...how exactly is that a small market? 51% of 120M people and pregnant women (who you can be sure will drag friends and boyfriends/husbands with them by force or threat) doesn't exactly seem negligible. The Passion of the Christ was driven by a significantly smaller market than that and it did pretty well. While it likely to appeal to a less cohesive market, it's not a small one.
Pres. Bush argues that his Administration's policies (particularly the foreign policies, but presumably the domestic ones as well) are intended to strengthen the cause of freedom and democracy in the world. While the people abroad shouldn't choose our President, they are an important part of W's policies abroad - democracy doesn't work with slaves or droids, only with people capable of thinking and choosing for themselves. Since W needs their help to make this happen, shutting them out from information on his intentions, motivation, and means doesn't exactly help to convince others in the world that we view them as people rather than as objects of our will or that he has their best interests at heart. Since the "go it alone" plan is probably not going to be effective on a larger scale than the at which is currently employed (one might argue it isn't effective now...), W needs the help of the world to make his goals reality. Shutting them out only tells them that they don't matter, in opposition to W's stated goals and to the interests of those whose help he needs.
So, while non-US citizens are irrelevant to who is elected President, they aren't irrelevant to how he fares if he is reelected, or whether his goals are actually achieved. If W believes what he says, their opinions do matter, because if they don't, his goals are either lies or doomed to failure (or both).
and as long as we continue to have (somewhat) open borders, the NKs (or people paid/allied with them) can come over and use US computers to DDoS W's website. The 9/11 people had valid ID - there is no reason to expect that a foreign gov't with malevolent intent for our election couldn't get a few people into the US to nuke his website.
Denying access to W's website from abroad might be likely to protect against spammer-type attacks from abroad, but it isn't an effective defense against gov't-sanctioned attacks on his website.
the attacks would be harder to stop, but I'm guessing there are plenty of people in the US who would love to DDoS Pres. Bush's website. Why would people outside the US be the only security threat to his website?
Why do chemists use an unattractive form of the Ideal Gas Law? Well, using numbers ending in 6.022e23 is kind of inconvenient for any mass of material that a chemist would use on a daily basis. Chemists work with mg-kg of material; at those scales, counting particles as a unit of mass is impractical and inconvenient. It's better instead to convert to units that approximate the unit scale on which one works.
Physicists are likely to deal with particles, hence the use of particles as a unit is reasonable, in addition to the fact that they are more likely to work with equations that get ugly when using molar units (the same goes for some physical chemists). For most chemists, molar weights are a far more useful measure of mass than particles would be. The beauty of the IGL if particles were used as the unit is far outweighed by the awkwardness of the use of particles as units for most things chemists do.
The additional factor is the IGL is only an approximation - a good starting point for understanding how gases behave, but not useful for high precision measurements, at low temperatures or at high pressures. The more accurate versions of the IGL for these circumstances are much uglier. Changing things for the sake of the IGL, in this case, is like sacrificing one's schedule to be with an accurate doll rather than a girlfriend/SO - you would be altering a useful units system for an equation that is interesting but has lost much of what is real about the phenomena it models.
sorry, I was wrong - falsifiable means able to be disproven (I thought it was the opposite - the meaning I was using (incorrectly) was that another theory can replace the theory under discussion but give the same observable output).
With the rest of your response - I'm not trying to be annoying but can you please give examples of non-falsifiable statements in science? I have operated under nonfalsifiability as an axiomatic property of science, which made sense to me (it doesn't make sense to ask a question if I can't get meaningful answers, or more properly, if I can't distinguish yes from no). It would be good to know when this is incorrect.
I'm out of my depth in the second part of your response (the inability to distinguish meaningful statements from meaningless ones) - I don't know if this is related to Chomsky's statement of grammar and meaning (grammar can't distinguish meaningful from meaningless statements either). In the case of grammar (if I'm even in the stadium here) grammar doesn't exist to determine meaning, but to provide a framework in which to communicate meaning. People make lots of ungrammatical statements; their grammatical incorrectness doesn't imply that the statements aren't meaningful, and the ability of people to make grammatically correct statements does not imply that those statements are meaningful. I didn't believe that science's role was to determine meaning, but only to determine order - unless order defines the meaning as a consequence, which isn't assured, science doesn't operate on meaning.
I wrote the last part of the response to argue that if ID is not science does not imply that it is meaningless. "Why Religions Exist" (I can't remember the author but he's a sort of liberal, comparative religion person) talks about religion as a superset of knowledge - science can operate on some of the knowledge that religion lays claim to but not all of it, and so there is some knowledge in religion that is not contained in science. If this is an accurate picture of knowledge, ID could be an element in that set. ID as an element not is science != ID being meaningless.
I don't see the utility of ID as a scientific theory. The method of science I'm used to is: ask a question, generate potential answers, define how I can tell those answers apart, go and find out information, see which (if any) of my potential answers fits observation, go back to step 2 if nothing is correct, go back to step 3 if one or more answers is correct, and if all the available data is consistent, publish or otherwise disclose the theory. If I can't tell ID apart from any competing theories, I can't ask any questions in science that hold any meaning within science. While the difference between ID and evolution may be large in terms of spirit (although what if a Creator used evolution to build a world - although Dawkins may have answered this), and thus meaningful to my behavior and thoughts, for science it doesn't seem to have any meaning. ID is a black box, and it seems to be a black box as part of its nature rather than because we don't have a variable or measuring device to describe it.
The problem with ID is neither who believes in it or how probable it is, but whether it is a legitimate scientific theory.
