You can teach a chicken to be unbeatable at Tic-tac-toe.
No, no you can't. When you see a chicken playing tic-tac-toe, it's a trick whereby feed is released to the place that it's supposed to go to next.
Granted, you're still right that tic-tac-toe is an amazingly simple game, and thus, that's not much of an accomplishment for a computer. Still, it's a proof-of-concept that their computer can run some logic, not a demo of the next AMD / IBM / Intel CPU technology.
The manual install, means clicking install on the same webpage as per the screenshot.
The button that says "install" on that web page is a link to an exe, which is why you have to choose "run" after it. Are you proposing that IE7 should prevent the user from downloading a frigging program and then running it. You could click on that "install" button using firefox and run it, that's not a frigging security hole. You could do with opera. You can do it with whatever frigging browser you want to that allows you to download things.
My opinions ARE biased. In this case, my bias is that I don't want my computer to ever preventing me from installing something I want to install.
But this is how we're in the mess we are now. One "would you like to install... Nutjob Inc assert that this is safe" box looks much like another. Novice users will blindly click Yes or OK here, even if the No button was flashing in yellow. And the biggest trouble comes from home users without an admin to lock things down.
Correction. This is how novice users are in that mass right now. If they want their computer to not get infected, they should learn to be more untrusting of Nutjob Inc companies they've never heard of. The problem comes when this stuff spreads through actual security holes. I don't care if five of my neighbors are having problems because they don't listen to me when I tell them not to install everything they see. It's their choice, their fault. I care if something gets installed on my computer that I didn't download and/or clicked the "No" button. There are/were plenty of security holes that allow just that in IE. I'm all for complaining about those.
I'm typing this "defense" of IE on my linux computer running firefox. It's not that I'm a microsoft fanboy or anything. It's just that one of the things that I most complain about is when software doesn't let me do something because it thinks it knows better than me. I'm not going to do a 180 in the name of protecting the novices. If someone wants to ride a bike but doesn't know how, they don't decide to ride with training wheels forever so that they won't fall and get hurt. They learn how to ride the darn bike and live with the danger that they might fall while learning.
Re:Is it really an infection if...
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IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh, come on. First of all, the computer should never prevent you from doing something you want to do, regardless of how dangerous or stupid it might be. It should most definitely warn you that it is dangerous and stupid. If the user really does click 'yes' for everything, it should get installed. As long as you get stern warnings about it (and as long as an admin can prevent it from happening to work computers by locking it down), it's plenty secure.
That said, even clicking 'yes' on everything didn't allow stuff to get installed. Did you see his explanations? "Being the windows-noob that I am, I will click allow." Then when that fails to install, he said, "all is not lost, as it wants us to try a 'manual install' instead." The windows-noob who clicks 'allow' for every single screen he sees would have no idea how to try a "manual install." Regardless of how easy it is, it's not automatic.
As a former kid, I know how easy it is to mask certain behavior. My parents had no clue I was into a lot of the things I was into until they got "the call" one day. Why didn't they know? Because much of what I said and did at home regarding it was done on a computer, and they were clueless about computers.
Sure, as a kid it's easy to mask your actions. Your parents had no idea what you were doing on your computer because they didn't understand computers, that's fine. The question is, why were you doing questionable things on your computer? By the time you want to do those things, it's already too late to prevent. It's a cat and mouse game your parents can't win. So let's assume they were fairly computer proficient, logged your activities and then had a talk to you about it. You realize you got caught, you start to wonder how, I'll assume you're smart enough that you realize that your computer usage is being logged. At that point, if you can't find a technical way around it, you start doing the same things from the library computer, or from a friend's house. Even if your parents somehow manage to stop that, you might start doing it as an adult and potentially get into some serious trouble.
Now, if your parents instead talked to you about consequences of illegal actions, you might make the informed decision to not do those things. You're not going to listen to them on everything, and you'll make mistakes, you'll face the consequences. If this is happening from an early enough age, by the time you're old enough to make decisions with consequences that might ruin your life, you'll know to make the right one.
Or he's just really smart and knows what will happen if you find out.
You know, that's exactly my point. At the age that kids are old enough to get themselves in real trouble, they're also old enough to be able to anticipate the consequences to their actions. The kid in your scenario has been taught to fear the wrong consequences. He's afraid of his parents punishment, and he's not afraid of dying? He's not afraid of being in jail for the rest of his life? Instead of deciding that shooting people in his school is a bad idea, he decides getting caught is a bad idea.
Besides, as I tried to make clear with my original post, it's not that the parents didn't know the kid was going to shoot people on Monday morning. I expect them to be plenty smart enough to figure out how to hide their plans, even under ultra surveillance. It's that they didn't know their kid was capable of killing people. You can't seriously be considering mass murder and be normal. These kids will usually torture animals. After seeing the news of someone getting murdered on tv, they might make comments as to how the victim "deserved" it. There will be signs that people getting hurt doesn't bother the kid. There'll be smaller signs before that. If you spend enough time with your kid, you'll know his personality and be able to talk to him about his ideas and fears, and how to overcome his problems. You might realize that you're not having enough of an impact, and take him to a shrink, in order to help you turn him around.
Someone capable of killing their classmates cannot possibly sit down to dinner and talk about his day at school went without getting going apeshit nuts. It's not that they're not smart enough to hide it, it's that they genuinely have emotions of hate about the people around them, and wants to see them dead. Think about it. What would make you pick up a gun, go to work one morning and start shooting your co-workers? You can't be in a normal state of mind to ever come close to such a decision. The only explanation is that they weren't talking about school (or anything), so he managed to keep his emotions burried and in check.
And what happens when the daughter you've taught starts camwhoring for grown men at the ripe old age of 14? It
When kids shoot up schools, people ask "where were the parents? They should have known." When kids end up teenage parents, people ask "where were the parents? They should have taught them better." When kids get connected to the internet, people say "mind your own business! Privacy! Big Brother! OMG 1984!!!"
What the hell? When people ask, "where are the parents?" and say "they should have known," they don't mean "they should have tapped his phone to hear him talk about his plan, logged his computer to know he was visiting sites that instruct him how to make bombs and sneaked into his room and go through his stuff so they can find his Wile E. Coyote-like plans to destroy the school". They mean that parents should have known, because you can't possibly live in the same house as the kid, talk to the kid every day, and not realize he is THAT screwed up. The only explanation for this is that either you never talk to your kid, or you ride his ass so much with all your surveillance that you've escalated his normal teenage rebellion into something bigger and completely and utterly screwed up his mind. It's YOUR fault that he got that way, not that you didn't manage to stop him, call the police, or chain him to the bed minutes before he was supposed to carry out his plan.
