I was thinking about that. Every time I've had to do government work, I've been surprised at how many obsolescent pos's I see lying around in their data centers.
Are they going to push a hardware/software upgrade to get everything to a level where it can even run this stuff? Seems like a total waste. They need to virtualize, and they need to move things off local machines.
Meh, they try to hide stuff all the time now, and how many things do we find out because someone left it written up on a poorly secured computer? Government "transparency" always depends on people on the inside leaking the information.
On the other hand, they're losing laptops full of veteran's records on a monthly basis. Either they need to take better care of the data, or they need to put tighter controls on who has access to the data.
Well, on the one hand, it's a good idea to encrypt machines that contain sensitive data.
On the other hand, this is just a bandaid on their terrible information policy...The reason that they have to encrypt a zillion machines is because they store sensitive personal data on a zillion machines. Then there are multiple operating systems, levels of security, etc. All this means that compromising one machine will still be pretty easy, because when you have encryption on the crappy desktop in the mailroom where everyone surfs porn, you stop taking it seriously.
They could kill the whole problem by centralizing their data stores, and developing some secure web interfaces across enhanced encryption. That way, instead of trying to encrypt every machine, you could encrypt 50 data centers and control access locally...Hell, if I were the government I'd push all my software needs toward think clients and terminal services anyway...The average user doesn't need more, and that makes all your security problems more managable.
Not sure where this becomes an ethics breach or a bit of partisan hackery...They're upholding a precident that's been in place for more than a decade.
C-Span's argument that they ought to be allowed to pan the room and take congressional "reaction shots" seems idiotic to me. Who gives a crap what their reaction is? What's important is what's going on at the damn speakers podium, and I don't want to miss any of that because some jackass producer thinks that I'm interested in what the redneck representative from Virginia is flicking at his new Muslim archenemy.
Having the video record of your government in action being controlled by a third party who wants to use it for their own commercial benefit is a good thing? Nice troll.
C-span is pointless. In this modern age, the only thing that excuses the fact that all the senate/house deliberations aren't available on the house/senate websites in a downloadable non-proprietary format is the fact that those two groups are made up of technological retards.
Seriously. There is no better definition of public domain. That content should be out there and viewable by more than just a few jaded press correspondents.
When was the last time you saw a law passed in the states that made selling a violent movie to a minor against the law?
Parent's groups decry violence in movies, but it's not to the degree that they get outraged toward games...A movie that was exactly the same as GTA San Andreas would barely show up as a blip on their radar.
The thing that always leaps to my mind, and they touched on it in tfa, is the persecution of comics in the late 40's early 50's. they were blamed for everything, from making kids more violent, to promoting homosexuality (all those guys in their tights with their little boy sidekicks), to promoting Communism...Not that everything wasn't accused of promoting Communism right then, but that's beside the point. They had congressional hearings, they came up with standards for "decency", the works.
Flash forward to the 80's when comics started going really adult in this country for the first time. Really dark, gory, and real. Congressional hearings? No. New standards? No.
And why not? Because they were just comic books. The same people who had read them as kids were running the country, and blew off the concerns of the few as unwarranted. Comics had been around forever, and nobody'd seen any ill effects, so what was the big deal? Not worth getting in a flap over.
The biggest thing against games right now is how new they are. You get these hugely violent movies, above and beyond the pale, and no one cares. Why? Because people grew up with movies. You understand whats going on there, there is no mystery...You can flash back to all the risque crap you watched in your youth, and know that it didn't warp you forever.
In ten, twenty, thirty years at the outside, video games will be completely accepted, and no one will give a damn when the new super realistic holographic blood & guts game comes out...Till then though, we're just going to have to suck it up, because the old fogies are still running things and they lack clue.
Heh. So what's your point? That there is a vast conspiracy to keep myspace-related sexual assaults secret?
This stuff is tremendously over-reported in tv media because it improves ratings, so a relatively few cases, which affect a tiny minority of users, have become this nationwide "cause for concern", and people want to buy into it because they like to believe that sexual predators are out there lurking in their vans with the tinted windows more than they like to believe the truth...that you're far far more likely as a child to be sexually assaulted by your dad than by a random stranger you meet on myspace.
Search for "MySpace" on the National Center for Victims of Crime website, and you get a staggering 12 hits, mostly to articles talking about parents groups freaking out.
There is also a victim report(pdf warning) from the DoJ, but the most recent one is 2000, so not much can be made of that. However, searching the DoJ website itself turns up a big 29 hits for MySpace, which drops to 12 hits if you refine the search to include "sexual".
