed of his chemical weapons and allowed UN weapons inspectors inside his country. Iraq was in a pretty delicate situation, though - its military was very weak, and the surrounding countries were at a risk to invade if they knew exactly how weak it was. So Saddam had to convince the USA that he was no threat to them, while at the same time maintaining enough doubt and confusion to deter other Middle East countries from invasion. Given the position Saddam was in, his actions seem pretty rational.
George Bush' actions seem much less rational - he seems to have decided on an invasion and was actively looking for excuses, even though the UN inspections made it very unlikely that Saddam had any WMDs left. The Bush administration accepted any intelligence reports which confirmed the course of action they had already decided upon, even though most of them were unreliable or outright forgeries (such as the one about yellow uranium cakes), and were dismissed by the US' allies, such as the British intelligence service.
Saddam was a despicable dictator, but that doesn't make him irrational. He was secularised and at least made an attempt to modernise his country. George Bush was a democratically elected leader, but that doesn't make him rational. A large part of his motivations for invading Iraq were religious, and his religious motivations seem to have been pretty easily manipulated by his advisors.
Hm? Why do you believe the reasoning is wrong in this case? Couldn't, for example, North Korea just replicate the research if they wanted to release a virus of this type onto the world?
Of course, but vaccinations also have a cost in terms of money, time, and the small risk that the vaccine is faulty or you get an adverse immune reaction. If you vaccinate hundreds of millions of people to prevent a *possible* pandemic, those costs are not negligible.
The main reason people stopped dying from infectious disease was because of better hygiene and better nutrition and care. People die from infectious diseases mainly because they become dehydrated and malnourished, not from the virus itself. The most powerful weapon against disease in developing countries today is boiled water with salt and sugar, not vaccines.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with vaccines - they can be very effective against some diseases. But the way vaccines are used today has more to do with politics than with science.
Is it really that different? I agree it's more of a tragedy if 20 000 young people die of the flu, than if 20 000 elderly people do, but neither of those scenarios are disastrous for society.
Islamic terrorists are by far the most common sort in the modern world
Most terrorist acts in Europe are still carried out by Christian Europeans, like the Catalonian separatists in Spain, or the Catholic separatists on Northern Ireland. The most recent major act of terrorism, Anders Breivik's bombing of the Norwegian parliament with 8 dead and subsequent shooting of another 77 people, was motivated by his racist and Christian beliefs. There have been far more terrorist acts carried out on American soil by Christian Americans than by Islamists, although the one exception (9/11) had a very high death toll.
But, hey, those terrorists are white Christians, so they can't be as bad as the Islamists, can they?
Why would you need to to write crappy code to find an SQL injection joke funny? What makes the joke funny is that other people write crappy code. The joke lets you feel a little smug and superior to them.
And yes, it does not just drop the buzzwords "SQL injection", but actually constructs a small story around it. And I just checked, the strip doesn't even mention "SQL injection", it just shows the consequences of one...
Precisely. The joke isn't "SQL injection is possible", it's "someone named their child to a string of gibberish just to crash a database". And it was delivered in a funny way.
The rest of the "comics" are just ancient jokes that anyone who has spent any time in an academic or laboratory setting would've seen years, or even decades, ago.
This. For the significant portion of the population which hasn't spent time in an academic or laboratory setting, the jokes are new.
Chapter 1 of 17 USC is pretty clear that private copying isn't covered, since it fits the definition of "fair use".
How do you mean? Fair use only covers "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research".
If private copying was fair use, wouldn't it be legal to download anything off the Internet?
Hidden variables used to be one of the interpretations of quantum theory. The apparent randomness of quantum theory were interpreted by some as true randomness, by others as the result of hdiden variables, and by yet others in terms of the many-worlds-interpretation.
Hidden variables only stopped being an interpretation because Bell's Theorem ruled out that possibility (more or less).
Unless you define "interpretation" as something which has no testable predictions, but in that case the question becomes trivial.
There's a branch of philosophy among mathematicians called constructivism, which holds that all mathematical objects should be possible to construct. For example, constructivists don't admit proofs of the existence of a mathematical object, if they don't show how that object can be constructed. Since infinity can't be constructed directly, constructivists don't believe in infinity as such. They do, of course, recognise that there is an unlimited number of real numbers, but they hesitate to say there are infinitely many, since no one can ever imagine or compute more than a finite number of them.
Apart from seeming like a play with words, I always thought that argument had a logical hole...
Let's define the property P as 1) being a unicorn, and 2) existing. Now let's look at a hypothetical object p with the property P. Does p exist? Yes, obviously, since it follows from the definition of P. Therefore, there exists at least one unicorn.
