The problem is, however, that the media needs to be brief.
The media needs to be critical of the government. It's the very reason it is given the power to be uncensored. It's meant to be the natural predator on the power structure. It doesn't matter if it is brief or lengthy. Sometimes the problems are complicated and might take a while to explain. That's ok. As long as the media is both critical and accurate, it is doing its job. In its current form it acts as a cheerleader for the power structures. As such, it does not fulfill its mandate.
Even the most left-leaning people admit that Obama following is very cultish in nature. So the swing was from warrior-God to free-giveaway-God. It always amazed me to see Obama followers. They act and talk nothing like the man himself. They seem very maniacal. Whereas, he himself is very leveled.
Just in case you don't know the uproar started with programmers being ticked off by RSA getting a patent on their algorithm. Because programmers until then essentially thought they had the right to implement any algorithm they could understand. I seriously doubt that RSA existed since Pyramid time in any form.
Except that the founding fathers didn't envision a machine that would perform tasks as instructed through a given process (certainly not on the level of complexity that modern computers would do). A new and innovative process (algorithm) is itself a scientific discovery (as evidenced by the fact that they are published in dedicated scientific journals). They are certainly "useful". And allowing mathematicians to negotiate the product of their labor would promote abstract research into useful subjects more than having them rely on hand outs (aka grants). So there. The standard is completely fulfilled.
Canada and UK are not exactly dens of innovation (compared to the US). US economy is approximately 3 times larger than the economy of the entire European Union. Yes, even now.
Critics of business-method patents say it was never the intent of the law to protect such things, which in their view are often far closer to abstract concepts or mathematical algorithms rather than physical inventions.
And, naturally, as a mathematician I will once again point out that mathematical algorithms should patentable. No reason why mathematicians should live on donations (aka grants) and not be able to negotiate the product of their minds' work (by owning it through patents). Of course, most of slashdot will disagree because most people think everyone else's work should be free except theirs. Arguments will be brought up pointing out that if I had my way, we'd still be paying to use Calculus -- arguments which completely ignore the fact that patents do (and should) be issued for a limited term after which they expire. Blah, blah, blah. We've all gone through motions. I refuse to work on my best and most useful ideas until I can profit from them at my choosing. Good luck regurgitating the ideas you get from 30-year-old publicly-available research. I'll keep working on papers that are in useless esoteric fields. But hey, you have your "rights". Enjoy.
Largely depends on what "conservative" means. Social conservatives are not bothered so much with what the government is as long as its "users" are like the Mac users: preachy, committed and not too worried about what's going on behind the curtain. Fiscal conservatives agree with libertarians (just not on social issues). Old school conservatives (ala beginning of the 20th century Democratic party)... oh, I give up.
Wikipedia also regularly bans Congressmans' offices from editing because they try to use the site to create fictional accounts of either their own candidates or the opposition. This is actually a show of integrity by Wikipedia (equal treatment of all). They are preventing a certain behavior from occurring -- not certain group of people from behaving.
If the guy said that 5 != 3 and 4 != 7, would that imply that 5 is equal to all numbers other than 3 or that 4 is equal to all numbers other than 7? Your logical flaw is in saying that A != B implies that A = !B in a situation where A and B are not boolean. This is known as "implied dichotomy". It is often false. An even more apropos analogy would be if a guy said that the line segment (3,5) is not equal to the line segment (4,6), then your logic would imply that (3,5) is equal to everything outside of the line segment (4,6). But the truth is that while they overlap (in the (4,5) line segment) they are not equal. Just like legal and right sometimes are the same thing and sometimes are not.
Yeah, and that would match the brutal reign of terror by the International Telecommuncation Union (which handles things like telephone and telegraph), or a similarly notorious Universal Postal Union.
What an incredibly false analogy. Those organizations only have advisory and standard setting power. They don't have the power to physically cut any one off. An organization administering DNS would.
I'll be harsh. But only because this deserves a bit of harshness. The attitude of those who say "the choice is always yours" is arrogant. This quote, often repeated to addicts, plays on language. From the point of view of an addict the choice is made much more difficult. But rather than say that, most people (not just the addicts) will often say the simpler phrase "the choice is gone". It's true that it's not gone 100%. But it's the choice between running a marathon without having any practice and eating a piece of chocolate cake. Those who insist on uttering this phrase fail to recognize the difficulty of the choice and the struggle that it entails.
Maybe my understanding of Aristotle wasn't as good as I had hoped. But it seemed that he did, in fact, argue for balance. The "good life" was not just success as we define it in the modern life, but a thriving household. What gave me a particularly strong indication that he strived for balance was his view that a city must balance power between the head, the people of quality (he used the word "aristocracy" but it didn't mean to him what it means to us) and the people. His view on the city though seemed to be an extension of his view on the household.
