If the Supreme Court of the United States of America says it does not violate the Constition then how can it be illegal?
By "it", you must mean the specific role the court played in overturning the Florida Supreme Court ruling that all counties must perform recounts.
The Democrats could have pushed more lawsuits, and they probably would have if they could have known what Bush would invade Iraq to help keep himself elected and his friends rich.
He was elected mostly through the illegal efforts of his brother's appointed administration, who fought the idea of recounts all the way, who prevented enough poor blacks to vote to change the course of the election, and who allowed enough invalid overseas military votes to change the outcome of the election.
What happened in Florida was illegal, and it was all done with the knowledge that it had to happen in order to make Bush the winner.
It's warm and sunny here, so I'm going to channel some good vibes and be optimistic for a rare and brief moment.
Flash back to when the Penguin said to Darl: "If you attack me now, I will grow stronger than you could possibly imagine..."
We've learned a lot from the tactics of SCO. Perhaps most importantly, Linux has had huge visibility as a result of the lawsuit. Plus there's time to tinker or shore up defenses. Plus laws in different countries are different.
That's funny strange; I picked the flag example not because I happen to believe it (I don't) but because I thought it was a canonical example. I still maintain that people in general have *something* they consider sacred, whether it be institutions or something extremely personal.
The whole point I'm trying to make is that individual rights and societal rights are never without tension.
With technology moving so much faster than legislation, it's clear to me that the individual is winning, and libertarians should be rejoicing. People are doing things before society can decide the moral implications. One huge gorilla of an example is private military contractors. It's not illegal to use these in war under U.S. law, but there are some pretty nasty implications if some kind of boundary isn't drawn around it.
How about if you take command-completion and apropos a level further, and pop up a menu for each successive logical item?
#cd Menu: burn | eject | play | mount |directory
I like it; it doesn't have to get in the way of an expert user, but it's a simple enough approach that a beginner could catch on quickly and always have some kind of help available.
What about a key like "F1" giving you a split-screen view of the manpage for the current command? Perhaps if you're in the middle of selecting an option, it can move you to the relevant part of the man page? Or if you're within X, you get a separate help window that updates for each F1 keypress and optionally keeps a history?
So...has anyone taken a cell phone and performed the Star Trek communicator hardware mod? It would be too cool to flip it open and say, "Kirk here...."
and that you're a fool for pulling _that_ assumption out on _this_ site.
Are you using logical argument here or are you resorting to trollish ad hominem? A nonsensical idea calling someone a "fool" would under most definitions constitute flamebait, and I hope your post gets modded accordingly.
I don't follow you at all. Who decides what is sacred? Are you saying you don't care what the rest of the world thinks, or that you just already know?
If you really are a troll, then just do your karma a favor and don't bother replying.
I repeat: people outside of Slashdot--that is, the REAL WORLD in which people are more concerned with their car payments
Fine, your definition of the REAL WORLD includes grandparents, kids, mom and dad.
What you need to deal with is that most of these people are SHEEP. If Dell switches to Linux desktop on their machines, they're by God going to be Linux users and probably won't even know it.
The corporate folks who actually matter in this debate damn well know about Linux. And, to to quote you:
That's why God created conditional expressions, my friend.
I believe his point was that it sucks to program a whole bunch of them in, both initially and later when it comes to code maintenance. Programming would be a lot easier with fewer of them. Also, when a new edition of the rules comes out, it's nice not to have to modify a bunch of existing special cases.
It's very possible that a pseudorandom sequence of numbers just won't cut it for AD&D-based gaming systems.
I don't believe you know what you're talking about with this one. If you don't need a zillion random numbers every second, there are clever ways to reseed the random number generator periodically to increase arbitrariness of the random number stream. Considering the relatively few number of dice rolls in a game (less than 10e6), you're not ever going to see structure in the random numbers.
HP, Sun, and Novell have all announced that they're selling computers with Linux-based desktops. Has this ever happened before 2004?
IBM's main server distro is linux-based. This doesn't affect desktop users as much, but it does mean that there are legions of PAID linux developers out there.
