Say I walk up to you and say "Get the fuck out of my house!". Is what I just said true or false? It makes no sense to ask that question; "get the fuck out of my house" is not the kind of utterance that can be true or false, because it's not making any claim, it's issuing a command. Likewise, "there is a bird over there" can be true or false, but the bird itself cannot be true or false - it makes no sense to say that a physical object is true or false, only claims about physical objects (that they exist, that they have certain properties, etc) can be true or false. And yes, "3 > 2" is a proposition (a linguistic entity) just like that; you're claiming a fact, and your claim is either correct or incorrect, true or false; however, "3" itself is not true or false because it's not a proposition, and only propositions can be true or false.
But the sort of case I was thinking of is actually a case where you give some substantial criteria for "truth", such as verifiability (a proposition is true if there is some set of observations, perhaps infinite, that could in principle be done to verify that the thing proposed actually obtains), and neither a proposition nor its negation meets that criteria. In short, you're uttering something which superficially seems to be making a claim but really isn't saying anything. The logical positivists (who introduced the verifiability criteria) claimed that most talk of metaphysics and theology was like this - you're asking questions like "does God exist?" which have no answer because neither "God exists" nor "God does not exist" are verifiable and thus neither are true; they are both meaningless, devoid of any truth value. Likewise if indeterminism is correct and there are no facts about the future (yet), then statements about the future would also be of this nature - neither true nor false, no fact of the matter, at least not yet. In my logical notation, you could say "it is not true that God exists", without saying "it is true that God does not exist".
Since the modal logic of this is like that of necessity and possibility, I like to call "non-false" statements "transcendent possibilities", because you can believe them or not believe them and it really makes no difference, because they really have no content. It's like adding or subtracting zero; A + B + C = A + B + (-C), if C=0, and likewise, P & Q & R = P & Q & (not-R), if R is meaningless nonsense.
(I'm going to simplify my notation here and start using ~ for negation, G(x) for "good(x)", and r/g/b for red/green/blue).
Given that, in your terms, I think we'd want to say that the monkey judges good(red) & good(green) & good(blue).
Actually I had taken the initial conditions to be ~G(r) & ~G(g) & ~G(b) - which does not mean that they are all bad, but that none of them are particularly good. In other words, no preference; at the same time, the monkey also judges ~G(~r) & ~G(~g) & ~G(~b). But then, when the monkey chooses red over blue, he not only changes his opinion from "~G(r) & ~G(~r)" to "G(~)", negating his opinion that ~G(r), but also unnecessarily changes his opinion from "~G(b) & ~G(~b)" to "G(~b)", negating his opinion that ~G(~b). If he were rational, he would merely make the first change, and leave blue judged neither good nor bad, just like green.
Of course now that I say it this way, I realize (as another respondent pointed out) that we're not talking about absolute judgements of goodness and badness but of relative preferences. To the monkey, all M&Ms are good; just some are more good than others. So it's not quite changing from neutral on both to pro one and anti the other, but changing from equal preferences to increased one and decreased the other; the irrationality thus not being the judgement of blue M&Ms as "bad" per se, but the decreased preference for blue M&Ms. It's a similar error in reasoning (unnecessarily lowering the value one option just because an alternative option was raised in value), but using a more relative, less absolute sort of reasoning.
I was recently thinking of a way of incorporating such relative reasoning into a modal logic, upon observing that impossibility is equivalent to probability of 0 and necessity is equivalent to a probability of 1. Instead of using a unary "necessity" operator (N) have a binary "probability" operator (P). So "it is necessary that x" would be P(1,x), and "it is impossibile that x" would be P(0,x). To get the modal notions of contingency and possibility, we can just use negation on these functions: ~P(1,x) = "it is not necessary that x" = "it is contingent that x" = "the probability that x is non-unity", and ~P(0,x) = "it is not impossible that x" = "it is possible that x" = "the probability that x is non-zero". This could also be used in place of the epistemic operator for certainty, replacing it with a "confidence" binary operator.
I've not really thought through what such relative operators would be for deontic and (as I like to call them) apodachic operators (apodachic is to deontic as epistemic is to alethic), but it seems like it could be extended to straightforward truth and goodness operators as well (and by extension to "belief" and "desire" operators, bearing the same relation to truth and goodness as epistemic and apodachic operators bear to deontic and alethic operators). This would allow us to express in logic things like "that is mostly true", meaning perhaps that the statement in question approximates the truth (but is not, in absolute terms, completely true); or things like "that is pretty good", indicating a non-absolute scale of value like we've been discussing. For this context, since we're talking about a subjective judgement of value rather than any objective value (if there is such a thing when it comes to the colors of M&Ms), a "desire" operator (D) would be most useful.
So given some numeric values x, y, and z, where x x, he chooses green over blue. The irrationality is still as I put forth earlier, in that by liking red he comes to dislike that which he chose red over, instead of remaining the same in that respect and just liking red more; it's just in relative rather than absolute terms now.
And now that I think about this more, I can see what the evolutionary advantage of this mindset might be. When two options are places in competition, whichever is not the monkey's choice must be bad. When tribes of monkeys are i
Speak for yourself. It's entirely possible for something to be not-good while also being not-bad. That is my position as well. I was commenting on the common ERROR I observe of taking "non-good" to mean "good-not" (= "bad") - of seeing the whole world in terms of black and white - using "we" to refer to "common people in general", though actually meaning to exclude myself from that category. Sorry; I can see why that would be confusing.
You know, this is oddly similar to a strange error in modal reasoning I've been noticing a lot in my philosophical work.
