Most people are not affected adversely, in any serious way, by these violent games.
And? The same could be said about the Bible or Quran, for instance. It is also important not to look away from these books as having a dangerous effect on certain elements in society who are ill-equipped to handle the violent imagery inherent in such books.
but there is one main reason to keep freedom and that is freedom.
So, ID cards take away the freedom? That's news to me. I've got a unique social security number on an ID card. It's required when I use public services such as health care, when I vote, to show that I am permitted to drive a car or that I am the owner of the bank/credit card when I'm making a significant purchase. And you know what? I like it. I like to know that requiring positive identification reduces health care fraud, that it's hard for someone to vote in my place or that it's risky for a thief to use my bank/credit card. No, an ID card is not the perfect solution, but it will do a lot of good.
This talk about people losing their freedoms if ID cards are issued is just a lot of hot air and a non-issue. It's an extremist, all-or-nothing attitude that's bordering on religious fervor and hysteria. Such ideals are hardly ever practical or even beneficial in real life.
There is no such thing as too much liberty... it would be like saying that science is too rational.
Well, as a scientist I don't think a purely rational approach to problems would work as well as the present intuitive/rational-combination.
Saying that there can not be too much liberty is nonsense. Freedom is essentially defined by the few boundaries we set to it. No boundaries, no freedom.
Are you talking about nuclear reactions as in "fission/fusion explosion" or as in "radiation induced damage to surrounding materials". Both explosions and the aging of warhead can be simulated. Both processes involve nuclear reactions and, as far as I know, only the former is subject to the nuclear test ban. I don't see how investigating radiation damage to materials, for instance, would constitute a breach of the treaty.
I admire your positive outlook on the prospects of simulations, but as an experimentalist, I find this "soon we won't need experiments at all" (see Rev. Mod. Phys. 64, 1045-1097 (1992), for instance) attitude very dangerous. Simulations and models, even at the first principles level, should never be trusted implicitly. They only sure way to tell how nature works is via experimentation.
I can sort of understand simulating nuclear explosions, but simulating the aging process of a warhead doesn't make that much sense to me - unless the simulations are accompanied by direct observation of the (accelerated) aging of a warhead.
In the life of every scientific instrument comes the time when its capabilities are so much overshadowed by the more contemporary technology and its maintenance is such a drain on the funds that it simply must be retired. Sure you can do research with it, but it's low grade. They simply are not useful for good research anymore and maintaining them will take away funds from more important, new fields.
Personally, as a scientist, I don't much care what happens to what is essentially scrap metal at that point. In fact, I personally dismantled the equipment I did my PhD Thesis on in order to build another, better one. No tears shed there.
Only when our food supply was brought under lock and key did politics become neccessary.
Uh. No. The moment there was more than two people together, there was politics. With the emergence of the first shamans, wise-men, tribal leaders and priests, the fight for socioeconomical control within the group just became more formalized. You're right in saying that the way how politics works has changed during our social evolution, but as one of the fundamental ways of how we organize ourselves, it will never go away.
I have no problem with spam.
I do and it has nothing to do with my mail-box getting clogged by spam. It hinders my work, because these days when I send critical work related information to someone by e-mail, I also have to fax it and sometimes even phone the recipient to make sure that he/she has got the information. Where do the e-mails go then? They disappear into spam filtters or simply get accidentally deleted when the recipient is purging his mailbox manually. The e-mail as a means for communication is getting more and more useless every year.
Saying that spam is not out of control or that it isn't costing the infrastructure money is just wrong. Hiding your head in the sand won't make the problem disappear.
The UN is politico organistation with aims and goals, they engage in PR. Do you think they publish every piece of information they recieve?
Of course not. Why should they? It wouldn't serve any purpose. Withholding sensitive information from people who're not entitled to it is not censorship, but common sense. Any government does it and it's a good thing. If you want direct access to such information, get yourself involved in politics - if, like me, you don't want to do that, you'll just have to trust your elected representatives.
