GRO LITE x 12............$34.68 MAX STR ROBITUSSIN x 4...$14.23 ASS-TRO GLIDE.............$7.98 PETS/HMSTR............... $2.98 MUSIC/B.STREISAND........$16.98
TOTAL: $76.85
IN ACCORDANCE WITH NEW HOMELAND SECURITY DIRECTIVES, THIS INFORMATION IS BEING FORWARDED TO THE NSA, WHO WILL THEN FORWARD RELEVANT INFORMATION TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS.
Yes, I get that. I'm not advocating the banning of everything I don't like. Quite the opposite. I'm advocating that society strip its norms down to what's really needed, and no more.
There's no law that says persons wearing an orange top hat will be denied employment, but there might as well be. The government won't stop you from dancing a jig whenever you feel like it - but your peers will. And if you want to understand "chilling effect," try discussing religion or politics at work. Civil society curtails most harmless freedoms before the government gets a chance to. I'm saying we should change that.
I'm also going to add that moral relativism is a stupid way to go about looking at the world, and that if tolerating people having different ideas than you necessitates you actually accepting those ideas as well, then there is something severely wrong with your brain, which you should really see a doctor about.
First, I don't advocate accepting the ideas.
Moral relativism would be a stupid way of looking at the world if everyone agreed, but they don't. Two smart people can start out with the best of intentions, and come up with two moral codes. About the only thing that everyone agrees on is that they don't want to be harmed themselves. Thus, the only rule you can really expect everyone to agree on is that they shouldn't harm other people. ( That's a complex enough rule all by itself. Is annoying someone harming them? Is a one-month-old fetus "people?" )
Consider: It's wrong to murder, but is it wrong to murder Bin Laden?
It's wrong to steal, but is it wrong to steal a gun from a madman?
You're right - my post was an oversimplification. Talking loudly in a movie theater steps on the toes of other moviegoers, and you should be able to snark at those people without having them arrested. I guess my point was that "your freedom ends where my nose begins," is a system that works better when people are less nose-y.
Gay marriage is a perfect example. When this subject comes up, people turn out in droves to vote against other people's freedom. And then they complain when the majority votes to outlaw their rifle collection, or to make their smoking habit ruinously expensive, not realizing that by voting to manage someone else's behavior, they've just legitimized society's power to manage theirs.
And that gets back into the power of law, but the same principles apply to what people accept or don't accept in each other. If I establish that it's okay for me to fire someone purely for being gay/Commie/whatever, then I've also established that it's okay for you to fire me for being ugly/Democrat/whatever.
Free minds. The greatest chilling effect of universal surveillance doesn't come from men in black vans. It comes from being unveiled as a Commie, or an Islamic Sympathizer, or even A Guy Who Googled for "Fatties" in front of your friends/employers/relatives/whatever. The greatest force against freedom in our society is us.
Not one of Sen. McCarthy's victims was actually thrown in a gulag. Think about that. They weren't fired by the government. They were fired by PHBs who acted in blind sympathy with loudmouthed bureaucrats. There would have been no McCarthyism if the public had not been willing to punish itself for unpopular thought and/or speech.
We need a society in which there's no difference between what's illegal and what harms others, and holds all other things not only legal, but acceptable. Once we have that society, people who have done nothing to harm others really will have little to fear. But there's one more thing: If we're going to use public safety as an excuse for universal surveillance, we have to give the power of surveillance to everyone, not just government.
Privacy advocates might cringe at that last statment, but consider this: People are getting more wired, surveillance is getting easier and cheaper, and that trend may never reverse. There may be nothing we can do to stop privacy from dying. Maybe we should start thinking about what we're going to do when it does.
For example I long ago decided I will never go to meetings again because I think face to face meetings are the biggest waste of time you can ever have.
Hi, this is Dan from Human Resources. You probably don't know me, because you were absent from the Workplace Amicable Relationship Promotion Meeting. After meeting with your supervisors, we have come to the decision that we should meet with you RE your attitude toward workplace gatherings.
Not only does your absence from group meetings project the wrong image to the rest of the company, but some employees have taken it as a personal affront. There have been complaints, and many people at the last Work/Life Socialization Meeting have asked us to step in. Is 2:00 PM okay for everyone?
it's dangerous to discount all conspiracy theories. The Tuskeegee Experiment was a real conspiracy. The Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish doctrine is a real conspiracy. When landlords get together and change a neighborhood's zoning laws, that's a conspiracy too.
