Wrong. I mentioned robots for a reason. The speech produced is controlled by algorithms, by random numbers, and by protocol interactions. There is no human in the loop anywhere.
Sorry that's incorrect. There are many examples of autonomous robots doing speech. For example, bots in chatrooms, machines producing spam messages designed to pass through filters, etc.
Speech is no longer th esole province of human beings.
Robots and devices have made speech in the past and do so now more than ever. Each time you use Google for example, you're exposed to robotically generated speech in both a narrow and a wider sense.
They are. They are advertising that $CELEBRITY is wearing their clothes. If they were advertising their clothes only, one would expect to see pictures of the clothes laid out on a display stand, or on a plastic mannequin at worst.
What matters to people is that "$CELEBRITY is wearing the clothes", which is the argument for buying the clothes, at it means the customer is "wearing the same clothes as $CELEBRITY". Even showing off clothes on a plastic mannequin is actually implying that the clothes are fit for human beings to wear, which in an of itself is a stronger statement than simply advertising the clothes themselves.
In any event, any photoshopped picture of a human being goes against truth in advertising for the simple reason that it is a lie: the actual depicted scene doesn't exist in the real world, yet tries to convince people that it is a real scene depicting whatever.
They
refer to Kim Dotcom as a "celebrity hacker and internet entrepreneur". He was
a career criminal who made a living by deliberately charging for access to
content that he didn't own, and didn't create, nor have any license or
agreement in place to distribute. Hardly an entrepreneur.
Blah blah blah. I hate to break it to you, but he's as much an entrepreneur as the Google guys were around when they started. What, you think a search engine owns all the content you can access through their search page? And yet, they charge you through forcing ads down your throat, and through selling your private browsing behaviour to third parties.
Welcome to the Internet in 2012. Kim Dotcom is just an average internet entrepreneur, but I guess he's not an American darling.
It's true that *abstractly*, any computer system has bugs and
vulnerabilities, and if you attach it to an untrusted network and if
this network has a lot of malware that targets the system then
compromises will happen, in direct proportion to the quantity of
malware in circulation and the number of bugs and vulnerabilities in
said system, which itself is proportional to the amount of code etc.
But having said that, malware is not very smart or adaptable and this has nothing to do with the profit motive: every
tiny change in a target system requires a rewrite or an addition to
the malware code, and the more additions there are the bigger and
more conspicuous the malware becomes, which makes it easier to recognize.
That's why patching systems is effective, the malware is too dumb to smoothly react to the unexpected. It's also why predominantly Microsoft and to some extent Apple systems are more vulnerable than Linux systems. Microsoft OSes are hyper identical (available APIs, installed software, etc), so malware can be quite dumb and still be successful. Apple systems are a monoculture too. But OSes that come in kits and have lots of alternative subsystems that must be configured by users/owners, like Linux, are inherently safer. The malware just has too many variations to consider when it tries to invade. Note that systems like Android are also more vulnerable, like Apple systems, because the needs of user friendliness and unified user experience result in monoculture again.
And thats where the commercial/consumer world is shooting itself in the foot.
As the installed base grows, the cluster of identical machines grows at the same rate. Whereas in the more chaotic world of Linux/*BSD, the total installed base can grow but it's ok to fracture into alternative distros and flavours, and it suffices for the number of incompatible alternative clusters to grow at the same rate as the total installed OS base, so you can have more and more clusters which are all of a limited size and any malware can only affect one or two clusters at a time.
What kind of fool of a company would Google be if it DIDN'T exploit every
tool the government gives it to minimize it's tax burden?
Since when does being no fool imply being no villain? Aren't the greatest villains dangerous because they *aren't* fools?
Google is not the villain here. No company is, when it's simply exercising
the controls given to it by the government under which it operates.
What if the taxation loopholes are mistakes and unintended imperfections in the laws? Then a company exploiting those loopholes isn't simply exercising rights given by the government, but defrauding the government via technicalities.
What if, however it comes about, the intention that companies pay a reasonable fraction of their earnings in tax is compared with the reality that some companies pay a negligible fraction only? Then the obvious conclusion that something evil and condemnable is going on applies.
So the only thing
that will change is that the person grabbing your balls will wear a different
logo on his shirt--and answer only to a private company.
If a private person is grabbing your balls and you smack him good in the teeth as a result, isn't that better than if an official does that and you get jailed for assaulting an officer of the law?
