Or, do you envisage essentially a return to the days when artists were sponsored by wealthy patrons, who then release the music to the public without worrying about even covering their own costs?
I envisage a world where people are not caught up in the busy-day-to-day work of just surviving, and have free time to do what they love and share it with others. Our society seems wealthy enough that we're supposedly not concerned strictly with survival anymore, and are making leaps and bounds in the arts and sciences - so why are so many people still working their asses off doing things they hate? Where is all this extra effort going? It seems to me it's either profiting only a few fortunate individuals ("Remember, your time is our money!"), or a lot of it is just wasted effort in an inefficient system. Or both.
Think about it. Naturally, we tend to want to get done what needs to be done, and then have free time to do what we want. A lot of people want to be creative. If they had the time and means to be creative, they would be, simply because they *want to*, for its own sake. Profit does not have to be an incentive to do art, people simple need the economic ability to pursue it.
Are we really still so caught up with survival that we can't afford free time for art? How has civilization progressed at all if we're still spending all day - more than our ancestors used to, even - *just making ends meet*? Where is all this labor going?
If we as a civilization really can't afford to be doing this, then we just shouldn't be doing it. The reason why in ancient times wealthy patrons financed the arts without respect to "intellectual property" was because they wanted beauty in their world, and they were far enough removed from survival problems to be able to afford it. If a given society didn't have any people wealthy enough to afford it, art didn't get done, cause people were too preoccupied with things like food and shelter.
In our supposedly egalitarian society where we (in theory) strive not to have a few wealthy and powerful barons surrounded by masses of grovelling peasants, then if *anyone* is wealthy enough to be able to finance the arts (either their own works or the work of others), then *many* should be afforded the same priviledge. If we as a society aren't that wealthy, then we shouldn't be wasting effort that is better spent keeping people alive. But it seems to me that we as a society are plenty wealthy to keep everybody alive and comfortable and give them enough free time to pursue the arts for their own sake. So why don't we have that time? Where is it all going? What's the problem in this system?
One way or another, "intellectual property" like copyright just doesn't make any sense, and is a broken hack, a kludge, to try to allow equality opportunity to pursue the arts and sciences. Unfortunately like all hacks and kludged it is easily exploitable and is now being turned against its original purpose. It just doesn't work.
The only sensible way is to pay for the arts up front and allow for their free (as in speech) replication. In a ruthless cut-throat barbaric old-world kingdom, the wealthy princes could afford to finance the arts and give them away. In a supposedly advanced and egalitarian civilization like ours, we should all be able to afford it. So why can't we?
I was just saying elsewhere in this thread: the arts and sciences don't need "promoting" as per the justification for copyright: they just need allowance to exist. Artists and scientists will do what they do because they love to do it, so long as they can afford to do it and are not too busy just making ends meet. If you want to "promote the arts and sciences", find some way to give the average populace time and wealth enough for their hobbies. Allow the products of those hobbies to be shared freely and we will all reap the benefits.
"Stars" in live performance media such as sports and theater get paid for their performances. A baseball player gets paid for playing baseball. A movie star gets paid for acting in the movie. How many times that game or movie is rebroadcast on TV doesn't affect how much monet the performer gets paid: they were paid for the initial act of the performance.
"Stars" in the music world get paid to do something good once and then sit around on their asses raking in royalties. Hell, usually not even that in the music biz: they sign over their rights to the studios, whose executives sit around on their asses raking royalties.
I agree entirely with the GP poster, on all counts: copyright is a broken way to see to it that content creators get paid. The value in a copy of some media is in two things: the cost it took to make it the original, and the cost it took to make the copy of it. If enough people (or a rich enough person) wants something good made just for them, let them pay for it to be made. If you want me to write a rock ballad, you pay me the price for my time and effort creating it, up front. If anyone wants to sell copies of it, let them; I've been paid, and you got the song you wanted.
True artists (and true scientists for that matter) do things for the love of their craft. The only reason they need to be paid for it is so that they can afford to do their craft. If you want some government regulation to "promote the arts and sciences", make sure that enough of the average creative populace has enough free time and resources to follow their heart and do what they love to do, and some of them will use that time to create things, some of them great things, that we can all then enjoy.
If there's not enough time and resources to do that, then there's probably more important things that need to be done anyway, like surviving. But for a civilization like ours that seems to have this survival thing down pat, there's no reason why we shouldn't all have enough free time and wealth to pursue the arts and sciences as we please, and share them with everyone.
I'm not a Christian and I don't intend to bring religion into this proper, but I recall reading something once about what was actually meant by the Bible's prohibition against "swearing" (or "taking the Lord's name in vain"), which seems relevant here.
"To swear" is not "to say a bad word". To swear is to make a promise. The reason why it was prohibited to "take the Lord's name in vain", or to swear in the name of God, is that by doing so, you have effectively put "the name of God" (whatever that means, but it's something valuable to Christians) on the table as a gambling chip.
When you make a promise, which is really no different from a guarantee, you are taking a gamble. To say "I promise I will [Foo], or else, [Bar]." is to say "I bet [Bar] that I can [Foo]." If you can't [Foo] as you promised, then you owe [Bar].
You don't know the future. You don't know if you will actually be able to [Foo]. You are wagering that you will be able to [Foo], and offering [Bar] should you fail. In the case of bank loan, you are usually promising that you will repay the money, or else, they get something like your house.