So... Don't believe, don't believe, don't believe the FUD!
Cygwin does not allow developers to comfortably develop Linux apps on windows
The parent understates this point: You can't compile any linux app under Windows, unless you don't make any library calls or system calls. Perhaps CYGWIN provides basic text I/O libraries for gcc, I don't know. That's fine for toy problems, but not for industrial use.
So CoLinux on a machine means easier access to Linux for Windows developers: you don't have to set up a dual-boot configuration and then boot back and forth.
CyberKinetics, the company mentioned in the article, has implanted chips into monkeys that enable them to play video games using brain waves alone.
Not only is this a miracle for paralyzed people, but I predict that brain waves will be able to control bionic arms and legs. It's only a matter of biofeedback learning and a chip capable of measuring ten or so distinct brainwave patterns.
Don't forget that they're going to learn a lot about how to defeat various abusive strategies with their own record-keeping and creative ideas. They're going to have the world's best testbed for all kinds of new internet-related issues.
My guess is that they'll experiment with techniques to make sure it's a person, rather than a script. And they'll keep stats on how effective each technique was.
There will be so many interesting research opportunities for them. There are perks to being the world's largest provider of something (MS, Oracle, Google, etc).
I say: how about mentioning what, if anything, is sacred to you? If you're arguing that nothing's sacred, then I argue that you will, at some later point in your life, wonder what your life was really for.
Bla bla bla...spare me intellectual BS. Seriously though. You very nature of being human at this point in time is contributing to the pollution problem. And it's not just you, it's everyone (99.9999%) that takes part in 1st world activity.
Great reason to throw all principles away, huh? Believe it or not, I ride around on a bicycle to/from work because I believe it makes a difference. And sure, I dry my clothes in the dryer instead of on the line right now. But just because we can't be perfect (and none of us will ever be) doesn't mean you should give up completely.
Nothing would get done with an attitude like "We're not perfect, so why even try to be better?"
You're at the "ground zero" of cynical thought with that one.
What is polluting what, here? A very small bit of metal is "polluting" a huge, cold rock whirling around a nuclear fireball, which will some day swell and swallow up that rock. I'm sorry, but this is not immoral.
Is flag burning immoral? It doesn't create much pollution, either.
I see this issue as fundamentally similar to the idea of dropping garbage on the moon.
It's everyone's moon, dammit. I ask you seriously and not rhetorically: Which is worse, denying one individual the right to spoil something, or denying a billion people the right to think of the moon as unspoiled?
Wonderful post; I really enjoyed it. It gives the impression that you've been on this earth for a long, long time, or at least that you've been blessed like few others are with ample time for contemplation.
I've come across several of the ideas you've mentioned before, the most central to my post being the idea that philosophy is the realm of non-provable theories. This is an idea I can hardly disagree with.
It kinda ceases to fascinate after awhile. You've heard it all before.
This is true on the timescale of single lifetimes, but perhaps not true on the timescale of multiple human generations. I'm interested in the idea that the boundary between philosophy and other subjects (such as mathematics) is not a stationary one. It is a bit like the boundary between A.I. and the rest of computer science: at one time, a spell-checking text editor was considered A.I., as was a parser for a compiler. People viewed these programs as "intelligent". These programs are no longer considered anything but straightforward engineering topics today.
Here's my half-baked, just-hatched-today claim: theories do occasionally move from philosophy to science or other modes of logical thought, such as mathematics. It happens rarely but makes the seemingly endless hashing over of ideas never lose its excitement and potential for hard discovery. A theory can be said to move out of the realm of pure philosophy once someone finds a way to test it within the concrete universe. I think of physics, mathematics, and psychology as examples.
Psychology, in fact, is currently "in between" and could fall completely outside the realm of philosophy if we ever develop machines capable of capturing the full complexity of a brain state.
Given our limited understanding of the universe, it's no surprise that this happens once every millenium or so.
Once interesting issues are framed, they sometimes get answered and a new concrete subject area is born.
Mathematics and geometry are two examples. We would hardly call those fields "religious argument" today, although it may have seemed that way at first.
