I regret that I have to agree with the assessment that it's not just a few bad apples and a lot of good cops. What convinced me of this was the foreclosure crisis. We had the occasional isolated sheriff's dept. that tried to insist the banks follow the law just like everybody they were foreclosing on, and refused to evict people until the banks would at least show somewhat where they'd made the calls, sent the letters or filed the proper paperwork, but those people were literally one in a thousand, as in, out of every thousand counties in the US, one person in the department at least raised some objections. If most cops were really honest, we'd see one hell of a lot better average than that.* If most DAs were really trying to follow the law, again, we'd see an incredibly better average than that.
* To be fair, in most places eviction warrants are served by the county sheriff's personnel, and issued only by one select set of judges. In theory that proves there is an overwhelming lot of 'just following orders' syndrome there, but it's still theoretically possible that city or state or federal police agencies could be incredibly honest on the average, and it's somehow just sheriff's depts. or related court's Judges and DA's that are so overwhelmingly screwed up. Does anyone really buy that?
The thing is, this test does reveal a few honest sheriffs, DAs who try to actually follow the law, and such. If you really want good police in this country, lets start getting up petitions for these people to run for higher office, like Governor! They're that exceptionally ethical - why don't we try to fast track them to positions where they can really accomplish something?
I don't know whether the parent poster is implying that she's just lucky, or if you're inferring it instead. Either way, here's another way to interpret it.
1. A basic reason for the press to be able to watch the police and publish the results is to oppose police corruption. Even a 'mere' blogger in this context enjoys the right to be protected in this, as it is clearly political speech, and that is the most important focus of our first amendment protections.
2. Corrupt police are precisely the kind who might attempt to stifle such speech by violence, quite possibly including murder, and not just by making an unjustified arrest. That the police in this case did not, suggests they are either trying to do their jobs honestly, or they are, at least somewhat ethical, somewhat inclined to follow their formal training, or significantly reluctant to go to such extremes as simply making a problem person disappear.
3. Many of us suspect there are cops out there in some locales, who would bend the rules much further or flat out break all the basic rules of society. It's because of them that point 1 is necessary - that is constitutional recognition of such substantial freedom of the press in dealing with police is justified by how serious some cases of police corruption can be. But, point 2 suggests that this case may not be severe enough to justify all the normally protected press tactics. So there are legitimate questions, such as: Is there any way to limit either the press or the police that will still balance everyone's rights - the general public's right to get rid of bad cops, the press's right to report them, the right of the individual cops themselves to have a private life off duty, or of the police on duty to use such methods as unmarked cars to help them enforce the law? And, assuming it's even possible, are there any needs to impose such limits?
A couple of months ago, I e-mailed my state Governor's office (Tennessee) over a problem. I got a personal reply from one of his assistants, giving me several contact names and phone numbers within 24 hours. One of those contacts called me faster than I could call them. I got a full solution for a problem that, as it turned out, actually spanned several departments of the government involved, within five days, including everyone involved identifying themselves, telling me what steps they planned to take and when they would do them by, giving me contact information if there was anything else, handling most of the problem by phone and following up with a written final document that resolved everything to my complete satisfaction.
Ohh, but that's one of those inefficient government things, where they control the use of force and so don't have to cooperate, rather than a nice, efficient business situations where mutual, non-coercive conditions mean a swift resolution is the general rule out of enlightened self interest. (Go ahead Slash-libertarians, pile all over this). And no, I am not a contributor to either my Governor's last campaign or his party, but I will be next time.
And I deal with the IRS in situations where sometimes a physical document absolutely must be in the mail within 24 hours of my receiving it from a client or I am subject to fine. To be frank, the world sometimes works far faster than you do. Maybe you can accomplish good, meaningful work with processes taking 3 month cycles and more, but even some legal proceedings are nowadays based on a lot less time than that. One month and 13 days actually sounds like a reasonable time, and depending on the venue, may be giving the other side more, perhaps much more, than average time to respond.
You probably can charge a reasonable amount for handling as well, although there's always the risk with that pesky word reasonable that your definition of reasonable may exceed the court's definition.
Coming at it from another angle, every couple of years there's an article about how even in the Western world, some absurdly large proportion of companies use pirated software. What makes you think that the GPL will make them suddenly compliant?
I wouldn't expect all of them to suddenly comply, and I have a low enough opinion of some companies that I fully expect they would deliberately never comply, even if it bites them on the butt repeatedly for not complying.
There still is a difference. the ratio of costs and benefits for compliance is different, usually far, far in Linux's favor. If a company understands how that open source aided its own developers, and how much alternatives, such as the price of privileged access to MS's internal calls, would cost them, they ought to see that as somebody playing fair with them (in the limited sense that all the cards are on the table - no hidden aces up the Linux source's sleeve). Many won't, of course - but the more they abuse the license, the more obviously they become self identifying: They don't think anyone else ever plays fair, and they don't ever play fair with anyone else.
Zombies and Vampires, and maybe some others. But one thing that makes zombies the most overused cliche evah is that ALL these zombies are just a subset of Night of the Living Dead's zombies. The whole sudden lunges, eat brains, massively multiplying zombies trend ignores Zombies as they used to be in film and print fiction before Romero. The only films I can think of offhand that portrayed old fashioned Zombies after NotLD is the two Phil Lovecraft Private Eye movies made for HBO - "Cast a Deadly Spell" and "Witch Hunt". Even though those two films went straight back to old shambling occultly animated corpses for the zombie parts, they also had more originality, novelty and style overall than a whole host of modern zombie flicks put together.