Take a mathematical function "f". It's obvious to all of us that -f(x) does not mean the same thing as f(-x). With modal logical operators such as the "necessity" or "obligation" operators, this holds as well: "it is necessary that not-x" means "it is impossible that x", but "it is not necessary that x" means "it is possible that not-x"; and "it is obligatory that not-x" means "it is prohibited that x", but "it is not obligatory that x" means "it is permissible that x".
However, when it comes to assertions of straightforward truth and goodness, as opposed to the stronger notions of necessity and obligation, people suddenly lose the ability to think in such modal categories, if they ever had it at all. With necessity and obligation, we have four categories each: f(x), -f(x), f(-x), and -f(-x); those translating to necessity/contingency/impossibility/possibility and obligation/supererogatoriety/prohibition/permission, respectively. But when we speak of truth and goodness, these categories collapse: it -f(x), i.e. it's not true that x , we say f(-x), i.e. it's true that not x; and likewise with not-good being taken to mean good-not.
But that doesn't follow. While in the proper modal logics f(-x) does entail -f(x), the other way around is not so. It seems to me that we should use the same logic when speaking of straightforward truth and goodness too; just being non-true does not make something false (it could be nonsense or otherwise carry no truth value), even though being false makes something non-true; and just being non-good does not make something bad (it could be morally irrelevant), even though being bad makes something non-good. But most people don't seem to think in those terms; everything is either true or false, good or bad, no middle ground. (And before someone screams "principle of bivalence", note that using modal notation like this, you can express such concepts while keeping bivalent functionality in your logic).
Which brings us back on topic. The monkeys in this experiment were given the choice of red and blue and, choosing red but not-choosing blue (i.e. judging good(red) and not-good(blue)), in the same act chose not-blue (taking not-good(blue) to entail good(not-blue)), when they didn't logically have to to so. So later, presented with blue and green, they remained consistant with their earlier opinion that good(not-blue), when if they had been logical earlier they would have just seen a color they had not-chosen and another color they had not-chosen, rather than a color they had not-chosen and a color they had chosen-not.
I guess this kind of flaw runs pretty deep in the psyche, which explains why it pops up in human reasoning so often...
It's raining and overcast here, you insensitive clod! Better weather than we've got 'round these parts. It's raining ash here right now. Guess it could be worse... at least my town isn't on fire.
Greetings from sunny... er, smokey Southern California! We've got different seasons, honestly... there's Flooding, Sunny, Hot, and On Fire!
Microsoft's Longhorn and Blackcomb sound much like Apple's Copland and Gershwin of the mid 90s. Gershwin was supposed to be the big revision to the Mac OS plumbing; Copland was a stepping stone between classic System 7 and what the future of Mac OS was to become. Then Copland (OS 8) took so damn long it became the next big thing, and when "OS 8" (no longer Copland) was finally released it was little if anything at all of what was promised.
You know what Apple did to solve this dilemma? They switched over to a unix-based core, and concentrated their efforts on making a unix system plus all the advantages of their old proprietary system. Now, I know Microsoft's problems with Vista aren't quite the same as Apple's were with Copland, but the situation does seem to have a lot of parallels. Anyone else want to bet that MS may turn to BSD like Apple did, to get themselves out of their quagmire?
You may be interested in checking out Portable Apps. They have a bunch of open-source apps that have been tuned to work in a "portable" mode, so that you can launch them from a USB key for instance (or running off the network, etc.). For instance you can use a portable version of Firefox and Thunderbird so that your web-browsing preferences and all your email are accessible from any computer. This is slightly OT, but as a Mac user I've long wondered why ALL apps aren't like this everywhere, especially on *nixes? (Windows I can understand being stupid, with the registry and all). On the Mac, the closest thing to "installing" you usually do with the average application is copy it to your hard disk from whatever medium it came from; but I know plenty of people who (somewhat stupidly, but harmlessly) run them from the medium it came on, e.g. they download a.dmg, and run the app from inside the mounted disk image rather than copying it to their HD and throwing away the.dmg. In other words, nearly all Mac apps are "portable" - and this has always been the case, since long before OSX. I'm highly suspicious whenever something wants to be "installed" via an installer program, unless it's clear why it might need to be (e.g. an alteration to the user environment, or something that runs an invisible service in the background). But a web browser, mail program, media player, word processor? What the hell do these things need to tie into that they can't keep in their own app bundle? What are they putting where, and why do they need to do so?
I guess what I'm asking is, what is it on *nixes that has so long kept most apps non-"portable"? Why isn't nearly everything "portable" by default?
This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. Last I checked, I was allowed to do whatever the hell I want on or with my computer in the privacy of my own home, except use it to commit things that are otherwise illegal, and even then the restriction is on committing the illegal act, not using some software on the computer.
What existing legal restrictions to simply USE software are there, that MS can waive with a license? I'm restricted by copyright law from copying it, and they can waive that restriction (perhaps only on certain conditions) if they like, thus licensing me to make copies. It is only because of copyright law that the notion of licensing someone to make copies even makes sense. But I'm already allowed to use it however I damn well please, so their allowed conditions of use aren't worth the pixels they're displayed via. What law says "you may not use software except as permitted by it use-right holder"? AFAIK there is no such law. I can't sell you a toaster over and stipulate that you may not make bagels in it; and you can't sell me a copy of some software and stipulate how I may or may not use it.
In Rocky Horror Picture Show productions, a common pre-show routine to get the audience's attention is to shout "Attitude check!", which is properly answered by a resounding "FUCK YOU!" from all the regulars. (There are also follow-ups such as "Hormone check!" - "FUCK ME!" and "Reality check!" - "WHAT THE FUCK!?", but the first is the best IMO).
