The President doesn't really matter. The orientation of Congress doesn't really matter. What matters is the overall opinion of the American population
There's an element of truth to this, partly because there's benn a lot of convergence in major parties over the last few decades. It started in or before the early 90s in America (Clinton &c), and in the early-mid 90s in Britain (Blair, Brown &c). In Australia it happened in the early 80s (Hawke, Keating &c). Whether this really is the tail wagging the dog I'm curious to know.
But it's an overstatement to say it "doesn't really matter". Iraq, for instance, would be a very different place if Al Gore had been president rather than George Bush. (Not trying to say better or worse, just very different.)
America as a nation is only 234 years old, compared to other nations that have been in roughly the same state for a thousand years.
There is no such other nation.
The United States is actually one of the more constitutionally conservative countries. Its last major change to its way of government, neglecting gradual extensions of the franchise, could be argued to be either 1861-5 or 1783. There aren't many countries who can beat that. Britain can probably claim 1660 but I can't think of anywhere else offhand that beats the US.
The more precise chain of logic is "The majority of proprietary games released these days are DRM-encumbered, therefore mcgrew says the majority of proprietary game producers are thieves, therefore mcgrew is calling a majority of said producers thieves, therefore mcgrew is calling the majority of such producers dishonest, and making a jump from there to calling most people dishonest, we conclude that mcgrew must believe himself to be dishonest." Which is a little bodgy in places but if mcgrew wants to disagree with a particular step he can.
Whether honest people believe that other people are honest is wholly irrelevant to the reality of whether people are honest or not.
I would largely agree with you. But mcgrew said
Honest people think most other people are honest
so we can't rule out mcgrew being honest, but we can pretty much rule out that mcgrew believes himself to be honest. Assuming he's thinking clearly enough to understand the consequences of his statements.
Tangomargarine quoted the line about thieves which was a mistake on his part. He should have quoted the phrase about honest people. But it's in the nature of a slip rather than a serious logical flaw.
The presence or absence of DRM on a software product is rarely, if ever a decision of the actual creators of that product, rather, it is a property of the distribution channel.
That doesn't affect feepness's conclusion, since feepness doesn't care whether mcgrew's statements are true, only that mcgrew made them. But it's an interesting point and would be a good argument of the implausibility of mcgrew's initial claim.
Nothing you've said contradicts my statement. Just believing that somebody is a thief does not make you yourself a thief, and this is easily provable.
I agree. But the debate isn't about whether that is true, it's about the consequences of mcgrew's premise that "Honest people think most other people are honest". Nobody said mcgrew was a thief, just that mcrew was saying mcgrew was a thief. (Which isn't quite true, but close enough to true that it's reasonable to ask mcgrew to clarify.)
If David Prowse was really in Darth Vader's suite then he probably never got paid because he was killed when the Death Star was destroyed. He must have attached his soul to something as he was dying. Can detached souls sue?
Just because thieves think everyone is a thief, it does not follow that if you think someone is a thief, then so are you.
The relevant statements are, "Honest people think most other people are honest" and "If you see any kind of DRM on anything, you can be pretty sure its creator is a thief". The syllogism is that if he sees lots of DRM about then he must think most people are dishonest and therefore can't be honest himself.
The case is far from airtight: the speaker might believe that most creators are thieves but most people aren't (you just can't trust artistic types) or he might believe most creators never use DRM. But there's no need to rely on the statement about thieves so it isn't really the logical fallacy you traduce.
Last I checked, "Muslim" was recognised as neither an ethnicity, nor a nationality. But don't get that in the way of trying to make life simple for yourself or others.
I think if anything you're the one who is oversimplifying, by assuming names are determined by ethnicity or nationality rather than by religion. In fact, many names are inspired by religion, Mohammed being the most obvious example.
That said, "Khan" isn't really from Islam but from Central Asia. It was carried by Turks and Mongols wherever they conquered. I'm guessing Indians named Khan get it from the Mughals, who got it from Afghanistan, who got it from the Seljuq Turks. Who happened to be muslim, but that's probably not relevant to the name.
Can you explain to me how the ability to read cell phones is relevant to the case you adduce?
If you want to argue wipes are good then you need to show us a case where the police abused their ability to read records, where a wipe would have protected the innocent. This case doesn't seem to qualify.
The only real relevance of records in this case would seem to be that the dead police officer didn't keep them.
Given that the police apparently raided someone innocent one could argue that better access to electronic records might have reduced the chance of making this mistake. In which case it's an argument against you, though that's a bit of a stretch.
