"I'm not saying you deserved to be raped, the rapist was definitely the one in the wrong there, but seriously what did you expect going out alone at night dressed like that?"
I think more analogous, and true of myself, would be: I am completely 100% anti-religious and am firmly of the belief that nobody should follow any religion. That doesn't mean I'm an asshole to, or even dislike, all religious people. Some religious people can be really nice, morally good, generally intelligent people. They're still doing something wrong, being religious, but if that's one flaw in an otherwise good person that doesn't somehow cause them to become terrible people in every way, then it's a flaw I can overlook. I still hate religion, but I can like, or even love, religious people.
Now substitute "homosexuality" for "religion" in there, and that seems to be the attitude behind the "love the sinner, hate the sin" thing.
FWIW, I am pansexual and pangendered and so definitely on the "there's no sin there to hate" side of things, but the form of the attitude is sound. If there were any "sin" in it, it would still be possible and desirable to love the people committing that "sin" while still condemning the "sin" itself.
Yes. The people hypothetically trampling others in a panic are responsible for that act, not the person claiming there is a fire, whether or not there really is a fire.
Every act says something, and every instance of speech is an action. What's important is to distinguish the "speech" aspect of a given speech-act from the "action" aspect. The distinction is very easy to make in rigorous physical terms. Every "act" of one thing upon another (really always and interaction between them), including actions by humans upon other humans and other things, transfers both information and energy. We should not regulate those actions based on their information content. We should only regulate them based on their energy content, relative to already-present ambient energies.
For a simple example: every image displayed is light emitted or reflected at people who might possibly claim victimization by that. We can regulate shining light at people based on how bright that light is, or based on the general shape of its spectrum compared to ambient lighting (x-rays are not ok), but we cannot regulate shining light at people based on the information conveyed by that light, i.e. based on the image. Likewise sounds: we can regulate sending air vibrations at people based on the amplitude and general frequency pattern of those vibrations relative to ambient noise, but not based on the information conveyed by them. Likewise smells: we can regulate emitting chemicals into the atmosphere based on their quantities relative to quantities already present in the ambient atmosphere, but otherwise not (so exhaling your carbon dioxide into the air is OK, but spraying noxious chemicals in the same quantities into the air is not). Likewise touch, which since there is not generally an ambient level of people touching each other (except maybe to some degree in crowds where shoulders bump etc), means touching can almost always be regulated.
Take a damn class in ethics, especially metaethics, or read an overview of it; start here if you want. I'm not going to bother arguing an obvious troll, other than to ask the rhetorical "Who said anything about metaphysics?"
False dichotomy. You're assuming the only source of morality is a possible God, and that in the absence of said God anything goes. There are plenty of possible ways of grounding morality in something other than the edicts of a God, and those may all have different things to say about how humans ought to treat other animals. (There are also many possible conceptions of God and claims as to what he may or may not have said and what any such things may mean, so in either case it's not open-and-shut like you say).
Even if aliens are using radio waves, even we generally aren't broadcasting unencrypted analog signals. Most of our communication now is directed, encrypted, and digitally encoded, to the point that you'd only pick it up if you were lucky enough to pass directly between sender and intended receiver, and even if you did get it you'd have great difficulty discerning it from noise, and even if you knew already that it wasn't noise, you'd have a hell of a time making any sense of it would knowing the encoding and encryption.
For all we know, a lot of "random" gamma ray bursts and things we pick up are the Earth just happening to pass across some kind of interstellar communication channel, but we can't discern the message from noise and so have no idea there's even a message there.
Life is self-productive machinery: physical systems that transform flows of energy through them in a way that reduces their own internal entropy.
Everything traditionally considered life meets this formal definition, and essentially nothing else doesexcept computers, because the storage and processing of information constitutes a reduction of their internal entropy.
Robots, computers with fancy peripherals, are therefore alive.
(Doesn't mean we have to worry about the ethical treatment of computers though, because the bacteria all over your kitchen countertop that you happily exterminate every time you clean house are also alive, and we don't have to worry about ethical treatment of them. TFA is talking about sapient and therefore sapient robots though, and we would have to care about them.)
