Call me stupid, but I cannot figure out how your comment is at all related to my post.
To take your bait, it is quite irrelevant whether BL is lying or not. If US pulled out of the Middle East both politically and economically, then no one there would give a flying *uck about US anymore. It is really hard to care about a country on the other side of the globe when it does nothing to interfere with your affairs. I am sure BL would have much worthier targets right next to him, as simple as that.
Your statements assume that terrorists are reasonable and rational, operate in good faith, never want to simply make a point that no one is safe, and that what you consider to be "pacifying" and "non-predatory" and "respectful" is seen that way from their side.
Take a look, there's a link below to Bin Ladin's speech. The man sounds reasonable, rational, intelligent; he has a clear agenda and seems to operate in good faith. In fact, I was so taken aback by that speech, I started to suspect that it was written by some liberal journalist in NY city.
No matter WHAT you do, there's going to be someone with a different viewpoint and beliefs, and often with conflicting interests. Simple example: your not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries can be taken as inaction and indifference by one side, and they may bomb you anyway just to get you "involved".
Hahaha, do you believe for a moment in what you are saying? I'll give you a simple example of my own. Will Israel bomb US if the latter pulls out and cuts its financial & military support? Even a child can see that they will save those bombs for their neighbours. Bombing US will only serve as means for suicide.
US is the top dog. As long as it does not interfere into the affairs of small countries, those small countries worship it for just that.
This is the problem: even here, on/., many people disbelieve you, even though you are obviously right. (1) is the hardest to swallow, and I do not wish to discuss it here, because it is not directly related to terrorism. (2-4) hit the nail on the head.
As far as I understand, the acts of terror are accomplished by people who are weak and hateful. A powerful person/party/group will not resort to terrorism, because a war would be much more effective. Without hatred, it is impossible to kill people, while having nothing tangible to gain through this act. Your points (2-4) address the very source of terrorism, and therefore are most effective. They are effective because they make our adversaries stronger, more independent, and take away all reasons to hate us.
For contrast, let us now examine the practical measures taken so far. What is the government doing to "prevent terrorism"? They want to install bomb detectors in the subway. Will it assuage the hatred? No. Will it make Britain's opponents in the Middle East more powerful and/or independent? No. Rather, by strengthening itself, Britain makes them relatively weaker. We can conclude that installing bomb detectors will at best have no impact on terrorist activity.
It gets really funny (in a sad way), when we look at the US policy. US public was made to believe that attacking and occupying a sovereign country in the Middle East would somehow abate the terrorism. For Christ's sake, by that one act Bush's government generated more hatred than all of the rest of their foreign policy put together. At the same time, they have made their enemy even weaker than before, by that taking away all means of retaliation except... you guessed it, terrorism. It is almost like Bush and Co. are deliberately nurturing a terrorist network, that elusive Al Qaeda, which probably didn't even exist when they set out to wage war, but now becomes more and more real, thanks all to their labour.
I agree with the parent. If restitution they want -- restitution they may get, but not at the cost of stiffling the research. I like that idea of awarding inventions in some kinda nationwide contest, and then setting the IP loose, thereby forcing manufacturers to compete on merit.
As for the arts, I do not see any point in awarding artists at all -- iff we are talking specifically about awarding with IP protection, and doing so postfactum. I can argue this point by showing how artists can (indeed are) get paid in the absence of the copyrights.
As one smart slashdotter noted above, they can spell their license out on the front cover, but it will not make it legally binding. When you are buying a book in the game store, that is all you are doing -- buying a book. The cover may say "By buying this book you agree to pay $20 per year to play" or "Top Secret, Burn Before Reading", but this cannot have any legal consequences for you. From what little I understood, the only sure way to enforce this license would be to have you sign a contract at the POS.
IANPWD (I am not a professional web developer), but I see no reason not to use Emacs. For everything. Start out by making it your start-up shell, and go from there.
What happens to the consciousness when a perfect material copy of a human is created?
Is it possible to have a "distributed" consciousness, whatever that means?
I think that the answer to the first question is rather obvious and was addressed by other posters already: even when a perfect copy is manufactured -- which may be plain impossible due to the nondeterministic nature of the world we live in -- it only results in creation of an individual very similar to the original. There is no reason to think that these 2 will be able to share consciousness in any way transcending the common human interaction.