I think that's a pretty good rule for anyone, though I can see why it's doubly so for judges and politicians...You never know when that one, off-the-cuff remark will be picked up out of context and trumpeted as proof that you're biased against
Sounds like more of a problem with your kids, frankly. The danger of sexual predators has been blown way the hell out of proportion...Your kid is still far more likely to be molested by someone you know. It's typical media scaremongering...The number of reported cases of actual assault/molestation are crazy low.
Might as well ask where the safeguards are at your local high school...The opportunities for trouble there are way the hell greater than on MySpace or similar.
The concern for privacy, however is much more real. You don't have to show your tits to be compromising yourself to future employers and current school administrators. I wish like hell I'd never started posting under my own name...I ought to change it, but Satanicpuppy has such a nice ring...
The idea of determinism is an artefact of religious thought, for the reasons I mentioned above...The idea of free will had to be invented to explain why everyone didn't do what the omnipotent/omnibenevolent god would obviously want us to do.
In a day to day life, we all assume that the person we're dealing with is operating of their own free will...The very idea of their free will being taken away conjures fantasies of brain-sucking aliens, or vicious blackmail, or CIA mind control, because that is the only way in which we can imagine someone not having control over their actions.
Even if the universe is purely deterministic, from the inside it'll seem like we're making our own choices, and hell, it may be that we actually are making our own choices, and yet things work out as if we weren't because we all choose the same way.
They go round and round. I sat in class once and heard the professor try and redefine "omnipotent" to just mean all things that are possible, rather than the more open-ended "all things".
I almost always ascribe to the idea that, if you have to spend a lot of time adding exceptions to the rule, then there is something wrong with the rule. Omnipotence is an incoherent idea, because it leads to tons of paradoxes.
I don't mean to be flip about it, but all too often in philosophy, you end up arguing these points that are so abstruse that the actual distinction you're trying to make is almost impossible to discern, and in a case like this, where the outcome has practical consequences, the debate has to bow to that.
I think most people believe in free will, because it agrees with our perception of the world.
I personally think that breaking it down into a dichotomy in the first place leads to an epistemilogical hellhole from which there is no escape. It's like asking fish to describe water...What are they goign to say, "Wet?" It's not wet to them.
It's just as difficult for us to try and put a finger on exactly what free will would entail. I think in some things we are definitely constrained to act in a certain way, but I don't think that we are constrained in all things.
Sure. I mean, Descartes' original argument against the use of sense data is that he might be dreaming...Now, you've got to be pretty wealthy to have so little distinction between your waking and dreaming life that you occasionally get them confused. Ask his tenant farmers whether they're dreaming or not, and I'd imagine you'd get a pretty definite answer.
Unfortunately for Descartes, he spends a lot of time in the meditations killing off the idea that sense data is in any way useful. He goes from dreams, all the way up to the idea that an "evil genius" is controlling his senses, and feeding him lies, a la The Matrix, so by the time he gets to the Cogito he really can't turn around and say, "So everything else exists." He;s already proven that there is no way that he could no if anything exists or not.
He'd like to, no doubt, but all the objections he has so laboriously raised now come around to bite him in the ass. He can't say, "I observe..." because as soon as he does, all the people who have been following his train of thought will cry foul, and rightfully so.
In the last 100 or so years there has been a movement by a subset of philosophers to reclassify certain "classic" philosophical problems as linguistic problems rather than actual solvable dilemmas. I agree with them, and believe that free will is an issue whose roots lie more in the fact that the language in which we frame our thought has the unfortunate side effect of allowing us to frame questions that are more or less incoherent, than in any sort of reality. It is Western Philosophy's answer to the Buddhist Koan.
On top of that comes the complete uselessness of the answer. What would happen if people were conclusively proven to have no free will? Would we stop punishing them for committing crimes? Would we let it pass when they play us false? Or would we just say, "Oh well, he was predestined for jail. Too bad the universe hates him." If the article is anything to go by, we'd treat people with even less leniency, but even there it would have very little effect on society.
As for a, b, and c:
a) Society doesn't care, the same way society doesn't care that we might not exist at all. It has practically no bearing on the day to day life of non-philosophers.
b) No, it is impossible to prove you don't have free will...Or that you do, which makes it a fruitless direction of inquiry.
c) It is possible that at some point we will discover that physical determinism does apply, and that all our actions can be predicted based on natural laws, so it is faintly testable, and, indeed the article talks about trying to make use of genetic predispositions, which aren't the same thing, but definitely move in that direction. So, physical determinism could be framed for scientific inquiry, but most of the rest of the debate doesn't lend itself to any sort of testing so no, not useful.
