Yes. I assumed OP meant "algorithm" as "deterministic algorithm."
I do still think it's unfair to use the term at all when you're describing a stochastic process which is likely too complex for humans ever to characterize. "There are rules for it -- we aren't capable of discovering them, but darnit there are rules!" -- just doesn't seem like a very meaningful assertion. It certainly doesn't follow that "anything a brain can do, a computer can do" -- they operate, and the latter is designed to operate, in fundamentally different ways, and we aren't capable of writing the software that will let the latter simulate the former.
As I said, unlikely for dice. When we're working on the level of neurotransmitters and electrical impulses, these are much smaller relative to the size of quantum effects; still, it's a thought, not an assertion. I don't mean to say it's definitely going on.
But with that said, there is also no evidence that conscious experience is the result of a strictly deterministic universe. (Step one of that claim would be to prove that the universe is strictly deterministic, which seems a pretty ambitious proposition, though if proof exists I'd like to hear it.) Even if it were, it likely doesn't do us much good, since any underlying determinism is likely to be so detailed and complicated that it will always be outside our computational abilities to make meaningful use of it. And even if it were, that doesn't mean that a brain is suddenly identical to a computer.
I am less concerned with making positive assertions about the nature of consciousness (I do not claim to have those answers) than with questioning the foundations upon which others embrace an easy reductionism that denies any interesting characteristics to the phenomenon of consciousness. Call it one big "citation needed" to the claim that human minds readily reduce to computers.
No, what I mean is computers, at present, cannot love. They do not have strong AI. AI researchers are committed to this idea that brains are computers, therefore strong AI is just around the corner. It isn't -- and it won't be, because the field is still driven by the attempt to recreate in silicon something other than what exists in meat. The fundamental problem is the hand-waving that happens around the assertion that "the human mind is a complicated neural network with some chemically adjustable parameters. Nothing more." All right... This is a tremendously bold claim. Where's your proof? What's your evidence? Your statement is an axiom held dear by people who are much more familiar with computers than with human minds, but reasserting that "it's obvious this must be the case" is just retrenchment of your beliefs.
If you build an AI which has emotions and is functionally indistinguishable from a human in terms of emotional response, I will be very impressed. You haven't done that, though, have you? Nor has anyone else. Call me when you do. (Better give your great-great-grandson my phone number.)
As for your thought experiment, it's not a new one to me. AI research, if it's ever going to get anywhere near strong AI, is going to have to go this route. If you can effectively simulate a human brain, yes, I agree you have a sentient being on your hands (and a major problem when the next brownout rolls along). That said, you won't be able to do this unless you also simulate sensory connections to the world, basic physical needs, the ability to move around and experience the world, centralized location in space, and a lifetime of lived experience (the latter would probably be accomplished by providing the simbrain with a lifetime in which to experience things through its sense simulations). You would, of course, need to simulate the brain's development from infancy through childhood through puberty. But do all those things, and yes, eventually you probably have some sort of simulated human life.
But your thought experiment assumes the conclusion in its terms. You have posited that you have computing resources and know-how to assemble something that's indistinguishable from the brain of a conscious person, a brain that can generate a mind, and then asked if it can generate a mind. Well... yes. If it didn't, it wouldn't meet the terms of your assumptions. Beyond that, it's a thought experiment. I do not believe that such a thing could come close to being assembled in practical reality. Thought experiments of the form of "if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle" don't really demonstrate much.
That also still doesn't demonstrate that the life in question is algorithmic within any pragmatic definition of the term; determinism that requires a supercomputer larger than the universe to calculate isn't really determinism worth talking about...
Yeah, somebody ought to do something about that. Discovery exists for a reason, and establishing a policy of "we destroy drafts" is fundamentally equivalent to a policy of "we do not comply with legitimate discovery requests," which is obviously a non-starter...
This is the old "is the universe deterministic" debate that's been raging for thousands of years.
My personal suspicion is that we would need to measure the variables to a sufficient degree of precision that we would hit the realm where physics is no longer strictly deterministic, i.e. that changes at the subatomic level could potentially alter the result. That's probably an overbold claim for dice (unless I want to throw in a "for sufficiently well-constructed dice" weasel), but even so, it may be the case for neurons, for which the normal level of operation is a lot smaller; a sufficiently accurate model would need to account for a lot of movement at the molecular level...
