Model the legislative process after the scientific method.
Some people conduct polls and ethnographic research to determine what needs there are to be met - this is analogous to raw observational data in need of explanation. This Occupy movement is essentially a bunch of people saying "hey! there are these needs which aren't being met!" This is the first stage of the process.
Then different people propose plans of action to meet those needs. These are analogous to scientific theories. Others review those proposed plans of action to see if they really do fulfill the needs they are proposed to fulfill. This is the legislative process proper, and is analogous to the peer review process.
But more importantly, those others review those proposed plans of action to see if they contradict any rights - this is analogous to attempts at falsification. If it can be shown that a given law contradicts someone's rights, then that law is thrown out, no matter how many other needs it managed to fulfill while doing so.
Although, more practically, we do not throw out scientific theories as soon as exceptions to them are found, unless we have other theories standing by which explain all that they explain without those exceptions. Instead, we make ad-hoc exceptions to the theories until we come up with better ones that don't require that. We know that the Standard Model of physics is incomplete, there are some cases it does not accurately predict; but we don't have a replacement yet, so we use the Standard Model still, but only within the domain that it is accurate, and we do not use it in the areas it is known to be inaccurately.
Likewise, when a generally productive (needs-fulfilling) law is found to violate someone's rights, exceptions should be made to that law as necessary, until a better law to fulfill those same needs without making any exceptions is conceived.
And in general, as in science, new laws are only passed when a consensus is reached that they solve outstanding problems without causing any new ones. If no such consensus can be reached, no new law is passed.
To ask "what is the purpose of x?" is essentially to ask "why is it good that x?"; much like asking "what is the cause of x?" is asking "why is it true that x?" Purpose is the prescriptive analogue of descriptive cause: "why is it..." vs "why should it be...".
Thus, asking what the purpose of something is presupposes, as you say, that there is a purpose; which is to say, presupposes that it is good, that it should be. Asking what the purpose of a volcano is may then be something like asking what the cause of Atlantis sinking was -- it presumes something that is probably not correct. There is no cause of Atlantis sinking because there was never an Atlantis to sink. There is no purpose to volcanoes erupting because it is not particularly good that volcanoes erupt.
Asking the purpose of the universe is thus asking what's so good about the universe existing, and that seems like a pretty straightforward question: something must exist for anything good to exist, and if anything exists then the universe exists, consisting of at least that thing if nothing else.
Science is not in the business of answering normative questions, so science cannot answer questions of purpose. That does not mean that there are no answers to normative questions; nor does that mean that normative questions are the domain of religion. Religion is an approach to answering both normative and factual questions. Science is a superior approach to answering factual questions, and there are are many superior (irreligious) approaches to answering normative questions too, which do not eliminatively reduce them to factual questions for science to answer. They just... need better PR and more refinement, I guess, but we're getting there.
This (the idea of a balance of extremes, not the "extremes" you "suggest") very nicely sums up my stance on the existing political parties.
We in America do not have a left party and a right party. We have a moderate party in the Democrats, and a fascist party in the Republicans. As a result, what gets called a reasonable compromise in this country is moderately fascist. I criticise the Democrats for not being libertarian enough, but when their supporters get up in arms I have to clarify that I also criticise them for not being socialist enough.
What I would really like to see is a true libertarian party and a true socialist party dominating the political scene, so we get, at worst, a moderate compromise between the two, and at best, some kind of clever collaboration toward a more ideal libertarian socialism.
But a good short-term stop-gap would be, as you suggest, to throw our weight toward the socialist corner to counteract this fascist trend. We would have to be very mindful going forward, however, to pull back in a libertarian direction once the socialist momentum takes off.
I've been proposing a new moderation system here whenever the topic comes up for some years now. I agree with other replies that Slashdot actually has the best moderation system on the net, but I think there is still room for improvement.
This proposal could also be used to improve the quality of stories on the main page and alleviate complains about "xyz subject is not suitable for slashdot, give us more zyx instead!", replace the fixed categories for that matter, and replace the karma system and the friend/foe system too while we're at it.
The idea is that not only can you rate posts +1 or -1 (like every site out there), and simultaneously tag them with a descriptive label to explain that rating (like Slashdot's "insightful", "informative", etc, but more similar to article tags, with multiple tags possible, and subject matters like "science" or "politics" too), but different users ratings interact with each other in interesting ways:
An "affinity" rating is calculated between every pair of users on the site; directionally, so my affinity to you and your affinity to me may differ. Rating up someone's post increases your affinity to them, and rating down their posts decreases your affinity.
Affinity is transitive: if you have affinity to someone else and they have affinity to a third party, some your affinity bleeds over, diminishing by degree. So if I like you and you like Bob, then the system things I will like Bob somewhat; if I like you and you hate Bob then the system will think I will not like Bob so much. Of course you have a first-degree affinity to that third party too which is weighted more strongly than you second-degree affinity to them.
Effective ratings on posts (what you see them rated as when reading them) are weighted by affinity. So, posts by people you've previously rated up will show at a higher score by default. Posts by people they like will likewise, and posts by people they dislike will show at a lower score by default. Of course your ongoing ratings on the new selection may well temper that if their first posts you rated were unusually better or worse than those people's usual fare. As you moderate more, the system will learn what you like and dislike and the effective ratings of posts displayed to you will adjust likewise.
Note that this not only filters posts by their quality but also by their subject. If you're really into computer hardware but never want to see a political debate again, and you uprate all the interesting hardware posts you see and downrate all the political commentary, then the people who post interesting hardware comments will become your "friends" and you will see comments from them and people they like more, increasing the odds of hardware articles showing up; and likewise the people who post all political commentary will becomes your "enemies" and you will see comments from them and the people they like less often.
(It occurs to me now that the system could perhaps track "interests" as well, and weight posts based on those. If you rate lots of things "-1 politics", it will learn that you dislike politics and show you fewer articles tagged "politics", even if the people who rated them did so because they like politics and so rated them "+1 politics". This could also tell the system that you only like Insightful posts and don't like Funny ones; or perhaps you're a troll connoisseur and rate things +1 Troll, in which case the system would learn that you have an interest in Trolls. If we were to allow multiple tags per post, you might rate something "+1 Funny Troll", or even "+1 Funny Politics Troll", and other things "-1 Politics Flamebait" and just "-1 Troll"; the system would then learn that you like political comments and trolls when they're funny and especially all three, but you dislike political flamebait and unfunny trolls).