I've posted like 20 times in this thread, and it's clear you didn't read any of them. Regardless of whether we actually have or do not have free will, we cannot function as a society unless we treat everyone as though they have free will.
And since having/not having free will is about as tangible as having/not having a soul, there is zero reason to ever even suspect you don't have free will unless you're just hanging around speculating on existence. It's pointless.
I'm not going to go over this whole thing again. Read up the thread. I think free will/determinism is a false dichotomy, and that the whole issue is a linguistic mindgame originating from arbitrary views on the nature of god.
I am saying that, in the absence of any proof whatsoever, for or against free will, that the debate is meaningless. I am furthermore saying that, in it's current incarnation, the debate is loaded with so much baggage that the discussion is nearly meaningless.
There are a lot of things that would change, were it proven that we have or do not have free will. I would be surprised if either such proof were made convincingly.
It's easy to prove that you exist. The Cogito is perfect for that. But it leads to a philosophical solipsim...You can't derive anything from that fact that you exist except for the fact that you exist, which makes it an argumentative dead end.
The problem is always living things. We can predict so well the functioning of everything else, but things that move around on their own are weird.
I think in time we will find that sub-quantum physics plays a much bigger part in the universe than we're currently aware of, and that it will help explain some things that we really don't understand about ourselves.
No you're right, I was calling it a pseudo-problem, because in my opinion that's what it is: A problem of language. I, personally, based on my reading of the investigations would say that he would agree that the free will debate as it is usually framed is more of a linguistic boondoggle than an actual solvable problem.
Free will, along with the mind/body problem, and the ideas of objective good/beauty are commonly cited as examples of what Wittgenstien would call philosophers "misuse of language".
Wittgenstein, however, and especially the later Wittgenstein is open to interpretation, however, so you are free to disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
Now THAT is how you wield the ban hammer.
I was thinking about that. Every time I've had to do government work, I've been surprised at how many obsolescent pos's I see lying around in their data centers.
Are they going to push a hardware/software upgrade to get everything to a level where it can even run this stuff? Seems like a total waste. They need to virtualize, and they need to move things off local machines.
Meh, they try to hide stuff all the time now, and how many things do we find out because someone left it written up on a poorly secured computer? Government "transparency" always depends on people on the inside leaking the information.
On the other hand, they're losing laptops full of veteran's records on a monthly basis. Either they need to take better care of the data, or they need to put tighter controls on who has access to the data.
Well, on the one hand, it's a good idea to encrypt machines that contain sensitive data.
On the other hand, this is just a bandaid on their terrible information policy...The reason that they have to encrypt a zillion machines is because they store sensitive personal data on a zillion machines. Then there are multiple operating systems, levels of security, etc. All this means that compromising one machine will still be pretty easy, because when you have encryption on the crappy desktop in the mailroom where everyone surfs porn, you stop taking it seriously.
They could kill the whole problem by centralizing their data stores, and developing some secure web interfaces across enhanced encryption. That way, instead of trying to encrypt every machine, you could encrypt 50 data centers and control access locally...Hell, if I were the government I'd push all my software needs toward think clients and terminal services anyway...The average user doesn't need more, and that makes all your security problems more managable.
Not sure where this becomes an ethics breach or a bit of partisan hackery...They're upholding a precident that's been in place for more than a decade.
C-Span's argument that they ought to be allowed to pan the room and take congressional "reaction shots" seems idiotic to me. Who gives a crap what their reaction is? What's important is what's going on at the damn speakers podium, and I don't want to miss any of that because some jackass producer thinks that I'm interested in what the redneck representative from Virginia is flicking at his new Muslim archenemy.
Having the video record of your government in action being controlled by a third party who wants to use it for their own commercial benefit is a good thing? Nice troll.
C-span is pointless. In this modern age, the only thing that excuses the fact that all the senate/house deliberations aren't available on the house/senate websites in a downloadable non-proprietary format is the fact that those two groups are made up of technological retards.
Seriously. There is no better definition of public domain. That content should be out there and viewable by more than just a few jaded press correspondents.
When was the last time you saw a law passed in the states that made selling a violent movie to a minor against the law?
Parent's groups decry violence in movies, but it's not to the degree that they get outraged toward games...A movie that was exactly the same as GTA San Andreas would barely show up as a blip on their radar.
