Culture vs. law.... If it isn't illegal than that culture should have passed laws to protect itself or should enlist the government's aide in ensuring their values are maintained. If that means enacting laws to restrict this in the future and even retroactively have the practiced banned then they should do so.
Nonsense. You don't need a law for everything. Even if you did, you can always find some greedy lawyer to twist it your way. The United States if a good example. They make lots of rules in schools for little kids because they're too young to know better. Grown ups can (and should) be able to understand and respect other peoples values and cultures. This is sorely lacking in the "unrestricted free speech brigade" and the "total censorship brigade". The need for responsible and mature human beings is more serious now than ever.
The disc in the drive thing doesn't just drive me nuts. It puts in a position much below the one eyed pirate who got a copy of the game from some warez site. I recently cracked (physically broke) my Oblivion DVD and now, although I'm a paying customer, I can't play the game. Whereas Mr. pirate who's got a cracked copy can play his without any problems.
Also, the cost factor is there. I tend to buy games a little after they set the market on fire because at that time, the prices skyrocket. Once the hype dies out, if the game survives, it's probably worth buying and it'll definitely be cheaper. The downside is that you can't talk to your buddies about the latest games but that's not a real problem. Here in India, the price of a a new PC game released on DVD can easily feed a casual labourer for a month. It's a disgusting feeling to buy one of those and then walk out of the shop and brush aside some of the people who are starving and look at you for some change to buy a meal.
Finally, I find it interesting that some of the same people who support "it takes a village to raise a child" scream like crazy when somebody so much as suggests that the community even HELP raise kids.
I couldn't agree more. While the onus of raising a child is almost entirely upon his or her parents (and to some extent, teachers), it's incredibly hard to help the children develop a sense of discernment given the blitz of advertising and marketing they're exposed to at the earliest of ages. I recently became a father and I get calls from salesmen asking me if I'm interested in "edutainment" toys for 2 months old babies.
It's a lot more easier to raise smart kids in an atmosphere that's unpolluted by the kind of games/music that you see these days. I'm not advocating a ban or anything but I'd be happy if there was some more breathing space.
Thanks to Al-Ghazali, REAL science has been anathema to Islam for almost a thousand years.
There's a popular idea that Al-Ghazzali was the person most responsible for stopping Islamic scientific exploration. This is not really true. What Al-Ghazzali did was to balance Islamic teachings with Greek ideas and to prevent the former from being completely eclipsed by the latter. While one may argue that this was not a good thing to do, to say that he single handedly made Islam anti-science is not true.
For anyone who's interested, the introduction to the translation of the revival of religious sciences by T.J. Winter is a good place to look.
All the hysteria surrounding violence in games and policing measures aside, is there any reason that game manufacturers need to put in more and more photorealistic gore into their games? I'm a little behind the times in this department but games like The Incredible Machine and Lemmings were fun to play and didn't need to even approach things like gore and sex to sell copies.
Sure, you need ways to show off your new GPU and rendering algorithms but can't they get a little more creative? Or maybe they're going the way of the media and the movie industries by fanning controversy for free advertising and sales.
At least in North America and the EU, speaking out against political figures and government is not only legal, but gets you cred among ideologically like-minded people.
As long as you stay within the accepted limits of debate. Your views will be criticised as nonsensical and you won't be allowed on mainstream news channels (or if you are, you'll be "fox news"ed) - The 911 truth movement is an example. There's also the "ability" of the government to single you out for tax audits if you're a political opponent. So, it's not exactly a "free" society. You can even get jailed and tortured in this way. Here is an example.
You can still go to work the next day confident that you won't lose your job by government mandate.
Depending on what you say. Although not by "government mandate", there are other forces that can silence/control you in the United States. This is a recent example that's been on the news for a while now. The United States is not really run by the elected government anymore.
I find it hard to believe that Americans oppose Chavez because he's a dictator and because he's supressing freedom in Venezuela. He's not perfect but he's trying to free his country and South America from external control and so, the bottom line is that he's not "standing in line".
Why does the state need so much control when it can so easily be voted out within 4 years? It just doesn't make any sense.
Because it doesn't matter who's in power. The "Republicrats" are going to keep winning. They might have internal disagreements on some issues but on the overall, the "democratic process" as it exists right now (drop a piece of paper in a ballot box once in four years) is pretty much a sham.
It's obvious that there are social problems that led to this person going postal like this. Increased access to people's private records *might* reduce the chances of such things happening but that is symptomatic treatment. In the end, you'd end up with a society where the only way to keep sanity was to shoot anyone that had over a x% chance of doing something wrong. I have my opinions on what the reasons for this sort of dysfunction is but those are just opinions. I do however think that it's fairly certain that there are sociological problems in (atleast sections) of American society which need to be addressed at a more fundamental level.
