If the UK evicted its Muslim immigrants, and gave up trying to occupy Northern Ireland, wouldn't that lower the threat level enough for these measures to be easily repealed?
No. First, the Muslim terrorists we've had problems with mostly weren't immigrants, they were born in Britain. Second, the north of Ireland isn't a significant terrorist threat any more, since most of the terrorists are now in the regional government; a couple of splinter factions have taken to shooting people again lately, but for practical purposes they're almost beneath contempt. Third, if you think for one moment this is really about terrorism then I've got a tower in Paris to sell you.
Who would have thought that willingly giving up one right would have set the precedent for the Government taking away other rights?
Any particular right you have in mind there? I can't quite see your argument here. There's been a gradual erosion of civil liberties throughout the last decade or so, but I can't think of a single major breakthrough that led to all of the rest.
Probably the best way to do this would be on a per-connection basis. If your 30 connections to some bit-torrent swarm are using most of your bandwidth, they can be throttled but the short-lived http connections to slashdot.org (who reads that anyway?) can run at full burst speed, expiring before the throttle timer kicks in.
Good plan. I like that plan.
* sets to work reprogramming BitTorrent to disconnect and immediately reconnect peers at random every couple of minutes *
Is there a torrent anywhere of the netbook remix? I'm downloading that from Canonical UK at the moment and it's not exactly quick. There seem to be torrents for every other release, but not that one. Oversight?
No indeed. It's called a staging-post. It's where a stagecoach would stop, and rather than waiting until the horses were fed and watered and well rested, they'd simply drop off the horses there and take fresh horses for the next stage of their journey.
Remember when BioWare had Obsidian develop the sequel to KOTOR and ended up with an unfinished clone of the original?
It was more of an unfinished clone of Planescape: Torment IN SPAAAAAAAAACE. Which isn't such a bad thing. Soon enough we might even get to play through the HK-50 factory and see proper endings, too... although occasionally I wonder whether TSLRP or Duke Nukem Forever will actually release first.
A caveat to the Vatican, they may find the Italian monopoly of the export market leads to some thin margins
European power grids are all quite heavily interconnected these days, and the big issue if you're getting into this market is France. They went for nuclear power in a big way, and now have an absolutely colossal generating capacity which is usually far more than the country uses. They sell the surplus to their neighbours: I think Britain, Germany and Italy all have 'buy surplus from the French' as a significant slice of their respective national energy budgets.
So there's going to be a market all right. Italy needs electricity, and if the Vatican undercuts the French then the Italians will buy up all of the holy power first, and only then start buying from EDF. Not a problem. Trouble is, the peak power from a solar cell is in the summer - just the time when everybody's lightbulbs and central heating systems spend most of the time off, and energy is as cheap as it ever gets...
The only way the Catholic Church is worth a hundred billion of anything is when you calculate its worth in Lira.
In theory, the Church is enormously rich. Most of that wealth isn't saleable, though. How would you put a price on the Sistine Chapel, or St Mark's basilica? And of the properties that could be sold - what's the total price of every one of who knows how many parish church buildings?
If the organisation were to be liquidated, the final sum would be colossal. But you're right in saying that the actual wealth of the Church isn't so huge. All those glorious buildings are financial liabilities, with scaffolding endlessly going up and down to patch them up against the wear of the centuries. As the richer nations become more and more secular, there are fewer and fewer pennies in plates around the world. The amount of money available for day-to-day operations and for projects such as this one is certainly large - this is a global organisation with well over a billion nominal members, after all - but it's not the legendarily huge treasure that is sometimes imagined.
So what the fuck is your point? Mine is simple: if you don't like how something is made, then don't use it. People who decry stem cell research should not be permitted the benefits of the research.
Ah, I apologise. I assumed you would object to the medical experimentation on prisoners in death camps during the war. If you do not object to such experimentation, then certainly you can enjoy the benefits thereof with a clear conscience. If you did object to a fascist regime deliberately freezing members of minority groups to see how it damaged them, then by your own argument you should not be allowed to benefit from the resulting treatments: but clearly you don't. My mistake.
Personally, I object vehemently to such experimentation, but would still gladly accept its benefits should I ever be found half-frozen somewhere. Therefore I find I cannot in good conscience tell those who object to experimentation on embryos or animals that they should refuse the resulting treatments, when I would not refuse treatments that derive from Holocaust experiments.
I just don't see how taking the life of an embryo so that the older or sick can keep on living is anything other than vampirisim (in a loose sense of the word, or course).
