First of all, it's not an issue of which societal categorization is perfect, or even which is better. It is an issue of recognizing that this is a multivariate issue; yes, religion is a major, and in some cases, dominant force in Muslim-majority countries - but that is not like saying it's the cause of all their problems, or why we as a nation are having difficulty having peaceful relationships with them.
If you go back not two hundred years, and posed the challenge "name a primarily Christian-run government that doesn't use religion to control and oppress it's people?" and you'd get the same response; well, there are some countries that are moving in that direction, but by and large the church has a great deal of influence in secular life. That doesn't make the people of those countries, or those religions, something you should dismiss out of hand as violent and unworthy of dealing with on equal footing.
But you seem to yet cling to this idea that we are, in fact, 'better' somehow. "We have a court system in place, judged by our peers, so that mob mentality doesn't win over rational thought." If you've ever studied law, in the least, you understand that it is not really based on rational thought. One of the first things they teach you in first year law school is, "The metric of the 'rational person' is a fallacy, but one we use." Juries are not rational - hence the great focus on throwing out better educated people, or people likely to be biased against you. Don't mistake this as a filter for rationality; it's simply a filtering for the bias you want.
You were the one who claimed Western morality was better, not me - but it's not. By and large the morals we practice are not particularly good, even against our metrics. 50%+ divorce/adultery rate, for instance. Rampant crime in many parts of the country. Western people shooting up other westerners in school massacres. Bottom-line economics that leave miners trapped or dead, or people without their pensions. Percentages of minorities on Death Row that far exceed their representation in the prison population. Immorality can take root anywhere, and typically does so with those who have a lot of power. I'm not valuing an entire society on a few issues - voting or otherwise - but how we end up treating other people; our equals, our lower classes, our ethics enshrined in law, other nations and cultures we are orthogonal to. And in each case we have great improvements to make.
But what gets me the most is that you've really swallowed the line that Islam is evil; where in the Qu'ran - point out the passage - does it say 'kill the infidels'? Point of Fact; Islam is, in actuality, a peaceful religion - doctrinally manipulated, as Christianity has been in the past and present (see assassinated abortion doctors), for the sake of a few individuals interested in one conflict or another. Then note that our own such 'leaders' readily manipulate and leverage us into the same conflicts, and that we by and large swallow their propaganda for why it's a good idea to do so.
I really, really think it's a good idea to step back and look at your own country as if it were no better, rather than starting from where you want to end up. The fact is we have some material advantage, and we use it to our ends. Look at how NGOs operate; funding 'third world' development projects using only US companies - projects that never finish. Take Exxon, lending it's heavy machinery to bury genocide victims of south-east asian countries in order to get the few in government to allow them to continue to take oil. Our stance on China and their civil rights abuses; hey, they're lending us money for our pet war, why should we object to their crazy unethical behavior? We of course need not go back to our own manifest destiny years and the exploitation of the west - hardly a different situation than killing Kurds or [insert ethnic minority here]. Phizer's clinical trials in Africa - nevermind the diamond trade, of which 3-5% of the annual product are blood
Lets Talk About Oppression
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
You don't think the class warfare going on in the US isn't oppressive? Where rich kids are allowed - aided, even - in going to wealthy schools, while poor kids are relegated to dumps and an educational future that is next to useless? You think that the corporate execs of Enron were looking to help the common man, their employees, have a permissive future by embezzling their money and leaving them without recourse? Perhaps you think things like the Patriot Act give us more options?
There are many types of freedom; I am free, right now, to walk anywhere. But I have to pay for a car - I'm limited financially. I am limited by my education, by my age, by my skin color, by any number of things, and these little limitations can add up to oppression. Would I be less free elsewhere? Sure, but lets not lie to ourselves and pretend that we, in America, are as free as we could possibly be.
But, you know, some of my ancestors were probably slave owners. Some of them probably slaughtered some demographic at some point. Some of them were probably Vikings or Romans or somesuch. I definitely don't fight for the glory of Pax Romana - and would fight against it, if it were even feasible. It's not unnatural for people to change what they want. It's also not unnatural to say, 'My ancestors died for this cause, but I choose to live for the fruits of that cause'. One of the fruits of freedom is that you don't have to kill to enforce your viewpoint, you have to educate. And perhaps, for the French, they deem that the highest virtue is accommodation, rather than oppression of a choice that people are making.
There is nothing wrong with promoting Islam. There is everything wrong with promoting oppressive regimes. But what person in this world can say they aren't doing that? The U.S. - and all it's taxpayers - gave Saddam the money and the arms to fight Iran, and oppress his people. We are doing the same with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis - even while our own government takes our rights away. Long story short; Let he who is without fault throw the first stone.
Philosophy Versus Religion
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
No, but no one has blown anything up in the name of Sartre or Plato, either. Plenty of things have been blown up for 'God', though, in many forms - because God is a thought, an abstraction, an entity without material form. And thus the ultimate in things that can be corrupted to serve any purpose. Buddha was real, and preached a practical philosophy.