GP (not sure if that's you or not, both ACs) mentioned both 2 megabyte images from his current (7.2 megapixel) camera and a 2.1 megapixel old camera, and was apparently surprised that the 2 megabyte (presumably JPEG) files from his current camera have fewer artifacts than the 5872 byte JPEGs on the example site. I suspect he thought the 5872 number was kilobytes, i.e. a 5-6 megabyte file, which would explain why he would seemingly expect that to have better quality than the 2 megabyte files.
And bits per pixel times pixels only gives you a higher number of uncompressed bytes for the resultant files; compression should more than compensate for that, such as how his 7.2 megapixel camera which is presumably 32 bits per pixel doesn't therefore produce 28.8 megabyte files, but rather only around 2 megabytes files. If his old 2.1 megapixel camera was generating files that looked as crappy as the 5872 byte JPEG on the example site, they were probably (or at least hopefully) only a few kilobytes large each themselves.
Offshoring and immigration are completely irrelevant to the "information wants to be free" debate. One is about labor relations, and asking the government not to enable (though immigration and tax policy) greedy corporations to force down the price of wages for local people just to stuff the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives. The other is about communication and not prohibiting any forms of it. They have nothing to do with each other.
Hosting is absurdly cheap though. I have a Dreamhost "unlimited" (for purposes of hosting a website, not being your personal backup, etc) plan that costs me less than $10/mo. The labor required to build and maintain a hobbyist site for a large community would be worth more than cost of hosting. So if you've got hobbyists who are enthusiastic enough to actually do the community-maintenance stuff to keep their online community running, gathering a measly 33 cents a day on average across all of them can't be that hard. If just one person in that community makes a decent enough living that a $10/mo donation to their favorite online community is trivial, then bam, hosting costs handled. Or ten fans who can each spare a buck a month?
It doesn't assign a heapiness value, though: it assigns odds of something being a heap. That still treats heaps as a crisp set. Compare: a probability function will tell me the odds of a die rolling a six, but it still either the die does or doesn't land on six; there is no "slightly six" in dice, there are just the odds of being either completely six or not. That's not the case with heaps: a collection of grains can be only slightly heapish, or very heapish, which is something different than being slightly or very likely to be (completely and unambiguously) a heap.
Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance; Americans think 200 years is a long time.
(And 2000 years ago is still pretty recent, even just as far as human history goes. That's closer to the Moon Landing than it is to the building of the Pyramids of Giza).
The formalism of use here is not probability, but fuzzy sets. The Problem of the Heap basically highlights that "heapishness" is not a crisp property; there is not a clear-cut line between heaps and non-heaps, rather the demarcation between heaps and non-heaps is fuzzy. A collection of grains of rice can be more heapish or less heapish, and sufficiently non-heapish (for a given purpose, context, etc) collections can be called simply "non-heaps", of sufficiently heapish collections likewise simply called "heaps", but there is never a sudden switch from heap to non-heap.
Probability doesn't express that properly, because it still speaks as though a given collection either is or isn't a heap, and adds the further complication that two different collections of the same number of grains may be a heap and not a heap respectively, though their odds of being a heap are the same.
Going back to chickens: it's not that over time, successive organisms got more and more likely to be chickens. It's that over time, successive organisms got more and more chickenish. Chickens are not a crisp set. Chickenishness if a fuzzy property.
But stillsufficiently chickenish birds came before sufficiently-chickenish-bird eggs, because a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, not necessarily an egg containing a chicken embryo. (Consider: when you buy unfertilized eggs at the store, are those chicken eggs or not?)
This is tangential but I just have to comment that there is so much presumption in your suggestions. That he has retirement savings that he could live off of. That he has a house he could sell. Especially that the alternative to owning a house would cost LESS than owning one — why would anyone ever buy if not to escape the infinite debt that is a life of renting until you die?
In my 20s I wanted to spend my life doing things to enrich the world, art and writing and philosophy, but got sidetracked from those things by the need to get a stable enough life that I could do those things without ending up homeless or starving again —after that happened or nearly happened too many times for comfort. Now as I'm approaching middle age myself, it's becoming clear that it's going to take my entire productive life, if I'm lucky and things continue going as well as they recently have started to, to get to a point where I don't have to work doing pointless things that contribute nothing of value to the world just to have a place to sleep, and can actually start doing something worth doing with my life when I retire — if I'm lucky enough to ever actually retire, since it'll likely be by retirement age that housing is secured and I can start saving up food money to live off of for the few years I'll have left, and that's ignoring the probability that by then I will likely have medical expenses destroying any ability to save like that anymore.
