I think it's pretty clear, from the following quote:
It's going to be very tricky. A not-well-intentioned government, or a government with authoritarian tendencies, is going to use these technologies in ways that the citizenry wouldn't approve of. But that government is not going to give them a chance to approve it.
We can trust our government with any of these surveillance technologies because they're the good guys, and there is no chance of that ever changing. That's the message.
There is perhaps one great danger to growing up in an (arguably) free country; you lose the inclination to be jealous of your liberty and in guarding that liberty. It's like growing up in a plastic bubble. The first germ that comes your way, you have no defense for.
It doesn't matter that you may trust your government or love your country. You do not cede certain powers to it. Government is like a chainsaw. You can get a lot of good done with one, but you need to be careful of it at all times.
I think criticizing Shatner's acting in Star Trek has become the real cliche.
I don't want to contribute to a flame war, so I would ask that people take my comments as a matter of personal taste. But, when I look at Star Trek: The Next Generation, I often cannot get over how campy it seems -- Patrick Stewart included. I don't know where this show gets off as being the definitives statement concerning Star Trek.
I like Shatner's acting in Star Trek; and, taken in the context of 1960's television, I think any over-the-top quality is quite forgivable. (Incidentally, William Shatner in Boston Legal is absolutely inspired.)
Anyway, I just wanted to say that I agree with what you've written.
"Grandma's hunt and peck"?
on
iPad Review
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Where do you guys find your grandma's?
My mother, age 69, is a grandma. She worked as a secretary for many years, as did many women of her generation. She touch-types wicked fast. I'm sure there are plenty more where she came from.
You're arguing for moral relativism, which is no way of arguing. Moral relativism means that there is no right or wrong.
Taking the individual as the default state is an exercise in conceptual isolation, the same way positing something like inertia is. You don't ever see inertia, or any of the other laws of the physical world in isolation.
Logically, you take the individual as that primary because that is what lives or dies. As such, the actions one should take to ensure one's survival are not arbitrary. The reasoning that I subscribe to, as I wrote earlier, applies this objective standard to a social setting.
I'm not sure what you mean by evolutionary pressure. However, living by the law of the jungle is not living in a human society, a point to which I think you would agree. For the lone individual, the concept of rights is moot. Once individuals decide to associate, then through a process of abstract thought, as you say, people need to discern how life lived as a human being applies to a social context.
This is individualist reasoning, admittedly. But the point is that human beings exist as individuals in society with one another: in other words, the individual is the primary fact of existence. There is no society apart from the individuals in it. (I often write it "Society" when I'm referring to the opposite conception -- quotation marks and spooky italics.) "Society" is not the primary fact of existence; moreover, "Society" cannot re-write the facts of existence. Rights are not arbitrary.
Rights are an aspect of reality and apply to individuals.
If you lived as an isolated individual, you would have to build shelter, make tools, hunt and gather for food. No other person would be there to stop you. You would be free to preserve your life and well-being; you would be free to take the actions you saw fit to take; you would be free to keep the shelter, tools, and food that you produced. The only thing you would have to worry about would be animals, and the vagaries of nature.
When people choose to live together, they can recognize what it means to live as a human being, and apply that to a social setting. The rights to life, liberty, and property are the recognition of the life of a human individual in society with other human individuals.
People could live in close proximity, and wantonly steal or kill one another, but that's not society. That's living like animals.
Society cannot invent rights, only recognize them; government cannot grant rights, only protect them. Rights exist apart from society and government, and their existence is definite and specific.
If the social mores of a group of people reflect something other than life, liberty, and property -- so much the worse for them. What they're perpetuating has nothing to do with rights. Moreover, what they're perpetuating is something less than a human society.
The problem with SS is that they've "borrowed" from it for the general fund, and that taxes are capped at $75k per year.
These are two separate issues, and only the first is a problem.
As initially sold to the American people, Social Security was meant to be an insurance policy, mainly against indigence in old age for people who had outlived their savings. It was never sold as a scheme to transfer wealth from one segment of the population to another.
The original retirement age of 65 was set when the life expectancy of the average working man was something like 62. It wasn't expected that most people would collect Social Security. People were expected to finance their own retirement or work until they dropped. In the event that you lived so long that you either blew through your savings or were too old to work anymore and support yourself, Social Security would then kick in.