The thing that always leaps to my mind, and they touched on it in tfa, is the persecution of comics in the late 40's early 50's. they were blamed for everything, from making kids more violent, to promoting homosexuality (all those guys in their tights with their little boy sidekicks), to promoting Communism...Not that everything wasn't accused of promoting Communism right then, but that's beside the point. They had congressional hearings, they came up with standards for "decency", the works.
Flash forward to the 80's when comics started going really adult in this country for the first time. Really dark, gory, and real. Congressional hearings? No. New standards? No.
And why not? Because they were just comic books. The same people who had read them as kids were running the country, and blew off the concerns of the few as unwarranted. Comics had been around forever, and nobody'd seen any ill effects, so what was the big deal? Not worth getting in a flap over.
The biggest thing against games right now is how new they are. You get these hugely violent movies, above and beyond the pale, and no one cares. Why? Because people grew up with movies. You understand whats going on there, there is no mystery...You can flash back to all the risque crap you watched in your youth, and know that it didn't warp you forever.
In ten, twenty, thirty years at the outside, video games will be completely accepted, and no one will give a damn when the new super realistic holographic blood & guts game comes out...Till then though, we're just going to have to suck it up, because the old fogies are still running things and they lack clue.
Heh. So what's your point? That there is a vast conspiracy to keep myspace-related sexual assaults secret?
This stuff is tremendously over-reported in tv media because it improves ratings, so a relatively few cases, which affect a tiny minority of users, have become this nationwide "cause for concern", and people want to buy into it because they like to believe that sexual predators are out there lurking in their vans with the tinted windows more than they like to believe the truth...that you're far far more likely as a child to be sexually assaulted by your dad than by a random stranger you meet on myspace.
Search for "MySpace" on the National Center for Victims of Crime website, and you get a staggering 12 hits, mostly to articles talking about parents groups freaking out.
There is also a victim report(pdf warning) from the DoJ, but the most recent one is 2000, so not much can be made of that. However, searching the DoJ website itself turns up a big 29 hits for MySpace, which drops to 12 hits if you refine the search to include "sexual".
That's pretty damn low.
I think that's a pretty good rule for anyone, though I can see why it's doubly so for judges and politicians...You never know when that one, off-the-cuff remark will be picked up out of context and trumpeted as proof that you're biased against
Sounds like more of a problem with your kids, frankly. The danger of sexual predators has been blown way the hell out of proportion...Your kid is still far more likely to be molested by someone you know. It's typical media scaremongering...The number of reported cases of actual assault/molestation are crazy low.
Might as well ask where the safeguards are at your local high school...The opportunities for trouble there are way the hell greater than on MySpace or similar.
The concern for privacy, however is much more real. You don't have to show your tits to be compromising yourself to future employers and current school administrators. I wish like hell I'd never started posting under my own name...I ought to change it, but Satanicpuppy has such a nice ring...
The idea of determinism is an artefact of religious thought, for the reasons I mentioned above...The idea of free will had to be invented to explain why everyone didn't do what the omnipotent/omnibenevolent god would obviously want us to do.
In a day to day life, we all assume that the person we're dealing with is operating of their own free will...The very idea of their free will being taken away conjures fantasies of brain-sucking aliens, or vicious blackmail, or CIA mind control, because that is the only way in which we can imagine someone not having control over their actions.
Even if the universe is purely deterministic, from the inside it'll seem like we're making our own choices, and hell, it may be that we actually are making our own choices, and yet things work out as if we weren't because we all choose the same way.
Not at all! Free will/Determinism is equally an argument if you believe in god or don't, you just trade one type of determinism for another.
Admittedly, it annoys me when religion tries to lay an absolute claim on ethics...people kill and hate in the name of religion every day.
They go round and round. I sat in class once and heard the professor try and redefine "omnipotent" to just mean all things that are possible, rather than the more open-ended "all things".
I almost always ascribe to the idea that, if you have to spend a lot of time adding exceptions to the rule, then there is something wrong with the rule. Omnipotence is an incoherent idea, because it leads to tons of paradoxes.
I don't mean to be flip about it, but all too often in philosophy, you end up arguing these points that are so abstruse that the actual distinction you're trying to make is almost impossible to discern, and in a case like this, where the outcome has practical consequences, the debate has to bow to that.
I think most people believe in free will, because it agrees with our perception of the world.
I personally think that breaking it down into a dichotomy in the first place leads to an epistemilogical hellhole from which there is no escape. It's like asking fish to describe water...What are they goign to say, "Wet?" It's not wet to them.