That's silly. The jurors are _supposed_ to decide from their own conscience. If one of them is an expert already and has a bias, there's nothing wrong with that and in fact it's great, because it means that his point of view is going to be represented among the twelve.
The jurors are supposed to be representative (and chosen randomly) from the population at large, so if in the population 1% of people are experts with a certain bias, then they should be represented with approximately that frequency in juries deliberating on that subject.
It's much like that Finnish Internet blacklist. It's there to protect the
citizens against the evils of child pornography, but no-one except for the
maintainers of the list knows what's actually on it, because its contents is
itself forbidden for distribution as CP. So in practice the list can have any
random website on it.
There is no blacklist on Nazi facts. The facts are on the ground in Germany for all to see. What is forbidden is to glorify the Nazis, or propose Nazi political ideas as legitimate, etc.
This is like if the Finnish Internet blacklist is completely publically viewable, but the owners of the blacklisted websites cannot make money from Finnish commerce, and cannot make proposals to add or remove new items on the list.
Same here. Suppose I do use deductive reasoning, investigate the facts, and
come to some conclusion that you don't like. You then call me a Nazi and
exclude me from the decision making process. You can also do it to anyone who
tries to use deductive reasoning etc to determine whether your pronouncement
of me as a Nazi was valid in the first place.
Not at all. If you investigate and come to the conclusion that 6 million Jews weren't murdered, then I don't need to look closely at your reasoning to be sure you have made a mistake somewhere. But if you investigate and find that one person's grandfather was accused of being a Nazi and wasn't, then your investigation is worth publishing so that many people can read and verify your work.
Calling people Nazis on the internet during a discussion is not the same as having laws to ban holocaust denial. Some facts are so well established that it's obvious that people who dispute them have an agenda. Most facts aren't nearly so well understood, and there are no laws that apply. Somebody like David Irving can write and say all sorts of things for many years without it being clear what his true motivation is. However, sooner or later, if he is a Nazi sympathizer, he will say something grossly incorrect and stand by it, and he will get identified and caught as a result. That is what happened to him.
The
fundamental problem here is the ability to complete exclude a group of people
from discourse.
You can't have that ability while guaranteeing that it will
always be used against the "right" group (i.e. the one that you personally
want to see excluded)
You're overgeneralizing. If you replace Nazis with Hippies and war crimes with free love, you can criticize the idea of not letting Hippies fuck and have long hair, but it's an irrelevant generalization. The facts matter. Nazis aren't Hippies, and war crimes aren't free love, and laws intended to prevent Nazism from gaining legitimacy don't make sense for Hippies.
There is no Nazi detector, there are simply a number of red lines which are far from the mainstream, and if anyone crosses those lines (holocaust denial, public Nazi worship, creating a Nazi party, etc), then it is beyond reasonable doubt that they are promoting Nazism. It is very easy for secret Nazis to stay far away from those red lines, but it is frustrating for them because the lines also prevent the Nazis from rehabilitation and having public influence. Sooner or later, frustrated secret Nazis become careless and cross the lines, and are caught.
You have just substituted one problem with another.
What problem would that be?
Now you're saying that Nazis shouldn't be allowed.
I've been saying that all along. That's the German law, and also the law in France, Austria, Italy, etc. There are places like America where Nazis are allowed, but so what?
Who decides who is a Nazi and who is not? How can
I verify that their decision is indeed correct?
Precisely as I explained. You use deductive reasoning and investigate the facts. Anybody can do it, that's one of the principles of the Enlightenment.
discussion is nessisary. The only reason inteleligent design in schools
causes issues is because it keeps the actual facts from being known.
Likewise, supressing stuff like this book, or discussion on why the Nazi's
did what they did, or why they felt it was justified, keeps discussion from
explaining WHY what they did was NOT justified.
I don't know why you think there isn't precisely this sort of discussion in Germany. Those questions are standard topics in high schools, etc.
The German laws ban the Nazi party (so that Nazis can't make laws or enter government), collection and selling or displaying of Nazi memorabilia (so that Nazis can't make money to fund activities, or build public shrines to Hitler), and holocaust denial (so that Nazis can't lie about the past, and pollute the known facts with untruths, which can always be debunked eventually but cause damage nevertheless, kind of like spam).
None of this impacts learning from the past. To learn from the past you look at and discuss the facts, which occurs in schools, in the media, in museums, etc.