The rule, "All terrorists are collectivists or Muslims" is only rarely violated.
This is probably more true today than historically. A hundred years ago we had anarchist terrorists who'd be horrified to be called collectivist. Fifty years ago we had Jewish terrorists, with no great collectivist tendencies. Western China still has a few Uighur terrorists, doesn't it? I don't know whether that Japanese nerve gas sect is collectivist.
I think Islam and Marxism are just the two most recent generators for terrorism against western and epi-western states. And Marxism is running out of puff lately, with the Tamil Tigers and FARC in collapse and the IRA gone quiet. Indian Maoists are still there, who else?
Like the U.S. and the Soviet Union in WW2, we will fight our common enemy from either side, then when we meet in Berlin we will resume fighting each other.
So if the US and USSR hadn't fought each other in Berlin, what conclusions would you draw?
Re:Why does PJ matter so much to you?
on
Novell Wins vs. SCO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Reasonable people understand that there is no "PJ", that IBM spun up a screen name and went to town.
In this forum PJ is defined by her work on groklaw so she can't help being real. What's really claimed here is that her biological component is other than we'd thought, but her biological component isn't something we've ever interacted with so why should we care? It's probably a big deal to PJ's personal friends, lovers, family, church choir colleagues, volleyball team and pets but to people who know her only through the web it's not clear it means anything. If PJ was a dog, and for all I know she is, would it change anything about her work?
It's a lot like the old claim that The Iliad and Odyssey were written, not by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name.
Re:Probably because they are war profiteers
on
RPG Heroes Are Jerks
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· Score: 1
Maybe it's like the villagers in The Seven Samurai. "Yes, we want the world to be saved, but that won't do us any good if we die in the winter because our food supplies were looted. We know you're our only hope, but we've been robbed by so many adventurers that we hide our possessions."
It's got one nice feature I wish ASCII had: the code for a digit is the same as the value of a digit. That would save a little programming boilerplate.
The other obvious advantage of a cruise missile is that it can fly a sea-skimming trajectory. That's a big issue for penetration of defences. And that's the main driver for this kind of missile: if they just wanted to hit things that couldn't shoot back then a subsonic weapon would have been cheaper and much lighter. You can carry four harpoon for the weight of one of these monsters and as the Russians say, quantity has a quality all of its own.
Sea-skimming is especially important if you intend to fight someone with an air defence system which is long-range but horizon-limited, e.g. the USN Aegis. Which is where this missile's Russian antecedents came from.
Maybe India is seeing the US as its most important potential enemy? Doesn't make much sense to me - I'd be worried about China - but maybe they think capability is more important than intentions. Or maybe they just think supersonic is cool.
It sounds like the crystals make electricity which in turn makes the hydrogen. If that's true then it would be more useful, if possible, just to harvest the electricity. It's a lot easier to move electrical power around, especially from a diffuse source, than it is to collect and transport hydrogen. Though the idea still sounds impractical even then.
People always think of the best outcome when a new technology is created, forgetting the cesspool we call humanity that's going to use and pervert it.
I don't think this is true. I often hear people saying something new is undesirable.
The day you have bionic eyes is the day people start paying good money to augment your "virtual reality" to replace competitors advertisements, add advertisements onto everyday objects surrepticiously
As long as they're offering me the money, and I can decide whether or not to accept, I don't see this is a problem. Personally I shall decline.
except you won't be able to unplug.
It's a contact lens. If I want to unplug I take it out.
Not fifteen years ago when the internet was in its infancy, most of what was out there was high quality scientific research and most of the e-mails being sent were between real people, having real conversations. Today, it's a cesspool where 99% of what your inbox gets hit with is someone trying to sell you something.
And yet the internet remains useful, and is indeed even more useful than it was then. So these problems must be tolerable. Even spam is less of a problem now than it was recently, mostly because filters are better.
All technology does, this one included, is expose and direct us towards the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
This is obviously not true, especially for the dogs amongst us.
Seriously, I don't know whether this is true because it's impossible to tell what activities might fall under the umbrella of "expose and direct us towards the fundamental question of what it means to be human". But this is one of those sentences Twain was talking about when he said that it sounded very fine, but there wasn't a shred of sense to it or meaning in it.
The parent post was intended as an axeing of the modern net, amongst other things. But the fact a content-free rant like the parent post was modded "+5, insightful" is really a better indictment than anything the parent post itself can provide.
