The differences here in Quebec, Canada... Violence is of course something we do NOT encourage but at least our reaction is not "let's hide it and act as if it's not there".
Nudity does not free speech make, post-1960s concepts of "freedom to shock" aside. Indeed, Canada has stronger restrictions on private speech than America -- there is no absolute right to free speech, as there is in America. If this same suit were to be brought in Canada, it would have a much greater likelihood of succeeding due to Canadian restrictions on free speech in the interests of preventing racism. Canadians such as yourself might prefer to "sit and talk about" sources of conflict (in the Habermasian sense), but I'm afraid your statutory law would rather confront it as a matter of criminal behavior.
One example is a commercial run by an American firm selling weather insurance for special events. The commercial was a comic piece showing an American Indian shaman leading a group of elderly customers in a rain dance. The CBC decided the commercial was offensive to Native Americans and refused to run it.
A less humorous example concerns a newspaper columnist who wrote several columns questioning the existence of the Holocaust, calling (for example) the movie "Schindler's List" "Swindler's List." The courts fined the writer and his newspaper several thousand dollars apiece for violating hate speech laws.
In another, more famous, case, a teacher (Keegstra) who made repeated slurs against Jews to his students was convicted of violating the hate speech laws and was sentenced to prison, a conviction later upheld by the Supreme Court after an appellate court overturned it.
Without defending the content of what these people said, it must be noted that such speech falls under First Amendment protections in the United States; Keegstra, for example, would surely have been fired from his position for teaching anti-Semitism to students, but could not have been criminally prosecuted. ("Fighting words" are a rare example of unprotected speech -- if Keegstra had told his students to beat up the next Jew they say, knowing they might follow his suggestions, he could be criminally prosecuted. That was not, however, the case in Canada.)
I am not, I should note, passing judgment on which system is superior from a normative perspective; both have their defenders and detractors. For example, Stanley Fish has repeatedly argued that "freedom of speech" doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, and consequently there are only degrees of restriction. Fish would have no issues restricting the speech of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers because their political beliefs -- which, if implemented, would destroy any liberality and liberalism in society -- places them beyond the pale. We have no duty to extend rights to those who would see those same rights denied to us.
On the other hand, Fish comes to this conclusion because he rejects the fundamental Enlightenment belief in good speech driving out bad. The German theorist Habermas, on the other side of the spectrum, would argue that total freedom of speech is necessary for fulfilling his "rules of reason." Habermas might suggest, for example, that Canada's criminal prosecution of Keegstra's speech only made it impossible to come to a societal consensus that anti-Semitism is a bad thing -- and consequently the suppression of his speech led to his elevation as a major far-right figure in Canada. Habermas' discursive theory of democracy assumes that discussion is the only way to build a lasting and stable consensus.
The patent (USPTO link here) covers any system in which a purchaser provides credit information to a mediating party, who then approves the payment and provides authorization and an identifying value to the seller. IANAIPL, but this patent covers a whole lot of ground. Obviously, if you as an e-vendor are processing credit card claims yourself, the patent doesn't apply. But the patent pretends to apply to a whole set of services, an argument that doesn't to my untrained eyes seem to follow from the claims:
Another use for such a system is a gift or donation registration service. An entity seeking gifts or donations would provide a list of what it needed to the registration service. Entities wishing to make gifts or donations would call the registration service and the service would mediate a transaction between the donor and the source of the item to be given or donated.
Still other uses involve assigning available resources of a given type to clients who call for assistance. One example of such a system is a lawyer referral service. The referral service would maintain a database of lawyers and would assign lawyers to clients on a basis which assured that each lawyer would get a fair share of the referrals. The system would determine from the database which lawyer was to get the referral and would connect the lawyer with the calling client.
Additionally, a communications system may be advantageously used to mediate a transaction such as an auction. Customers could make bids. The communications system would validate the bids and provide them to the auctioneer, who would know only the mounts, and not the identities of the bidders. The communications system could then indicate to each participant the current highest bid and solicit new bids until a single highest bid remained. In some embodiments, the communications system itself might play the role of auctioneer. In such an embodiment, the transaction manager would keep track of the current highest bid, would inform the participants of that bid, and when bidding had ceased, would complete the transaction with the highest bidder.
eBay itself seems to be safe as (from what I understand of the auction site) it doesn't handle any payments directly, PayPal excepted. The claim over a lawyer referral service doesn't make much sense to me, since it doesn't suggest that the mediating service handle billing and payment, while the gift service... well, it seems a stretch to call a recipient of a gift a "vendor" (as in claim 1).
I remember a book from several years ago in in which a cyberpunk lawyer (it was a very strange piece of fiction, yes) used the theory of adverse possession (What's that?) to claim title to a piece of intellectual property left unimproved by its owner. I'm starting to think that implementing such a theory in IP law, as insane as that is, would be an improvement over the current situation....
It's definitely an "idea" movie, with all the problems and opportunities represented -- the only thing I can compare it to right now is the Ring Cycle (though Wagner was inspired by Schopenhauer, a very fine philosopher from a very different school than that which inspired the Matrix). I think there are more references in M:Rld and M:Rv than you give credit for, however.