As for teenage pregnancy, "they should have taught them better" is just that. They should have taught her, not locked her in her room because you intercepted an e-mail from her boyfriend. The idea is that you teach your kids to understand the consequences of their actions. I don't mean consequences as in punishment. I mean consequences of their actions, not whatever artificial things you impose. When you punish your kids for every little thing they do, they know that the action that led to the consequence was when they weren't careful enough to not get caught. When you explain to them that even their first sexual encounter can lead to pregnancy or STD's, they'll be thinking about that consequence.
And as to your little rant about your kids illegal internet actions leading to you...if you're really thinking along the lines of "better him in jail than me," you're one of the most screwed up parents I've ever heard.
People violating copyrights and other applicable licenses in the name of sticking it to The Man is good.
The Man violating copyright and other applicable licenses in the name of sticking it to the people is bad.
You know, people who use your argument obviously forgot why the GPL exists. Stallman would be all for living in a world where there is no such thing as copyright and the GPL isn't needed. The whole concept of copyleft is using copyright against people who believe in it. Whether you agree with it or not, the GPL crowd is being perfectly consistent. The true hyprocrite would be the one who believes in not sharing his code, but appropriates GPL'ed code into his proprietary one.
"The very brief net neutrality description used by the pollsters is somewhat misleading insofar as it suggests that net neutrality would bar Internet Service Providers from selling faster service than is available today."
Well, not to take sides here, but that is exactly how S.2917 proposes net neutrality should be defined: A prohibition against offering tiered Internet services.
No. In particular, "a prohibition against offering tiered internet services" is NOT the same as preventing ISP's from selling faster service than is available today. The bill explicitly defines that what the ISP cannot do is "block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person" to access any content they want, nor can they charge the user to prioritize content or services, although they are still free to use QoS to prioritize content as long as it is free of charge to the user. The bill goes on to say that the ISP must inform the user with information concerning the "speed, nature, and liminations of such user's broadband service."
Under the wording of the bill you posted, the ISP is perfectly allowed to sell Bill a 2Mbit package, and Joe a 6Mbit package for more money. They're also perfectly allowed to offer higher bandwidth services in the future, and charge even more for them. What they're not allowed to do is to sell you the 6Mbit package, and then decide to degrade your connection to less than 6Mbit because ubuntu doesn't pay them to be on their "faster tier". They also can't tell you that if you pay them an extra $10, they're going to allow you the 6Mbit access to download your linux iso from ubuntu.com.
You've already paid for 6Mbit access, and that's what you should get regardless of where you're downloading from. That's net neutrality, that's exactly what the bill you posted says, and it's vastly different from the definition given in the poll. Show me any bill that does agree with the definition in the poll, and I'll be against it as well, but S.2917 is perfectly fine.
Even with electronic voting, the voter has the option of anulling their vote, by selecting the "Annul Vote" option.
Well, it wasn't so much an error. What I said was that I didn't know whether the software allowed you to annul the vote or not, since I moved out of Brazil before they implemented the electronic voting. Thanks for chiming in and explaining that you can.
Second, I disagree that not being forced by law to vote generates better informed voters, necessarily. Again, using GWB as a case study, it seems to me that a lot of his voters were lured by vague things like "Values", or "Tough on Terror"
I completely agree with you. You can never eliminate the uninformed from voting completely. After all, many of those people think they have plenty of information to make a decision. Who am I to tell them that they're don't? However, if people do that even when they're not forced to vote, imagine when all the people who previously didn't even care enough about the election to show up are suddenly forced to make a decision? Are they just going to develop an interest and want to do research so they can be better informed?
Not to mention that there's a large number of people who really do believe on the "get out and vote" nonsense, and they feel enormously proud that they took 30 minutes off their day to go somewhere and select a candidate, even if they did no work for that. I met many people in Brazil who honestly told me, "I don't know who I'm going to vote for, I'll decide when I see the ballot." That type of thing angers me, and if you're that complacent, you wouldn't vote at all if you had the choice.
A president is elected in singnificant part based on his positions on issues like Stem Cell Research and Abortion, while polls show that the majority of Americans disagrees with him.
A majority of Americans might dislike Bush, but that doesn't actually mean that he'd get voted out if everyone who disapproved of him were forced to vote. Due to the Electoral College system, it depends on where those people live. See the other discussions in the thread which talk about how much your vote is worth depending on whether you live in a "safe" or "swing" state.
The amount of annulled votes is a valuable statistic that reflects the fraction of the population that thinks the system has failed them. No such assessment can be made from the fraction of the Citizens that just didn't feel like voting that day...the right to actively abstain from voting by indicating so on a ballot, that to me is as important as voting.
I think the voting turnout is a similar good statistic too. Were people sufficiently motivated by the issues brought up by the candidates to vote? And about the right to actively abstain on a ballot, there's nothing preventing you from showing up at the poll booth and turning in a blank ballot, you could still do that if you're so inclined. Many people also consider voting for the third-party candidate, even though you know he can't possibly win, to be a measure of that same protest (although I voted for the third-party candidate because I honestly believed he was the best candidate, and I can't bring myself to choose between two people I dislike just so that one may win. Although, in the end, none of it may matter, since I live in South Carolina, and as the bumper stickers everywhere say, This is Bush Country).
In Australia they issue you a small fine if you didn't get your named marked off at polling booth. You don't actually need to vote for anyone - you can put the blank ballot in the box and go home.
Well, there's nobody watching you vote, so people turned in blank ballots too. The more paranoid people would nullify them instead to prevent people that are counting the votes from checking the boxes themselves (I don't know if it's actually an issue, but it doesn't hurt to be paranoid). As for the fine, it's the same method in Brazil. After all, they're not going to just not allow you to renew your documents. If you don't have your receipt, you pay a fine, and all is well. Still, generally people don't want to pay a fine, so you get extremely high voting turnout, but I argue that doesn't mean the system is better.
The informal voting rate isn't that large - about 5% of the votes cast are informal
That may be true, but still doesn't solve the problem of people voting for people without doing their research. Name recognition is a huge boost for example. It's the reason why Arnold gets to be governor of California. There are a whole bunch of stupid reasons that causes people to make choices, and although many of those people would stay home, more of them show up if they're forced to show up. Now, if they want to show up and vote for their stupid reason, that's their right, but I see no reason in forcing the other people who don't care to go.
there's a great tradition of Donkey voting though - being first on the ballot can give you an extra 1.4% or so, unless you're a woman strangely enough when it gives you nada - Robson rotation would fix that but they don't bother.