What did we do wrong? Well, by defining the property P as both being a unicorn and existing, we are implicitly assuming that it's possible to have those two properties, i.e, that there is an object which both exists and is a unicorn.
In the same way, by defining the property G as "being God", and defining God in such a way that it implies existing, we're implicitly assuming that there exists an object which fulfils the definition of God.
Oh, I agree. I just mean treating it as a service makes more sense from a legal perspective - it's becomes much less contrived than trying to view movies and music as physical goods. If we consistently treat it as a service, there also shouldn't be anything to stop people from creating their competing services, i.e, selling other copies of the same movies and music.
It's my understanding that you already have the right to return a product for a refund (within a reasonable time period) if you don't agree to the shrink-wrap terms, either to the store or to the producer. I'm not a lawyer, though, and I'm not sure if the courts are even consistent on this issue.
Legally speaking, when you buy copyrighted goods, you don't buy a license, you buy a physical copy. A license is only needed if you want to make additional copies or perform the work publicly. As long as you don't do that, you can do whatever you like with the physical copy.
It makes much more sense to think of digital goods as a service. For example, a digital music store provides you with the service of downloading the latest songs quickly and conveniently. Pirate Bay is a competing, free service, which the commercial services need to beat in terms of speed, convenience and support.
Musicians can still earn money even if people pirate their music. In fact, a lot of musicians have realised it's better if they offer their music as a free download, and earn their money on merchandise and concerts.
TV companies have been able to earn money by giving away their programmes for free for half a century, using advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
How so?
Are politicians and bureaucrats more morally upright today than back then? I highly doubt it.
Is the press more free and able to expose irregularities in the government today than it was back then? I highly doubt it.
Are there more effective checks and balances in effect on the government today? I highly doubt it.
If someone had told me ten years ago that the USA would imprison and torture people indefinitely on the mere suspicion of terrorism(*), I wouldn't have believed it. And yet, it happened, and a lot of Americans seem to believe it's perfectly normal. I don't think the step is very far to performing experiments on humans "for the good of the nation", if the need should arise. If it's illegal, you can rationalise it simply by doing it on foreign soil, like with Guantanamo.
(*) Or, in some cases, without any suspicion at all - some people were held and tortured at Guantanamo Bay not because they were suspected of any wrongdoing, but because the US military believed they could become useful informants.
But, they might very well be done by unhinged nut jobs like Saddam Hussein, who did in fact use biological weapons against Kurds and others that he had issues with.
Biological? You mean chemical?
I don't think Saddam Hussein was as unhinged as you believe. All countries use propaganda to diminish and vilify their enemies. If you live in the USA, a country which was at war with Iraq, everything you hear about Saddam is likely to be prejudice or propaganda.
Saddam Hussein didn't want a war with the USA, so he disposed of his chemical weapons and allowed UN weapons inspectors inside his country. Iraq was in a pretty delicate situation, though - its military was very weak, and the surrounding countries were at a risk to invade if they knew exactly how weak it was. So Saddam had to convince the USA that he was no threat to them, while at the same time maintaining enough doubt and confusion to deter other Middle East countries from invasion. Given the position Saddam was in, his actions seem pretty rational.
George Bush' actions seem much less rational - he seems to have decided on an invasion and was actively looking for excuses, even though the UN inspections made it very unlikely that Saddam had any WMDs left. The Bush administration accepted any intelligence reports which confirmed the course of action they had already decided upon, even though most of them were unreliable or outright forgeries (such as the one about yellow uranium cakes), and were dismissed by the US' allies, such as the British intelligence service.
Saddam was a despicable dictator, but that doesn't make him irrational. He was secularised and at least made an attempt to modernise his country.
George Bush was a democratically elected leader, but that doesn't make him rational. A large part of his motivations for invading Iraq were religious, and his religious motivations seem to have been pretty easily manipulated by his advisors.
Hm? Why do you believe the reasoning is wrong in this case? Couldn't, for example, North Korea just replicate the research if they wanted to release a virus of this type onto the world?
Of course, but vaccinations also have a cost in terms of money, time, and the small risk that the vaccine is faulty or you get an adverse immune reaction. If you vaccinate hundreds of millions of people to prevent a *possible* pandemic, those costs are not negligible.
The main reason people stopped dying from infectious disease was because of better hygiene and better nutrition and care. People die from infectious diseases mainly because they become dehydrated and malnourished, not from the virus itself. The most powerful weapon against disease in developing countries today is boiled water with salt and sugar, not vaccines.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with vaccines - they can be very effective against some diseases. But the way vaccines are used today has more to do with politics than with science.
Is it really that different? I agree it's more of a tragedy if 20 000 young people die of the flu, than if 20 000 elderly people do, but neither of those scenarios are disastrous for society.