I believe the Matrix is largely incomprehensible unless one has at least a reasonable familiarity with S0ren Kierkegaard ("SK") and crisis theology. In fact, I'd argue that the series narrows down from its expansive view of philosophy in the first two movies to, in both the EtM video game and M:Rv, a tight focus on Kierkegaard's conception of freedom as radical choice. By contrast, M:Rld went all over the philosophical map, my favorite example being that the Zion council seems to be populated entirely by Jamesian Pragmatists (including Cornel West, whose most interesting work was a sustained discussion of American Pragmatism).
Just a few Kierkegaardian references in the Matrix:
- In EtM (which crystallized my understanding of TM as Kierkegaardian), Ghost quotes SK on faith and absurdity. In the game, the tripartite crew of Sparks, Niobe, and Ghost are almost certainly representative of SK's view of human life as aesthetic, ethical and religious, respectively. (The three Demiurges -- the Merovingian, Architect, and Oracle -- seem to recapitulate this schematic.)
- The Christ parallel in Neo is so blatant as to hardly be worth mentioning, but his death deserves some observations: he died to redeem Man (and Machine), since Trinity's death precluded his doing it out of love for any one individual; his death redeemed M&M from Smith (who seems, amongst many other things, to represent Original Sin, being the ultimate descendent from the war between M&M); his death also freed the condemned from hell (when the Architect agrees to release programs and persons who wish to leave the Matrix).
- When Neo dies, the machine-ruler says, "It is done." This is the same thing Christ says in John 19:30 (and is also used two more times in the Bible -- after the world is created in Genesis, and after it is destroyed in the Revelation). Smith is then rescinded from the world, the Matrix is created anew, and peace descends upon Zion. Apart from begging the infralapsarian question, this reinforces the idea of Neo as propitiation (as many Christians see Christ dying to expiate the sins of Man). I'm a bit uneasy with this part because Neo is shown as bargaining for salvation -- something that is completely incoherent in most versions of Christianity, and more importantly, within Kierkegaard. At the same time, I have to wonder what happens to Neo at this point. In John, Christ says, "It is done," then commends his soul to God. Does this imply that Neo has joined with the machine-ruler? Is one of the reasons peace descends because Neo has joined the machine-consciousness and broken the old covenant of slavery? Is he a mediator between man and machine (viz 1 Tim. 2:5-6)?
- The Trainman is deeply concerned with time: when we meet him in EtM, he tells Niobe how many hours Zion can be expected to last against the machine onslaught. ("72 hours. That's exactly how long Zion lasted last time.") In M:Rv, he is obsessed with punctuality, and has an intimate connection with time, shown by the many watches he wears on his wrist and his intimate knowledge of train schedules. This emphasis on time seems designed to evoke SK's discussion of time in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which he directly discusses the entrance of eternity into time. (The Oracle's line in EtM, "The path of the One is made by the many," echoes SK's assertion that the many discrete points of temporality create the possibility of eternity.)
- Kierkegaard's doctrine of radical choice permeates the script, culminating in the Smith v. Neo showdown. I suspect that Smith is meant to represent (amongst many things!) existentialism, just as the Age
Less-restrictively licensed alternative
on
Jess in Action
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· Score: 4, Informative
Should you wish an alternative to the commercially-licensed JESS, Stanford has its own Java Theorem Prover, DAML-compliant and capable of handling forward- and backward-chained reasoning. Object code can be freely redistributed.
This guy hacked into other computers to send out tens of thousands of bogus emails that caused massive boucebacks to the victims.
Ah, yes, but what does "hacked" mean in this context? As far as I can tell, it means that he went through open SMTP servers -- ugly, nasty but also a pretty generous definition of "hack," as most on/. will probably agree. (Next up on Channel 8 at 11, "'Ping:' Harmless ICMP toy or virtual carjacker?")
Furthermore, there's a fundamental confusion in the indictment: after stating that the defendant went out and harvested e-mail addresses, the indictment charges him with launching a DDoS attack because of the bounces from incorrect addresses! (In other words: he expended effort to find valid e-mail addresses, but then is charged with deliberately saturating SMTP servers with bounced e-mails.) Yes, you could certainly make a nice tort case out of the fact that he recklessly sent thousands of e-mails out to addresses that had a high probability of being incorrect (depraved heart, yes), but there's a certain lack of mens rea in his acts.
As for other posters who say that the defendant is getting his due -- yes, this guy's a troll, a racist, an ex-con and a Phillies fan, but that doesn't mean that a conviction under these circumstances is a good precedent. It is when our civil liberties protect the legal acts of unpleasant people that our legal system truly shines.
Surely I'm not the only one who finds a dark amusement in seeing both "The benefits of being unemployed" and "Where do I find an honest headhunter?" showing up simultaneously on the Slashdot front page.
When the FSF refers to the GPL license as being a "copyleft" they're making a joke, because they're using COPYRIGHT law to ensure that the code remains freely available. Copyleft is not a principle the law recognizes.
Absolutely correct, and that's why invoking preemption isn't so crazy as many seem to think. The federal courts, in Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software, held that Title 17 Sec. 117 of the U.S. Code preempted terms in Vault's shrink-wrap licensing, so there's precedent for applying the preemption doctrine to private contracts in copyright litigation.
Without knowing more about SCO's argument, we certainly can't argue on the merits of it, but there's always the possibility that some enterprising copyright lawyer has found a potential incompatibility between the GPL and copyright law. (Offhand, though, any argument based on Title 17 Sec. 117(a) seems specious to me, since I don't see how it could possibly affect the right to authorize copies and derivative works in Sec. 106 -- but IANA(IP)L.)