You can't get that sort of feeling of achievement from a video game.
You can't get the same achievement. But, you can get the same feeling of achievement. It's my understanding that WoW now has a built-in system of "achievements". There are also some actually difficult in-game events that most people aspire to but never accomplish (the difficulty mostly arises from the requirement to pay attention to more simultaneous indicators than an average person is capable of). But on the other hand every little thing you do in the game pops up a shiny "congratulations" notice with a sound similar to the one played by slot machines when someone hits a jackpot. And the "achievements" are recorded and touted to other players. Grats on your personal ability to lead a "good life" in Aristotelian sense, but what I am trying to argue here is that WoW is not just an outlet for people who can't achieve much outside of the game. It also destroys lives of some people who are productive. Imagine that someone in your position were stupid enough to try heroine. It's virtually impossible to not be addicted to heroine after the first try. This addiction would derail their built impulses towards achieving a good life through natural means and would refocus their life towards ensuring a steady supply of heroine. It would give a more intense feeling of elation than the life you are currently enjoying. But only because it would move the baseline for anxiety threshold. Just as you are occasionally anxious to ask yourself "ok, what's next?", they would be constantly anxious to feed the addiction. The difference, I guess, is that when you ask "what's next?" you exercise a choice. And addict doesn't have a choice. To clarify that last statement (because it come out a little too absolute), an addict only has a very narrow set of choices.
It would give some international body actual enforcement power over something. Up until now they only have the power of rhetoric and proclamation (even if they are "binding"). This would create a mechanism for them to actually enforce penalties against non-complying (insert blank here). Given that the international relations are always (by definition) nothing but politics, this would have almost immediate chilling effects on free speech on the Internet.
I thought you might get dismissive. Being bored is not the same as having an addiction and I suspect boredom is all you'd feel if you didn't get what you wanted. So here's the experiment that (if you perform it) will show you what's going on. Here's how you can go through what an addict goes through without getting any harmful addictions. Estimate how long you can go without sex. And I don't mean sex proper. I mean without sexual release of any kind. You know yourself better than anyone else. So figure out what is the upper estimate on that number of days (hours?). And then commit to going without sexual release for twice the number of days. Don't tell anyone during this celibacy period that you are doing this experiment (because addicts can't admit what they are even to the loved ones). So you won't have any support group. At some point you will start to feel anxiety. Don't stop the experiment. Continue and try to live your life as normal as you can: go to work, (school?), interact with your friends, etc. You will find that you will become moody and unable to concentrate on tasks at hand (nope, no pun intended... this is not sarcasm... I am really honestly trying to demonstrate a point here). But after it's over you will find that you don't really miss sex anymore. But as soon as the opportunity presents and you do have it, you'll be "addicted" again. You may think it's silly that some people feel this way about a game. You may think that it's because they don't have actual sex (which isn't true because plenty of the committed players have families and kids), but it doesn't really matter. As long as the physical manifestation of addiction is the same, it's addiction and it cannot be removed with a simple choice or decision.
I think I just have a unique worldview. I'm one of the few people who can say "I want to do this" and just go do it.
Without getting into the whole nature v nurture debate (been there done that... don't care for the t-shirt), it could also mean that you haven't found your addiction yet. Here's something I like to point out to people: I don't get addicted to smoking. Yes, I do it right. Yes, I do get the slight calming feeling from it and a slight buzz after chain smoking a pack. But I can smoke for a month. And then just stop and not even miss it. Most people can't do that with nicotine. Brain chemistry is not exactly the same for everyone. It's not your view (which is nurture) as much as it is the totality of your pre-dispositions (which is nature). Count your blessings if you have high resistance to addiction. But don't underestimate the fact that addiction does exist. And the question posed was not "how do we become like the people who never get addicted", it was "what causes addiction in the people that do have moderate-to-high capacity for getting addicted".
And by the way, the fact that his/played time was 200 days doesn't mean that he played for 200 days. It means that he spent 200 x 24 hours logged into his characters. Given that it was pre-BC, that means he spend that many hours during the 2 years that the game was live at that point.
The thing about playing for 200 days (without stating the obvious) is that it doesn't happen overnight. That person played on day 5 after playing for 4 previous days. Addiction feeds itself. One doesn't get bored. One doesn't plan for it to lead to anything productive. One may even on occasion notice that it is eating away at other things that one wants to achieve, but that doesn't stop it. It's not about priorities. One's values don't matter much, either. We use our values as part of the mechanism for making rational decisions based on choices. With addiction, the choice is gone. I've played WoW. I've seen people say things like "I am so bored of this game" and "I want my life back. I used to be so good at (some random productive activity)". Many of those people kept playing after saying this. Getting out of an addictive behavior requires about as much effort as a vow of celibacy. It's not easy. And value system doesn't help much.