Today's philosophers of mind are asking the questions that direct AI researchers toward identifying and solving the interesting research problems.
Those of use who have studied and performed research in AI know that "android epistomology" (the study of the space of possible thoughts in an android mind) is a very vibrant and important topic that is widely debated. The term "android epistemology" was first coined by Clark Glymour in a sourcebook on this topic.
Rudolf Carnap was the first to combine propositional logic with natural language to come up with a general philosophy of high-level thought. His ideas were rigorous enough to be considered computer programs, and yet he came up with them in 1928!
Recently, we heard about the Robotic Race, a 150-mile race of autonomous vehicles, where the winner only made it 7 miles. Want to know why the winner didn't get farther? It got a tire stuck in sand, and wasn't "smart" enough to realize that flooring the accelerator wasn't doing any good, so it burned the tire off, right down to the rim. Had it included in its space of possible mental states the idea it could disengage an axle, it could have gotten out of its hole and kept going. It didn't have the "mental capacity" to step back, reflect, and consider an alternative idea.
The question of how we, as humans, are able to adjust our "space of mental thoughts" to external conditions is hardly even addressed in the modern AI literature, and yet it's precisely this kind of question that philosophers identify as an important problem and ask first!
So, we owe philosophy a debt for often framing the correct questions for other to later answer.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Supreme Court of the United States of America says it does not violate the Constition then how can it be illegal?
By "it", you must mean the specific role the court played in overturning the Florida Supreme Court ruling that all counties must perform recounts.
The Democrats could have pushed more lawsuits, and they probably would have if they could have known what Bush would invade Iraq to help keep himself elected and his friends rich.
He was elected mostly through the illegal efforts of his brother's appointed administration, who fought the idea of recounts all the way, who prevented enough poor blacks to vote to change the course of the election, and who allowed enough invalid overseas military votes to change the outcome of the election.
What happened in Florida was illegal, and it was all done with the knowledge that it had to happen in order to make Bush the winner.
It's warm and sunny here, so I'm going to channel some good vibes and be optimistic for a rare and brief moment.
Flash back to when the Penguin said to Darl: "If you attack me now, I will grow stronger than you could possibly imagine..."
We've learned a lot from the tactics of SCO. Perhaps most importantly, Linux has had huge visibility as a result of the lawsuit. Plus there's time to tinker or shore up defenses. Plus laws in different countries are different.
Yes. I think in movie scenes. So what if I do?
The soundtrack for the SCO saga just cross-faded to a distant drumbeat, getting...slowly...louder.
It doesn't matter. I woke up this morning after having a lucid dream about the future. Linux WILL RULE over all. IT CANNOT BE STOPPED.
Today, I'm burning KnoppixMAME for a number of friends and family. It's over. LINUX...SCORES....FATALITY...
Or maybe I've just had too much coffee this morning. That could definitely be true.
That's funny strange; I picked the flag example not because I happen to believe it (I don't) but because I thought it was a canonical example. I still maintain that people in general have *something* they consider sacred, whether it be institutions or something extremely personal.
The whole point I'm trying to make is that individual rights and societal rights are never without tension.
With technology moving so much faster than legislation, it's clear to me that the individual is winning, and libertarians should be rejoicing. People are doing things before society can decide the moral implications. One huge gorilla of an example is private military contractors. It's not illegal to use these in war under U.S. law, but there are some pretty nasty implications if some kind of boundary isn't drawn around it.
How about if you take command-completion and apropos a level further, and pop up a menu for each successive logical item?
#cd Menu: burn | eject | play | mount |directory
I like it; it doesn't have to get in the way of an expert user, but it's a simple enough approach that a beginner could catch on quickly and always have some kind of help available.
What about a key like "F1" giving you a split-screen view of the manpage for the current command? Perhaps if you're in the middle of selecting an option, it can move you to the relevant part of the man page? Or if you're within X, you get a separate help window that updates for each F1 keypress and optionally keeps a history?
Brainstorming is fun.