And, actually, *I* say:x!, but who's keeping track?
While it's true that Congress wanted to ban (or sharply curtail) genetic research in the 1970s, it was the self-policing of the scientific community (at the Asilomar Conference) that convinced Congress not to enact legislative bans on the research. Asilomar showed that scientists were concerned about the ethical and public policy effects of their research, rather than being the Dr. Frankensteins so many members of the press and the anti-scientific left painted them to be.
What we lack today is the same kind of scientific consensus-building process in ethical and policy matters. The inability of the research community to show that it cares about the moral, legal, political and social effects of its work has led to greater political scrutiny of that research, and acts such as the Executive Order limiting research into stem cells.
So, to raise the obvious question, what chance do we have for another Asilomar? Can the scientific establishment convince the public that it's not hell-bent on progress at any price, or is modern bio-science too fragmented, too much a creature of academic, corporate, and social specialization to speak with a united voice again?
Okay, so I admit that it's not much of a campaign slogan, but here's the related questions:
1) You suggest that California should legalize marijuana use. However, federal pre-emption of drug legalization under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 (AKA the Controlled Substances Act) takes precedence over any state decriminalization of drug use. How would you avoid what could be a particularly nasty battle between state and federal control?
2) Although you propose several major spending initiatives, including a "clean elections" law and a health-care system along the lines of Vermont's, you also state that balancing the budget is a priority. Obviously, the only way to reconcile these priorities is to raise taxes, as you acknowledge.
If we conservatively assume that adding new and restoring existing funding for projects only reopens the budget gap to where it was prior to the May Revision, some $38.2 billion must be recovered to balance the state's budget. Almost all of this will have to come out of the three general fund taxes (personal, sales, and corporate).
To give an idea of the numbers we're talking about, if we rolled back the California tax cuts of the mid-1990s, we would recover only around $5 billion (estimated as the revenue loss for FY 1999-2000 due to the tax cuts).
Having said that, what kind of increase in the various tax rates are you contemplating (income rate increases, capital gains, tobacco, etc)? Are there any major program reductions you support? Do you propose to shift burdens onto local governments to help close the gap?
... is that they depend heavily upon a fundamentally indefensible assumption: that we can assume ourselves to be a randomly-chosen member of a given population that is invariant across time and space.
Basically, Bostrom's argument states that, assuming that the human population will continue to grow geometrically until it catastrophically declines (and thus assuming that the last human population prior to that decline is the largest set of living humans in history), you are statistically most likely to be in the final generation before the end of the world. The same argument, with slightly different assumptions (and you can twist the argument any way you wish, as long as you make different starting assumptions), is used in the Simulation Argument.
The problem is that it's incoherent by any measurement. After all, we are not plucked randomly from all over the time stream to form a statistically-representative sample, nor do we have any idea what the actual population distribution will be. The real nail in the coffin of Bostrom's thesis is that each person living before the final generation has a statistical probability of zero of being in the final generation, no matter the degree of their uncertainty as to which generation they belong.
To put it another way, Bostrom's argument is functionally equivalent to this: I have one hundred black marbles in this jar. In this other jar, I have one thousand white marbles that I will at some point in time add to the black marbles, in part or in whole. To Bostrom, if I ask you to guess the color of a marble drawn from the first jar at a specific point in time, you should always assume white. The problem, of course, is that you don't actually know the actual distribution of marbles: I may have added no white marbles, one, one hundred, or one thousand. Thus, we can drawn no conclusions from Bostrom's thesis. One guess is quite literally as good as another under such conditions of uncertainty.
John Barrow's paper (on postulated "glitches and small drifts... in the laws of Nature over time" in a simulated universe) suffers from similar flaws. Yes, a simulated universe might experience small glitches as it attempts to regain homeostasis, if indeed a simulated universe allowed small glitches in the pursuit of homeostasis -- but that's tautological at best. (Who's to say that a simulated universe might not run perfectly, with completely rigid laws?) You can equally well argue that changes in an inflationary or deflationary universe will result in changes in assumed constants; for that matter, you can say that it's the will of God, the flutter of angel wings, or the acts of Douglas Adams' mice at work.
Like the work of too many philosophers who desperately want to prove that philosophy can triumph over physics (see Putnam, Hilary, and Searle, John), the Sim and Doom arguments try to argue to a conclusion from nonexistent premises. Most philosophers have trouble taking these arguments seriously; scientists should chuck them out the window entirely.
Considering that the House overwhelmingly passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Funding Prohibition Act in June, I think now is not the time for an idea like this.
Remember: just because you've got a good idea, doesn't mean it's a legal idea. Consult your local attorney for more details, &c., &c.
I have never seen so much disgusting anti-Americanism as I have in this thread..... Innocent people do not plead guilty.... This government is protecting YOU, if you don't like that protection then vote for someone who'll do it your way.
Whoa there! Aren't you the same person who played Thoreau in a different thread?
It's an open secret of law that innocent people plead guilty all the time. Consider, for example, the recent furor in Tulia, TX, where a police source went bad and turned in dozens of innocent people on drug distribution charges. Those people -- uniformly poor and African-American -- chose almost to the one to plead guilty to lesser charges. Governor Rick Perry is currently reviewing papers to dismiss all charges and convictions in that case.