To say that holocaust denial is not a common Islamic thread because their holy books were written before the holocaust is disingenuous.
To say that Muslims deny the holocaust these days is one thing. To say that it's a part of their faith is something else.
And the Armenian Genocide. Of course, that was the Religion of Peace exterminating Christians so don't expect the government education monopoly to mention it.
Not exactly. The Armenian genocide was committed by the secular "young turks" who seized power from the caliphate. They stood for all the fancy things like liberalism, dissent, separation of church from religion and had the idea that science should replace religion in the country (a sort of ultra-secularism if you will). It wasn't a religiously motivated event but a political one.
It's amazing how people don't understand that it's possible to live ones life without being "computer literate". There are more people than not who haven't used the net, a computer or even a phone and many of them lead perfectly normal lives and have families.
I haven't read the article, but I'd be very supportive of a person who says something like "I don't know what a web site is because I've never used the net and I don't need to". There's so much emphasis being placed on being a "net junkie" these days that's it positively revolting.
P.S. Although not as much as posting something like this on/. I guess...
Linux is invisible to India. Only communist politicians listen to RMS and that because they don't know a dime about Linux.
The president is an exception to this?
Most people doing outsourced jobs don't even know basic commands of Unix.
I work for a US firm (the second in my career so far). Each and every person in my office (and the last) knew atleast basic Unix. Sure, some of them couldn't write sendmail config files but they definitely knew basic Unix.
I remember one of my friend studying at IT-BHU (one of the leading insitutes of technology) who did not wanted to install SuSE 9.1 because he "likes to install everything and SuSE comes with 5 CDs and Windows takes only 1". And he was studying computer science.
Your statements are inaccurate or your sampling is biassed. This "friend" you're talking about doesn't sound very clued in. I studied at a college that is not as renowned as BHU but where the professor in charge of the computer centers asked the more clued in of the students to replace all the windows machines with Linux/Solaris. We ran a complete Unix shop with some smaller networks running windows and DOS for some specific projects. May of the colleges I know have good Linux communities. People are becoming aware of the OS and even your local neighbourhood computer institutes offer Linux courses for the uninitiated.
I agree with most of what you say. The clipboard behaviour would benefit from some standardisation across applications but there is another issue at hand.
I'll state it using Emacs as an example since I'm am Emacs user. The kill-ring which allows you to yank multiple pieces of text and paste them back is quite useful when you're coding. It allows you to move around chunks of code quite easily. I'd like some subset of Emacs' kill/yank behaviour to interact with the graphical subsystem to provide consistent behaviour but inside Emacs when I'm developing, I'd like the custom behaviour since it's quite useful when I code. I think vim users will have similar concerns.
Bad analogy. I didn't mean volume. I meant that the point of the discussion would get lost and the one with the most bells and whistles (spin etc.) would be the one who would "win".
There is no such thing as "limits on free speech" or "Free speech going too far". It either is free speech or it is not.
Providing and guaranteeing it is one thing. It being something good and beneficial for society is something else. The latter requires a mature and well informed public. Otherwise, it becomes a brawl where whoever has the loudest voice wins.
Free speech is best used in critique of concepts and actions than of people.
I agree. And you need an informed cultured public to use free speech in this fashion. That's my point. Without such a public, free speech becomes a sham.
If parents don't want their kids to watch stuff like this, they should stop their kids from watching stuff like this, not call the TV station to take it off the air. They're "parents". That's a title that entails some amount of responsibility.
There is a better option which is to throw the TV out the window and get it over with. Almost everything that comes on it is not worth watching anyway but that's a suggestion that'll most probably get me branded as a luddite.
I think our society suffers from a tremendous lack of confidence on the individual level as well as the collective.
That's an interesting idea. I never thought of it in such a way. Thanks. Free speech I suppose can get annoying but it's only annoying when you lack the maturity to give and receive criticism in the proper way.
I agree that just as we cannot effectively legislate decency, we cannot effectively legislate politeness, common sense, and empathy either.
Exactly. And as long as these things are not there in society, you can have as much free speech as you want and it won't (atleast in my opinion) do much good. That's not an argument to eliminate free speech.
I suppose I could sum up my argument (although not completely) by saying that I think free speech is necessary but not sufficient and that it plays a smaller role than advertised these days in the building of a healthy and prosperous society.
You advocate the sort of ideas that lead to "decency" laws.
Why is it that everyone thinks in terms of "laws" and "enforcement"? I don't think it's possible to enforce decency. I do however think and insist that people should be more decent.
