Please do read it. Tunisia is not commonly considered to be in the Middle East. Admittedly it's a fuzzy thing. The true Middle East is generally considered to be the Levant region, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and probably Saudi Arabia. Iran and Turkey are bordering it, but are not generally considered part of the Middle Easy. Libya is questionable. French North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) lies too far to the west to be considered "east", and is only part of the Middle East if you're confusing the term with "The Muslim World" or "The Arab World". Afghanistan is only Middle East if you're confusing it with "The Muslim World".
North Africa is North Africa, the Middle East is the Middle East, Central Asia is Central Asia.
It doesn't use https, so that password is going over the net completely unencypted. Don't rely on it remaining secret. Do not use the same password that you also use for services that matter, like banking or private email.
there are plenty of ways to communicate privately in facebook BTW
Don't count on it. Don't trust them to remain private. Facebook has a bad track record. Privacy is an afterthought at best. Facebook is only for information you want to be public.
In light of the RIAA's own standards on this, as well as the position of power that the record labels have, this should have been punished far more harshly than this.
Are they? Sounds a bit risky to invest money into something that Sony might declare illegal tomorrow.
Is Sony legislature now?
As far as I know, no company, not even Sony or Apple, can declare something illegal. In fact, what Sony did: disabling OtherOS after selling it to lots of people, should be illegal. I don't understand why there hasn't been a big lawsuit over that yet.
Whatever the case, I'm glad PS3 owners get to own their own hardware again.
Unless your woman makes more than you...in which case you don't need to be wasting time at home playing games, you need to get a better job.
Is the quality of a job really only measured in money? Maybe I would be able to make as much money as my wife, but then I'd have to accept really shitty, stressful, time-consuming work. Personally I prefer programming over management, and I'm a lot better at it too. Maybe it's unfair that managers get paid more than programmers (they're both rare talents), but apparently it's the way the job market works.
On another topic: do you know that you sound like a misogynistic loser in your posts?
These are good points. They're asking to be treated as the dominant dog, inhabitant of that territory, etc. I'm all for respecting animals as animals. It's treating them as humans that's not going to do anyone any good.
To those species who ask for it. (Unfortunately that nuance seems lost on a lot of people here.)
That's the problem with personhood tests: not all humans can pass them, unless you set the bar so low that even most chickens can pass it.
Exactly. And I don't think lowering the bar that far is really going to do anyone any good. It's better to just respect all forms of life for what they are, rather than forcing them into some human-shaped mold.
Good points. Dolphins (and other animals) get to live as hunter-gatherers, which we humans simply can't afford anymore. It takes way too much space to be economically feasible, so you need to be bloody rich to do it. Yet dolphins get to live like that for free.
Just look at the horrors we inflict on humans: living in cramped houses on top of each other, being forced to pay for those houses, having to work 40 hours a week in tiny cubicles to pay for it, and having to fill in complicated tax forms on top of that. It'd be inhuman to inflict that on animals.
I can question it. They may be human genetically and biologically, but do they have the mental capacities which make humans worth legal and moral protections?
Is it really only mental capabilities that make humans worthy of legal and moral protection? I think it's mostly compassion that makes us grant these legal and moral protections.
I see no problem with a scale of some sort - rather than just classify all animals as 'human' and 'not human,' find some way to recognise that it's a continuous measure.
Rather than classifying animals according to how human they are, I'd rather just respect them for what they are. It is possible to respect non-human organisms (or even non-organic structures). They don't have to be somewhat human in order to gain rights or respect.
What? You don't think the fact that we write mythologies and philosophy at all makes us special among animals?
No, because we learned to write before we wrote mythology and philosophy:p
Then what were we writing, if not mythology and philosophy? It's my impression that those were among the first subjects that we wrote a lot about.
Of course, all this means that human mind is so flexible because it's self-modifying code running in a virtual machine, while animal minds run close to the metal. I simply must point this out in the next C(++) vs. high-level languages debate >:).
Heh. Interesting notion.
No we can't. That's pure speculation. In fact, it's not so much the size of the brain that matters, but the structure.
All mammals have basically the same brain structure. It only differs in relative size of areas.
Not entirely. Yes, in broad terms, you're right. Apes and some other mammals have more neocortex than most mammals, and we have more than them. But we also have quite big parts of our brain dedicated to stuff like language, whereas other mammals have big parts of their brain dedicated to stuff like smell. Or echolocation, perhaps. I think it matters what the parts of the brain do, and not merely how big they are.