Islamic terrorists are by far the most common sort in the modern world
Most terrorist acts in Europe are still carried out by Christian Europeans, like the Catalonian separatists in Spain, or the Catholic separatists on Northern Ireland. The most recent major act of terrorism, Anders Breivik's bombing of the Norwegian parliament with 8 dead and subsequent shooting of another 77 people, was motivated by his racist and Christian beliefs. There have been far more terrorist acts carried out on American soil by Christian Americans than by Islamists, although the one exception (9/11) had a very high death toll.
But, hey, those terrorists are white Christians, so they can't be as bad as the Islamists, can they?
I think the judges must have been replaced by aliens. That's the only sensible explanation!
Why would you need to to write crappy code to find an SQL injection joke funny? What makes the joke funny is that other people write crappy code. The joke lets you feel a little smug and superior to them.
And yes, it does not just drop the buzzwords "SQL injection", but actually constructs a small story around it. And I just checked, the strip doesn't even mention "SQL injection", it just shows the consequences of one...
Precisely. The joke isn't "SQL injection is possible", it's "someone named their child to a string of gibberish just to crash a database". And it was delivered in a funny way.
The rest of the "comics" are just ancient jokes that anyone who has spent any time in an academic or laboratory setting would've seen years, or even decades, ago.
This. For the significant portion of the population which hasn't spent time in an academic or laboratory setting, the jokes are new.
Chapter 1 of 17 USC is pretty clear that private copying isn't covered, since it fits the definition of "fair use".
How do you mean? Fair use only covers "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research".
If private copying was fair use, wouldn't it be legal to download anything off the Internet?
Hidden variables used to be one of the interpretations of quantum theory. The apparent randomness of quantum theory were interpreted by some as true randomness, by others as the result of hdiden variables, and by yet others in terms of the many-worlds-interpretation.
Hidden variables only stopped being an interpretation because Bell's Theorem ruled out that possibility (more or less).
Unless you define "interpretation" as something which has no testable predictions, but in that case the question becomes trivial.
There's a branch of philosophy among mathematicians called constructivism, which holds that all mathematical objects should be possible to construct. For example, constructivists don't admit proofs of the existence of a mathematical object, if they don't show how that object can be constructed. Since infinity can't be constructed directly, constructivists don't believe in infinity as such. They do, of course, recognise that there is an unlimited number of real numbers, but they hesitate to say there are infinitely many, since no one can ever imagine or compute more than a finite number of them.
Apart from seeming like a play with words, I always thought that argument had a logical hole...
Let's define the property P as 1) being a unicorn, and 2) existing.
Now let's look at a hypothetical object p with the property P. Does p exist? Yes, obviously, since it follows from the definition of P. Therefore, there exists at least one unicorn.
What did we do wrong? Well, by defining the property P as both being a unicorn and existing, we are implicitly assuming that it's possible to have those two properties, i.e, that there is an object which both exists and is a unicorn.
In the same way, by defining the property G as "being God", and defining God in such a way that it implies existing, we're implicitly assuming that there exists an object which fulfils the definition of God.
Bell's Theorem made some testable predictions. Sure, it's not much, but it shows that it's not just philosophy.
I'm sure he just needs a hug.
The point is to hide from an eavesdropper that data is being exchanged. That's what the "Steg" in "TranSteg" stands for (Steganography).
That's great! Thanks for the info!
Oh, I agree. I just mean treating it as a service makes more sense from a legal perspective - it's becomes much less contrived than trying to view movies and music as physical goods. If we consistently treat it as a service, there also shouldn't be anything to stop people from creating their competing services, i.e, selling other copies of the same movies and music.
It's my understanding that you already have the right to return a product for a refund (within a reasonable time period) if you don't agree to the shrink-wrap terms, either to the store or to the producer. I'm not a lawyer, though, and I'm not sure if the courts are even consistent on this issue.
Legally speaking, when you buy copyrighted goods, you don't buy a license, you buy a physical copy. A license is only needed if you want to make additional copies or perform the work publicly. As long as you don't do that, you can do whatever you like with the physical copy.
It makes much more sense to think of digital goods as a service. For example, a digital music store provides you with the service of downloading the latest songs quickly and conveniently. Pirate Bay is a competing, free service, which the commercial services need to beat in terms of speed, convenience and support.
Musicians can still earn money even if people pirate their music. In fact, a lot of musicians have realised it's better if they offer their music as a free download, and earn their money on merchandise and concerts.
TV companies have been able to earn money by giving away their programmes for free for half a century, using advertising.
(I laugh at anyone who pays money for digital music.)
I agree. You should only pay for the convenience of downloading it. If the music store can't provide convenient downloads, there's always Pirate Bay.