These are the kinds of conspiracies that occur without the protection of the federal government. What kinds of schemes might people think up if they're free from any oversight whatsoever?
I'm just saying that a little paranoia is a healthy thing. I'm not saying that our government hides aliens with guitar pick-shaped heads, or that they orchestrated the 9-11 attack, or that they conspired to fool everyone into thinking Iraq had nuclear...
IANAP(rogrammer), but I can see how it would make a variety of things possible within the open source community.
For instance, if one knows exactly how Java works, one should be able to make code intended for a Java VM compile into native binaries. That means that every Java app out there, and there are a lot, should be able to run much faster and in native windowing environments within Linux - and that Java code written natively for Linux would also be (somewhat) portable between platforms using VMs.
Again, I'm not a programmer, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Before you start laughing and saying "well of course," take a gander at this map. You'll notice that Alabama votes to the left of a significant percent of the country. If you consider the Washington Post a bastion of neoconservative thought, you haven't encountered the really rabid Bush authoritarians.
I'm not sure where you live but, ahem... would you mind sending me the real estate section?:-)
Most people even think that voting for a third party is too risky. A sizable chunk of them can't be bothered to vote at all. And you're going to ask this lot to go up against the most powerful military force on Earth in defense of a liberty that they can't see or feel? The same voting public that consistently goes to the polls and votes to suppress other people's right to get legally married? They don't even know what liberty means.
Even if by some freak accident they won, what then? How would you go about making, from scratch, a system better than the one that's already in place? Consider the French Revolution. They spent years lopping off each other's heads, only to return to an Emperor. Yes, they eventually became a free republic, but I wonder if it was because of the Revolution, or the slow trickle down of new ideas about civil society.
If you want to change the world, revolution talk is a waste of time, as is any scheme that requires the unflinching support of a large base of people. Spread ideas instead. Teach people how to use free/open source software. Encourage people to read mind-expanding books.
Think sideways: Free software has done more just by existing than any tech lobbyist could do with a million dollars. The greatest forces for good in the Civil Rights era were (the atheist says reluctantly,) ordinary citizen-run Baptist churches. And of course, if there was a car that ran on something cheaper than gas, we would have had much fewer wars, fewer enemies in the middle-east, and therefore less excuse for security measures like this one.
There are plenty of opportunites to promote a free and open society that can be exploited without turning to politics. The dance of war and politics is like humanity armwrestling with itself. The real changes happen from the bottom up.
But there's also an urgent reason to get everyone else to switch to FOSS as well: In twenty years, when everyone's walking around with heads-up displays ala Vernor Vinge, coordinating everything of importance through the internet, the company/government that controls the tools will control society as well. Having a closed-source monoculture at that point would be a terrible, possibly irreparable, blow to open civil society. You'd literally have to buy a license to live.
Anti-bioscience is only common among theologians who don't have cancer. But if Pat Robertson grew an inoperable tumor tomorrow, I imagine we'd discover pretty soon that God is A-OK with gene therapy.
Salesman: Vista is much more advanced than Windows XP. It interfaces with hardware right on the motherboard that keeps you from copying things you're not supposed to copy, and...
Chinese Businessman: What the price?
Salesman: We're pricing it aggressively, with the bare bones version just under one hundred U.S. dollars.
Chinese Businessman: One hundred dollars! What else it do?
Salesman: It's like Windows XP, but it has Digital Rights Management, and look - the windows can be transparent.
Chinese Businessman: Give me a brochure that say exactly what it do, and I think about it.
Salesman: Okay, great! Here are the technical specs, and here's a pamphlet that shows you why you need the new Windows Vista.
Chinese Businessman: Okay, goodbye!
******* One Month Later *******
Chinese Businessman: Happy Panda Software is pleased to announce that "Mindows Fiesta" is now available. Home version only seventy-five cents!
Yes, I am interested in that concept. Thanks for the link!
...though I don't think it would replace GDP, because GDP can be calculated without subjectively assigning human value to things. You can't put a value on social liberties, for instance, that will mean the same thing in both the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
I've finally put my finger on the problem with the idea that open-source software is bad for the economy: It employs the Broken Window Fallacy of economics.
The fallacy goes something like this: A boy breaks a shopkeeper's window. The shopkeeper must then buy a new window from the glassmaker, who then buys bread from the baker, who then buys shoes from the shoemaker, making the child seem like a boon to the economy for having broken the window.
The problem with this thinking is that the money the shopkeeper spends on the window is money he does not spend on something that he actually wants. So the boy who breaks the window isn't a boon to the economy after all.
