He is a large amount of many sets of differentiated cells. An Embryo can be described as a clump because its shape is similar to a clump of dirt. Fetuses, sure, they're not clumps. They're just incredibly stupid parasitic entities that might one day not be quite as stupid.
Personally, I'm only solidly against the killing of humans who are smarter than the things I eat. If a pig is smarter and more self-aware than a fetus, I don't see how the fetus's suffering can be greater.
Officially, though, on the abortion debate, I'm neutral, except in cases where people sincerely use "anti-choice" or "pro-abortion" to describe their opponent's stance, in which case I'm against their position, as I care more about logic than positions.
As for genetic engineering, I read Brave New World and thought the concepts were more intriguing than disturbing. I imagine that the kids who grew up having been designer babies would think it the most natural thing in the world, as would most of the people born well after such things became common.
What you're talking about is exactly the reason why Google was vastly superior to Altavista. It's also the reason why I tried MSN's search a couple of times, then ran away, as the advertising search results weren't clearly different from the actual search results.
'course, I'm not at all sure why Friendster(and possibly Orkut, though it was never the biggest thing, I think) lost out. Myspace I've hated for a good long while because it looks like it was designed by a n00b from 1994 who thinks that eighteen different colors of flashing text is a good idea.
While I agree with your post, I wanted to pick apart one sentence of yours:
Indeed, "intelligence" and "cleverness" are different words with different definitions. How about if I define "intelligence" as "the ability to be clever"?
I think that's the biggest problem with saying that Google is making us stoopid -- by which definition of intelligence?
There was a study that I only faintly recall(and cannot think of an easy way to Google for it) where they had people define "intelligence", then rate how intelligent they were given that definition. Quite unsurprisingly, people tended to give definitions of "intelligence" that made them intelligent. So, if we don't agree on what "intelligence" is, how could we agree that Google makes us less(or more) intelligent?
So if we mimic Russia ca. 1993, and have troops loyal to the President shelling the Capitol, we'll pretty much have obtained the ideal situation with regard to protecting the rights and incomes of the American citizenry? Okay, so you're saying that the president would order the military to attack the body that has the right to entirely defund the entire military? Then, after the military has its money cut off, congress would proceed to impeach and remove the president who attacked his own country. And, obviously, that's what you must mean, because if the president's attack were successful at cowing congress, that wouldn't have the maximum level of conflict between the two branches, now would it?
Come now; obviously, GP doesn't mean conflict to the point where multiple groups would work directly against their own interests in order to increase conflict. What he likely does mean is a situation that includes gridlock maximized to a reasonable extent -- e.g., the government doesn't shut down, but very little gets passed, and what does get passed are things that significant segments of both parties agree on.
Besides that, the point is that in chile we *don't have* discrepancies....We tally all votes in the week following the election, and the final discrepancy between preliminary, 99%-confidence results and final results is always less than 0.02%. that's NOT 98% accuracy...
First off, I said "at least 98% accuracy". Key part of that being "at least"; there are a lot of situations out there, and I'm not going to claim 99.9% accuracy for all of them.
Secondly, the in-depth, but unofficial media recount of the 2000 Florida general election had the vote totals swinging from Gore by 171 to Bush by 537. That's a max swing of 708 votes. Compare that to the total vote count of 5,962,657, and the total accuracy is at least 99.988%.
Now, let's assume that 20,000 random votes were wrong in some way. That would be an accuracy of 99.664%.
Or, in other words, in a Florida election where tons of stuff seemed to have gone wrong(and certain ballot designs were unquestionably bad), the accuracy was over 99.5%.
This is still just a side note, though, and I can't fully disagree with your conclusions; it's just that I doubt that the Chilean system would come out cleanly if there were an election with five million votes, the victor won by fewer than 600, and organizations spent months of time looking for potential problems.
I don't mean any offense to Chile, but you're comparing a country that evidently doesn't have money to spend on election machinery to a country where enough people spout conspiracy theories about a one to two percent difference that candidates are willing to pay for recounts and mainstream media are willing to pick up on the story.
Or, in other words, if you spent a ton of time and money analyzing election results in Chile, you'd find extremely minor discrepancies that are unlikely to change anything.