A guy just hears, "wawawawa" noises contexted with a tone of voice. A female will hear what you actually say, and then think about it, then try to reconcile it with your subsequent and prior actions.
This is just a generalization. Lots of guys behave in what I'm representing as the "female" mode, and there are a lot of women who pay as little or less attention to what you're saying as a guy would. Funny, in my experience it's exactly the opposite. Men listen to the actual words you say and take them at face value; women listen to your tone of voice and hear what they think you mean based on how you seem to feel, rather than what you literally say.
That too of course is a generalization, but it just goes to show, generalizations are like shits... anyone can make one and they usually stink.
I think you are making a slight mistake. Democracy is about the majority of people. What you are talking about, is the majority of power.
As a simplistic example, consider 10 peasants vs 1 knight. That's why I had the qualifying assumption that no person differs significantly from the average in terms of his own personal power. Sure a knight is stronger and a better fighter than a peasant, and in that sense does have some greater degree of personal power, but for the most part his real, significant power only exists because the majority of people let the knights get away with (ab)using that power over the peasants. I'd say a straight fight between 10 peasants vs a knight might actually be in the peasants' favor, if they're all actually attacking the knight at once and trying to stop him from winning over any of the others. Sure, some of the peasants will probably die, but in the end the peasants will win.
The point of my original post was precisely that, in any decently large group of humans (large enough to average out the slight personal power differences), the majority of power does rest with the majority of people. The problem is always that that majority either neglects to exercise that power as necessary (preventing injustices committed by minority parties, be they petty criminals, organized gangs, or a king and his knights), or abuses that power (committing injustices themselves). For a society to be just, the majority of it's people must be just. There is no other way.
But your point stands in very small groups, where one individual or a minority party is truly able to dominate the rest of the people. So in the end, yes, what I'm saying is that the good of a society rests on the good of its majority power base; but I'm also saying that in societies of any significant size, the majority power base rests with the majority of the population, given that people are similar enough that differences are quickly diluted in groups, as they appear to be.
The problem with all this talk about who should or should not have law-making power is that it largely ignores the inescapable facts of who really *does* have the lawmaking power, and that those people will have that power regardless of what some piece of paper says. This is because said piece of paper's only real power is the power that the people themselves give it; thus, no matter what any law on paper says, the law in fact will be whatever the bulk of the people want it to be. This is of course assuming, as seems reasonable, that no one person holds disproportionate amounts of real personal power compared to others; that is, that one individual's advantages over others are by and large only the product of other individuals supporting or at least condoning the acts of the "powerful" individual. Even the absolute monarch of a great empire has no exceptional power if nobody believes that he has power, unless that monarch was truly a god with superhuman powers.
I consider myself an anarchist in just this sense. I don't call for the abolition of government or the state; I deny that any such thing as the state exists. There simply is no such entity. There's just a bunch of people. And in that sense, all societies are direct democracies. Representative democracies are just societies in which people generally grant their support or consent to "whatever that guy says" (their representative), rather than supporting particular issues themselves directly; and that may sometimes be a good thing, deferring to someone who you believe knows better than yourself, and the same exact thing happens when demagogues routinely sway the popular of a direct democracy. An absolute monarchy is just a society in which the majority grant their support or consent either directly to one individual, or to his agents (law enforcement); if the majority did not grant that support or consent, the monarch would be powerless.
So no matter what form of government people officially erect, in the end we are all, always, subject to the tyranny of the majority. And thus the only way we can change a society and the way it is governed for the better is to make its people morally better. Thus, the problem with *all* forms of government is that they rely on humans being fundamentally good; this problem is not unique to anarchism, communism and the like.
As for accusations of "cultural imperialism" - can I just point out that English speaking people developed the Internet at their own time and expense (and a lot of tax-payers money) - so they are entitled to have it in English if they want And other countries are free to develop their own networks in their own languages and scripts if they want.
I agree that segregating the Internet into separate "internets" for particular countries is a bad idea; however, if other people want to have networks that operate in their native languages, who are we to tell them that they should stop that and be forced to use English instead? Wouldn't it be better to just make the Internet (the one that we have now, predominantly English) capable of supporting multiple languages, so that if and when people want to build networks in other languages, they're at least connectable to our internet, even if we can't type the domain names directly from our English keyboards? The alternatives are either making everyone build their networks in English, which WOULD be cultural imperialism, or ignoring the pressure for multilingual networks to the point that completely incompatible non-English alternatives spring up.
The world is already largely divided up by language. I doubt you (presumably a native English speaker in a predominantly English-speaking country) visit many Chinese websites written entirely in Chinese languages for Chinese speakers in China right now, even though their domains are written in 7-bit ASCII script like every other site on the Internet. This proposition won't make that any better, but it won't make it any worse either; and it holds the possibility of staving off the even worse alternative of completely separate, incompatible, non-ASCII "internets" springing up to meet the demands of these other peoples. At least with this multilingual system, an English site (with an ASCII domain) can link to a Chinese site (with a Hanzi domain). If China were to invent their own Hanzi-based DNS protocol, separate from our existing DNS protocol, not even that would be possible. Making our network multilingual actually prevents Balkanization more than it induces it.
I wasn't thinking of any case in particular, but that does clarify it. Apparently dances can be copyrighted.
Pardon me while I go copyright the Horizontal Mambo. and demand that only I and my designated partners be allowed to perform it... now there's a monopoly worth having.