Either way, I think that in the absence of more data, the kind of strong determinism you're proposing is really just an article of faith.
More to the point, you aren't responding to my claim that brains can generate minds, something computers have never been shown capable of doing. I think that the ability to create a mind, and the ability to create concepts with "aboutness" through conceptual metaphor, both present in brains but not computers, are two fundamental hurdles to be overcome before we can really say that a brain is reducible to an algorithm/computer.
The laws of physics are mathematical, so fundamentally the human mind is an algorithm.
This is where your logic breaks down. The laws of physics are mathematical, but that does not imply that the things they govern are algorithmic. The laws of physics govern the roll of dice, too, but you aren't saying there's a dice algorithm, are you? (if you are, cut me in, let's go make billions in Monaco, sound good?)
Because of Turing completeness, there's fundamentally nothing that the human mind can do that a computer cannot.
If any of us ever believed anything said by a large corporation -- well, I think I found your problem right there.
Seriously, Norquist has it backwards. What we need to do is get all businesses down to the size where we can drown them in the bathtub.
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Oh, I totally agree that it would be a fun toy, if for the Star Trek / Old-Man's-War series / generic Sci-Fi futurism aspects. Plus I suppose it's a decent way to watch movies.
I just don't see it having as broad-based an appeal as many of these other products, particularly since it's internal competition within Apple's existing product lines. I don't mean to say that they'll all be dust, just that it's not going to be the breakthrough success that everyone seems to expect -- and for my money, I'd rather have the netbook. There will certainly be a role for it, just nowhere near so big a one as the gaga gadget media seems to expect.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
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iPod? Great idea (digital walkman) for a strong existing market (mobile music). iPhone? Killer entrant into an already-proven market (mobile internet via web-enabled phone, which had been popular for at least six years).
iPad? Awkward entrant in a sluggish market (ebooks) that cannibalizes Apple's own sales for another market (mobile media via iPod) and can't really measure up to an existing, more robust, slightly cheaper & more featureful solution for highly-mobile computing (netbooks).
See the difference? Or do you just think Apple's never launched a flop, and you'll be surprised at Newton 2.0?
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Right. You're a zero-day adopter, i.e. a fanboy. You are not the mainstream.
And your use case is "it's a great replacement for an ipod and a (paper) notebook." I'm not convinced.
Incidentally, what multiplayer games are you playing with your kids on a single screen? Tic-tac-toe or something?
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
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None of the examples you use, with the exception of the business use case, are handled better on an iPad than a netbook. In fact, they're pretty much all handled worse, because tablet computing input still sucks. Not to mention that grandma's arthritic hands aren't going to enjoy this thing. And are you seriously telling me you want to type tricky cli commands on a no-feedback slick-surface touchscreen keyboard? Please.
The business case is irrelevant, because no business is going to spring for an iPad when they could have a Blackberry instead. It's cheaper, lighter, and makes phone calls. If even the iPhone isn't making major inroads against the Blackberry, you can bet the iPad won't.
The iPad's "killer functionality" will be mobile videos, ebooks, and generally media playback. I don't expect that to revolutionize the computing world, however. It will likely compete with existing Apple products, like the iPod Touch.
This is a device without a purpose. Many hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars will be spent to create one, but in the end there isn't really a niche for it, doubly so when Apple tries to use it to remake the web. Ultimately, it is not a computer replacement, and until it is, the kind of stuff it's good for is a niche application for people who already have a computer.
Yes, yes, change is important. That doesn't mean every change is a good idea.
Re:iChat? Really? What about multi-tasking?
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What use a chat client when typing is an exhausting chore?
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
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you have to use keyboard every now and then to use web or to do basically anything. That's not going to change until we have good speech recognition.
Which doesn't bode well for the iPad, because the last thing you want to do is go around dictating everything on a device that's meant to be used on-the-go, in public.
Who is iPad aimed at then?