The inherent problem with vote counting is that the votes are made by humans(and your average ninety-year-old person with significant dementia problems is significantly more likely than average to find some way to mess up a ballot, even if it's straight forward.), and counted by humans(Try counting three hundred pieces of paper. See if you can reliably end up with the same number. Now imagine someone less capable doing it.) or human-made machinery.
Now, there might very well be a conspiracy, or a significant vote problem of some sort, but for the most part our discrepancies are in areas where everyone agrees that there's at least 98% accuracy in the vote counting.
Passing through the birth canal seems to be an arbitrary time to define the start of personhood. Why should the soul suddenly exist, simply because one has breathed air?
If memory serves, adult chimps are roughly as intelligent as a four year old. So, until a child has reached four years of age, I'd say that there's nothing extra special about them besides their potential(and I'm ignoring the concept of the soul, as my religion might have a different opinion on that issue than yours, and there's no useful evidence for either side.). That said, killing three-year-olds isn't allowed because it'd be rather difficult to establish a black-and-white point when it's okay to kill needy individuals.
Fetuses, on the other hand, are parasitic organisms stealing nutrients from women.
Or, to make my point more obvious, it's not that birth is an especially reasonable cutoff developmentally where killing the fetus makes any more sense, it's that it's an extremely clear dividing line for when the fetus goes from being a parasite to being a needy child.
Anyway, to get a little closer to the actual point of the question, Ron Paul advocates having a constitution that more closely matches the sort of constitution that existed a couple of hundred years ago. The right to privacy was created by five supreme court judges using the excuse that a bunch of the amendments were basically hinting at privacy anyway.
(Hopefully that pair of frothy rants will convince any readers that I'm not arguing my personal point of view; I'm just making points.)
Anyway, with Ron Paul's originalist view toward warfare, I think it would be terribly inconsistent of him to suddenly decide that the constitution contains all sorts of rights just waiting for judges and/or presidents to discover. (And I'm ignoring the 9th amendment, as not even Roe v. Wade mentioned it.)
So I don't know if Ron Paul really is the best choice if you're aiming for "privacy", whatever "privacy" happens to mean to you. Liberty? That's another story.
I loved reading Jon Katz's stories; his splendid writing ability really brought you into whatever concept he was trying to get across.
Of course, I stopped reading him after I read a few of his stories(such as the one positing the Spiderman franchise as the newer generation's Star Wars franchise), and realized that, while his writing was great, his logic was on par with my cat's ability to speak(and she can't even meow).
You're a few years off (59), it is unconstitutional for courts to enforce these agreements. Shelley v. Kraemer (USSCT 1948)
IAA3YLS (sitting in Trusts and Wills class) Not only do I agree with you, it's my entire point.
Or, to be even more obvious, just because Autodesk puts something in an agreement doesn't mean that it's a legal thing to put in an agreement.
if you don't like the license terms, don't buy the product. Oh, like how Microsoft doesn't like it when computers come without Windows, so they force companies to choose between buying no Windows software or buying a copy for every computer they sell?
Or, perhaps, like how some neighborhoods dislike black people, and thus have homeowner agreements that require that black people never be allowed to purchase the property?
So, of course, if you don't like Microsoft's terms, you shouldn't buy the software, and if you have a problem with having a legally-mandated white neighborhood, you should live somewhere else.
The console is sold on the basis that it is a games console. this is the sellers business model if you don't like it, don't buy one. But will it blend? I want to know, but you seem to be saying that it's illegal. How sad; I'll miss the crazy Blendtec guy when the police come to take him away.
Sure, until you get a 1080p a year or two down the road. Just seems kinda shortsighted not to spend the extra $100 and to get a player that is going to support you for much longer. I'm on my third DVD player due to hardware failure, and I was a bit of a late adopter. Do you really think that a low-end first generation HD-DVD player is going to last more than a year or two? I'd imagine that in a year or two the players are likely to get faster and more useful anyway -- heck, combo Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives might be relatively commonplace.
With that much uncertainty, why would spending $100 now for currently useless features be a good idea?
If [you're] talking about the freedom to maintain reproduction rights of your own artistics works, then those who support that portion of the DMCA are actually supporters of freedom. I don't buy that -- that's a bit like a city having the freedom to restrict your movements with barricades. Sure, it's technically a "freedom" that the city has, but it's a freedom to restrict.