Even so, I just founds something incredibly intriguing on wikipedia: spindle cells. So far, these have only been found in humans, great apes, African elephants and some dolphins and whales. Pretty much the list of animals that's considered very intelligent and social, right?
Apparently researchers aren't entirely sure of their significance yet. It's unknown whether giraffes or hippopotami (less sophisticated animals that happen to have large brains) have them too. But if they don't, we might be on to something here.
Learn something, wont you? Dolphins (other than war and senseless killing) have very complex societal and cultural existences. We have known that for DECADES.
But so do chimps (and that includes the senseless killing).
Sure, dolphins are smart and interesting and fascinating, but they're not significantly more "like us" than chimps or some other smart animals.
And have you read about that population of crows that have a standardized tool set? No other animal (other than us) has that. Don't they deserve special rights too?
Do a Google search on it, and you will find tons of similar papers on the subject. You will also find flaws in all of them in favor of downplaying dolphin intelligence and group structures. Like the brain/size ratio. Let's just analyze that one, shall we?
The entire discussion about brain size is ignoring the fact that brain structure is far more important. Birds have tiny brains, yet they're pretty smart in some ways. No animal has a brain that comes anywhere close to ours, however.
That aside, dolphins have shown as complex social structures as humans
Elephants have complex social structures too. They mourn their dead. And pubescent male elephants behave in some ways remarkably similar to human teenagers. But that doesn't mean they should be treated like human teenagers. They're elephants, completely different needs from humans.
I'm convinced that the "higher" animals have feelings too, and deserve to not be tortured or slaughtered or bred in brutal ways. But don't pretend that they're people, because they're just not.
Well, obviously not, since since "people" is a plural for "human beings".
I thought it was plural for "person", which is exactly what we're talking about.
What better definition of person than "like us" do we have?
You aren't like me.
You mean you don't have eyes, ears, mouth, a brain, language, culture, the ability to plan and reflect, the capacity to solve abstract problems, parents who taught you stuff, a tradition that goes back for hundreds of generations, etc? Because that's what I'm like.
Given any group of humans that doesn't include you, you are almost guaranteed to have some trait the people in the group don't have, or lack some which they have.
Your definition would let me declare bald people non-persons, which is clearly absurd.
This is a red herring. It's irrelevant to the subject at hand. It's not about whether they're indistinguishable from us, it's about whether they share sufficient characteristics to consider them people.
And I do hope you don't consider bald people sub-human. I used to have a grandfather who was bald, you know.
We aren't talking about right to vote, which is denied from quite a few humans too - all non-citizens, for example, making this another red herring. We're talking about things like not being kept in captivity against the individual being's will.
Then call it that, and keep the concept of persoonhood out of it. I'm all for proper treatment of animals. And not just dolphins, but also cows, dogs and chickens. But to what extend they're able to deal with captivity or the lack thereof, varies tremendously per species. Granting them all some sort of generic personhood will only muddy the issue. Dogs, cats and cows are bred for captivity. You're not doing them any favour by releasing them into the wild, but even in captivity, you can treat them well. To what extend dolphins and apes are able to deal with captivity I don't know, but they definitely come with a big list of requirements, whether they live in the wild or in captivity.
And yes, quite a lot of animals - at least all mammals - have a personality, most bigger ones to the point where it's easy to tell individuals apart from behaviour even if they belong to the same species or even the same herd.
Exactly. Dolphins are nothing special. Not compared to apes and elephants, at least. Pretending they're closer to us than to other animals is silly and not productive. Respect them for what they are, rather than pretending they're in some way like us, and would only deserve respect for that reason.
This is a thid red herring. The issue isn't whether dolphins might build a fishbowl-tank to explore the dry land, the issue is whether they're self-aware enough that they should be treated as retarded humans rather than mere sources of amusement/study.
And that is a really stupid issue. Treating animals as humans (retarded or not) is as stupid as treating dolphins as chimps.
Human infants are still human. Sure, you can question their personhood when they're unborn, a few weeks after conception and little more than a lump of cells, but once born and breathing and learning and crying, most people have little doubt about their humanity.
I'm not saying each individual dolphin has to ask for the same rights as humans, I'm fine when just one of them does it on behalf of the species. The rest will get a free pass for being the same species, just like most humans do.
Slashdot Mirror
If you consider waterboarding health care...
And Tunisia is generally considered not to be part of that region.
Please do read it. Tunisia is not commonly considered to be in the Middle East. Admittedly it's a fuzzy thing. The true Middle East is generally considered to be the Levant region, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and probably Saudi Arabia. Iran and Turkey are bordering it, but are not generally considered part of the Middle Easy. Libya is questionable. French North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) lies too far to the west to be considered "east", and is only part of the Middle East if you're confusing the term with "The Muslim World" or "The Arab World". Afghanistan is only Middle East if you're confusing it with "The Muslim World".