It's like somebody (the George Romero equivalent in my car analogy) had the idea to make NASCAR, and practically everybody else on the planet took one look, and stopped doing Formula One racing, Drag racing, Motocross, and even the Olympic Luge to take their best shot at creating a thousand identical clones of NASCAR.
Something that has the potential to either eat or infect you may stay frightening for a long time, but they lost any traces of cool remaining about 20 years ago, in the same way that you can't have a guitarist, a bassist, a keyboard player and a drummer in your four guy group, record a bunch of tracks that are all 3 min. 14 sec. long, and still be cool. A moratorium hell! - somebody needs to tell these people they are so far from cool they would barely approach lukewarm if somebody gave them a liquid helium enema on Pluto.
Until the end he thought he was in the right and had the moral justification to do those things.
Can this really be safely assumed? Even if it is fair to assume for Jolly Old Adolph himself, isn't it just as reasonable to assume that at least some of the major Nazis didn't buy into the arguments that it was the Aryan race against racially inferior contaminants? Maybe Gobels or Reinhardt Heydrich really believed all the arguments that 'excused' their atrocities, but it seems as likely that some of them just saw how convenient having scapegoats for any screw ups would be.
It's a fundamental paradox. Many of us regard true evil as including a self destructive component as well as an other destructive one, but if this thing erases itself, it's virtual suicide would stop it from doing any more evil, which is a choice we can't ALWAYS consider evil. No matter what it does, it has to choose to live. You're tangling Kantian Categorical Imperatives here, darnit!
Unlike Frankenstein's monster, which was arguably less evil than its creator, this thing can't be less evil than anything, so Frankenstein analogies are right out. And its creator shares something with God than no normal mortal does, having created a being of ultimate Eeeee-vil (ala Satan).
So, I propose that it is Mathematically certain either there exists an action (let's call it Action X), for which this thing can't possibly differentiate whether that action is Good or Evil, or an Action X that is diferentiatablly evil but this thing cannot choose it. For proof, read Turning and Godel (QED).
So what? I mean this quite sincerely, so fraga-freakin what? Religions have philosophies at their cores - good ones or bad ones. So do movements. Social Darwinism may or may not have had some particular connection to the real science, but it definitely had an underlying philosophy. The same goes for Atheism as an organized movement, whether it has philosophical underpinnings for an individual or not. If Atheism is not a philosophy, then neither is Nihilism, nor is Berkleyian Pre-Existential Subjectivism, or modern Existentialism, since they all have a very strong element of disbelief in something as a fundamental principle.
The poster you replied to wrote about "evolutionary theories of ethics". You attempted to rebut that by saying something about evolution not commanding anything. That's why I started off flip with you. Are you really sincerely claiming that an "evolutionary theory of ethics" doesn't command anything just because the word 'evolution' itself doesn't? Tell you what, I'm now an Evolutionary Zen Kabalist, not just a typical Zen Kabalist, so now I have the word Evolution in there and that makes what I believe SCIENCE, and not a mere philosophy or religion (by your linguistic argument, not mine). If you don't like me misusing the word that way, maybe you should stop, or else acknowledge the scientific authority of Zen Kabalism (and Scientology and Christian Science, that try YOUR word trick in the real world). If using a word like evolution were all it took to make a religion or philosophy into a science, or if being negative about something was all it took to make the viewpoint not philosophical any more, then someone can found the "First Plate Tectonics Church of Millennial (830897) is a Stupid Git", and they'd be right, (and not be a religion nor a philosophy to boot).
Your person was probably fairly typical. Back when people actually tried to rehabilitate felons, there were studies for long term repeat offender rates, and therapy/counseling made a big difference for child molesters in most of them. One Canadian study, for example, looked at the repeat offender rate for paroled felons 20 years or more after they left prison the first time. It was found that, with treatment, the percentages went about as follows (This is from memory, all I guarantee is that I exactly remember the 10's digit.). Molesters who were first caught abusing related children - 21%. Heterosexual molesters who were first caught abusing unrelated children - 34%. Homosexual molesters who were first caught abusing unrelated children - 44%.
(Note: This was back in the 70's, and some of the prison programs treating homosexual molesters also tried to 'reform' the homosexual aspect, so there's a good chance the difference in gay/straight numbers doesn't mean gay pedophiles are somehow 'eviler' or 'dumber', but simply reflects people deciding that they couldn't change that part of themselves, and so the people who were telling them they could change the pedophilia were wrong about that too.)
I suspect a lot of pedophiles tell themselves lies that help them sustain the behavior, and so fall into the category of people who claim to be causing some harm to achieve a greater good. NAMBLA's claim that children are inherently polysexual creatures and only gain from early 'awakening' would be an example. There's a certain "Later, you'll thank me for this" attitude to it that makes it sound to the criminal like they are only doing the same sort of thing adults generally do to children. Evidence like that study suggests that confronting people with the real damages they inflict, their own hidden motives, and their evasions and equivocations, frequently IS enough to get them to change.