That's the problem with freedom, we can't all have it. True. And my calling people "enemies of freedom" is a rhetorical device that I picked up from George W. Bush. Sure, it's a bit over the top, but it's moderately true and rather cathartic in a area where it seems like nearly all the powers that be(including Sony BMG) have interests contrary to mine.
IANAL, either, but if I recall correctly, the DMCA doesn't have a fair-use exemption. So, sure, you can make all the fair-use copies you want from any of your copy-protected CDs or DVDs. It's just that, while exercising your fair-use rights, you'd be circumventing DRM, which is illegal under the DMCA.
Which is why those who support that portion of the DMCA are enemies of freedom.
Maybe because most people don't get chances every day to ask presidential candidates about issues they care about? Does this mean I'll pick up the Thursday Wall Street Journal and see a Mossberg column dedicated to the war in Iraq, because it's an important issue to discuss? No? So why can't I expect him to be on topic at an "all things digital" conference?
rather than asking about whether or not some geek has to pay a bit more for the bandwidth to wank off to porn? How about, "Do you think campers should be required to clear rights before singing songs around the campfire?" or "What are your opinions about the RIAA suing thousands of people, and tens of millions of kids evidently committing felonies every day?" or "Do you think it's fair that Fox will not allow citizens to use video from presidential debates?" or "Is DRM a good thing? Even though it restricts competition?"
The thing is, while the Iraq war has killed off roughly 3,000 Americans, each year there are over 2 million American deaths. Hundreds of thousands of non-Americans are dying in wars around the world that we don't care about. Millions are dying from AIDS in Africa. Millions of abortions happen each year. Stem-cell research has the potential to save millions of lives.
Do I want to talk about any of those things? No. Are they important? Sure. What do they all have in common? A complete lack of anything to do with digital stuff.
And, as I pointed out earlier in this comment, there are plenty of serious, non-porn-related questions to ask a major presidential candidate, and it's likely that he's never answered them before.
Iraq? Again, just google parts of the questions, and you'll likely find other examples of him answering the same question.
Maybe because, in spite of how important net neutrality is, tens of thousands of people dying might be slightly more important. Really? Sure, people will die, but we seem to get into wars every 10 or so years regardless, and there's always a ton of press about it. Copyright law, and how it's being shaped, has the ability to destroy our culture and our society, yet gets virtually no coverage.
I'll grant you that most people would consider life and death more important than amorphous concepts like liberty -- especially when those concepts are not under some frontal assault. And I'll admit that I'm mostly just debating the point because I don't think it's as clear as you feel it is.
My real point is that I read about the Iraq war constantly. The lines of debate and politician's stands are constantly on display and dissected. In no way will the world be less informed if we just asked a couple fewer questions about Iraq when it happens to be wildly off-topic.
Finally a technology conference where there's a presidential candidate present, and it's quite reasonable to grill him about all the pressing topics of interest to the Slashdot crowd, and half the article is about Iraq?
Geez. I know it's important, but McCain has answered the exact same questions hundreds of time. And this article is the first time I've heard a question that involved copyright. Why, oh why, do we have to read the same answers about Iraq in every situation, despite it being wildly off-topic?
I only read through the posting because I actually complained to Ameritrade about the same thing. I blogged about it back about a year ago. Frankly, I thought Ameritrade's response was decent:
Please know that even though you provided your e-mail address only to Ameritrade, it does still sit on a server that other people can see and may gain access to. If you receive an e-mail from one of the following addresses, it is ours:
...
In the case you are speaking of, we have not yet been able to rid ourselves of the spam. The issue is still being worked on.
To view Ameritrade's privacy policy, please click the link below:
Terrence B.
Client Services, TD AMERITRADE
Division of TD AMERITRADE, Inc.
It's still annoying, and TDAmeritrade certainly deserves some amount of heat over this, but I'm guessing that they have slightly tighter standards over their use of social security numbers than they do with the e-mail.
What this minor experiment is showing is that we have judges who are abusing their position / authority and ruling from their own beliefs instead of from the Law.
the vast majority of those Google stories would have a whole argument about whether or not Google is doing evil. I don't follow the tags much, so I'm not sure if that answered your question in relation to the "yes, no, maybe" tags, but I'd be interested to hear your opinion on that question. Honestly, I'm not sure if my question was a fair one; sure, there are lots of useless tags, and it's likely that both the "yes, no, maybe" and "donoevil" tags will continue to be applied to every story possible, but it doesn't make them terribly useful.