As far as we're concerned from now on you can just point at things. Not so fast there, mister. I am the choreographer who created the famous Pointing Dance, and such blatant public performance of derivative works as you suggest would be a clear violation of my intellectual property rights.
But seriously, I recall hearing that dance choreography is a protected form of "intellectual property", but I can't for the life of me find anything on the internet about what laws specifically regulate it. Neither copyrights, nor patents, nor trademarks seem applicable. Can anyone shed some light on what the law says about obtaining exclusive monopolies on moving your body in a certain way?
Nobody questions whether a fetus is human. It is a member of our biological species, Homo sapiens; that question is easily settled. The question at hand is whether a fetus is a PERSON. Not all humans are necessarily people , and not all people are necessarily human. "What counts as a person?" is an important philosophical question, especially if you only extend moral rights and responsibility to things which count as people.
"When is it okay to kill another human?" is an equally fundamental question in this issue, but it's not *more* fundamental. Both questions must be answered to resolve the issue. You could have a clear answer as to whether a fetus is a person and still be unsure whether it's OK to kill it or not; or, like me, you could have a very clear answer as to when it's OK to kill a person, but be unsure whether a fetus counts as a person at all. If it doesn't, then your moral reasoning about people is irrelevant.
But beyond that, there is the further issue of "when is it OK to kill non-people?", or more generally "what are the moral rights of non-people?", which remains to be answered if you conclude that a fetus is not a person. To me, the issue of abortion and the rights of very young children is closely related to the issue of animal rights. I'm very clear about my stance on what's right and wrong with people, but less clear on the issue of what is or is not a person, and what rights (if any) non-people have. I'm having trouble finding a consistent philosophical position that would give normal infants (no abortion involved) the rights we usually grant them (e.g. infanticide is illegal) and not commit one to also being a strict vegetarian and hardcore pro-lifer.
Or to put it another way "how many bits does God's Computer have, and can we hack it?" Your answers are "42" and "only if you can code in base-13", respectively.
There can't be a relationship if one party is screaming at you, "I'M NOT YOUR LAWYER. I'M NOT GIVING YOU LEGAL ADVICE." You know, I've often wondered about this, given that disclaimer seen every time a lawyer comments here on Slashdot: What exactly is the legal standing of statements such as "I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but USC section foo article bar says 'blah blah blah' and given your description of the circumstances you should probably do such-and-such."
That is, can you say "on the record, this is not officially legal advice", and then proceed to informally advise someone about the law with impunity? I mean, I imagine that I, a non-lawyer, could go look up the relevant law books and say "well according to the law (USC section foo article bar), blah blah blah, so if I were you I'd do such-and-such". In any informal, non-technical sense of the phrase, that's "legal advice" - I'm giving someone advice about the law, the same way I might offer relationship advice or car advice.
So can a lawyer do that and not be held any more liable than I would, provided he disclaim "this is not legal advice", in the technical sense of creating an attorney-client relationship? Or perhaps, conversely, could a layman like me be held as liable as a lawyer if I cite the law and make recommendations without such a disclaimer?
This woman had every right to wear that shirt, which was in fact not a bomb. However, she should have had the common sense to realize that it could easily be mistaken for a bomb, and that that would upset a lot of people in the airport. And while she was both stupid and rude to ignore the initial questioning (if she was indeed intentionally ignoring them and not just not paying attention), instead of just saying "it's an art piece" and possibly avoiding all the hassle, it's her right to say or not say what she wants, and her silence in itself should not constitute a threat - though it *may* be taken as suspicious activity worthy of investigation, given the circumstances.
In that vein, the police had every right, and indeed, the responsibility to stop her and make sure that she was not in fact carrying a bomb. That's what police are there for: to ask questions and investigate potentially dangerous situations. However, upon finding that the situation was not, in fact, dangerous, they should have let the suspect go. And though they're holding her on "hoax" charges, unless she claimed that it was a bomb, then that's just bull. It's not a hoax unless you meant to deceive; if just being deceived was grounds for calling "hoax", you could be arrested for anything just by the police playing stupid - "well *I* thought it was a bomb, how dare she fool me like that, she should have to pay". That's the only injustice in any of this. The rest is just stupidity.
if i grab something off the shelf, and head for the exit, what better way is there to confront me than to ask for a receipt If the store owner witnesses someone shoplifting, he can order that person to stop and prove that he's not or else the storeowner will call the police, who will then determine based on evidence if the person should be arrested for shoplifting, and track the person down (put a warrant out for his arrest) if there's evidence of shoplifting and the suspected shoplifter has already left the premises.
In this case, the "suspected shoplifter" said that if he was really under suspicion, to call the cops, otherwise he is free to leave. The store did not, and instead detained him, at which point HE called the police. Then insult was added to injury when the police demanded he provide proof of identity, AFTER determining that he was in the right, which they're not allowed to do, though they can ask you to identify yourself, i.e. state your name. In other words "It looks like you're OK, and these shopkeepers were wrong to detain you; your papers, please".
The outrage is that everyone is a "suspected shoplifter" automatically, expected to prove that they're not stealing on their way out the door, without any prior evidence that they are shoplifting, and saying "no" to this search is *counted* as evidence. Then, the same issue on a larger scale, the police demanding something from an innocent person that they have no right to demand, and then taking that refusal as suspicious evidence worthy of arrest itself.
This is EXACTLY what the 5th Amendment was meant to protect against: people being held automatically under suspicion, and refusing to comply with an unwarranted search counting as evidence warranting the search. It's like being arrested for "resisting arrest" alone - what was I being arrested for that I was resisting? Refusing a warranted search is wrong; but refusing a search alone should not be grounds for a search, otherwise anyone could search you whenever they wanted on no grounds whatsoever, and either you comply willingly, or your refusal justifies force. That's not right.