So the alternative to "toil[ing] away the rest of my life working for The Man doing trivial things" as the GP put it isn't "sell my house" or "live off my retirement savings", it's "sleep in my car and beg for food money". In either case I lose out on actually doing anything worth living for, but in the former case at least I'm living a comfortable pointless existence.
The mold dies once it reaches my stomach anyway, and it's already there by the time the wine gets anywhere near it, so I don't know what you're talking about with "kill the fungus". But seriously, bread and water with a roquefort? That leaves a meal of the strongest savory-flavored food in the world, paired with no other flavors of note (depending on the bread you're thinking of). Gotta add some variety in there, and the sweet and sour notes of a rich fruity wine contrast the savory cheese beautifully.
I also have a very high alcohol tolerance and don't care much for the taste, so I never understood why drinking was attractive at all. (With the exception of drinks that actually do taste good, mostly paired with good foods; I do like a nice sangria with my roquefort cheese).
I eventually discovered that I could get drunk if I combined hard liquor with caffeine. And I still didn't understand why that feeling would be appealing. Why would anyone enjoy having poor motor control and cloudy thinking?
Now a drug that made you hyper-competent, that I could see the appeal of; and it would probably be the downfall of me, assuming side-effects and addiction are the price of that temporary boost.
To be complete, Adams' story was far from complimentary of the B-ark people, too. In fact it's mostly just ragging on how useless and incompetent the B-ark people are (and how they completely ruined the world they eventually settled on), and only mentions in passing how their homeworld also collapsed in their absence.
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Analogy.
"I'm not saying you deserved to be raped, the rapist was definitely the one in the wrong there, but seriously what did you expect going out alone at night dressed like that?"
I think more analogous, and true of myself, would be: I am completely 100% anti-religious and am firmly of the belief that nobody should follow any religion. That doesn't mean I'm an asshole to, or even dislike, all religious people. Some religious people can be really nice, morally good, generally intelligent people. They're still doing something wrong, being religious, but if that's one flaw in an otherwise good person that doesn't somehow cause them to become terrible people in every way, then it's a flaw I can overlook. I still hate religion, but I can like, or even love, religious people.
Now substitute "homosexuality" for "religion" in there, and that seems to be the attitude behind the "love the sinner, hate the sin" thing.
FWIW, I am pansexual and pangendered and so definitely on the "there's no sin there to hate" side of things, but the form of the attitude is sound. If there were any "sin" in it, it would still be possible and desirable to love the people committing that "sin" while still condemning the "sin" itself.
And we can safely disregard anything you ever have to say again, you flippant sack of shit.
Yes. The people hypothetically trampling others in a panic are responsible for that act, not the person claiming there is a fire, whether or not there really is a fire.
Every act says something, and every instance of speech is an action. What's important is to distinguish the "speech" aspect of a given speech-act from the "action" aspect. The distinction is very easy to make in rigorous physical terms. Every "act" of one thing upon another (really always and interaction between them), including actions by humans upon other humans and other things, transfers both information and energy. We should not regulate those actions based on their information content. We should only regulate them based on their energy content, relative to already-present ambient energies.
For a simple example: every image displayed is light emitted or reflected at people who might possibly claim victimization by that. We can regulate shining light at people based on how bright that light is, or based on the general shape of its spectrum compared to ambient lighting (x-rays are not ok), but we cannot regulate shining light at people based on the information conveyed by that light, i.e. based on the image. Likewise sounds: we can regulate sending air vibrations at people based on the amplitude and general frequency pattern of those vibrations relative to ambient noise, but not based on the information conveyed by them. Likewise smells: we can regulate emitting chemicals into the atmosphere based on their quantities relative to quantities already present in the ambient atmosphere, but otherwise not (so exhaling your carbon dioxide into the air is OK, but spraying noxious chemicals in the same quantities into the air is not). Likewise touch, which since there is not generally an ambient level of people touching each other (except maybe to some degree in crowds where shoulders bump etc), means touching can almost always be regulated.
Black holes eat stars and frequently eject giant gas plumes too...