So...has anyone taken a cell phone and performed the Star Trek communicator hardware mod? It would be too cool to flip it open and say, "Kirk here...."
and that you're a fool for pulling _that_ assumption out on _this_ site.
Are you using logical argument here or are you resorting to trollish ad hominem? A nonsensical idea calling someone a "fool" would under most definitions constitute flamebait, and I hope your post gets modded accordingly.
I don't follow you at all. Who decides what is sacred? Are you saying you don't care what the rest of the world thinks, or that you just already know?
If you really are a troll, then just do your karma a favor and don't bother replying.
I repeat: people outside of Slashdot--that is, the REAL WORLD in which people are more concerned with their car payments
Fine, your definition of the REAL WORLD includes grandparents, kids, mom and dad.
What you need to deal with is that most of these people are SHEEP. If Dell switches to Linux desktop on their machines, they're by God going to be Linux users and probably won't even know it.
The corporate folks who actually matter in this debate damn well know about Linux. And, to to quote you:
Deal with it.
That's why God created conditional expressions, my friend.
I believe his point was that it sucks to program a whole bunch of them in, both initially and later when it comes to code maintenance. Programming would be a lot easier with fewer of them. Also, when a new edition of the rules comes out, it's nice not to have to modify a bunch of existing special cases.
It's very possible that a pseudorandom sequence of numbers just won't cut it for AD&D-based gaming systems.
I don't believe you know what you're talking about with this one. If you don't need a zillion random numbers every second, there are clever ways to reseed the random number generator periodically to increase arbitrariness of the random number stream. Considering the relatively few number of dice rolls in a game (less than 10e6), you're not ever going to see structure in the random numbers.
HP, Sun, and Novell have all announced that they're selling computers with Linux-based desktops. Has this ever happened before 2004?
IBM's main server distro is linux-based. This doesn't affect desktop users as much, but it does mean that there are legions of PAID linux developers out there.
So... Don't believe, don't believe, don't believe the FUD!
Cygwin does not allow developers to comfortably develop Linux apps on windows
The parent understates this point: You can't compile any linux app under Windows, unless you don't make any library calls or system calls. Perhaps CYGWIN provides basic text I/O libraries for gcc, I don't know. That's fine for toy problems, but not for industrial use.
So CoLinux on a machine means easier access to Linux for Windows developers: you don't have to set up a dual-boot configuration and then boot back and forth.
Easier Linux access === Faster Linux transition.
I thought about that, but with hardware costs failling through the floor, it's only a matter of time before we can all be bionic for $600,000 or so.
Follow the CyberKinetics link above: they've already implanted chips in monkeys and taught them to play video games with brainwaves alone.
"Turning Thought Into Action"
That's the CyberKinetics catch-phrase.
CyberKinetics, the company mentioned in the article, has implanted chips into monkeys that enable them to play video games using brain waves alone.
Not only is this a miracle for paralyzed people, but I predict that brain waves will be able to control bionic arms and legs. It's only a matter of biofeedback learning and a chip capable of measuring ten or so distinct brainwave patterns.
Don't forget that they're going to learn a lot about how to defeat various abusive strategies with their own record-keeping and creative ideas. They're going to have the world's best testbed for all kinds of new internet-related issues.
My guess is that they'll experiment with techniques to make sure it's a person, rather than a script. And they'll keep stats on how effective each technique was.
There will be so many interesting research opportunities for them. There are perks to being the world's largest provider of something (MS, Oracle, Google, etc).
> Is flag burning immoral?
no. what do you have to say to that?
I say: how about mentioning what, if anything, is sacred to you? If you're arguing that nothing's sacred, then I argue that you will, at some later point in your life, wonder what your life was really for.
Bla bla bla...spare me intellectual BS. Seriously though. You very nature of being human at this point in time is contributing to the pollution problem. And it's not just you, it's everyone (99.9999%) that takes part in 1st world activity.
Great reason to throw all principles away, huh? Believe it or not, I ride around on a bicycle to/from work because I believe it makes a difference. And sure, I dry my clothes in the dryer instead of on the line right now. But just because we can't be perfect (and none of us will ever be) doesn't mean you should give up completely.