I work in tax prep, and it's the same situation. To file an individual return electronically or on paper, there has to be verification of all persons on it by SSN. The IRS rejects any return where any SSN is omitted, or doesn't match the info on file with the Social Security Administration. They check this 100% of the time, directly with the SSA's records. They won't process a return where someone got even one dependent's SSN wrong.
If using SSNs on tax forms doesn't work for someone, they should lobby congress to make separate ITIN''s (Individual Taxpayer ID Numbers) available to people who already have an SSN - right now ITINs are only for people who need to file but don't have an SSN (i.e. non-resident alien spouses). Unless this is changed, individuals who have been issued a SSN, simply must use it to file individual returns. There is no dodge, such as incorporating and/or getting an EIN (Employer ID Number), that will let you use that number to file an individual return.
There's only one exception - a child who was born and died in the same year can be claimed without a SSN if you instead provide both the birth and death certificates.
When I file an individual's return, I have access to programs that will check within minutes (to maybe a couple of hours if it's the busy season for the IRS) to see if the IRS has received it, and I will see an error code for any wrong SSN. This coding system is the IRS's own, not ours, and is specific enough that I can determine, for example, that it is the second listed dependent which has the problem in a given case.
Given all this, I may have to verify a person's SSN several times, or look up old records specifically to examine the SSN. So yes, we use the number for internal tracking and billing as well - under the circumstances, why the hell not? We also absolutely have to keep the number on some paperwork and electronic data and hold those for a minimum of three years, whether someone asks us to destroy old records or not. Again, that's the IRS's requirement, not ours. So, if you use a paid tax preparer, you should probably look at the privacy policy, to make sure they don't share anything, but particularly anything with the SSN on it, and you might want to ask what encryption they use to send returns and for other data access.
Because the people evaluating your report will read it in detail and analyze it to see what it really implies, rather than just looking at the top numbers? These are, of course, the same Human Resources people who toss piles of resumes into the trash because they don't like the font choices.
I have contracted several times to train people in reading credit reports. I've known responsible companies which gave it serious attention, but I have also known plenty of cases where somebody in management thought this task needed about 15 minutes, or didn't need trained at all. I've had enough management people tell me that the one number says it all to know how screwed up this is. I've seen the problem, up close and personal, and frankly, there are about ten people posting to this thread, singing "la-la-la there is no problem", and you all are doing real harm to real people's lives.
Why did you post this as AC? I'll put my name to it, if you won't - Evilandi is making a theoretical proposal, then insisting only other people should be judged by scientific standards. His actions are cowardly and abusive. ColdWetDog spoke truth to power (Not that evilandi necessarily has any power, but he's parroting what powerful social structures have told us all). So why not put your name behind that assessment. If you won't, I will.
Following through on this reveals the National Debt Clock is now slashdotted. Either you've stopped the debt from increasing or now we will never get it paid down, all thanks to you. I don't know whether to welcome you as my new clock stopping overlord or cover some petrified Korean with grits.
Orlando Florida recently passed a law that makes giving a homeless person food in public a crime. A lot of the city's most prominent men lobbied for it. (The link I attach doesn't go into this last point, but the law is apparently suspended until a state court challenge is resolved - thank goodness!)
The 'morality aspect' gets pretty complex. Is Sasha Cohen doing a public service by exposing that a lot of people are dumb enough to go along with his hoaxes? Is that a positive value, or does it cause as many good people to dispair of the human condition as it causes others to try to be less gullible? Borat, and other works like it, seem to try and minimize collateral damage. These pranks may make some people more aware of their gullibility and make other people more cynical in much the same way, but they are doing a lot more direct damage. Cohen is also available to mitigate normal damages, for example, he could be sued by anyone willing to risk the additional embarrassment of making a case in court. How much effort are these 'pranksters' putting into avoiding that risk?
There is a problem with such metaphors in the law: First, the mapping of 'yelling fire' is a particularly poor analogy to the case in Schenck. Second, there are some other poor analogies and metaphors in law and every one of them that comes to mind offhand seems to be part of just those very areas where reasonable people are still struggling and the law seems to lack continuity. I think those analogies contribute to the ambiguity that makes these sore spots in law. As you point out, controversy attracts more court cases, and this sort of analogy seems to keep the controversy going.
Did you know there has never been a court case where a man hacked up his wife with a cleaver, but claimed to be not guilty because he was so delusional at the time he thought he was cutting up a head of cabbage? It's an analogy that has been raised many times since it was coined, notably in the John Hinkley trial, but it isn't a very good analogy for that case, or any other I can find where it was introduced in court. Most people know that the legal definition of insanity isn't the same as the clinical one, but there's the roots of that distinction, a really stretched analogy that's been used in jury instruction or closing arguments many times since, without, I submit, being questioned nearly enough.
I'd even argue that the whole behavioral model that comes from treating schools as gaining 'in loco parentis' rights causes the problems it does because it's a poor fitting analogy at heart. One reason for proclaiming it a poorly fitting or badly stretched analogy is that it doesn't cut off at age 18, when the student nominally becomes a legal adult.