It's just yuck factor, you'll get over it. It comes with a lot of new medical advances. When the first live organ transplants were done people thought of Dr Frankenstein and Igor cackling over the patchwork man on the slab. Blood transfusion similarly met with superstitious opposition, which survives in some sects to this day. And going back further, you should take a look at some of the cartoons commenting on the first vaccinations. People move on pretty quickly once they see the benefits.
And I think that anyone who is opposed to embryonic stem cell research should not be allowed to have this treatment, should they need it and testing proves it successful.
So if you're opposed to the manner in which the research was done, you shouldn't be allowed to benefit from the resulting medical treatment? Interesting. Well, I hope that if you're ever rescued from some mountainside with severe frostbite and hypothermia, you won't mind being allowed to die. Because an awful lot of our knowledge of how the human body responds to extreme cold originates from research done by the German military, the better to treat their casualties on the Eastern front. I'll give you one guess where they got their research subjects.
Isn't the issue here the cavalier attitude that being able to fight wars with out cost will engender. The idea of the citizen soldier was born specifically because when a society had no personal investment in a conflict they became endemic.
Depends what you want to do. You couldn't fight a war like the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with drones alone - those are wars of occupation, with large numbers of infantry on the ground. The advantage comes with conflicts like those we saw from time to time in the 1990s: faction A (we like) are fighting faction B (we don't like), but we lack the will for a proper war, so we just bomb faction B's facilities and units and let faction A take advantage. That's the kind of situation where drones would be wonderful. Mind you, I don't think the risk to pilots is a major deterrent to our leaders in that case: it's more a matter of how the scenes of devastation on the ground will play with the voters, and those are the same whether it's a human or a drone that did it.
See Also: The mercenary wars fought in late medieval Europe.
According to Machiavelli, the problem with those wasn't so much that the availability of mercenaries let leaders go to war with less risk to their own people: it was that the mercenaries themselves were unreliable and disloyal. For a start they'd fight only for their pay, and so their stomach for a losing battle was considerably less; and if the mercenaries won their battle, then whatever lands had been conquered were held by the triumphant prince only so long as he kept the loyalty of the mercenaries. Whose price, of course, just went steeply upward. Better, he said, to triumph by your own arms. This, at least, is not a problem with machines, which will happily sacrifice themselves for you, more willingly than even the most jingoistic soldier.
We need manned aircraft right now, and the F-15 is not only good enough, it's far far more than good enough.
Not necessarily. The US isn't going to sell anybody any F-22s. But the European nations are selling Typhoons to every friendly nation that has the money. And history shows us that a friendly nation today can be distinctly hostile tomorrow: that's how come there are F-14s in the Iranian air force. Skip the F-22, and some day the US might find itself going up with F-15s against Typhoons, and that's a bloody dangerous thing to be doing. F-22 represents a clear advantage over any rival aircraft of any nation for the foreseeable future, and that's what the Pentagon pays the big money for.
I expect that the F-22 will be the last of the breed - the high water mark of the fighter jet family, rarely used, and sidelined in its own lifetime by cheaper robot drones. This century's Mallard train. But in the meantime it might just turn out to be worth having.
You strike me as the type of person who would become a doctor and then refuse to perform abortions because it was against your "morals".
Nonsense. He's the type of person who had the ability to become a doctor, but would refuse to do so if it would come with the expectation that he would perform abortions, and so instead found a different line of work. That's a perfectly morally acceptable way to behave.
And he asks a worthwhile question too. It's similar to the question often asked of defence lawyers as to how they can defend people they know to be guilty. If you're a programmer of weapons systems, how does that sit with your conscience? Especially unmanned warplanes: while the current generation are remotely controlled by some guy with a joystick, future models are expected to be fully autonomous - which means that somebody, somewhere, right now, is working on the AI code to control them. AI code to make decisions as to whether to fire weapons. AI code to decide whether to kill somebody.
How can that person sleep at night? Since there's a realistic possibility that such a person is reading/., the question's well worth asking, and the answers could well be very interesting and illuminating.
Yes, I think UAV's will eventually be the planes of the future, but you still need manned aircraft for a while. With a UAV, you have no environmental system for a pilot, plane can out turn (G's) one with a pilot, and most importantly, you don't put the pilots life at risk.
I can't imagine why anybody would build another fighter jet after the F-22. I mean, yes, in terms of performance and stealth and all that it's every flyboy's wet dream. But the Battle of Britain was seventy years ago, and the days of heroic pilots taking each other on in exciting single combat are long gone. Planes now are just missile launch platforms, and the contest between them mostly a matter of getting the first radar lock and then letting rip; is it not therefore better to use cheap mass-produced drones for that task, rather than risking some technological masterwork and the colossal ego behind the stick over hostile territory?