Right. In real capitalism, companies offer variety if they think it will make them more money. Why not, instead of trying to force the monopoly to do what they likely would if it were not a monopoly, remove the government-sanctioned monopoly? Like, say, declare the physical cables public property (we paid for them anyway) and allow the content creators to sell their channels a la carte over them?
Or would you like to have to pay for a construction crew to come out and bury new cables whenever you want to switch to a upstart new provider? That's kind of an insurmountable barrier to entry there, if you ask me. Might as well make USP and FedEx build their own roads...
They probably (A) all read the same threads, being old-schoolers from the days when Slashdot was (so I've heard) far more focused on tech issues, and (B) have many of each other marked as Friends, possibly with +1 bonuses, so they pop out of the noise to each other.
I too am not fond of using an umbrella term for these things, especially "intellectual property", as like Spun I think it lends too much of an air of moral legitimacy to it. (Someone infringing on another person's government-granted distribution monopoly isn't something people get too riled up about; but someone STEALING another person's intellectual PROPERTY, well, that's just plain wrong!). I was just suggesting that, if we're going to have an umbrella term, keeping the "intellectual" part of it isn't so bad... it's the "property" part that's really askew from reality.
Let me simplify things so your anger addled brain can understand: Superset terms should accurately reflect the most important properties of the referenced members of the set. 'Intellectual' isn't an accurate descriptor for the aforementioned items , and neither is 'property.'
If 'thought monopoly' doesn't work for you, how about 'expression monopoly?' That is an accurate superset term. I'd actually say that "intellectual" is an apt descriptor, as all these things relate to the expression of ideas; ideas being the subject of all intellectual activities. So how's about "intellectual monopoly"? A monopoly on the communication or implementation of certain ideas. Sound similar enough to "intellectual property" that it might catch on, like "Digital Restrictions Management". I might start using it myself...
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You're missing the point again.
Say I walk up to you and say "Get the fuck out of my house!". Is what I just said true or false? It makes no sense to ask that question; "get the fuck out of my house" is not the kind of utterance that can be true or false, because it's not making any claim, it's issuing a command. Likewise, "there is a bird over there" can be true or false, but the bird itself cannot be true or false - it makes no sense to say that a physical object is true or false, only claims about physical objects (that they exist, that they have certain properties, etc) can be true or false. And yes, "3 > 2" is a proposition (a linguistic entity) just like that; you're claiming a fact, and your claim is either correct or incorrect, true or false; however, "3" itself is not true or false because it's not a proposition, and only propositions can be true or false.
But the sort of case I was thinking of is actually a case where you give some substantial criteria for "truth", such as verifiability (a proposition is true if there is some set of observations, perhaps infinite, that could in principle be done to verify that the thing proposed actually obtains), and neither a proposition nor its negation meets that criteria. In short, you're uttering something which superficially seems to be making a claim but really isn't saying anything. The logical positivists (who introduced the verifiability criteria) claimed that most talk of metaphysics and theology was like this - you're asking questions like "does God exist?" which have no answer because neither "God exists" nor "God does not exist" are verifiable and thus neither are true; they are both meaningless, devoid of any truth value. Likewise if indeterminism is correct and there are no facts about the future (yet), then statements about the future would also be of this nature - neither true nor false, no fact of the matter, at least not yet. In my logical notation, you could say "it is not true that God exists", without saying "it is true that God does not exist".
Since the modal logic of this is like that of necessity and possibility, I like to call "non-false" statements "transcendent possibilities", because you can believe them or not believe them and it really makes no difference, because they really have no content. It's like adding or subtracting zero; A + B + C = A + B + (-C), if C=0, and likewise, P & Q & R = P & Q & (not-R), if R is meaningless nonsense.
Given that, in your terms, I think we'd want to say that the monkey judges good(red) & good(green) & good(blue).
Actually I had taken the initial conditions to be ~G(r) & ~G(g) & ~G(b) - which does not mean that they are all bad, but that none of them are particularly good. In other words, no preference; at the same time, the monkey also judges ~G(~r) & ~G(~g) & ~G(~b). But then, when the monkey chooses red over blue, he not only changes his opinion from "~G(r) & ~G(~r)" to "G(~)", negating his opinion that ~G(r), but also unnecessarily changes his opinion from "~G(b) & ~G(~b)" to "G(~b)", negating his opinion that ~G(~b). If he were rational, he would merely make the first change, and leave blue judged neither good nor bad, just like green.
Of course now that I say it this way, I realize (as another respondent pointed out) that we're not talking about absolute judgements of goodness and badness but of relative preferences. To the monkey, all M&Ms are good; just some are more good than others. So it's not quite changing from neutral on both to pro one and anti the other, but changing from equal preferences to increased one and decreased the other; the irrationality thus not being the judgement of blue M&Ms as "bad" per se, but the decreased preference for blue M&Ms. It's a similar error in reasoning (unnecessarily lowering the value one option just because an alternative option was raised in value), but using a more relative, less absolute sort of reasoning.
I was recently thinking of a way of incorporating such relative reasoning into a modal logic, upon observing that impossibility is equivalent to probability of 0 and necessity is equivalent to a probability of 1. Instead of using a unary "necessity" operator (N) have a binary "probability" operator (P). So "it is necessary that x" would be P(1,x), and "it is impossibile that x" would be P(0,x). To get the modal notions of contingency and possibility, we can just use negation on these functions: ~P(1,x) = "it is not necessary that x" = "it is contingent that x" = "the probability that x is non-unity", and ~P(0,x) = "it is not impossible that x" = "it is possible that x" = "the probability that x is non-zero". This could also be used in place of the epistemic operator for certainty, replacing it with a "confidence" binary operator.