Under that original rationale, there is no reason to repeal the cap on taxes. To do so makes Social Security less of an insurance policy and more of a welfare policy.
The fact that the government has been looting Social Security, and that now most people expect to collect Social Security for a good number of years, is where the problems stem from.
I seem to remember reading something that contradicts what you're saying.
As I recall, some scientists are wondering if vaccinating children against chickenpox is having an adverse affect on the adult population who have had chickenpox. Since kids aren't carrying the active virus, adults are exposed to it less. It seems like routine exposure may actually help keep our immune systems primed. The result is, since more immune systems are "out of practice," so to speak, more adults are contracting shingles.
Disclaimer: I have no science background to start with, and I'm recounting this from memory. If I'm wrong, I apologize.
The separate domains of my life shouldn't overlap.
For me, that's the big shortcoming of Facebook. When I first got on and my Facebook "friends" was limited to a small circle, that was one thing. But now I'm getting that uncomfortable feeling that I'm mixing worlds, so to speak. I find myself censoring what I post, because even though one set of "friends" might like it, another might not. And of course, my family is another story entirely.
I'm an old guy, compared to the original users of Facebook. I imagine those that started using it when it was restricted to college students are even more unhappy about it.
(b) does not guarantee your ability to access all websites [...]
That sounds more like a hold harmless clause to keep you from suing them if you aren't able to access your local radio station's Web contest because of Internet traffic or server failure on their part than it does a notification that they may at anytime decide to block a Web site.
I think Verizon has done something wrong here. If they want to offer something more along the lines AOL's old walled garden, they can't advertise it as the Internet, or at the very least, they need to spell out their restrictions.
When an ISP blocks your SMTP port to combat spam, somewhere in the agreement they spell this out. If they're going to reserve the right to block Web sites, they need to spell this out, too.
[G]overnments have been looking for "non-lethal" crowd control devices like this [...]
I actually find this worrisome, from the standpoint of civil liberty. Non-violent protest actually relies on the brutality of governmental response to provoke sympathy and garner support for one's cause. While the so-called "non-lethal" weapons of today are still pretty brutal, I invite people to follow me on a little thought experiment that illustrates my concern.
Let's carry non-lethal crowd control methods to their ultimate conclusion. Imagine a device that lulls people to sleep, whereupon they're carried home, placed in their beds, enjoy a night's rest like the haven't managed in months, and awake to find a chocolate morsel on their nightstands and a terrifically refreshed sense of well-being. If crowds of peaceful protesters are broken up by repressive governments using this device, how much sympathy will that garner? How effective will civil disobedience be?
The scenario I describe is purposefully fanciful and exaggerated. Nevertheless, my point is that non-lethal methods carry the very real threat of keeping bad governments from looking all that bad. Government should hurt; and repressing civil disobedience should carry the risk of looking bad. Otherwise, you can be sure it will be used at the drop of a hat. And that may just pose a problem.
I know very little about this, but the term "gene splicing" calls to mind images of tiny scalpels. From my understanding that's not what's going on at all.
What I've heard is that Monsanto basically bombards produce with radiation in an effort to produce mutations. It then sifts through these mutations looking for something marketable. Again, to my understanding, to most people involved in recombinant gene technology (or whatever it's called) this technique is both primitive and absolutely horrifying. What happens is that all sorts of proteins and amino acids get damaged in the process.
I'm going to reach for a metaphor here, but I take it that, at the molecular level, eating this stuff is basically like swallowing shards of broken glass.
Her novels are the way they are for two reasons. One, she writes within the tradition of Romantic literature. Issues in the book are cleanly drawn, with no grey areas. Is there sympathy for Cardinal Richelieu in the Three Musketeers? What about the main character in the Count of Monte Cristo? Isn't he a bit larger than life? Two, her works are meant to be philosophical: she has an agenda and makes no bones about it. It's not meant to be wishy washy.
What I see is that there are critics of her work, whether they've hated it from the beginning or went off the deep end from the beginning, who seem unable to get the fact that she's boiling down the issues, characters, and so forth to their essentials -- to their philosophical essentials. The book isn't supposed to be journalistic in nature. In her non-fiction, she discusses grey areas. (Though, to be fair, she's against them. But, she doesn't pretend that they don't exist.)