It is the second question that is most interesting, and fewer people understood it. I myself never was in what they call a "close relationship" (hey, it's/.), but I am impressed by the sheer number of testimonies which bring into the spotlight the "shared consciousness" of partners who know each other well. It is a fact that some long term relationships provide the partners with what Homer J. called a "profound mystical understanding" -- a level of mutual understanding where they think that they can anticipate each other's thoughts, feelings and desires. Note that these people use nothing but an ordinary human language available to all of us. This, I think, goes to show that a "distributed" human mind is actually very close at hand. I believe (but cannot prove) that when we find a way to connect the minds directly to one another (let your favourite SF movie provide you with a visual), i.e. come up with a way of communicating without the spoken word as a middleman, "getting to know" a person will become a slippery slope towards convergence of the minds. It will be indeed only a matter of time before you and your spouse, for example, will start understanding "I" as "we". I do not mean by that that you will confuse these notions while talking to strangers, oh no, but that the true meaning of self for you will account for 2 physical bodies, you will believe that you have the good old "free will" to act with any of the 2, etc.
This imagined way of communicating without using the language raises yet another very interesting question: is the verbal language indispensable in the process of learning? In other words, would it be possible to bring up an intelligent child by using that more direct mind melt-like interaction? Would it be possible to teach the verbal language in the end -- to treat it as an auxiliary skill which can be optionally learned for interacting with "untrusted" entities? As you may know, in the modern epistemology the line between language and mind became more blurred than ever. I personally heard Searle saying something to the point that the verbal language is the only conceivable foundation of whatever we call "consciousness" and "understanding". And while it can and should be argued that there is more to the analytic philosophy than just the study of language, many individual analytic philosophers were criticized for making this mistake by their continental peers. To sum up, an ability for minds to communicate directly could effect the most profound development in philosophy, with concepts like "mind", "individual", "human", "consciousness" changing their meanings to something very different from what we know or even are able to know today. This question is almost too deep for me, so I will shut up for now.
Calling your religion "science" does not make it any less of a religion. A doctrine which states that an entire slice of the world culture -- a very thick and jucy slice at that -- is pure evil is as much a fundamentalist doctrine as any other modern christian dogma.
Thank you for spelling this one out. I agree, most of the losses of classical works were not due to a crusading fundamentalist attitude. Rather, it was a simple matter of recycling the materials which were of little or no interest to anyone. We can blame the organized religion for taking us into a cultural recession of the middle ages (in which the classical works became irrelevant), but that's a whole different matter. I'd say, what the monk did was actually prudent for what had known.
Now that we are deep enough in the thread, let me give you an extended version: I did not say it was intended to be a children's book, just that it is similar to SW in that it is received by a child's mind more readily, as is often the case with mythology. As far as the genre/style is concerned, the similarity between SW and LOTR is twofold: they are both mythological and epic.
The biggest thing a crowd dislikes about it is that it is epic. The slow development of ep.I, focussed more on providing background to the story than on anything else; an extremely intense love affair in ep.II that few of us can relate to; portraying ideals and principles (read: gods, daemons) rather than people -- making them bigger than people, creating the sense that the spiritual world is just as alive as the material one -- all of this is very boring, of course, unless you have a taste for that kind of thing. This is epic. I happen to enjoy it, I also happen to enjoy mythology, and I really think that Lucas did a great job. He is the only one today, imho, who could shoot an epic film.
Why am I ranting? I liked the movie, and many others didn't, and that's cool. I get slightly pissed though when people are saying things like "this is the end of Loucas", "he is out of ideas", "he sold out", etc. Bullshit, that's just not true. If he was any of these, we would never see an epic. As a rule, they don't sell as well -- not while the author is alive, anyway. They don't capture the people's minds as quickly, they need time to catch on. If Lucas was a money whore, we would see another 3 episodes of LOTR-the-movie-like mediocrity.
So hooray for Lucas. He is kicking ass more than ever, just not in a popular genre. I am glad that we have at least one director who has both talent and finances to do produce fine art without totally prostituting himself. (He has a great balance at that. I am extremely bored with pop, LCD art, yet I would not trust an artist who is doing it "just for art's sake" when money comes his way). It just warms my heart to know that critics on this board keep paying him.
It's been said before: most of those who are bitching about SW I-III are grownups who are way too much in love with their childhood (that's some 80% of/. population). I agree with the parent: this is very much a children's move (cf. LOTR, the book), so quit whining, take your kid to the cinema with you, and get high from an expression on his/her face.
On the contrary, he took "free" back to its
roots.