In order to be a scientific theory, I have to be able to disprove it (at least theoretically) - there has to be a question whose answer differs between ID and evolution derivs. and whose answer could potentially be observed. ID seems to argue that low probabilities of events or sequences of events in evolution imply an external "designer", but depending on the length of a sequence of events (a series of lottery winners, for example, over a short period of time), arbitrarily improbable events happen, and on a regular basis. If probability doesn't distinguish a sequence of events mediated by a designer from one which is not (or if improbability axiomatically defines the presence of a designer), then ID is indistinguishable from evolution. When I asked if ID was disprovable to a person advocating ID at OSU, he replied that if a sequence of events could be found that were "probable enough" in the absence of a designer, it would disprove ID - what is "probable enough" is arbitrary, however, or useless in distinguishing the two theories.
Science deals with measureable quantities. In ID and evolution both, specific events had to have happened to get us to this point - whatever that sequence of events, either theory would have to account for them. Outside of observable variables, how does one distinguish ID from evolution? If a designer made the universe, then he had to manipulate physical reality, generating a sequence of events. Potentially, both evolution and ID would have to account for this sequence of events (a designer would be using observable forces, etc. and either theory would have to account for them to be complete), so what is left to distinguish them?
ID fails as a scientific theory because it doesn't have a way to distinguish a designed universe from an evolved universe. It's falsifiable, and so doesn't work. On a larger scale, this neither proves of disproves the existence of GodXXXa designer - it merely says that science doesn't have a useful answer to the question.
In your books (Snow Crash and Diamond Age particularly, because they deal with the future) you discuss moral and physical systems of the world - how people organize themselves to optimize their well-being or achievement or how groups work to do so. How do you think the world will organize itself in the future?
moderators: the analogy here may be inaccurate, but it isn't offtopic. The "less restrictive" rules that telemarketers favored were also less effective - thus telemarketers wanted to allow people to use only countermeasures against them that don't work.
Whether you think gun possession helps or hurts crime is another story, but the analogy isn't OT.
would be if the French (who helped us in our Revolutionary War) decided to choose our interim leaders and set conditions for elections of independent leaders but excluded those sections of the US from the elections that were opposed to them.
(The fights in Iraq now aren't to restore Saddam, since that is likely not possible, but either to eject the US and/or impose Islamic law on Iraq - the settlers in your analogy would not be fighting to restore the British, but either fighting to eject the French or fighting to welcome someone else - the Spanish perhaps?)
Our record on removing tyranny has been decidely mixed. Japan and Germany have been successes and independent of us, but much of Central (Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama) and South America (Chile) has been a playground for our interests for a long time. We helped to rectify that problem in Panama (and in Haiti), but that doesn't negate the fact that it was a problem we created. The Middle East has been a playground for lots of nations because of its oil - Iran and Iraq both have had a variety of "regime changes" facilitated by other nations without regard to the people who lived there, and a fair number of which the US participated in if not masterminded. It's not hard to see why people might not trust our motives (or our manipulation) as being well-intentioned and as being simply to remove Iraq from the arms of tyranny.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men. deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (via National Archives, www.archives.gov)
I don't think the people that signed the above document considered it a logic problem, either - the government they fought against was illegitimate because it imposed on them without their consent, and so the government they instituted was one where the consent of the people was required to exist. Other messages on this thread indicate that we intend only to let such areas of Iraq vote in national elections as agree with us - that doesn't sound either like freedom from tyranny or "consent of the governed". It sounds more like tyranny - a better tyranny than Saddam provided, but tyranny nonetheless.
Governments are legitimate insofar as they respect the will of their people. When a leader is manipulated by others either for personal gain or out of foolishness, he is no longer respected because he no longer represents his people, but the interests of another person or country.
The UK and Australian leaders supported us, but at the cost of alienating and ignoring the people they represented. Allawi was chosen by us; he may or may not represent the interests of the Iraqi people, but he was chosen to represent our interests - hence, his legitimacy as an Iraqi leader is suspect. (Having been a CIA asset doesn't help that either - would we tolerate the President having worked as an "asset" for British, Russian, or Chinese intelligence services?) Time will tell his true motives and effectiveness, but his past gives reason to question.
It seems pretty simple. Countries run by despots, dictators, etc. are denigrated because they ignore their people and do what they (or those who give them money or power) wish. After all, this is why (after other claims failed to pan out) we got rid of Saddam. Yet now the Dems criticize the Iraqi leader for being a paid political operative for our President, for acting in our interests rather than those of his people (they may or may not be the same thing) and the Dems are considered wrong for doing so. Democracy and legitimacy come from the interests of your people being first - not as an afterthought to what your previous employer tells you to do.
Criticizing countries for ignoring their people and doing what our President wants is wrong, but manipulating the leaders of other countries into being political operatives for your benefit is appropriate and just (all in the name of "democracy")? I must have missed Republican logic 101...
How can you do both? It's hard to say one supports the troops while sending them on a mission under false pretenses and without proper preparation (even previous military people under the great military leader Clinton (ha ha) recognized that armed uprising was likely if Hussein was removed in Iraq by force, something GWB et al. couldn't bother preparing for) while cutting their and their families' benefits, all the while touting the job as "Mission Accomplished". If the lack of military preparation or readiness was Clinton's fault, GWB should have come up with better/legitimate reasons why the military had to go when they did (announcing it all the while) rather than building up quietly and then executing.
Supporting the military (and the Constitution, and the economy) and supporting GWB are mutually exclusive.