That's pretty interesting. I had no idea you could get so much of an advantage by being first, even when you can turn in a blank ballot. I guess the problem would be even worse if you couldn't because the software forced you to choose someone. Of course, it would also be easier to implement a rotation, but somehow I'd think that they still wouldn't bother.
Compulsary voting gets rid of the "get out and vote" idiocy that clearly favours candidates with the resources to round people into buses... It also removes the ability to influence the outcome by preventing people from voting - or at least makes it very noticable if you try.
Those are good points. I guess there are some advantages to compulsary voting, but I still don't think it's worth it.
Are you also going to fight against those who try and make people do other "civic duties" like jury duty?
Yep. Although that's an easy fight, anyone who wants to can get out of jury duty in the US. There's an old joke, "the only people in the jury are the ones that are too stupid to get out of jury duty."
I don't know how things work there, but maybe voting in at least presidental elections should be required to maintain your US citizenship. The ability to (partially) elect your own goverment is what makes America so great, but it gets screwed up if people don't vote. I guess most people just don't care.
I don't know how it works in Australia, but I lived in Brazil for a long time, where it is also compulsory to vote. What they do is make your life difficult if you don't have the receipt that says you voted in the last election (they require the receipts in order for you to get renewed documents such as passports, etc). Thus, the system works in that people do vote. The argument there is similar to the one you're making. You have the right to vote, so you should damn well use it, because that's what makes a democratic government great. I disagree with that in so many ways that I can't cover it all, but I'll just discuss the major problems with it right now.
I suppose the most important reason is the practical one: It doesn't work. They can make you vote but they can't make you care. The ballots were secret as they are here (a very good thing), so there were a large number of nullified ballots by people who just didn't want to vote. Essentially, they'd check the mark next to all the candidates, making the ballot worthless. They're doing the electronic voting there too now, but that's after I moved out, so I have no idea if the software disallows that. If the software does prohibit you from doing that, it puts you in a much scarier situation. I imagine most people who didn't care would simply vote for the first person on the list.
The second reason why voting shouldn't be compulsory also relates to the fact that most people don't care. You say that the system gets screwed up if people don't vote, but I claim it gets screwed up even more when people who don't do their research vote. I really hate the whole "get out and vote" campaigns because they make it seem like just showing up and voting satisfies all your civic responsibilities. It's not about just making a decision, it's about making an informed decision (although I guess "The Decider" would disagree). I'd be seriously in favor of the "Get out and learn about the candidate's track records, their proposals, and the success rate of similar actions to the ones they are proposing in the past, then vote for the best candidate" campaign, but people don't seem to want to do the hard things. Frankly, people who just show up and vote based on the fact that, "I don't like the damn republicans, I shall vote democrat" or "I'm conservative, I shall vote republican" are ruining for the rest of us who are actually doing our research.
Finally, there's the freedom argument. I don't like any laws that restricts people's freedoms. Your right to not vote is as important to me as your right to vote. If you want to vote I'll fight against anyone trying to prevent you to do so, regardless of whether or not I agree with who you are voting for. If you do not want to vote, I'll fight against anyone trying to make you do that.
That's not right...intentions have nothing to do with it.
You can license your code any way you want. If you want to license part of it as gpl, write a dll that is meant to work with your program only, but license it in a proprietary form, than release that stuff together with only the source code for the part that talks to the dll, you're fine. RMS would probably show up on your door holding a bat, but his lawyer won't be with him.
The license limitations don't limit what your gpl code can do, they limit what people can do with gpl code. So, if someone grabs the source code to a dll, and dynamically links to that with their non-gpl-compatible-licensed program, they are in violation of the gpl license for the dll, which doesn't allow that. However, if you're writing gpl code, you can link it to whatever you want, as long as the other license allows that. If the other license says you can't link it to gpl programs, you're screwed, but API's usually allow you to link to them, because they'd be useless if they didn't.
It almost sounds as if they wanted to dictate to him what the terms should be, and they are unhappy that he is not complying.
What's wrong with that? People negotiate licence issues all the time. Schilling can licence his code using whatever licence he chooses, but he can't be annoyed when Debian doesn't like it and refuses to package it with their distribution. It's their distribution, they can make their decisions on what to package based on whatever they want to.
And since he chose the GPL as a licence previously, he can't get pissed off when people fork it either. That's their right, granted to them by him when he used the GPL.
The article argues that copyleft (not free software) is anti-business. This is clearly not true because the copylefted free Unix-like operating system (GNU/Linux) has far more business contributions and business models base on it than the non-copylefted free Unix-like operating systems (the free BSDs).
That's a very good point, although the types of businesses must be differentiated. For businesses that do not produce free software, BSD is very much what they prefer. They can get the code without any obligations and include it in their proprietary product. On the other hand, if your business intends on making contributions to free software, you obviously prefer the GPL because you don't want your competitors making use of your work, improving it, and then selling a better product than you, that is based on your work. If it's GPL'ed, if they improve the code, you get the improvements as well.
What I never really understood is why hardware manufacturers fear the GPL. What do they have to lose? At worst, people still need to buy the hardware from them if they want to run their software. At best, they get tons of free contributions that will make their hardware more desirable (like with the whole linksys router thing). Even more puzzling are companies like tivo. "We'll give you the GPL source code, but you can't run it on our hardware, because we check for private keys. Off course, there's nothing stopping a competitor from building similar hardware and plopping our modified GPL'd code in there, which is far more damaging to us than user modifications." I wonder why no one has done that...
I'm not an astrophysist, nor was I involved in the conversation before now, but I did read your linked article:)
Thanks for posting it, btw. I was taking what the parent said for granted, and it sounded pretty bad, but now it looks like it was a combination of bad reading comprehension and badly worded writing. The article you linked to at least, doesn't claim scientists are finding less deuterium than they expected and therefore expect more. Quite the contrary, they're finding a lot more than they expected, and thus are deciding that their theories need to be changed. I quote:
scientists had assumed that at least a third of the primordial deuterium present in the Milky Way was destroyed over time as it cycled through the stars...but FUSE found deuterium exists in amounts less than 15 percent below what was there originally.
So, they thought there were massive amounts of deuterium was "destroyed" and that not as much was left. Destroyed is a pretty bad way of describing it, but they allude to it in the article that what they mean by it is, "was transformed into heavier elements by stellar fusion." Instead, they're finding out that the amount of deuterium in the galaxy now is only about 15% less than what they thought was the original amount available. They also mention it being in unexpected places, or rather, not distributed evenly, which they find unusual according to current theories.
Nothing to complain about here. Seems to me that the astrophysicists still have their brains intact, and realize their theory needs to be tweaked if it doesn't match the evidence.