I. Not in bondage to another.
Etymology: The primary sense of the adj. is 'dear'; the Germanic and Celtic sense comes of its having been applied as the distinctive epithet of those members of the household who were connected by ties of kindred with the head, as opposed to the slaves. (OED)
In that sense, free software is a kind that is not enslaved, i.e. controlled by persons/corporations/governments; it is a kind that enjoys being everyone's and no one's at the same time, like a beloved family memeber. Free software talks to us as equal. We make it free not by slashing its price, but by giving it liberty.
Gosh, I sound like Bible, but I am afraid it is unavoidable if I am to explain Stallman's stance:P
Arrr! We, pirates, take nothing from the artists. We are in no relationship to them. We did not promise them anything. We did not sign a contract. We never expressed a desire to have music produced in the first place. We did not break into their houses and steal their secrets.
We look at what is available to the general public and we pay our own money for re-distributing it for our personal use.
We are most certainly not parasites, and RIAA is.
Now, we -- Americans, we do have a relationship with Artists. We gave them IP, hoping that it will encourage the creativity in arts and sciences. And guess what, it looks like it did for quite a while.
But we, conscientious pirates (Arrr!!), believe that IP is not working anymore the way it was designed, blame digital technology, and so not even as Americans we have any reason to keep this deal with the Artists. IP has to change or to go away.
I know this isn't an option for many people, but it works for me.
Why, I think it certainly is an option for many people, for everyone even. If one is broke, it may not be an option to pay for the CDs, but how's not buying them can break anyone's back? And besides downloading music (which can still be accomplished quite safely) there are also live performances and friends. When I stopped buying CDs a few years ago, I found that my friends are more than willing to (a) tell me what music they like and (b) make a copies for me. They will do these things almost to the point of being obnoxious. Just recently, a guy I hardly knew burned for me a compilation of Underground, just because I chatted with him about his music interests for 10 minutes.
This, I believe, is the reason why IP will ultimately be ineffective in the realm of popular art: regardless of what they think about feeding artists, people believe that they have a God-given right to share their interests with others, and they will do so even if it involves investing time and effort, and without any material gain to themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a link to a torrent. I never seeded before, so tell me if it worked out for you.
http://melikamp.net/gfx/LH%20Screenshots.torrent
Call me stupid, but I cannot figure out how your comment is at all related to my post.
To take your bait, it is quite irrelevant whether BL is lying or not. If US pulled out of the Middle East both politically and economically, then no one there would give a flying *uck about US anymore. It is really hard to care about a country on the other side of the globe when it does nothing to interfere with your affairs. I am sure BL would have much worthier targets right next to him, as simple as that.
Your statements assume that terrorists are reasonable and rational, operate in good faith, never want to simply make a point that no one is safe, and that what you consider to be "pacifying" and "non-predatory" and "respectful" is seen that way from their side.
Take a look, there's a link below to Bin Ladin's speech. The man sounds reasonable, rational, intelligent; he has a clear agenda and seems to operate in good faith. In fact, I was so taken aback by that speech, I started to suspect that it was written by some liberal journalist in NY city.
No matter WHAT you do, there's going to be someone with a different viewpoint and beliefs, and often with conflicting interests. Simple example: your not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries can be taken as inaction and indifference by one side, and they may bomb you anyway just to get you "involved".
Hahaha, do you believe for a moment in what you are saying? I'll give you a simple example of my own. Will Israel bomb US if the latter pulls out and cuts its financial & military support? Even a child can see that they will save those bombs for their neighbours. Bombing US will only serve as means for suicide.
US is the top dog. As long as it does not interfere into the affairs of small countries, those small countries worship it for just that.
By Allah, mod parent up as informative. This speech is amazing, and especially so if it's true.
This is the problem: even here, on /., many people disbelieve you, even though you are obviously right. (1) is the hardest to swallow, and I do not wish to discuss it here, because it is not directly related to terrorism. (2-4) hit the nail on the head.
As far as I understand, the acts of terror are accomplished by people who are weak and hateful. A powerful person/party/group will not resort to terrorism, because a war would be much more effective. Without hatred, it is impossible to kill people, while having nothing tangible to gain through this act. Your points (2-4) address the very source of terrorism, and therefore are most effective. They are effective because they make our adversaries stronger, more independent, and take away all reasons to hate us.
For contrast, let us now examine the practical measures taken so far. What is the government doing to "prevent terrorism"? They want to install bomb detectors in the subway. Will it assuage the hatred? No. Will it make Britain's opponents in the Middle East more powerful and/or independent? No. Rather, by strengthening itself, Britain makes them relatively weaker. We can conclude that installing bomb detectors will at best have no impact on terrorist activity.