When you make a movie, you make it not only for yourself but for the people who will want to see them. People go to movies to enjoy themselves, and to take home a part of the world that the people who made it bequeathed to them. Star Wars did that and was wildly successful; many, many people have internalized the world of Star Wars, built on to it, and fitted themselves into it. That's why, even twenty years later, the movies are still popular and still worth talking about.
By changing the movies, Lucas is appropriating not only his work but that of the people who have watched and internalized his world. If you want a movie which is alterable to your changing desires, don't release it. Once it's released, the movie is no longer yours exclusively - not quite the people's who made it, not quite the people who watched and enjoyed it.
Complaints about people's complaints on the alterations is like the complaints of stars about their fame. Some of fame's consequences are ridiculous, but they knew that when they set out to get there. Lucas set out to make a popular movie - and popular movies become as much the public's as the people who made them. If he wanted a private vision, then he should have left it there. I am glad that he didn't, but I am not suprised at the backlash - when you play with people's cherished memories, you are going to make life hard for a lot of people.
previous articles on/. have discussed the potential problems with data security caused by the use of large capacity compact storage devices. This makes sense...as long as MS writes the OS securely. If the controls are written badly, then they will become a hindrance to those who do want to do useful work and a loophole for people who would actually copy confidential data. Paraphrasing Gavin DeBecker, bad security fools everyone but the bad guys.
If the elections had been about rational choices in the first place, the person who wrote the description of this posting would have a reasonable point. However, the main flash points of presidential elections (or at least the issues that seemed to have most affected voter opinions and outcomes) have little to do with rational selection of presidential candidates. Furloughs and Willie Horton and VP Quayle's National Guard service to Clinton's affairs to Kerry's "falsification" of his records (and perhaps job loss for GWB - depending on how much one believes he and his appointees have influenced it and in what way), elections have been focused successfully on emotional issues and displacing other (perhaps) more substantive issues.
Given this history, it makes sense for MM to try to do what he is doing, since it has been employed by others in slightly different ways to good effect. Let his opponents argue against it (and perhaps others counterargue it); maybe they don't want to, but give them a chance to. Showing F911 might help people to vote for GWB or Kerry for the right reasons - they can at least see what Moore claims, and what others say is untrue, and people can decide.
Then again, it may be moot, because I don't see him getting the time.
Counterexample: when networks first started using logos and small advertisements over their shows, they attempted to be unobtrusive for the most part. Once they were accepted/tolerated, the ads got bigger and obtrusive. Now I have a pit crew (with sound effects) using a quarter of the screen every 10-15 min. (for about 20-30 s) on TBS during Aliens swapping tires (or whatever it is they do) on a NASCAR logo.
The problem comes down to: advertisers have no limits (as someone else here posted). They will do what it takes to get sales, and the successful ones have no internal limiter that tells them when to stop. Unless you complain loud and long when they get their foot in the door, they'll use techniques that put their presence in your house, on your couch, ordering pizza, and trying to crawl into your lap - like a dog, but without the cuteness or unconditional love.
if you managed to get a hold of ten terrorists that would vote against Bush in '04, that must mean that GWB's antiterror policy is working real well...
If you talked to OBL, I'm sure that GWB would probably appreciate it if you left his address with the CIA, along the with the locations of any WMD's (other than ours) in Iraq.
Re:Changed the view of the US?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In my opinion (I am a liberal, so you can take this with however large a grain of salt you need), GWB has other (legitimate) flaws that have been problematic. A lot of the problem rests in the way that he (and his party) have chosen to do business.
Cheney's secrecy with energy policy, the issues with policy in the EPA that precipitated Whitmam's departure, the loss of GWB's SecTreas and R. Clarke, and the way in which the Republican Congress has approached legislation (including the Patriot Act and the drug insurance act) all point at the issue that I have with GWB; his righteousness. In the Bible (presumably part of where he gets this feeling), righteousness is a good quality, because the operating assumption is that God is absolutely good and that following what He wants is thus infallible. Government and diplomacy operate on a different ethos. Government have abused unbounded power in the past, so openness and accountability are used as ways to evaluate the "righteousness" of a government. In addition, governments are accountable to their people - rather than telling people what they should be, government is there to help people be want they want and to guard the rights of others in the process. GWB and the RP have chosen the most confrontational ways to achieve policy goals and have curtailed the openness that allows people to trust their government.
Ashcroft is disliked, but he is simply an avatar of GWB's approach. GWB wants power, not out of corruption, but because he believes that he knows what is right and wants to do it. In a democracy (or an approximation thereof), this is dangerous, particularly when his manner curtails openness. There is some inconsistency with GWB's stated or implied goals and methods (fiscal conservatism and his spending are not consistent, for example; securing freedom while curtailing its expression and criticizing such expression as anti-American is another) - without openness, one doesn't know whether the inconsistency arises from lack of forethought, honest mistakes, dishonesty or something worse.
Bush's dawdling on security policy before 9/11 was a mistake - I don't think he saw anything coming but he ignored the advice of people who knew there might be a problem and who had no motive to mislead GWB. I haven't read the last Clancy nonfiction book, but its subject criticizes GWB because he ignored the advice of the military and prior art on the potential problems with a "regime change" in Iraq; after three years of pondering, someone might have thought about the consequence of invading a country which supports terrorists (GWB) and/or has one of the largest secret police forces in the world.