Likewise, in Dallas, the local police department has come under intense fire for planting fake drugs on poor Latino residents, many of whom accepted plea bargains (usually due to inattentive defense counsel, a real problem down this way). Because evidence was moved upwards into the federal courts, even those cases are now under review as judges seek to determine which defendants were truly innocent of charges.
Then there are those quasi-Art. III courts, such as the IRS and immigration courts, where people frequently accept deals even though they may not be guilty at all.
Why do people do this? Simple: it takes time and money to fight in court. If you're hauled in front of an IRS judge on charges you're innocent of, you may still rationally accept a lesser penalty knowing that it's less money than hiring an experienced tax attorney. (I've got a former IRS prosecutor as a friend who quite cheerfully explains every trick up that particular profession's sleeve.) If you're poor, a minority, or an immigrant resident, you may not have the resources or even the knowledge necessary to fight a criminal charge when it comes down the pipe; your defense counsel, who's either a private attorney getting less than scale for his time on your case, or a public defender who has literally hundreds of other cases sitting on his desk, has no incentive to spend more time than is absolutely necessary on your case -- and cutting a deal with the prosecutor is the fastest way to dispose of a pending case.
Now, this doesn't obviate the fact that Hawash doesn't seem to be an innocent party. He's admitted to conspiracy to provide material support of a foreign terrorist organization, starting on October 20, 2001, two years after the official designation of the Taliban as an FTO and following the declaration of hostilities against the Taliban by the United States.
The information set out in the plea arrangement is pretty precise regarding his actions, and the end result is not particularly favorable for Hawash -- if the judge accepts the sentencing level set out in the agreement (and there's no guarantee he or she won't apply an upward departure), Hawash gets a minimum sentence of over eight years. Now, the prosecutors certainly dangled a much harsher sentence over his head, but the specifics in the agreement (such as Hawash going to China and attempting to cross the border into Afghanistan) are precise, and serious, enough that I can't see him being truly innocent in this case.
Nonetheless, just as I can remain conservative while damning every sentence from an Ann Coulter or Michael Savage, I can affirm my belief in Hawash's guilt while saying of your statement: wrong, wrong, naive, and wrong.
It's probably not a coincidence that Houston ISD has recently gotten in a world of hurt by way of a Chron story showing how the school district had used Enron accounting to reduce their dropout rate. School principals and teachers, whose bonuses were based in part on dropout rates, reclassified those who had left the school system as instead being students who were pursuing alternative educations, such as vo-tech schools. (3,000 out of 5,500 records in the sample were incomplete or incorrect.)
Considering that Secretary of Education Rod Paige got his current job because of the gravity-defying dropout rates, this is a serious political scandal down in the Texas swamps. Tracking students through data mining may not be the best way to handle the problem, but I suppose it's somewhat cheering that they're trying at all.
The site reads to me like a label from a Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap bottle (but, then, so do most New York Times articles these days, so maybe it's just me). There's certainly no connection to any established philosophical tradition that I'm aware of.
In any case, what to make of his plans to create a "Diagnostic Classification of the Emotions?" According to the site, the "DCE-I" "represents [each moral failing with] a 3-digit coding system in the vein of the DSM-IV and ICD-10 series." ("In the vein of" meaning "absolutely nothing like the clinical tradition that has held sway since DSM-III.") It makes things worse that he conflates all mental disorders into a single category -- evidently, to this ethicist, narcissistic personality disorder and disorganized schizophrenia belong in the same grouping.
It seems like this guy believes that ethics can be boiled down to a set of simple propositions that can be assessed in an ethical equivalent to the five-minute mini-mental state exam. The strangeness of that claim suggests that his patent, based on that assumption as it is, will have little use in practice.
Actually, it's not surprising at all. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has done extensive research on Americans' attitude towards representative government, and the results are rather dismal; Americans simply don't like, or can't be bothered with, the messy details of democratic governance.
This doesn't come as a shock, especially to those familiar with the work of Delli Carpini and other researchers on the matter. But conflict, compromise, and coordination are learned habits and in modern America -- unlike, say, Renaissance Florence or colonial America -- there are few opportunities to exercise political habits in the public sphere. (When was the last time you attended a city council meeting? Checked your state and federal representatives' voting records? Read the Federal Register? And why would you, unless you're in a politically-related profession?) Basically, as politics has retreated from the public square to private corridors, we've fallen out of the habit of democracy.
On the other hand, ATITD offers its players a direct connection between politics and policy; it's a little hard to adopt the "Don't blame me, I didn't vote for him" line when your character is zapped out of existence by a single person, just as apathy was discouraged in early American democracy by the devolution of power to small towns and accessible state legislatures. So, there's a hopeful nugget buried in this: if you give folks a reason to vote, they'll remain politically engaged.
John Doolittle's a major player on the Hill -- one of the uncompromisingly conservative young turks in the mid-nineties, he's forged a close relationship with Tom DeLay and attends the weekly House leadership meetings as secretary.
An uncompromising conservative who has forged a reputation as a reliable ally and savvy lawmaker, he's got a wide net of influence that makes him considerably more powerful than he would seem at first. If anyone can get this thing on the agenda, it's him; his relationship with DeLay and Hastert will ensure that.