You're making an entirely fallacious connection by saying that the religion is the primary source of their societies. That is a lot like saying the entirety of the United States culture was a result Protestantism. We have more freedoms due to our form of government - which explicitly separated out the Church. We have more wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with religion - and little to do with our outstanding moral character. We have gone all over the world taking what we want to make ourselves richer; it is a great surprise anyone still likes us, given the travesties of poverty we've inflicted. Islamic morality is actually quite appealing, if you look at it - but it has little to do with the 'fundamentalist' values we see spoken about on TV. It is certainly more appealing than a society who can't get their voting straight, who let convicted criminals of national-scope crimes get away without a sentence, who pollute their environment and the environments of others with nary a care. I don't think you can point to Western morality as our saving grace.
Bangladesh has 100M people, of which 85M are Muslim. It is a secular parliamentary democracy. That sounds like a 'reasonable degree of freedom' to me. In short; your view of the Muslim world is a bit biased.
Don't Drink The Purple Punch!
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
First of all, lets go over some terrorism we've been exposed to in the last thirty years that aren't Muslim; The IRA, Timothy McVeigh, Christians who shoot abortion doctors, Japanese who gas subways - and lets not get into what sort of fear-mongering, heavy-handed threats and bombing that the current Administration has engaged in which could easily classify as 'terrorism'.
I mean, clearly you're flame-baiting - else why are you anonymous? But it's a bald-faced lie that Islam is any more terrorist than any other demographic. Propagating that lie is as immoral as any act as I can think of. I mean, really, think for yourself - stop listening to the propaganda that is being fed to you.
And before you respond; Islam is not at all about violence, or about hate. In fact, if you knew anything at all about it's origins, you'd probably recognize the perversion that it's being put through to serve the ends of people who don't have religious enlightenment in mind at all, but their own lamentable ends.
The Necessity Of Oversight
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
You said, "find it kinda disconcerting that I could one day be confronted by police with an exhaustive list of my movements for the last 10 years."
But that's just the thing; you're disconcerted, and nothing more. It is uncomfortable, feeling like you're constantly watched, under scrutiny and that everything you do can be held against you. But that only underscores what the real problem is; that even though we are putting in place systems to watch (and, perhaps in an ideal world 'secure') the public and public spaces, we are not putting into place anything to oversee those systems. No one is watching the watchers.
In fact, we're fed the line, "You can't know what we're doing because it compromises (national) security." The real uncomfortable truth, though, is that in a democratic society which is becoming ever-more populated, we are not only going to have to accept that the technology which can be used to track individuals will be used to do so, but that if we want that to not be a problem, we must rise to the challenge of putting into place a check and a balance for that new power being utilized by our government.
I think, though, it's a mistake to try and escape to a non-'Western Axis' country. I think it was Mohamed who said (and I'm paraphrasing, because I don't speak Arabic), "One should act, and if one cannot act, one should speak, and if one cannot speak, only then should one simply think. But thinking is the weakest form doing right." He was talking about the necessity to speak and, more importantly, do the things that are required to bring around a just society. Simply thinking, 'This is wrong' or 'I am made uncomfortable by this' is not enough; one has to speak to that and to act upon that. I think that removing yourself from the arena is therefore the worst thing that can happen; Americans are underexposed to Islamic culture as it is. Separation isn't the answer, integration is. When we are living side by side with Muslims it is going to be a lot harder to vote for someone who is eager to "threaten to bomb Mecca and Medina" in the 'war on terror'.
The solution is really to balance the power equation. You can run - for now, anyway - or you can demand your right as a human and moreover as a citizen; your right to know who is accessing that information, and how they're using it, and what other information they're accessing - or not accessing.
Oh, perhaps. But, then, no one has ever even tried it, so that argument doesn't particularly convince me. Where is the evidence you can never escape (the appearance of) gerrymandering? Simply because it is an intractable problem does not make it an unsolvable one.
That's not actually the problem with gerrymandering.
It has always been assumed that people with similar concerns group together for mutual self-interest. There is, in fact, nothing wrong with that in a democratic system; your representative should be as close in opinion to as many of his constituents as possible. The difficulty is that when an elected official then gets to decide the boundaries of districts, he gets to choose who is within a district and who is without; and currently there is no constraint on 'shape' of a district.
So then the problem arises that the elected official changes a district shape to include opponents of his platform, but in numbers that are insufficient to challenge the supporters of his platform. In this fashion you can take whole districts of people who were previously voting for representatives of the opposite party and siphon them off to surrounding districts, perhaps down to the block level. You take their votes and nullify them against your superior numbers in other districts. If, as is often the case, you have to lose a district, you make sure that as few of your people as possible are within that district, meaning that proportionally speaking the majority of their people are getting a minimum number of representatives.
It can be worse than this, of course. There was one case in Philidelphia, I think, where the majority party extended the district line in a long 'arm' one block wide for half a mile or a mile, to include at the tip the house of an opponent representative. Because the representative was suddenly no longer a resident of his district, he had to run in an entirely different district where he had no power base.
I think that mathematically speaking you could undercut a lot of these tactics by forcing districts to have a certain 'circular' shape, within reason. Yes, you would still have districts wherein people of like mind clumped together, but they would not be disproportionally represented; they would be proportionally represented.
I am adverse to any solution that suggests the hiring of more lobbyists. Our political system is already grossly weighted towards those with more money, we do not want to exacerbate the issue.
Personally, I feel that districting should have strict mathematically-based boundaries. We can use math to describe the convolution of a line, so why not say that it has to be within a certain amount? Politicians are using math to maximize their leverage, why not use math to protect the voter? Other than you have to get it by the politicians, first, and they're notoriously adverse to such things that might mark them as someone with a brain.