If you can't sleep through normal day sounds like dogs barking and cars passing in front of your house (which I find much more annoying than dogs barking), you shouldn't work the third shift. I perfectly understand getting angry when a neighbor is deliberately trying to annoy others with noise or other distractions, but anything else and you're the one being the bad neighbor, annoying the crap out of him with your ridiculous complaints.
And no, I don't have a neighbor that is complaining about me. I did, however, live in an apartment and often heard loud music from the neighbors that lived on the apartment down from me (repetitive music I disliked at that). They weren't deliberately raising the volume to annoy me, and the walls were thin. As such, I accepted that it was their right to listen to music, and if I really couldn't live with it, well, I should move. After all, I don't anyone trying to stop me from listening to music or, if I had a house, stop me from having dogs that will actually bark and make noise if someone is threatening to enter my house.
What matters to you isn't the same thing that matters to me and vice-versa. To answer your question, we're really 'frickin' shallow.
The point is, we seek to be happy and avoid pain. What matters to us is whatever can help us seek happiness and avoid pain. To that end, owning video game consoles can bring you happiness, but they can't offset the pain brought on by katrina. It's as simple as that. Material posessions matter very much in the long run if you enjoy having them. Your SAT score matters if getting into that great university would make you happy. Getting high scores in video games certainly do make people giddy. Curing cancer means absolutely nothing to people who do not have cancer or know someone with cancer...except that you'll get that warm fuzzy feeling that if you end up getting it in the future, it won't be a big deal. It's one less thing to fear and, truthfully, that's the only reason people care.
Don't do the deal if you don't want things to stop freaking cold as frozen carbon dioxide should you decide not to pay.
That's exactly what I said. I said the software company has the right to do it, but that it is a horrible deal the city shouldn't have entered into.
They don't blow your integrity by purposefully not honoring the contract
They did honor the contract, as per the article. However, it expired and they didn't renew it, so there was no more contract. Now they're paying the consequences for buying software that expires. It's a completely ridiculous concept, and I can't believe anyone agrees to it.
I see your point, but what a lot of people are thinking is that even though they agreed to the deal, the deal is unfair. If I agree to a deal where I become your slave in exchange for something now, you can bet that's not going to wash, regardless of what I agreed to. So, "because that's what the deal was" isn't an end-all argument. Of course, in this case the deal was perfectly legal, so I agree with you that the city violated the contract (which isn't theft, but also isn't right).
Now, as to why so many people here dislike the deal: it's artificial. You have the software, the garage, the equipment. You can pay your own people to operate it. What service are you paying the software company for? You could be paying for support, but in this case, 'support' seems to be like protection money. "If you don't pay us to support your software, it just might stop working. You wouldn't want that, would you?"
It's not about the software company doing charity for the city. It's about them earning money for the work they do, not for the work they've done years ago. They can sell more copies of the software, they can sell updates, they can provide support options. An expiration date on the software so you can renegotiate a contract at a higher cost later sounds like exploitation to me. The software company of course has the right to do it. They have the right to shut the software down. Now, hopefully the city and everyone else will realize that it's a bad deal, and just what the risks associated with letting another company control the software on your equipment are. Then they'll never enter such a deal again, and that ridiculous business model can die.
putting these restrictions on the GPL isn't going to suddenly cause all the manufacturers to migrate en masse to GPL software...if anything they would avoid it.
Yes, and that's what they should do, avoid it. Not use the software written by someone who has licensed it with the specific intent of allowing people to run modified versions of it while using some loophole that prevents people from doing exactly that.
However, the second phrase in bold says that modified versions must be indistinguishible from the original source from the point of view of an outside device.
I don't think that's exactly what it says. It's more along the lines of, if I use gpl software for my instant messaging client, I can't make it so that a modified version of said instant messaging client is blocked from logging onto my servers, or treat them differently by deciding that they don't get to use one of my cool features like...saving your friends list on the server or something. Which makes sense. What's the point of being allowed to modify the source code if you can't use your modifications?
Now, if you run into bugs, and call the company saying, "I can't connect to your servers", they should have the right to say, "we can't help you fix your problem unless you're running an unmodified version." I don't think anything in the gpl v3 is trying to prevent them from doing that.
Here's the problem: when you gain weight, you gain fat cells.
If you're gaining weight while in puberty. Because after that point your body is not capable of creating new fat cells, the ones you have just expand or shrink. That doesn't mean that people who got fat during that period can't lose it. They can lose the fat stored in the fat cells. The only thing it means is that during that period it is determined where the fat cells are. For example, some people will gain weight more easily around the gut. That's because that's where the fat cells were formed during puberty. It doesn't mean they can't lose weight, or even that it's harder to lose weight. It means that whatever fat they gain will be accumulated there.
This is why people who lose weight almost always (95%) gain it back with a vengeance, and usually in such a way that they further increase their weight relative to what it was before they attempted weight loss.
No. People gain their weight back for two reasons:
They got to their ideal weight via some sort of fad diet. Eating less without exercising lowered their metabolism, and now their base metabolic rate is much lower and they need to eat less calories per day. If they could eat 2500 calories per day without gaining weight before the diet start, that may be down to 1800 at the end of it, if not even less.
People stop working out and dieting after they lose the weight. They were thinking of it as "what I have to do in order to lose weight" as opposed to, "this is how I have to live for the rest of my life." You don't work out to lose weight, you work out because it's healthy. If you continue working out, you'll keep the weight off as long as you don't go back to overeating.
I used to believe as you do, that weight loss is merely a matter of a little willpower. If that were so, then permanent weight loss (not to be confused with avoiding weight gain to begin with) would be achieved by much more than the mere 5% of the people who try.
It's not easy, and it takes a lot of willpower, not just a little. That's because there is an abundance of high calorie foods in today's world, coupled with the fact that we don't exercise nearly as much. Instead of spending the day farming, you're sitting at an office. When you need to go somewhere, you drive your car. When you need to go up to the 8th floor of a building, you take the elevator. If we want to live in this new world without becoming obese, we need to watch what we eat and find alternate ways to exercise, since just living doesn't do it anymore.
Maybe because American laws against price fixing wouldn't apply to an internation organization of which the US isn't even a member?
What do you think that we can do? We're a large consumer of oil, so we can apply economic pressue. That already happens though, and we already get very good deals. Believe me, gas is much less expensive in the US than in just about any other country.
You know, I've been arguing with people that there's no such thing as free will for quite some time, so I just had to join in on this discussion. I do in fact believe that all our actions are due to biological and environmental stimuli and that choices are an illusion.