I've not really thought through what such relative operators would be for deontic and (as I like to call them) apodachic operators (apodachic is to deontic as epistemic is to alethic), but it seems like it could be extended to straightforward truth and goodness operators as well (and by extension to "belief" and "desire" operators, bearing the same relation to truth and goodness as epistemic and apodachic operators bear to deontic and alethic operators). This would allow us to express in logic things like "that is mostly true", meaning perhaps that the statement in question approximates the truth (but is not, in absolute terms, completely true); or things like "that is pretty good", indicating a non-absolute scale of value like we've been discussing. For this context, since we're talking about a subjective judgement of value rather than any objective value (if there is such a thing when it comes to the colors of M&Ms), a "desire" operator (D) would be most useful.
So given some numeric values x, y, and z, where x x, he chooses green over blue. The irrationality is still as I put forth earlier, in that by liking red he comes to dislike that which he chose red over, instead of remaining the same in that respect and just liking red more; it's just in relative rather than absolute terms now.
And now that I think about this more, I can see what the evolutionary advantage of this mindset might be. When two options are places in competition, whichever is not the monkey's choice must be bad. When tribes of monkeys are i
You know, this is oddly similar to a strange error in modal reasoning I've been noticing a lot in my philosophical work.
Take a mathematical function "f". It's obvious to all of us that -f(x) does not mean the same thing as f(-x). With modal logical operators such as the "necessity" or "obligation" operators, this holds as well: "it is necessary that not-x" means "it is impossible that x", but "it is not necessary that x" means "it is possible that not-x"; and "it is obligatory that not-x" means "it is prohibited that x", but "it is not obligatory that x" means "it is permissible that x".
However, when it comes to assertions of straightforward truth and goodness, as opposed to the stronger notions of necessity and obligation, people suddenly lose the ability to think in such modal categories, if they ever had it at all. With necessity and obligation, we have four categories each: f(x), -f(x), f(-x), and -f(-x); those translating to necessity/contingency/impossibility/possibility and obligation/supererogatoriety/prohibition/permission, respectively. But when we speak of truth and goodness, these categories collapse: it -f(x), i.e. it's not true that x , we say f(-x), i.e. it's true that not x; and likewise with not-good being taken to mean good-not.
But that doesn't follow. While in the proper modal logics f(-x) does entail -f(x), the other way around is not so. It seems to me that we should use the same logic when speaking of straightforward truth and goodness too; just being non-true does not make something false (it could be nonsense or otherwise carry no truth value), even though being false makes something non-true; and just being non-good does not make something bad (it could be morally irrelevant), even though being bad makes something non-good. But most people don't seem to think in those terms; everything is either true or false, good or bad, no middle ground. (And before someone screams "principle of bivalence", note that using modal notation like this, you can express such concepts while keeping bivalent functionality in your logic).
Which brings us back on topic. The monkeys in this experiment were given the choice of red and blue and, choosing red but not-choosing blue (i.e. judging good(red) and not-good(blue)), in the same act chose not-blue (taking not-good(blue) to entail good(not-blue)), when they didn't logically have to to so. So later, presented with blue and green, they remained consistant with their earlier opinion that good(not-blue), when if they had been logical earlier they would have just seen a color they had not-chosen and another color they had not-chosen, rather than a color they had not-chosen and a color they had chosen-not.
I guess this kind of flaw runs pretty deep in the psyche, which explains why it pops up in human reasoning so often...
Greetings from sunny... er, smokey Southern California! We've got different seasons, honestly... there's Flooding, Sunny, Hot, and On Fire!
You know what that quote really reminds me of?
Microsoft's Longhorn and Blackcomb sound much like Apple's Copland and Gershwin of the mid 90s. Gershwin was supposed to be the big revision to the Mac OS plumbing; Copland was a stepping stone between classic System 7 and what the future of Mac OS was to become. Then Copland (OS 8) took so damn long it became the next big thing, and when "OS 8" (no longer Copland) was finally released it was little if anything at all of what was promised.
You know what Apple did to solve this dilemma? They switched over to a unix-based core, and concentrated their efforts on making a unix system plus all the advantages of their old proprietary system. Now, I know Microsoft's problems with Vista aren't quite the same as Apple's were with Copland, but the situation does seem to have a lot of parallels. Anyone else want to bet that MS may turn to BSD like Apple did, to get themselves out of their quagmire?
I guess what I'm asking is, what is it on *nixes that has so long kept most apps non-"portable"? Why isn't nearly everything "portable" by default?
What existing legal restrictions to simply USE software are there, that MS can waive with a license? I'm restricted by copyright law from copying it, and they can waive that restriction (perhaps only on certain conditions) if they like, thus licensing me to make copies. It is only because of copyright law that the notion of licensing someone to make copies even makes sense. But I'm already allowed to use it however I damn well please, so their allowed conditions of use aren't worth the pixels they're displayed via. What law says "you may not use software except as permitted by it use-right holder"? AFAIK there is no such law. I can't sell you a toaster over and stipulate that you may not make bagels in it; and you can't sell me a copy of some software and stipulate how I may or may not use it.