Sure, protons decay. But I bet that total mass replacement would occur long before you had to worry about parts of your atomic physical structure spontaneously degrading.
There are a number of true future predictions you can make. For instance "The future will be dissimilar to some significant number of predictions we make." It's simply a matter of having a prediction whose verbiage is inclusive enough.
But that aside, they are doing amazing things with longevity these days; I think that betting your money on not dying is about as wise as deciding that the Atlantic Ocean would never be crossed would have been in the days of Columbus. Physically speaking there is little known reason for people to die. Why can't they replace their body forever? It looks more and more like we are biologically built to die - because evolution 'designed' us, and evolution is notoriously defective. Until we can scientifically show there is good cause to believe people have to eventually die, from a biophysical aspect, I think that the prediction of "we'll all die" holds as much water as "we'll never fly".
A lot of people say, "Oh, if this goes through, allowing the (essential) monopoly, then people will be motivated to go for competitive alternatives - such as independent labels." The difficulty there is the exact same thing that is plaguing the operating system industry - Microsoft and the RIAA both have no incentive to change because they're currently holding (nearly) all the cards. Let me explain:
Artists with successful songs right now, or software with successful followings, are tied to the RIAA/Microsoft; they no longer get money from that legacy work if they go for greener pastures. Yes, they can do *new* work, and get credit/money for that, but they sacrifice their previous work - and the sum of all previous work is greater than all new work will be in the short to medium term; possibly even the long term.
Only in the 'explosive' phases of a new industry is it easy to be 'independent', because the threshold for adopting a new pattern is still low; a smaller percentage of the total body of work in play is affected. Right now, most artists would rather get something from the RIAA than nothing - or at least much less - from being independent. They are looking at many years of getting much less than what they'd get from the RIAA before the monopoly is broken.
And that is rather the issue; the idea of these mega-companies with near-monopolies - only not so through fine tuning of the application of the law to their particular situation. You can't claim that capitalism is going to work in the large unless there is something of a level playing field; we have in many respects institutionalized monopolies in our system of laws. Until there is a greater natural resistance built in to that sort of company, they'll continue to propagate their monopolies - and because they already control much of the industry, they will continue to fight every step of the way against this sort of thing; and largely succeed. Individuals may rebel against it, but it's hard to see how they're benefiting, personally, in the end by doing so. People call it 'selling out', but the fact is that the individual cost-benefit is heavily weighted, and it's irrational to expect individuals to act different based on hard-to-specify morality.
As others have pointed out, the n you should be looking at in this situation is not the number of monkeys, but the number of times they run the learning experiment; remember, what you're looking for in Science is repeatable results. So, the task of this experiment is to see if a given monkey will show repeatable results with the experiment they've defined. We have already done many experiments (or, more precisely, taken many observations) that lead us to suspect that more most intents and purposes one Rhesus Macaque is similar to the next. We need not test all Rhesus Macaques, only follow up on discrepancies in the data set if it arises. Sometimes more monkeys is useful for that, generally not though.
Business behavior is human behavior. Businesses acting badly, lying to their customers and attempting to keep unholy control on something that isn't really theirs is a far greater crime than claiming something that for your true intent and purpose is not in your possession. If you claim your cell is in your car, and you have no intent or use in pulling it out - well, then that serves everyone's purposes; and is only a lie in terms of the details, not the spirit.
Joe realized that Alex' DRM tools were cracked. Alex knows that too, and he knows well that the spin of "we make it uncrackable" doesn't hold water. But he also knows how Joe thinks. His selling strategy thus is:
1. Cracking DRM is another burden, which keeps a few more people from copying.
2. Cracking DRM has been made illegal, which keeps another few more from copying.
3. Our DRM solution costs less than the losses due to illegal copying.
Joe understands that. And thus Joe buys.
I think, though, that your calculus requires 'Joe' to have an inherent belief that "a few people" and "another few people" are large enough to be considered a business 'threat'; and that the cost due to illegal copying is, in fact, greater than the DRM solution. Herein, though, personal bias can run roughshod over good business sense; if you're a shark, trained to get as much value out of something for as little cost as possible, naturally you're going to see 'free copying' as a god-send. Of course everyone would do it! Nevermind that in a world where copying is a possibility, your business model must change from 'producing' music to 'delivering' music. It's that shift - and the loss of the heretofor gains - that they don't want to suffer.
Thus, they allow their personal biases to put in numbers to the calculus that make their instinctive choice seem 'right'.
Sex is pretty complicated. Not really the act itself - though there is a fair amount of understanding what goes where when to have the act be as satisfying as it can be. I mean more the relationship surrounding sex. Sex is, after all, one of the most intimate acts you can undertake - it can cut to the core of your personality if you let it, or you can guard that core at the expense of the experience.
My point is this; I know plenty of people who wanted certain things out of their sex life but who never achieved it, because they were either afraid of rejection and so did not admit to it, or they were already committed and did not wish to rock the boat. Sleeping with people for whom you feel comfortable having an intimate relationship is not an act that you should necessarily 'reserve' for only the very most worthy situation. Sometimes it's better to learn how to be close to people, and to learn how that extreme closeness affects you, affects them, affects your relationship with them, and with others. These learning experiences are generally categorized as reckless, but I think that usually - 95% of the time - they're far from it. They're natural, and humans learn from it.