People argue that the creation of stuff like OpenOffice deprives the fine folks working on MS Office of their jobs. What's ignored is the fact that every company who once spent $300 a pop on Office licenses can now put that money toward projects that didn't exist before, or better yet (but more unlikely) pay it to their employees. And the guys at MS Office are now free to work on something that doesn't already exist.
Money is just a placeholder. The economy is actually about value, and OpenOffice adds what was previously considered hundreds of dollars of value to the computer of everyone who downloads it - at no actual charge.
When software can be distributed to the whole world for free, it's actually better for the economy than paid software.
Another side effect of universal surveillance
on
Inescapable Data
·
· Score: 1
is that our concept of morality will have to change. There will be no more "keeping up appearances" if anyone can dial up a public webcam and see Reverend Jones walking into the brothel. There'll be no more "don't ask, don't tell." There'll be no more picking your nose while no one's looking.
I remember hearing of a child custody battle in Utah where the ex-wife got a really good legal team and got her husband on the front page of the local paper with the headline: Local Man Seeks Porn on Internet. He lost custody of his child because of that move, because even though most sane people realize that it's a widespread activity, it remains scandalous to actually acknowledge.
To maintain that separation in a society of universal surveillance would be to create one's own citizen-run police state. If we're going to live in this future, we'll have to pare our ethics all the way down to the harm principle: If it don't hurt nobody, it ain't wrong.
...to sell infinitely reproducible information at a profit?
Would it be worth making every piece of film, art, music, literature, and software available to every human being on Earth if it meant that there could no longer be a profitable industry in any of those fields?
It would mean no more MPAA, and no more Matrix. No more RIAA, and no more "getting discovered." No more $800 Photoshop, and no more app developer market. No more IP lawyers, and no more living off of your art. What if you could press a button and choose one or the other?
Suppose the Republican Party graciously donates the spare cycles of all the computers at its headquarters, and the results magically turn out to mesh with their official line that there's no such thing as global warming?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I get that. I'm not advocating the banning of everything I don't like. Quite the opposite. I'm advocating that society strip its norms down to what's really needed, and no more.
There's no law that says persons wearing an orange top hat will be denied employment, but there might as well be. The government won't stop you from dancing a jig whenever you feel like it - but your peers will. And if you want to understand "chilling effect," try discussing religion or politics at work. Civil society curtails most harmless freedoms before the government gets a chance to. I'm saying we should change that.
I'm also going to add that moral relativism is a stupid way to go about looking at the world, and that if tolerating people having different ideas than you necessitates you actually accepting those ideas as well, then there is something severely wrong with your brain, which you should really see a doctor about.
First, I don't advocate accepting the ideas.
Moral relativism would be a stupid way of looking at the world if everyone agreed, but they don't. Two smart people can start out with the best of intentions, and come up with two moral codes. About the only thing that everyone agrees on is that they don't want to be harmed themselves. Thus, the only rule you can really expect everyone to agree on is that they shouldn't harm other people. ( That's a complex enough rule all by itself. Is annoying someone harming them? Is a one-month-old fetus "people?" )
Consider: It's wrong to murder, but is it wrong to murder Bin Laden?
It's wrong to steal, but is it wrong to steal a gun from a madman?
It's wrong to drink on Sunday, but...oh, wait.
How's that? :-)
You're right - my post was an oversimplification. Talking loudly in a movie theater steps on the toes of other moviegoers, and you should be able to snark at those people without having them arrested. I guess my point was that "your freedom ends where my nose begins," is a system that works better when people are less nose-y.
Gay marriage is a perfect example. When this subject comes up, people turn out in droves to vote against other people's freedom. And then they complain when the majority votes to outlaw their rifle collection, or to make their smoking habit ruinously expensive, not realizing that by voting to manage someone else's behavior, they've just legitimized society's power to manage theirs.
And that gets back into the power of law, but the same principles apply to what people accept or don't accept in each other. If I establish that it's okay for me to fire someone purely for being gay/Commie/whatever, then I've also established that it's okay for you to fire me for being ugly/Democrat/whatever.
Free minds. The greatest chilling effect of universal surveillance doesn't come from men in black vans. It comes from being unveiled as a Commie, or an Islamic Sympathizer, or even A Guy Who Googled for "Fatties" in front of your friends/employers/relatives/whatever. The greatest force against freedom in our society is us.