So we'll be having parades of unmanned planes on trailers going down streets on Veterans Day? Salute our brave button pushers.
Works for me. You may like wars to be about heroism and patriotism and motherhood and apple pie and dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that bullshit, but I prefer them to be won, as quickly as possible, and with as few people getting hurt as possible. If that can be achieved by using robots instead of humans, that's just fine.
I'm looking for a well written and researched piece that can tell me why TPB and other such sites are good for society, not some crap "I just want stuff for free" argument. I mean, a lot of justifications I've seen for what they're doing are based around legal arguments (some would say loopholes). I'm actually more interested in the ethical side of things. Why is making it easy for people to steal ethical?
Thought experiment for you:
I have invented a Star Trek replicator. Given the right pattern, it can create any physical object. Given a physical object, it can scan it and record the pattern to make more. I manufacture a great many replicators, which I distribute worldwide, and I set up a website where users can upload the patterns they've scanned.
Is this a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing? Suppose that instead of going to a shop and buying a pair of shoes, I download a pattern that somebody else scanned and replicate a pair: have I stolen something, since I haven't paid anybody for them? Is the world richer, or poorer, for my creation of an extra pair of shoes in it?
I would say that the creation of useful goods from thin air at near-zero cost is a terrifically good thing, and would make the world a far richer and happier place. Even though it would instantly make a lot of people's businesses obsolete.
Same goes for music. I realise you didn't want an 'I just want stuff for free' argument, but that's what it boils down to. We don't have replicators for material goods yet, but we do have replicators for information, and the reasoning is just the same.
When you get wounded, your team mates have to transport you to a hospital or you die. When you have been mortally wounded, you die anyway. When you're dead, all your $49.95 software shows from then on is a cross on a military graveyard. You have to buy another copy to join the game again. If you don't fight, you can go to concerts and strip shows and hang out with your friends. I wonder how much fighting would be going on in that game.
Funnily enough, quite a lot. Dulce et decorum est and all that. People just will keep buying the Old Lie every single time it gets told.
On the other hand killing an soldier of US or GB army, even in a video game, seems to be... well, another story.
Is that because gamers are a jingoistic bunch who wouldn't want to shoot their own side? Or is it just that the British and Americans mostly won their wars, and games tend to cast the player as part of the winning side?
I'm actually surprised there aren't more games where you play a guerrilla or terrorist, especially with the current topical interest in the whole subject. There was a rather good strategy game I picked up long ago called 'Central Intelligence' in which your job is to organise a revolution on behalf of the CIA in some banana republic. Set up safe houses, establish contacts with sympathisers in the media and among the student radicals, organise a leaflet campaign, put up propaganda posters, raid the quarry and steal explosives, send a letter bomb to the chief of police... Wonderful idea, but crippled by a terribly clumsy interface.
There's got to be a market for this. 'Freedom Fighter' - play as Lenin, Collins, Mao, de Gaulle, Guevara, Khomeini! Overthrow the corrupt puppet government of the oppressors! Establish liberty and justice for the common people! Intimidate and beat up collaborators! Execute informers! Blow up police stations!
If a wide enough opening is made in the mountains between California and other desert states would it bring good climate change? If Arizona, Nevada, etc could be made lush I'd nuke 'em.
It'll never work, Lex. Superman will be able to stop both missiles, don't fool yourself. Go back to the cake plan - no one is looking.
Slashdot Mirror
No. First, the Muslim terrorists we've had problems with mostly weren't immigrants, they were born in Britain. Second, the north of Ireland isn't a significant terrorist threat any more, since most of the terrorists are now in the regional government; a couple of splinter factions have taken to shooting people again lately, but for practical purposes they're almost beneath contempt. Third, if you think for one moment this is really about terrorism then I've got a tower in Paris to sell you.
Any particular right you have in mind there? I can't quite see your argument here. There's been a gradual erosion of civil liberties throughout the last decade or so, but I can't think of a single major breakthrough that led to all of the rest.
Good plan. I like that plan.
* sets to work reprogramming BitTorrent to disconnect and immediately reconnect peers at random every couple of minutes *
Or PERHAPS he should try WRITING scripts for SUPERHERO COMICS.
Is there a torrent anywhere of the netbook remix? I'm downloading that from Canonical UK at the moment and it's not exactly quick. There seem to be torrents for every other release, but not that one. Oversight?
No indeed. It's called a staging-post. It's where a stagecoach would stop, and rather than waiting until the horses were fed and watered and well rested, they'd simply drop off the horses there and take fresh horses for the next stage of their journey.