But sometimes you shouldn't be allowed to do [Foo] or [Bar]. If I promise to kill someone for you, or else if I can't, to kill myself, should I be held to either of those promises? If I promise to give up my house and all my worldly possessions and leave myself and my family to starve on the streets so that some lending company can show better numbers on their books that year, should I be held to that promise?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all on your side about honesty in borrowing. I'm pathologically aversed to debt, have never owed anyone anything and never intend to. I count debt into my net worth, so if I've got $5K and owe $3K I've really only got $2K and would rather pay off my debt and have my balance reflect that $2K I've really got. And if I ever owe more than I've got, then I have *LESS THAN ZERO*, and I'm fucked unless I'm fortunate enough to be able to recoup that somehow. But none of this changes the fact that sometimes it's just not possible to make good on a promise. You often can't do [Foo] no matter how much you swore that you would, and sometimes you can't even do [Bar] either.
This hasn't been very well written, but the point I'm making is that all lending, borrowing, promises and guarantees, are all wagers, gambling, risk management. The future is unpredictable and you've got to account for that sometime, you will lose. The only safe bet is not to gamble at all - don't make promises, don't go into debt. Unfortunately no man is an island and we can't be our own self-sufficient universes, so we will always be required to owe or promise some things. But it's best to try to minimize that.
This is why the debt-happy modern American society disappoints me so. I'm expected to go into debt in order to obtain some basic services (like phone), or else to pay MORE to avoid that. Can't I just give them the money now up front? Wouldn't they prefer that? I know I would rather have money now than later.
(Unfortunately, they'd rather you owe them, so they have a means to control you).
I'm not arguing anything about what *does* happen. There are plenty of factual, easily demonstratable cases of things that *do* happen, even if by all rights they probably *shouldn't*.
I'm only arguing that this is a case of something that *shouldn't* happen, regardless of whether or not is *does* happen. If we, the public (taxpayers), paid for some research, the results of that research rightly belong to us, in the public domain. If that's happening, great. If not, that's wrong. I don't know factually which case is actually happening (can't RTFA at the moment), I'm just reasoning which should or shouldn't be happening.
A statement of fact has no bearing on a statement of value. If I said "murder is wrong", would you counter "people get murdered anyway" and expect that to somehow counter my argument?
Disclaimer: I have not RTFA so I don't know who is actually funding this. That said...
The GP poster claimed that this was GOVERNMENT FUNDED research, done through NASA. While it may have been conducted by a private organization, if the funding money came from the government, that means that it came from "We, the people". Therefore, giving ownership of the resultant "intellectual property" (debates on the legitimacy thereof aside) to a particular corporation or individual is robbing "We, the people" from the due returns on our investment, and furthermore, allowing us to be charged twice for it!
We already paid for the R&D, through our tax dollars. The only thing we should have to pay for any application of that R&D are the costs to actually apply it - the production costs. Non-public-domain IP rights for IP which was already funded by the public is a nonsense idea. We already bought it. It belongs to us, collectively. To assign it otherwise is no less than theft (by the RIAA/MPAA definition of the word).
Great scott, that's not the half of it! A trans-fictional confluence of that magnitude could result in a possible cross-genre paradox that could lead, through a long series of plotholes and bad fan fiction, to the complete and utter destuction of both universes! We must destroy this thread before it is possible for such an event to occur.
Excellent! Finally someone is doing something about filtering out all that motion picture equivalent of spam that comes out of Hollywood, keeping these "blockbusters" from congesting our airwaves and cable lines! We may see television dominated by decent, quality entertainment at last!
Oh, wait, did they mean "decency" as in, no words like "fuck" or "cunt", and no bare tits or ass? Damn. There's a good number of decent flicks that we'll be missing if that goes through then...
t is, he disagreed with society's definition, therefore he should not be punished for violating the prohibtion on child abuse/porn.
The confusion is arising from this use of the world "should". If another poster was arguing that people *should* not be punished for doing something which is in his society illegal, then he is arguing that that law is wrong, or unjust.
If you respond that he *should* be punished because it is illegal, then you are also making a value judgement, namely that anything illegal is also, for lack of a better word, immoral - that you *should* or *should not* do things based entirely on what the law says.
On the other hand if you want to argue the factual point that someone doing something illegal *will* most likely be punished by their society, I don't think anyone will contest that. The point in contention is whether or not someone *should* be punished for a certain act.
You seem to be arguing that that act is illegal, and (implying that anything illegal *should* be punished) therefore he should be punished. Others are countering that there is nothing ("morally") wrong with breaking an unjust law, and while he most someone who does so *will* be punished, that that punishment is unjust and wrong.
Not all value judgements are legal judgements. Not all value judgements are moral judgements. Not all legal judgements are moral judgements, and vice versa. There are different types of value judgement, and just because something is wrong according to law (illegal) does not make it universally wrong by all other measures of value.
Why would I be compelled to support it? I didn't make that argument.
The discussion seemed up to this point to be about what one should or should not do, as previous posters in this thread were debating whether laws regarding "children" and sex were just or not. Not about whether or not something is technically legal - I don't think anyone will really vehemently disagree with you that, in the U.S., in this-or-that state, having sex with a person under 16/18/21/whatever is illegal, and if they do you can easily find an authorative source - the law itself - to support your position. There's no discussion to be had there.
What we're talking about is whether such a law is just. The way you are emphasising that but child abuse IS a crime, whether anyone like it or not, seems to imply that you think the arbitrary laws we have on the books are just.
That said, if a society made consumption of certain foods criminal, then that would, in fact, be criminal within that society.