Or are you going to tell me these services work and are worth money they cost?
Where I live, they work and I would be willing to pay even more taxes to expand them. It would be horrific to live in a society where you'd be denied medical help just because "you haven't paid the last installment as specified in your contract with MediCorp(tm)".
The question is did the goverment help or hinder the development?
The Finnish internet backbone (funet.fi) is a state sponsored infrastructure into which all the stream from private ISPs eventually flows. I'd say that the government involvement has significantly helped our access to the internet.
The internet is driven by it's users, the UN, the protoype world goverment, is driven by power.
Power, but I'd it politics. You know, it has been practised since foverer and is fundamentally a good thing? Internet is becoming way too important economically and politically to be left in the direct control of the "users" (citizens).
The internet has intelligence at it's ends
And this distributed intelligence you speak of has been just how successful in dealing with crap like spam?
The internet routes around censorship, the UN is censorship.
That's just silly. UN is not censorship.
He's from the goverment and all he does is cost money and fuck things up.
Remember that the next time you use any national infrastructure such as rescue services, health care or... (gasp!) the internet!
The Internet should be for the People, by the People, and of the People.
Just to play a devil's advocate: why? It's not a natural right or anything.
I think the idea was not to involve UN per se, but to develop a single controlling body for internet regulation the operation of which resembles UN.
We are seriously overdue for an international "Internet Council" that would have the final say in internet legislation and its enforcement. We have no hope in curbing spam, for instance, as long as we hope it's dealt with at a national level.
your lazy friend is more deserving of my money than my sick mother is.
And why would the care of my friend and your sick mother be mutually exclusive?
That would be only because "I should have a say"-people think that they should be allowed to personally dictate who's entitled to health care, housing or food and who's not.
Everyone is entitled to the same good level of care regardless of their input to the society.
If you can pay more, feel free to go to a private clinic (again, public and private health care are not mutually exclusive even in "socialist" states like where I live), but the taxation should and will continue until everyone's guaranteed an adequate care.
Yes. I advocate that, if necessary, the society takes "your money at gunpoint" in order to feed all the hungry and heal the sick.
There are some that are truly lazy, and expect a hand-out. But these are few. Very few. Within a population of 50,000, there are 3 that she claims, "Even Jesus hates."
Thank you.
That was the point I was trying to make, but I just couldn't put it in a nutshell.
they are very interested in creating functioning system of government in which we would (in my opinion of course) possess more freedoms than we currently do
Well, I'm sure we all would like that.
However, when it comes to freedoms, compromises will have to be made. I'm willing to compromise the income and freedom of the well-off people like me over in favour of the less fortunate. Personally, I find that a functioning system.
I don't think there's anything wrong with your views. As a European, I find the American use of conservative/liberal confusing sometimes.
To me a conservative means anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-drugs, anti-sex, pro-corporate and pro-religion. In other words, they're hell-bent on cracking down on individual freedoms.
Good points, but I still insist that the society should provide a modest income to everyone (a citizen's salary, so to speak) - even if you admit you're just a lazy son-of-a-bitch who doesn't feel like working. I've got such a friend. He just doesn't feel like having a job, but is perfectly OK with his minimal dole. I'm perfectly OK with that, too.
My argument is that most people simply can't handle the life of being truly lazy. Heck, over here people who've been unemployed for months are getting psychological help in order to cope with the situation of having nothing "real" to do.
In other words, the financial burden of supporting the real leeches would be insignificant. It's just the people who hate their jobs, but who don't have the guts to actually admit it or the initiative to do something about it, are the ones who are having problems here.
our power needs will continue to increase, and I have no problem with that.
So you think that conserving energy and striving for zero growth both in the consumption of energy and materials by recycling and improving technology is futile?
In the present politically unipolar world, the dominant school of economy is hell-bent on promoting endless economical growth made seemingly possible by our sickening waste of materials and energy. Instead of curbing the consumption, we're simply selling out our future for more energy today.