I think you are missing the point of what addiction is. Addicts act in an irrational manner even though they know they are doing it. The fix is prioritized over all other impulses (including survival).
It's a question for neuroscientists. If the game experiences produce the same chemical reactions in the brain as the ones that occur during drug use (reuptake or inhibition of some specific neurotransmitters), then the experience is indistinguishable from drug use as far as the brain is concerned. All the personal-responsibility arguments aside (because they can also be made about mild drug use), it's generally some re-association of flight vs fight mechanism or sexual excitation mechanism (or both). But again, for exact details, ask a neuroscientist -- not a programmer.
Conciousness is basically an invention to allow us to kill animals and satisfy our conscience.
Well, there is no doubt that consciousness is a real rather than made-up concept. Your attribution of motives is quite loaded. And not only is it not causal, but your hypothesis is not even correlated with your conclusion. There are people who feel bad about animal pain and perform animal experiments on daily basis. There are people who feel bad about animal pain and try to alleviate the suffering. There are people who are in both of those categories (I've known plenty of scientists who work on animals and yet have domestic pets). You are really making a moral judgment and trying to doctor the evidence to justify it. You are not presenting evidence and then drawing conclusion out of it. And you are really trying to play with words here. You are using the phase "don't know what animal thinks", but "thinking" is very difficult to define without defining consciousness. And keep in mind, just because you don't know something, it doesn't mean that it is not known. Your ignorance is not evidence.
How exactly is it even relevant if they are similar to hotel that knows that prostitution goes in it? Can a hotel be expected to refuse services to clients who are known prostitutes? Can it be illegal for a hotel to act otherwise? Doesn't it boil down to refusing service to a person because of previous criminal acts? Can the law really require a private business to refuse service to past criminals because they are likely (but not guaranteed) to use the business' services to repeat the criminal activity? When did we all become employees of the police? The last I checked their job is stopping crime -- not arresting anyone else who didn't stop crime.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, however, that the media needs to be brief.
The media needs to be critical of the government. It's the very reason it is given the power to be uncensored. It's meant to be the natural predator on the power structure. It doesn't matter if it is brief or lengthy. Sometimes the problems are complicated and might take a while to explain. That's ok. As long as the media is both critical and accurate, it is doing its job. In its current form it acts as a cheerleader for the power structures. As such, it does not fulfill its mandate.
Even the most left-leaning people admit that Obama following is very cultish in nature. So the swing was from warrior-God to free-giveaway-God. It always amazed me to see Obama followers. They act and talk nothing like the man himself. They seem very maniacal. Whereas, he himself is very leveled.
Just in case you don't know the uproar started with programmers being ticked off by RSA getting a patent on their algorithm. Because programmers until then essentially thought they had the right to implement any algorithm they could understand. I seriously doubt that RSA existed since Pyramid time in any form.
Except that the founding fathers didn't envision a machine that would perform tasks as instructed through a given process (certainly not on the level of complexity that modern computers would do). A new and innovative process (algorithm) is itself a scientific discovery (as evidenced by the fact that they are published in dedicated scientific journals). They are certainly "useful". And allowing mathematicians to negotiate the product of their labor would promote abstract research into useful subjects more than having them rely on hand outs (aka grants). So there. The standard is completely fulfilled.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1252871&cid=28178061
Canada and UK are not exactly dens of innovation (compared to the US). US economy is approximately 3 times larger than the economy of the entire European Union. Yes, even now.
Critics of business-method patents say it was never the intent of the law to protect such things, which in their view are often far closer to abstract concepts or mathematical algorithms rather than physical inventions.
And, naturally, as a mathematician I will once again point out that mathematical algorithms should patentable. No reason why mathematicians should live on donations (aka grants) and not be able to negotiate the product of their minds' work (by owning it through patents). Of course, most of slashdot will disagree because most people think everyone else's work should be free except theirs. Arguments will be brought up pointing out that if I had my way, we'd still be paying to use Calculus -- arguments which completely ignore the fact that patents do (and should) be issued for a limited term after which they expire. Blah, blah, blah. We've all gone through motions. I refuse to work on my best and most useful ideas until I can profit from them at my choosing. Good luck regurgitating the ideas you get from 30-year-old publicly-available research. I'll keep working on papers that are in useless esoteric fields. But hey, you have your "rights". Enjoy.