Why is it, then, that there is such a prevalence of the mindset that if you never do something, the first person you do it with will be the perfect person? That it somehow increases your chances of finding a working relationship? If anything, the people I know whom have had a great deal of sex are more in tune with how it affects their relationship. I'm not advocating being enslaved to your loins - but there are multiple ways for that enslavement to incur. Letting them run rampant is one; never learning mastery over them is another.
"I believe that God gave me a brain to think with and make intelligent decisions, not allow my loins to drive me. One of those decisions was staying true to who I am when finding a woman to spend my life with."
Leaving aside that there is likely little rational foundation for a belief in God, did you stop to think that perhaps there is more than one way to slice the pie? Why do you assume that finding a woman to spend your life with is a given? For that matter, even if you accept that it is a given for you, why is it a given for everyone?
I object to the notion that any homogeneous set of sexual or mating standards is applied in the same sentence as the claim to being a 'thinking person'. You have claimed that wanting to just have sex with someone is mutually exclusive with using your brain to think - but how can that possibly be the case? There are, in fact, any number of geniuses who were also philanderers - Ben Franklin jumps to mind.
In short, I think that the 'Commitment, Commitment, Commitment' based mindset is, in fact, one propagated for social stability, and that truly independent thinkers are able to see it for what it is; useful in developing many kinds of relationships but not mandatory for all interactions between all people all the time. Such a generalization bespeaks groupthink and weak rationalization. I think the thing you said that most rings true is that you have to be true to yourself; only internal reflection will give you the sort of tools you need to forge outward connections. External frameworks for how you live your life will always sit uncomfortably. I point to the >50% divorce rate.
What... banks take the handling of money seriously? Tricks a fourth grader would come up with would not actually circumvent their notice? Surely, you must be joking!
I admit that I did not read all of your, ah... extensive... writing. But I think that you need to step back and study international politics a bit more. Not everything revolves around M.A.D, and Israel could have any number of reasons to have nuclear weapons. The thing you might do better to come to understand is that the difficulty in the Middle East is far from simplistic; certainly no singular decision at any point in history would have changed that situation to one of easy peace. As I'm sure the recent conflict in Lebanon made all too clear, Israel's primary enemies are not really the sort they can nuke out of existence. Forward-deployed nukes are not going to do them a great deal of strategic good, as deterrents or for more nefarious reasons.
In short, though, you're jumping to about a dozen conclusions without supporting evidence, only thinly reasoned hypotheticals. It is small wonder few are taking you seriously.
The difficulty is that different corporations wield a lot of power in different ways. No one is complaining that 3M is censoring people, but Google and other media and/or advertising companies are going to come up against that accusation a great deal. We need to be able, for reasons of oversight and policy, to better define corporations and what they are and are not allowed to do. If we see it as necessary to prevent broadcast companies from portraying images of naked people, or not have audible swear words between certain hours, then we can probably bring ourselves to find it necessary to extend constitutional protections against censorship to people who use private services that are capable of rendering leverage in that arena similar to a government's.
That said, if the site being 'censored' by google is hosting or verging on hosting hate speech, one might ask if their terms of use weren't violated? You can't ask a private company - or a public one, or the government - to do something illegal to protect a tenuous protection. Hate speech, or speech meant to incite to illegal action, has generally been found to be less protected than 'regular speech'. I might suggest that if one has an important message to spread, one makes every effort not to use invective or monikors that suggest a generalized set of people are acting in a particular way. Transmit data, not bias.
The consultant can engineer it on his own. He sends the tapes home with the intern; the intern acts in good faith, but the consultant takes the tapes in the night. He then sells them to the second party, and is never fingered because the expectation is that it is a random criminal element; the only thing they can cite him for is incompetence, but perhaps at $1/number, he won't care. The interesting thing about this theory is that it does, in fact, sound like the sort of criminal plan that someone would concoct who knew the workings of the system. Most thefts are, in actuality, done by employees of one sort or another - they know what's going on, and so aren't taking a random risk. For that matter, it might not be the consultant, but anyone in the office who knew the deal.
How is that market segmentation any different from segmenting by packet usage, rather than packet type? If you want to segment out the high-traffic users you don't need DPI - and the associated capital costs and overhead - to do it.
There are a number of anti-consumer applications that I could see; charging this or that company for packets to or from them is the example that leaps (obviously) to mind. Recording your traffic usage, so as to better nail you with marketing would be another example. In theory, I suppose it would make it easier to focus in on where spam is coming from.
But, in short, I don't know that this constitutes a substantive new risk.
I agree; let them install the monitoring and filtering. How long do you think it will be, given the proliferation of wireless technology, before routing internet data through land lines is a thing of the past? Thirty years ago, the scale and type of data transmission seen on the internet would have been unthinkable. In thirty years, my bet is on technologies that truly bring about the sort of 'datasphere' that Simmons mentions in Hyperion. You can't filter that, or monitor it in a centralized fashion; at best you can test or sample it, like you might test or sample for pollution in the ocean.
If this sort of thing had happened ten years ago, I think we would have had real cause to worry. As it is, it is the sort of cash cow government project that will bring a lot of money in to someone, but need never be really completed or functioning. Because, frankly, the end goal isn't achievable. To date no society has succeeded in restraining it's children. Why are we any different?