But would that be a fair or just law? There's nothing to be said by saying "of a society calls X a crime, X is a crime in that society." Bachelors are unmarried men, too - what's your point? I know these definitions. You're just citing tautologies as though they were evidence for something else.
that a society determines what is and is not criminal behavior within that society, and that, therefore, the opinion of an individual member of that society "doesn't count" if the individual disagrees with the societal consensus. His behavior remains criminal.
Individual dissent from the consensus is what changes and refines the law. His behavior may remain criminal by the books but that doesn't make it wrong, and his opinion certainly does still count. The law is supported by our opinions - our opinions are not a privledge granted to us by law.
Everyone's opinion counts. Always. Even if they're wrong - let those with the "right" opinion prove them so, if they can. If not, then there should be no judgement made here as far as the law is concerned.
Child abuse is whatever a society says it is. Unless an individual can convince his society to go along with him, his opinion is irrelevant.
So whatever "society" says, goes? What if society set the legal age of content to 50 years old - would that mean that my girlfriend and I, both in our young twenties, would be engaging in child sexual abuse?
If you say "yes" because by defintion that's what such a society's laws would define child sexual abuse as, then I suppose you've got a point there, technically. But if you then support such a law, simple because "society say so", you've basically negated the value of your own opinion. What if society declared it illegal to eat past 6PM EST? Most people *do* eat past 6PM EST and there's no harm being done by such a practice, so how can you justify a law which instantly and arbitrarily makes a large number of normally innocent people into criminals?
What it comes down to - in fact, what all law really comes down do - is really a very simple set of rules:
1) Doing something to someone against their will is wrong. 2) If they give their consent, then it's not a problem. 3) If unable to give consent, they deserve protection by society. 4) If they CLAIM to be able to give consent, they ARE able.
In this case, of sexual crimes, point (1) comes down to "rape is wrong". (2) Would counter "if both people say (not under duress, in reasonable circumstances) that it's consentual, it's not wrong." Point (3) allows for the protection of children and those otherwise unable to make rational decisions about their own wellbeing. But under point (4), if a "child" (by whatever means you wish to define that term) is able to present a rational argument that yes, he/she really would like to be having sex, and understands what that means, then by all means, let them.
Just because you or I think it's sick that people under (insert age here) are doing something, doesn't mean they have to think it's sick, and they shouldn't be prevented from doing it. I think lots of people have disgusting tastes in food, music, and clothing, and often engage in behaviors that I'd really rather not engage in myself, and would rather not have to see them engaging in... but so long as no one's will has been violated, I'm not about to tell anyone what they should or should not do.
Neither should you.
(And yes, I realize the irony of that last sentence, but really it's not, because by trying to impose your beliefs on others you *are* violating their will).
On Safari and IE for Mac (at least, the last version of it I ever used), a standard "enter" on a nonvalid URL (like "thaturl") will first try that URL, then try http://thaturl.com/, then try http://www.thaturl.com/, before giving up and giving an error page. I always found Windows browsing immensely annoying in that I had to actually TYPE the http://www.thedamnpageiwant.com/, instead of just the name of the page I want. Combined with autocompletion of URLs, for the most part I just type the first letter or two of the sites I commonly visit and hit return to go there. ("sl" for http://slashdot.org/, for example).
Though, someone else in this thread mentioned the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" results that are used in FireFox... that seems like a much better method to me. Although as much as I love Google, I always hate it when a piece of software relies on the continued existence of some commercial service to function...
They're sacrificing income for morals. That's unusual in the corporate world and should be applauded when seen, not rediculed.
No. They're imposing the majority view on what is moral regarding a certain topic (sex), which is certainly not an uncontested moral view in the slightest, in order to not offend the majority of their customer base which would throw a fit over such a thing and boycott them. And thus, preserving their profit.
I'm sure some of the people in charge of such decisions at Blockbuster enjoy porn just as much as a good portion of the world does, but believe it is a sound business move not to carry it in their stores because the "moral majority" would have a hissy fit if corporate America allowed people to think for themselves and choose what they wanted to watch from an uncensored selection.
Blockbuster is also known for further censoring movies which have already been appropriately censored for their theatrical rating. True morality would allow people the freedom of choice unless it's directly harming others. How would you like it if all the radio stations and music publishers of 50, 60, 70 years ago had decided that this "rock and roll" was the devil's music and thus deserves no distribution?
Would it be possible to write some browser plugin that automatically follow the links in ads and loads whatever page comes up "invisibly", off screen somewhere - just so that the avertiser registers a click and has to pay the site for it? With the sacrifice of a little bandwidth to load the advertised site in the background, you benefit the maintainer of the site you're reading (which presumably you'd want to do, if you like the site), and costing advertisers money for which they get no real return.
The two caveats I see are 1) How to distinguish ads and follow links only on them?
2) The lower purchase-to-click ratio would force the advertisers to pay less, so the site owners woudl have to advertise more to make the same ad revenue, and in the end you only see more ads.
This is immediately obvious if you're using anything other than WinXP with the default theme. I'm on OSX and it is very clearly not a window but some function of the website itself. I notice this quite often - "buttons" in certain banner ads or popups which are actually nothing more than images, and clearly so as the buttons look like Windows-style buttons.
I imagine Windows users could easily get this ease of identification for things which are not actual OS widgets by installing a custom theme, thus making anything with the default theme clearly identifiable as phoney.