With the conservative flank well-protected, it's the Democrats -- who, let's tell a hawk from a handsaw here, have often been craven in their defense of entertainment campaign dollars -- that need to be courted.
And real professionalism, it's worth noting, whether it's a port (just started playing the Uplink demo, expect my credit card and free hours soon) or an original game (EV Nova being Marathon for the post-Bungie Mac community). I still have fond memories of whiling away hours of compile time with "Harry the Handsome Executive." Not to mention your strong support of the MacOS X development community. Kudos!
Just remember that markets are imperfect beasts -- if the libertarian in you finds that statement offensive, then take comfort in the fact that Hayek and the Austrian school is predicated on that very fact.
Given that the most effective way to improve market efficiency is to increase and level the amount of information available, Open Source contributes to market efficiency by allowing purchasers to better evaluate their purchases, and to ensure that they have flexibility of future purchases. So, in that sense, this is a very pro-market rule.
Of course, one can also point out that similar strictures are placed on government purchases all the time and, if the company doesn't wish to comply, it simply can decide not to sell to the government.
It's telling that the Plan9 Unix-to-P9 compiler porting system is called the "ANSI C/POSIX Environment," or APE. Never saw the movie, but there's your reference for ya.
Plan 9... could really provide a breadth of fresh hair to the Linux kernal, putting it head and shoulders above Windows.
Most Unix geeks already have a large enough breadth of hair, although freshening it once in a while would be a good idea, as would the use of Head and Shoulders.
Something to remember is that Jobs' loyalty in that meeting was to John Doerr, not to Dean Kamen and the Segway. When a friend and business associate comes over and says, "Hey, I'm thinking about sinking around $40 billion into an untested product from an eccentric genius, could you drop by and feel this thing out," playing go-along-to-get-along with the eccentric is precisely the wrong thing to do. If the players can't stand up to a couple of hours of intense questioning, maybe they're not the right people to handle a major product launch. (And, yes, maybe they weren't.)
In any case, I think that Jobs' intense questioning proves that he really was engaged with the product; he treated it just as he would anything Apple designed, and insisted that it hold to the same rigorous standards. That his fears turned out to be well-founded suggests that, no matter how his worries were couched (he does seem to have a penchant for incontinence as metaphor, doesn't he?), his call for a solid business plan, a real launch strategy, and the tripartite mantra of "innovation, elegant and anthropomorphism" would have been well-heeded.
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Nudity does not free speech make, post-1960s concepts of "freedom to shock" aside. Indeed, Canada has stronger restrictions on private speech than America -- there is no absolute right to free speech, as there is in America. If this same suit were to be brought in Canada, it would have a much greater likelihood of succeeding due to Canadian restrictions on free speech in the interests of preventing racism. Canadians such as yourself might prefer to "sit and talk about" sources of conflict (in the Habermasian sense), but I'm afraid your statutory law would rather confront it as a matter of criminal behavior.
One example is a commercial run by an American firm selling weather insurance for special events. The commercial was a comic piece showing an American Indian shaman leading a group of elderly customers in a rain dance. The CBC decided the commercial was offensive to Native Americans and refused to run it.
A less humorous example concerns a newspaper columnist who wrote several columns questioning the existence of the Holocaust, calling (for example) the movie "Schindler's List" "Swindler's List." The courts fined the writer and his newspaper several thousand dollars apiece for violating hate speech laws.
In another, more famous, case, a teacher (Keegstra) who made repeated slurs against Jews to his students was convicted of violating the hate speech laws and was sentenced to prison, a conviction later upheld by the Supreme Court after an appellate court overturned it.
Without defending the content of what these people said, it must be noted that such speech falls under First Amendment protections in the United States; Keegstra, for example, would surely have been fired from his position for teaching anti-Semitism to students, but could not have been criminally prosecuted. ("Fighting words" are a rare example of unprotected speech -- if Keegstra had told his students to beat up the next Jew they say, knowing they might follow his suggestions, he could be criminally prosecuted. That was not, however, the case in Canada.)
I am not, I should note, passing judgment on which system is superior from a normative perspective; both have their defenders and detractors. For example, Stanley Fish has repeatedly argued that "freedom of speech" doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, and consequently there are only degrees of restriction. Fish would have no issues restricting the speech of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers because their political beliefs -- which, if implemented, would destroy any liberality and liberalism in society -- places them beyond the pale. We have no duty to extend rights to those who would see those same rights denied to us.
On the other hand, Fish comes to this conclusion because he rejects the fundamental Enlightenment belief in good speech driving out bad. The German theorist Habermas, on the other side of the spectrum, would argue that total freedom of speech is necessary for fulfilling his "rules of reason." Habermas might suggest, for example, that Canada's criminal prosecution of Keegstra's speech only made it impossible to come to a societal consensus that anti-Semitism is a bad thing -- and consequently the suppression of his speech led to his elevation as a major far-right figure in Canada. Habermas' discursive theory of democracy assumes that discussion is the only way to build a lasting and stable consensus.
I remember a book from several years ago in in which a cyberpunk lawyer (it was a very strange piece of fiction, yes) used the theory of adverse possession (What's that?) to claim title to a piece of intellectual property left unimproved by its owner. I'm starting to think that implementing such a theory in IP law, as insane as that is, would be an improvement over the current situation ....