In Rocky Horror Picture Show productions, a common pre-show routine to get the audience's attention is to shout "Attitude check!", which is properly answered by a resounding "FUCK YOU!" from all the regulars. (There are also follow-ups such as "Hormone check!" - "FUCK ME!" and "Reality check!" - "WHAT THE FUCK!?", but the first is the best IMO).
This is just a generalization. Lots of guys behave in what I'm representing as the "female" mode, and there are a lot of women who pay as little or less attention to what you're saying as a guy would. Funny, in my experience it's exactly the opposite. Men listen to the actual words you say and take them at face value; women listen to your tone of voice and hear what they think you mean based on how you seem to feel, rather than what you literally say.
That too of course is a generalization, but it just goes to show, generalizations are like shits... anyone can make one and they usually stink.
As a simplistic example, consider 10 peasants vs 1 knight. That's why I had the qualifying assumption that no person differs significantly from the average in terms of his own personal power. Sure a knight is stronger and a better fighter than a peasant, and in that sense does have some greater degree of personal power, but for the most part his real, significant power only exists because the majority of people let the knights get away with (ab)using that power over the peasants. I'd say a straight fight between 10 peasants vs a knight might actually be in the peasants' favor, if they're all actually attacking the knight at once and trying to stop him from winning over any of the others. Sure, some of the peasants will probably die, but in the end the peasants will win.
The point of my original post was precisely that, in any decently large group of humans (large enough to average out the slight personal power differences), the majority of power does rest with the majority of people. The problem is always that that majority either neglects to exercise that power as necessary (preventing injustices committed by minority parties, be they petty criminals, organized gangs, or a king and his knights), or abuses that power (committing injustices themselves). For a society to be just, the majority of it's people must be just. There is no other way.
But your point stands in very small groups, where one individual or a minority party is truly able to dominate the rest of the people. So in the end, yes, what I'm saying is that the good of a society rests on the good of its majority power base; but I'm also saying that in societies of any significant size, the majority power base rests with the majority of the population, given that people are similar enough that differences are quickly diluted in groups, as they appear to be.
The problem with all this talk about who should or should not have law-making power is that it largely ignores the inescapable facts of who really *does* have the lawmaking power, and that those people will have that power regardless of what some piece of paper says. This is because said piece of paper's only real power is the power that the people themselves give it; thus, no matter what any law on paper says, the law in fact will be whatever the bulk of the people want it to be. This is of course assuming, as seems reasonable, that no one person holds disproportionate amounts of real personal power compared to others; that is, that one individual's advantages over others are by and large only the product of other individuals supporting or at least condoning the acts of the "powerful" individual. Even the absolute monarch of a great empire has no exceptional power if nobody believes that he has power, unless that monarch was truly a god with superhuman powers.
I consider myself an anarchist in just this sense. I don't call for the abolition of government or the state; I deny that any such thing as the state exists. There simply is no such entity. There's just a bunch of people. And in that sense, all societies are direct democracies. Representative democracies are just societies in which people generally grant their support or consent to "whatever that guy says" (their representative), rather than supporting particular issues themselves directly; and that may sometimes be a good thing, deferring to someone who you believe knows better than yourself, and the same exact thing happens when demagogues routinely sway the popular of a direct democracy. An absolute monarchy is just a society in which the majority grant their support or consent either directly to one individual, or to his agents (law enforcement); if the majority did not grant that support or consent, the monarch would be powerless.
So no matter what form of government people officially erect, in the end we are all, always, subject to the tyranny of the majority. And thus the only way we can change a society and the way it is governed for the better is to make its people morally better. Thus, the problem with *all* forms of government is that they rely on humans being fundamentally good; this problem is not unique to anarchism, communism and the like.
I agree that segregating the Internet into separate "internets" for particular countries is a bad idea; however, if other people want to have networks that operate in their native languages, who are we to tell them that they should stop that and be forced to use English instead? Wouldn't it be better to just make the Internet (the one that we have now, predominantly English) capable of supporting multiple languages, so that if and when people want to build networks in other languages, they're at least connectable to our internet, even if we can't type the domain names directly from our English keyboards? The alternatives are either making everyone build their networks in English, which WOULD be cultural imperialism, or ignoring the pressure for multilingual networks to the point that completely incompatible non-English alternatives spring up.
The world is already largely divided up by language. I doubt you (presumably a native English speaker in a predominantly English-speaking country) visit many Chinese websites written entirely in Chinese languages for Chinese speakers in China right now, even though their domains are written in 7-bit ASCII script like every other site on the Internet. This proposition won't make that any better, but it won't make it any worse either; and it holds the possibility of staving off the even worse alternative of completely separate, incompatible, non-ASCII "internets" springing up to meet the demands of these other peoples. At least with this multilingual system, an English site (with an ASCII domain) can link to a Chinese site (with a Hanzi domain). If China were to invent their own Hanzi-based DNS protocol, separate from our existing DNS protocol, not even that would be possible. Making our network multilingual actually prevents Balkanization more than it induces it.
I wasn't thinking of any case in particular, but that does clarify it. Apparently dances can be copyrighted.
Pardon me while I go copyright the Horizontal Mambo. and demand that only I and my designated partners be allowed to perform it... now there's a monopoly worth having.
But seriously, I recall hearing that dance choreography is a protected form of "intellectual property", but I can't for the life of me find anything on the internet about what laws specifically regulate it. Neither copyrights, nor patents, nor trademarks seem applicable. Can anyone shed some light on what the law says about obtaining exclusive monopolies on moving your body in a certain way?