Speaking can arguably be part of causing harm, but can the words themselves? The 'Fire in a crowded theater' example presumes the person is guilty, not because of the actual word, but by method (presumably the person shouts 'Fire!' in the same manner he or she might for a real fire - I won't swear that you can't panic a bunch of people by behaving calmly and saying 'fire' in a low, comfortable tone of voice, but it would seem difficult). Possibly, running franticly down the aisle, screaming incoherently, could have the exact same effect, with no semantic content, as could faking a fire with smoke bombs and colored lighting tricks.
I'd submit that speech is just one possible tool to commit certain crimes. (i.e. Reckless endangerment, in the case of the theater crowd). Note for a similar example, you could commit a fraud by speech, but non-speech actions, such as salting land with fake mineral samples, could theoretically be sufficient to prove fraud as well (AFAIK). There are some crimes where the content is as important as the delivery, but libel or slander are punishable based on separate legal principles, and there's even a sort of non-speech equivalent to them (planting false evidence of a crime).
If you can think of some others where the communication aspect matters separately from the method, maybe you could make a better case. The only other one I can think of seems to be pornography, and the courts tend to claim that isn't speech at all, so I don't see how they can rationally apply the 'crowded theater' analogy to porn.
It's not really better (or worse). One of the basic postulates of Quantum Mechanics is that several interpretations seem to fit equally well, and there's no mathematical reason to pick one of them and decide it's superior to the others.
Psychologically, it's definitely less mind blowing for most people to treat a lot of quantum processes as something happening to probabilities rather than objectified things. It's probably much less mind numbing for the average person, to claim, for example, that the universe at our level seems deterministic only because the underlying state is so purely probabilistic, than it is to insist the whole universe splits every time a state vector collapses, but both are really remarkable claims, a lot of formally trained philosophers would find either equally disturbing, and the math itself doesn't show a preference.
I confess I don't like the term 'collapse' much when referring to state vectors. It has a certain negative sound to it. It seems to imply the quantum realm is somehow superior to the classical one. Like the quantum level is heavenly and things fall into our mundane world like Lucifer leaving the divine presence. I personally prefer the word "reification" (Latinate for 'thing becoming'), meaning the quantum level isn't just probabilistic, it consists of probabilities, whereas in the classical universe, we find real things instead. But that's a linguistic preference, the math doesn't specify which interpretation is 'better'.
Uhm, you said 'finally' twice and then you still kept going. Maybe you have some good ideas there, but present them as you just did to even highly intelligent employees, and you will get about 3% compliance.
I'm a sometimes tax preparer who has to have a separate password for the individual and corporate programs, separate ones for two related e-mail accounts, separate ones for the point of sale machines in each office, additional separate ones if I have to reconcile the day's receipts to accounting, a separate one to access the office time clock system if I have to correct an hourly worker's punches, a couple of separate, very very long ones for underlying Kerberos support if I have to reboot the back room servers, others for dealing with the IRS and for Treasury dept., and others for some premium on-line financial research sites, plus I'm legally a bank agent as well and have what are basically passwords I use there. I just counted them all up, and its 48, none of them shorter than 8 characters, most with non-alphanumerics required, all at least not subject to a dictionary cracking, and nearly half of them changed quarterly or more often. Now that I finally realize how bad it is, I'm wondering how in the hell I possibly do it.
I used to stick post its with things that weren't my password on the underside of the desk drawer. I'd write sloppy and deliberately ambiguous too, so whomever found them would have to make several tries to test all combinations of what it could be.
The wallet idea works safer if you don't write the password, but an 'un-mutated' version of the password, and you know the rule you use to mutate all your passwords. If you can disguise what's written down so it doesn't look like a password, even better. Jot some name (Lucinda Mott), and address (1630 N. Highway 33, Mesa City) on the back of a business card, with a note like 'carries Valmont brand 3/8ths tubing - closes early Fridays - call Dodge city branch', and let anyone who steals your wallet guess which part of all that is the cue to your password. You can even use dates with this system to let you pick out the current password, just leave the old ones in your wallet too - that actually makes it harder for a pickpocket to spot.
One way to make an actual word safer (at least from your cohorts at the office), is just to pick something you have no interest in, if you can avoid becoming interested in it just from picking it. If you are in your 20's, and learn the name of a song Frank Sinatra got a Grammy for, and the year, who's going to guess something permutated from that, by a rule such as "reverse the date and put it in the even numbered characters of the password.", especially if you don't write the rule down. Yet you can remember a system like this more easily by far than a truly random password.
I base this on having once cracked a machine on the first try, when a national guard NCO that was former Navy dared me to - (Hint, most sailors get assigned to just one ship their whole hitch, and it's a big deal to them, as in they usually have a picture or two around standing on the dock in front of their ship, and OMFG, those ships have names painted right on their bows!). I told this person some of the above methods, and kept testing until he got something I wouldn't guess quickly (which took about three tries - Hint 2, If you talk NASCAR all the time, don't be surprised when someone else tries a few variations on your favorite driver and their Car number.). I don't know what he came up with eventually, but it was evidently something actually tricky, because we had a change passwords every month rule and after the first few months, he got to where I couldn't get a one of them. (yes, it was part of my job description to bug half a dozen people this way).