This applied to articles (user-submitted, unfiltered and unedited) could completely replace the fixed "sections" of the site. You could also filter articles (and posts) based on their tags, e.g. 5
The second problem is that science requires the ability to perform repeatable measurements. Large-scale social sciences (like macroeconomics) are therefore not really sciences.
Is astrophysics not a real science then? We can't create and destroy planets, stars, and galaxies at a whim to repeat our experiments, all we can do is sit back and watch them and note any patterns in them we see. How are large-scale social sciences any different?
Problem is, we do want people to learn to trust and obey reasonable authorities: to listen when someone tells them it's not OK to go stabbing other people, etc. In order to do this, we need to give these people consistent examples of reasonable authorities: people who do not act against harmless behaviors but do act against harmful behaviors, consistently and predictably.
If little Johnny is never punished for anything he does, even obviously harmful things, he will never learn that some things are not OK to do, and will think he can get away with anything. But likewise, if little Johnny is always punished for everything he does, even obviously harmless things, then as you seem to say, he will learn that authorities are unreasonable, ignore them completely, and do whatever the fuck he wants, even obviously harmful things.
In other words, if the response from authority figures is always the same no matter what your pattern of behavior, then it has no molding influence on your behavior, and becomes completely ineffectual. But we do want to be able to sometimes effectually mold people's behavior -- to deter them from being rapists and murderers, say -- and in order to do so, people have to be exposed (from an early age and consistently through adulthood) to reasonable exercises of authority that punish only harmful actions and let harmless ones fly. Teaching kids that all authority is unreasonable will leave us unable to teach them, e.g., that stabbing and shooting people is not a cool fun thing to do, but a bad thing, not to be done.
I'm not fond of calling people morons, but when they make asses of themselves like that, I'm very tempted.
GPP asked not whether the set of several universes can be called a universe; obviously, we call that a multiverse. He asked whether, if those several universes physically interact with each other, can each of those several physically-interacting things rightly be called a "universe", which together compose the multiverse?
Traditionally, part of the definition of the universe is its causal closure and spatiotemporal isolation. Anything which interacts with anything in the universe is in turn a part of that same universe; consequently, different universes are not connected to each other in space or time. If there are multiple universes, thus, they must not interact with each other; for if they did, they would all be same universe. Otherwise, why don't we call each separate galaxy a "universe"?
This definitional lack of interaction is one of the reasons some people take issue with the concept of the multiverse to begin with, as it makes them inherently untestable. That's why the article is supposed to be noteworthy: "Hey look! A way of observationally testing for other universes!" The GPP is noting, in turn, that if you can observationally test for it, that implies its interacting with our universe, and thus fails the usual definition of "another universe".
I'm going to stick my neck out and state that, IMO, police should be under video surveillance at all times during duty. They are granted exclusive privileges in order to do their job, such privileges require oversight to control abuse.
I'm going to go a step further and say that they shouldn't be granted such exclusive privileges to begin with.
There should be procedures by which it is legal to stop, question, or apprehend someone who is committing a crime and bring them to trial, sure.
There should be people paid specifically to go around performing that valuable public service, sure.
But those procedures shouldn't grant any power that any ordinary person couldn't be trusted with, because try as you might, search anywhere you want, and you're not going to find anybody besides ordinary people to hire for that job.
So look at any police action, ignore the uniform, and see it as an interaction between two ordinary people, because that's all they are, all they can ever be. Is that interaction just? Did the one person do anything to warrant the behavior of the other? If the answer is "no", then what does it matter what clothes the other wears or who his employer is?
In Plato's Pheadrus volume Socrates complains that writing weakens memory and the mind. It causes them to become dependent on written words and books. "Rhetoric" was one of the four liberal arts in classical education. It not only covered how to compose good speeches but tricks to memorizing them too. The Internet may just be the next stage in the process.
There were seven classical liberal arts, not four. Rhetoric was part of the fundamental three, the trivium, along with grammar and logic. The remaining four, the quadrivium, were arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
I knew most of this from memory, but confirmed it with Wikipedia first, and had too look up the four parts of the quadrivium because I don't understand the reasoning behind why those four disciplines were chosen for the quadrivium. (The trivium makes sense to me: grammar tells you how to construct propositions, logic tells you how to connect those propositions into arguments, and rhetoric tells you how to smooth delivery of those arguments).
In my experience, understanding actually aids fact-retention like that. And if I recall correctly (har har), there is neurological evidence to back that up: interrelations between memories aid retention of those memories, so understanding how and why things fit together helps us remember those things better than we would a random laundry list. I don't recall the names of the studies that concluded thus... but I could probably look them up;)
On a more serious note, I submit that the arrow of time is a local anisomorphy in the phase-space of possible worlds, from less entropic ones to more entropic ones, in which case it really may be a sphere, or really a hypersphere, centered on the nearest local entropic minimum in the aforementioned phase-space.
2. Health Care is absolutely a right. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
I am actually in favor of public health care, but please, the UDHR is a laughable source to appeal to for a claim of rights. "Periodic vacations with pay" is also lauded as a "human right" by that document. Are the indigenous tribes-people of New Guinea being denied their basic human rights because they have to hunt and gather every day and nobody ever pays them to take a day off?
Public health care is a smart use of a wealthy nation's resources, just like public education is, and all sorts of public goods; but that doesn't make any of those rights.
And to be pedantic, American is the regional dialect.
To be pedantic, any variation of a language local to a specific region is a regional dialect. Brits, Americans, Canadians, Aussies, and others -- and many subdivisions within each of those regions -- all speak English. The variety of English spoken in any such region is a regional dialect. Neither of any two modern dialects is the same as the most recent common ancestor dialect.
The truth can be conveyed to even the thickest of morons (who are willing to listen) by a skilled and patient enough teacher. If there were a God, surely he would be skilled and patient enough. I can give your version a simple improvement right here:
God: I created time, at the first moment in time, I created one single point of space. And everything in the universe was crammed together there, formless and void. Then I created more a lot more space, and that formless ball of everything exploded, and there was light. God: Over a very long time I shaped that formless stuff into the stars. One of those stars is the sun. Near that star, the sun, I made the Earth, and the moon, and all the planets, and set them all in their cycles, and there was day and night and seasons and such. On Earth I gathered all the waters into their places and let there be dry land elsewhere. God: Over another very long time I created plants, and creepy bugs, and fish, and land animals, and eventually humans like you. You're the first things I've created that I can actually talk to like this, and that's pretty cool, so I'm gonna trust you guys to take care of things down there on Earth, and I'll be keeping an eye out for you, k? Be cool, peace out.