Finally, the criticism that you levy about "young, maladjusted geeks" is something should be said for all the people who carry on about how we would have a cake and ice cream paradise, but for those bogey-man corporations, etc. There is no shortage of "seductive" ideologies out there.
Oh, my proposal was still within the context of merchants collecting the tax. I just meant that they shouldn't be responsible for calculating the myriad varieties of sales tax. No private information would have to be transmitted.
Even every single one of the named characters in Atlas Shrugged doesn't fall into the nice divide of white-hat noble genius and black-hat greedy do-nothings, so the novel itself is more "complicated" than you make it out to be. Significantly, nothing in Rand's philosophy says anything about brilliance and hard work necessarily leading to success, nor poverty always being an indication of sloth or lack of ambition.
I'm sure there are kids who never get the book in the first place and so "grow up" out of their puerile understanding of it and fall into whatever kind of hodgepodge of philosophy that they absorb, but that's no argument against the philosophy within the book itself.
I'm against businesses bearing the cost of collecting and administering sales taxes in the first place, but that's an entirely different argument; however, I think I have a better idea than the one you propose.
Let each state develop and maintain a Web service based on open standards that calculates the sales tax. That way, each state is responsible for its byzantine sales tax program. An online retailer would need only consume the service.
Apple tends to take other peoples' ideas and make them look nice.
With all due respect, I'm not even sure how to characterize that statement -- "oversimplification" itself seems to be an oversimplification.
If anything, what the iPhone, iPod, and even Mac OS itself demonstrates is that it is a long way from some skunkworks lab at a buttoned-up company to designing and implementing a game-changing product. How is it that even after Apple comes out with its products that its competitors' ripoff copies often look so second-rate by comparison?
We should be trusting it to the parents, whether the individual parents are trustworthy or not; so I'm with you on having no law be the ideal. But in any case adults come first, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know if he's being sarcastic or not, but I would prefer his suggestion to some poorly written, non-objective law that can be twisted into a Kafkaesque nightmare by some overly ambitious prosecutor.
I, for one, have no wish to live under a giant, child-proof cap.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who finds dead-tree books hard to read in the sunlight? The reflection off of a white page hurts my eyes.
My point is that I really don't see how the "reading in sunlight" angle is all that important. I've never been able to do it.
I think it's pretty clear, from the following quote:
We can trust our government with any of these surveillance technologies because they're the good guys, and there is no chance of that ever changing. That's the message.
There is perhaps one great danger to growing up in an (arguably) free country; you lose the inclination to be jealous of your liberty and in guarding that liberty. It's like growing up in a plastic bubble. The first germ that comes your way, you have no defense for.
It doesn't matter that you may trust your government or love your country. You do not cede certain powers to it. Government is like a chainsaw. You can get a lot of good done with one, but you need to be careful of it at all times.
I think criticizing Shatner's acting in Star Trek has become the real cliche.
I don't want to contribute to a flame war, so I would ask that people take my comments as a matter of personal taste. But, when I look at Star Trek: The Next Generation, I often cannot get over how campy it seems -- Patrick Stewart included. I don't know where this show gets off as being the definitives statement concerning Star Trek.
I like Shatner's acting in Star Trek; and, taken in the context of 1960's television, I think any over-the-top quality is quite forgivable. (Incidentally, William Shatner in Boston Legal is absolutely inspired.)
Anyway, I just wanted to say that I agree with what you've written.
Where do you guys find your grandma's?
My mother, age 69, is a grandma. She worked as a secretary for many years, as did many women of her generation. She touch-types wicked fast. I'm sure there are plenty more where she came from.
You're arguing for moral relativism, which is no way of arguing. Moral relativism means that there is no right or wrong.
Taking the individual as the default state is an exercise in conceptual isolation, the same way positing something like inertia is. You don't ever see inertia, or any of the other laws of the physical world in isolation.
Logically, you take the individual as that primary because that is what lives or dies. As such, the actions one should take to ensure one's survival are not arbitrary. The reasoning that I subscribe to, as I wrote earlier, applies this objective standard to a social setting.