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I regret that I have to agree with the assessment that it's not just a few bad apples and a lot of good cops. What convinced me of this was the foreclosure crisis. We had the occasional isolated sheriff's dept. that tried to insist the banks follow the law just like everybody they were foreclosing on, and refused to evict people until the banks would at least show somewhat where they'd made the calls, sent the letters or filed the proper paperwork, but those people were literally one in a thousand, as in, out of every thousand counties in the US, one person in the department at least raised some objections. If most cops were really honest, we'd see one hell of a lot better average than that.* If most DAs were really trying to follow the law, again, we'd see an incredibly better average than that.
* To be fair, in most places eviction warrants are served by the county sheriff's personnel, and issued only by one select set of judges. In theory that proves there is an overwhelming lot of 'just following orders' syndrome there, but it's still theoretically possible that city or state or federal police agencies could be incredibly honest on the average, and it's somehow just sheriff's depts. or related court's Judges and DA's that are so overwhelmingly screwed up. Does anyone really buy that?
The thing is, this test does reveal a few honest sheriffs, DAs who try to actually follow the law, and such. If you really want good police in this country, lets start getting up petitions for these people to run for higher office, like Governor! They're that exceptionally ethical - why don't we try to fast track them to positions where they can really accomplish something?
I don't know whether the parent poster is implying that she's just lucky, or if you're inferring it instead. Either way, here's another way to interpret it.
1. A basic reason for the press to be able to watch the police and publish the results is to oppose police corruption. Even a 'mere' blogger in this context enjoys the right to be protected in this, as it is clearly political speech, and that is the most important focus of our first amendment protections.
2. Corrupt police are precisely the kind who might attempt to stifle such speech by violence, quite possibly including murder, and not just by making an unjustified arrest. That the police in this case did not, suggests they are either trying to do their jobs honestly, or they are, at least somewhat ethical, somewhat inclined to follow their formal training, or significantly reluctant to go to such extremes as simply making a problem person disappear.
3. Many of us suspect there are cops out there in some locales, who would bend the rules much further or flat out break all the basic rules of society. It's because of them that point 1 is necessary - that is constitutional recognition of such substantial freedom of the press in dealing with police is justified by how serious some cases of police corruption can be. But, point 2 suggests that this case may not be severe enough to justify all the normally protected press tactics. So there are legitimate questions, such as: Is there any way to limit either the press or the police that will still balance everyone's rights - the general public's right to get rid of bad cops, the press's right to report them, the right of the individual cops themselves to have a private life off duty, or of the police on duty to use such methods as unmarked cars to help them enforce the law? And, assuming it's even possible, are there any needs to impose such limits?
A couple of months ago, I e-mailed my state Governor's office (Tennessee) over a problem. I got a personal reply from one of his assistants, giving me several contact names and phone numbers within 24 hours. One of those contacts called me faster than I could call them. I got a full solution for a problem that, as it turned out, actually spanned several departments of the government involved, within five days, including everyone involved identifying themselves, telling me what steps they planned to take and when they would do them by, giving me contact information if there was anything else, handling most of the problem by phone and following up with a written final document that resolved everything to my complete satisfaction.
Ohh, but that's one of those inefficient government things, where they control the use of force and so don't have to cooperate, rather than a nice, efficient business situations where mutual, non-coercive conditions mean a swift resolution is the general rule out of enlightened self interest. (Go ahead Slash-libertarians, pile all over this). And no, I am not a contributor to either my Governor's last campaign or his party, but I will be next time.
And I deal with the IRS in situations where sometimes a physical document absolutely must be in the mail within 24 hours of my receiving it from a client or I am subject to fine. To be frank, the world sometimes works far faster than you do. Maybe you can accomplish good, meaningful work with processes taking 3 month cycles and more, but even some legal proceedings are nowadays based on a lot less time than that. One month and 13 days actually sounds like a reasonable time, and depending on the venue, may be giving the other side more, perhaps much more, than average time to respond.
You might even charge for CD and postage.
You probably can charge a reasonable amount for handling as well, although there's always the risk with that pesky word reasonable that your definition of reasonable may exceed the court's definition.
Coming at it from another angle, every couple of years there's an article about how even in the Western world, some absurdly large proportion of companies use pirated software. What makes you think that the GPL will make them suddenly compliant?
I wouldn't expect all of them to suddenly comply, and I have a low enough opinion of some companies that I fully expect they would deliberately never comply, even if it bites them on the butt repeatedly for not complying.
There still is a difference. the ratio of costs and benefits for compliance is different, usually far, far in Linux's favor. If a company understands how that open source aided its own developers, and how much alternatives, such as the price of privileged access to MS's internal calls, would cost them, they ought to see that as somebody playing fair with them (in the limited sense that all the cards are on the table - no hidden aces up the Linux source's sleeve). Many won't, of course - but the more they abuse the license, the more obviously they become self identifying: They don't think anyone else ever plays fair, and they don't ever play fair with anyone else.
Zombies and Vampires, and maybe some others. But one thing that makes zombies the most overused cliche evah is that ALL these zombies are just a subset of Night of the Living Dead's zombies. The whole sudden lunges, eat brains, massively multiplying zombies trend ignores Zombies as they used to be in film and print fiction before Romero. The only films I can think of offhand that portrayed old fashioned Zombies after NotLD is the two Phil Lovecraft Private Eye movies made for HBO - "Cast a Deadly Spell" and "Witch Hunt". Even though those two films went straight back to old shambling occultly animated corpses for the zombie parts, they also had more originality, novelty and style overall than a whole host of modern zombie flicks put together.