Not one of Sen. McCarthy's victims was actually thrown in a gulag. Think about that. They weren't fired by the government. They were fired by PHBs who acted in blind sympathy with loudmouthed bureaucrats. There would have been no McCarthyism if the public had not been willing to punish itself for unpopular thought and/or speech.
We need a society in which there's no difference between what's illegal and what harms others, and holds all other things not only legal, but acceptable. Once we have that society, people who have done nothing to harm others really will have little to fear. But there's one more thing: If we're going to use public safety as an excuse for universal surveillance, we have to give the power of surveillance to everyone, not just government.
Privacy advocates might cringe at that last statment, but consider this: People are getting more wired, surveillance is getting easier and cheaper, and that trend may never reverse. There may be nothing we can do to stop privacy from dying. Maybe we should start thinking about what we're going to do when it does.
For example I long ago decided I will never go to meetings again because I think face to face meetings are the biggest waste of time you can ever have.
Hi, this is Dan from Human Resources. You probably don't know me, because you were absent from the Workplace Amicable Relationship Promotion Meeting. After meeting with your supervisors, we have come to the decision that we should meet with you RE your attitude toward workplace gatherings.
Not only does your absence from group meetings project the wrong image to the rest of the company, but some employees have taken it as a personal affront. There have been complaints, and many people at the last Work/Life Socialization Meeting have asked us to step in. Is 2:00 PM okay for everyone?
Thanks,
Dan
Human Resources
it's dangerous to discount all conspiracy theories. The Tuskeegee Experiment was a real conspiracy. The Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish doctrine is a real conspiracy. When landlords get together and change a neighborhood's zoning laws, that's a conspiracy too.
...oh, wait.
These are the kinds of conspiracies that occur without the protection of the federal government. What kinds of schemes might people think up if they're free from any oversight whatsoever?
I'm just saying that a little paranoia is a healthy thing. I'm not saying that our government hides aliens with guitar pick-shaped heads, or that they orchestrated the 9-11 attack, or that they conspired to fool everyone into thinking Iraq had nuclear...
IANAP(rogrammer), but I can see how it would make a variety of things possible within the open source community.
For instance, if one knows exactly how Java works, one should be able to make code intended for a Java VM compile into native binaries. That means that every Java app out there, and there are a lot, should be able to run much faster and in native windowing environments within Linux - and that Java code written natively for Linux would also be (somewhat) portable between platforms using VMs.
Again, I'm not a programmer, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Before you start laughing and saying "well of course," take a gander at this map. You'll notice that Alabama votes to the left of a significant percent of the country. If you consider the Washington Post a bastion of neoconservative thought, you haven't encountered the really rabid Bush authoritarians.
:-)
I'm not sure where you live but, ahem... would you mind sending me the real estate section?
...us getting the government they deserve.
Anyone who utters the words: "If you've done nothing wrong, then what are you afraid of?" should immediately be put on the no-fly list.
Most people even think that voting for a third party is too risky. A sizable chunk of them can't be bothered to vote at all. And you're going to ask this lot to go up against the most powerful military force on Earth in defense of a liberty that they can't see or feel? The same voting public that consistently goes to the polls and votes to suppress other people's right to get legally married? They don't even know what liberty means.
Even if by some freak accident they won, what then? How would you go about making, from scratch, a system better than the one that's already in place? Consider the French Revolution. They spent years lopping off each other's heads, only to return to an Emperor. Yes, they eventually became a free republic, but I wonder if it was because of the Revolution, or the slow trickle down of new ideas about civil society.
If you want to change the world, revolution talk is a waste of time, as is any scheme that requires the unflinching support of a large base of people. Spread ideas instead. Teach people how to use free/open source software. Encourage people to read mind-expanding books.
Think sideways: Free software has done more just by existing than any tech lobbyist could do with a million dollars. The greatest forces for good in the Civil Rights era were (the atheist says reluctantly,) ordinary citizen-run Baptist churches. And of course, if there was a car that ran on something cheaper than gas, we would have had much fewer wars, fewer enemies in the middle-east, and therefore less excuse for security measures like this one.
There are plenty of opportunites to promote a free and open society that can be exploited without turning to politics. The dance of war and politics is like humanity armwrestling with itself. The real changes happen from the bottom up.
But there's also an urgent reason to get everyone else to switch to FOSS as well: In twenty years, when everyone's walking around with heads-up displays ala Vernor Vinge, coordinating everything of importance through the internet, the company/government that controls the tools will control society as well. Having a closed-source monoculture at that point would be a terrible, possibly irreparable, blow to open civil society. You'd literally have to buy a license to live.