The very idea of making it illegal for adults to buy a videogame or to buy a movie is ludicrous.
As a possible counterexample, suppose there's a thriving industry in Nastystan producing films that show children being raped, tortured and murdered. Should it be legal to allow these films to be imported into Australia and sold to adults?
But all it takes is one person to talk to both groups.
These aren't soldiers, they haven't signed an official secrets act, they won't stop blabbing.
And the quantities we're talking about are huge. Millions of samples are hard to hide.
[...] "This item matches 1 in X people in the population." Now that's usually pretty good, like 1 in a million or something. However not so useful if your sample size is 300,000,000 and growing. [...] So I can't really see this of being a whole lot of use to law enforcement either.
If I understand correctly what you're saying is that at the moment we're convicting people because they happen to be in the DNA database which is relatively small, but that if our database was larger we'd notice there were several such people so we wouldn't be able to convict on this evidence.
If that's true then the enlarged database would serve to prevent unsafe convictions, which sounds like an excellent benefit to law enforcement.
BIG ASSUMPTIONS he is making: (1) A sample will be destroyed after it is used to create a DNA profile.
Actually that's probably valid. The typing isn't going to be done by people with top secret clearances in highly secure government laboratories where everything is need to know. There just aren't enough such people to run a project of this size. It's going to be done by basically ordinary medical technicians. And if every one of these people is told, "Oh, and illegally keep the whole sample as well," then it's going to get out because that many people can't keep anything secret.
(2) Only law enforcement will have access
That's an interesting one. I'm wondering what specific abuses would be an issue. If I understand correctly, "I think my daughter is still seeing that black kid, here's her bra, tell me if it's been handled by an African American" wouldn't work because race doesn't correlate to DNA fingerprint. If it's "the same guy as touched this door handle," then we don't need the database. I guess we could do, "the guy with this license plate" but how big a concern is that?
I'm not sure the parent-squared deserved what was heaped on his head.
Slashdot Mirror
The President doesn't really matter. The orientation of Congress doesn't really matter. What matters is the overall opinion of the American population
There's an element of truth to this, partly because there's benn a lot of convergence in major parties over the last few decades. It started in or before the early 90s in America (Clinton &c), and in the early-mid 90s in Britain (Blair, Brown &c). In Australia it happened in the early 80s (Hawke, Keating &c). Whether this really is the tail wagging the dog I'm curious to know.
But it's an overstatement to say it "doesn't really matter". Iraq, for instance, would be a very different place if Al Gore had been president rather than George Bush. (Not trying to say better or worse, just very different.)
America as a nation is only 234 years old, compared to other nations that have been in roughly the same state for a thousand years.
There is no such other nation.
The United States is actually one of the more constitutionally conservative countries. Its last major change to its way of government, neglecting gradual extensions of the franchise, could be argued to be either 1861-5 or 1783. There aren't many countries who can beat that. Britain can probably claim 1660 but I can't think of anywhere else offhand that beats the US.
The more precise chain of logic is "The majority of proprietary games released these days are DRM-encumbered, therefore mcgrew says the majority of proprietary game producers are thieves, therefore mcgrew is calling a majority of said producers thieves, therefore mcgrew is calling the majority of such producers dishonest, and making a jump from there to calling most people dishonest, we conclude that mcgrew must believe himself to be dishonest." Which is a little bodgy in places but if mcgrew wants to disagree with a particular step he can.
Whether honest people believe that other people are honest is wholly irrelevant to the reality of whether people are honest or not.
I would largely agree with you. But mcgrew said
Honest people think most other people are honest
so we can't rule out mcgrew being honest, but we can pretty much rule out that mcgrew believes himself to be honest. Assuming he's thinking clearly enough to understand the consequences of his statements.
Tangomargarine quoted the line about thieves which was a mistake on his part. He should have quoted the phrase about honest people. But it's in the nature of a slip rather than a serious logical flaw.
The presence or absence of DRM on a software product is rarely, if ever a decision of the actual creators of that product, rather, it is a property of the distribution channel.
That doesn't affect feepness's conclusion, since feepness doesn't care whether mcgrew's statements are true, only that mcgrew made them. But it's an interesting point and would be a good argument of the implausibility of mcgrew's initial claim.
Nothing you've said contradicts my statement. Just believing that somebody is a thief does not make you yourself a thief, and this is easily provable.