Largely depends on what "conservative" means. Social conservatives are not bothered so much with what the government is as long as its "users" are like the Mac users: preachy, committed and not too worried about what's going on behind the curtain. Fiscal conservatives agree with libertarians (just not on social issues). Old school conservatives (ala beginning of the 20th century Democratic party)... oh, I give up.
Wikipedia also regularly bans Congressmans' offices from editing because they try to use the site to create fictional accounts of either their own candidates or the opposition. This is actually a show of integrity by Wikipedia (equal treatment of all). They are preventing a certain behavior from occurring -- not certain group of people from behaving.
If the guy said that 5 != 3 and 4 != 7, would that imply that 5 is equal to all numbers other than 3 or that 4 is equal to all numbers other than 7? Your logical flaw is in saying that A != B implies that A = !B in a situation where A and B are not boolean. This is known as "implied dichotomy". It is often false. An even more apropos analogy would be if a guy said that the line segment (3,5) is not equal to the line segment (4,6), then your logic would imply that (3,5) is equal to everything outside of the line segment (4,6). But the truth is that while they overlap (in the (4,5) line segment) they are not equal. Just like legal and right sometimes are the same thing and sometimes are not.
You are trolling. The opposite of "honest" is not "for-profit". It's "dishonest".
Yeah, and that would match the brutal reign of terror by the International Telecommuncation Union (which handles things like telephone and telegraph), or a similarly notorious Universal Postal Union.
What an incredibly false analogy. Those organizations only have advisory and standard setting power. They don't have the power to physically cut any one off. An organization administering DNS would.
The choice is always yours.
I'll be harsh. But only because this deserves a bit of harshness. The attitude of those who say "the choice is always yours" is arrogant. This quote, often repeated to addicts, plays on language. From the point of view of an addict the choice is made much more difficult. But rather than say that, most people (not just the addicts) will often say the simpler phrase "the choice is gone". It's true that it's not gone 100%. But it's the choice between running a marathon without having any practice and eating a piece of chocolate cake. Those who insist on uttering this phrase fail to recognize the difficulty of the choice and the struggle that it entails.
Maybe my understanding of Aristotle wasn't as good as I had hoped. But it seemed that he did, in fact, argue for balance. The "good life" was not just success as we define it in the modern life, but a thriving household. What gave me a particularly strong indication that he strived for balance was his view that a city must balance power between the head, the people of quality (he used the word "aristocracy" but it didn't mean to him what it means to us) and the people. His view on the city though seemed to be an extension of his view on the household.
You can't get that sort of feeling of achievement from a video game.
You can't get the same achievement. But, you can get the same feeling of achievement. It's my understanding that WoW now has a built-in system of "achievements". There are also some actually difficult in-game events that most people aspire to but never accomplish (the difficulty mostly arises from the requirement to pay attention to more simultaneous indicators than an average person is capable of). But on the other hand every little thing you do in the game pops up a shiny "congratulations" notice with a sound similar to the one played by slot machines when someone hits a jackpot. And the "achievements" are recorded and touted to other players. Grats on your personal ability to lead a "good life" in Aristotelian sense, but what I am trying to argue here is that WoW is not just an outlet for people who can't achieve much outside of the game. It also destroys lives of some people who are productive. Imagine that someone in your position were stupid enough to try heroine. It's virtually impossible to not be addicted to heroine after the first try. This addiction would derail their built impulses towards achieving a good life through natural means and would refocus their life towards ensuring a steady supply of heroine. It would give a more intense feeling of elation than the life you are currently enjoying. But only because it would move the baseline for anxiety threshold. Just as you are occasionally anxious to ask yourself "ok, what's next?", they would be constantly anxious to feed the addiction. The difference, I guess, is that when you ask "what's next?" you exercise a choice. And addict doesn't have a choice. To clarify that last statement (because it come out a little too absolute), an addict only has a very narrow set of choices.
It would give some international body actual enforcement power over something. Up until now they only have the power of rhetoric and proclamation (even if they are "binding"). This would create a mechanism for them to actually enforce penalties against non-complying (insert blank here). Given that the international relations are always (by definition) nothing but politics, this would have almost immediate chilling effects on free speech on the Internet.