Jean Jacques Roussea once famously argued (famously amongst political philosophers at least) that it is necessarily rational to follow the majority decision, because the larger a group you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is going to be.
He argued this roughly as follows: (1) The average person is at least a tiny, tiny bit more likely to be right than to be wrong on any given question. (2) Any bias in a set of figures will tend to be more pronounced in a larger set [e.g. a coin weighted 51% toward heads will be more likely to show a greater proportion of heads to tails in a series of a million flips than it would in say, two flips, where you might very reasonably expect one heads and one tails]. Therefore: (3) The larger a crowd you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is to be correct.
I am fond of inverting that argument against his position, showing that if we deny the first premise and instead adopt the inverse, that the average person is most likely going to give you an incorrect question to a random question (which I find much more plausible than Rousseau's assumption), then by the same statistical reasoning, the larger a crowd you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is to be incorrect.
Voila, statistical proof that people are stupider in crowds than they are on their own.
I recently had a long chat with some friends of mine about how you could fill 24/7 worth of TV with classic sci-fi reruns, and it would be better than what's on the SyFy channel now. It still wouldn't be free (networks have to pay per airing like my sibling poster mentions), but it would certainly be a lot cheaper than making new stuff, even shaky-cam infrared-vision shoestring-budget ghost-busters.
Mornings: Old scifi like Lost In Space, original Dr. Who (and spin-offs), original BSG, and ST:TOS.
Afternoons: Newer sci-fi like TNG, DS9, and Voyager. I'm struggling to think of anything non-Trek (and worth watching) that aired contemporary with these.
Evenings: Even newer sci-fi like Enterprise, SG1 and Atlantis, Firefly, the new Dr. Who and BSG, etc.
Nights: Spooky things like X-files and Millennium, Outer Limits and Twilight Zone (the new ones and then the old ones to segue into morning schedule), maybe even shows like Unsolved Mysteries. Possibly also irreverent/silly things like MST3K, which could compete well with Adult Swim for midnight zaniness.
Weekends: Non-stop movie marathons. Of actual sci-fi movies, not Megashark VS Crocosaurus or Attack Of The 50ft Africanized Honeybee.
If and when anyone starts making new and worthwhile sci-fi TV again, you can plug that into the prime-time slot, pushing the progressively older stuff back and dropping the less popular of the old shows to make room.
Everyone I've asked has said that they would rather watch such a Sci-Fi Rerun Channel than anything currently on SyFy, and I just filled up at least a 20hr schedule off the top of my head right here. Come on network execs, you get paid for this shit, surely you can do better?
I've had an idea floating in the back of my mind for a while that would allow each user of a discussion system to see either their own preferred form of groupthink, or for those who want to see lively debate to see a mixed variety of intelligent opinions.
Every user can like (+1) or dislike (-1) a comment. When they do so, the database records that that particular user likes that particular comment; so you have a table of "ratings" which pairs a user to a post with signed bit. Each comment's base score is calculated based on the sum of likes and dislikes. Every logged-in post begins at +1 because it's assumed that the poster likes his own comments; anonymous users cannot cast ratings so their postings start at 0. Allow users to change their ratings of postings, and logged-in users can choose to rate their own posts 0 for the equivalent of "no karma bonus" (because of user-weighted multipliers, see below), or even switch it to "-1" if they decide that they later regret their own comment (since, like Slashdot, there is to be no comment deletion).
Then, every user in turn has a relationship score with each other user, based on how many of each other's comments they have respectively liked and disliked. Relationship scores are multiplicative, calculated as the ratio of likes to dislikes. So say, for instance, that Alice likes Bob's first post; Bob's post gets a +1 to its base score, and Bob gets a +1 to the numerator of his relationship with Alice, making his relationship 2x instead of (the default) 1x. What that means is that thenceforth, all of Bob's posts automatically appear more highly rated to Alice; in Slashdot terms, we might say that Bob has good karma, relative to Alice at least.
What's more, all of Bob's ratings also get this multiplication. So say that Bob likes Charles's comment, and rates it +1; that only adds 1 to Charles's comment's base score, but Alice sees it as +2 because her relationship with Bob is 2x. But that has no effect on Alice's relationship with Charles, which is still 1x. If Alice reads Charles's comment anyway and likes it, in disagreement with Bob, then Charles's relationship to Alice becomes 2x as well; Charles's comment now appears as +2 (presuming Charles likes his own comment) -2 (because Bob dislikes it) = 0. If Alice likes more of Charles's than Bob's, then whenever Charles and Bob disagree on the quality of a post she will see it rated more toward Charles's opinion; or vice versa if she likes more of Bob's comments than Charles's.
The potential to get an echochamber groupthink effect going on here is obvious: if Alice is liberal and likes Bob because Bob is liberal and Bob only likes posts with a liberal bias and all in all the only thing Alice likes, and the things they like, etc, are liberal, then Alice will see liberal comments all hugely modded up. If Charles is a conservative, and Alice and all her liberal friends and all their liberal friends dislike Charles's posts, then Alice will see Charles modded into oblivion.
However, on the other side, if Charles the conservative is disliking all of the liberals' posts, as are all the conservative friends whose posts he likes, and so on and so forth, then Charles will see Alice and Bob and all their liberal cohort modded into oblivion, and all of the conservative posts float to the top. You end up with two simultaneous coexisting groupthinks in the same discussion board.
Where it gets interesting is if you have someone who likes a good lively debate and rates up insightful, interesting, or informative comments regardless of simple agreement/disagreement. Say Dan does this; Dan will then see things which people who he found insightful liked as more highly rated, on both sides of the debate. If Dan thinks that Alice has good points and Charles also has good points, he will see them, and everyone that they like, more highly rated, minus those rabid biased trolls on either side which he has in turn disliked.
Where it gets really interesting is: what if Dan's posts are hig
And just try expressing an anti capitalist or critical of capitalism/libertarian/market opinion on slashdot. Slashdot is a bastion of free marketeers, libertarians and virulent 'anti left'.
This is what I find interesting about Slashdot; people on either side of the aisle claim that it holds the opposite of their own bias. I find that that generally means someone has struck a radical middle ground, standing for something which both supposedly opposing sides are jointly against. In Slashdot's case that's mostly simple libertarianism, but now and then I see an opinion not so easily categorized, which are the real gems here.