Nothing would get done with an attitude like "We're not perfect, so why even try to be better?"
You're at the "ground zero" of cynical thought with that one.
What is polluting what, here? A very small bit of metal is "polluting" a huge, cold rock whirling around a nuclear fireball, which will some day swell and swallow up that rock. I'm sorry, but this is not immoral.
Is flag burning immoral? It doesn't create much pollution, either.
I see this issue as fundamentally similar to the idea of dropping garbage on the moon.
It's everyone's moon, dammit. I ask you seriously and not rhetorically:
Which is worse, denying one individual the right to spoil something, or denying a billion people the right to think of the moon as unspoiled?
Wonderful post; I really enjoyed it. It gives the impression that you've been on this earth for a long, long time, or at least that you've been blessed like few others are with ample time for contemplation.
I've come across several of the ideas you've mentioned before, the most central to my post being the idea that philosophy is the realm of non-provable theories. This is an idea I can hardly disagree with.
It kinda ceases to fascinate after awhile. You've heard it all before.
This is true on the timescale of single lifetimes, but perhaps not true on the timescale of multiple human generations. I'm interested in the idea that the boundary between philosophy and other subjects (such as mathematics) is not a stationary one. It is a bit like the boundary between A.I. and the rest of computer science: at one time, a spell-checking text editor was considered A.I., as was a parser for a compiler. People viewed these programs as "intelligent". These programs are no longer considered anything but straightforward engineering topics today.
Here's my half-baked, just-hatched-today claim: theories do occasionally move from philosophy to science or other modes of logical thought, such as mathematics. It happens rarely but makes the seemingly endless hashing over of ideas never lose its excitement and potential for hard discovery. A theory can be said to move out of the realm of pure philosophy once someone finds a way to test it within the concrete universe. I think of physics, mathematics, and psychology as examples.
Psychology, in fact, is currently "in between" and could fall completely outside the realm of philosophy if we ever develop machines capable of capturing the full complexity of a brain state.
Given our limited understanding of the universe, it's no surprise that this happens once every millenium or so.
I'd very much enjoy your reactions to this idea.
A philosopher would have had something constructive and interesting to say. You sound more like a troll to me.
Holden: You look down and you see a slasdot troll, Leon. It's crawling toward you.
Leon: Troll? What's that?
Holden: You know what a loser is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Deckard (Harrison Ford) giving a test. You're deleting spam from your inbox. You come across a full page nude photo of a girl.
Rachael (Sean Young) Is this testing whether I'm a spammer or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?
It often starts out that way.
Once interesting issues are framed, they sometimes get answered and a new concrete subject area is born.
Mathematics and geometry are two examples. We would hardly call those fields "religious argument" today, although it may have seemed that way at first.
Today's philosophers of mind are asking the questions that direct AI researchers toward identifying and solving the interesting research problems.
Those of use who have studied and performed research in AI know that "android epistomology" (the study of the space of possible thoughts in an android mind) is a very vibrant and important topic that is widely debated. The term "android epistemology" was first coined by Clark Glymour in a sourcebook on this topic.
Rudolf Carnap was the first to combine propositional logic with natural language to come up with a general philosophy of high-level thought. His ideas were rigorous enough to be considered computer programs, and yet he came up with them in 1928!
Recently, we heard about the Robotic Race, a 150-mile race of autonomous vehicles, where the winner only made it 7 miles. Want to know why the winner didn't get farther? It got a tire stuck in sand, and wasn't "smart" enough to realize that flooring the accelerator wasn't doing any good, so it burned the tire off, right down to the rim. Had it included in its space of possible mental states the idea it could disengage an axle, it could have gotten out of its hole and kept going. It didn't have the "mental capacity" to step back, reflect, and consider an alternative idea.
The question of how we, as humans, are able to adjust our "space of mental thoughts" to external conditions is hardly even addressed in the modern AI literature, and yet it's precisely this kind of question that philosophers identify as an important problem and ask first!
So, we owe philosophy a debt for often framing the correct questions for other to later answer.