If self is only an illusion it is by far one of the cruelest illusions that could come of nature, because without it there can be no concept of injustice, unfairness or abuse.
I don't know that it's "cruel", but the rest of it is right. We sort of define as a society the concepts of injustice, unfairness and abuse, but there's no inherent "right" and "wrong". Look at what different cultures consider "right" and "wrong". What makes you think that your culture is the one that values the "correct" things? Heck, what we think is right and wrong changed over time. And even now, within the same culture, we don't agree. I'm sure plenty of your own neighbors would think there's nothing wrong with the technology you're complaining about. Why is it that their inner concept of right and wrong isn't telling them that it's "bad"? Why isn't mine?
if there is no 'me' independent of my environment then why should I be concerned if I experience various stimuli?
For the same reason any other animal tries to avoid pain and increase pleasure. You are wired to really dislike feeling pain, and really like feeling pleasure. Unless you're a masochist. Then you're wired a different way from the rest of us, and you're going to seek pain. See, the things that cause pain will usually be bad for the survival of your species, so natural selection would cause those that extremely disliked the nerve impulses associated with things like burning or cutting of your flesh to have an advantage over those that don't mind being burned and maimed. Humans are way more complex and we get to analyze our environment. Since we're capable of these complex analysis, we get to have more complex goals.
The same is even more true about concern for someone else. It is irrational to be concerned either about yourself or somewhat else.
Not irrational, no. Being concerned about what happens to us is what got us naturally selected. If you're not, you'll die off. There are plenty of advantages to being social creatures. A single human is not particularly strong, but together we rule the world and are on top of the food chain. There are other pack animals. My dog "cares" about me. He'll attack someone if he believes they're a threat to him, even if they're not threatening him directly. Bees will protect their queen. The queen is essential for their survival, so it benefits them.
I think your flaw is the "if I'm not really making choices, why should I care about anything at all?" Well, who cares why you are wired to like pleasure, or how it works? You enjoy it, whatever that means, so enjoy it. Who cares if you're really making choices? The illusion is there, and if you can't tell that it's illusion, why does it matter?
So like I said I think it is sad that people are even trying to invent this kind of thing. It goes against the idea that people are valuable.
Now, I know you disagree with me on everything I said so far, and that's fine. I have nothing against religion, and if your beliefs help with your life, that's great. I don't mean that condescendingly, I accept the probability that you're right and I'm wrong, and there's a God, and we have free will. The thing about religion being unfalsifiable is that...well, it's unfalsifiable. It could very well be right.
However, even if you are right, I don't see why that matters with the subject at hand, and I need to ask you this: is the life of an unwanted abandoned baby, created in an act of passion between parents who weren't thinking about the consequences of their actions, given more or less value than a baby created in the lab by scientists paid for by parents who want to build a family and will truly love the resulting child? Is the method of conception really that important?
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No, no you can't. When you see a chicken playing tic-tac-toe, it's a trick whereby feed is released to the place that it's supposed to go to next.
Granted, you're still right that tic-tac-toe is an amazingly simple game, and thus, that's not much of an accomplishment for a computer. Still, it's a proof-of-concept that their computer can run some logic, not a demo of the next AMD / IBM / Intel CPU technology.
The button that says "install" on that web page is a link to an exe, which is why you have to choose "run" after it. Are you proposing that IE7 should prevent the user from downloading a frigging program and then running it. You could click on that "install" button using firefox and run it, that's not a frigging security hole. You could do with opera. You can do it with whatever frigging browser you want to that allows you to download things.
My opinions ARE biased. In this case, my bias is that I don't want my computer to ever preventing me from installing something I want to install.
Correction. This is how novice users are in that mass right now. If they want their computer to not get infected, they should learn to be more untrusting of Nutjob Inc companies they've never heard of. The problem comes when this stuff spreads through actual security holes. I don't care if five of my neighbors are having problems because they don't listen to me when I tell them not to install everything they see. It's their choice, their fault. I care if something gets installed on my computer that I didn't download and/or clicked the "No" button. There are/were plenty of security holes that allow just that in IE. I'm all for complaining about those.
I'm typing this "defense" of IE on my linux computer running firefox. It's not that I'm a microsoft fanboy or anything. It's just that one of the things that I most complain about is when software doesn't let me do something because it thinks it knows better than me. I'm not going to do a 180 in the name of protecting the novices. If someone wants to ride a bike but doesn't know how, they don't decide to ride with training wheels forever so that they won't fall and get hurt. They learn how to ride the darn bike and live with the danger that they might fall while learning.
Oh, come on. First of all, the computer should never prevent you from doing something you want to do, regardless of how dangerous or stupid it might be. It should most definitely warn you that it is dangerous and stupid. If the user really does click 'yes' for everything, it should get installed. As long as you get stern warnings about it (and as long as an admin can prevent it from happening to work computers by locking it down), it's plenty secure.
That said, even clicking 'yes' on everything didn't allow stuff to get installed. Did you see his explanations? "Being the windows-noob that I am, I will click allow." Then when that fails to install, he said, "all is not lost, as it wants us to try a 'manual install' instead." The windows-noob who clicks 'allow' for every single screen he sees would have no idea how to try a "manual install." Regardless of how easy it is, it's not automatic.
That would be red. Gold kryptonite could permanently remove his powers.
This was just a test to bring us ultra nerds out in the open wasn't it? Damn, alright I confess. I'm not just a trekkie, I'm a comic book guy as well.
Sure, as a kid it's easy to mask your actions. Your parents had no idea what you were doing on your computer because they didn't understand computers, that's fine. The question is, why were you doing questionable things on your computer? By the time you want to do those things, it's already too late to prevent. It's a cat and mouse game your parents can't win. So let's assume they were fairly computer proficient, logged your activities and then had a talk to you about it. You realize you got caught, you start to wonder how, I'll assume you're smart enough that you realize that your computer usage is being logged. At that point, if you can't find a technical way around it, you start doing the same things from the library computer, or from a friend's house. Even if your parents somehow manage to stop that, you might start doing it as an adult and potentially get into some serious trouble.
Now, if your parents instead talked to you about consequences of illegal actions, you might make the informed decision to not do those things. You're not going to listen to them on everything, and you'll make mistakes, you'll face the consequences. If this is happening from an early enough age, by the time you're old enough to make decisions with consequences that might ruin your life, you'll know to make the right one.
You know, that's exactly my point. At the age that kids are old enough to get themselves in real trouble, they're also old enough to be able to anticipate the consequences to their actions. The kid in your scenario has been taught to fear the wrong consequences. He's afraid of his parents punishment, and he's not afraid of dying? He's not afraid of being in jail for the rest of his life? Instead of deciding that shooting people in his school is a bad idea, he decides getting caught is a bad idea.