In matters of policy, GWB dictates to others what they should do. Not only does this rub people the wrong when he is right, but the consequences of his policy have been mixed and inconsistent with his claims. While being sure is a useful quality in a president, being sure in the presence of contrary evidence without explanation does not lead people to trust him. This certainty has bad enough effects on its own, as above; it probably also leads to the irrelevant jibes at his speech - the mistakes make people wonder why GWB is so certain, and if they mistrust him already, amplifies that mistrust.
GWB is made fun of for some reasons that are unfair, but his manner both provides legitimate reason to question and amplifies the effect of silly mistakes.
I don't think most people will care about DRM, either. But they will care if they can't watch their shows without sitting through moronic commercials that they can't skip (when they can remember being able to decide being able to do precisely that) or when they can't watch it more than a week later. These are the characteristics of the digital broadcast flag that TV fought for. While nonphysical DVD replacements might provide lots of convenience, it's more likely that their producers will use them to support broken business models, giving consumers less for their money than before.
Consumers won't care if content is DRMd, until they find that it denies them what they want and handcuffs them to something they don't. Content producers desire DRM so that they can sell what they want, rather than what the public actually wants - copyright infringement comes into play because customers weren't getting what they wanted for what they wanted to pay from content providers. There's no reason to expect that content providers with ironclad DRM will be any more respectful of their customers' desires than they are now, and if that's the case what they sell later won't be as attractive as what people have now - it will cost more and be more restrictive. At that point, people will care - either they'll get angry, or find new ways to infringe copyright, neither of which bodes well for the people selling DRM.
This is all about control. With physical media, the user can control what is done with it. The DRM/copy-protection on discs can't stop anyone, and so any attempts to manage the end users' rights fail, because the end users can circumvent the restrictions. If the people who own the copyrights abuse their customers with them, the customers have the ability to screw the copyright owners back, by distributing their works. Even non-physical works can be controlled, because computers can store the data until it can be broken, or can simply store the unencrypted stream - physical media make it easier, and allow users to store and keep content that its providers don't want kept.
MS desires DRM (particularly hardware DRM), as do many of/. favorite copyright-/monopoly-protecting organizations, Hardware DRM prevents users from storing or manipulating digital works, and thus prevents users from being able to do anything with content that its providers don't want done. The problem with this fantasy is users want to control the content they pay for - that's why DIVX went down in a ball of flame. Users don't want to be forced to sit through commercials, to pay to watch movies they "own", to be forced to listen to what music companies say they should listen to. Physical media allow users to exercise the rights that they fought for and desire. The movement away from physical media and towards hardware DRM is the content providers' attempt to reassert control over their works and to enforce their pricing schemes.
This is just another attempt for the people that sell content to tell people what they want and force-feed it to them, rather than selling what their customers want. I hope that the market will greet them with the silence (and the lack of sales) that their contempt deserves.
While it's hard for a small armed group to take over a country, at least a few major insurrections (China with Mao, N. Vietnam - while eventually they had big army support, Afghanistan) started out that way. In addition, all a small group like that has to do is make it impossible to govern - the problem in Iraq, etc. indicate that this isn't so hard to do.
If someone can take your life without fear, they can (and probably will) take whatever else they want.
I wouldn't doubt that there is illegal uploading/downloading going on, but I'd have a hard time trust any of the **AAs as unbiased sources...
While the SPI has a good reputation (I think) I can help but wonder if this article might have something to do with a little software company in Washington who has a deep and abiding interest in software- and hardware-based DRM schemes. Hyping the threat to companies from "software terrorists" is a prerequisite for the kind of digital rights infringement that Microsoft and other want to sell the public and content providers.
This doesn't mean that copying isn't happening, just that someone nearby has an incentive to make the problem appear larger than it is.
"If there isn't a Second Amendment, there won't be a First Amendment."
Guns are used to kill lots of people. If their complete abolition (their nonexistence) were possible, then the merits of gun debates become more relevant (because you could prevent those people from dying). The problem is that someone (government, insurgents, etc.) will always have guns - as long as they are produced (and since they are invaluable military weapons, that will likely be a very long time) someone will be able to get them. It's only a matter of how amoral one needs to be to do so.
If the gov't has the power to take your life without the ability to stop it, then they can take anything they want - your ability to to speak or believe freely, to gather publicly, etc. While I don't seriously expect an armed revolt in the US to succeed, the potential of one is likely to make a government more likely to behave well than in its absence. Another poster in this thread said it well; governments in their desire for control have killed far more people than terrorists and other agents of violence. The fear of government (or at least of unrestrained gov't) seems more reasonable than the fear of terrorists or individuals with guns.
There is also of course the 9th (or 10th?) Amendment to the US Constitution, in which the people or the states hold rights not expressly given to the federal gov't - power comes from the people, not from the gov't.
While I don't like guns, their costs (people that die by or are injured by gun violence) are likely less than that of a government without accountability (without ability to secure their rights, people cannot demand anything of government) which their "absence" (lack of legal possession) would likely cause.
If I'm OT or have imputed beliefs to you that you don't have, I'm sorry.
If you have lots of people and no money, you go for solutions that use manpower (what you have) and avoid expensive equipment (that you don't have or can't afford). If you have lots of money but few people, you buy solutions, because your time is more valuable than your money.
You use what you have - if you have lots of people, then you use them. Where money is tight, you only buy what you can't get another way. Since with software India has a choice (commercial or OS solutions), they can throw programmers at problems and save their money for situations where they don't have another way. They can afford to be inefficient with people, but not with money, so even if the solutions aren't efficient, if they save money they make more sense than efficient solutions that cost lots of money (that they don't have).