Nobody questions whether a fetus is human. It is a member of our biological species, Homo sapiens; that question is easily settled. The question at hand is whether a fetus is a PERSON. Not all humans are necessarily people , and not all people are necessarily human. "What counts as a person?" is an important philosophical question, especially if you only extend moral rights and responsibility to things which count as people.
"When is it okay to kill another human?" is an equally fundamental question in this issue, but it's not *more* fundamental. Both questions must be answered to resolve the issue. You could have a clear answer as to whether a fetus is a person and still be unsure whether it's OK to kill it or not; or, like me, you could have a very clear answer as to when it's OK to kill a person, but be unsure whether a fetus counts as a person at all. If it doesn't, then your moral reasoning about people is irrelevant.
But beyond that, there is the further issue of "when is it OK to kill non-people?", or more generally "what are the moral rights of non-people?", which remains to be answered if you conclude that a fetus is not a person. To me, the issue of abortion and the rights of very young children is closely related to the issue of animal rights. I'm very clear about my stance on what's right and wrong with people, but less clear on the issue of what is or is not a person, and what rights (if any) non-people have. I'm having trouble finding a consistent philosophical position that would give normal infants (no abortion involved) the rights we usually grant them (e.g. infanticide is illegal) and not commit one to also being a strict vegetarian and hardcore pro-lifer.
That is, can you say "on the record, this is not officially legal advice", and then proceed to informally advise someone about the law with impunity? I mean, I imagine that I, a non-lawyer, could go look up the relevant law books and say "well according to the law (USC section foo article bar), blah blah blah, so if I were you I'd do such-and-such". In any informal, non-technical sense of the phrase, that's "legal advice" - I'm giving someone advice about the law, the same way I might offer relationship advice or car advice.
So can a lawyer do that and not be held any more liable than I would, provided he disclaim "this is not legal advice", in the technical sense of creating an attorney-client relationship? Or perhaps, conversely, could a layman like me be held as liable as a lawyer if I cite the law and make recommendations without such a disclaimer?
This woman had every right to wear that shirt, which was in fact not a bomb. However, she should have had the common sense to realize that it could easily be mistaken for a bomb, and that that would upset a lot of people in the airport. And while she was both stupid and rude to ignore the initial questioning (if she was indeed intentionally ignoring them and not just not paying attention), instead of just saying "it's an art piece" and possibly avoiding all the hassle, it's her right to say or not say what she wants, and her silence in itself should not constitute a threat - though it *may* be taken as suspicious activity worthy of investigation, given the circumstances.
In that vein, the police had every right, and indeed, the responsibility to stop her and make sure that she was not in fact carrying a bomb. That's what police are there for: to ask questions and investigate potentially dangerous situations. However, upon finding that the situation was not, in fact, dangerous, they should have let the suspect go. And though they're holding her on "hoax" charges, unless she claimed that it was a bomb, then that's just bull. It's not a hoax unless you meant to deceive; if just being deceived was grounds for calling "hoax", you could be arrested for anything just by the police playing stupid - "well *I* thought it was a bomb, how dare she fool me like that, she should have to pay". That's the only injustice in any of this. The rest is just stupidity.
In this case, the "suspected shoplifter" said that if he was really under suspicion, to call the cops, otherwise he is free to leave. The store did not, and instead detained him, at which point HE called the police. Then insult was added to injury when the police demanded he provide proof of identity, AFTER determining that he was in the right, which they're not allowed to do, though they can ask you to identify yourself, i.e. state your name. In other words "It looks like you're OK, and these shopkeepers were wrong to detain you; your papers, please".
The outrage is that everyone is a "suspected shoplifter" automatically, expected to prove that they're not stealing on their way out the door, without any prior evidence that they are shoplifting, and saying "no" to this search is *counted* as evidence. Then, the same issue on a larger scale, the police demanding something from an innocent person that they have no right to demand, and then taking that refusal as suspicious evidence worthy of arrest itself.
This is EXACTLY what the 5th Amendment was meant to protect against: people being held automatically under suspicion, and refusing to comply with an unwarranted search counting as evidence warranting the search. It's like being arrested for "resisting arrest" alone - what was I being arrested for that I was resisting? Refusing a warranted search is wrong; but refusing a search alone should not be grounds for a search, otherwise anyone could search you whenever they wanted on no grounds whatsoever, and either you comply willingly, or your refusal justifies force. That's not right.
Or would you like to have to pay for a construction crew to come out and bury new cables whenever you want to switch to a upstart new provider? That's kind of an insurmountable barrier to entry there, if you ask me. Might as well make USP and FedEx build their own roads...
They probably (A) all read the same threads, being old-schoolers from the days when Slashdot was (so I've heard) far more focused on tech issues, and (B) have many of each other marked as Friends, possibly with +1 bonuses, so they pop out of the noise to each other.
I too am not fond of using an umbrella term for these things, especially "intellectual property", as like Spun I think it lends too much of an air of moral legitimacy to it. (Someone infringing on another person's government-granted distribution monopoly isn't something people get too riled up about; but someone STEALING another person's intellectual PROPERTY, well, that's just plain wrong!). I was just suggesting that, if we're going to have an umbrella term, keeping the "intellectual" part of it isn't so bad... it's the "property" part that's really askew from reality.
If 'thought monopoly' doesn't work for you, how about 'expression monopoly?' That is an accurate superset term. I'd actually say that "intellectual" is an apt descriptor, as all these things relate to the expression of ideas; ideas being the subject of all intellectual activities. So how's about "intellectual monopoly"? A monopoly on the communication or implementation of certain ideas. Sound similar enough to "intellectual property" that it might catch on, like "Digital Restrictions Management". I might start using it myself...