Apple thinks everything it touches will become gold. So it's assuming -- like all the gushy tech reviewers -- that this is a device that will "make its own niche" or for which people will "discover needs and uses they didn't realize they had." Okay, that's possible I suppose, but people have been talking about this thing for months, and the best case anybody's been able to make for it is as an e-book reader. Seriously guys?
in hindsight, the central failure in the attempted bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, involved inadequate sharing of information."
...wow. Good thing we didn't know that EIGHT YEARS AGO.
You should consult the American's With Disabilities Act. Basically, it says that if you are fucked up, all the rest of us are responsible for accommodating you.
...within limits. For instance, Title III (which deals with accessibility in public facilities like malls or places of business) is partially tested against the means of the business, and does not require modifications if they would entail an unfair burden on the business owner.
And that's precisely my point in responding to OP -- not that we shouldn't be accommodating to people with disabilities, but that there has to be a sense of proportion. I have no problem with mandating that new malls need wheelchair ramps, or that employers not discriminate against people with disabilities in their hiring practices. I have a problem when someone demands that someone else no longer communicate with her family members through very-broadly-adopted technologies, on the grounds of a sensitivity that is vanishingly rare (granting for the sake of argument that it actually exists, which I do not believe).
Justice is about balancing competing interests. It is not served by demanding that one side make disproportionate sacrifices, while the other makes no effort whatsoever to remedy its problem by changing its own behavior.
There have to be limits to the ability of one person to restrict the rights of others on their own property. Purely fictitious injuries are one example of an appropriate limit. The protection of extreme minority conditions would be a similar one, as there are cases in which the needs of the individual impose such an undue burden on the rest of the society that the society is no longer bound to accommodate those needs.
Let's take a case that, unlike this guy's "illness", might actually exist. Assume that there's a kid in the neighborhood who's allergic to pine pollen, which could be ameliorated by chopping down some nearby trees. For the purposes of the hypothetical, it's a medically real sensitivity that causes him serious respiratory problems.
So what do we do? Naturally the family is welcome to cut down all the pine trees on their property. But what about the neighbors? Are they bound to chop down their pine trees? What about the neighbors for a full mile? For five miles? If the kid can only be helped by killing off every pine tree in a twenty-five-mile radius, is it still okay to harm everyone else, destroying their quality of life, their property values, and the environment generally, because of his phenomenally rare sensitivity?
I will submit that you don't disagree with me in principle, only in where you draw the radius.
Further, I do not believe it is okay to harm someone else by denying them reasonable freedoms in order to accommodate one's own sensitivity. People are obliged to look after themselves before making excessive demands to control the lives of others. If there were a sizable group of people negatively impacted by the defendant's actions, or if it posed some kind of threat to a natural system, that would be one thing, but she's not polluting the water table or blotting out the sun here, she's just using a cell phone.
If these sensitivities were real (though I very much doubt that they are), he would have a point. Just because something has become socially common doesn't mean it's ok to do if it later turns out that it harms others in their own home.
Er, no offense, but no he wouldn't. He'd have a sensitivity that it would be incumbent upon him to solve. Otherwise what's to stop him from moving into an apartment in the center of a city and demanding that everyone in the building stop using electronics? He's welcome to retrofit his home to make it a Faraday cage if he wishes, but he has no right to restrict the law-abiding behavior of his neighbor in *her* home just because he's (supposedly) a genetic freak who can sense EMF radiation.
The compromise would be for games companies to be more supportive of mod programmers and allow them to sell their mods at low cost whilst taking a cut themselves - maybe even sell third-party mods on their web sites. Hopefully, the remuneration that the games programmers would receive would be encouragement to complete more projects.
Of course, it will never happen in the real world because greedy games companies will see this as extending the shelf-life of games and won't want gamers buying mods instead of new games...
It really depends on the genre you're playing. Strategy games in particular (I'm thinking EU, the Civ series, & the like) have tended to be very modder-friendly. Why? Precisely because it extends the games' shelf life. It makes you love the manufacturer's products and it means a longer tail in sales, all for work that's being done for free from people who really love the game. As for centralizing mod repositories -- this is actually even in consideration for Civ V, with in-game access to Firaxis-hosted mods being one of the new selling points...
Now, you won't find this with games in other genres, but game companies are recognizing that user-generated content lets them sell access to something they don't create, and make money for nothing.