Now, Slashdot is not one person with a single coherent opinion, so it's hard to say what "our" collective opinion is. But that there is enough going on that both liberals and conservatives find the discourse challenging their opinions means that there's some real intelligent dialogue happening here, and that's what I still like about this place.
The point is you can't prove or disprove god. ever.
Not true at all. Depending on the precise conceptualization of God given, you could possibly prove that concept to be logically inconsistent and thus impossible to realize, i.e. nothing could possibly exist matching that concept. You could, in principle, instead show the negation of such a concept to be inconsistent, and thus the concept to be necessary, proving with mathematical certainty the reality of something matching that concept of God. But valid proofs of such an affirmative nature rarely if ever exist for non-trivial concepts; and if you manage to prove only some trivial concept of God (e.g. precisely equivalent to the material universe as even atheists understand it), then be prepared to answer for why that concept really deserves the name of "God".
For example, I believe:
that any nontrivial concept of God must be at least that of an all-knowing and all-powerful person (where "person" does not mean "human", but rather anything with self-awareness and self-control, consciousness and will);
that any concept of God (or anything else for that matter) must be either of a proper part of the universe, of something identical to the universe itself, or of something apart from the universe;
that by definition everything is a part of the universe (although there may be more to the universe than we presently believe, and it may be of a different nature than we presently believe), and that consequently nothing is apart from the universe; everything is an improper part of itself, so the universe is a(n improper) part of the universe;
that no proper part of something can be all-knowing or all-powerful over the whole of which it is part, so the only things that could be all-knowing or all-powerful would be something apart from the universe (which cannot exist) or the universe itself
that the universe itself cannot be a person (because it mathematically cannot contain a complete model of itself without trivially just becoming that model, leaving nothing to be aware of or exercise control of itself)
Therefore the only thing which could be God would have to be apart from the universe, which cannot exist; therefore God cannot exist. The closest thing that could exist would be in the limit of some enlarged concept of mundane personhood; as a mundane person (like a human) becomes more knowledgeable and more powerful, and closer to encompassing the whole of the universe within itself in the process, it becomes closer and closer to being God, but can never actually reach that stage, though it can always get arbitrarily closer.
Anyway, if one's concept of God is consistent and thus possible, but not necessary, merely contingent, then we look for empirical evidence. This kind of evidence cannot under any circumstances establish certain proof in the same sense as the logical proofs described above, and this is where things like null hypotheses come into play...
Perhaps, but non-existence of God is the null hypothesis... People claim that God exists, so if they want to use God as a reason for their actions, then the burden of proof is on them. My only objection to most peoples religious beliefs is that they treat existence of God as the Null.
No proposition is inherently a null hypothesis or not. "Null hypothesis" doesn't mean "common sense assumption we should accept unless proven otherwise"; it means "the way things would be if the thing we're testing for were false". Empirical 'proofs' work by showing the evidence to be inconsistent with something: merely showing that the evidence is consistent with a hypothesis does not make that hypothesis any more probable, because there are always infinitely many other, at least subtly different hypotheses which are also consistent with any given evidence. So to show evidence for a hypothesis, you must formulate the negation of it, that being your null hypothesis, and then try to
Strictly speaking, I would say that POSSESSION of any of those things should not be illegal per se. USE of them in increasingly many ways (more ways the further down the list you go) should be illegal.
But someone who would be undeterred by the illegality of their use would be equally undeterred by the illegality of their possession, so the only people caught by anti-possession laws who wouldn't be caught by anti-use laws are the people who possess them but aren't using them for any illegitimate purpose. That is to say: anti-use laws catch everyone misusing such things; and adding anti-possession laws on top of that only catches additional people who were NOT abusing them, i.e. not doing anything wrong with them.
However, on top of all that, as there are increasingly fewer legitimate uses for such things the further down the list you go, possession should increasingly be grounds for SUSPICION of illegal activity. It makes perfect sense to be much more cautious and careful and suspicious about someone walking around with a gun than someone walking around with a three foot pole. Someone with a nuclear bomb better have a really good excuse or he can expect to be under surveillance 24/7. And more than just ordinary police surveillance from public places that can be done on anyone: as suspicion of illegal activity is grounds for special search and surveillance warrants, if possession of something is grounds for suspicion of illegal activity (even if the possession is not ITSELF illegal activity), then possession is grounds for special search and surveillance warrants.
In short, if you want to own a nuke, that's fine, but since it is very unlikely that your are neither ill-intentioned or dangerously incompetent with regards to that nuke, the courts are perfectly justified in allowing trained scientists and nice men with guns to come into your home several times a day to look at your nuke and make sure that you're not going to accidentally blow up the city with it, and for the police to regularly check your papers and communications etc to make sure that you're not planning to intentionally blow the city up with it. If it turns out that you are being dangerously incompetent in the care and maintenance of this nuke that you own for some reason, then you can be found guilty of negligence so gross that "gross negligence and reckless endangerment" doesn't begin to cover it. And of course if the police checking your communications find you are planning on using that nuke in any way that might affect anything you don't personally own (have your own private micro-continent somewhere, with self-contained weather to accommodate fallout? no? then good luck with that), then you are in the deepest of deep criminal shit.
Of course, most people wouldn't want to own a nuke just for no reason; most people who want to own a nuke plan to use it to do bad things, and those bad things would be discovered when their possession of the nuke was discovered and they were investigated. Of the remaining set, most of those who do, for some reason, want to own a nuke and have no intention of using it for any nefarious purposes, are probably nowhere near competent enough to keep and maintain it in a way that does not recklessly endanger millions of people, and so will get busted for that. Of the tiny fraction of people who want a nuke for non-nefarious purposes and are competent enough to handle it safely... well, those people are most likely nuclear scientists, the kind of people we already allow to handle nukes. And even then we keep a real close eye on them.
This same pattern scales down the list of items you gave. By the time you get to guns, there are enough legitimate reasons why someone might own a firearm that mere ownership is not grounds enough for suspicion. I could see an argument being made for a warranted inspection of the weapon's storage for safety against negligent, reckless endangerment. Carrying the weapon on the street could be an additional element of suspicion if you are stopped by the police for any ot
Something close to that used to be the case. Not copyright per se because there was no such thing as printing and every Bible was transcribed by hand, but for about the first millennium and a half of the Church's existence most Bibles were written in Latin, which only the clergy could read. So to most people possessing a copy of the Bible would have been pointless; it was locked down, in effect, by a primitive DRM. A major point of the Protestant Reformation was the demand for Bibles written in the local languages so that people could actually read what God (supposedly) had said himself, rather than just taking the local priest's word for it.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so Prince (or whatever he's calling himself these days) might complain
"The Artist". Formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
Model the legislative process after the scientific method.