I agree. But the debate isn't about whether that is true, it's about the consequences of mcgrew's premise that "Honest people think most other people are honest". Nobody said mcgrew was a thief, just that mcrew was saying mcgrew was a thief. (Which isn't quite true, but close enough to true that it's reasonable to ask mcgrew to clarify.)
If David Prowse was really in Darth Vader's suite then he probably never got paid because he was killed when the Death Star was destroyed. He must have attached his soul to something as he was dying. Can detached souls sue?
Just because thieves think everyone is a thief, it does not follow that if you think someone is a thief, then so are you.
The relevant statements are, "Honest people think most other people are honest" and "If you see any kind of DRM on anything, you can be pretty sure its creator is a thief". The syllogism is that if he sees lots of DRM about then he must think most people are dishonest and therefore can't be honest himself.
The case is far from airtight: the speaker might believe that most creators are thieves but most people aren't (you just can't trust artistic types) or he might believe most creators never use DRM. But there's no need to rely on the statement about thieves so it isn't really the logical fallacy you traduce.
Last I checked, "Muslim" was recognised as neither an ethnicity, nor a nationality. But don't get that in the way of trying to make life simple for yourself or others.
I think if anything you're the one who is oversimplifying, by assuming names are determined by ethnicity or nationality rather than by religion. In fact, many names are inspired by religion, Mohammed being the most obvious example.
That said, "Khan" isn't really from Islam but from Central Asia. It was carried by Turks and Mongols wherever they conquered. I'm guessing Indians named Khan get it from the Mughals, who got it from Afghanistan, who got it from the Seljuq Turks. Who happened to be muslim, but that's probably not relevant to the name.
I agree this sounds weird.
A suspended sentence is essentially a ban on committing further crimes, perhaps this is somehow similar?
Can you explain to me how the ability to read cell phones is relevant to the case you adduce?
If you want to argue wipes are good then you need to show us a case where the police abused their ability to read records, where a wipe would have protected the innocent. This case doesn't seem to qualify.
The only real relevance of records in this case would seem to be that the dead police officer didn't keep them.
Given that the police apparently raided someone innocent one could argue that better access to electronic records might have reduced the chance of making this mistake. In which case it's an argument against you, though that's a bit of a stretch.
the U.S. and other countries spy on each other all the time, but the U.S. would never spy on Toyota and share that intelligence with General Motors
And we know this how?
Have you been baking hyperbolic pies again?
The rule, "All terrorists are collectivists or Muslims" is only rarely violated.
This is probably more true today than historically. A hundred years ago we had anarchist terrorists who'd be horrified to be called collectivist. Fifty years ago we had Jewish terrorists, with no great collectivist tendencies. Western China still has a few Uighur terrorists, doesn't it? I don't know whether that Japanese nerve gas sect is collectivist.
I think Islam and Marxism are just the two most recent generators for terrorism against western and epi-western states. And Marxism is running out of puff lately, with the Tamil Tigers and FARC in collapse and the IRA gone quiet. Indian Maoists are still there, who else?
Notice how once you get to a tipping point of around 35-45% Muslim you start getting into such lovely subjects as ethnic cleansing?
The term "ethnic cleansing" was invented to euphemise maltreatment principally of muslims, not by them.
Like the U.S. and the Soviet Union in WW2, we will fight our common enemy from either side, then when we meet in Berlin we will resume fighting each other.
So if the US and USSR hadn't fought each other in Berlin, what conclusions would you draw?
Reasonable people understand that there is no "PJ", that IBM spun up a screen name and went to town.
In this forum PJ is defined by her work on groklaw so she can't help being real. What's really claimed here is that her biological component is other than we'd thought, but her biological component isn't something we've ever interacted with so why should we care? It's probably a big deal to PJ's personal friends, lovers, family, church choir colleagues, volleyball team and pets but to people who know her only through the web it's not clear it means anything. If PJ was a dog, and for all I know she is, would it change anything about her work?
It's a lot like the old claim that The Iliad and Odyssey were written, not by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name.
Maybe it's like the villagers in The Seven Samurai. "Yes, we want the world to be saved, but that won't do us any good if we die in the winter because our food supplies were looted. We know you're our only hope, but we've been robbed by so many adventurers that we hide our possessions."
Fact 1: The internet is made of cats.
Fact 2: On the internet no one can tell you're a dog.
Who can reconcile this for me?
I would say only the "IO" letter is missing
Isn't $75 the IO? Or am I misunderstanding?