There are no facts to be gained from modern Nazis themselves (all the original ones are dead), but allowing a Nazi party to exist legitimately today is much too dangerous for society.
There's a good point in there but you're not expressing it. People certainly are allowed to, and encouraged to, approach the facts from a critical point of view, but it isn't something that requires or is helped by Nazis being explicit discussants.
What does it mean to approach facts from a critical point of view? It means applying the rules of logic, the methods of science and deductive reasoning to a set of (purported) facts and investigating them for yourself. These standard methods are well known and widely taught today, and anybody can apply them correctly with training. In particular, being Nazi or not is irrelevant, one either follows the standard of reasoning, or one doesn't.
And that is why Nazis aren't needed to represent their "side". The facts can be investigated and discussed rationally, the evidence can be collected and inspected, the ruins and museums can be visited, by most everybody.
What are you talking about? Where do you see a mob? And why do you allude to historical facts about Nazism in quotation marks? You're not making sense.
Nonsense. There's no ruling party. There are facts, and people can say what they like provided the facts are accepted. That's how rational societies progress.
The facts about Nazism have long been settled and must be taught as they are, and discussed without denying them. They are not subject to interpretation or ideology, and that is the basis for the analogy with intelligent design.
It's a false principle to give Nazis a voice as if their point of view is valuable - they only use that voice to spread lies: that the concentration camps didn't exist or didn't exterminate people, that Hitler was misunderstood, that Nazism is really an ideology of peace, etc. (And that's perfectly logical, since that's the only way they can rehabilitate and gain adherents in the open, ie listen to us we're misunderstood).
The quote attributed to Voltaire makes sense for contrary points of view and beliefs that aren't settled, but never applies to known facts. "The truth brooks no compromise" applies to Nazism.
There's nothing knee-jerk about the German policy. It's easy for Americans to pretend to be superior and allow "free" speech to extremist minorities when there's no chance that they can be taken seriously nation-wide, but the Nazi and fascist ideologies have been *proven* to be dangerous and *proven* to be realistic alternatives if given the chance to spread.
The idea that Germany isn't allowing discussion of the Nazi past is ridiculous. The only thing it isn't allowing is the Nazi side a free voice in the matter, but there are plenty of discussions about Nazism and everything related.
For slashdotters, the closest present analogy is probably the teaching of intelligent design in schools. The intelligent designers should *not* be given a voice in the school science curriculum, as doing so 1) legitimizes their delusion, and 2) it confuses school children on the *actual known facts*.
Similarly, giving the Nazis a free voice in Germany would lead to lies being spread as fact, thereby confusing people and weakening the historical consensus in the public mind.
No, there is, and there should continue to be, plenty of discussion of Nazism. However, the Nazis themselves and their sympathisers don't deserve a place in that discussion. They can rot on the sidelines - they lost the war, and that is part of the penalty - it's still better than being "disappeared" or shot in the night, which is what they did with minorities who didn't think like them.
Heh. I'm guessing you don't have a PhD? A lot of us here on slashdot have them, and we also remember what the other grad students earning their PhDs were like during that time...
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. I mentioned robots for a reason. The speech produced is controlled by algorithms, by random numbers, and by protocol interactions. There is no human in the loop anywhere.
Speech is no longer th esole province of human beings.
That's not actually true.
Robots and devices have made speech in the past and do so now more than ever. Each time you use Google for example, you're exposed to robotically generated speech in both a narrow and a wider sense.
They are. They are advertising that $CELEBRITY is wearing their clothes. If they were advertising their clothes only, one would expect to see pictures of the clothes laid out on a display stand, or on a plastic mannequin at worst.
What matters to people is that "$CELEBRITY is wearing the clothes", which is the argument for buying the clothes, at it means the customer is "wearing the same clothes as $CELEBRITY". Even showing off clothes on a plastic mannequin is actually implying that the clothes are fit for human beings to wear, which in an of itself is a stronger statement than simply advertising the clothes themselves.
In any event, any photoshopped picture of a human being goes against truth in advertising for the simple reason that it is a lie: the actual depicted scene doesn't exist in the real world, yet tries to convince people that it is a real scene depicting whatever.
Blah blah blah. I hate to break it to you, but he's as much an entrepreneur as the Google guys were around when they started. What, you think a search engine owns all the content you can access through their search page? And yet, they charge you through forcing ads down your throat, and through selling your private browsing behaviour to third parties.