It sounds to me like this description fits me then. I've actually had formal diagnosis of ADD (before they had an ADHD diagnosis; now I'd probably have had the H too) and OCD, suggestions of SAD by non-psychiatric doctors, and a bipolar diagnosis most recently. The bipolar doesn't really seem to tie in with these symptoms much, except perhaps that my depressive phases often come from obsessing about something, and my manic phases could easily fit into the ADHD pattern.
The one caveat I can think of is that, while I was at one point very socially awkward, and am still often very uncomfortable around large groups of people, in the past couple of years I've become very skilled at direct interpersonal interaction, both in reading other people and in conveying emotion myself. I went through a long period of intentionally isolating myself, then decided that I would really rather have friends, and went out and figured out how to make them. It actually scares me often times, I feel like I'm manipulating people. The people I find myself most attracted to nowadays are those who are alert and aware enough that I can't get away with it, who feel like actual functional people and not easily manipulated automatons.
The other side of this coin is that I'm apparently a very good actor, both on and off stage. Sometimes when I'm telling a story and trying to communicate, say, that someone was *REALLY ANGRY*, people will be frightened for a moment and think that I'm actually getting really angry - but no, I was just briefly acting the part to convey the emotion I'm talking about. I suppose both this and the sort of systematic approach to interpersonal interaction I've developed could both just be an application of the way that my brain naturally works to solving the percieved problem of my earlier troubles with social interaction.
What you just wrote there seems a perfectly succinct way of saying what you said - in fact I don't think I could make it any shorter than you did without some effort. I myself have often been accused of being too wordy - for example, I almost always went over the page limits in school assignments.
On the other hand, I also seem especially skilled at turning logical statements about complex systems into very simply-stated rules that convey highly accurate information about the entirity of the complex system I'm describing. So when I'm arguing a point I've already thought out well, I have a tendancy to be a bit too short and to the point, and wind up having to elaborate a lot in order for people to completely grok what was meant by the short (though perfectly accurate and proper English) sentence I previously said. Or sometimes I end up assuming that the reader will need such elaboration, and thus give it all to them ahead of time before delivering my point. Neitehr seems to be a very pleasant form of communication to most people I talk to.
How exactly does one go about finding out if they have something like this? TFA and these comments have gotten me thinking a lot - I seem to share a lot in common with the person in TFA and some people who have spoken here, and I'm very interested to find out if I meet the definition of some of these terms. Not sure what use it would be to me to have such a diagnosis, or perhaps it could even be a bad thing (negative stereotypes and all)... but I'm still quite curious just to know.
If an effect of your Aspergers is supposed to be difficulty with language, it certainly doesn't come out in your writing.
Then again, I suspect that I may be borderline autistic myself (this Aspergers term is new to me - what exactly is it?), and I seem to have better comprehension of written language (even poorly written language) than most people I've met on the internet.
Ironically, I can't stand trying to communicate in person with people with poor English skills or speech impediments. Makes me very uncomfortable to have less than perfect verbal communication. It's not the same in text though.
Every DVD I've ever rented or bought you can either skip chapters through to the menu or just press root menu.
Same deal here. There are usually SOME things that can't be skipped, usually the 'scene' which contains the FBI warnings and a few other bits, but those are rarely more than 30 seconds, or a minute long at most.
Almost every DVD I've bought or rented recently does include trailers at the start, but I've never seen one with unskippable trailers.
Now, you want to talk about bad DVD design... '2001: A Space Odyssey' begins with a black screen with a classical orchestra warm-up that continues for AGES..... skipping to the next scene skips straight through to the 'Dawn of Man' first actual scene, completely skipping the classic Moon-Earth-Sun alignment and the start of Thus Spake Zarahustra which is the signature introduction to the movie. You've got to skip ahead to Dawn of Man and then rewind (not skip) backwards until you get to black and begin playing forward from there. To this day I don't know exactly how long the black with orchestra warmup lasts, I've never had the patience to sit through the entire thing.
To make matters worse, there's an intermission on the DVD that's exactly the same - intermission begins with black and at some point in the middle of that 'scene' (in the DVD sense) begins the next actual scene of the movie. Horrible, horrible design. Neat movie though:-)
There was a Star Trek episode that was sort of about this (forget which series, probably TOS) in which the Enterprise crew encountered a pair of worlds killing their own populations (by vaporization or some such) because of the results of a virtual war being carried on between them. One world would land a virtual bomb on another world's cities in the virtual war, and everyone "killed" in the sim would then be escorted to the vaporization chambers for execution. If either side didn't comply with the rules, actual bombs got lobbed instead, and not only people but the physical cities were destroyed as well.
The difference between that scenario or your chess scenario, and where this robotic/cyber warfare is headed, is that the objective of cyber warfare would be to disable the enemy's robots, so that your robots can get into the enemy city and... at that point just the enemy's defenselessness would probably lead them to surrender. If not, they send human defenders, which the robots would likely defeat, and then be free to do accomplish whatever it is the war was about.
But then, given that, as you say, many wars nowadays are really just personal disputed between individual leaders whose followers get caught up in, I'm much more in favor of the "if you really hate them, then YOU go and fight them" policy.
I hate the concept of organized military, where people fight only because they're paid and ordered to do so, but I'd gladly fight to defend my home, city, state, country, what-have-you from direct attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, do you envisage essentially a return to the days when artists were sponsored by wealthy patrons, who then release the music to the public without worrying about even covering their own costs?