You basically are saying that someone should only be allowed to speak freely when they have proved themselves mature and responsible. However, the courts would decide whether someone fulfilled these criteria.
No I'm not. I'm saying that if we have to think of laws that protect these sort of things and enforce them, the society has diseases more serious than "suppression of free speech".
If we are going to end up in court either way I will always choose the path of free speech. Just because someone is offended by what another says does not mean that the speaker should be censored. As Voltaire said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
In the same vein, I have the right to be an annoying person. I don't want laws that allow or deny me this right. But I still think that society should have less annoying people. Enforcement and laws are not the only things that society is built on. Voltaire's quote is becoming a Godwin's law of sorts these days. I don't really care about allowing or denying someone to express his point of view. I think society has bigger problems that need to be addressed which can only be handled at an individual rather than a collective level (which is the best that legislations can do).
I don't think you should stop at bullying. This whole "free speech" thing is getting out of hand. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for it but if you grant something like that to a bunch of immature, irresponsible people, you're going to get into a mess. It's fun to stir up some controversy and then go to court to settle it while overlooking whether it was the humanly decent thing to do but that sort of thing will kill "society" faster than suppression of free speech and turn it into a dog eat dog jungle where the courts protect the right to eat and encourage people to be dogs.
What does "their" mean in this context? Where I am, we first get a connection and a SIM from a provider then go to a showroom and buy a phone from there (Nokia, Motorola whatever). Insert the SIM into the phone and start using it. The carrier and the handset are provided by different people. Isn't it the same way there in the US?
Are these people jobless or something? What's the point of conducting a "study" to figure out the health benefits of winning a Nobel prize? Am I the only one who sees this as a mostly wasted effort?
The US is facing the same issues right now. It wants to restart its space oddeysey, but unfortunately most of the technology used back then has been outdated - plus the original team that worked on these missions are either resting in their graves or enjoying retirement. I welcome this move - more players in the field bring in more competition, more innovation and a race to get things moving. Remember what happened in the 70s when the Soviet Union stopped their space voyages?
India does not have access to the same financial resources that the United States has. To spend a good chunk of it's income on "putting a man on the moon" when it has more serious issues to deal with might spur a race to "get things moving" but frankly, I think it's an irresponsible way to spend national wealth.
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Culture vs. law.... If it isn't illegal than that culture should have passed laws to protect itself or should enlist the government's aide in ensuring their values are maintained. If that means enacting laws to restrict this in the future and even retroactively have the practiced banned then they should do so.
Nonsense. You don't need a law for everything. Even if you did, you can always find some greedy lawyer to twist it your way. The United States if a good example. They make lots of rules in schools for little kids because they're too young to know better. Grown ups can (and should) be able to understand and respect other peoples values and cultures. This is sorely lacking in the "unrestricted free speech brigade" and the "total censorship brigade". The need for responsible and mature human beings is more serious now than ever.
The disc in the drive thing doesn't just drive me nuts. It puts in a position much below the one eyed pirate who got a copy of the game from some warez site. I recently cracked (physically broke) my Oblivion DVD and now, although I'm a paying customer, I can't play the game. Whereas Mr. pirate who's got a cracked copy can play his without any problems.
Also, the cost factor is there. I tend to buy games a little after they set the market on fire because at that time, the prices skyrocket. Once the hype dies out, if the game survives, it's probably worth buying and it'll definitely be cheaper. The downside is that you can't talk to your buddies about the latest games but that's not a real problem. Here in India, the price of a a new PC game released on DVD can easily feed a casual labourer for a month. It's a disgusting feeling to buy one of those and then walk out of the shop and brush aside some of the people who are starving and look at you for some change to buy a meal.
Finally, I find it interesting that some of the same people who support "it takes a village to raise a child" scream like crazy when somebody so much as suggests that the community even HELP raise kids.
I couldn't agree more. While the onus of raising a child is almost entirely upon his or her parents (and to some extent, teachers), it's incredibly hard to help the children develop a sense of discernment given the blitz of advertising and marketing they're exposed to at the earliest of ages. I recently became a father and I get calls from salesmen asking me if I'm interested in "edutainment" toys for 2 months old babies.
It's a lot more easier to raise smart kids in an atmosphere that's unpolluted by the kind of games/music that you see these days. I'm not advocating a ban or anything but I'd be happy if there was some more breathing space.
Thanks to Al-Ghazali, REAL science has been anathema to Islam for almost a thousand years.
There's a popular idea that Al-Ghazzali was the person most responsible for stopping Islamic scientific exploration. This is not really true. What Al-Ghazzali did was to balance Islamic teachings with Greek ideas and to prevent the former from being completely eclipsed by the latter. While one may argue that this was not a good thing to do, to say that he single handedly made Islam anti-science is not true.