Some people conduct polls and ethnographic research to determine what needs there are to be met - this is analogous to raw observational data in need of explanation. This Occupy movement is essentially a bunch of people saying "hey! there are these needs which aren't being met!" This is the first stage of the process.
Then different people propose plans of action to meet those needs. These are analogous to scientific theories. Others review those proposed plans of action to see if they really do fulfill the needs they are proposed to fulfill. This is the legislative process proper, and is analogous to the peer review process.
But more importantly, those others review those proposed plans of action to see if they contradict any rights - this is analogous to attempts at falsification. If it can be shown that a given law contradicts someone's rights, then that law is thrown out, no matter how many other needs it managed to fulfill while doing so.
Although, more practically, we do not throw out scientific theories as soon as exceptions to them are found, unless we have other theories standing by which explain all that they explain without those exceptions. Instead, we make ad-hoc exceptions to the theories until we come up with better ones that don't require that. We know that the Standard Model of physics is incomplete, there are some cases it does not accurately predict; but we don't have a replacement yet, so we use the Standard Model still, but only within the domain that it is accurate, and we do not use it in the areas it is known to be inaccurately.
Likewise, when a generally productive (needs-fulfilling) law is found to violate someone's rights, exceptions should be made to that law as necessary, until a better law to fulfill those same needs without making any exceptions is conceived.
And in general, as in science, new laws are only passed when a consensus is reached that they solve outstanding problems without causing any new ones. If no such consensus can be reached, no new law is passed.
To ask "what is the purpose of x?" is essentially to ask "why is it good that x?"; much like asking "what is the cause of x?" is asking "why is it true that x?" Purpose is the prescriptive analogue of descriptive cause: "why is it..." vs "why should it be...".
Thus, asking what the purpose of something is presupposes, as you say, that there is a purpose; which is to say, presupposes that it is good, that it should be. Asking what the purpose of a volcano is may then be something like asking what the cause of Atlantis sinking was -- it presumes something that is probably not correct. There is no cause of Atlantis sinking because there was never an Atlantis to sink. There is no purpose to volcanoes erupting because it is not particularly good that volcanoes erupt.
Asking the purpose of the universe is thus asking what's so good about the universe existing, and that seems like a pretty straightforward question: something must exist for anything good to exist, and if anything exists then the universe exists, consisting of at least that thing if nothing else.
Science is not in the business of answering normative questions, so science cannot answer questions of purpose. That does not mean that there are no answers to normative questions; nor does that mean that normative questions are the domain of religion. Religion is an approach to answering both normative and factual questions. Science is a superior approach to answering factual questions, and there are are many superior (irreligious) approaches to answering normative questions too, which do not eliminatively reduce them to factual questions for science to answer. They just... need better PR and more refinement, I guess, but we're getting there.
This (the idea of a balance of extremes, not the "extremes" you "suggest") very nicely sums up my stance on the existing political parties.
We in America do not have a left party and a right party. We have a moderate party in the Democrats, and a fascist party in the Republicans. As a result, what gets called a reasonable compromise in this country is moderately fascist. I criticise the Democrats for not being libertarian enough, but when their supporters get up in arms I have to clarify that I also criticise them for not being socialist enough.
What I would really like to see is a true libertarian party and a true socialist party dominating the political scene, so we get, at worst, a moderate compromise between the two, and at best, some kind of clever collaboration toward a more ideal libertarian socialism.
But a good short-term stop-gap would be, as you suggest, to throw our weight toward the socialist corner to counteract this fascist trend. We would have to be very mindful going forward, however, to pull back in a libertarian direction once the socialist momentum takes off.
I've been proposing a new moderation system here whenever the topic comes up for some years now. I agree with other replies that Slashdot actually has the best moderation system on the net, but I think there is still room for improvement.
This proposal could also be used to improve the quality of stories on the main page and alleviate complains about "xyz subject is not suitable for slashdot, give us more zyx instead!", replace the fixed categories for that matter, and replace the karma system and the friend/foe system too while we're at it.
The idea is that not only can you rate posts +1 or -1 (like every site out there), and simultaneously tag them with a descriptive label to explain that rating (like Slashdot's "insightful", "informative", etc, but more similar to article tags, with multiple tags possible, and subject matters like "science" or "politics" too), but different users ratings interact with each other in interesting ways:
An "affinity" rating is calculated between every pair of users on the site; directionally, so my affinity to you and your affinity to me may differ. Rating up someone's post increases your affinity to them, and rating down their posts decreases your affinity.
Affinity is transitive: if you have affinity to someone else and they have affinity to a third party, some your affinity bleeds over, diminishing by degree. So if I like you and you like Bob, then the system things I will like Bob somewhat; if I like you and you hate Bob then the system will think I will not like Bob so much. Of course you have a first-degree affinity to that third party too which is weighted more strongly than you second-degree affinity to them.
Effective ratings on posts (what you see them rated as when reading them) are weighted by affinity. So, posts by people you've previously rated up will show at a higher score by default. Posts by people they like will likewise, and posts by people they dislike will show at a lower score by default. Of course your ongoing ratings on the new selection may well temper that if their first posts you rated were unusually better or worse than those people's usual fare. As you moderate more, the system will learn what you like and dislike and the effective ratings of posts displayed to you will adjust likewise.
Note that this not only filters posts by their quality but also by their subject. If you're really into computer hardware but never want to see a political debate again, and you uprate all the interesting hardware posts you see and downrate all the political commentary, then the people who post interesting hardware comments will become your "friends" and you will see comments from them and people they like more, increasing the odds of hardware articles showing up; and likewise the people who post all political commentary will becomes your "enemies" and you will see comments from them and the people they like less often.
(It occurs to me now that the system could perhaps track "interests" as well, and weight posts based on those. If you rate lots of things "-1 politics", it will learn that you dislike politics and show you fewer articles tagged "politics", even if the people who rated them did so because they like politics and so rated them "+1 politics". This could also tell the system that you only like Insightful posts and don't like Funny ones; or perhaps you're a troll connoisseur and rate things +1 Troll, in which case the system would learn that you have an interest in Trolls. If we were to allow multiple tags per post, you might rate something "+1 Funny Troll", or even "+1 Funny Politics Troll", and other things "-1 Politics Flamebait" and just "-1 Troll"; the system would then learn that you like political comments and trolls when they're funny and especially all three, but you dislike political flamebait and unfunny trolls).