The one thing I think tagging does reasonably well is to capture the general Slashdot mood or first response to an issue -- if it's about Google, Slashdotters often think of "Do no evil", and it reminds everyone of how Google has an image to maintain. "Think of the children" pops up whenever politicians talk about kids. "Reality Distortion Field" might pop up whenever there's something about Steve Jobs.
Or, in other words, it's useful in seeing how the community sees an issue -- having "donoevil" as a tag is likely to continue until the point when people stop thinking of that when they hear Google; perhaps then they'll get an "EvilEmpire" tag.
So, I don't know if I'm answering the question either. I doubt tags like "donoevil" are helpful for finding only Google stories where they did something wrong, but perhaps tags can be useful for something without having to depend on Slashdot users to tag responsibly.
It isn't that you took the person's comment in the way that he or she said it, it's that you failed to take the comment in the context that it was given. Huh? You made a (justifiably highly-modded)comment about the law of the situation. Person #2 questioned if you thought the law was moral. Person #3 said that stuff that is against the law is inherently immoral.
How is that not in context?
If I missed anything, it was that person #2 assumed that you thought that the current law was moral, and that I ignored that assumption after I got to his question, as I thought the question was valid and vaguely on-topic, regardless of how person #2 (mis)interpreted your meaning.
and then telling them that incest is wrong and they need to get help, when that was actually just a punchline to a dirty joke. I agree that's highly annoying, which is why I very rarely get angry with people over one comment. I believe this situation is different, though, as after you take all the emotional content out of the comments, there is a discussion that started talking about law that tangented into morality. Which is an entirely reasonable way to see the situation.
All this said, I'll admit I may be being nitpicky(though I still think it's reasonably likely that person #3 really did mean what he wrote), and that I almost certainly agree with you -- Google did the right thing, and they really didn't do evil, even if this seems, on its face, to be like Google's following of the laws of China.
Anyway, given how many posts get "yes, no, maybe" as tags, do you think it's unreasonable to have "donoevil" as a tag on a subject where some people think Google has done something bad?
Slashdot Mirror
After all, he is just a clump of cells.
He is a large amount of many sets of differentiated cells. An Embryo can be described as a clump because its shape is similar to a clump of dirt. Fetuses, sure, they're not clumps. They're just incredibly stupid parasitic entities that might one day not be quite as stupid.
Personally, I'm only solidly against the killing of humans who are smarter than the things I eat. If a pig is smarter and more self-aware than a fetus, I don't see how the fetus's suffering can be greater.
Officially, though, on the abortion debate, I'm neutral, except in cases where people sincerely use "anti-choice" or "pro-abortion" to describe their opponent's stance, in which case I'm against their position, as I care more about logic than positions.
As for genetic engineering, I read Brave New World and thought the concepts were more intriguing than disturbing. I imagine that the kids who grew up having been designer babies would think it the most natural thing in the world, as would most of the people born well after such things became common.
What you're talking about is exactly the reason why Google was vastly superior to Altavista. It's also the reason why I tried MSN's search a couple of times, then ran away, as the advertising search results weren't clearly different from the actual search results.
'course, I'm not at all sure why Friendster(and possibly Orkut, though it was never the biggest thing, I think) lost out. Myspace I've hated for a good long while because it looks like it was designed by a n00b from 1994 who thinks that eighteen different colors of flashing text is a good idea.
I think that's the biggest problem with saying that Google is making us stoopid -- by which definition of intelligence?
There was a study that I only faintly recall(and cannot think of an easy way to Google for it) where they had people define "intelligence", then rate how intelligent they were given that definition. Quite unsurprisingly, people tended to give definitions of "intelligence" that made them intelligent. So, if we don't agree on what "intelligence" is, how could we agree that Google makes us less(or more) intelligent?
Come now; obviously, GP doesn't mean conflict to the point where multiple groups would work directly against their own interests in order to increase conflict. What he likely does mean is a situation that includes gridlock maximized to a reasonable extent -- e.g., the government doesn't shut down, but very little gets passed, and what does get passed are things that significant segments of both parties agree on.