For anyone who's interested, the introduction to the translation of the revival of religious sciences by T.J. Winter is a good place to look.
Isn't this similar to what Apple does with their iLife (I think) suite?
All the hysteria surrounding violence in games and policing measures aside, is there any reason that game manufacturers need to put in more and more photorealistic gore into their games? I'm a little behind the times in this department but games like The Incredible Machine and Lemmings were fun to play and didn't need to even approach things like gore and sex to sell copies.
Sure, you need ways to show off your new GPU and rendering algorithms but can't they get a little more creative? Or maybe they're going the way of the media and the movie industries by fanning controversy for free advertising and sales.
At least in North America and the EU, speaking out against political figures and government is not only legal, but gets you cred among ideologically like-minded people.
As long as you stay within the accepted limits of debate. Your views will be criticised as nonsensical and you won't be allowed on mainstream news channels (or if you are, you'll be "fox news"ed) - The 911 truth movement is an example. There's also the "ability" of the government to single you out for tax audits if you're a political opponent. So, it's not exactly a "free" society. You can even get jailed and tortured in this way. Here is an example.
You can still go to work the next day confident that you won't lose your job by government mandate.
Depending on what you say. Although not by "government mandate", there are other forces that can silence/control you in the United States. This is a recent example that's been on the news for a while now. The United States is not really run by the elected government anymore.
I find it hard to believe that Americans oppose Chavez because he's a dictator and because he's supressing freedom in Venezuela. He's not perfect but he's trying to free his country and South America from external control and so, the bottom line is that he's not "standing in line".
Why does the state need so much control when it can so easily be voted out within 4 years? It just doesn't make any sense.
Because it doesn't matter who's in power. The "Republicrats" are going to keep winning. They might have internal disagreements on some issues but on the overall, the "democratic process" as it exists right now (drop a piece of paper in a ballot box once in four years) is pretty much a sham.
It's obvious that there are social problems that led to this person going postal like this. Increased access to people's private records *might* reduce the chances of such things happening but that is symptomatic treatment. In the end, you'd end up with a society where the only way to keep sanity was to shoot anyone that had over a x% chance of doing something wrong. I have my opinions on what the reasons for this sort of dysfunction is but those are just opinions. I do however think that it's fairly certain that there are sociological problems in (atleast sections) of American society which need to be addressed at a more fundamental level.
So, India is a democracy, but it is not a Western nation.
Thankfully.
To say that holocaust denial is not a common Islamic thread because their holy books were written before the holocaust is disingenuous.
To say that Muslims deny the holocaust these days is one thing. To say that it's a part of their faith is something else.
And the Armenian Genocide. Of course, that was the Religion of Peace exterminating Christians so don't expect the government education monopoly to mention it.
Not exactly. The Armenian genocide was committed by the secular "young turks" who seized power from the caliphate. They stood for all the fancy things like liberalism, dissent, separation of church from religion and had the idea that science should replace religion in the country (a sort of ultra-secularism if you will). It wasn't a religiously motivated event but a political one.
It's amazing how people don't understand that it's possible to live ones life without being "computer literate". There are more people than not who haven't used the net, a computer or even a phone and many of them lead perfectly normal lives and have families.
I haven't read the article, but I'd be very supportive of a person who says something like "I don't know what a web site is because I've never used the net and I don't need to". There's so much emphasis being placed on being a "net junkie" these days that's it positively revolting.
P.S. Although not as much as posting something like this onLinux is invisible to India. Only communist politicians listen to RMS and that because they don't know a dime about Linux.
The president is an exception to this?
Most people doing outsourced jobs don't even know basic commands of Unix.
I work for a US firm (the second in my career so far). Each and every person in my office (and the last) knew atleast basic Unix. Sure, some of them couldn't write sendmail config files but they definitely knew basic Unix.
I remember one of my friend studying at IT-BHU (one of the leading insitutes of technology) who did not wanted to install SuSE 9.1 because he "likes to install everything and SuSE comes with 5 CDs and Windows takes only 1". And he was studying computer science.
Your statements are inaccurate or your sampling is biassed. This "friend" you're talking about doesn't sound very clued in. I studied at a college that is not as renowned as BHU but where the professor in charge of the computer centers asked the more clued in of the students to replace all the windows machines with Linux/Solaris. We ran a complete Unix shop with some smaller networks running windows and DOS for some specific projects. May of the colleges I know have good Linux communities. People are becoming aware of the OS and even your local neighbourhood computer institutes offer Linux courses for the uninitiated.