I'm not sure what you mean by evolutionary pressure. However, living by the law of the jungle is not living in a human society, a point to which I think you would agree. For the lone individual, the concept of rights is moot. Once individuals decide to associate, then through a process of abstract thought, as you say, people need to discern how life lived as a human being applies to a social context.
This is individualist reasoning, admittedly. But the point is that human beings exist as individuals in society with one another: in other words, the individual is the primary fact of existence. There is no society apart from the individuals in it. (I often write it "Society" when I'm referring to the opposite conception -- quotation marks and spooky italics.) "Society" is not the primary fact of existence; moreover, "Society" cannot re-write the facts of existence. Rights are not arbitrary.
Rights are an aspect of reality and apply to individuals.
If you lived as an isolated individual, you would have to build shelter, make tools, hunt and gather for food. No other person would be there to stop you. You would be free to preserve your life and well-being; you would be free to take the actions you saw fit to take; you would be free to keep the shelter, tools, and food that you produced. The only thing you would have to worry about would be animals, and the vagaries of nature.
When people choose to live together, they can recognize what it means to live as a human being, and apply that to a social setting. The rights to life, liberty, and property are the recognition of the life of a human individual in society with other human individuals.
People could live in close proximity, and wantonly steal or kill one another, but that's not society. That's living like animals.
Society cannot invent rights, only recognize them; government cannot grant rights, only protect them. Rights exist apart from society and government, and their existence is definite and specific.
If the social mores of a group of people reflect something other than life, liberty, and property -- so much the worse for them. What they're perpetuating has nothing to do with rights. Moreover, what they're perpetuating is something less than a human society.
These are two separate issues, and only the first is a problem.
As initially sold to the American people, Social Security was meant to be an insurance policy, mainly against indigence in old age for people who had outlived their savings. It was never sold as a scheme to transfer wealth from one segment of the population to another.
The original retirement age of 65 was set when the life expectancy of the average working man was something like 62. It wasn't expected that most people would collect Social Security. People were expected to finance their own retirement or work until they dropped. In the event that you lived so long that you either blew through your savings or were too old to work anymore and support yourself, Social Security would then kick in.
Under that original rationale, there is no reason to repeal the cap on taxes. To do so makes Social Security less of an insurance policy and more of a welfare policy.
The fact that the government has been looting Social Security, and that now most people expect to collect Social Security for a good number of years, is where the problems stem from.
I seem to remember reading something that contradicts what you're saying.
As I recall, some scientists are wondering if vaccinating children against chickenpox is having an adverse affect on the adult population who have had chickenpox. Since kids aren't carrying the active virus, adults are exposed to it less. It seems like routine exposure may actually help keep our immune systems primed. The result is, since more immune systems are "out of practice," so to speak, more adults are contracting shingles.
Disclaimer: I have no science background to start with, and I'm recounting this from memory. If I'm wrong, I apologize.
For me, that's the big shortcoming of Facebook. When I first got on and my Facebook "friends" was limited to a small circle, that was one thing. But now I'm getting that uncomfortable feeling that I'm mixing worlds, so to speak. I find myself censoring what I post, because even though one set of "friends" might like it, another might not. And of course, my family is another story entirely.
I'm an old guy, compared to the original users of Facebook. I imagine those that started using it when it was restricted to college students are even more unhappy about it.
That sounds more like a hold harmless clause to keep you from suing them if you aren't able to access your local radio station's Web contest because of Internet traffic or server failure on their part than it does a notification that they may at anytime decide to block a Web site.
I think Verizon has done something wrong here. If they want to offer something more along the lines AOL's old walled garden, they can't advertise it as the Internet, or at the very least, they need to spell out their restrictions.
When an ISP blocks your SMTP port to combat spam, somewhere in the agreement they spell this out. If they're going to reserve the right to block Web sites, they need to spell this out, too.
Once upon a time, a comment like this was called trolling.
I actually find this worrisome, from the standpoint of civil liberty. Non-violent protest actually relies on the brutality of governmental response to provoke sympathy and garner support for one's cause. While the so-called "non-lethal" weapons of today are still pretty brutal, I invite people to follow me on a little thought experiment that illustrates my concern.
Let's carry non-lethal crowd control methods to their ultimate conclusion. Imagine a device that lulls people to sleep, whereupon they're carried home, placed in their beds, enjoy a night's rest like the haven't managed in months, and awake to find a chocolate morsel on their nightstands and a terrifically refreshed sense of well-being. If crowds of peaceful protesters are broken up by repressive governments using this device, how much sympathy will that garner? How effective will civil disobedience be?