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, it's not an issue of which societal categorization is perfect, or even which is better. It is an issue of recognizing that this is a multivariate issue; yes, religion is a major, and in some cases, dominant force in Muslim-majority countries - but that is not like saying it's the cause of all their problems, or why we as a nation are having difficulty having peaceful relationships with them.
If you go back not two hundred years, and posed the challenge "name a primarily Christian-run government that doesn't use religion to control and oppress it's people?" and you'd get the same response; well, there are some countries that are moving in that direction, but by and large the church has a great deal of influence in secular life. That doesn't make the people of those countries, or those religions, something you should dismiss out of hand as violent and unworthy of dealing with on equal footing.
But you seem to yet cling to this idea that we are, in fact, 'better' somehow. "We have a court system in place, judged by our peers, so that mob mentality doesn't win over rational thought." If you've ever studied law, in the least, you understand that it is not really based on rational thought. One of the first things they teach you in first year law school is, "The metric of the 'rational person' is a fallacy, but one we use." Juries are not rational - hence the great focus on throwing out better educated people, or people likely to be biased against you. Don't mistake this as a filter for rationality; it's simply a filtering for the bias you want.
You were the one who claimed Western morality was better, not me - but it's not. By and large the morals we practice are not particularly good, even against our metrics. 50%+ divorce/adultery rate, for instance. Rampant crime in many parts of the country. Western people shooting up other westerners in school massacres. Bottom-line economics that leave miners trapped or dead, or people without their pensions. Percentages of minorities on Death Row that far exceed their representation in the prison population. Immorality can take root anywhere, and typically does so with those who have a lot of power. I'm not valuing an entire society on a few issues - voting or otherwise - but how we end up treating other people; our equals, our lower classes, our ethics enshrined in law, other nations and cultures we are orthogonal to. And in each case we have great improvements to make.
But what gets me the most is that you've really swallowed the line that Islam is evil; where in the Qu'ran - point out the passage - does it say 'kill the infidels'? Point of Fact; Islam is, in actuality, a peaceful religion - doctrinally manipulated, as Christianity has been in the past and present (see assassinated abortion doctors), for the sake of a few individuals interested in one conflict or another. Then note that our own such 'leaders' readily manipulate and leverage us into the same conflicts, and that we by and large swallow their propaganda for why it's a good idea to do so.
I really, really think it's a good idea to step back and look at your own country as if it were no better, rather than starting from where you want to end up. The fact is we have some material advantage, and we use it to our ends. Look at how NGOs operate; funding 'third world' development projects using only US companies - projects that never finish. Take Exxon, lending it's heavy machinery to bury genocide victims of south-east asian countries in order to get the few in government to allow them to continue to take oil. Our stance on China and their civil rights abuses; hey, they're lending us money for our pet war, why should we object to their crazy unethical behavior? We of course need not go back to our own manifest destiny years and the exploitation of the west - hardly a different situation than killing Kurds or [insert ethnic minority here]. Phizer's clinical trials in Africa - nevermind the diamond trade, of which 3-5% of the annual product are blood
You don't think the class warfare going on in the US isn't oppressive? Where rich kids are allowed - aided, even - in going to wealthy schools, while poor kids are relegated to dumps and an educational future that is next to useless? You think that the corporate execs of Enron were looking to help the common man, their employees, have a permissive future by embezzling their money and leaving them without recourse? Perhaps you think things like the Patriot Act give us more options?
There are many types of freedom; I am free, right now, to walk anywhere. But I have to pay for a car - I'm limited financially. I am limited by my education, by my age, by my skin color, by any number of things, and these little limitations can add up to oppression. Would I be less free elsewhere? Sure, but lets not lie to ourselves and pretend that we, in America, are as free as we could possibly be.
But, you know, some of my ancestors were probably slave owners. Some of them probably slaughtered some demographic at some point. Some of them were probably Vikings or Romans or somesuch. I definitely don't fight for the glory of Pax Romana - and would fight against it, if it were even feasible. It's not unnatural for people to change what they want. It's also not unnatural to say, 'My ancestors died for this cause, but I choose to live for the fruits of that cause'. One of the fruits of freedom is that you don't have to kill to enforce your viewpoint, you have to educate. And perhaps, for the French, they deem that the highest virtue is accommodation, rather than oppression of a choice that people are making.
There is nothing wrong with promoting Islam. There is everything wrong with promoting oppressive regimes. But what person in this world can say they aren't doing that? The U.S. - and all it's taxpayers - gave Saddam the money and the arms to fight Iran, and oppress his people. We are doing the same with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis - even while our own government takes our rights away. Long story short; Let he who is without fault throw the first stone.
No, but no one has blown anything up in the name of Sartre or Plato, either. Plenty of things have been blown up for 'God', though, in many forms - because God is a thought, an abstraction, an entity without material form. And thus the ultimate in things that can be corrupted to serve any purpose. Buddha was real, and preached a practical philosophy.
You're making an entirely fallacious connection by saying that the religion is the primary source of their societies. That is a lot like saying the entirety of the United States culture was a result Protestantism. We have more freedoms due to our form of government - which explicitly separated out the Church. We have more wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with religion - and little to do with our outstanding moral character. We have gone all over the world taking what we want to make ourselves richer; it is a great surprise anyone still likes us, given the travesties of poverty we've inflicted. Islamic morality is actually quite appealing, if you look at it - but it has little to do with the 'fundamentalist' values we see spoken about on TV. It is certainly more appealing than a society who can't get their voting straight, who let convicted criminals of national-scope crimes get away without a sentence, who pollute their environment and the environments of others with nary a care. I don't think you can point to Western morality as our saving grace.