North Africa is North Africa, the Middle East is the Middle East, Central Asia is Central Asia.
It doesn't use https, so that password is going over the net completely unencypted. Don't rely on it remaining secret. Do not use the same password that you also use for services that matter, like banking or private email.
Could you explain how private messages on Facebook differ from email?
The former are on Facebook, the latter aren't. That is a huge difference.
there are plenty of ways to communicate privately in facebook BTW
Don't count on it. Don't trust them to remain private. Facebook has a bad track record. Privacy is an afterthought at best. Facebook is only for information you want to be public.
Google is somewhat competent on privacy. Facebook explicitly wants to share your information with as many people as possible.
Never ever count on anything on Facebook being private. Do not share stuff you don't want the entire world to know. Not even as a private message.
According to recent news, not to mention speeches from politicians, the US seems to be soundly in the "ammo" stage now.
What do you mean, "hacked"? We're talking about Facebook, aren't we? There never was any privacy there to begin with.
In light of the RIAA's own standards on this, as well as the position of power that the record labels have, this should have been punished far more harshly than this.
Since a couple of years now. It varies somewhat by law, though.
Are they? Sounds a bit risky to invest money into something that Sony might declare illegal tomorrow.
Is Sony legislature now?
As far as I know, no company, not even Sony or Apple, can declare something illegal. In fact, what Sony did: disabling OtherOS after selling it to lots of people, should be illegal. I don't understand why there hasn't been a big lawsuit over that yet.
Whatever the case, I'm glad PS3 owners get to own their own hardware again.
Unless your woman makes more than you...in which case you don't need to be wasting time at home playing games, you need to get a better job.
Is the quality of a job really only measured in money? Maybe I would be able to make as much money as my wife, but then I'd have to accept really shitty, stressful, time-consuming work. Personally I prefer programming over management, and I'm a lot better at it too. Maybe it's unfair that managers get paid more than programmers (they're both rare talents), but apparently it's the way the job market works.
On another topic: do you know that you sound like a misogynistic loser in your posts?
Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to grant it to corporations. Can't we revert that first, before we allow more entities to become persons?
These are good points. They're asking to be treated as the dominant dog, inhabitant of that territory, etc. I'm all for respecting animals as animals. It's treating them as humans that's not going to do anyone any good.
Grant personhood only to those who ask for it?
To those species who ask for it. (Unfortunately that nuance seems lost on a lot of people here.)
That's the problem with personhood tests: not all humans can pass them, unless you set the bar so low that even most chickens can pass it.
Exactly. And I don't think lowering the bar that far is really going to do anyone any good. It's better to just respect all forms of life for what they are, rather than forcing them into some human-shaped mold.
Sounds like corporations. I'm sure dolphins are smarter (not to mention more compassionate) than that.
Good points. Dolphins (and other animals) get to live as hunter-gatherers, which we humans simply can't afford anymore. It takes way too much space to be economically feasible, so you need to be bloody rich to do it. Yet dolphins get to live like that for free.
Just look at the horrors we inflict on humans: living in cramped houses on top of each other, being forced to pay for those houses, having to work 40 hours a week in tiny cubicles to pay for it, and having to fill in complicated tax forms on top of that. It'd be inhuman to inflict that on animals.
I can question it. They may be human genetically and biologically, but do they have the mental capacities which make humans worth legal and moral protections?
Is it really only mental capabilities that make humans worthy of legal and moral protection? I think it's mostly compassion that makes us grant these legal and moral protections.
I see no problem with a scale of some sort - rather than just classify all animals as 'human' and 'not human,' find some way to recognise that it's a continuous measure.
Rather than classifying animals according to how human they are, I'd rather just respect them for what they are. It is possible to respect non-human organisms (or even non-organic structures). They don't have to be somewhat human in order to gain rights or respect.
Are you saying that this "personhood" should be directly proportional to intelligence? I'm inclined to disagree.
Kittens aren't gorillas. And gorillas, and dolphins, aren't people. They are animals. And that alone is worthy of respect and some rights.
That's exactly my point. Let's respect them as animals, rather than treating them as retarded humans, as the summary suggests.
No, because we learned to write before we wrote mythology and philosophy :p
Then what were we writing, if not mythology and philosophy? It's my impression that those were among the first subjects that we wrote a lot about.
Of course, all this means that human mind is so flexible because it's self-modifying code running in a virtual machine, while animal minds run close to the metal. I simply must point this out in the next C(++) vs. high-level languages debate >:).