It's like somebody (the George Romero equivalent in my car analogy) had the idea to make NASCAR, and practically everybody else on the planet took one look, and stopped doing Formula One racing, Drag racing, Motocross, and even the Olympic Luge to take their best shot at creating a thousand identical clones of NASCAR.
Something that has the potential to either eat or infect you may stay frightening for a long time, but they lost any traces of cool remaining about 20 years ago, in the same way that you can't have a guitarist, a bassist, a keyboard player and a drummer in your four guy group, record a bunch of tracks that are all 3 min. 14 sec. long, and still be cool. A moratorium hell! - somebody needs to tell these people they are so far from cool they would barely approach lukewarm if somebody gave them a liquid helium enema on Pluto.
Until the end he thought he was in the right and had the moral justification to do those things.
Can this really be safely assumed? Even if it is fair to assume for Jolly Old Adolph himself, isn't it just as reasonable to assume that at least some of the major Nazis didn't buy into the arguments that it was the Aryan race against racially inferior contaminants? Maybe Gobels or Reinhardt Heydrich really believed all the arguments that 'excused' their atrocities, but it seems as likely that some of them just saw how convenient having scapegoats for any screw ups would be.
It's a fundamental paradox. Many of us regard true evil as including a self destructive component as well as an other destructive one, but if this thing erases itself, it's virtual suicide would stop it from doing any more evil, which is a choice we can't ALWAYS consider evil. No matter what it does, it has to choose to live. You're tangling Kantian Categorical Imperatives here, darnit!
Unlike Frankenstein's monster, which was arguably less evil than its creator, this thing can't be less evil than anything, so Frankenstein analogies are right out. And its creator shares something with God than no normal mortal does, having created a being of ultimate Eeeee-vil (ala Satan).
So, I propose that it is Mathematically certain either there exists an action (let's call it Action X), for which this thing can't possibly differentiate whether that action is Good or Evil, or an Action X that is diferentiatablly evil but this thing cannot choose it. For proof, read Turning and Godel (QED).
So what? I mean this quite sincerely, so fraga-freakin what? Religions have philosophies at their cores - good ones or bad ones. So do movements. Social Darwinism may or may not have had some particular connection to the real science, but it definitely had an underlying philosophy. The same goes for Atheism as an organized movement, whether it has philosophical underpinnings for an individual or not. If Atheism is not a philosophy, then neither is Nihilism, nor is Berkleyian Pre-Existential Subjectivism, or modern Existentialism, since they all have a very strong element of disbelief in something as a fundamental principle.
The poster you replied to wrote about "evolutionary theories of ethics". You attempted to rebut that by saying something about evolution not commanding anything. That's why I started off flip with you. Are you really sincerely claiming that an "evolutionary theory of ethics" doesn't command anything just because the word 'evolution' itself doesn't? Tell you what, I'm now an Evolutionary Zen Kabalist, not just a typical Zen Kabalist, so now I have the word Evolution in there and that makes what I believe SCIENCE, and not a mere philosophy or religion (by your linguistic argument, not mine). If you don't like me misusing the word that way, maybe you should stop, or else acknowledge the scientific authority of Zen Kabalism (and Scientology and Christian Science, that try YOUR word trick in the real world). If using a word like evolution were all it took to make a religion or philosophy into a science, or if being negative about something was all it took to make the viewpoint not philosophical any more, then someone can found the "First Plate Tectonics Church of Millennial (830897) is a Stupid Git", and they'd be right, (and not be a religion nor a philosophy to boot).
Your person was probably fairly typical. Back when people actually tried to rehabilitate felons, there were studies for long term repeat offender rates, and therapy/counseling made a big difference for child molesters in most of them. One Canadian study, for example, looked at the repeat offender rate for paroled felons 20 years or more after they left prison the first time. It was found that, with treatment, the percentages went about as follows (This is from memory, all I guarantee is that I exactly remember the 10's digit.). Molesters who were first caught abusing related children - 21%. Heterosexual molesters who were first caught abusing unrelated children - 34%. Homosexual molesters who were first caught abusing unrelated children - 44%.
(Note: This was back in the 70's, and some of the prison programs treating homosexual molesters also tried to 'reform' the homosexual aspect, so there's a good chance the difference in gay/straight numbers doesn't mean gay pedophiles are somehow 'eviler' or 'dumber', but simply reflects people deciding that they couldn't change that part of themselves, and so the people who were telling them they could change the pedophilia were wrong about that too.)
I suspect a lot of pedophiles tell themselves lies that help them sustain the behavior, and so fall into the category of people who claim to be causing some harm to achieve a greater good. NAMBLA's claim that children are inherently polysexual creatures and only gain from early 'awakening' would be an example. There's a certain "Later, you'll thank me for this" attitude to it that makes it sound to the criminal like they are only doing the same sort of thing adults generally do to children. Evidence like that study suggests that confronting people with the real damages they inflict, their own hidden motives, and their evasions and equivocations, frequently IS enough to get them to change.