Bangladesh has 100M people, of which 85M are Muslim. It is a secular parliamentary democracy. That sounds like a 'reasonable degree of freedom' to me. In short; your view of the Muslim world is a bit biased.
First of all, lets go over some terrorism we've been exposed to in the last thirty years that aren't Muslim; The IRA, Timothy McVeigh, Christians who shoot abortion doctors, Japanese who gas subways - and lets not get into what sort of fear-mongering, heavy-handed threats and bombing that the current Administration has engaged in which could easily classify as 'terrorism'.
I mean, clearly you're flame-baiting - else why are you anonymous? But it's a bald-faced lie that Islam is any more terrorist than any other demographic. Propagating that lie is as immoral as any act as I can think of. I mean, really, think for yourself - stop listening to the propaganda that is being fed to you.
And before you respond; Islam is not at all about violence, or about hate. In fact, if you knew anything at all about it's origins, you'd probably recognize the perversion that it's being put through to serve the ends of people who don't have religious enlightenment in mind at all, but their own lamentable ends.
You said, "find it kinda disconcerting that I could one day be confronted by police with an exhaustive list of my movements for the last 10 years."
But that's just the thing; you're disconcerted, and nothing more. It is uncomfortable, feeling like you're constantly watched, under scrutiny and that everything you do can be held against you. But that only underscores what the real problem is; that even though we are putting in place systems to watch (and, perhaps in an ideal world 'secure') the public and public spaces, we are not putting into place anything to oversee those systems. No one is watching the watchers.
In fact, we're fed the line, "You can't know what we're doing because it compromises (national) security." The real uncomfortable truth, though, is that in a democratic society which is becoming ever-more populated, we are not only going to have to accept that the technology which can be used to track individuals will be used to do so, but that if we want that to not be a problem, we must rise to the challenge of putting into place a check and a balance for that new power being utilized by our government.
I think, though, it's a mistake to try and escape to a non-'Western Axis' country. I think it was Mohamed who said (and I'm paraphrasing, because I don't speak Arabic), "One should act, and if one cannot act, one should speak, and if one cannot speak, only then should one simply think. But thinking is the weakest form doing right." He was talking about the necessity to speak and, more importantly, do the things that are required to bring around a just society. Simply thinking, 'This is wrong' or 'I am made uncomfortable by this' is not enough; one has to speak to that and to act upon that. I think that removing yourself from the arena is therefore the worst thing that can happen; Americans are underexposed to Islamic culture as it is. Separation isn't the answer, integration is. When we are living side by side with Muslims it is going to be a lot harder to vote for someone who is eager to "threaten to bomb Mecca and Medina" in the 'war on terror'.
The solution is really to balance the power equation. You can run - for now, anyway - or you can demand your right as a human and moreover as a citizen; your right to know who is accessing that information, and how they're using it, and what other information they're accessing - or not accessing.
Oh, perhaps. But, then, no one has ever even tried it, so that argument doesn't particularly convince me. Where is the evidence you can never escape (the appearance of) gerrymandering? Simply because it is an intractable problem does not make it an unsolvable one.
That's not actually the problem with gerrymandering.
It has always been assumed that people with similar concerns group together for mutual self-interest. There is, in fact, nothing wrong with that in a democratic system; your representative should be as close in opinion to as many of his constituents as possible. The difficulty is that when an elected official then gets to decide the boundaries of districts, he gets to choose who is within a district and who is without; and currently there is no constraint on 'shape' of a district.
So then the problem arises that the elected official changes a district shape to include opponents of his platform, but in numbers that are insufficient to challenge the supporters of his platform. In this fashion you can take whole districts of people who were previously voting for representatives of the opposite party and siphon them off to surrounding districts, perhaps down to the block level. You take their votes and nullify them against your superior numbers in other districts. If, as is often the case, you have to lose a district, you make sure that as few of your people as possible are within that district, meaning that proportionally speaking the majority of their people are getting a minimum number of representatives.
It can be worse than this, of course. There was one case in Philidelphia, I think, where the majority party extended the district line in a long 'arm' one block wide for half a mile or a mile, to include at the tip the house of an opponent representative. Because the representative was suddenly no longer a resident of his district, he had to run in an entirely different district where he had no power base.
I think that mathematically speaking you could undercut a lot of these tactics by forcing districts to have a certain 'circular' shape, within reason. Yes, you would still have districts wherein people of like mind clumped together, but they would not be disproportionally represented; they would be proportionally represented.
I am adverse to any solution that suggests the hiring of more lobbyists. Our political system is already grossly weighted towards those with more money, we do not want to exacerbate the issue.
Personally, I feel that districting should have strict mathematically-based boundaries. We can use math to describe the convolution of a line, so why not say that it has to be within a certain amount? Politicians are using math to maximize their leverage, why not use math to protect the voter? Other than you have to get it by the politicians, first, and they're notoriously adverse to such things that might mark them as someone with a brain.
Ah, yes. That *would* be a problem. But with 10^21 years, one would suspect we'd come up with a solution.