I envisage a world where people are not caught up in the busy-day-to-day work of just surviving, and have free time to do what they love and share it with others. Our society seems wealthy enough that we're supposedly not concerned strictly with survival anymore, and are making leaps and bounds in the arts and sciences - so why are so many people still working their asses off doing things they hate? Where is all this extra effort going? It seems to me it's either profiting only a few fortunate individuals ("Remember, your time is our money!"), or a lot of it is just wasted effort in an inefficient system. Or both.
Think about it. Naturally, we tend to want to get done what needs to be done, and then have free time to do what we want. A lot of people want to be creative. If they had the time and means to be creative, they would be, simply because they *want to*, for its own sake. Profit does not have to be an incentive to do art, people simple need the economic ability to pursue it.
Are we really still so caught up with survival that we can't afford free time for art? How has civilization progressed at all if we're still spending all day - more than our ancestors used to, even - *just making ends meet*? Where is all this labor going?
If we as a civilization really can't afford to be doing this, then we just shouldn't be doing it. The reason why in ancient times wealthy patrons financed the arts without respect to "intellectual property" was because they wanted beauty in their world, and they were far enough removed from survival problems to be able to afford it. If a given society didn't have any people wealthy enough to afford it, art didn't get done, cause people were too preoccupied with things like food and shelter.
In our supposedly egalitarian society where we (in theory) strive not to have a few wealthy and powerful barons surrounded by masses of grovelling peasants, then if *anyone* is wealthy enough to be able to finance the arts (either their own works or the work of others), then *many* should be afforded the same priviledge. If we as a society aren't that wealthy, then we shouldn't be wasting effort that is better spent keeping people alive. But it seems to me that we as a society are plenty wealthy to keep everybody alive and comfortable and give them enough free time to pursue the arts for their own sake. So why don't we have that time? Where is it all going? What's the problem in this system?
One way or another, "intellectual property" like copyright just doesn't make any sense, and is a broken hack, a kludge, to try to allow equality opportunity to pursue the arts and sciences. Unfortunately like all hacks and kludged it is easily exploitable and is now being turned against its original purpose. It just doesn't work.
The only sensible way is to pay for the arts up front and allow for their free (as in speech) replication. In a ruthless cut-throat barbaric old-world kingdom, the wealthy princes could afford to finance the arts and give them away. In a supposedly advanced and egalitarian civilization like ours, we should all be able to afford it. So why can't we?
You hit the nail on the head.
I was just saying elsewhere in this thread: the arts and sciences don't need "promoting" as per the justification for copyright: they just need allowance to exist. Artists and scientists will do what they do because they love to do it, so long as they can afford to do it and are not too busy just making ends meet. If you want to "promote the arts and sciences", find some way to give the average populace time and wealth enough for their hobbies. Allow the products of those hobbies to be shared freely and we will all reap the benefits.
"Stars" in live performance media such as sports and theater get paid for their performances. A baseball player gets paid for playing baseball. A movie star gets paid for acting in the movie. How many times that game or movie is rebroadcast on TV doesn't affect how much monet the performer gets paid: they were paid for the initial act of the performance.
"Stars" in the music world get paid to do something good once and then sit around on their asses raking in royalties. Hell, usually not even that in the music biz: they sign over their rights to the studios, whose executives sit around on their asses raking royalties.
I agree entirely with the GP poster, on all counts: copyright is a broken way to see to it that content creators get paid. The value in a copy of some media is in two things: the cost it took to make it the original, and the cost it took to make the copy of it. If enough people (or a rich enough person) wants something good made just for them, let them pay for it to be made. If you want me to write a rock ballad, you pay me the price for my time and effort creating it, up front. If anyone wants to sell copies of it, let them; I've been paid, and you got the song you wanted.
True artists (and true scientists for that matter) do things for the love of their craft. The only reason they need to be paid for it is so that they can afford to do their craft. If you want some government regulation to "promote the arts and sciences", make sure that enough of the average creative populace has enough free time and resources to follow their heart and do what they love to do, and some of them will use that time to create things, some of them great things, that we can all then enjoy.
If there's not enough time and resources to do that, then there's probably more important things that need to be done anyway, like surviving. But for a civilization like ours that seems to have this survival thing down pat, there's no reason why we shouldn't all have enough free time and wealth to pursue the arts and sciences as we please, and share them with everyone.
He's a lawyer. Why does he care if people are happy, especially when it means he pockets less money?
He's a lawyer. Why does he care if people are happen, especially when it means he pockets less money?
I'm not a Christian and I don't intend to bring religion into this proper, but I recall reading something once about what was actually meant by the Bible's prohibition against "swearing" (or "taking the Lord's name in vain"), which seems relevant here.
"To swear" is not "to say a bad word". To swear is to make a promise. The reason why it was prohibited to "take the Lord's name in vain", or to swear in the name of God, is that by doing so, you have effectively put "the name of God" (whatever that means, but it's something valuable to Christians) on the table as a gambling chip.
When you make a promise, which is really no different from a guarantee, you are taking a gamble. To say "I promise I will [Foo], or else, [Bar]." is to say "I bet [Bar] that I can [Foo]." If you can't [Foo] as you promised, then you owe [Bar].
You don't know the future. You don't know if you will actually be able to [Foo]. You are wagering that you will be able to [Foo], and offering [Bar] should you fail. In the case of bank loan, you are usually promising that you will repay the money, or else, they get something like your house.