To me, as a physicist, this is folly. There is no such thing as endless growth and the alternative, as you provocatively put it, is not a return to the dark ages. On the contrary, the alternative is to actually use our brains and to employ existing energy in a more efficient way! What's holding us back is our current wasteful school of thought: buy today, pay later - profit is all that matters.
This simply won't last. We absolutely need to find another one that cuts down our use of energy and is self-regulating. Unless such a system is instituted I'm afraid that we'll end up on a self-limiting (=global starvation and poverty) trajectory sooner or later.
Libertarians have a much better sense of what equality really means
Huh? Equality as in: "You're stupid, sick, handicapped, lazy or environmentally conscious and therefore you should be treated like shit by the dog-eat-dog, profit-hounding winners with a can-do attitude like us"?
Hey, wake up already! It's OK to be lazy (the truly lazy will always be in a minority), stupid, sick, handicapped and politically conscious and to be supported by tax money. It's the primary function of a society to guarantee the welfare of the weak - not to guarantee free trade or maximum profit for you "winners".
I vote for Greens because they've got a pretty centrist - at least in a European context - fiscal policy and very liberal social agenda (drugs, sex, immigration and religion).
100% agree. we should start by blocking the bible. it's full of obscene, graphically explicit sexual passages and extreme violence.
(Sarcasm on)
Oh, but don't you see?
All the obscenity, incest, rape, pillage, torture and slaughter in the Good Book makes a very good reading for your soul. Why? Because it can't be in the Good Book for nothing! And you shouldn't be too put off by the brutal violence in good biblical movies such as the The Passion of the Christ for they just shows how much he loved us all for going through all that. In fact, you should take all your kids to watch it too! They've never too young to witness a crucifixion, savage beating, a good whipping and how treacherous the jews are.
(Sarcasm off)
Personally, I'm all for criminalizing any public expression of religion, meaning scarves, yarmulkes, religious symbols and speech - particularly in politics and other positions of power.
Go practise your self-deception and denial at home. Feel free to turn your and your childrens' natural human sexuality into "love for christ until you're 18 and married", but stop bothering the rest of us (a majority at least here in Europe) with your fairytales and moral coercion/oppression.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Like sonypictures.com could be slashdotted. Sonypictures.com will laugh at the effect.
And? The same could be said about the Bible or Quran, for instance. It is also important not to look away from these books as having a dangerous effect on certain elements in society who are ill-equipped to handle the violent imagery inherent in such books.
Ah, so you see guys like this only in computer games like CS?
I don't see where the game comes in. If one wants to play the blamegame, why not blame a movie or a book, for instance?
My condolences.
If I were given a chance of becoming an Antarctican for a while, I'd go for it. I don't even have any molars left...
So, ID cards take away the freedom? That's news to me. I've got a unique social security number on an ID card. It's required when I use public services such as health care, when I vote, to show that I am permitted to drive a car or that I am the owner of the bank/credit card when I'm making a significant purchase. And you know what? I like it. I like to know that requiring positive identification reduces health care fraud, that it's hard for someone to vote in my place or that it's risky for a thief to use my bank/credit card. No, an ID card is not the perfect solution, but it will do a lot of good.
This talk about people losing their freedoms if ID cards are issued is just a lot of hot air and a non-issue. It's an extremist, all-or-nothing attitude that's bordering on religious fervor and hysteria. Such ideals are hardly ever practical or even beneficial in real life.
There is no such thing as too much liberty ... it would be like saying that science is too rational.
Well, as a scientist I don't think a purely rational approach to problems would work as well as the present intuitive/rational-combination.
Saying that there can not be too much liberty is nonsense. Freedom is essentially defined by the few boundaries we set to it. No boundaries, no freedom.
Are you talking about nuclear reactions as in "fission/fusion explosion" or as in "radiation induced damage to surrounding materials". Both explosions and the aging of warhead can be simulated. Both processes involve nuclear reactions and, as far as I know, only the former is subject to the nuclear test ban. I don't see how investigating radiation damage to materials, for instance, would constitute a breach of the treaty.