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...how exactly is that a small market? 51% of 120M people and pregnant women (who you can be sure will drag friends and boyfriends/husbands with them by force or threat) doesn't exactly seem negligible. The Passion of the Christ was driven by a significantly smaller market than that and it did pretty well. While it likely to appeal to a less cohesive market, it's not a small one.
Pres. Bush argues that his Administration's policies (particularly the foreign policies, but presumably the domestic ones as well) are intended to strengthen the cause of freedom and democracy in the world. While the people abroad shouldn't choose our President, they are an important part of W's policies abroad - democracy doesn't work with slaves or droids, only with people capable of thinking and choosing for themselves. Since W needs their help to make this happen, shutting them out from information on his intentions, motivation, and means doesn't exactly help to convince others in the world that we view them as people rather than as objects of our will or that he has their best interests at heart. Since the "go it alone" plan is probably not going to be effective on a larger scale than the at which is currently employed (one might argue it isn't effective now...), W needs the help of the world to make his goals reality. Shutting them out only tells them that they don't matter, in opposition to W's stated goals and to the interests of those whose help he needs.
So, while non-US citizens are irrelevant to who is elected President, they aren't irrelevant to how he fares if he is reelected, or whether his goals are actually achieved. If W believes what he says, their opinions do matter, because if they don't, his goals are either lies or doomed to failure (or both).
and as long as we continue to have (somewhat) open borders, the NKs (or people paid/allied with them) can come over and use US computers to DDoS W's website. The 9/11 people had valid ID - there is no reason to expect that a foreign gov't with malevolent intent for our election couldn't get a few people into the US to nuke his website.
Denying access to W's website from abroad might be likely to protect against spammer-type attacks from abroad, but it isn't an effective defense against gov't-sanctioned attacks on his website.
the attacks would be harder to stop, but I'm guessing there are plenty of people in the US who would love to DDoS Pres. Bush's website. Why would people outside the US be the only security threat to his website?
Why do chemists use an unattractive form of the Ideal Gas Law? Well, using numbers ending in 6.022e23 is kind of inconvenient for any mass of material that a chemist would use on a daily basis. Chemists work with mg-kg of material; at those scales, counting particles as a unit of mass is impractical and inconvenient. It's better instead to convert to units that approximate the unit scale on which one works.
Physicists are likely to deal with particles, hence the use of particles as a unit is reasonable, in addition to the fact that they are more likely to work with equations that get ugly when using molar units (the same goes for some physical chemists). For most chemists, molar weights are a far more useful measure of mass than particles would be. The beauty of the IGL if particles were used as the unit is far outweighed by the awkwardness of the use of particles as units for most things chemists do.
The additional factor is the IGL is only an approximation - a good starting point for understanding how gases behave, but not useful for high precision measurements, at low temperatures or at high pressures. The more accurate versions of the IGL for these circumstances are much uglier. Changing things for the sake of the IGL, in this case, is like sacrificing one's schedule to be with an accurate doll rather than a girlfriend/SO - you would be altering a useful units system for an equation that is interesting but has lost much of what is real about the phenomena it models.
yes, I am a chemist....
sorry, I was wrong - falsifiable means able to be disproven (I thought it was the opposite - the meaning I was using (incorrectly) was that another theory can replace the theory under discussion but give the same observable output).
With the rest of your response - I'm not trying to be annoying but can you please give examples of non-falsifiable statements in science? I have operated under nonfalsifiability as an axiomatic property of science, which made sense to me (it doesn't make sense to ask a question if I can't get meaningful answers, or more properly, if I can't distinguish yes from no). It would be good to know when this is incorrect.
I'm out of my depth in the second part of your response (the inability to distinguish meaningful statements from meaningless ones) - I don't know if this is related to Chomsky's statement of grammar and meaning (grammar can't distinguish meaningful from meaningless statements either). In the case of grammar (if I'm even in the stadium here) grammar doesn't exist to determine meaning, but to provide a framework in which to communicate meaning. People make lots of ungrammatical statements; their grammatical incorrectness doesn't imply that the statements aren't meaningful, and the ability of people to make grammatically correct statements does not imply that those statements are meaningful. I didn't believe that science's role was to determine meaning, but only to determine order - unless order defines the meaning as a consequence, which isn't assured, science doesn't operate on meaning.
I wrote the last part of the response to argue that if ID is not science does not imply that it is meaningless. "Why Religions Exist" (I can't remember the author but he's a sort of liberal, comparative religion person) talks about religion as a superset of knowledge - science can operate on some of the knowledge that religion lays claim to but not all of it, and so there is some knowledge in religion that is not contained in science. If this is an accurate picture of knowledge, ID could be an element in that set. ID as an element not is science != ID being meaningless.
I don't see the utility of ID as a scientific theory. The method of science I'm used to is: ask a question, generate potential answers, define how I can tell those answers apart, go and find out information, see which (if any) of my potential answers fits observation, go back to step 2 if nothing is correct, go back to step 3 if one or more answers is correct, and if all the available data is consistent, publish or otherwise disclose the theory. If I can't tell ID apart from any competing theories, I can't ask any questions in science that hold any meaning within science. While the difference between ID and evolution may be large in terms of spirit (although what if a Creator used evolution to build a world - although Dawkins may have answered this), and thus meaningful to my behavior and thoughts, for science it doesn't seem to have any meaning. ID is a black box, and it seems to be a black box as part of its nature rather than because we don't have a variable or measuring device to describe it.
The problem with ID is neither who believes in it or how probable it is, but whether it is a legitimate scientific theory.