It gets really funny (in a sad way), when we look at the US policy. US public was made to believe that attacking and occupying a sovereign country in the Middle East would somehow abate the terrorism. For Christ's sake, by that one act Bush's government generated more hatred than all of the rest of their foreign policy put together. At the same time, they have made their enemy even weaker than before, by that taking away all means of retaliation except... you guessed it, terrorism. It is almost like Bush and Co. are deliberately nurturing a terrorist network, that elusive Al Qaeda, which probably didn't even exist when they set out to wage war, but now becomes more and more real, thanks all to their labour.
I agree with the parent. If restitution they want -- restitution they may get, but not at the cost of stiffling the research. I like that idea of awarding inventions in some kinda nationwide contest, and then setting the IP loose, thereby forcing manufacturers to compete on merit.
As for the arts, I do not see any point in awarding artists at all -- iff we are talking specifically about awarding with IP protection, and doing so postfactum. I can argue this point by showing how artists can (indeed are) get paid in the absence of the copyrights.
As one smart slashdotter noted above, they can spell their license out on the front cover, but it will not make it legally binding. When you are buying a book in the game store, that is all you are doing -- buying a book. The cover may say "By buying this book you agree to pay $20 per year to play" or "Top Secret, Burn Before Reading", but this cannot have any legal consequences for you. From what little I understood, the only sure way to enforce this license would be to have you sign a contract at the POS.
Dude, you rock.
IANPWD (I am not a professional web developer), but I see no reason not to use Emacs. For everything. Start out by making it your start-up shell, and go from there.
By typing with penis?
Law enforcement in Russia is this kind of organization.
Doh! No mod points here.
+1 Insightful
You have 2 different metaphysical questions here:
I think that the answer to the first question is rather obvious and was addressed by other posters already: even when a perfect copy is manufactured -- which may be plain impossible due to the nondeterministic nature of the world we live in -- it only results in creation of an individual very similar to the original. There is no reason to think that these 2 will be able to share consciousness in any way transcending the common human interaction.
It is the second question that is most interesting, and fewer people understood it. I myself never was in what they call a "close relationship" (hey, it's /.), but I am impressed by the sheer number of testimonies which bring into the spotlight the "shared consciousness" of partners who know each other well. It is a fact that some long term relationships provide the partners with what Homer J. called a "profound mystical understanding" -- a level of mutual understanding where they think that they can anticipate each other's thoughts, feelings and desires. Note that these people use nothing but an ordinary human language available to all of us. This, I think, goes to show that a "distributed" human mind is actually very close at hand. I believe (but cannot prove) that when we find a way to connect the minds directly to one another (let your favourite SF movie provide you with a visual), i.e. come up with a way of communicating without the spoken word as a middleman, "getting to know" a person will become a slippery slope towards convergence of the minds. It will be indeed only a matter of time before you and your spouse, for example, will start understanding "I" as "we". I do not mean by that that you will confuse these notions while talking to strangers, oh no, but that the true meaning of self for you will account for 2 physical bodies, you will believe that you have the good old "free will" to act with any of the 2, etc.
This imagined way of communicating without using the language raises yet another very interesting question: is the verbal language indispensable in the process of learning? In other words, would it be possible to bring up an intelligent child by using that more direct mind melt-like interaction? Would it be possible to teach the verbal language in the end -- to treat it as an auxiliary skill which can be optionally learned for interacting with "untrusted" entities? As you may know, in the modern epistemology the line between language and mind became more blurred than ever. I personally heard Searle saying something to the point that the verbal language is the only conceivable foundation of whatever we call "consciousness" and "understanding". And while it can and should be argued that there is more to the analytic philosophy than just the study of language, many individual analytic philosophers were criticized for making this mistake by their continental peers. To sum up, an ability for minds to communicate directly could effect the most profound development in philosophy, with concepts like "mind", "individual", "human", "consciousness" changing their meanings to something very different from what we know or even are able to know today. This question is almost too deep for me, so I will shut up for now.
-Mel
Calling your religion "science" does not make it any less of a religion. A doctrine which states that an entire slice of the world culture -- a very thick and jucy slice at that -- is pure evil is as much a fundamentalist doctrine as any other modern christian dogma.
Q.E.D. bitch.
P.S. I hope Maddox won't sue me for appropriating his style...
Thank you for spelling this one out. I agree, most of the losses of classical works were not due to a crusading fundamentalist attitude. Rather, it was a simple matter of recycling the materials which were of little or no interest to anyone. We can blame the organized religion for taking us into a cultural recession of the middle ages (in which the classical works became irrelevant), but that's a whole different matter. I'd say, what the monk did was actually prudent for what had known.