Anti-bioscience is only common among theologians who don't have cancer. But if Pat Robertson grew an inoperable tumor tomorrow, I imagine we'd discover pretty soon that God is A-OK with gene therapy.
Salesman: Vista is much more advanced than Windows XP. It interfaces with hardware right on the motherboard that keeps you from copying things you're not supposed to copy, and...
Chinese Businessman: What the price?
Salesman: We're pricing it aggressively, with the bare bones version just under one hundred U.S. dollars.
Chinese Businessman: One hundred dollars! What else it do?
Salesman: It's like Windows XP, but it has Digital Rights Management, and look - the windows can be transparent.
Chinese Businessman: Give me a brochure that say exactly what it do, and I think about it.
Salesman: Okay, great! Here are the technical specs, and here's a pamphlet that shows you why you need the new Windows Vista.
Chinese Businessman: Okay, goodbye!
******* One Month Later *******
Chinese Businessman: Happy Panda Software is pleased to announce that "Mindows Fiesta" is now available. Home version only seventy-five cents!
Experts claim the "Microcomputer" will enable sufferers to hold down meaningful jobs while avoiding painful human interaction.
Yes, I am interested in that concept. Thanks for the link!
...though I don't think it would replace GDP, because GDP can be calculated without subjectively assigning human value to things. You can't put a value on social liberties, for instance, that will mean the same thing in both the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
The point was that there should be no limit to open-source software.
I've finally put my finger on the problem with the idea that open-source software is bad for the economy: It employs the Broken Window Fallacy of economics.
The fallacy goes something like this: A boy breaks a shopkeeper's window. The shopkeeper must then buy a new window from the glassmaker, who then buys bread from the baker, who then buys shoes from the shoemaker, making the child seem like a boon to the economy for having broken the window.
The problem with this thinking is that the money the shopkeeper spends on the window is money he does not spend on something that he actually wants. So the boy who breaks the window isn't a boon to the economy after all.
People argue that the creation of stuff like OpenOffice deprives the fine folks working on MS Office of their jobs. What's ignored is the fact that every company who once spent $300 a pop on Office licenses can now put that money toward projects that didn't exist before, or better yet (but more unlikely) pay it to their employees. And the guys at MS Office are now free to work on something that doesn't already exist.
Money is just a placeholder. The economy is actually about value, and OpenOffice adds what was previously considered hundreds of dollars of value to the computer of everyone who downloads it - at no actual charge.
When software can be distributed to the whole world for free, it's actually better for the economy than paid software.
1. Worldwide internet communication allows large numbers of international friendships, dampening public support for all geopolitical war.
2. Cheap connectivity makes government propaganda impractical in every country
3. Nearly all software becomes free, as the impracticality of selling infinitely copyable material becomes evident.
4. Pop culture dies for the same reason, and is replaced by amateur arts and culture
5. AIDS vaccine is found, triggering second sexual revolution
6. Tech advances too fast for traditional college to keep up. Other methods of training become more prominent.
7. Privacy dies. Morality becomes more utilitarian as "public face" becomes impossible
You go around with a chip in your shoulder!
is that our concept of morality will have to change. There will be no more "keeping up appearances" if anyone can dial up a public webcam and see Reverend Jones walking into the brothel. There'll be no more "don't ask, don't tell." There'll be no more picking your nose while no one's looking.
I remember hearing of a child custody battle in Utah where the ex-wife got a really good legal team and got her husband on the front page of the local paper with the headline: Local Man Seeks Porn on Internet. He lost custody of his child because of that move, because even though most sane people realize that it's a widespread activity, it remains scandalous to actually acknowledge.
To maintain that separation in a society of universal surveillance would be to create one's own citizen-run police state. If we're going to live in this future, we'll have to pare our ethics all the way down to the harm principle: If it don't hurt nobody, it ain't wrong.
...to sell infinitely reproducible information at a profit?
Would it be worth making every piece of film, art, music, literature, and software available to every human being on Earth if it meant that there could no longer be a profitable industry in any of those fields?
It would mean no more MPAA, and no more Matrix. No more RIAA, and no more "getting discovered." No more $800 Photoshop, and no more app developer market. No more IP lawyers, and no more living off of your art. What if you could press a button and choose one or the other?
Suppose the Republican Party graciously donates the spare cycles of all the computers at its headquarters, and the results magically turn out to mesh with their official line that there's no such thing as global warming?