I thought you might get dismissive. Being bored is not the same as having an addiction and I suspect boredom is all you'd feel if you didn't get what you wanted. So here's the experiment that (if you perform it) will show you what's going on. Here's how you can go through what an addict goes through without getting any harmful addictions. Estimate how long you can go without sex. And I don't mean sex proper. I mean without sexual release of any kind. You know yourself better than anyone else. So figure out what is the upper estimate on that number of days (hours?). And then commit to going without sexual release for twice the number of days. Don't tell anyone during this celibacy period that you are doing this experiment (because addicts can't admit what they are even to the loved ones). So you won't have any support group. At some point you will start to feel anxiety. Don't stop the experiment. Continue and try to live your life as normal as you can: go to work, (school?), interact with your friends, etc. You will find that you will become moody and unable to concentrate on tasks at hand (nope, no pun intended... this is not sarcasm... I am really honestly trying to demonstrate a point here). But after it's over you will find that you don't really miss sex anymore. But as soon as the opportunity presents and you do have it, you'll be "addicted" again. You may think it's silly that some people feel this way about a game. You may think that it's because they don't have actual sex (which isn't true because plenty of the committed players have families and kids), but it doesn't really matter. As long as the physical manifestation of addiction is the same, it's addiction and it cannot be removed with a simple choice or decision.
I think I just have a unique worldview. I'm one of the few people who can say "I want to do this" and just go do it.
Without getting into the whole nature v nurture debate (been there done that... don't care for the t-shirt), it could also mean that you haven't found your addiction yet. Here's something I like to point out to people: I don't get addicted to smoking. Yes, I do it right. Yes, I do get the slight calming feeling from it and a slight buzz after chain smoking a pack. But I can smoke for a month. And then just stop and not even miss it. Most people can't do that with nicotine. Brain chemistry is not exactly the same for everyone. It's not your view (which is nurture) as much as it is the totality of your pre-dispositions (which is nature). Count your blessings if you have high resistance to addiction. But don't underestimate the fact that addiction does exist. And the question posed was not "how do we become like the people who never get addicted", it was "what causes addiction in the people that do have moderate-to-high capacity for getting addicted".
And by the way, the fact that his /played time was 200 days doesn't mean that he played for 200 days. It means that he spent 200 x 24 hours logged into his characters. Given that it was pre-BC, that means he spend that many hours during the 2 years that the game was live at that point.
The thing about playing for 200 days (without stating the obvious) is that it doesn't happen overnight. That person played on day 5 after playing for 4 previous days. Addiction feeds itself. One doesn't get bored. One doesn't plan for it to lead to anything productive. One may even on occasion notice that it is eating away at other things that one wants to achieve, but that doesn't stop it. It's not about priorities. One's values don't matter much, either. We use our values as part of the mechanism for making rational decisions based on choices. With addiction, the choice is gone. I've played WoW. I've seen people say things like "I am so bored of this game" and "I want my life back. I used to be so good at (some random productive activity)". Many of those people kept playing after saying this. Getting out of an addictive behavior requires about as much effort as a vow of celibacy. It's not easy. And value system doesn't help much.
I think you are missing the point of what addiction is. Addicts act in an irrational manner even though they know they are doing it. The fix is prioritized over all other impulses (including survival).
It's a question for neuroscientists. If the game experiences produce the same chemical reactions in the brain as the ones that occur during drug use (reuptake or inhibition of some specific neurotransmitters), then the experience is indistinguishable from drug use as far as the brain is concerned. All the personal-responsibility arguments aside (because they can also be made about mild drug use), it's generally some re-association of flight vs fight mechanism or sexual excitation mechanism (or both). But again, for exact details, ask a neuroscientist -- not a programmer.
the internet browses you
Conciousness is basically an invention to allow us to kill animals and satisfy our conscience.
Well, there is no doubt that consciousness is a real rather than made-up concept. Your attribution of motives is quite loaded. And not only is it not causal, but your hypothesis is not even correlated with your conclusion. There are people who feel bad about animal pain and perform animal experiments on daily basis. There are people who feel bad about animal pain and try to alleviate the suffering. There are people who are in both of those categories (I've known plenty of scientists who work on animals and yet have domestic pets). You are really making a moral judgment and trying to doctor the evidence to justify it. You are not presenting evidence and then drawing conclusion out of it. And you are really trying to play with words here. You are using the phase "don't know what animal thinks", but "thinking" is very difficult to define without defining consciousness. And keep in mind, just because you don't know something, it doesn't mean that it is not known. Your ignorance is not evidence.
How exactly is it even relevant if they are similar to hotel that knows that prostitution goes in it? Can a hotel be expected to refuse services to clients who are known prostitutes? Can it be illegal for a hotel to act otherwise? Doesn't it boil down to refusing service to a person because of previous criminal acts? Can the law really require a private business to refuse service to past criminals because they are likely (but not guaranteed) to use the business' services to repeat the criminal activity? When did we all become employees of the police? The last I checked their job is stopping crime -- not arresting anyone else who didn't stop crime.