I believe the Matrix is largely incomprehensible unless one has at least a reasonable familiarity with S0ren Kierkegaard ("SK") and crisis theology. In fact, I'd argue that the series narrows down from its expansive view of philosophy in the first two movies to, in both the EtM video game and M:Rv, a tight focus on Kierkegaard's conception of freedom as radical choice. By contrast, M:Rld went all over the philosophical map, my favorite example being that the Zion council seems to be populated entirely by Jamesian Pragmatists (including Cornel West, whose most interesting work was a sustained discussion of American Pragmatism).
Just a few Kierkegaardian references in the Matrix:
- In EtM (which crystallized my understanding of TM as Kierkegaardian), Ghost quotes SK on faith and absurdity. In the game, the tripartite crew of Sparks, Niobe, and Ghost are almost certainly representative of SK's view of human life as aesthetic, ethical and religious, respectively. (The three Demiurges -- the Merovingian, Architect, and Oracle -- seem to recapitulate this schematic.)
- The Christ parallel in Neo is so blatant as to hardly be worth mentioning, but his death deserves some observations: he died to redeem Man (and Machine), since Trinity's death precluded his doing it out of love for any one individual; his death redeemed M&M from Smith (who seems, amongst many other things, to represent Original Sin, being the ultimate descendent from the war between M&M); his death also freed the condemned from hell (when the Architect agrees to release programs and persons who wish to leave the Matrix).
- When Neo dies, the machine-ruler says, "It is done." This is the same thing Christ says in John 19:30 (and is also used two more times in the Bible -- after the world is created in Genesis, and after it is destroyed in the Revelation). Smith is then rescinded from the world, the Matrix is created anew, and peace descends upon Zion. Apart from begging the infralapsarian question, this reinforces the idea of Neo as propitiation (as many Christians see Christ dying to expiate the sins of Man). I'm a bit uneasy with this part because Neo is shown as bargaining for salvation -- something that is completely incoherent in most versions of Christianity, and more importantly, within Kierkegaard. At the same time, I have to wonder what happens to Neo at this point. In John, Christ says, "It is done," then commends his soul to God. Does this imply that Neo has joined with the machine-ruler? Is one of the reasons peace descends because Neo has joined the machine-consciousness and broken the old covenant of slavery? Is he a mediator between man and machine (viz 1 Tim. 2:5-6)?
- The Trainman is deeply concerned with time: when we meet him in EtM, he tells Niobe how many hours Zion can be expected to last against the machine onslaught. ("72 hours. That's exactly how long Zion lasted last time.") In M:Rv, he is obsessed with punctuality, and has an intimate connection with time, shown by the many watches he wears on his wrist and his intimate knowledge of train schedules. This emphasis on time seems designed to evoke SK's discussion of time in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which he directly discusses the entrance of eternity into time. (The Oracle's line in EtM, "The path of the One is made by the many," echoes SK's assertion that the many discrete points of temporality create the possibility of eternity.)
- Kierkegaard's doctrine of radical choice permeates the script, culminating in the Smith v. Neo showdown. I suspect that Smith is meant to represent (amongst many things!) existentialism, just as the Age
Should you wish an alternative to the commercially-licensed JESS, Stanford has its own Java Theorem Prover, DAML-compliant and capable of handling forward- and backward-chained reasoning. Object code can be freely redistributed.
Ah, yes, but what does "hacked" mean in this context? As far as I can tell, it means that he went through open SMTP servers -- ugly, nasty but also a pretty generous definition of "hack," as most on /. will probably agree. (Next up on Channel 8 at 11, "'Ping:' Harmless ICMP toy or virtual carjacker?")
Furthermore, there's a fundamental confusion in the indictment: after stating that the defendant went out and harvested e-mail addresses, the indictment charges him with launching a DDoS attack because of the bounces from incorrect addresses! (In other words: he expended effort to find valid e-mail addresses, but then is charged with deliberately saturating SMTP servers with bounced e-mails.) Yes, you could certainly make a nice tort case out of the fact that he recklessly sent thousands of e-mails out to addresses that had a high probability of being incorrect (depraved heart, yes), but there's a certain lack of mens rea in his acts.
As for other posters who say that the defendant is getting his due -- yes, this guy's a troll, a racist, an ex-con and a Phillies fan, but that doesn't mean that a conviction under these circumstances is a good precedent. It is when our civil liberties protect the legal acts of unpleasant people that our legal system truly shines.
Surely I'm not the only one who finds a dark amusement in seeing both "The benefits of being unemployed" and "Where do I find an honest headhunter?" showing up simultaneously on the Slashdot front page.
You can read the original blog post our friendly troll ripped off here. And you can find the author's more recent take on the Mac here.
Absolutely correct, and that's why invoking preemption isn't so crazy as many seem to think. The federal courts, in Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software, held that Title 17 Sec. 117 of the U.S. Code preempted terms in Vault's shrink-wrap licensing, so there's precedent for applying the preemption doctrine to private contracts in copyright litigation.
Without knowing more about SCO's argument, we certainly can't argue on the merits of it, but there's always the possibility that some enterprising copyright lawyer has found a potential incompatibility between the GPL and copyright law. (Offhand, though, any argument based on Title 17 Sec. 117(a) seems specious to me, since I don't see how it could possibly affect the right to authorize copies and derivative works in Sec. 106 -- but IANA(IP)L.)