Welcome to the Internet in 2012. Kim Dotcom is just an average internet entrepreneur, but I guess he's not an American darling.
It's true that *abstractly*, any computer system has bugs and vulnerabilities, and if you attach it to an untrusted network and if this network has a lot of malware that targets the system then compromises will happen, in direct proportion to the quantity of malware in circulation and the number of bugs and vulnerabilities in said system, which itself is proportional to the amount of code etc.
But having said that, malware is not very smart or adaptable and this has nothing to do with the profit motive: every tiny change in a target system requires a rewrite or an addition to the malware code, and the more additions there are the bigger and more conspicuous the malware becomes, which makes it easier to recognize.
That's why patching systems is effective, the malware is too dumb to smoothly react to the unexpected. It's also why predominantly Microsoft and to some extent Apple systems are more vulnerable than Linux systems. Microsoft OSes are hyper identical (available APIs, installed software, etc), so malware can be quite dumb and still be successful. Apple systems are a monoculture too. But OSes that come in kits and have lots of alternative subsystems that must be configured by users/owners, like Linux, are inherently safer. The malware just has too many variations to consider when it tries to invade. Note that systems like Android are also more vulnerable, like Apple systems, because the needs of user friendliness and unified user experience result in monoculture again.
And thats where the commercial/consumer world is shooting itself in the foot. As the installed base grows, the cluster of identical machines grows at the same rate. Whereas in the more chaotic world of Linux/*BSD, the total installed base can grow but it's ok to fracture into alternative distros and flavours, and it suffices for the number of incompatible alternative clusters to grow at the same rate as the total installed OS base, so you can have more and more clusters which are all of a limited size and any malware can only affect one or two clusters at a time.
Since when does being no fool imply being no villain? Aren't the greatest villains dangerous because they *aren't* fools?
What if the taxation loopholes are mistakes and unintended imperfections in the laws? Then a company exploiting those loopholes isn't simply exercising rights given by the government, but defrauding the government via technicalities.
What if, however it comes about, the intention that companies pay a reasonable fraction of their earnings in tax is compared with the reality that some companies pay a negligible fraction only? Then the obvious conclusion that something evil and condemnable is going on applies.
If a private person is grabbing your balls and you smack him good in the teeth as a result, isn't that better than if an official does that and you get jailed for assaulting an officer of the law?
You're probably not a Calvinist, or you wouldn't propose such a controversial interpretation.
*tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*
ZZ
vi more_code.cpp *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*
ZZ
vi extra_code.cpp *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*
ZZ
firefox http://www.slashdot.org/
INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! AUTOMATIC LOGOUT AND SHUTDOWN IN PROGRESS!
The jurors are supposed to be representative (and chosen randomly) from the population at large, so if in the population 1% of people are experts with a certain bias, then they should be represented with approximately that frequency in juries deliberating on that subject.
No he won't. But that's ok, because you're a sinner, and so you deserve all the viruses you're getting.
(*) That would be somewhat like saying Feynman was the father of calculus.
There is no blacklist on Nazi facts. The facts are on the ground in Germany for all to see. What is forbidden is to glorify the Nazis, or propose Nazi political ideas as legitimate, etc.
This is like if the Finnish Internet blacklist is completely publically viewable, but the owners of the blacklisted websites cannot make money from Finnish commerce, and cannot make proposals to add or remove new items on the list.
Not at all. If you investigate and come to the conclusion that 6 million Jews weren't murdered, then I don't need to look closely at your reasoning to be sure you have made a mistake somewhere. But if you investigate and find that one person's grandfather was accused of being a Nazi and wasn't, then your investigation is worth publishing so that many people can read and verify your work.
Calling people Nazis on the internet during a discussion is not the same as having laws to ban holocaust denial. Some facts are so well established that it's obvious that people who dispute them have an agenda. Most facts aren't nearly so well understood, and there are no laws that apply. Somebody like David Irving can write and say all sorts of things for many years without it being clear what his true motivation is. However, sooner or later, if he is a Nazi sympathizer, he will say something grossly incorrect and stand by it, and he will get identified and caught as a result. That is what happened to him.
You're overgeneralizing. If you replace Nazis with Hippies and war crimes with free love, you can criticize the idea of not letting Hippies fuck and have long hair, but it's an irrelevant generalization. The facts matter. Nazis aren't Hippies, and war crimes aren't free love, and laws intended to prevent Nazism from gaining legitimacy don't make sense for Hippies.