It was more of an unfinished clone of Planescape: Torment IN SPAAAAAAAAACE. Which isn't such a bad thing. Soon enough we might even get to play through the HK-50 factory and see proper endings, too... although occasionally I wonder whether TSLRP or Duke Nukem Forever will actually release first.
What... a Fallout game set in and around the ruins of Los Angeles? What a novel idea!
European power grids are all quite heavily interconnected these days, and the big issue if you're getting into this market is France. They went for nuclear power in a big way, and now have an absolutely colossal generating capacity which is usually far more than the country uses. They sell the surplus to their neighbours: I think Britain, Germany and Italy all have 'buy surplus from the French' as a significant slice of their respective national energy budgets.
So there's going to be a market all right. Italy needs electricity, and if the Vatican undercuts the French then the Italians will buy up all of the holy power first, and only then start buying from EDF. Not a problem. Trouble is, the peak power from a solar cell is in the summer - just the time when everybody's lightbulbs and central heating systems spend most of the time off, and energy is as cheap as it ever gets...
In theory, the Church is enormously rich. Most of that wealth isn't saleable, though. How would you put a price on the Sistine Chapel, or St Mark's basilica? And of the properties that could be sold - what's the total price of every one of who knows how many parish church buildings?
If the organisation were to be liquidated, the final sum would be colossal. But you're right in saying that the actual wealth of the Church isn't so huge. All those glorious buildings are financial liabilities, with scaffolding endlessly going up and down to patch them up against the wear of the centuries. As the richer nations become more and more secular, there are fewer and fewer pennies in plates around the world. The amount of money available for day-to-day operations and for projects such as this one is certainly large - this is a global organisation with well over a billion nominal members, after all - but it's not the legendarily huge treasure that is sometimes imagined.
This is the Vatican we're talking about. What the hell are you doing telling them 'there's no proof of this'? It's never stopped them before.
Ah, I apologise. I assumed you would object to the medical experimentation on prisoners in death camps during the war. If you do not object to such experimentation, then certainly you can enjoy the benefits thereof with a clear conscience. If you did object to a fascist regime deliberately freezing members of minority groups to see how it damaged them, then by your own argument you should not be allowed to benefit from the resulting treatments: but clearly you don't. My mistake.
Personally, I object vehemently to such experimentation, but would still gladly accept its benefits should I ever be found half-frozen somewhere. Therefore I find I cannot in good conscience tell those who object to experimentation on embryos or animals that they should refuse the resulting treatments, when I would not refuse treatments that derive from Holocaust experiments.
It's just yuck factor, you'll get over it. It comes with a lot of new medical advances. When the first live organ transplants were done people thought of Dr Frankenstein and Igor cackling over the patchwork man on the slab. Blood transfusion similarly met with superstitious opposition, which survives in some sects to this day. And going back further, you should take a look at some of the cartoons commenting on the first vaccinations. People move on pretty quickly once they see the benefits.
So if you're opposed to the manner in which the research was done, you shouldn't be allowed to benefit from the resulting medical treatment? Interesting. Well, I hope that if you're ever rescued from some mountainside with severe frostbite and hypothermia, you won't mind being allowed to die. Because an awful lot of our knowledge of how the human body responds to extreme cold originates from research done by the German military, the better to treat their casualties on the Eastern front. I'll give you one guess where they got their research subjects.
Depends what you want to do. You couldn't fight a war like the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with drones alone - those are wars of occupation, with large numbers of infantry on the ground. The advantage comes with conflicts like those we saw from time to time in the 1990s: faction A (we like) are fighting faction B (we don't like), but we lack the will for a proper war, so we just bomb faction B's facilities and units and let faction A take advantage. That's the kind of situation where drones would be wonderful. Mind you, I don't think the risk to pilots is a major deterrent to our leaders in that case: it's more a matter of how the scenes of devastation on the ground will play with the voters, and those are the same whether it's a human or a drone that did it.
See Also: The mercenary wars fought in late medieval Europe.
According to Machiavelli, the problem with those wasn't so much that the availability of mercenaries let leaders go to war with less risk to their own people: it was that the mercenaries themselves were unreliable and disloyal. For a start they'd fight only for their pay, and so their stomach for a losing battle was considerably less; and if the mercenaries won their battle, then whatever lands had been conquered were held by the triumphant prince only so long as he kept the loyalty of the mercenaries. Whose price, of course, just went steeply upward. Better, he said, to triumph by your own arms. This, at least, is not a problem with machines, which will happily sacrifice themselves for you, more willingly than even the most jingoistic soldier.