But sometimes you shouldn't be allowed to do [Foo] or [Bar]. If I promise to kill someone for you, or else if I can't, to kill myself, should I be held to either of those promises? If I promise to give up my house and all my worldly possessions and leave myself and my family to starve on the streets so that some lending company can show better numbers on their books that year, should I be held to that promise?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all on your side about honesty in borrowing. I'm pathologically aversed to debt, have never owed anyone anything and never intend to. I count debt into my net worth, so if I've got $5K and owe $3K I've really only got $2K and would rather pay off my debt and have my balance reflect that $2K I've really got. And if I ever owe more than I've got, then I have *LESS THAN ZERO*, and I'm fucked unless I'm fortunate enough to be able to recoup that somehow. But none of this changes the fact that sometimes it's just not possible to make good on a promise. You often can't do [Foo] no matter how much you swore that you would, and sometimes you can't even do [Bar] either.
This hasn't been very well written, but the point I'm making is that all lending, borrowing, promises and guarantees, are all wagers, gambling, risk management. The future is unpredictable and you've got to account for that sometime, you will lose. The only safe bet is not to gamble at all - don't make promises, don't go into debt. Unfortunately no man is an island and we can't be our own self-sufficient universes, so we will always be required to owe or promise some things. But it's best to try to minimize that.
This is why the debt-happy modern American society disappoints me so. I'm expected to go into debt in order to obtain some basic services (like phone), or else to pay MORE to avoid that. Can't I just give them the money now up front? Wouldn't they prefer that? I know I would rather have money now than later.
(Unfortunately, they'd rather you owe them, so they have a means to control you).
I'm not arguing anything about what *does* happen. There are plenty of factual, easily demonstratable cases of things that *do* happen, even if by all rights they probably *shouldn't*.
I'm only arguing that this is a case of something that *shouldn't* happen, regardless of whether or not is *does* happen. If we, the public (taxpayers), paid for some research, the results of that research rightly belong to us, in the public domain. If that's happening, great. If not, that's wrong. I don't know factually which case is actually happening (can't RTFA at the moment), I'm just reasoning which should or shouldn't be happening.
A statement of fact has no bearing on a statement of value. If I said "murder is wrong", would you counter "people get murdered anyway" and expect that to somehow counter my argument?
Disclaimer: I have not RTFA so I don't know who is actually funding this. That said...
The GP poster claimed that this was GOVERNMENT FUNDED research, done through NASA. While it may have been conducted by a private organization, if the funding money came from the government, that means that it came from "We, the people". Therefore, giving ownership of the resultant "intellectual property" (debates on the legitimacy thereof aside) to a particular corporation or individual is robbing "We, the people" from the due returns on our investment, and furthermore, allowing us to be charged twice for it!
We already paid for the R&D, through our tax dollars. The only thing we should have to pay for any application of that R&D are the costs to actually apply it - the production costs. Non-public-domain IP rights for IP which was already funded by the public is a nonsense idea. We already bought it. It belongs to us, collectively. To assign it otherwise is no less than theft (by the RIAA/MPAA definition of the word).
Great scott, that's not the half of it! A trans-fictional confluence of that magnitude could result in a possible cross-genre paradox that could lead, through a long series of plotholes and bad fan fiction, to the complete and utter destuction of both universes! We must destroy this thread before it is possible for such an event to occur.
Excellent! Finally someone is doing something about filtering out all that motion picture equivalent of spam that comes out of Hollywood, keeping these "blockbusters" from congesting our airwaves and cable lines! We may see television dominated by decent, quality entertainment at last!
Oh, wait, did they mean "decency" as in, no words like "fuck" or "cunt", and no bare tits or ass? Damn. There's a good number of decent flicks that we'll be missing if that goes through then...
t is, he disagreed with society's definition, therefore he should not be punished for violating the prohibtion on child abuse/porn.
The confusion is arising from this use of the world "should". If another poster was arguing that people *should* not be punished for doing something which is in his society illegal, then he is arguing that that law is wrong, or unjust.
If you respond that he *should* be punished because it is illegal, then you are also making a value judgement, namely that anything illegal is also, for lack of a better word, immoral - that you *should* or *should not* do things based entirely on what the law says.
On the other hand if you want to argue the factual point that someone doing something illegal *will* most likely be punished by their society, I don't think anyone will contest that. The point in contention is whether or not someone *should* be punished for a certain act.
You seem to be arguing that that act is illegal, and (implying that anything illegal *should* be punished) therefore he should be punished. Others are countering that there is nothing ("morally") wrong with breaking an unjust law, and while he most someone who does so *will* be punished, that that punishment is unjust and wrong.
Not all value judgements are legal judgements. Not all value judgements are moral judgements. Not all legal judgements are moral judgements, and vice versa. There are different types of value judgement, and just because something is wrong according to law (illegal) does not make it universally wrong by all other measures of value.
the Ditital Millenium Copyright Act
They're making legistlation with breasts now? Two of them, no less? Wow! Where can I get some of that?
Why would I be compelled to support it? I didn't make that argument.
The discussion seemed up to this point to be about what one should or should not do, as previous posters in this thread were debating whether laws regarding "children" and sex were just or not. Not about whether or not something is technically legal - I don't think anyone will really vehemently disagree with you that, in the U.S., in this-or-that state, having sex with a person under 16/18/21/whatever is illegal, and if they do you can easily find an authorative source - the law itself - to support your position. There's no discussion to be had there.
What we're talking about is whether such a law is just. The way you are emphasising that but child abuse IS a crime, whether anyone like it or not, seems to imply that you think the arbitrary laws we have on the books are just.
That said, if a society made consumption of certain foods criminal, then that would, in fact, be criminal within that society.