Besides, as I tried to make clear with my original post, it's not that the parents didn't know the kid was going to shoot people on Monday morning. I expect them to be plenty smart enough to figure out how to hide their plans, even under ultra surveillance. It's that they didn't know their kid was capable of killing people. You can't seriously be considering mass murder and be normal. These kids will usually torture animals. After seeing the news of someone getting murdered on tv, they might make comments as to how the victim "deserved" it. There will be signs that people getting hurt doesn't bother the kid. There'll be smaller signs before that. If you spend enough time with your kid, you'll know his personality and be able to talk to him about his ideas and fears, and how to overcome his problems. You might realize that you're not having enough of an impact, and take him to a shrink, in order to help you turn him around.
Someone capable of killing their classmates cannot possibly sit down to dinner and talk about his day at school went without getting going apeshit nuts. It's not that they're not smart enough to hide it, it's that they genuinely have emotions of hate about the people around them, and wants to see them dead. Think about it. What would make you pick up a gun, go to work one morning and start shooting your co-workers? You can't be in a normal state of mind to ever come close to such a decision. The only explanation is that they weren't talking about school (or anything), so he managed to keep his emotions burried and in check.
What the hell? When people ask, "where are the parents?" and say "they should have known," they don't mean "they should have tapped his phone to hear him talk about his plan, logged his computer to know he was visiting sites that instruct him how to make bombs and sneaked into his room and go through his stuff so they can find his Wile E. Coyote-like plans to destroy the school". They mean that parents should have known, because you can't possibly live in the same house as the kid, talk to the kid every day, and not realize he is THAT screwed up. The only explanation for this is that either you never talk to your kid, or you ride his ass so much with all your surveillance that you've escalated his normal teenage rebellion into something bigger and completely and utterly screwed up his mind. It's YOUR fault that he got that way, not that you didn't manage to stop him, call the police, or chain him to the bed minutes before he was supposed to carry out his plan.
As for teenage pregnancy, "they should have taught them better" is just that. They should have taught her, not locked her in her room because you intercepted an e-mail from her boyfriend. The idea is that you teach your kids to understand the consequences of their actions. I don't mean consequences as in punishment. I mean consequences of their actions, not whatever artificial things you impose. When you punish your kids for every little thing they do, they know that the action that led to the consequence was when they weren't careful enough to not get caught. When you explain to them that even their first sexual encounter can lead to pregnancy or STD's, they'll be thinking about that consequence.
And as to your little rant about your kids illegal internet actions leading to you...if you're really thinking along the lines of "better him in jail than me," you're one of the most screwed up parents I've ever heard.
You know, people who use your argument obviously forgot why the GPL exists. Stallman would be all for living in a world where there is no such thing as copyright and the GPL isn't needed. The whole concept of copyleft is using copyright against people who believe in it. Whether you agree with it or not, the GPL crowd is being perfectly consistent. The true hyprocrite would be the one who believes in not sharing his code, but appropriates GPL'ed code into his proprietary one.
No. In particular, "a prohibition against offering tiered internet services" is NOT the same as preventing ISP's from selling faster service than is available today. The bill explicitly defines that what the ISP cannot do is "block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person" to access any content they want, nor can they charge the user to prioritize content or services, although they are still free to use QoS to prioritize content as long as it is free of charge to the user. The bill goes on to say that the ISP must inform the user with information concerning the "speed, nature, and liminations of such user's broadband service."
Under the wording of the bill you posted, the ISP is perfectly allowed to sell Bill a 2Mbit package, and Joe a 6Mbit package for more money. They're also perfectly allowed to offer higher bandwidth services in the future, and charge even more for them. What they're not allowed to do is to sell you the 6Mbit package, and then decide to degrade your connection to less than 6Mbit because ubuntu doesn't pay them to be on their "faster tier". They also can't tell you that if you pay them an extra $10, they're going to allow you the 6Mbit access to download your linux iso from ubuntu.com.
You've already paid for 6Mbit access, and that's what you should get regardless of where you're downloading from. That's net neutrality, that's exactly what the bill you posted says, and it's vastly different from the definition given in the poll. Show me any bill that does agree with the definition in the poll, and I'll be against it as well, but S.2917 is perfectly fine.
Well, it wasn't so much an error. What I said was that I didn't know whether the software allowed you to annul the vote or not, since I moved out of Brazil before they implemented the electronic voting. Thanks for chiming in and explaining that you can.
I completely agree with you. You can never eliminate the uninformed from voting completely. After all, many of those people think they have plenty of information to make a decision. Who am I to tell them that they're don't? However, if people do that even when they're not forced to vote, imagine when all the people who previously didn't even care enough about the election to show up are suddenly forced to make a decision? Are they just going to develop an interest and want to do research so they can be better informed?
Not to mention that there's a large number of people who really do believe on the "get out and vote" nonsense, and they feel enormously proud that they took 30 minutes off their day to go somewhere and select a candidate, even if they did no work for that. I met many people in Brazil who honestly told me, "I don't know who I'm going to vote for, I'll decide when I see the ballot." That type of thing angers me, and if you're that complacent, you wouldn't vote at all if you had the choice.
A majority of Americans might dislike Bush, but that doesn't actually mean that he'd get voted out if everyone who disapproved of him were forced to vote. Due to the Electoral College system, it depends on where those people live. See the other discussions in the thread which talk about how much your vote is worth depending on whether you live in a "safe" or "swing" state.
I think the voting turnout is a similar good statistic too. Were people sufficiently motivated by the issues brought up by the candidates to vote? And about the right to actively abstain on a ballot, there's nothing preventing you from showing up at the poll booth and turning in a blank ballot, you could still do that if you're so inclined. Many people also consider voting for the third-party candidate, even though you know he can't possibly win, to be a measure of that same protest (although I voted for the third-party candidate because I honestly believed he was the best candidate, and I can't bring myself to choose between two people I dislike just so that one may win. Although, in the end, none of it may matter, since I live in South Carolina, and as the bumper stickers everywhere say, This is Bush Country).
Well, there's nobody watching you vote, so people turned in blank ballots too. The more paranoid people would nullify them instead to prevent people that are counting the votes from checking the boxes themselves (I don't know if it's actually an issue, but it doesn't hurt to be paranoid). As for the fine, it's the same method in Brazil. After all, they're not going to just not allow you to renew your documents. If you don't have your receipt, you pay a fine, and all is well. Still, generally people don't want to pay a fine, so you get extremely high voting turnout, but I argue that doesn't mean the system is better.