And, actually, *I* say :x!, but who's keeping track?
What we lack today is the same kind of scientific consensus-building process in ethical and policy matters. The inability of the research community to show that it cares about the moral, legal, political and social effects of its work has led to greater political scrutiny of that research, and acts such as the Executive Order limiting research into stem cells.
So, to raise the obvious question, what chance do we have for another Asilomar? Can the scientific establishment convince the public that it's not hell-bent on progress at any price, or is modern bio-science too fragmented, too much a creature of academic, corporate, and social specialization to speak with a united voice again?
1) You suggest that California should legalize marijuana use. However, federal pre-emption of drug legalization under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 (AKA the Controlled Substances Act) takes precedence over any state decriminalization of drug use. How would you avoid what could be a particularly nasty battle between state and federal control?
2) Although you propose several major spending initiatives, including a "clean elections" law and a health-care system along the lines of Vermont's, you also state that balancing the budget is a priority. Obviously, the only way to reconcile these priorities is to raise taxes, as you acknowledge.
If we conservatively assume that adding new and restoring existing funding for projects only reopens the budget gap to where it was prior to the May Revision, some $38.2 billion must be recovered to balance the state's budget. Almost all of this will have to come out of the three general fund taxes (personal, sales, and corporate).
To give an idea of the numbers we're talking about, if we rolled back the California tax cuts of the mid-1990s, we would recover only around $5 billion (estimated as the revenue loss for FY 1999-2000 due to the tax cuts).
Having said that, what kind of increase in the various tax rates are you contemplating (income rate increases, capital gains, tobacco, etc)? Are there any major program reductions you support? Do you propose to shift burdens onto local governments to help close the gap?
Basically, Bostrom's argument states that, assuming that the human population will continue to grow geometrically until it catastrophically declines (and thus assuming that the last human population prior to that decline is the largest set of living humans in history), you are statistically most likely to be in the final generation before the end of the world. The same argument, with slightly different assumptions (and you can twist the argument any way you wish, as long as you make different starting assumptions), is used in the Simulation Argument.
The problem is that it's incoherent by any measurement. After all, we are not plucked randomly from all over the time stream to form a statistically-representative sample, nor do we have any idea what the actual population distribution will be. The real nail in the coffin of Bostrom's thesis is that each person living before the final generation has a statistical probability of zero of being in the final generation, no matter the degree of their uncertainty as to which generation they belong.
To put it another way, Bostrom's argument is functionally equivalent to this: I have one hundred black marbles in this jar. In this other jar, I have one thousand white marbles that I will at some point in time add to the black marbles, in part or in whole. To Bostrom, if I ask you to guess the color of a marble drawn from the first jar at a specific point in time, you should always assume white. The problem, of course, is that you don't actually know the actual distribution of marbles: I may have added no white marbles, one, one hundred, or one thousand. Thus, we can drawn no conclusions from Bostrom's thesis. One guess is quite literally as good as another under such conditions of uncertainty.
John Barrow's paper (on postulated "glitches and small drifts ... in the laws of Nature over time" in a simulated universe) suffers from similar flaws. Yes, a simulated universe might experience small glitches as it attempts to regain homeostasis, if indeed a simulated universe allowed small glitches in the pursuit of homeostasis -- but that's tautological at best. (Who's to say that a simulated universe might not run perfectly, with completely rigid laws?) You can equally well argue that changes in an inflationary or deflationary universe will result in changes in assumed constants; for that matter, you can say that it's the will of God, the flutter of angel wings, or the acts of Douglas Adams' mice at work.
Like the work of too many philosophers who desperately want to prove that philosophy can triumph over physics (see Putnam, Hilary, and Searle, John), the Sim and Doom arguments try to argue to a conclusion from nonexistent premises. Most philosophers have trouble taking these arguments seriously; scientists should chuck them out the window entirely.
Remember: just because you've got a good idea, doesn't mean it's a legal idea. Consult your local attorney for more details, &c., &c.
Whoa there! Aren't you the same person who played Thoreau in a different thread?
It's an open secret of law that innocent people plead guilty all the time. Consider, for example, the recent furor in Tulia, TX, where a police source went bad and turned in dozens of innocent people on drug distribution charges. Those people -- uniformly poor and African-American -- chose almost to the one to plead guilty to lesser charges. Governor Rick Perry is currently reviewing papers to dismiss all charges and convictions in that case.
Likewise, in Dallas, the local police department has come under intense fire for planting fake drugs on poor Latino residents, many of whom accepted plea bargains (usually due to inattentive defense counsel, a real problem down this way). Because evidence was moved upwards into the federal courts, even those cases are now under review as judges seek to determine which defendants were truly innocent of charges.
Then there are those quasi-Art. III courts, such as the IRS and immigration courts, where people frequently accept deals even though they may not be guilty at all.
Why do people do this? Simple: it takes time and money to fight in court. If you're hauled in front of an IRS judge on charges you're innocent of, you may still rationally accept a lesser penalty knowing that it's less money than hiring an experienced tax attorney. (I've got a former IRS prosecutor as a friend who quite cheerfully explains every trick up that particular profession's sleeve.) If you're poor, a minority, or an immigrant resident, you may not have the resources or even the knowledge necessary to fight a criminal charge when it comes down the pipe; your defense counsel, who's either a private attorney getting less than scale for his time on your case, or a public defender who has literally hundreds of other cases sitting on his desk, has no incentive to spend more time than is absolutely necessary on your case -- and cutting a deal with the prosecutor is the fastest way to dispose of a pending case.
