With everything going on in the tech world should we be worried about a lawsuit about Trumps hair?
No, but we should absolutely be worried about yet another attempt to use copyright law to diminish freedom: "Thiel's lawyer, Charles J. Harder, is threatening to sue Gawker for reporting on the company that made Donald Trump's hair, claiming copyright prohibits Gawker from republishing his threat."
All such abuses should be reported to help depotentate and overturn copyright law ASAP, least the Information Age becomes a time of artificial scarcity rather than the era of plenty it has the potential to be.
Why? Given the trouble we're already having on Earth, that's probably one of the stupidest research areas we could pursue. Only attractive to those with an unreasonable fear of death, and the narcissists who think the world would be a better place if they lived forever.
Because stopping and preferably reversing aging would benefit people by stopping their bodies from deteriorating with age. Duh.
And seriously, are you now a narcissist if you'd rather be alive than dead or healthy rather than decrepit? WTF?
Until a robot decides to help someone who wants to commit suicide. Then you are going to have to figure out exceptions... because there always are exceptions, except to the always exceptions rule.
No, because a sapient robot is of course fully capable of thinking beyond the moment and comprehending that the person is probably suffering some kind of malfunction and should not be obeyed without further information. It's not a mindlessly obedient machine but a devoted servant.
Exactly. Atheism is the exact opposite of a religion.
And the North Pole is the exact opposite of South, but does that really matter to some poor bastard who has to deal with either?
Atheism gets lumped in with religions because it keeps inspiring preachy assholes to get holier than thou in their quest to convert you and/or assert their e-dominance.
I don't care much about religion, regardless which variety. But I do not consider islam to be a religion. It is an ideology, an all-encompassing view on how civilization should be ran.
Ideologies are secular religions. You simply don't notice them as such because whatever you grew up with is "normal" to you. For West, the ideas of Christianity, Enlightenment and - to a lesser extent - Capitalism are what our civilization is built on. As are centuries of oppression, strife and domination. Our problems are caused by the conflicts and contradictions between the Big Three which gives opportunities to the darker aspects of our heritage to resurface under the guise of finding a scapegoat. Muslims currently serve as that, just like Jews did in centuries past.
And it is totally incompatible with our civilization. It is out to infiltrate and destroy our civilization.
No, but people who have tried to gain power through xenophobia in the past have actually come pretty close to doing just that. And it seems people like you never learn to ignore them.
Frankly, I'm okay with police arresting jackasses who harass random people for things that have nothing to do with them. It's kinda what police are for.
Humans get passionate about their beliefs. They raise their voices. Some of them get carried away. It hardly even matters what they get passionate about - football or faith: both result dead people.
People get passionate about their beliefs, and sometimes even carried away. That doesn't result in dead people, it results in people painting flags in their faces and throwing wicked celebrations should their team win. What does result in dead people is people having faith in violence itself.
As Tsingis Khan put it: "âoeA man's greatest joy is crushing his enemies.â No, it isn't, unless your life really sucks, but that doesn't stop people from thinking that this time they're surely get the hate-gasm, and if they don't have enemies, they'll just treat anyone who happens to be near that way. Of course, not being part of the steppe hordes they need to frame their behaviour in a way that makes it seem rational or at least understandable to themselves. For a football fan it's the rather twisted idea the rival team is "enemy", for the politically inclined politics provides the perfect excuse. But that's all they are: excuses.
As our technology keeps advancing our faith in violence has transformed from merely making life short and miserable to seriously threatening the existence of our entire species. We need to stop excusing that shit. No, people getting passionate doesn't result in dead people; people choosing to engage in violence does. And they do so not because they're passionate, but because they're murderers. And they choose to be murderers because somewhere in their hearts there's a certainty - a religious conviction - that killing their enemies will make them heroes.
Remember when all those progressives and the media said that after Dylann Roof murdered 9 people there needed to be a national dialog on the confederate flag? A guy just killed 50 people was a muslim, I'm sure they're going to be lining up to suggest a national dialog on Islam.
Your right to be a Muslim - or, for that matter, an Atheist, a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever - is protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, no amendment protects your right to be or swear allegiance to a traitor.
If you want to get into the "You are the product" social networking business
Then you'd be better off starting your own than dropping 26 billion dollars on a domain name. There's nothing stopping your "products" from simply walking away. And Microsoft has a pretty bad track record when it can't abuse lock-in.
But then it kept being brought back far too often, and readers took it too seriously.
It kept being brought back because the robot series is all about how badly any attempt to mechanize ethics fails. The Three Laws were, in a sense, the villain - or at least the antagonist - of the series.
If we ever get sapient robots, and conclude that it's okay to treat them as servants, I'd suggest using "do as you think I'd want you to do" or "treat everyone as you think they'd want to be treated" as the law.
Streaming and cloud offer no permanence unless one can store local copies of equal quality.
But content isn't scarce anymore, so what's the point of permanence?
Want that movie? Pay for it for every view! Want that song / record? Pay for it for every listen!
How many movies are worth watching more than - or even - once? Go to a theater if you want to see big-budget special effects. For everything else, there's Youtube and endless amounts of user-generated content. And the same goes for music.
Not worrying about permanence or control is perfectly rational when the Internet makes content like the air we breath: always there, just inhale when you need it and don't worry about it otherwise. Yes, some gulps of air smell sweeter than others, but there will be others just as sweet, so why try to cling to them? It's us old farts who carefully store pressurized containers because we're haunted by our memories of pre-photosynthesis days who are the irrational ones:).