There is no Nazi detector, there are simply a number of red lines which are far from the mainstream, and if anyone crosses those lines (holocaust denial, public Nazi worship, creating a Nazi party, etc), then it is beyond reasonable doubt that they are promoting Nazism. It is very easy for secret Nazis to stay far away from those red lines, but it is frustrating for them because the lines also prevent the Nazis from rehabilitation and having public influence. Sooner or later, frustrated secret Nazis become careless and cross the lines, and are caught.
What problem would that be?
I've been saying that all along. That's the German law, and also the law in France, Austria, Italy, etc. There are places like America where Nazis are allowed, but so what?
Precisely as I explained. You use deductive reasoning and investigate the facts. Anybody can do it, that's one of the principles of the Enlightenment.
I don't know why you think there isn't precisely this sort of discussion in Germany. Those questions are standard topics in high schools, etc.
The German laws ban the Nazi party (so that Nazis can't make laws or enter government), collection and selling or displaying of Nazi memorabilia (so that Nazis can't make money to fund activities, or build public shrines to Hitler), and holocaust denial (so that Nazis can't lie about the past, and pollute the known facts with untruths, which can always be debunked eventually but cause damage nevertheless, kind of like spam).
None of this impacts learning from the past. To learn from the past you look at and discuss the facts, which occurs in schools, in the media, in museums, etc. There are no facts to be gained from modern Nazis themselves (all the original ones are dead), but allowing a Nazi party to exist legitimately today is much too dangerous for society.
What does it mean to approach facts from a critical point of view? It means applying the rules of logic, the methods of science and deductive reasoning to a set of (purported) facts and investigating them for yourself. These standard methods are well known and widely taught today, and anybody can apply them correctly with training. In particular, being Nazi or not is irrelevant, one either follows the standard of reasoning, or one doesn't.
And that is why Nazis aren't needed to represent their "side". The facts can be investigated and discussed rationally, the evidence can be collected and inspected, the ruins and museums can be visited, by most everybody.
What are you talking about? Where do you see a mob? And why do you allude to historical facts about Nazism in quotation marks? You're not making sense.
Nonsense. There's no ruling party. There are facts, and people can say what they like provided the facts are accepted. That's how rational societies progress.
In the case of Nazism, the Second World War decided who was right and wrong. The Nazis were wrong.
Right. It's somewhat like framing then?
It's a false principle to give Nazis a voice as if their point of view is valuable - they only use that voice to spread lies: that the concentration camps didn't exist or didn't exterminate people, that Hitler was misunderstood, that Nazism is really an ideology of peace, etc. (And that's perfectly logical, since that's the only way they can rehabilitate and gain adherents in the open, ie listen to us we're misunderstood).
The quote attributed to Voltaire makes sense for contrary points of view and beliefs that aren't settled, but never applies to known facts. "The truth brooks no compromise" applies to Nazism.
Yes, that's sometimes called the "Overton window".
There's nothing knee-jerk about the German policy. It's easy for Americans to pretend to be superior and allow "free" speech to extremist minorities when there's no chance that they can be taken seriously nation-wide, but the Nazi and fascist ideologies have been *proven* to be dangerous and *proven* to be realistic alternatives if given the chance to spread.
The idea that Germany isn't allowing discussion of the Nazi past is ridiculous. The only thing it isn't allowing is the Nazi side a free voice in the matter, but there are plenty of discussions about Nazism and everything related.
For slashdotters, the closest present analogy is probably the teaching of intelligent design in schools. The intelligent designers should *not* be given a voice in the school science curriculum, as doing so 1) legitimizes their delusion, and 2) it confuses school children on the *actual known facts*.
Similarly, giving the Nazis a free voice in Germany would lead to lies being spread as fact, thereby confusing people and weakening the historical consensus in the public mind.
No, there is, and there should continue to be, plenty of discussion of Nazism. However, the Nazis themselves and their sympathisers don't deserve a place in that discussion. They can rot on the sidelines - they lost the war, and that is part of the penalty - it's still better than being "disappeared" or shot in the night, which is what they did with minorities who didn't think like them.
Heh. I'm guessing you don't have a PhD? A lot of us here on slashdot have them, and we also remember what the other grad students earning their PhDs were like during that time...