It's got one nice feature I wish ASCII had: the code for a digit is the same as the value of a digit. That would save a little programming boilerplate.
The other obvious advantage of a cruise missile is that it can fly a sea-skimming trajectory. That's a big issue for penetration of defences. And that's the main driver for this kind of missile: if they just wanted to hit things that couldn't shoot back then a subsonic weapon would have been cheaper and much lighter. You can carry four harpoon for the weight of one of these monsters and as the Russians say, quantity has a quality all of its own.
Sea-skimming is especially important if you intend to fight someone with an air defence system which is long-range but horizon-limited, e.g. the USN Aegis. Which is where this missile's Russian antecedents came from.
Maybe India is seeing the US as its most important potential enemy? Doesn't make much sense to me - I'd be worried about China - but maybe they think capability is more important than intentions. Or maybe they just think supersonic is cool.
It sounds like the crystals make electricity which in turn makes the hydrogen. If that's true then it would be more useful, if possible, just to harvest the electricity. It's a lot easier to move electrical power around, especially from a diffuse source, than it is to collect and transport hydrogen. Though the idea still sounds impractical even then.
People always think of the best outcome when a new technology is created, forgetting the cesspool we call humanity that's going to use and pervert it.
I don't think this is true. I often hear people saying something new is undesirable.
The day you have bionic eyes is the day people start paying good money to augment your "virtual reality" to replace competitors advertisements, add advertisements onto everyday objects surrepticiously
As long as they're offering me the money, and I can decide whether or not to accept, I don't see this is a problem. Personally I shall decline.
except you won't be able to unplug.
It's a contact lens. If I want to unplug I take it out.
Not fifteen years ago when the internet was in its infancy, most of what was out there was high quality scientific research and most of the e-mails being sent were between real people, having real conversations. Today, it's a cesspool where 99% of what your inbox gets hit with is someone trying to sell you something.
And yet the internet remains useful, and is indeed even more useful than it was then. So these problems must be tolerable. Even spam is less of a problem now than it was recently, mostly because filters are better.
All technology does, this one included, is expose and direct us towards the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
This is obviously not true, especially for the dogs amongst us.
Seriously, I don't know whether this is true because it's impossible to tell what activities might fall under the umbrella of "expose and direct us towards the fundamental question of what it means to be human". But this is one of those sentences Twain was talking about when he said that it sounded very fine, but there wasn't a shred of sense to it or meaning in it.
The parent post was intended as an axeing of the modern net, amongst other things. But the fact a content-free rant like the parent post was modded "+5, insightful" is really a better indictment than anything the parent post itself can provide.
The very idea of making it illegal for adults to buy a videogame or to buy a movie is ludicrous.
As a possible counterexample, suppose there's a thriving industry in Nastystan producing films that show children being raped, tortured and murdered. Should it be legal to allow these films to be imported into Australia and sold to adults?
But all it takes is one person to talk to both groups. These aren't soldiers, they haven't signed an official secrets act, they won't stop blabbing. And the quantities we're talking about are huge. Millions of samples are hard to hide.
[...] "This item matches 1 in X people in the population." Now that's usually pretty good, like 1 in a million or something. However not so useful if your sample size is 300,000,000 and growing. [...] So I can't really see this of being a whole lot of use to law enforcement either.
If I understand correctly what you're saying is that at the moment we're convicting people because they happen to be in the DNA database which is relatively small, but that if our database was larger we'd notice there were several such people so we wouldn't be able to convict on this evidence.
If that's true then the enlarged database would serve to prevent unsafe convictions, which sounds like an excellent benefit to law enforcement.
BIG ASSUMPTIONS he is making: (1) A sample will be destroyed after it is used to create a DNA profile.
Actually that's probably valid. The typing isn't going to be done by people with top secret clearances in highly secure government laboratories where everything is need to know. There just aren't enough such people to run a project of this size. It's going to be done by basically ordinary medical technicians. And if every one of these people is told, "Oh, and illegally keep the whole sample as well," then it's going to get out because that many people can't keep anything secret.
(2) Only law enforcement will have access
That's an interesting one. I'm wondering what specific abuses would be an issue. If I understand correctly, "I think my daughter is still seeing that black kid, here's her bra, tell me if it's been handled by an African American" wouldn't work because race doesn't correlate to DNA fingerprint. If it's "the same guy as touched this door handle," then we don't need the database. I guess we could do, "the guy with this license plate" but how big a concern is that?
I'm not sure the parent-squared deserved what was heaped on his head.