Not necessarily. The US isn't going to sell anybody any F-22s. But the European nations are selling Typhoons to every friendly nation that has the money. And history shows us that a friendly nation today can be distinctly hostile tomorrow: that's how come there are F-14s in the Iranian air force. Skip the F-22, and some day the US might find itself going up with F-15s against Typhoons, and that's a bloody dangerous thing to be doing. F-22 represents a clear advantage over any rival aircraft of any nation for the foreseeable future, and that's what the Pentagon pays the big money for.
I expect that the F-22 will be the last of the breed - the high water mark of the fighter jet family, rarely used, and sidelined in its own lifetime by cheaper robot drones. This century's Mallard train. But in the meantime it might just turn out to be worth having.
Nonsense. He's the type of person who had the ability to become a doctor, but would refuse to do so if it would come with the expectation that he would perform abortions, and so instead found a different line of work. That's a perfectly morally acceptable way to behave.
And he asks a worthwhile question too. It's similar to the question often asked of defence lawyers as to how they can defend people they know to be guilty. If you're a programmer of weapons systems, how does that sit with your conscience? Especially unmanned warplanes: while the current generation are remotely controlled by some guy with a joystick, future models are expected to be fully autonomous - which means that somebody, somewhere, right now, is working on the AI code to control them. AI code to make decisions as to whether to fire weapons. AI code to decide whether to kill somebody.
How can that person sleep at night? Since there's a realistic possibility that such a person is reading /., the question's well worth asking, and the answers could well be very interesting and illuminating.
I can't imagine why anybody would build another fighter jet after the F-22. I mean, yes, in terms of performance and stealth and all that it's every flyboy's wet dream. But the Battle of Britain was seventy years ago, and the days of heroic pilots taking each other on in exciting single combat are long gone. Planes now are just missile launch platforms, and the contest between them mostly a matter of getting the first radar lock and then letting rip; is it not therefore better to use cheap mass-produced drones for that task, rather than risking some technological masterwork and the colossal ego behind the stick over hostile territory?
Works for me. You may like wars to be about heroism and patriotism and motherhood and apple pie and dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that bullshit, but I prefer them to be won, as quickly as possible, and with as few people getting hurt as possible. If that can be achieved by using robots instead of humans, that's just fine.
Thought experiment for you:
I have invented a Star Trek replicator. Given the right pattern, it can create any physical object. Given a physical object, it can scan it and record the pattern to make more. I manufacture a great many replicators, which I distribute worldwide, and I set up a website where users can upload the patterns they've scanned.
Is this a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing? Suppose that instead of going to a shop and buying a pair of shoes, I download a pattern that somebody else scanned and replicate a pair: have I stolen something, since I haven't paid anybody for them? Is the world richer, or poorer, for my creation of an extra pair of shoes in it?
I would say that the creation of useful goods from thin air at near-zero cost is a terrifically good thing, and would make the world a far richer and happier place. Even though it would instantly make a lot of people's businesses obsolete.
Same goes for music. I realise you didn't want an 'I just want stuff for free' argument, but that's what it boils down to. We don't have replicators for material goods yet, but we do have replicators for information, and the reasoning is just the same.
Funnily enough, quite a lot. Dulce et decorum est and all that. People just will keep buying the Old Lie every single time it gets told.
Is that because gamers are a jingoistic bunch who wouldn't want to shoot their own side? Or is it just that the British and Americans mostly won their wars, and games tend to cast the player as part of the winning side?
I'm actually surprised there aren't more games where you play a guerrilla or terrorist, especially with the current topical interest in the whole subject. There was a rather good strategy game I picked up long ago called 'Central Intelligence' in which your job is to organise a revolution on behalf of the CIA in some banana republic. Set up safe houses, establish contacts with sympathisers in the media and among the student radicals, organise a leaflet campaign, put up propaganda posters, raid the quarry and steal explosives, send a letter bomb to the chief of police... Wonderful idea, but crippled by a terribly clumsy interface.
There's got to be a market for this. 'Freedom Fighter' - play as Lenin, Collins, Mao, de Gaulle, Guevara, Khomeini! Overthrow the corrupt puppet government of the oppressors! Establish liberty and justice for the common people! Intimidate and beat up collaborators! Execute informers! Blow up police stations!
If a wide enough opening is made in the mountains between California and other desert states would it bring good climate change? If Arizona, Nevada, etc could be made lush I'd nuke 'em.
It'll never work, Lex. Superman will be able to stop both missiles, don't fool yourself. Go back to the cake plan - no one is looking.
... Despite your violent behaviour, all you've managed to break is my heart.
No, they're making excuses to get paid for playing World of Warcraft all day. Oh, and by the way, the local greengrocer want's hi's apostrophe's back.