This applied to articles (user-submitted, unfiltered and unedited) could completely replace the fixed "sections" of the site. You could also filter articles (and posts) based on their tags, e.g. 5
The second problem is that science requires the ability to perform repeatable measurements. Large-scale social sciences (like macroeconomics) are therefore not really sciences.
Is astrophysics not a real science then? We can't create and destroy planets, stars, and galaxies at a whim to repeat our experiments, all we can do is sit back and watch them and note any patterns in them we see. How are large-scale social sciences any different?
Moved to California to "avoid equality"?
California, the state that doesn't have a single majority race at all? Have the demographics changed that much since then?
Problem is, we do want people to learn to trust and obey reasonable authorities: to listen when someone tells them it's not OK to go stabbing other people, etc. In order to do this, we need to give these people consistent examples of reasonable authorities: people who do not act against harmless behaviors but do act against harmful behaviors, consistently and predictably.
If little Johnny is never punished for anything he does, even obviously harmful things, he will never learn that some things are not OK to do, and will think he can get away with anything. But likewise, if little Johnny is always punished for everything he does, even obviously harmless things, then as you seem to say, he will learn that authorities are unreasonable, ignore them completely, and do whatever the fuck he wants, even obviously harmful things.
In other words, if the response from authority figures is always the same no matter what your pattern of behavior, then it has no molding influence on your behavior, and becomes completely ineffectual. But we do want to be able to sometimes effectually mold people's behavior -- to deter them from being rapists and murderers, say -- and in order to do so, people have to be exposed (from an early age and consistently through adulthood) to reasonable exercises of authority that punish only harmful actions and let harmless ones fly. Teaching kids that all authority is unreasonable will leave us unable to teach them, e.g., that stabbing and shooting people is not a cool fun thing to do, but a bad thing, not to be done.
I'm not fond of calling people morons, but when they make asses of themselves like that, I'm very tempted.
GPP asked not whether the set of several universes can be called a universe; obviously, we call that a multiverse. He asked whether, if those several universes physically interact with each other, can each of those several physically-interacting things rightly be called a "universe", which together compose the multiverse?
Traditionally, part of the definition of the universe is its causal closure and spatiotemporal isolation. Anything which interacts with anything in the universe is in turn a part of that same universe; consequently, different universes are not connected to each other in space or time. If there are multiple universes, thus, they must not interact with each other; for if they did, they would all be same universe. Otherwise, why don't we call each separate galaxy a "universe"?
This definitional lack of interaction is one of the reasons some people take issue with the concept of the multiverse to begin with, as it makes them inherently untestable. That's why the article is supposed to be noteworthy: "Hey look! A way of observationally testing for other universes!" The GPP is noting, in turn, that if you can observationally test for it, that implies its interacting with our universe, and thus fails the usual definition of "another universe".
I'm going to stick my neck out and state that, IMO, police should be under video surveillance at all times during duty. They are granted exclusive privileges in order to do their job, such privileges require oversight to control abuse.
I'm going to go a step further and say that they shouldn't be granted such exclusive privileges to begin with.
There should be procedures by which it is legal to stop, question, or apprehend someone who is committing a crime and bring them to trial, sure.
There should be people paid specifically to go around performing that valuable public service, sure.
But those procedures shouldn't grant any power that any ordinary person couldn't be trusted with, because try as you might, search anywhere you want, and you're not going to find anybody besides ordinary people to hire for that job.
So look at any police action, ignore the uniform, and see it as an interaction between two ordinary people, because that's all they are, all they can ever be. Is that interaction just? Did the one person do anything to warrant the behavior of the other? If the answer is "no", then what does it matter what clothes the other wears or who his employer is?
In Plato's Pheadrus volume Socrates complains that writing weakens memory and the mind. It causes them to become dependent on written words and books. "Rhetoric" was one of the four liberal arts in classical education. It not only covered how to compose good speeches but tricks to memorizing them too. The Internet may just be the next stage in the process.
There were seven classical liberal arts, not four. Rhetoric was part of the fundamental three, the trivium, along with grammar and logic. The remaining four, the quadrivium, were arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
I knew most of this from memory, but confirmed it with Wikipedia first, and had too look up the four parts of the quadrivium because I don't understand the reasoning behind why those four disciplines were chosen for the quadrivium. (The trivium makes sense to me: grammar tells you how to construct propositions, logic tells you how to connect those propositions into arguments, and rhetoric tells you how to smooth delivery of those arguments).
In my experience, understanding actually aids fact-retention like that. And if I recall correctly (har har), there is neurological evidence to back that up: interrelations between memories aid retention of those memories, so understanding how and why things fit together helps us remember those things better than we would a random laundry list. I don't recall the names of the studies that concluded thus... but I could probably look them up ;)
A sphere? Don't you mean a ball?
On a more serious note, I submit that the arrow of time is a local anisomorphy in the phase-space of possible worlds, from less entropic ones to more entropic ones, in which case it really may be a sphere, or really a hypersphere, centered on the nearest local entropic minimum in the aforementioned phase-space.
2. Health Care is absolutely a right. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
I am actually in favor of public health care, but please, the UDHR is a laughable source to appeal to for a claim of rights. "Periodic vacations with pay" is also lauded as a "human right" by that document. Are the indigenous tribes-people of New Guinea being denied their basic human rights because they have to hunt and gather every day and nobody ever pays them to take a day off?
Public health care is a smart use of a wealthy nation's resources, just like public education is, and all sorts of public goods; but that doesn't make any of those rights.
And to be pedantic, American is the regional dialect.
To be pedantic, any variation of a language local to a specific region is a regional dialect. Brits, Americans, Canadians, Aussies, and others -- and many subdivisions within each of those regions -- all speak English. The variety of English spoken in any such region is a regional dialect. Neither of any two modern dialects is the same as the most recent common ancestor dialect.
The truth can be conveyed to even the thickest of morons (who are willing to listen) by a skilled and patient enough teacher. If there were a God, surely he would be skilled and patient enough. I can give your version a simple improvement right here:
God: I created time, at the first moment in time, I created one single point of space. And everything in the universe was crammed together there, formless and void. Then I created more a lot more space, and that formless ball of everything exploded, and there was light.