Okay, I did some more looking into this. More info e.g. here.
The parent's point (misogynistic ranting aside) is actually correct; many states consider parentage and parental obligations to inhere in genetic parentage. This has nothing to do with the mother's rights vs. the father's; it's about the child's right to support. Which is fair enough as far as it goes, except the legal precedent is obsessed with the child at the expense of the parents (e.g. a case where a 12-year-old who impregnated his babysitter is liable for child support, even though it was statutory rape -- that ruling actually implies that consent to a sexual act is of no relevance whatsoever in determining obligations to the child, which is obviously wrong; there is no better example of a case where a child should be supported by the community/state rather than a 12-year-old...)
Family law is far from just, but it looks like a couple really could sue a female egg donor for child support if they could demonstrate that she was in a better financial position than they were, and they didn't mind that the woman who received the egg would probably lose all parental rights to a "stranger child."
There have been court cases where the mother who was artificially inseminated with donated sperm was later able to track down the man who donated the sperm, and successfully sue him for child support.
Mmhm. What's the source on this? I remember a case like that happening once in Germany about ten years back, when the sperm donor was a personal friend of the woman receiving the sperm, but that was the only one I ever heard of.
The broader point being, the vast majority of functions of a modern government are not envisioned anywhere in the Framers' thought or in the Constitution; it is a document that has failed to keep pace with the times.
I mean, it does not explicitly authorize the federal government to fund the Internet or have a space program, either, but almost nobody is challenging those on Constitutional grounds. It makes no explicit mention of social security or medicare, programs which have remained incredibly popular and cannot credibly be claimed to have led to totalitarianism of any stripe, for over seventy years. All the Framers were dead by the time the Constitution ceased to permit the literal ownership of human beings, or allowed more than a tiny fraction of the population to vote at all.
For that matter, a literal reading of the Constitution doesn't even grant any power whatsoever to establish a federal-level police force with jurisdiction over anything other than piracy and counterfeiting (so bye bye FBI); there is no mention of a draft, or even a standing army -- hrrm -- no mention of legislation relating to drug laws... The "Department of Homeland Security" stands on no firmer ground (a vague "provide for the common defense") than any of the social legislation which so raises conservative hackles.
The point is, governments have moved on. The Founders were not "for" or "against" any particular social program, because when they were setting up this country, no such things had been invented yet. The Constitution predates the steam engine. I am persistently inspired and awed by its brilliant defense of individual liberties against tyrannical interference -- though it hardly goes far enough in this regard -- but very little that the Right complains about can be legitimately considered tyrannical.
And the Ron Paul fans are completely out of touch with reality in placing absolute faith in a document that's only been altered a dozen times since back when there were still serfs; there have been tremendous, mixed but generally positive, developments in the ways that governments are involved with the lives of citizens in the past two hundred fifty years -- in the ways that they help organize people to leverage collective action for collective benefit, that could not be achieved without them -- and in large part due to historically-specific reasons, the Constitution has never kept pace. You can't turn back the clock on how modern governance works (as appealing as that would seem at times), not without unraveling a huge amount of necessary historical change, so digging in on the strict Constitutionality of this particular issue -- well, you do not want to open that can of worms.
On a total side note, the issue with the Second Amendment isn't that "well-regulated" part; it's that the Framers' intent, and the language of the Amendment, clearly refers to ownership of weaponry in the context of groups organized for a civic purpose, not for individual protection. The Constitution is envisioning collective action, most likely as part of what are essentially posses, for community policing. This has nothing to do with modern arguments about gun ownership (full disclosure: personally I think you should have a right to your guns, but they're a less effective means of personal self-defense than their advocates claim); it's another instance of how the Constitution has not at all kept pace with social and political change, and so we just project our modern arguments back onto it and assume, as with all other Scripture, that it agrees with us.
Video taken from the point of view of the designating laser (if it was ground based) can be back-tracked. Even if the video is from the launcher information on the designator used can be determined & be useful in many cases. The less al-queda knows, the better.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
The sentiment expressed in your post, compared alongside that expressed in your sig, interests me.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, the best browser is almost as impotent
You calling my Firefox flaccid?