D. Church wanted paper and that was the cheapest way to get it.
Now that we are deep enough in the thread, let me give you an extended version: I did not say it was intended to be a children's book, just that it is similar to SW in that it is received by a child's mind more readily, as is often the case with mythology. As far as the genre/style is concerned, the similarity between SW and LOTR is twofold: they are both mythological and epic.
The biggest thing a crowd dislikes about it is that it is epic. The slow development of ep.I, focussed more on providing background to the story than on anything else; an extremely intense love affair in ep.II that few of us can relate to; portraying ideals and principles (read: gods, daemons) rather than people -- making them bigger than people, creating the sense that the spiritual world is just as alive as the material one -- all of this is very boring, of course, unless you have a taste for that kind of thing. This is epic. I happen to enjoy it, I also happen to enjoy mythology, and I really think that Lucas did a great job. He is the only one today, imho, who could shoot an epic film.
Why am I ranting? I liked the movie, and many others didn't, and that's cool. I get slightly pissed though when people are saying things like "this is the end of Loucas", "he is out of ideas", "he sold out", etc. Bullshit, that's just not true. If he was any of these, we would never see an epic. As a rule, they don't sell as well -- not while the author is alive, anyway. They don't capture the people's minds as quickly, they need time to catch on. If Lucas was a money whore, we would see another 3 episodes of LOTR-the-movie-like mediocrity.
So hooray for Lucas. He is kicking ass more than ever, just not in a popular genre. I am glad that we have at least one director who has both talent and finances to do produce fine art without totally prostituting himself. (He has a great balance at that. I am extremely bored with pop, LCD art, yet I would not trust an artist who is doing it "just for art's sake" when money comes his way). It just warms my heart to know that critics on this board keep paying him.
It's been said before: most of those who are bitching about SW I-III are grownups who are way too much in love with their childhood (that's some 80% of /. population). I agree with the parent: this is very much a children's move (cf. LOTR, the book), so quit whining, take your kid to the cinema with you, and get high from an expression on his/her face.
Oh, wait, it's /. How insensitive of me...
No you do not, cf. LOTR.
You mean, in ways never felt before...
On the contrary, he took "free" back to its roots.
I. Not in bondage to another.
Etymology: The primary sense of the adj. is 'dear'; the Germanic and Celtic sense comes of its having been applied as the distinctive epithet of those members of the household who were connected by ties of kindred with the head, as opposed to the slaves. (OED)
In that sense, free software is a kind that is not enslaved, i.e. controlled by persons/corporations/governments; it is a kind that enjoys being everyone's and no one's at the same time, like a beloved family memeber. Free software talks to us as equal. We make it free not by slashing its price, but by giving it liberty.
Gosh, I sound like Bible, but I am afraid it is unavoidable if I am to explain Stallman's stance :P
Mod parent up! I think it is the default setting in XP.
Arrr! We, pirates, take nothing from the artists. We are in no relationship to them. We did not promise them anything. We did not sign a contract. We never expressed a desire to have music produced in the first place. We did not break into their houses and steal their secrets.
We look at what is available to the general public and we pay our own money for re-distributing it for our personal use.
We are most certainly not parasites, and RIAA is.
Now, we -- Americans, we do have a relationship with Artists. We gave them IP, hoping that it will encourage the creativity in arts and sciences. And guess what, it looks like it did for quite a while.
But we, conscientious pirates (Arrr!!), believe that IP is not working anymore the way it was designed, blame digital technology, and so not even as Americans we have any reason to keep this deal with the Artists. IP has to change or to go away.
I know this isn't an option for many people, but it works for me.
Why, I think it certainly is an option for many people, for everyone even. If one is broke, it may not be an option to pay for the CDs, but how's not buying them can break anyone's back? And besides downloading music (which can still be accomplished quite safely) there are also live performances and friends. When I stopped buying CDs a few years ago, I found that my friends are more than willing to (a) tell me what music they like and (b) make a copies for me. They will do these things almost to the point of being obnoxious. Just recently, a guy I hardly knew burned for me a compilation of Underground, just because I chatted with him about his music interests for 10 minutes.
This, I believe, is the reason why IP will ultimately be ineffective in the realm of popular art: regardless of what they think about feeding artists, people believe that they have a God-given right to share their interests with others, and they will do so even if it involves investing time and effort, and without any material gain to themselves.