Sure, protons decay. But I bet that total mass replacement would occur long before you had to worry about parts of your atomic physical structure spontaneously degrading.
There are a number of true future predictions you can make. For instance "The future will be dissimilar to some significant number of predictions we make." It's simply a matter of having a prediction whose verbiage is inclusive enough.
But that aside, they are doing amazing things with longevity these days; I think that betting your money on not dying is about as wise as deciding that the Atlantic Ocean would never be crossed would have been in the days of Columbus. Physically speaking there is little known reason for people to die. Why can't they replace their body forever? It looks more and more like we are biologically built to die - because evolution 'designed' us, and evolution is notoriously defective. Until we can scientifically show there is good cause to believe people have to eventually die, from a biophysical aspect, I think that the prediction of "we'll all die" holds as much water as "we'll never fly".
A lot of people say, "Oh, if this goes through, allowing the (essential) monopoly, then people will be motivated to go for competitive alternatives - such as independent labels." The difficulty there is the exact same thing that is plaguing the operating system industry - Microsoft and the RIAA both have no incentive to change because they're currently holding (nearly) all the cards. Let me explain:
Artists with successful songs right now, or software with successful followings, are tied to the RIAA/Microsoft; they no longer get money from that legacy work if they go for greener pastures. Yes, they can do *new* work, and get credit/money for that, but they sacrifice their previous work - and the sum of all previous work is greater than all new work will be in the short to medium term; possibly even the long term.
Only in the 'explosive' phases of a new industry is it easy to be 'independent', because the threshold for adopting a new pattern is still low; a smaller percentage of the total body of work in play is affected. Right now, most artists would rather get something from the RIAA than nothing - or at least much less - from being independent. They are looking at many years of getting much less than what they'd get from the RIAA before the monopoly is broken.
And that is rather the issue; the idea of these mega-companies with near-monopolies - only not so through fine tuning of the application of the law to their particular situation. You can't claim that capitalism is going to work in the large unless there is something of a level playing field; we have in many respects institutionalized monopolies in our system of laws. Until there is a greater natural resistance built in to that sort of company, they'll continue to propagate their monopolies - and because they already control much of the industry, they will continue to fight every step of the way against this sort of thing; and largely succeed. Individuals may rebel against it, but it's hard to see how they're benefiting, personally, in the end by doing so. People call it 'selling out', but the fact is that the individual cost-benefit is heavily weighted, and it's irrational to expect individuals to act different based on hard-to-specify morality.
As others have pointed out, the n you should be looking at in this situation is not the number of monkeys, but the number of times they run the learning experiment; remember, what you're looking for in Science is repeatable results. So, the task of this experiment is to see if a given monkey will show repeatable results with the experiment they've defined. We have already done many experiments (or, more precisely, taken many observations) that lead us to suspect that more most intents and purposes one Rhesus Macaque is similar to the next. We need not test all Rhesus Macaques, only follow up on discrepancies in the data set if it arises. Sometimes more monkeys is useful for that, generally not though.
I think you mean "fewer harmless lies".
Business behavior is human behavior. Businesses acting badly, lying to their customers and attempting to keep unholy control on something that isn't really theirs is a far greater crime than claiming something that for your true intent and purpose is not in your possession. If you claim your cell is in your car, and you have no intent or use in pulling it out - well, then that serves everyone's purposes; and is only a lie in terms of the details, not the spirit.
Joe realized that Alex' DRM tools were cracked. Alex knows that too, and he knows well that the spin of "we make it uncrackable" doesn't hold water. But he also knows how Joe thinks. His selling strategy thus is: 1. Cracking DRM is another burden, which keeps a few more people from copying. 2. Cracking DRM has been made illegal, which keeps another few more from copying. 3. Our DRM solution costs less than the losses due to illegal copying. Joe understands that. And thus Joe buys.
I think, though, that your calculus requires 'Joe' to have an inherent belief that "a few people" and "another few people" are large enough to be considered a business 'threat'; and that the cost due to illegal copying is, in fact, greater than the DRM solution. Herein, though, personal bias can run roughshod over good business sense; if you're a shark, trained to get as much value out of something for as little cost as possible, naturally you're going to see 'free copying' as a god-send. Of course everyone would do it! Nevermind that in a world where copying is a possibility, your business model must change from 'producing' music to 'delivering' music. It's that shift - and the loss of the heretofor gains - that they don't want to suffer.
Thus, they allow their personal biases to put in numbers to the calculus that make their instinctive choice seem 'right'.
Sex is pretty complicated. Not really the act itself - though there is a fair amount of understanding what goes where when to have the act be as satisfying as it can be. I mean more the relationship surrounding sex. Sex is, after all, one of the most intimate acts you can undertake - it can cut to the core of your personality if you let it, or you can guard that core at the expense of the experience.
My point is this; I know plenty of people who wanted certain things out of their sex life but who never achieved it, because they were either afraid of rejection and so did not admit to it, or they were already committed and did not wish to rock the boat. Sleeping with people for whom you feel comfortable having an intimate relationship is not an act that you should necessarily 'reserve' for only the very most worthy situation. Sometimes it's better to learn how to be close to people, and to learn how that extreme closeness affects you, affects them, affects your relationship with them, and with others. These learning experiences are generally categorized as reckless, but I think that usually - 95% of the time - they're far from it. They're natural, and humans learn from it.