Apparently it's an updated version of an ancient troll, as when I first saw that back on CSMA, Macs weren't called "G"-anything yet.
Hey GGP, do the one about not being able to find a mouse at Target at 3AM next!
Take a damn class in ethics, especially metaethics, or read an overview of it; start here if you want. I'm not going to bother arguing an obvious troll, other than to ask the rhetorical "Who said anything about metaphysics?"
False dichotomy. You're assuming the only source of morality is a possible God, and that in the absence of said God anything goes. There are plenty of possible ways of grounding morality in something other than the edicts of a God, and those may all have different things to say about how humans ought to treat other animals. (There are also many possible conceptions of God and claims as to what he may or may not have said and what any such things may mean, so in either case it's not open-and-shut like you say).
Even if aliens are using radio waves, even we generally aren't broadcasting unencrypted analog signals. Most of our communication now is directed, encrypted, and digitally encoded, to the point that you'd only pick it up if you were lucky enough to pass directly between sender and intended receiver, and even if you did get it you'd have great difficulty discerning it from noise, and even if you knew already that it wasn't noise, you'd have a hell of a time making any sense of it would knowing the encoding and encryption.
For all we know, a lot of "random" gamma ray bursts and things we pick up are the Earth just happening to pass across some kind of interstellar communication channel, but we can't discern the message from noise and so have no idea there's even a message there.
Life is self-productive machinery: physical systems that transform flows of energy through them in a way that reduces their own internal entropy.
Everything traditionally considered life meets this formal definition, and essentially nothing else doesexcept computers, because the storage and processing of information constitutes a reduction of their internal entropy.
Robots, computers with fancy peripherals, are therefore alive.
(Doesn't mean we have to worry about the ethical treatment of computers though, because the bacteria all over your kitchen countertop that you happily exterminate every time you clean house are also alive, and we don't have to worry about ethical treatment of them. TFA is talking about sapient and therefore sapient robots though, and we would have to care about them.)
Communism was supposed to be a labor movement.
It's clear that whatever China has is not communism, if it ever was.
GP (not sure if that's you or not, both ACs) mentioned both 2 megabyte images from his current (7.2 megapixel) camera and a 2.1 megapixel old camera, and was apparently surprised that the 2 megabyte (presumably JPEG) files from his current camera have fewer artifacts than the 5872 byte JPEGs on the example site. I suspect he thought the 5872 number was kilobytes, i.e. a 5-6 megabyte file, which would explain why he would seemingly expect that to have better quality than the 2 megabyte files.
And bits per pixel times pixels only gives you a higher number of uncompressed bytes for the resultant files; compression should more than compensate for that, such as how his 7.2 megapixel camera which is presumably 32 bits per pixel doesn't therefore produce 28.8 megabyte files, but rather only around 2 megabytes files. If his old 2.1 megapixel camera was generating files that looked as crappy as the 5872 byte JPEG on the example site, they were probably (or at least hopefully) only a few kilobytes large each themselves.
Why are you surprised that a 5.8 thousand byte image has more artifacts than a 2 million(ish) byte image?
Offshoring and immigration are completely irrelevant to the "information wants to be free" debate. One is about labor relations, and asking the government not to enable (though immigration and tax policy) greedy corporations to force down the price of wages for local people just to stuff the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives. The other is about communication and not prohibiting any forms of it. They have nothing to do with each other.
There's no reason one approach has to block the other.
If there is a monopoly, it should be regulated as a common carrier.
If they don't want to be regulated as a common carrier, they have to let the competition in.
Let the ISPs themselves choose. Would you rather be a regulated common carrier monopoly or free to do as you like in a highly competitive market?
Either way, the users win.
Hosting is absurdly cheap though. I have a Dreamhost "unlimited" (for purposes of hosting a website, not being your personal backup, etc) plan that costs me less than $10/mo. The labor required to build and maintain a hobbyist site for a large community would be worth more than cost of hosting. So if you've got hobbyists who are enthusiastic enough to actually do the community-maintenance stuff to keep their online community running, gathering a measly 33 cents a day on average across all of them can't be that hard. If just one person in that community makes a decent enough living that a $10/mo donation to their favorite online community is trivial, then bam, hosting costs handled. Or ten fans who can each spare a buck a month?