That may be true, but still doesn't solve the problem of people voting for people without doing their research. Name recognition is a huge boost for example. It's the reason why Arnold gets to be governor of California. There are a whole bunch of stupid reasons that causes people to make choices, and although many of those people would stay home, more of them show up if they're forced to show up. Now, if they want to show up and vote for their stupid reason, that's their right, but I see no reason in forcing the other people who don't care to go.
That's pretty interesting. I had no idea you could get so much of an advantage by being first, even when you can turn in a blank ballot. I guess the problem would be even worse if you couldn't because the software forced you to choose someone. Of course, it would also be easier to implement a rotation, but somehow I'd think that they still wouldn't bother.
Those are good points. I guess there are some advantages to compulsary voting, but I still don't think it's worth it.
Yep. Although that's an easy fight, anyone who wants to can get out of jury duty in the US. There's an old joke, "the only people in the jury are the ones that are too stupid to get out of jury duty."
I don't know how it works in Australia, but I lived in Brazil for a long time, where it is also compulsory to vote. What they do is make your life difficult if you don't have the receipt that says you voted in the last election (they require the receipts in order for you to get renewed documents such as passports, etc). Thus, the system works in that people do vote. The argument there is similar to the one you're making. You have the right to vote, so you should damn well use it, because that's what makes a democratic government great. I disagree with that in so many ways that I can't cover it all, but I'll just discuss the major problems with it right now.
I suppose the most important reason is the practical one: It doesn't work. They can make you vote but they can't make you care. The ballots were secret as they are here (a very good thing), so there were a large number of nullified ballots by people who just didn't want to vote. Essentially, they'd check the mark next to all the candidates, making the ballot worthless. They're doing the electronic voting there too now, but that's after I moved out, so I have no idea if the software disallows that. If the software does prohibit you from doing that, it puts you in a much scarier situation. I imagine most people who didn't care would simply vote for the first person on the list.
The second reason why voting shouldn't be compulsory also relates to the fact that most people don't care. You say that the system gets screwed up if people don't vote, but I claim it gets screwed up even more when people who don't do their research vote. I really hate the whole "get out and vote" campaigns because they make it seem like just showing up and voting satisfies all your civic responsibilities. It's not about just making a decision, it's about making an informed decision (although I guess "The Decider" would disagree). I'd be seriously in favor of the "Get out and learn about the candidate's track records, their proposals, and the success rate of similar actions to the ones they are proposing in the past, then vote for the best candidate" campaign, but people don't seem to want to do the hard things. Frankly, people who just show up and vote based on the fact that, "I don't like the damn republicans, I shall vote democrat" or "I'm conservative, I shall vote republican" are ruining for the rest of us who are actually doing our research.
Finally, there's the freedom argument. I don't like any laws that restricts people's freedoms. Your right to not vote is as important to me as your right to vote. If you want to vote I'll fight against anyone trying to prevent you to do so, regardless of whether or not I agree with who you are voting for. If you do not want to vote, I'll fight against anyone trying to make you do that.
That's not right...intentions have nothing to do with it.
You can license your code any way you want. If you want to license part of it as gpl, write a dll that is meant to work with your program only, but license it in a proprietary form, than release that stuff together with only the source code for the part that talks to the dll, you're fine. RMS would probably show up on your door holding a bat, but his lawyer won't be with him.
The license limitations don't limit what your gpl code can do, they limit what people can do with gpl code. So, if someone grabs the source code to a dll, and dynamically links to that with their non-gpl-compatible-licensed program, they are in violation of the gpl license for the dll, which doesn't allow that. However, if you're writing gpl code, you can link it to whatever you want, as long as the other license allows that. If the other license says you can't link it to gpl programs, you're screwed, but API's usually allow you to link to them, because they'd be useless if they didn't.
What's wrong with that? People negotiate licence issues all the time. Schilling can licence his code using whatever licence he chooses, but he can't be annoyed when Debian doesn't like it and refuses to package it with their distribution. It's their distribution, they can make their decisions on what to package based on whatever they want to.
And since he chose the GPL as a licence previously, he can't get pissed off when people fork it either. That's their right, granted to them by him when he used the GPL.
That's a very good point, although the types of businesses must be differentiated. For businesses that do not produce free software, BSD is very much what they prefer. They can get the code without any obligations and include it in their proprietary product. On the other hand, if your business intends on making contributions to free software, you obviously prefer the GPL because you don't want your competitors making use of your work, improving it, and then selling a better product than you, that is based on your work. If it's GPL'ed, if they improve the code, you get the improvements as well.
What I never really understood is why hardware manufacturers fear the GPL. What do they have to lose? At worst, people still need to buy the hardware from them if they want to run their software. At best, they get tons of free contributions that will make their hardware more desirable (like with the whole linksys router thing). Even more puzzling are companies like tivo. "We'll give you the GPL source code, but you can't run it on our hardware, because we check for private keys. Off course, there's nothing stopping a competitor from building similar hardware and plopping our modified GPL'd code in there, which is far more damaging to us than user modifications." I wonder why no one has done that...
I'm not an astrophysist, nor was I involved in the conversation before now, but I did read your linked article :)
Thanks for posting it, btw. I was taking what the parent said for granted, and it sounded pretty bad, but now it looks like it was a combination of bad reading comprehension and badly worded writing. The article you linked to at least, doesn't claim scientists are finding less deuterium than they expected and therefore expect more. Quite the contrary, they're finding a lot more than they expected, and thus are deciding that their theories need to be changed. I quote:
So, they thought there were massive amounts of deuterium was "destroyed" and that not as much was left. Destroyed is a pretty bad way of describing it, but they allude to it in the article that what they mean by it is, "was transformed into heavier elements by stellar fusion." Instead, they're finding out that the amount of deuterium in the galaxy now is only about 15% less than what they thought was the original amount available. They also mention it being in unexpected places, or rather, not distributed evenly, which they find unusual according to current theories.
Nothing to complain about here. Seems to me that the astrophysicists still have their brains intact, and realize their theory needs to be tweaked if it doesn't match the evidence.
If you can't sleep through normal day sounds like dogs barking and cars passing in front of your house (which I find much more annoying than dogs barking), you shouldn't work the third shift. I perfectly understand getting angry when a neighbor is deliberately trying to annoy others with noise or other distractions, but anything else and you're the one being the bad neighbor, annoying the crap out of him with your ridiculous complaints.
And no, I don't have a neighbor that is complaining about me. I did, however, live in an apartment and often heard loud music from the neighbors that lived on the apartment down from me (repetitive music I disliked at that). They weren't deliberately raising the volume to annoy me, and the walls were thin. As such, I accepted that it was their right to listen to music, and if I really couldn't live with it, well, I should move. After all, I don't anyone trying to stop me from listening to music or, if I had a house, stop me from having dogs that will actually bark and make noise if someone is threatening to enter my house.