God: Over a very long time I shaped that formless stuff into the stars. One of those stars is the sun. Near that star, the sun, I made the Earth, and the moon, and all the planets, and set them all in their cycles, and there was day and night and seasons and such. On Earth I gathered all the waters into their places and let there be dry land elsewhere.
God: Over another very long time I created plants, and creepy bugs, and fish, and land animals, and eventually humans like you. You're the first things I've created that I can actually talk to like this, and that's pretty cool, so I'm gonna trust you guys to take care of things down there on Earth, and I'll be keeping an eye out for you, k? Be cool, peace out.
Jean Jacques Roussea once famously argued (famously amongst political philosophers at least) that it is necessarily rational to follow the majority decision, because the larger a group you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is going to be.
He argued this roughly as follows:
(1) The average person is at least a tiny, tiny bit more likely to be right than to be wrong on any given question.
(2) Any bias in a set of figures will tend to be more pronounced in a larger set [e.g. a coin weighted 51% toward heads will be more likely to show a greater proportion of heads to tails in a series of a million flips than it would in say, two flips, where you might very reasonably expect one heads and one tails].
Therefore:
(3) The larger a crowd you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is to be correct.
I am fond of inverting that argument against his position, showing that if we deny the first premise and instead adopt the inverse, that the average person is most likely going to give you an incorrect question to a random question (which I find much more plausible than Rousseau's assumption), then by the same statistical reasoning, the larger a crowd you pose a question to, the more likely the majority answer is to be incorrect.
Voila, statistical proof that people are stupider in crowds than they are on their own.
Why would a mouse own a dog? :-/
Easy: to protect itself from cats. (Cat eats mouse, but dog chases cat, and mouse owns dog).
I recently had a long chat with some friends of mine about how you could fill 24/7 worth of TV with classic sci-fi reruns, and it would be better than what's on the SyFy channel now. It still wouldn't be free (networks have to pay per airing like my sibling poster mentions), but it would certainly be a lot cheaper than making new stuff, even shaky-cam infrared-vision shoestring-budget ghost-busters.
Mornings: Old scifi like Lost In Space, original Dr. Who (and spin-offs), original BSG, and ST:TOS.
Afternoons: Newer sci-fi like TNG, DS9, and Voyager. I'm struggling to think of anything non-Trek (and worth watching) that aired contemporary with these.
Evenings: Even newer sci-fi like Enterprise, SG1 and Atlantis, Firefly, the new Dr. Who and BSG, etc.
Nights: Spooky things like X-files and Millennium, Outer Limits and Twilight Zone (the new ones and then the old ones to segue into morning schedule), maybe even shows like Unsolved Mysteries. Possibly also irreverent/silly things like MST3K, which could compete well with Adult Swim for midnight zaniness.
Weekends: Non-stop movie marathons. Of actual sci-fi movies, not Megashark VS Crocosaurus or Attack Of The 50ft Africanized Honeybee.
If and when anyone starts making new and worthwhile sci-fi TV again, you can plug that into the prime-time slot, pushing the progressively older stuff back and dropping the less popular of the old shows to make room.
Everyone I've asked has said that they would rather watch such a Sci-Fi Rerun Channel than anything currently on SyFy, and I just filled up at least a 20hr schedule off the top of my head right here. Come on network execs, you get paid for this shit, surely you can do better?
In cable television, SyFy channel jumps shark; but in Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, shark jumps YOU!
I've had an idea floating in the back of my mind for a while that would allow each user of a discussion system to see either their own preferred form of groupthink, or for those who want to see lively debate to see a mixed variety of intelligent opinions.
Every user can like (+1) or dislike (-1) a comment. When they do so, the database records that that particular user likes that particular comment; so you have a table of "ratings" which pairs a user to a post with signed bit. Each comment's base score is calculated based on the sum of likes and dislikes. Every logged-in post begins at +1 because it's assumed that the poster likes his own comments; anonymous users cannot cast ratings so their postings start at 0. Allow users to change their ratings of postings, and logged-in users can choose to rate their own posts 0 for the equivalent of "no karma bonus" (because of user-weighted multipliers, see below), or even switch it to "-1" if they decide that they later regret their own comment (since, like Slashdot, there is to be no comment deletion).
Then, every user in turn has a relationship score with each other user, based on how many of each other's comments they have respectively liked and disliked. Relationship scores are multiplicative, calculated as the ratio of likes to dislikes. So say, for instance, that Alice likes Bob's first post; Bob's post gets a +1 to its base score, and Bob gets a +1 to the numerator of his relationship with Alice, making his relationship 2x instead of (the default) 1x. What that means is that thenceforth, all of Bob's posts automatically appear more highly rated to Alice; in Slashdot terms, we might say that Bob has good karma, relative to Alice at least.
What's more, all of Bob's ratings also get this multiplication. So say that Bob likes Charles's comment, and rates it +1; that only adds 1 to Charles's comment's base score, but Alice sees it as +2 because her relationship with Bob is 2x. But that has no effect on Alice's relationship with Charles, which is still 1x. If Alice reads Charles's comment anyway and likes it, in disagreement with Bob, then Charles's relationship to Alice becomes 2x as well; Charles's comment now appears as +2 (presuming Charles likes his own comment) -2 (because Bob dislikes it) = 0. If Alice likes more of Charles's than Bob's, then whenever Charles and Bob disagree on the quality of a post she will see it rated more toward Charles's opinion; or vice versa if she likes more of Bob's comments than Charles's.
The potential to get an echochamber groupthink effect going on here is obvious: if Alice is liberal and likes Bob because Bob is liberal and Bob only likes posts with a liberal bias and all in all the only thing Alice likes, and the things they like, etc, are liberal, then Alice will see liberal comments all hugely modded up. If Charles is a conservative, and Alice and all her liberal friends and all their liberal friends dislike Charles's posts, then Alice will see Charles modded into oblivion.
However, on the other side, if Charles the conservative is disliking all of the liberals' posts, as are all the conservative friends whose posts he likes, and so on and so forth, then Charles will see Alice and Bob and all their liberal cohort modded into oblivion, and all of the conservative posts float to the top. You end up with two simultaneous coexisting groupthinks in the same discussion board.