Now, this doesn't obviate the fact that Hawash doesn't seem to be an innocent party. He's admitted to conspiracy to provide material support of a foreign terrorist organization, starting on October 20, 2001, two years after the official designation of the Taliban as an FTO and following the declaration of hostilities against the Taliban by the United States.
The information set out in the plea arrangement is pretty precise regarding his actions, and the end result is not particularly favorable for Hawash -- if the judge accepts the sentencing level set out in the agreement (and there's no guarantee he or she won't apply an upward departure), Hawash gets a minimum sentence of over eight years. Now, the prosecutors certainly dangled a much harsher sentence over his head, but the specifics in the agreement (such as Hawash going to China and attempting to cross the border into Afghanistan) are precise, and serious, enough that I can't see him being truly innocent in this case.
Nonetheless, just as I can remain conservative while damning every sentence from an Ann Coulter or Michael Savage, I can affirm my belief in Hawash's guilt while saying of your statement: wrong, wrong, naive, and wrong.
Considering that Secretary of Education Rod Paige got his current job because of the gravity-defying dropout rates, this is a serious political scandal down in the Texas swamps. Tracking students through data mining may not be the best way to handle the problem, but I suppose it's somewhat cheering that they're trying at all.
In any case, what to make of his plans to create a "Diagnostic Classification of the Emotions?" According to the site, the "DCE-I" "represents [each moral failing with] a 3-digit coding system in the vein of the DSM-IV and ICD-10 series." ("In the vein of" meaning "absolutely nothing like the clinical tradition that has held sway since DSM-III.") It makes things worse that he conflates all mental disorders into a single category -- evidently, to this ethicist, narcissistic personality disorder and disorganized schizophrenia belong in the same grouping.
It seems like this guy believes that ethics can be boiled down to a set of simple propositions that can be assessed in an ethical equivalent to the five-minute mini-mental state exam. The strangeness of that claim suggests that his patent, based on that assumption as it is, will have little use in practice.
Any decision yet whether you'll proceed with a MOSX port?
This doesn't come as a shock, especially to those familiar with the work of Delli Carpini and other researchers on the matter. But conflict, compromise, and coordination are learned habits and in modern America -- unlike, say, Renaissance Florence or colonial America -- there are few opportunities to exercise political habits in the public sphere. (When was the last time you attended a city council meeting? Checked your state and federal representatives' voting records? Read the Federal Register? And why would you, unless you're in a politically-related profession?) Basically, as politics has retreated from the public square to private corridors, we've fallen out of the habit of democracy.
On the other hand, ATITD offers its players a direct connection between politics and policy; it's a little hard to adopt the "Don't blame me, I didn't vote for him" line when your character is zapped out of existence by a single person, just as apathy was discouraged in early American democracy by the devolution of power to small towns and accessible state legislatures. So, there's a hopeful nugget buried in this: if you give folks a reason to vote, they'll remain politically engaged.
Dear God, Slashdot actually gets through most of a week without dropping a major spoiler, and now you have to do it for them?!!?!
That's it. I'm gonna read at +5 from now on....
An uncompromising conservative who has forged a reputation as a reliable ally and savvy lawmaker, he's got a wide net of influence that makes him considerably more powerful than he would seem at first. If anyone can get this thing on the agenda, it's him; his relationship with DeLay and Hastert will ensure that.
With the conservative flank well-protected, it's the Democrats -- who, let's tell a hawk from a handsaw here, have often been craven in their defense of entertainment campaign dollars -- that need to be courted.
Just so you know.
And real professionalism, it's worth noting, whether it's a port (just started playing the Uplink demo, expect my credit card and free hours soon) or an original game (EV Nova being Marathon for the post-Bungie Mac community). I still have fond memories of whiling away hours of compile time with "Harry the Handsome Executive." Not to mention your strong support of the MacOS X development community. Kudos!
Given that the most effective way to improve market efficiency is to increase and level the amount of information available, Open Source contributes to market efficiency by allowing purchasers to better evaluate their purchases, and to ensure that they have flexibility of future purchases. So, in that sense, this is a very pro-market rule.
Of course, one can also point out that similar strictures are placed on government purchases all the time and, if the company doesn't wish to comply, it simply can decide not to sell to the government.
It's telling that the Plan9 Unix-to-P9 compiler porting system is called the "ANSI C/POSIX Environment," or APE. Never saw the movie, but there's your reference for ya.
Most Unix geeks already have a large enough breadth of hair, although freshening it once in a while would be a good idea, as would the use of Head and Shoulders.
Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week.
In any case, I think that Jobs' intense questioning proves that he really was engaged with the product; he treated it just as he would anything Apple designed, and insisted that it hold to the same rigorous standards. That his fears turned out to be well-founded suggests that, no matter how his worries were couched (he does seem to have a penchant for incontinence as metaphor, doesn't he?), his call for a solid business plan, a real launch strategy, and the tripartite mantra of "innovation, elegant and anthropomorphism" would have been well-heeded.