I admire your positive outlook on the prospects of simulations, but as an experimentalist, I find this "soon we won't need experiments at all" (see Rev. Mod. Phys. 64, 1045-1097 (1992), for instance) attitude very dangerous. Simulations and models, even at the first principles level, should never be trusted implicitly. They only sure way to tell how nature works is via experimentation.
I can sort of understand simulating nuclear explosions, but simulating the aging process of a warhead doesn't make that much sense to me - unless the simulations are accompanied by direct observation of the (accelerated) aging of a warhead.
In the life of every scientific instrument comes the time when its capabilities are so much overshadowed by the more contemporary technology and its maintenance is such a drain on the funds that it simply must be retired. Sure you can do research with it, but it's low grade. They simply are not useful for good research anymore and maintaining them will take away funds from more important, new fields.
Personally, as a scientist, I don't much care what happens to what is essentially scrap metal at that point. In fact, I personally dismantled the equipment I did my PhD Thesis on in order to build another, better one. No tears shed there.
Of course IBM has nothing to hide! How can you even think that they'd have something to hide?
The Big Blue is, after all, a paragon of open source, they're all about sharing intellectual property and are patenting everything just in order to protect the OSS community against the likes of SCO and Microsoft. Heck, if a company has penguins and hearts spray painted on the San Francisco sidewalks, they can't be that bad, can they?
You mean like this?
What a humanitarian... "So, you got cancer and outsourced at the same time and now can't pay for your treatment anymore. Tough luck."
Uh. No. The moment there was more than two people together, there was politics. With the emergence of the first shamans, wise-men, tribal leaders and priests, the fight for socioeconomical control within the group just became more formalized. You're right in saying that the way how politics works has changed during our social evolution, but as one of the fundamental ways of how we organize ourselves, it will never go away.
I have no problem with spam.
I do and it has nothing to do with my mail-box getting clogged by spam. It hinders my work, because these days when I send critical work related information to someone by e-mail, I also have to fax it and sometimes even phone the recipient to make sure that he/she has got the information. Where do the e-mails go then? They disappear into spam filtters or simply get accidentally deleted when the recipient is purging his mailbox manually. The e-mail as a means for communication is getting more and more useless every year.
Saying that spam is not out of control or that it isn't costing the infrastructure money is just wrong. Hiding your head in the sand won't make the problem disappear.
The UN is politico organistation with aims and goals, they engage in PR. Do you think they publish every piece of information they recieve?
Of course not. Why should they? It wouldn't serve any purpose. Withholding sensitive information from people who're not entitled to it is not censorship, but common sense. Any government does it and it's a good thing. If you want direct access to such information, get yourself involved in politics - if, like me, you don't want to do that, you'll just have to trust your elected representatives.
Or are you going to tell me these services work and are worth money they cost?
Where I live, they work and I would be willing to pay even more taxes to expand them. It would be horrific to live in a society where you'd be denied medical help just because "you haven't paid the last installment as specified in your contract with MediCorp(tm)".
The question is did the goverment help or hinder the development?
The Finnish internet backbone (funet.fi) is a state sponsored infrastructure into which all the stream from private ISPs eventually flows. I'd say that the government involvement has significantly helped our access to the internet.
Power, but I'd it politics. You know, it has been practised since foverer and is fundamentally a good thing? Internet is becoming way too important economically and politically to be left in the direct control of the "users" (citizens).
The internet has intelligence at it's ends
And this distributed intelligence you speak of has been just how successful in dealing with crap like spam?
The internet routes around censorship, the UN is censorship.
That's just silly. UN is not censorship.
He's from the goverment and all he does is cost money and fuck things up.
Remember that the next time you use any national infrastructure such as rescue services, health care or... (gasp!) the internet!
I think the idea was not to involve UN per se, but to develop a single controlling body for internet regulation the operation of which resembles UN.