Yes. I assumed OP meant "algorithm" as "deterministic algorithm."
I do still think it's unfair to use the term at all when you're describing a stochastic process which is likely too complex for humans ever to characterize. "There are rules for it -- we aren't capable of discovering them, but darnit there are rules!" -- just doesn't seem like a very meaningful assertion. It certainly doesn't follow that "anything a brain can do, a computer can do" -- they operate, and the latter is designed to operate, in fundamentally different ways, and we aren't capable of writing the software that will let the latter simulate the former.
As I said, unlikely for dice. When we're working on the level of neurotransmitters and electrical impulses, these are much smaller relative to the size of quantum effects; still, it's a thought, not an assertion. I don't mean to say it's definitely going on.
But with that said, there is also no evidence that conscious experience is the result of a strictly deterministic universe. (Step one of that claim would be to prove that the universe is strictly deterministic, which seems a pretty ambitious proposition, though if proof exists I'd like to hear it.) Even if it were, it likely doesn't do us much good, since any underlying determinism is likely to be so detailed and complicated that it will always be outside our computational abilities to make meaningful use of it. And even if it were, that doesn't mean that a brain is suddenly identical to a computer.
I am less concerned with making positive assertions about the nature of consciousness (I do not claim to have those answers) than with questioning the foundations upon which others embrace an easy reductionism that denies any interesting characteristics to the phenomenon of consciousness. Call it one big "citation needed" to the claim that human minds readily reduce to computers.
No, what I mean is computers, at present, cannot love. They do not have strong AI. AI researchers are committed to this idea that brains are computers, therefore strong AI is just around the corner. It isn't -- and it won't be, because the field is still driven by the attempt to recreate in silicon something other than what exists in meat. The fundamental problem is the hand-waving that happens around the assertion that "the human mind is a complicated neural network with some chemically adjustable parameters. Nothing more." All right... This is a tremendously bold claim. Where's your proof? What's your evidence? Your statement is an axiom held dear by people who are much more familiar with computers than with human minds, but reasserting that "it's obvious this must be the case" is just retrenchment of your beliefs.
If you build an AI which has emotions and is functionally indistinguishable from a human in terms of emotional response, I will be very impressed. You haven't done that, though, have you? Nor has anyone else. Call me when you do. (Better give your great-great-grandson my phone number.)
As for your thought experiment, it's not a new one to me. AI research, if it's ever going to get anywhere near strong AI, is going to have to go this route. If you can effectively simulate a human brain, yes, I agree you have a sentient being on your hands (and a major problem when the next brownout rolls along). That said, you won't be able to do this unless you also simulate sensory connections to the world, basic physical needs, the ability to move around and experience the world, centralized location in space, and a lifetime of lived experience (the latter would probably be accomplished by providing the simbrain with a lifetime in which to experience things through its sense simulations). You would, of course, need to simulate the brain's development from infancy through childhood through puberty. But do all those things, and yes, eventually you probably have some sort of simulated human life.
But your thought experiment assumes the conclusion in its terms. You have posited that you have computing resources and know-how to assemble something that's indistinguishable from the brain of a conscious person, a brain that can generate a mind, and then asked if it can generate a mind. Well... yes. If it didn't, it wouldn't meet the terms of your assumptions. Beyond that, it's a thought experiment. I do not believe that such a thing could come close to being assembled in practical reality. Thought experiments of the form of "if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle" don't really demonstrate much.
That also still doesn't demonstrate that the life in question is algorithmic within any pragmatic definition of the term; determinism that requires a supercomputer larger than the universe to calculate isn't really determinism worth talking about...
Yeah, somebody ought to do something about that. Discovery exists for a reason, and establishing a policy of "we destroy drafts" is fundamentally equivalent to a policy of "we do not comply with legitimate discovery requests," which is obviously a non-starter...
This is the old "is the universe deterministic" debate that's been raging for thousands of years.
My personal suspicion is that we would need to measure the variables to a sufficient degree of precision that we would hit the realm where physics is no longer strictly deterministic, i.e. that changes at the subatomic level could potentially alter the result. That's probably an overbold claim for dice (unless I want to throw in a "for sufficiently well-constructed dice" weasel), but even so, it may be the case for neurons, for which the normal level of operation is a lot smaller; a sufficiently accurate model would need to account for a lot of movement at the molecular level...