It's just as difficult for us to try and put a finger on exactly what free will would entail. I think in some things we are definitely constrained to act in a certain way, but I don't think that we are constrained in all things.
Sure. I mean, Descartes' original argument against the use of sense data is that he might be dreaming...Now, you've got to be pretty wealthy to have so little distinction between your waking and dreaming life that you occasionally get them confused. Ask his tenant farmers whether they're dreaming or not, and I'd imagine you'd get a pretty definite answer.
Unfortunately for Descartes, he spends a lot of time in the meditations killing off the idea that sense data is in any way useful. He goes from dreams, all the way up to the idea that an "evil genius" is controlling his senses, and feeding him lies, a la The Matrix, so by the time he gets to the Cogito he really can't turn around and say, "So everything else exists." He;s already proven that there is no way that he could no if anything exists or not.
He'd like to, no doubt, but all the objections he has so laboriously raised now come around to bite him in the ass. He can't say, "I observe..." because as soon as he does, all the people who have been following his train of thought will cry foul, and rightfully so.
In the last 100 or so years there has been a movement by a subset of philosophers to reclassify certain "classic" philosophical problems as linguistic problems rather than actual solvable dilemmas. I agree with them, and believe that free will is an issue whose roots lie more in the fact that the language in which we frame our thought has the unfortunate side effect of allowing us to frame questions that are more or less incoherent, than in any sort of reality. It is Western Philosophy's answer to the Buddhist Koan.
On top of that comes the complete uselessness of the answer. What would happen if people were conclusively proven to have no free will? Would we stop punishing them for committing crimes? Would we let it pass when they play us false? Or would we just say, "Oh well, he was predestined for jail. Too bad the universe hates him." If the article is anything to go by, we'd treat people with even less leniency, but even there it would have very little effect on society.
As for a, b, and c:
a) Society doesn't care, the same way society doesn't care that we might not exist at all. It has practically no bearing on the day to day life of non-philosophers.
b) No, it is impossible to prove you don't have free will...Or that you do, which makes it a fruitless direction of inquiry.
c) It is possible that at some point we will discover that physical determinism does apply, and that all our actions can be predicted based on natural laws, so it is faintly testable, and, indeed the article talks about trying to make use of genetic predispositions, which aren't the same thing, but definitely move in that direction. So, physical determinism could be framed for scientific inquiry, but most of the rest of the debate doesn't lend itself to any sort of testing so no, not useful.
I've posted like 20 times in this thread, and it's clear you didn't read any of them. Regardless of whether we actually have or do not have free will, we cannot function as a society unless we treat everyone as though they have free will.
And since having/not having free will is about as tangible as having/not having a soul, there is zero reason to ever even suspect you don't have free will unless you're just hanging around speculating on existence. It's pointless.
I'm not going to go over this whole thing again. Read up the thread. I think free will/determinism is a false dichotomy, and that the whole issue is a linguistic mindgame originating from arbitrary views on the nature of god.
What, like I'm going to say, "Hurrrr, yea" and you're going to say, "HA! You DO believe in determinism, you're just too dumb to know it!"
No, I don't believe in destiny, or predestination, or determinism, whether it be religious determinism, or physical determinism.
I am saying that, in the absence of any proof whatsoever, for or against free will, that the debate is meaningless. I am furthermore saying that, in it's current incarnation, the debate is loaded with so much baggage that the discussion is nearly meaningless.
There are a lot of things that would change, were it proven that we have or do not have free will. I would be surprised if either such proof were made convincingly.
It's easy to prove that you exist. The Cogito is perfect for that. But it leads to a philosophical solipsim...You can't derive anything from that fact that you exist except for the fact that you exist, which makes it an argumentative dead end.
The problem is always living things. We can predict so well the functioning of everything else, but things that move around on their own are weird.
I think in time we will find that sub-quantum physics plays a much bigger part in the universe than we're currently aware of, and that it will help explain some things that we really don't understand about ourselves.
No you're right, I was calling it a pseudo-problem, because in my opinion that's what it is: A problem of language. I, personally, based on my reading of the investigations would say that he would agree that the free will debate as it is usually framed is more of a linguistic boondoggle than an actual solvable problem.
Free will, along with the mind/body problem, and the ideas of objective good/beauty are commonly cited as examples of what Wittgenstien would call philosophers "misuse of language".
Wittgenstein, however, and especially the later Wittgenstein is open to interpretation, however, so you are free to disagree.