Come now, without following American Pi Day, there'd be no ready-made yearly excuse to make Pi Pie.
In the same way that the reaction to a Klu Klux Klan event tends to shut down roads, and thus stop people from easily getting from point A to point B?
I'm all for jailing spammers, but your logic is awfully indirect.
First off, I said "at least 98% accuracy". Key part of that being "at least"; there are a lot of situations out there, and I'm not going to claim 99.9% accuracy for all of them.
Secondly, the in-depth, but unofficial media recount of the 2000 Florida general election had the vote totals swinging from Gore by 171 to Bush by 537. That's a max swing of 708 votes. Compare that to the total vote count of 5,962,657, and the total accuracy is at least 99.988%.
Now, let's assume that 20,000 random votes were wrong in some way. That would be an accuracy of 99.664%.
Or, in other words, in a Florida election where tons of stuff seemed to have gone wrong(and certain ballot designs were unquestionably bad), the accuracy was over 99.5%.
This is still just a side note, though, and I can't fully disagree with your conclusions; it's just that I doubt that the Chilean system would come out cleanly if there were an election with five million votes, the victor won by fewer than 600, and organizations spent months of time looking for potential problems.
I don't mean any offense to Chile, but you're comparing a country that evidently doesn't have money to spend on election machinery to a country where enough people spout conspiracy theories about a one to two percent difference that candidates are willing to pay for recounts and mainstream media are willing to pick up on the story.
Or, in other words, if you spent a ton of time and money analyzing election results in Chile, you'd find extremely minor discrepancies that are unlikely to change anything.
The inherent problem with vote counting is that the votes are made by humans(and your average ninety-year-old person with significant dementia problems is significantly more likely than average to find some way to mess up a ballot, even if it's straight forward.), and counted by humans(Try counting three hundred pieces of paper. See if you can reliably end up with the same number. Now imagine someone less capable doing it.) or human-made machinery.
Now, there might very well be a conspiracy, or a significant vote problem of some sort, but for the most part our discrepancies are in areas where everyone agrees that there's at least 98% accuracy in the vote counting.
Thanks for being an excellent example for your cause, whatever it is.
By the way, I love the assault on reason by Al Gore.
It's an excellent idea for a book.
If memory serves, adult chimps are roughly as intelligent as a four year old. So, until a child has reached four years of age, I'd say that there's nothing extra special about them besides their potential(and I'm ignoring the concept of the soul, as my religion might have a different opinion on that issue than yours, and there's no useful evidence for either side.). That said, killing three-year-olds isn't allowed because it'd be rather difficult to establish a black-and-white point when it's okay to kill needy individuals.
Fetuses, on the other hand, are parasitic organisms stealing nutrients from women.
Or, to make my point more obvious, it's not that birth is an especially reasonable cutoff developmentally where killing the fetus makes any more sense, it's that it's an extremely clear dividing line for when the fetus goes from being a parasite to being a needy child.
Anyway, to get a little closer to the actual point of the question, Ron Paul advocates having a constitution that more closely matches the sort of constitution that existed a couple of hundred years ago. The right to privacy was created by five supreme court judges using the excuse that a bunch of the amendments were basically hinting at privacy anyway.
(Hopefully that pair of frothy rants will convince any readers that I'm not arguing my personal point of view; I'm just making points.)
Anyway, with Ron Paul's originalist view toward warfare, I think it would be terribly inconsistent of him to suddenly decide that the constitution contains all sorts of rights just waiting for judges and/or presidents to discover. (And I'm ignoring the 9th amendment, as not even Roe v. Wade mentioned it.)
So I don't know if Ron Paul really is the best choice if you're aiming for "privacy", whatever "privacy" happens to mean to you. Liberty? That's another story.
I loved reading Jon Katz's stories; his splendid writing ability really brought you into whatever concept he was trying to get across.
Of course, I stopped reading him after I read a few of his stories(such as the one positing the Spiderman franchise as the newer generation's Star Wars franchise), and realized that, while his writing was great, his logic was on par with my cat's ability to speak(and she can't even meow).
Or, to be even more obvious, just because Autodesk puts something in an agreement doesn't mean that it's a legal thing to put in an agreement.
Or, perhaps, like how some neighborhoods dislike black people, and thus have homeowner agreements that require that black people never be allowed to purchase the property?