I agree with most of what you say. The clipboard behaviour would benefit from some standardisation across applications but there is another issue at hand.
I'll state it using Emacs as an example since I'm am Emacs user. The kill-ring which allows you to yank multiple pieces of text and paste them back is quite useful when you're coding. It allows you to move around chunks of code quite easily. I'd like some subset of Emacs' kill/yank behaviour to interact with the graphical subsystem to provide consistent behaviour but inside Emacs when I'm developing, I'd like the custom behaviour since it's quite useful when I code. I think vim users will have similar concerns.
Bad analogy. I didn't mean volume. I meant that the point of the discussion would get lost and the one with the most bells and whistles (spin etc.) would be the one who would "win".
There is no such thing as "limits on free speech" or "Free speech going too far". It either is free speech or it is not.
Providing and guaranteeing it is one thing. It being something good and beneficial for society is something else. The latter requires a mature and well informed public. Otherwise, it becomes a brawl where whoever has the loudest voice wins.
Free speech is best used in critique of concepts and actions than of people.
I agree. And you need an informed cultured public to use free speech in this fashion. That's my point. Without such a public, free speech becomes a sham.
If parents don't want their kids to watch stuff like this, they should stop their kids from watching stuff like this, not call the TV station to take it off the air. They're "parents". That's a title that entails some amount of responsibility.
There is a better option which is to throw the TV out the window and get it over with. Almost everything that comes on it is not worth watching anyway but that's a suggestion that'll most probably get me branded as a luddite.
I think our society suffers from a tremendous lack of confidence on the individual level as well as the collective.
That's an interesting idea. I never thought of it in such a way. Thanks. Free speech I suppose can get annoying but it's only annoying when you lack the maturity to give and receive criticism in the proper way.
I agree that just as we cannot effectively legislate decency, we cannot effectively legislate politeness, common sense, and empathy either.
Exactly. And as long as these things are not there in society, you can have as much free speech as you want and it won't (atleast in my opinion) do much good. That's not an argument to eliminate free speech.
I suppose I could sum up my argument (although not completely) by saying that I think free speech is necessary but not sufficient and that it plays a smaller role than advertised these days in the building of a healthy and prosperous society.
You advocate the sort of ideas that lead to "decency" laws.
Why is it that everyone thinks in terms of "laws" and "enforcement"? I don't think it's possible to enforce decency. I do however think and insist that people should be more decent.
You basically are saying that someone should only be allowed to speak freely when they have proved themselves mature and responsible. However, the courts would decide whether someone fulfilled these criteria.
No I'm not. I'm saying that if we have to think of laws that protect these sort of things and enforce them, the society has diseases more serious than "suppression of free speech".
If we are going to end up in court either way I will always choose the path of free speech. Just because someone is offended by what another says does not mean that the speaker should be censored. As Voltaire said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
In the same vein, I have the right to be an annoying person. I don't want laws that allow or deny me this right. But I still think that society should have less annoying people. Enforcement and laws are not the only things that society is built on. Voltaire's quote is becoming a Godwin's law of sorts these days. I don't really care about allowing or denying someone to express his point of view. I think society has bigger problems that need to be addressed which can only be handled at an individual rather than a collective level (which is the best that legislations can do).
I don't think you should stop at bullying. This whole "free speech" thing is getting out of hand. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for it but if you grant something like that to a bunch of immature, irresponsible people, you're going to get into a mess. It's fun to stir up some controversy and then go to court to settle it while overlooking whether it was the humanly decent thing to do but that sort of thing will kill "society" faster than suppression of free speech and turn it into a dog eat dog jungle where the courts protect the right to eat and encourage people to be dogs.
What does "their" mean in this context? Where I am, we first get a connection and a SIM from a provider then go to a showroom and buy a phone from there (Nokia, Motorola whatever). Insert the SIM into the phone and start using it. The carrier and the handset are provided by different people. Isn't it the same way there in the US?
Are these people jobless or something? What's the point of conducting a "study" to figure out the health benefits of winning a Nobel prize? Am I the only one who sees this as a mostly wasted effort?
The US is facing the same issues right now. It wants to restart its space oddeysey, but unfortunately most of the technology used back then has been outdated - plus the original team that worked on these missions are either resting in their graves or enjoying retirement. I welcome this move - more players in the field bring in more competition, more innovation and a race to get things moving. Remember what happened in the 70s when the Soviet Union stopped their space voyages?
India does not have access to the same financial resources that the United States has. To spend a good chunk of it's income on "putting a man on the moon" when it has more serious issues to deal with might spur a race to "get things moving" but frankly, I think it's an irresponsible way to spend national wealth.