I work in tax prep, and it's the same situation. To file an individual return electronically or on paper, there has to be verification of all persons on it by SSN. The IRS rejects any return where any SSN is omitted, or doesn't match the info on file with the Social Security Administration. They check this 100% of the time, directly with the SSA's records. They won't process a return where someone got even one dependent's SSN wrong.
If using SSNs on tax forms doesn't work for someone, they should lobby congress to make separate ITIN''s (Individual Taxpayer ID Numbers) available to people who already have an SSN - right now ITINs are only for people who need to file but don't have an SSN (i.e. non-resident alien spouses). Unless this is changed, individuals who have been issued a SSN, simply must use it to file individual returns. There is no dodge, such as incorporating and/or getting an EIN (Employer ID Number), that will let you use that number to file an individual return.
There's only one exception - a child who was born and died in the same year can be claimed without a SSN if you instead provide both the birth and death certificates.
When I file an individual's return, I have access to programs that will check within minutes (to maybe a couple of hours if it's the busy season for the IRS) to see if the IRS has received it, and I will see an error code for any wrong SSN. This coding system is the IRS's own, not ours, and is specific enough that I can determine, for example, that it is the second listed dependent which has the problem in a given case.
Given all this, I may have to verify a person's SSN several times, or look up old records specifically to examine the SSN. So yes, we use the number for internal tracking and billing as well - under the circumstances, why the hell not? We also absolutely have to keep the number on some paperwork and electronic data and hold those for a minimum of three years, whether someone asks us to destroy old records or not. Again, that's the IRS's requirement, not ours. So, if you use a paid tax preparer, you should probably look at the privacy policy, to make sure they don't share anything, but particularly anything with the SSN on it, and you might want to ask what encryption they use to send returns and for other data access.
666 isn't a very good score, Mr. Beast. I'm sorry, but we're going to have to deny your application for a loan to bring about the end times.
Because the people evaluating your report will read it in detail and analyze it to see what it really implies, rather than just looking at the top numbers? These are, of course, the same Human Resources people who toss piles of resumes into the trash because they don't like the font choices.
I have contracted several times to train people in reading credit reports. I've known responsible companies which gave it serious attention, but I have also known plenty of cases where somebody in management thought this task needed about 15 minutes, or didn't need trained at all. I've had enough management people tell me that the one number says it all to know how screwed up this is. I've seen the problem, up close and personal, and frankly, there are about ten people posting to this thread, singing "la-la-la there is no problem", and you all are doing real harm to real people's lives.
Why did you post this as AC? I'll put my name to it, if you won't - Evilandi is making a theoretical proposal, then insisting only other people should be judged by scientific standards. His actions are cowardly and abusive. ColdWetDog spoke truth to power (Not that evilandi necessarily has any power, but he's parroting what powerful social structures have told us all). So why not put your name behind that assessment. If you won't, I will.
Following through on this reveals the National Debt Clock is now slashdotted. Either you've stopped the debt from increasing or now we will never get it paid down, all thanks to you. I don't know whether to welcome you as my new clock stopping overlord or cover some petrified Korean with grits.
Orlando Florida recently passed a law that makes giving a homeless person food in public a crime. A lot of the city's most prominent men lobbied for it.
(The link I attach doesn't go into this last point, but the law is apparently suspended until a state court challenge is resolved - thank goodness!)
http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.youtube.com/watch%253Fv%253DHsvcwQEFKAI
The 'morality aspect' gets pretty complex. Is Sasha Cohen doing a public service by exposing that a lot of people are dumb enough to go along with his hoaxes? Is that a positive value, or does it cause as many good people to dispair of the human condition as it causes others to try to be less gullible? Borat, and other works like it, seem to try and minimize collateral damage. These pranks may make some people more aware of their gullibility and make other people more cynical in much the same way, but they are doing a lot more direct damage. Cohen is also available to mitigate normal damages, for example, he could be sued by anyone willing to risk the additional embarrassment of making a case in court. How much effort are these 'pranksters' putting into avoiding that risk?
There is a problem with such metaphors in the law: First, the mapping of 'yelling fire' is a particularly poor analogy to the case in Schenck. Second, there are some other poor analogies and metaphors in law and every one of them that comes to mind offhand seems to be part of just those very areas where reasonable people are still struggling and the law seems to lack continuity. I think those analogies contribute to the ambiguity that makes these sore spots in law. As you point out, controversy attracts more court cases, and this sort of analogy seems to keep the controversy going.
Did you know there has never been a court case where a man hacked up his wife with a cleaver, but claimed to be not guilty because he was so delusional at the time he thought he was cutting up a head of cabbage? It's an analogy that has been raised many times since it was coined, notably in the John Hinkley trial, but it isn't a very good analogy for that case, or any other I can find where it was introduced in court. Most people know that the legal definition of insanity isn't the same as the clinical one, but there's the roots of that distinction, a really stretched analogy that's been used in jury instruction or closing arguments many times since, without, I submit, being questioned nearly enough.
I'd even argue that the whole behavioral model that comes from treating schools as gaining 'in loco parentis' rights causes the problems it does because it's a poor fitting analogy at heart. One reason for proclaiming it a poorly fitting or badly stretched analogy is that it doesn't cut off at age 18, when the student nominally becomes a legal adult.