In order to be a scientific theory, I have to be able to disprove it (at least theoretically) - there has to be a question whose answer differs between ID and evolution derivs. and whose answer could potentially be observed. ID seems to argue that low probabilities of events or sequences of events in evolution imply an external "designer", but depending on the length of a sequence of events (a series of lottery winners, for example, over a short period of time), arbitrarily improbable events happen, and on a regular basis. If probability doesn't distinguish a sequence of events mediated by a designer from one which is not (or if improbability axiomatically defines the presence of a designer), then ID is indistinguishable from evolution. When I asked if ID was disprovable to a person advocating ID at OSU, he replied that if a sequence of events could be found that were "probable enough" in the absence of a designer, it would disprove ID - what is "probable enough" is arbitrary, however, or useless in distinguishing the two theories.
Science deals with measureable quantities. In ID and evolution both, specific events had to have happened to get us to this point - whatever that sequence of events, either theory would have to account for them. Outside of observable variables, how does one distinguish ID from evolution? If a designer made the universe, then he had to manipulate physical reality, generating a sequence of events. Potentially, both evolution and ID would have to account for this sequence of events (a designer would be using observable forces, etc. and either theory would have to account for them to be complete), so what is left to distinguish them?
ID fails as a scientific theory because it doesn't have a way to distinguish a designed universe from an evolved universe. It's falsifiable, and so doesn't work. On a larger scale, this neither proves of disproves the existence of GodXXXa designer - it merely says that science doesn't have a useful answer to the question.
Mr. Stephenson,
In your books (Snow Crash and Diamond Age particularly, because they deal with the future) you discuss moral and physical systems of the world - how people organize themselves to optimize their well-being or achievement or how groups work to do so. How do you think the world will organize itself in the future?
moderators: the analogy here may be inaccurate, but it isn't offtopic. The "less restrictive" rules that telemarketers favored were also less effective - thus telemarketers wanted to allow people to use only countermeasures against them that don't work.
Whether you think gun possession helps or hurts crime is another story, but the analogy isn't OT.
would be if the French (who helped us in our Revolutionary War) decided to choose our interim leaders and set conditions for elections of independent leaders but excluded those sections of the US from the elections that were opposed to them.
(The fights in Iraq now aren't to restore Saddam, since that is likely not possible, but either to eject the US and/or impose Islamic law on Iraq - the settlers in your analogy would not be fighting to restore the British, but either fighting to eject the French or fighting to welcome someone else - the Spanish perhaps?)
Our record on removing tyranny has been decidely mixed. Japan and Germany have been successes and independent of us, but much of Central (Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama) and South America (Chile) has been a playground for our interests for a long time. We helped to rectify that problem in Panama (and in Haiti), but that doesn't negate the fact that it was a problem we created. The Middle East has been a playground for lots of nations because of its oil - Iran and Iraq both have had a variety of "regime changes" facilitated by other nations without regard to the people who lived there, and a fair number of which the US participated in if not masterminded. It's not hard to see why people might not trust our motives (or our manipulation) as being well-intentioned and as being simply to remove Iraq from the arms of tyranny.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men. deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (via National Archives, www.archives.gov)
I don't think the people that signed the above document considered it a logic problem, either - the government they fought against was illegitimate because it imposed on them without their consent, and so the government they instituted was one where the consent of the people was required to exist. Other messages on this thread indicate that we intend only to let such areas of Iraq vote in national elections as agree with us - that doesn't sound either like freedom from tyranny or "consent of the governed". It sounds more like tyranny - a better tyranny than Saddam provided, but tyranny nonetheless.
Governments are legitimate insofar as they respect the will of their people. When a leader is manipulated by others either for personal gain or out of foolishness, he is no longer respected because he no longer represents his people, but the interests of another person or country.
The UK and Australian leaders supported us, but at the cost of alienating and ignoring the people they represented. Allawi was chosen by us; he may or may not represent the interests of the Iraqi people, but he was chosen to represent our interests - hence, his legitimacy as an Iraqi leader is suspect. (Having been a CIA asset doesn't help that either - would we tolerate the President having worked as an "asset" for British, Russian, or Chinese intelligence services?) Time will tell his true motives and effectiveness, but his past gives reason to question.
It seems pretty simple. Countries run by despots, dictators, etc. are denigrated because they ignore their people and do what they (or those who give them money or power) wish. After all, this is why (after other claims failed to pan out) we got rid of Saddam. Yet now the Dems criticize the Iraqi leader for being a paid political operative for our President, for acting in our interests rather than those of his people (they may or may not be the same thing) and the Dems are considered wrong for doing so. Democracy and legitimacy come from the interests of your people being first - not as an afterthought to what your previous employer tells you to do.
Criticizing countries for ignoring their people and doing what our President wants is wrong, but manipulating the leaders of other countries into being political operatives for your benefit is appropriate and just (all in the name of "democracy")? I must have missed Republican logic 101...
How can you do both? It's hard to say one supports the troops while sending them on a mission under false pretenses and without proper preparation (even previous military people under the great military leader Clinton (ha ha) recognized that armed uprising was likely if Hussein was removed in Iraq by force, something GWB et al. couldn't bother preparing for) while cutting their and their families' benefits, all the while touting the job as "Mission Accomplished". If the lack of military preparation or readiness was Clinton's fault, GWB should have come up with better/legitimate reasons why the military had to go when they did (announcing it all the while) rather than building up quietly and then executing.
Supporting the military (and the Constitution, and the economy) and supporting GWB are mutually exclusive.