Where it gets interesting is if you have someone who likes a good lively debate and rates up insightful, interesting, or informative comments regardless of simple agreement/disagreement. Say Dan does this; Dan will then see things which people who he found insightful liked as more highly rated, on both sides of the debate. If Dan thinks that Alice has good points and Charles also has good points, he will see them, and everyone that they like, more highly rated, minus those rabid biased trolls on either side which he has in turn disliked.
Where it gets really interesting is: what if Dan's posts are hig
Obviously Slashdot has a liberal bent
That's funny, just a few posts up in this thread, someone else said:
And just try expressing an anti capitalist or critical of capitalism/libertarian/market opinion on slashdot. Slashdot is a bastion of free marketeers, libertarians and virulent 'anti left'.
This is what I find interesting about Slashdot; people on either side of the aisle claim that it holds the opposite of their own bias. I find that that generally means someone has struck a radical middle ground, standing for something which both supposedly opposing sides are jointly against. In Slashdot's case that's mostly simple libertarianism, but now and then I see an opinion not so easily categorized, which are the real gems here.
Now, Slashdot is not one person with a single coherent opinion, so it's hard to say what "our" collective opinion is. But that there is enough going on that both liberals and conservatives find the discourse challenging their opinions means that there's some real intelligent dialogue happening here, and that's what I still like about this place.
Not true at all. Depending on the precise conceptualization of God given, you could possibly prove that concept to be logically inconsistent and thus impossible to realize, i.e. nothing could possibly exist matching that concept. You could, in principle, instead show the negation of such a concept to be inconsistent, and thus the concept to be necessary, proving with mathematical certainty the reality of something matching that concept of God. But valid proofs of such an affirmative nature rarely if ever exist for non-trivial concepts; and if you manage to prove only some trivial concept of God (e.g. precisely equivalent to the material universe as even atheists understand it), then be prepared to answer for why that concept really deserves the name of "God".
For example, I believe:
Therefore the only thing which could be God would have to be apart from the universe, which cannot exist; therefore God cannot exist. The closest thing that could exist would be in the limit of some enlarged concept of mundane personhood; as a mundane person (like a human) becomes more knowledgeable and more powerful, and closer to encompassing the whole of the universe within itself in the process, it becomes closer and closer to being God, but can never actually reach that stage, though it can always get arbitrarily closer.
Anyway, if one's concept of God is consistent and thus possible, but not necessary, merely contingent, then we look for empirical evidence. This kind of evidence cannot under any circumstances establish certain proof in the same sense as the logical proofs described above, and this is where things like null hypotheses come into play...
No proposition is inherently a null hypothesis or not. "Null hypothesis" doesn't mean "common sense assumption we should accept unless proven otherwise"; it means "the way things would be if the thing we're testing for were false". Empirical 'proofs' work by showing the evidence to be inconsistent with something: merely showing that the evidence is consistent with a hypothesis does not make that hypothesis any more probable, because there are always infinitely many other, at least subtly different hypotheses which are also consistent with any given evidence. So to show evidence for a hypothesis, you must formulate the negation of it, that being your null hypothesis, and then try to
Strictly speaking, I would say that POSSESSION of any of those things should not be illegal per se. USE of them in increasingly many ways (more ways the further down the list you go) should be illegal.
But someone who would be undeterred by the illegality of their use would be equally undeterred by the illegality of their possession, so the only people caught by anti-possession laws who wouldn't be caught by anti-use laws are the people who possess them but aren't using them for any illegitimate purpose. That is to say: anti-use laws catch everyone misusing such things; and adding anti-possession laws on top of that only catches additional people who were NOT abusing them, i.e. not doing anything wrong with them.
However, on top of all that, as there are increasingly fewer legitimate uses for such things the further down the list you go, possession should increasingly be grounds for SUSPICION of illegal activity. It makes perfect sense to be much more cautious and careful and suspicious about someone walking around with a gun than someone walking around with a three foot pole. Someone with a nuclear bomb better have a really good excuse or he can expect to be under surveillance 24/7. And more than just ordinary police surveillance from public places that can be done on anyone: as suspicion of illegal activity is grounds for special search and surveillance warrants, if possession of something is grounds for suspicion of illegal activity (even if the possession is not ITSELF illegal activity), then possession is grounds for special search and surveillance warrants.
In short, if you want to own a nuke, that's fine, but since it is very unlikely that your are neither ill-intentioned or dangerously incompetent with regards to that nuke, the courts are perfectly justified in allowing trained scientists and nice men with guns to come into your home several times a day to look at your nuke and make sure that you're not going to accidentally blow up the city with it, and for the police to regularly check your papers and communications etc to make sure that you're not planning to intentionally blow the city up with it. If it turns out that you are being dangerously incompetent in the care and maintenance of this nuke that you own for some reason, then you can be found guilty of negligence so gross that "gross negligence and reckless endangerment" doesn't begin to cover it. And of course if the police checking your communications find you are planning on using that nuke in any way that might affect anything you don't personally own (have your own private micro-continent somewhere, with self-contained weather to accommodate fallout? no? then good luck with that), then you are in the deepest of deep criminal shit.
Of course, most people wouldn't want to own a nuke just for no reason; most people who want to own a nuke plan to use it to do bad things, and those bad things would be discovered when their possession of the nuke was discovered and they were investigated. Of the remaining set, most of those who do, for some reason, want to own a nuke and have no intention of using it for any nefarious purposes, are probably nowhere near competent enough to keep and maintain it in a way that does not recklessly endanger millions of people, and so will get busted for that. Of the tiny fraction of people who want a nuke for non-nefarious purposes and are competent enough to handle it safely... well, those people are most likely nuclear scientists, the kind of people we already allow to handle nukes. And even then we keep a real close eye on them.
This same pattern scales down the list of items you gave. By the time you get to guns, there are enough legitimate reasons why someone might own a firearm that mere ownership is not grounds enough for suspicion. I could see an argument being made for a warranted inspection of the weapon's storage for safety against negligent, reckless endangerment. Carrying the weapon on the street could be an additional element of suspicion if you are stopped by the police for any ot
Something close to that used to be the case. Not copyright per se because there was no such thing as printing and every Bible was transcribed by hand, but for about the first millennium and a half of the Church's existence most Bibles were written in Latin, which only the clergy could read. So to most people possessing a copy of the Bible would have been pointless; it was locked down, in effect, by a primitive DRM. A major point of the Protestant Reformation was the demand for Bibles written in the local languages so that people could actually read what God (supposedly) had said himself, rather than just taking the local priest's word for it.
Wouldn't that just be datamines? Or maybe gold datamines? Or data goldmines?