Either way, I think that in the absence of more data, the kind of strong determinism you're proposing is really just an article of faith.
More to the point, you aren't responding to my claim that brains can generate minds, something computers have never been shown capable of doing. I think that the ability to create a mind, and the ability to create concepts with "aboutness" through conceptual metaphor, both present in brains but not computers, are two fundamental hurdles to be overcome before we can really say that a brain is reducible to an algorithm/computer.
The laws of physics are mathematical, so fundamentally the human mind is an algorithm.
This is where your logic breaks down. The laws of physics are mathematical, but that does not imply that the things they govern are algorithmic. The laws of physics govern the roll of dice, too, but you aren't saying there's a dice algorithm, are you? (if you are, cut me in, let's go make billions in Monaco, sound good?)
Because of Turing completeness, there's fundamentally nothing that the human mind can do that a computer cannot.
...love?
I'm seeing a pattern here...
..."People like puzzles"?
If any of us ever believed anything said by a large corporation -- well, I think I found your problem right there.
Seriously, Norquist has it backwards. What we need to do is get all businesses down to the size where we can drown them in the bathtub.
Oh, I totally agree that it would be a fun toy, if for the Star Trek / Old-Man's-War series / generic Sci-Fi futurism aspects. Plus I suppose it's a decent way to watch movies.
I just don't see it having as broad-based an appeal as many of these other products, particularly since it's internal competition within Apple's existing product lines. I don't mean to say that they'll all be dust, just that it's not going to be the breakthrough success that everyone seems to expect -- and for my money, I'd rather have the netbook. There will certainly be a role for it, just nowhere near so big a one as the gaga gadget media seems to expect.
iPod? Great idea (digital walkman) for a strong existing market (mobile music).
iPhone? Killer entrant into an already-proven market (mobile internet via web-enabled phone, which had been popular for at least six years).
iPad? Awkward entrant in a sluggish market (ebooks) that cannibalizes Apple's own sales for another market (mobile media via iPod) and can't really measure up to an existing, more robust, slightly cheaper & more featureful solution for highly-mobile computing (netbooks).
See the difference? Or do you just think Apple's never launched a flop, and you'll be surprised at Newton 2.0?
Right. You're a zero-day adopter, i.e. a fanboy. You are not the mainstream.
And your use case is "it's a great replacement for an ipod and a (paper) notebook." I'm not convinced.
Incidentally, what multiplayer games are you playing with your kids on a single screen? Tic-tac-toe or something?
None of the examples you use, with the exception of the business use case, are handled better on an iPad than a netbook. In fact, they're pretty much all handled worse, because tablet computing input still sucks. Not to mention that grandma's arthritic hands aren't going to enjoy this thing. And are you seriously telling me you want to type tricky cli commands on a no-feedback slick-surface touchscreen keyboard? Please.
The business case is irrelevant, because no business is going to spring for an iPad when they could have a Blackberry instead. It's cheaper, lighter, and makes phone calls. If even the iPhone isn't making major inroads against the Blackberry, you can bet the iPad won't.
The iPad's "killer functionality" will be mobile videos, ebooks, and generally media playback. I don't expect that to revolutionize the computing world, however. It will likely compete with existing Apple products, like the iPod Touch.
This is a device without a purpose. Many hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars will be spent to create one, but in the end there isn't really a niche for it, doubly so when Apple tries to use it to remake the web. Ultimately, it is not a computer replacement, and until it is, the kind of stuff it's good for is a niche application for people who already have a computer.
Yes, yes, change is important. That doesn't mean every change is a good idea.
What use a chat client when typing is an exhausting chore?
you have to use keyboard every now and then to use web or to do basically anything. That's not going to change until we have good speech recognition.
Which doesn't bode well for the iPad, because the last thing you want to do is go around dictating everything on a device that's meant to be used on-the-go, in public.
Who is iPad aimed at then?
Apple thinks everything it touches will become gold. So it's assuming -- like all the gushy tech reviewers -- that this is a device that will "make its own niche" or for which people will "discover needs and uses they didn't realize they had." Okay, that's possible I suppose, but people have been talking about this thing for months, and the best case anybody's been able to make for it is as an e-book reader. Seriously guys?