...when he released them.
When you make a movie, you make it not only for yourself but for the people who will want to see them. People go to movies to enjoy themselves, and to take home a part of the world that the people who made it bequeathed to them. Star Wars did that and was wildly successful; many, many people have internalized the world of Star Wars, built on to it, and fitted themselves into it. That's why, even twenty years later, the movies are still popular and still worth talking about.
By changing the movies, Lucas is appropriating not only his work but that of the people who have watched and internalized his world. If you want a movie which is alterable to your changing desires, don't release it. Once it's released, the movie is no longer yours exclusively - not quite the people's who made it, not quite the people who watched and enjoyed it.
Complaints about people's complaints on the alterations is like the complaints of stars about their fame. Some of fame's consequences are ridiculous, but they knew that when they set out to get there. Lucas set out to make a popular movie - and popular movies become as much the public's as the people who made them. If he wanted a private vision, then he should have left it there. I am glad that he didn't, but I am not suprised at the backlash - when you play with people's cherished memories, you are going to make life hard for a lot of people.
previous articles on /. have discussed the potential problems with data security caused by the use of large capacity compact storage devices. This makes sense...as long as MS writes the OS securely. If the controls are written badly, then they will become a hindrance to those who do want to do useful work and a loophole for people who would actually copy confidential data. Paraphrasing Gavin DeBecker, bad security fools everyone but the bad guys.
If the elections had been about rational choices in the first place, the person who wrote the description of this posting would have a reasonable point. However, the main flash points of presidential elections (or at least the issues that seemed to have most affected voter opinions and outcomes) have little to do with rational selection of presidential candidates. Furloughs and Willie Horton and VP Quayle's National Guard service to Clinton's affairs to Kerry's "falsification" of his records (and perhaps job loss for GWB - depending on how much one believes he and his appointees have influenced it and in what way), elections have been focused successfully on emotional issues and displacing other (perhaps) more substantive issues.
Given this history, it makes sense for MM to try to do what he is doing, since it has been employed by others in slightly different ways to good effect. Let his opponents argue against it (and perhaps others counterargue it); maybe they don't want to, but give them a chance to. Showing F911 might help people to vote for GWB or Kerry for the right reasons - they can at least see what Moore claims, and what others say is untrue, and people can decide.
Then again, it may be moot, because I don't see him getting the time.
Counterexample: when networks first started using logos and small advertisements over their shows, they attempted to be unobtrusive for the most part. Once they were accepted/tolerated, the ads got bigger and obtrusive. Now I have a pit crew (with sound effects) using a quarter of the screen every 10-15 min. (for about 20-30 s) on TBS during Aliens swapping tires (or whatever it is they do) on a NASCAR logo.
The problem comes down to: advertisers have no limits (as someone else here posted). They will do what it takes to get sales, and the successful ones have no internal limiter that tells them when to stop. Unless you complain loud and long when they get their foot in the door, they'll use techniques that put their presence in your house, on your couch, ordering pizza, and trying to crawl into your lap - like a dog, but without the cuteness or unconditional love.
if you managed to get a hold of ten terrorists that would vote against Bush in '04, that must mean that GWB's antiterror policy is working real well...
If you talked to OBL, I'm sure that GWB would probably appreciate it if you left his address with the CIA, along the with the locations of any WMD's (other than ours) in Iraq.
In my opinion (I am a liberal, so you can take this with however large a grain of salt you need), GWB has other (legitimate) flaws that have been problematic. A lot of the problem rests in the way that he (and his party) have chosen to do business.
Cheney's secrecy with energy policy, the issues with policy in the EPA that precipitated Whitmam's departure, the loss of GWB's SecTreas and R. Clarke, and the way in which the Republican Congress has approached legislation (including the Patriot Act and the drug insurance act) all point at the issue that I have with GWB; his righteousness. In the Bible (presumably part of where he gets this feeling), righteousness is a good quality, because the operating assumption is that God is absolutely good and that following what He wants is thus infallible. Government and diplomacy operate on a different ethos. Government have abused unbounded power in the past, so openness and accountability are used as ways to evaluate the "righteousness" of a government. In addition, governments are accountable to their people - rather than telling people what they should be, government is there to help people be want they want and to guard the rights of others in the process. GWB and the RP have chosen the most confrontational ways to achieve policy goals and have curtailed the openness that allows people to trust their government.
Ashcroft is disliked, but he is simply an avatar of GWB's approach. GWB wants power, not out of corruption, but because he believes that he knows what is right and wants to do it. In a democracy (or an approximation thereof), this is dangerous, particularly when his manner curtails openness. There is some inconsistency with GWB's stated or implied goals and methods (fiscal conservatism and his spending are not consistent, for example; securing freedom while curtailing its expression and criticizing such expression as anti-American is another) - without openness, one doesn't know whether the inconsistency arises from lack of forethought, honest mistakes, dishonesty or something worse.
Bush's dawdling on security policy before 9/11 was a mistake - I don't think he saw anything coming but he ignored the advice of people who knew there might be a problem and who had no motive to mislead GWB. I haven't read the last Clancy nonfiction book, but its subject criticizes GWB because he ignored the advice of the military and prior art on the potential problems with a "regime change" in Iraq; after three years of pondering, someone might have thought about the consequence of invading a country which supports terrorists (GWB) and/or has one of the largest secret police forces in the world.