Why is it, then, that there is such a prevalence of the mindset that if you never do something, the first person you do it with will be the perfect person? That it somehow increases your chances of finding a working relationship? If anything, the people I know whom have had a great deal of sex are more in tune with how it affects their relationship. I'm not advocating being enslaved to your loins - but there are multiple ways for that enslavement to incur. Letting them run rampant is one; never learning mastery over them is another.
"I believe that God gave me a brain to think with and make intelligent decisions, not allow my loins to drive me. One of those decisions was staying true to who I am when finding a woman to spend my life with."
Leaving aside that there is likely little rational foundation for a belief in God, did you stop to think that perhaps there is more than one way to slice the pie? Why do you assume that finding a woman to spend your life with is a given? For that matter, even if you accept that it is a given for you, why is it a given for everyone?
I object to the notion that any homogeneous set of sexual or mating standards is applied in the same sentence as the claim to being a 'thinking person'. You have claimed that wanting to just have sex with someone is mutually exclusive with using your brain to think - but how can that possibly be the case? There are, in fact, any number of geniuses who were also philanderers - Ben Franklin jumps to mind.
In short, I think that the 'Commitment, Commitment, Commitment' based mindset is, in fact, one propagated for social stability, and that truly independent thinkers are able to see it for what it is; useful in developing many kinds of relationships but not mandatory for all interactions between all people all the time. Such a generalization bespeaks groupthink and weak rationalization. I think the thing you said that most rings true is that you have to be true to yourself; only internal reflection will give you the sort of tools you need to forge outward connections. External frameworks for how you live your life will always sit uncomfortably. I point to the >50% divorce rate.
What... banks take the handling of money seriously? Tricks a fourth grader would come up with would not actually circumvent their notice? Surely, you must be joking!
I admit that I did not read all of your, ah... extensive... writing. But I think that you need to step back and study international politics a bit more. Not everything revolves around M.A.D, and Israel could have any number of reasons to have nuclear weapons. The thing you might do better to come to understand is that the difficulty in the Middle East is far from simplistic; certainly no singular decision at any point in history would have changed that situation to one of easy peace. As I'm sure the recent conflict in Lebanon made all too clear, Israel's primary enemies are not really the sort they can nuke out of existence. Forward-deployed nukes are not going to do them a great deal of strategic good, as deterrents or for more nefarious reasons.
In short, though, you're jumping to about a dozen conclusions without supporting evidence, only thinly reasoned hypotheticals. It is small wonder few are taking you seriously.
The difficulty is that different corporations wield a lot of power in different ways. No one is complaining that 3M is censoring people, but Google and other media and/or advertising companies are going to come up against that accusation a great deal. We need to be able, for reasons of oversight and policy, to better define corporations and what they are and are not allowed to do. If we see it as necessary to prevent broadcast companies from portraying images of naked people, or not have audible swear words between certain hours, then we can probably bring ourselves to find it necessary to extend constitutional protections against censorship to people who use private services that are capable of rendering leverage in that arena similar to a government's.
That said, if the site being 'censored' by google is hosting or verging on hosting hate speech, one might ask if their terms of use weren't violated? You can't ask a private company - or a public one, or the government - to do something illegal to protect a tenuous protection. Hate speech, or speech meant to incite to illegal action, has generally been found to be less protected than 'regular speech'. I might suggest that if one has an important message to spread, one makes every effort not to use invective or monikors that suggest a generalized set of people are acting in a particular way. Transmit data, not bias.
The consultant can engineer it on his own. He sends the tapes home with the intern; the intern acts in good faith, but the consultant takes the tapes in the night. He then sells them to the second party, and is never fingered because the expectation is that it is a random criminal element; the only thing they can cite him for is incompetence, but perhaps at $1/number, he won't care. The interesting thing about this theory is that it does, in fact, sound like the sort of criminal plan that someone would concoct who knew the workings of the system. Most thefts are, in actuality, done by employees of one sort or another - they know what's going on, and so aren't taking a random risk. For that matter, it might not be the consultant, but anyone in the office who knew the deal.
How is that market segmentation any different from segmenting by packet usage, rather than packet type? If you want to segment out the high-traffic users you don't need DPI - and the associated capital costs and overhead - to do it.
There are a number of anti-consumer applications that I could see; charging this or that company for packets to or from them is the example that leaps (obviously) to mind. Recording your traffic usage, so as to better nail you with marketing would be another example. In theory, I suppose it would make it easier to focus in on where spam is coming from.
But, in short, I don't know that this constitutes a substantive new risk.
I agree; let them install the monitoring and filtering. How long do you think it will be, given the proliferation of wireless technology, before routing internet data through land lines is a thing of the past? Thirty years ago, the scale and type of data transmission seen on the internet would have been unthinkable. In thirty years, my bet is on technologies that truly bring about the sort of 'datasphere' that Simmons mentions in Hyperion. You can't filter that, or monitor it in a centralized fashion; at best you can test or sample it, like you might test or sample for pollution in the ocean.
If this sort of thing had happened ten years ago, I think we would have had real cause to worry. As it is, it is the sort of cash cow government project that will bring a lot of money in to someone, but need never be really completed or functioning. Because, frankly, the end goal isn't achievable. To date no society has succeeded in restraining it's children. Why are we any different?