This device will prove to have been a mistake.
in hindsight, the central failure in the attempted bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, involved inadequate sharing of information."
...wow. Good thing we didn't know that EIGHT YEARS AGO.
9/10/01 called, it wants its society back.
(...of course, for that matter, so do I. Sigh.)
You should consult the American's With Disabilities Act. Basically, it says that if you are fucked up, all the rest of us are responsible for accommodating you.
...within limits. For instance, Title III (which deals with accessibility in public facilities like malls or places of business) is partially tested against the means of the business, and does not require modifications if they would entail an unfair burden on the business owner.
And that's precisely my point in responding to OP -- not that we shouldn't be accommodating to people with disabilities, but that there has to be a sense of proportion. I have no problem with mandating that new malls need wheelchair ramps, or that employers not discriminate against people with disabilities in their hiring practices. I have a problem when someone demands that someone else no longer communicate with her family members through very-broadly-adopted technologies, on the grounds of a sensitivity that is vanishingly rare (granting for the sake of argument that it actually exists, which I do not believe).
Justice is about balancing competing interests. It is not served by demanding that one side make disproportionate sacrifices, while the other makes no effort whatsoever to remedy its problem by changing its own behavior.
There have to be limits to the ability of one person to restrict the rights of others on their own property. Purely fictitious injuries are one example of an appropriate limit. The protection of extreme minority conditions would be a similar one, as there are cases in which the needs of the individual impose such an undue burden on the rest of the society that the society is no longer bound to accommodate those needs.
Let's take a case that, unlike this guy's "illness", might actually exist. Assume that there's a kid in the neighborhood who's allergic to pine pollen, which could be ameliorated by chopping down some nearby trees. For the purposes of the hypothetical, it's a medically real sensitivity that causes him serious respiratory problems.
So what do we do? Naturally the family is welcome to cut down all the pine trees on their property. But what about the neighbors? Are they bound to chop down their pine trees? What about the neighbors for a full mile? For five miles? If the kid can only be helped by killing off every pine tree in a twenty-five-mile radius, is it still okay to harm everyone else, destroying their quality of life, their property values, and the environment generally, because of his phenomenally rare sensitivity?
I will submit that you don't disagree with me in principle, only in where you draw the radius.
Further, I do not believe it is okay to harm someone else by denying them reasonable freedoms in order to accommodate one's own sensitivity. People are obliged to look after themselves before making excessive demands to control the lives of others. If there were a sizable group of people negatively impacted by the defendant's actions, or if it posed some kind of threat to a natural system, that would be one thing, but she's not polluting the water table or blotting out the sun here, she's just using a cell phone.
If these sensitivities were real (though I very much doubt that they are), he would have a point. Just because something has become socially common doesn't mean it's ok to do if it later turns out that it harms others in their own home.
Er, no offense, but no he wouldn't. He'd have a sensitivity that it would be incumbent upon him to solve. Otherwise what's to stop him from moving into an apartment in the center of a city and demanding that everyone in the building stop using electronics? He's welcome to retrofit his home to make it a Faraday cage if he wishes, but he has no right to restrict the law-abiding behavior of his neighbor in *her* home just because he's (supposedly) a genetic freak who can sense EMF radiation.
The compromise would be for games companies to be more supportive of mod programmers and allow them to sell their mods at low cost whilst taking a cut themselves - maybe even sell third-party mods on their web sites. Hopefully, the remuneration that the games programmers would receive would be encouragement to complete more projects.
Of course, it will never happen in the real world because greedy games companies will see this as extending the shelf-life of games and won't want gamers buying mods instead of new games...
It really depends on the genre you're playing. Strategy games in particular (I'm thinking EU, the Civ series, & the like) have tended to be very modder-friendly. Why? Precisely because it extends the games' shelf life. It makes you love the manufacturer's products and it means a longer tail in sales, all for work that's being done for free from people who really love the game. As for centralizing mod repositories -- this is actually even in consideration for Civ V, with in-game access to Firaxis-hosted mods being one of the new selling points...