In matters of policy, GWB dictates to others what they should do. Not only does this rub people the wrong when he is right, but the consequences of his policy have been mixed and inconsistent with his claims. While being sure is a useful quality in a president, being sure in the presence of contrary evidence without explanation does not lead people to trust him. This certainty has bad enough effects on its own, as above; it probably also leads to the irrelevant jibes at his speech - the mistakes make people wonder why GWB is so certain, and if they mistrust him already, amplifies that mistrust.
GWB is made fun of for some reasons that are unfair, but his manner both provides legitimate reason to question and amplifies the effect of silly mistakes.
I don't think most people will care about DRM, either. But they will care if they can't watch their shows without sitting through moronic commercials that they can't skip (when they can remember being able to decide being able to do precisely that) or when they can't watch it more than a week later. These are the characteristics of the digital broadcast flag that TV fought for. While nonphysical DVD replacements might provide lots of convenience, it's more likely that their producers will use them to support broken business models, giving consumers less for their money than before.
Consumers won't care if content is DRMd, until they find that it denies them what they want and handcuffs them to something they don't. Content producers desire DRM so that they can sell what they want, rather than what the public actually wants - copyright infringement comes into play because customers weren't getting what they wanted for what they wanted to pay from content providers. There's no reason to expect that content providers with ironclad DRM will be any more respectful of their customers' desires than they are now, and if that's the case what they sell later won't be as attractive as what people have now - it will cost more and be more restrictive. At that point, people will care - either they'll get angry, or find new ways to infringe copyright, neither of which bodes well for the people selling DRM.
This is all about control. With physical media, the user can control what is done with it. The DRM/copy-protection on discs can't stop anyone, and so any attempts to manage the end users' rights fail, because the end users can circumvent the restrictions. If the people who own the copyrights abuse their customers with them, the customers have the ability to screw the copyright owners back, by distributing their works. Even non-physical works can be controlled, because computers can store the data until it can be broken, or can simply store the unencrypted stream - physical media make it easier, and allow users to store and keep content that its providers don't want kept.
/. favorite copyright-/monopoly-protecting organizations, Hardware DRM prevents users from storing or manipulating digital works, and thus prevents users from being able to do anything with content that its providers don't want done. The problem with this fantasy is users want to control the content they pay for - that's why DIVX went down in a ball of flame. Users don't want to be forced to sit through commercials, to pay to watch movies they "own", to be forced to listen to what music companies say they should listen to. Physical media allow users to exercise the rights that they fought for and desire. The movement away from physical media and towards hardware DRM is the content providers' attempt to reassert control over their works and to enforce their pricing schemes.
MS desires DRM (particularly hardware DRM), as do many of
This is just another attempt for the people that sell content to tell people what they want and force-feed it to them, rather than selling what their customers want. I hope that the market will greet them with the silence (and the lack of sales) that their contempt deserves.
While it's hard for a small armed group to take over a country, at least a few major insurrections (China with Mao, N. Vietnam - while eventually they had big army support, Afghanistan) started out that way. In addition, all a small group like that has to do is make it impossible to govern - the problem in Iraq, etc. indicate that this isn't so hard to do.
If someone can take your life without fear, they can (and probably will) take whatever else they want.
I wouldn't doubt that there is illegal uploading/downloading going on, but I'd have a hard time trust any of the **AAs as unbiased sources...
While the SPI has a good reputation (I think) I can help but wonder if this article might have something to do with a little software company in Washington who has a deep and abiding interest in software- and hardware-based DRM schemes. Hyping the threat to companies from "software terrorists" is a prerequisite for the kind of digital rights infringement that Microsoft and other want to sell the public and content providers.
This doesn't mean that copying isn't happening, just that someone nearby has an incentive to make the problem appear larger than it is.
"If there isn't a Second Amendment, there won't be a First Amendment."
Guns are used to kill lots of people. If their complete abolition (their nonexistence) were possible, then the merits of gun debates become more relevant (because you could prevent those people from dying). The problem is that someone (government, insurgents, etc.) will always have guns - as long as they are produced (and since they are invaluable military weapons, that will likely be a very long time) someone will be able to get them. It's only a matter of how amoral one needs to be to do so.
If the gov't has the power to take your life without the ability to stop it, then they can take anything they want - your ability to to speak or believe freely, to gather publicly, etc. While I don't seriously expect an armed revolt in the US to succeed, the potential of one is likely to make a government more likely to behave well than in its absence. Another poster in this thread said it well; governments in their desire for control have killed far more people than terrorists and other agents of violence. The fear of government (or at least of unrestrained gov't) seems more reasonable than the fear of terrorists or individuals with guns.
There is also of course the 9th (or 10th?) Amendment to the US Constitution, in which the people or the states hold rights not expressly given to the federal gov't - power comes from the people, not from the gov't.
While I don't like guns, their costs (people that die by or are injured by gun violence) are likely less than that of a government without accountability (without ability to secure their rights, people cannot demand anything of government) which their "absence" (lack of legal possession) would likely cause.
If I'm OT or have imputed beliefs to you that you don't have, I'm sorry.
If you have lots of people and no money, you go for solutions that use manpower (what you have) and avoid expensive equipment (that you don't have or can't afford). If you have lots of money but few people, you buy solutions, because your time is more valuable than your money.
You use what you have - if you have lots of people, then you use them. Where money is tight, you only buy what you can't get another way. Since with software India has a choice (commercial or OS solutions), they can throw programmers at problems and save their money for situations where they don't have another way. They can afford to be inefficient with people, but not with money, so even if the solutions aren't efficient, if they save money they make more sense than efficient solutions that cost lots of money (that they don't have).