Heh. Interesting notion.
All mammals have basically the same brain structure. It only differs in relative size of areas.
Not entirely. Yes, in broad terms, you're right. Apes and some other mammals have more neocortex than most mammals, and we have more than them. But we also have quite big parts of our brain dedicated to stuff like language, whereas other mammals have big parts of their brain dedicated to stuff like smell. Or echolocation, perhaps. I think it matters what the parts of the brain do, and not merely how big they are.
Even so, I just founds something incredibly intriguing on wikipedia: spindle cells. So far, these have only been found in humans, great apes, African elephants and some dolphins and whales. Pretty much the list of animals that's considered very intelligent and social, right?
Apparently researchers aren't entirely sure of their significance yet. It's unknown whether giraffes or hippopotami (less sophisticated animals that happen to have large brains) have them too. But if they don't, we might be on to something here.
Learn something, wont you? Dolphins (other than war and senseless killing) have very complex societal and cultural existences. We have known that for DECADES.
But so do chimps (and that includes the senseless killing).
Sure, dolphins are smart and interesting and fascinating, but they're not significantly more "like us" than chimps or some other smart animals.
And have you read about that population of crows that have a standardized tool set? No other animal (other than us) has that. Don't they deserve special rights too?
Do a Google search on it, and you will find tons of similar papers on the subject. You will also find flaws in all of them in favor of downplaying dolphin intelligence and group structures. Like the brain/size ratio. Let's just analyze that one, shall we?
The entire discussion about brain size is ignoring the fact that brain structure is far more important. Birds have tiny brains, yet they're pretty smart in some ways. No animal has a brain that comes anywhere close to ours, however.
That aside, dolphins have shown as complex social structures as humans
Elephants have complex social structures too. They mourn their dead. And pubescent male elephants behave in some ways remarkably similar to human teenagers. But that doesn't mean they should be treated like human teenagers. They're elephants, completely different needs from humans.
Well, obviously not, since since "people" is a plural for "human beings".
I thought it was plural for "person", which is exactly what we're talking about.
You aren't like me.
You mean you don't have eyes, ears, mouth, a brain, language, culture, the ability to plan and reflect, the capacity to solve abstract problems, parents who taught you stuff, a tradition that goes back for hundreds of generations, etc? Because that's what I'm like.
Given any group of humans that doesn't include you, you are almost guaranteed to have some trait the people in the group don't have, or lack some which they have.
Your definition would let me declare bald people non-persons, which is clearly absurd.
This is a red herring. It's irrelevant to the subject at hand. It's not about whether they're indistinguishable from us, it's about whether they share sufficient characteristics to consider them people.
And I do hope you don't consider bald people sub-human. I used to have a grandfather who was bald, you know.
We aren't talking about right to vote, which is denied from quite a few humans too - all non-citizens, for example, making this another red herring. We're talking about things like not being kept in captivity against the individual being's will.
Then call it that, and keep the concept of persoonhood out of it. I'm all for proper treatment of animals. And not just dolphins, but also cows, dogs and chickens. But to what extend they're able to deal with captivity or the lack thereof, varies tremendously per species. Granting them all some sort of generic personhood will only muddy the issue. Dogs, cats and cows are bred for captivity. You're not doing them any favour by releasing them into the wild, but even in captivity, you can treat them well. To what extend dolphins and apes are able to deal with captivity I don't know, but they definitely come with a big list of requirements, whether they live in the wild or in captivity.
And yes, quite a lot of animals - at least all mammals - have a personality, most bigger ones to the point where it's easy to tell individuals apart from behaviour even if they belong to the same species or even the same herd.
Exactly. Dolphins are nothing special. Not compared to apes and elephants, at least. Pretending they're closer to us than to other animals is silly and not productive. Respect them for what they are, rather than pretending they're in some way like us, and would only deserve respect for that reason.
This is a thid red herring. The issue isn't whether dolphins might build a fishbowl-tank to explore the dry land, the issue is whether they're self-aware enough that they should be treated as retarded humans rather than mere sources of amusement/study.
And that is a really stupid issue. Treating animals as humans (retarded or not) is as stupid as treating dolphins as chimps.
Human infants are still human. Sure, you can question their personhood when they're unborn, a few weeks after conception and little more than a lump of cells, but once born and breathing and learning and crying, most people have little doubt about their humanity.
I'm not saying each individual dolphin has to ask for the same rights as humans, I'm fine when just one of them does it on behalf of the species. The rest will get a free pass for being the same species, just like most humans do.