The scenario I describe is purposefully fanciful and exaggerated. Nevertheless, my point is that non-lethal methods carry the very real threat of keeping bad governments from looking all that bad. Government should hurt; and repressing civil disobedience should carry the risk of looking bad. Otherwise, you can be sure it will be used at the drop of a hat. And that may just pose a problem.
I know very little about this, but the term "gene splicing" calls to mind images of tiny scalpels. From my understanding that's not what's going on at all.
What I've heard is that Monsanto basically bombards produce with radiation in an effort to produce mutations. It then sifts through these mutations looking for something marketable. Again, to my understanding, to most people involved in recombinant gene technology (or whatever it's called) this technique is both primitive and absolutely horrifying. What happens is that all sorts of proteins and amino acids get damaged in the process.
I'm going to reach for a metaphor here, but I take it that, at the molecular level, eating this stuff is basically like swallowing shards of broken glass.
The two of you are crowding out the kids posting from their mom's basement. Please, get off the Internet.
Her novels are the way they are for two reasons. One, she writes within the tradition of Romantic literature. Issues in the book are cleanly drawn, with no grey areas. Is there sympathy for Cardinal Richelieu in the Three Musketeers? What about the main character in the Count of Monte Cristo? Isn't he a bit larger than life? Two, her works are meant to be philosophical: she has an agenda and makes no bones about it. It's not meant to be wishy washy.
What I see is that there are critics of her work, whether they've hated it from the beginning or went off the deep end from the beginning, who seem unable to get the fact that she's boiling down the issues, characters, and so forth to their essentials -- to their philosophical essentials. The book isn't supposed to be journalistic in nature. In her non-fiction, she discusses grey areas. (Though, to be fair, she's against them. But, she doesn't pretend that they don't exist.)
Finally, the criticism that you levy about "young, maladjusted geeks" is something should be said for all the people who carry on about how we would have a cake and ice cream paradise, but for those bogey-man corporations, etc. There is no shortage of "seductive" ideologies out there.
Oh, my proposal was still within the context of merchants collecting the tax. I just meant that they shouldn't be responsible for calculating the myriad varieties of sales tax. No private information would have to be transmitted.
Even every single one of the named characters in Atlas Shrugged doesn't fall into the nice divide of white-hat noble genius and black-hat greedy do-nothings, so the novel itself is more "complicated" than you make it out to be. Significantly, nothing in Rand's philosophy says anything about brilliance and hard work necessarily leading to success, nor poverty always being an indication of sloth or lack of ambition.
I'm sure there are kids who never get the book in the first place and so "grow up" out of their puerile understanding of it and fall into whatever kind of hodgepodge of philosophy that they absorb, but that's no argument against the philosophy within the book itself.
Everyone kills Hitler on his first time travel... and then there's Bill Gates.
I'm against businesses bearing the cost of collecting and administering sales taxes in the first place, but that's an entirely different argument; however, I think I have a better idea than the one you propose.
Let each state develop and maintain a Web service based on open standards that calculates the sales tax. That way, each state is responsible for its byzantine sales tax program. An online retailer would need only consume the service.
I took a look at it on the Web. Is that a make believe scroll wheel?
With all due respect, I'm not even sure how to characterize that statement -- "oversimplification" itself seems to be an oversimplification.
If anything, what the iPhone, iPod, and even Mac OS itself demonstrates is that it is a long way from some skunkworks lab at a buttoned-up company to designing and implementing a game-changing product. How is it that even after Apple comes out with its products that its competitors' ripoff copies often look so second-rate by comparison?
But, you go ahead and believe what you want.
According to the article, the blogger criticized the congressman for his "childish approach" towards governing.
Well, he sure showed her!
We should be trusting it to the parents, whether the individual parents are trustworthy or not; so I'm with you on having no law be the ideal. But in any case adults come first, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know if he's being sarcastic or not, but I would prefer his suggestion to some poorly written, non-objective law that can be twisted into a Kafkaesque nightmare by some overly ambitious prosecutor.
I, for one, have no wish to live under a giant, child-proof cap.