So, of course, if you don't like Microsoft's terms, you shouldn't buy the software, and if you have a problem with having a legally-mandated white neighborhood, you should live somewhere else.
With that much uncertainty, why would spending $100 now for currently useless features be a good idea?
IANAL, either, but if I recall correctly, the DMCA doesn't have a fair-use exemption. So, sure, you can make all the fair-use copies you want from any of your copy-protected CDs or DVDs. It's just that, while exercising your fair-use rights, you'd be circumventing DRM, which is illegal under the DMCA.
Which is why those who support that portion of the DMCA are enemies of freedom.
So to speak.
rather than asking about whether or not some geek has to pay a bit more for the bandwidth to wank off to porn? How about, "Do you think campers should be required to clear rights before singing songs around the campfire?" or "What are your opinions about the RIAA suing thousands of people, and tens of millions of kids evidently committing felonies every day?" or "Do you think it's fair that Fox will not allow citizens to use video from presidential debates?" or "Is DRM a good thing? Even though it restricts competition?"
The thing is, while the Iraq war has killed off roughly 3,000 Americans, each year there are over 2 million American deaths. Hundreds of thousands of non-Americans are dying in wars around the world that we don't care about. Millions are dying from AIDS in Africa. Millions of abortions happen each year. Stem-cell research has the potential to save millions of lives.
Do I want to talk about any of those things? No. Are they important? Sure. What do they all have in common? A complete lack of anything to do with digital stuff.
And, as I pointed out earlier in this comment, there are plenty of serious, non-porn-related questions to ask a major presidential candidate, and it's likely that he's never answered them before.
Iraq? Again, just google parts of the questions, and you'll likely find other examples of him answering the same question.
I'll grant you that most people would consider life and death more important than amorphous concepts like liberty -- especially when those concepts are not under some frontal assault. And I'll admit that I'm mostly just debating the point because I don't think it's as clear as you feel it is.
My real point is that I read about the Iraq war constantly. The lines of debate and politician's stands are constantly on display and dissected. In no way will the world be less informed if we just asked a couple fewer questions about Iraq when it happens to be wildly off-topic.
Finally a technology conference where there's a presidential candidate present, and it's quite reasonable to grill him about all the pressing topics of interest to the Slashdot crowd, and half the article is about Iraq?
Geez. I know it's important, but McCain has answered the exact same questions hundreds of time. And this article is the first time I've heard a question that involved copyright. Why, oh why, do we have to read the same answers about Iraq in every situation, despite it being wildly off-topic?
At least I hope they do.
The one thing I think tagging does reasonably well is to capture the general Slashdot mood or first response to an issue -- if it's about Google, Slashdotters often think of "Do no evil", and it reminds everyone of how Google has an image to maintain. "Think of the children" pops up whenever politicians talk about kids. "Reality Distortion Field" might pop up whenever there's something about Steve Jobs.
Or, in other words, it's useful in seeing how the community sees an issue -- having "donoevil" as a tag is likely to continue until the point when people stop thinking of that when they hear Google; perhaps then they'll get an "EvilEmpire" tag.
So, I don't know if I'm answering the question either. I doubt tags like "donoevil" are helpful for finding only Google stories where they did something wrong, but perhaps tags can be useful for something without having to depend on Slashdot users to tag responsibly.
How is that not in context?
If I missed anything, it was that person #2 assumed that you thought that the current law was moral, and that I ignored that assumption after I got to his question, as I thought the question was valid and vaguely on-topic, regardless of how person #2 (mis)interpreted your meaning.
and then telling them that incest is wrong and they need to get help, when that was actually just a punchline to a dirty joke. I agree that's highly annoying, which is why I very rarely get angry with people over one comment. I believe this situation is different, though, as after you take all the emotional content out of the comments, there is a discussion that started talking about law that tangented into morality. Which is an entirely reasonable way to see the situation.
All this said, I'll admit I may be being nitpicky(though I still think it's reasonably likely that person #3 really did mean what he wrote), and that I almost certainly agree with you -- Google did the right thing, and they really didn't do evil, even if this seems, on its face, to be like Google's following of the laws of China.
Anyway, given how many posts get "yes, no, maybe" as tags, do you think it's unreasonable to have "donoevil" as a tag on a subject where some people think Google has done something bad?