But would that be a fair or just law? There's nothing to be said by saying "of a society calls X a crime, X is a crime in that society." Bachelors are unmarried men, too - what's your point? I know these definitions. You're just citing tautologies as though they were evidence for something else.
that a society determines what is and is not criminal behavior within that society, and that, therefore, the opinion of an individual member of that society "doesn't count" if the individual disagrees with the societal consensus. His behavior remains criminal.
Individual dissent from the consensus is what changes and refines the law. His behavior may remain criminal by the books but that doesn't make it wrong, and his opinion certainly does still count. The law is supported by our opinions - our opinions are not a privledge granted to us by law.
Everyone's opinion counts. Always. Even if they're wrong - let those with the "right" opinion prove them so, if they can. If not, then there should be no judgement made here as far as the law is concerned.
Child abuse is whatever a society says it is. Unless an individual can convince his society to go along with him, his opinion is irrelevant.
So whatever "society" says, goes? What if society set the legal age of content to 50 years old - would that mean that my girlfriend and I, both in our young twenties, would be engaging in child sexual abuse?
If you say "yes" because by defintion that's what such a society's laws would define child sexual abuse as, then I suppose you've got a point there, technically. But if you then support such a law, simple because "society say so", you've basically negated the value of your own opinion. What if society declared it illegal to eat past 6PM EST? Most people *do* eat past 6PM EST and there's no harm being done by such a practice, so how can you justify a law which instantly and arbitrarily makes a large number of normally innocent people into criminals?
What it comes down to - in fact, what all law really comes down do - is really a very simple set of rules:
1) Doing something to someone against their will is wrong.
2) If they give their consent, then it's not a problem.
3) If unable to give consent, they deserve protection by society.
4) If they CLAIM to be able to give consent, they ARE able.
In this case, of sexual crimes, point (1) comes down to "rape is wrong". (2) Would counter "if both people say (not under duress, in reasonable circumstances) that it's consentual, it's not wrong." Point (3) allows for the protection of children and those otherwise unable to make rational decisions about their own wellbeing. But under point (4), if a "child" (by whatever means you wish to define that term) is able to present a rational argument that yes, he/she really would like to be having sex, and understands what that means, then by all means, let them.
Just because you or I think it's sick that people under (insert age here) are doing something, doesn't mean they have to think it's sick, and they shouldn't be prevented from doing it. I think lots of people have disgusting tastes in food, music, and clothing, and often engage in behaviors that I'd really rather not engage in myself, and would rather not have to see them engaging in... but so long as no one's will has been violated, I'm not about to tell anyone what they should or should not do.
Neither should you.
(And yes, I realize the irony of that last sentence, but really it's not, because by trying to impose your beliefs on others you *are* violating their will).
On Safari and IE for Mac (at least, the last version of it I ever used), a standard "enter" on a nonvalid URL (like "thaturl") will first try that URL, then try http://thaturl.com/, then try http://www.thaturl.com/, before giving up and giving an error page. I always found Windows browsing immensely annoying in that I had to actually TYPE the http://www.thedamnpageiwant.com/, instead of just the name of the page I want. Combined with autocompletion of URLs, for the most part I just type the first letter or two of the sites I commonly visit and hit return to go there. ("sl" for http://slashdot.org/, for example).
Though, someone else in this thread mentioned the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" results that are used in FireFox... that seems like a much better method to me. Although as much as I love Google, I always hate it when a piece of software relies on the continued existence of some commercial service to function...
They're sacrificing income for morals. That's unusual in the corporate world and should be applauded when seen, not rediculed.
No. They're imposing the majority view on what is moral regarding a certain topic (sex), which is certainly not an uncontested moral view in the slightest, in order to not offend the majority of their customer base which would throw a fit over such a thing and boycott them. And thus, preserving their profit.
I'm sure some of the people in charge of such decisions at Blockbuster enjoy porn just as much as a good portion of the world does, but believe it is a sound business move not to carry it in their stores because the "moral majority" would have a hissy fit if corporate America allowed people to think for themselves and choose what they wanted to watch from an uncensored selection.
Blockbuster is also known for further censoring movies which have already been appropriately censored for their theatrical rating. True morality would allow people the freedom of choice unless it's directly harming others. How would you like it if all the radio stations and music publishers of 50, 60, 70 years ago had decided that this "rock and roll" was the devil's music and thus deserves no distribution?
Would it be possible to write some browser plugin that automatically follow the links in ads and loads whatever page comes up "invisibly", off screen somewhere - just so that the avertiser registers a click and has to pay the site for it? With the sacrifice of a little bandwidth to load the advertised site in the background, you benefit the maintainer of the site you're reading (which presumably you'd want to do, if you like the site), and costing advertisers money for which they get no real return.
The two caveats I see are 1) How to distinguish ads and follow links only on them?
2) The lower purchase-to-click ratio would force the advertisers to pay less, so the site owners woudl have to advertise more to make the same ad revenue, and in the end you only see more ads.
This is immediately obvious if you're using anything other than WinXP with the default theme. I'm on OSX and it is very clearly not a window but some function of the website itself. I notice this quite often - "buttons" in certain banner ads or popups which are actually nothing more than images, and clearly so as the buttons look like Windows-style buttons.
I imagine Windows users could easily get this ease of identification for things which are not actual OS widgets by installing a custom theme, thus making anything with the default theme clearly identifiable as phoney.