It doesn't assign a heapiness value, though: it assigns odds of something being a heap. That still treats heaps as a crisp set. Compare: a probability function will tell me the odds of a die rolling a six, but it still either the die does or doesn't land on six; there is no "slightly six" in dice, there are just the odds of being either completely six or not. That's not the case with heaps: a collection of grains can be only slightly heapish, or very heapish, which is something different than being slightly or very likely to be (completely and unambiguously) a heap.
Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance; Americans think 200 years is a long time.
(And 2000 years ago is still pretty recent, even just as far as human history goes. That's closer to the Moon Landing than it is to the building of the Pyramids of Giza).
The formalism of use here is not probability, but fuzzy sets. The Problem of the Heap basically highlights that "heapishness" is not a crisp property; there is not a clear-cut line between heaps and non-heaps, rather the demarcation between heaps and non-heaps is fuzzy. A collection of grains of rice can be more heapish or less heapish, and sufficiently non-heapish (for a given purpose, context, etc) collections can be called simply "non-heaps", of sufficiently heapish collections likewise simply called "heaps", but there is never a sudden switch from heap to non-heap.
Probability doesn't express that properly, because it still speaks as though a given collection either is or isn't a heap, and adds the further complication that two different collections of the same number of grains may be a heap and not a heap respectively, though their odds of being a heap are the same.
Going back to chickens: it's not that over time, successive organisms got more and more likely to be chickens. It's that over time, successive organisms got more and more chickenish. Chickens are not a crisp set. Chickenishness if a fuzzy property.
But stillsufficiently chickenish birds came before sufficiently-chickenish-bird eggs, because a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, not necessarily an egg containing a chicken embryo. (Consider: when you buy unfertilized eggs at the store, are those chicken eggs or not?)
This is tangential but I just have to comment that there is so much presumption in your suggestions. That he has retirement savings that he could live off of. That he has a house he could sell. Especially that the alternative to owning a house would cost LESS than owning one — why would anyone ever buy if not to escape the infinite debt that is a life of renting until you die?
In my 20s I wanted to spend my life doing things to enrich the world, art and writing and philosophy, but got sidetracked from those things by the need to get a stable enough life that I could do those things without ending up homeless or starving again —after that happened or nearly happened too many times for comfort. Now as I'm approaching middle age myself, it's becoming clear that it's going to take my entire productive life, if I'm lucky and things continue going as well as they recently have started to, to get to a point where I don't have to work doing pointless things that contribute nothing of value to the world just to have a place to sleep, and can actually start doing something worth doing with my life when I retire — if I'm lucky enough to ever actually retire, since it'll likely be by retirement age that housing is secured and I can start saving up food money to live off of for the few years I'll have left, and that's ignoring the probability that by then I will likely have medical expenses destroying any ability to save like that anymore.
So the alternative to "toil[ing] away the rest of my life working for The Man doing trivial things" as the GP put it isn't "sell my house" or "live off my retirement savings", it's "sleep in my car and beg for food money". In either case I lose out on actually doing anything worth living for, but in the former case at least I'm living a comfortable pointless existence.
The mold dies once it reaches my stomach anyway, and it's already there by the time the wine gets anywhere near it, so I don't know what you're talking about with "kill the fungus". But seriously, bread and water with a roquefort? That leaves a meal of the strongest savory-flavored food in the world, paired with no other flavors of note (depending on the bread you're thinking of). Gotta add some variety in there, and the sweet and sour notes of a rich fruity wine contrast the savory cheese beautifully.
I also have a very high alcohol tolerance and don't care much for the taste, so I never understood why drinking was attractive at all. (With the exception of drinks that actually do taste good, mostly paired with good foods; I do like a nice sangria with my roquefort cheese).
I eventually discovered that I could get drunk if I combined hard liquor with caffeine. And I still didn't understand why that feeling would be appealing. Why would anyone enjoy having poor motor control and cloudy thinking?
Now a drug that made you hyper-competent, that I could see the appeal of; and it would probably be the downfall of me, assuming side-effects and addiction are the price of that temporary boost.
To be complete, Adams' story was far from complimentary of the B-ark people, too. In fact it's mostly just ragging on how useless and incompetent the B-ark people are (and how they completely ruined the world they eventually settled on), and only mentions in passing how their homeworld also collapsed in their absence.