What matters to you isn't the same thing that matters to me and vice-versa. To answer your question, we're really 'frickin' shallow.
The point is, we seek to be happy and avoid pain. What matters to us is whatever can help us seek happiness and avoid pain. To that end, owning video game consoles can bring you happiness, but they can't offset the pain brought on by katrina. It's as simple as that. Material posessions matter very much in the long run if you enjoy having them. Your SAT score matters if getting into that great university would make you happy. Getting high scores in video games certainly do make people giddy. Curing cancer means absolutely nothing to people who do not have cancer or know someone with cancer...except that you'll get that warm fuzzy feeling that if you end up getting it in the future, it won't be a big deal. It's one less thing to fear and, truthfully, that's the only reason people care.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
That's exactly what I said. I said the software company has the right to do it, but that it is a horrible deal the city shouldn't have entered into.
They did honor the contract, as per the article. However, it expired and they didn't renew it, so there was no more contract. Now they're paying the consequences for buying software that expires. It's a completely ridiculous concept, and I can't believe anyone agrees to it.
Now, as to why so many people here dislike the deal: it's artificial. You have the software, the garage, the equipment. You can pay your own people to operate it. What service are you paying the software company for? You could be paying for support, but in this case, 'support' seems to be like protection money. "If you don't pay us to support your software, it just might stop working. You wouldn't want that, would you?"
It's not about the software company doing charity for the city. It's about them earning money for the work they do, not for the work they've done years ago. They can sell more copies of the software, they can sell updates, they can provide support options. An expiration date on the software so you can renegotiate a contract at a higher cost later sounds like exploitation to me. The software company of course has the right to do it. They have the right to shut the software down. Now, hopefully the city and everyone else will realize that it's a bad deal, and just what the risks associated with letting another company control the software on your equipment are. Then they'll never enter such a deal again, and that ridiculous business model can die.
Yes, and that's what they should do, avoid it. Not use the software written by someone who has licensed it with the specific intent of allowing people to run modified versions of it while using some loophole that prevents people from doing exactly that.
I don't think that's exactly what it says. It's more along the lines of, if I use gpl software for my instant messaging client, I can't make it so that a modified version of said instant messaging client is blocked from logging onto my servers, or treat them differently by deciding that they don't get to use one of my cool features like...saving your friends list on the server or something. Which makes sense. What's the point of being allowed to modify the source code if you can't use your modifications?
Now, if you run into bugs, and call the company saying, "I can't connect to your servers", they should have the right to say, "we can't help you fix your problem unless you're running an unmodified version." I don't think anything in the gpl v3 is trying to prevent them from doing that.
If you're gaining weight while in puberty. Because after that point your body is not capable of creating new fat cells, the ones you have just expand or shrink. That doesn't mean that people who got fat during that period can't lose it. They can lose the fat stored in the fat cells. The only thing it means is that during that period it is determined where the fat cells are. For example, some people will gain weight more easily around the gut. That's because that's where the fat cells were formed during puberty. It doesn't mean they can't lose weight, or even that it's harder to lose weight. It means that whatever fat they gain will be accumulated there.
No. People gain their weight back for two reasons:
It's not easy, and it takes a lot of willpower, not just a little. That's because there is an abundance of high calorie foods in today's world, coupled with the fact that we don't exercise nearly as much. Instead of spending the day farming, you're sitting at an office. When you need to go somewhere, you drive your car. When you need to go up to the 8th floor of a building, you take the elevator. If we want to live in this new world without becoming obese, we need to watch what we eat and find alternate ways to exercise, since just living doesn't do it anymore.
Maybe because American laws against price fixing wouldn't apply to an internation organization of which the US isn't even a member?
What do you think that we can do? We're a large consumer of oil, so we can apply economic pressue. That already happens though, and we already get very good deals. Believe me, gas is much less expensive in the US than in just about any other country.
You know, I've been arguing with people that there's no such thing as free will for quite some time, so I just had to join in on this discussion. I do in fact believe that all our actions are due to biological and environmental stimuli and that choices are an illusion.
I don't know that it's "cruel", but the rest of it is right. We sort of define as a society the concepts of injustice, unfairness and abuse, but there's no inherent "right" and "wrong". Look at what different cultures consider "right" and "wrong". What makes you think that your culture is the one that values the "correct" things? Heck, what we think is right and wrong changed over time. And even now, within the same culture, we don't agree. I'm sure plenty of your own neighbors would think there's nothing wrong with the technology you're complaining about. Why is it that their inner concept of right and wrong isn't telling them that it's "bad"? Why isn't mine?
For the same reason any other animal tries to avoid pain and increase pleasure. You are wired to really dislike feeling pain, and really like feeling pleasure. Unless you're a masochist. Then you're wired a different way from the rest of us, and you're going to seek pain. See, the things that cause pain will usually be bad for the survival of your species, so natural selection would cause those that extremely disliked the nerve impulses associated with things like burning or cutting of your flesh to have an advantage over those that don't mind being burned and maimed. Humans are way more complex and we get to analyze our environment. Since we're capable of these complex analysis, we get to have more complex goals.
Not irrational, no. Being concerned about what happens to us is what got us naturally selected. If you're not, you'll die off. There are plenty of advantages to being social creatures. A single human is not particularly strong, but together we rule the world and are on top of the food chain. There are other pack animals. My dog "cares" about me. He'll attack someone if he believes they're a threat to him, even if they're not threatening him directly. Bees will protect their queen. The queen is essential for their survival, so it benefits them.
I think your flaw is the "if I'm not really making choices, why should I care about anything at all?" Well, who cares why you are wired to like pleasure, or how it works? You enjoy it, whatever that means, so enjoy it. Who cares if you're really making choices? The illusion is there, and if you can't tell that it's illusion, why does it matter?
Now, I know you disagree with me on everything I said so far, and that's fine. I have nothing against religion, and if your beliefs help with your life, that's great. I don't mean that condescendingly, I accept the probability that you're right and I'm wrong, and there's a God, and we have free will. The thing about religion being unfalsifiable is that...well, it's unfalsifiable. It could very well be right.
However, even if you are right, I don't see why that matters with the subject at hand, and I need to ask you this: is the life of an unwanted abandoned baby, created in an act of passion between parents who weren't thinking about the consequences of their actions, given more or less value than a baby created in the lab by scientists paid for by parents who want to build a family and will truly love the resulting child? Is the method of conception really that important?