It sounds to me like this description fits me then. I've actually had formal diagnosis of ADD (before they had an ADHD diagnosis; now I'd probably have had the H too) and OCD, suggestions of SAD by non-psychiatric doctors, and a bipolar diagnosis most recently. The bipolar doesn't really seem to tie in with these symptoms much, except perhaps that my depressive phases often come from obsessing about something, and my manic phases could easily fit into the ADHD pattern.
The one caveat I can think of is that, while I was at one point very socially awkward, and am still often very uncomfortable around large groups of people, in the past couple of years I've become very skilled at direct interpersonal interaction, both in reading other people and in conveying emotion myself. I went through a long period of intentionally isolating myself, then decided that I would really rather have friends, and went out and figured out how to make them. It actually scares me often times, I feel like I'm manipulating people. The people I find myself most attracted to nowadays are those who are alert and aware enough that I can't get away with it, who feel like actual functional people and not easily manipulated automatons.
The other side of this coin is that I'm apparently a very good actor, both on and off stage. Sometimes when I'm telling a story and trying to communicate, say, that someone was *REALLY ANGRY*, people will be frightened for a moment and think that I'm actually getting really angry - but no, I was just briefly acting the part to convey the emotion I'm talking about. I suppose both this and the sort of systematic approach to interpersonal interaction I've developed could both just be an application of the way that my brain naturally works to solving the percieved problem of my earlier troubles with social interaction.
What you just wrote there seems a perfectly succinct way of saying what you said - in fact I don't think I could make it any shorter than you did without some effort. I myself have often been accused of being too wordy - for example, I almost always went over the page limits in school assignments.
On the other hand, I also seem especially skilled at turning logical statements about complex systems into very simply-stated rules that convey highly accurate information about the entirity of the complex system I'm describing. So when I'm arguing a point I've already thought out well, I have a tendancy to be a bit too short and to the point, and wind up having to elaborate a lot in order for people to completely grok what was meant by the short (though perfectly accurate and proper English) sentence I previously said. Or sometimes I end up assuming that the reader will need such elaboration, and thus give it all to them ahead of time before delivering my point. Neitehr seems to be a very pleasant form of communication to most people I talk to.
How exactly does one go about finding out if they have something like this? TFA and these comments have gotten me thinking a lot - I seem to share a lot in common with the person in TFA and some people who have spoken here, and I'm very interested to find out if I meet the definition of some of these terms. Not sure what use it would be to me to have such a diagnosis, or perhaps it could even be a bad thing (negative stereotypes and all)... but I'm still quite curious just to know.
If an effect of your Aspergers is supposed to be difficulty with language, it certainly doesn't come out in your writing.
Then again, I suspect that I may be borderline autistic myself (this Aspergers term is new to me - what exactly is it?), and I seem to have better comprehension of written language (even poorly written language) than most people I've met on the internet.
Ironically, I can't stand trying to communicate in person with people with poor English skills or speech impediments. Makes me very uncomfortable to have less than perfect verbal communication. It's not the same in text though.
Every DVD I've ever rented or bought you can either skip chapters through to the menu or just press root menu.
:-)
Same deal here. There are usually SOME things that can't be skipped, usually the 'scene' which contains the FBI warnings and a few other bits, but those are rarely more than 30 seconds, or a minute long at most.
Almost every DVD I've bought or rented recently does include trailers at the start, but I've never seen one with unskippable trailers.
Now, you want to talk about bad DVD design... '2001: A Space Odyssey' begins with a black screen with a classical orchestra warm-up that continues for AGES..... skipping to the next scene skips straight through to the 'Dawn of Man' first actual scene, completely skipping the classic Moon-Earth-Sun alignment and the start of Thus Spake Zarahustra which is the signature introduction to the movie. You've got to skip ahead to Dawn of Man and then rewind (not skip) backwards until you get to black and begin playing forward from there. To this day I don't know exactly how long the black with orchestra warmup lasts, I've never had the patience to sit through the entire thing.
To make matters worse, there's an intermission on the DVD that's exactly the same - intermission begins with black and at some point in the middle of that 'scene' (in the DVD sense) begins the next actual scene of the movie. Horrible, horrible design. Neat movie though
What I find more frightening is that it took me a second to realize you had written that wrongly at all.
(I am in some ways lysdexic but it usually doesn't seem to affect my writing ability at all).
There was a Star Trek episode that was sort of about this (forget which series, probably TOS) in which the Enterprise crew encountered a pair of worlds killing their own populations (by vaporization or some such) because of the results of a virtual war being carried on between them. One world would land a virtual bomb on another world's cities in the virtual war, and everyone "killed" in the sim would then be escorted to the vaporization chambers for execution. If either side didn't comply with the rules, actual bombs got lobbed instead, and not only people but the physical cities were destroyed as well.
The difference between that scenario or your chess scenario, and where this robotic/cyber warfare is headed, is that the objective of cyber warfare would be to disable the enemy's robots, so that your robots can get into the enemy city and... at that point just the enemy's defenselessness would probably lead them to surrender. If not, they send human defenders, which the robots would likely defeat, and then be free to do accomplish whatever it is the war was about.
But then, given that, as you say, many wars nowadays are really just personal disputed between individual leaders whose followers get caught up in, I'm much more in favor of the "if you really hate them, then YOU go and fight them" policy.
I hate the concept of organized military, where people fight only because they're paid and ordered to do so, but I'd gladly fight to defend my home, city, state, country, what-have-you from direct attack.
via a modem perhaps?
Mo-dem? What is this mo-dem of which you speak?