We are seriously overdue for an international "Internet Council" that would have the final say in internet legislation and its enforcement. We have no hope in curbing spam, for instance, as long as we hope it's dealt with at a national level.
All right, everybody. Brace yourselves for a flood of "what's wrong with X-Windows foundations or toolkits?!" posts!
And why would the care of my friend and your sick mother be mutually exclusive?
That would be only because "I should have a say"-people think that they should be allowed to personally dictate who's entitled to health care, housing or food and who's not.
Everyone is entitled to the same good level of care regardless of their input to the society.
If you can pay more, feel free to go to a private clinic (again, public and private health care are not mutually exclusive even in "socialist" states like where I live), but the taxation should and will continue until everyone's guaranteed an adequate care.
Yes. I advocate that, if necessary, the society takes "your money at gunpoint" in order to feed all the hungry and heal the sick.
Thank you.
That was the point I was trying to make, but I just couldn't put it in a nutshell.
Well, I'm sure we all would like that.
However, when it comes to freedoms, compromises will have to be made. I'm willing to compromise the income and freedom of the well-off people like me over in favour of the less fortunate. Personally, I find that a functioning system.
To me a conservative means anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-drugs, anti-sex, pro-corporate and pro-religion. In other words, they're hell-bent on cracking down on individual freedoms.
My argument is that most people simply can't handle the life of being truly lazy. Heck, over here people who've been unemployed for months are getting psychological help in order to cope with the situation of having nothing "real" to do.
In other words, the financial burden of supporting the real leeches would be insignificant. It's just the people who hate their jobs, but who don't have the guts to actually admit it or the initiative to do something about it, are the ones who are having problems here.
So you think that conserving energy and striving for zero growth both in the consumption of energy and materials by recycling and improving technology is futile?
In the present politically unipolar world, the dominant school of economy is hell-bent on promoting endless economical growth made seemingly possible by our sickening waste of materials and energy. Instead of curbing the consumption, we're simply selling out our future for more energy today.
To me, as a physicist, this is folly. There is no such thing as endless growth and the alternative, as you provocatively put it, is not a return to the dark ages. On the contrary, the alternative is to actually use our brains and to employ existing energy in a more efficient way! What's holding us back is our current wasteful school of thought: buy today, pay later - profit is all that matters.
This simply won't last. We absolutely need to find another one that cuts down our use of energy and is self-regulating. Unless such a system is instituted I'm afraid that we'll end up on a self-limiting (=global starvation and poverty) trajectory sooner or later.
Huh? Equality as in: "You're stupid, sick, handicapped, lazy or environmentally conscious and therefore you should be treated like shit by the dog-eat-dog, profit-hounding winners with a can-do attitude like us"?
Hey, wake up already! It's OK to be lazy (the truly lazy will always be in a minority), stupid, sick, handicapped and politically conscious and to be supported by tax money. It's the primary function of a society to guarantee the welfare of the weak - not to guarantee free trade or maximum profit for you "winners".
I vote for Greens because they've got a pretty centrist - at least in a European context - fiscal policy and very liberal social agenda (drugs, sex, immigration and religion).
(Sarcasm on)
Oh, but don't you see?
All the obscenity, incest, rape, pillage, torture and slaughter in the Good Book makes a very good reading for your soul. Why? Because it can't be in the Good Book for nothing! And you shouldn't be too put off by the brutal violence in good biblical movies such as the The Passion of the Christ for they just shows how much he loved us all for going through all that. In fact, you should take all your kids to watch it too! They've never too young to witness a crucifixion, savage beating, a good whipping and how treacherous the jews are.
(Sarcasm off)
Personally, I'm all for criminalizing any public expression of religion, meaning scarves, yarmulkes, religious symbols and speech - particularly in politics and other positions of power.
Go practise your self-deception and denial at home. Feel free to turn your and your childrens' natural human sexuality into "love for christ until you're 18 and married", but stop bothering the rest of us (a majority at least here in Europe) with your fairytales and moral coercion/oppression.
North Korea tops the list at 33.9%...