Speaking can arguably be part of causing harm, but can the words themselves? The 'Fire in a crowded theater' example presumes the person is guilty, not because of the actual word, but by method (presumably the person shouts 'Fire!' in the same manner he or she might for a real fire - I won't swear that you can't panic a bunch of people by behaving calmly and saying 'fire' in a low, comfortable tone of voice, but it would seem difficult). Possibly, running franticly down the aisle, screaming incoherently, could have the exact same effect, with no semantic content, as could faking a fire with smoke bombs and colored lighting tricks.
I'd submit that speech is just one possible tool to commit certain crimes. (i.e. Reckless endangerment, in the case of the theater crowd). Note for a similar example, you could commit a fraud by speech, but non-speech actions, such as salting land with fake mineral samples, could theoretically be sufficient to prove fraud as well (AFAIK). There are some crimes where the content is as important as the delivery, but libel or slander are punishable based on separate legal principles, and there's even a sort of non-speech equivalent to them (planting false evidence of a crime).
If you can think of some others where the communication aspect matters separately from the method, maybe you could make a better case. The only other one I can think of seems to be pornography, and the courts tend to claim that isn't speech at all, so I don't see how they can rationally apply the 'crowded theater' analogy to porn.
It's not really better (or worse). One of the basic postulates of Quantum Mechanics is that several interpretations seem to fit equally well, and there's no mathematical reason to pick one of them and decide it's superior to the others.
Psychologically, it's definitely less mind blowing for most people to treat a lot of quantum processes as something happening to probabilities rather than objectified things. It's probably much less mind numbing for the average person, to claim, for example, that the universe at our level seems deterministic only because the underlying state is so purely probabilistic, than it is to insist the whole universe splits every time a state vector collapses, but both are really remarkable claims, a lot of formally trained philosophers would find either equally disturbing, and the math itself doesn't show a preference.
I confess I don't like the term 'collapse' much when referring to state vectors. It has a certain negative sound to it. It seems to imply the quantum realm is somehow superior to the classical one. Like the quantum level is heavenly and things fall into our mundane world like Lucifer leaving the divine presence. I personally prefer the word "reification" (Latinate for 'thing becoming'), meaning the quantum level isn't just probabilistic, it consists of probabilities, whereas in the classical universe, we find real things instead. But that's a linguistic preference, the math doesn't specify which interpretation is 'better'.
Uhm, you said 'finally' twice and then you still kept going. Maybe you have some good ideas there, but present them as you just did to even highly intelligent employees, and you will get about 3% compliance.
I'm a sometimes tax preparer who has to have a separate password for the individual and corporate programs, separate ones for two related e-mail accounts, separate ones for the point of sale machines in each office, additional separate ones if I have to reconcile the day's receipts to accounting, a separate one to access the office time clock system if I have to correct an hourly worker's punches, a couple of separate, very very long ones for underlying Kerberos support if I have to reboot the back room servers, others for dealing with the IRS and for Treasury dept., and others for some premium on-line financial research sites, plus I'm legally a bank agent as well and have what are basically passwords I use there. I just counted them all up, and its 48, none of them shorter than 8 characters, most with non-alphanumerics required, all at least not subject to a dictionary cracking, and nearly half of them changed quarterly or more often. Now that I finally realize how bad it is, I'm wondering how in the hell I possibly do it.
They'll get my cold dead finger when they pry it from my trigger-guard.
I used to stick post its with things that weren't my password on the underside of the desk drawer. I'd write sloppy and deliberately ambiguous too, so whomever found them would have to make several tries to test all combinations of what it could be.
The wallet idea works safer if you don't write the password, but an 'un-mutated' version of the password, and you know the rule you use to mutate all your passwords. If you can disguise what's written down so it doesn't look like a password, even better. Jot some name (Lucinda Mott), and address (1630 N. Highway 33, Mesa City) on the back of a business card, with a note like 'carries Valmont brand 3/8ths tubing - closes early Fridays - call Dodge city branch', and let anyone who steals your wallet guess which part of all that is the cue to your password. You can even use dates with this system to let you pick out the current password, just leave the old ones in your wallet too - that actually makes it harder for a pickpocket to spot.
One way to make an actual word safer (at least from your cohorts at the office), is just to pick something you have no interest in, if you can avoid becoming interested in it just from picking it. If you are in your 20's, and learn the name of a song Frank Sinatra got a Grammy for, and the year, who's going to guess something permutated from that, by a rule such as "reverse the date and put it in the even numbered characters of the password.", especially if you don't write the rule down. Yet you can remember a system like this more easily by far than a truly random password.
I base this on having once cracked a machine on the first try, when a national guard NCO that was former Navy dared me to - (Hint, most sailors get assigned to just one ship their whole hitch, and it's a big deal to them, as in they usually have a picture or two around standing on the dock in front of their ship, and OMFG, those ships have names painted right on their bows!). I told this person some of the above methods, and kept testing until he got something I wouldn't guess quickly (which took about three tries - Hint 2, If you talk NASCAR all the time, don't be surprised when someone else tries a few variations on your favorite driver and their Car number.). I don't know what he came up with eventually, but it was evidently something actually tricky, because we had a change passwords every month rule and after the first few months, he got to where I couldn't get a one of them. (yes, it was part of my job description to bug half a dozen people this way).