Now, you won't find this with games in other genres, but game companies are recognizing that user-generated content lets them sell access to something they don't create, and make money for nothing.
Okay, I did some more looking into this. More info e.g. here.
The parent's point (misogynistic ranting aside) is actually correct; many states consider parentage and parental obligations to inhere in genetic parentage. This has nothing to do with the mother's rights vs. the father's; it's about the child's right to support. Which is fair enough as far as it goes, except the legal precedent is obsessed with the child at the expense of the parents (e.g. a case where a 12-year-old who impregnated his babysitter is liable for child support, even though it was statutory rape -- that ruling actually implies that consent to a sexual act is of no relevance whatsoever in determining obligations to the child, which is obviously wrong; there is no better example of a case where a child should be supported by the community/state rather than a 12-year-old...)
Family law is far from just, but it looks like a couple really could sue a female egg donor for child support if they could demonstrate that she was in a better financial position than they were, and they didn't mind that the woman who received the egg would probably lose all parental rights to a "stranger child."
There have been court cases where the mother who was artificially inseminated with donated sperm was later able to track down the man who donated the sperm, and successfully sue him for child support.
Mmhm. What's the source on this? I remember a case like that happening once in Germany about ten years back, when the sperm donor was a personal friend of the woman receiving the sperm, but that was the only one I ever heard of.
The broader point being, the vast majority of functions of a modern government are not envisioned anywhere in the Framers' thought or in the Constitution; it is a document that has failed to keep pace with the times.
I mean, it does not explicitly authorize the federal government to fund the Internet or have a space program, either, but almost nobody is challenging those on Constitutional grounds. It makes no explicit mention of social security or medicare, programs which have remained incredibly popular and cannot credibly be claimed to have led to totalitarianism of any stripe, for over seventy years. All the Framers were dead by the time the Constitution ceased to permit the literal ownership of human beings, or allowed more than a tiny fraction of the population to vote at all.
For that matter, a literal reading of the Constitution doesn't even grant any power whatsoever to establish a federal-level police force with jurisdiction over anything other than piracy and counterfeiting (so bye bye FBI); there is no mention of a draft, or even a standing army -- hrrm -- no mention of legislation relating to drug laws... The "Department of Homeland Security" stands on no firmer ground (a vague "provide for the common defense") than any of the social legislation which so raises conservative hackles.
The point is, governments have moved on. The Founders were not "for" or "against" any particular social program, because when they were setting up this country, no such things had been invented yet. The Constitution predates the steam engine. I am persistently inspired and awed by its brilliant defense of individual liberties against tyrannical interference -- though it hardly goes far enough in this regard -- but very little that the Right complains about can be legitimately considered tyrannical.
And the Ron Paul fans are completely out of touch with reality in placing absolute faith in a document that's only been altered a dozen times since back when there were still serfs; there have been tremendous, mixed but generally positive, developments in the ways that governments are involved with the lives of citizens in the past two hundred fifty years -- in the ways that they help organize people to leverage collective action for collective benefit, that could not be achieved without them -- and in large part due to historically-specific reasons, the Constitution has never kept pace. You can't turn back the clock on how modern governance works (as appealing as that would seem at times), not without unraveling a huge amount of necessary historical change, so digging in on the strict Constitutionality of this particular issue -- well, you do not want to open that can of worms.
On a total side note, the issue with the Second Amendment isn't that "well-regulated" part; it's that the Framers' intent, and the language of the Amendment, clearly refers to ownership of weaponry in the context of groups organized for a civic purpose, not for individual protection. The Constitution is envisioning collective action, most likely as part of what are essentially posses, for community policing. This has nothing to do with modern arguments about gun ownership (full disclosure: personally I think you should have a right to your guns, but they're a less effective means of personal self-defense than their advocates claim); it's another instance of how the Constitution has not at all kept pace with social and political change, and so we just project our modern arguments back onto it and assume, as with all other Scripture, that it agrees with us.
Video taken from the point of view of the designating laser (if it was ground based) can be back-tracked. Even if the video is from the launcher information on the designator used can be determined & be useful in many cases. The less al-queda knows, the better.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
The sentiment expressed in your post, compared alongside that expressed in your sig, interests me.