Then, the high oxygen content will cause fires. With enough combustable material,
All potentially combustible material is floating in the oceans, since life has yet to reach the land at this point, because an ozone layer which filters out UV radiation can't form until atmosphere has a high oxygen content, because ozone is made from atmospheric oxygen.
these may continue to burn until there's then not enough oxygen left for the remaining life (which has adapted for a very high oxygen content in the atmosphere to avoid dying out already) to survive.
Adapting to high oxygen content isn't the same as depending on it. Furthermore, a fire will deplete oxygen locally and go out while the global oxygen levels are only slightly affected by a single forest fire event. So what happens is that the increasing oxygen content causes more fires, which increase oxygen consumption until a balance is reached.
Not if we properly enforced the anti-trust laws. Monopolistic behavior is not capitalism.
How systems are supposed to work and how they actually do work when acted out by flawed humans are not the same thing. And in real life capitalism results in corruption because political power is one of the goods which can be bought and sold.
And enforcement of that is required to actually have competition, which is one of the primary goals.
Unfortunately, competition hurts the bottom line, so a rational actor tries to avoid it.
As somebody who's been here a whole lot longer than you, I cordially invite you to go fuck yourself with a broken baseball bat.
If memory serves, that's a pretty accurate summary of most Heinlein protagonists. The guy couldn't decide if he loved "frontier libertarianism" or militarism more.
That is something bureaucrats do routinely. They define how the world works, after all, not you or any pesky "facts". It is no surprise that if these people get enough power, a society invariably collapses.
I take it you're happy about this development, then? After all, it means the Highwayman - excuse me, Highway Patrol Officer - is free to exercise his judgement without any of that pesky oversight. Imagine if he had to clear his decision with some faceless bureaucrat who applied the formally defined rules mechanically as written without paying any attention to the "fact" that Officer Capone's gut is telling him you must be guilty. Why, under bureaucracy we'd have rule of law rather than whatever the good Officer happens to be in the mood for!
We dropped that issue when we realized we had lost, completely. Every now and then we treat the waters after a mass shooting to see if the winds have changed, but we drop it as soon as we see they haven't.
Winds change when they hit a mountain which they can't move, thus forcing them to turn aside. They keep blowing forever if unopposed.
Nothing is ever going to change for someone who folds at the first sign of conflict.
Without the right balance after photosynthesis evolved, the oxygen content of the air would have become high enough to kill off all life.
How could that possibly happen? As rising oxygen level kills off photosynthesising organisms, its production falls, and since free oxygen is reactive and is depleted if not replenished a balance will inevitably develop. After that it's just a matter of learning to tolerate, then utilize it.
What we have is corporate plutocracy. Google will push it towards technocracy, which is probably a good thing. Furthermore, Google receives its revenue through targeted advertising, which requires making sure people have at least some disposable income and communication channels which make it possible to profile them.
You'll always have a corporate overlord as long as you have capitalism, so why not a reasonably enlightened one?
This is a matter of siphoning data. It's a 45 degree drill into someone else's property via API.
Is it just me, or is the word "property" nowadays a pretty much meaningless term? Because it's hard to see how the price of a service offered to the public fits into any reasonable definition of "property".
Not that I'm complaining; the faster that particular naked emperor gets dethroned the better off we all are.
In the past 30 years it has grown from 10% of GDP to over 60%.
As it happens, the past 30 years have also seen a huge shift to the right. By contrast, Finland's socialist period saw the shift from an agrarian backwater to an industrial power.
Socialism always looks nice until you run our of other people's money (then it looks like Venezuela).
Socialism works as long as people in charge care more about building up the country more than filling their pockets or advancing their pet ideology (ironically enough, that includes socialism itself). Sadly, our current government is determined to not just loot the country for the benefit of the owning class but also destroying the very institutions that would allow it to be rebuilt, such as education, postal system, public roads, and government ownership of various industries.
In any case it doesn't matter. Capitalism nearly collapsed when Great Depression put people out of work, and thus made them unable to participate in the economy. This time the same is done by technological progress brought on by capitalism's own inexorable logic. The Age of Capital is ending, and the shadow of Soviet Union still weights down socialism as a viable alternative making peaceful transition difficult if not impossible, so I suppose we're heading for another age of turmoil and revolutions. The question is: what, if anything, will be left standing after Capitalism is done falling?
Slashdot Mirror
No, but we should absolutely be worried about yet another attempt to use copyright law to diminish freedom: "Thiel's lawyer, Charles J. Harder, is threatening to sue Gawker for reporting on the company that made Donald Trump's hair, claiming copyright prohibits Gawker from republishing his threat."
All such abuses should be reported to help depotentate and overturn copyright law ASAP, least the Information Age becomes a time of artificial scarcity rather than the era of plenty it has the potential to be.
Because stopping and preferably reversing aging would benefit people by stopping their bodies from deteriorating with age. Duh.
And seriously, are you now a narcissist if you'd rather be alive than dead or healthy rather than decrepit? WTF?
They could whine about being bored on Mars rather than on Slashdot. You have to admit that that's more impressive.
No, because a sapient robot is of course fully capable of thinking beyond the moment and comprehending that the person is probably suffering some kind of malfunction and should not be obeyed without further information. It's not a mindlessly obedient machine but a devoted servant.
And the North Pole is the exact opposite of South, but does that really matter to some poor bastard who has to deal with either?
Atheism gets lumped in with religions because it keeps inspiring preachy assholes to get holier than thou in their quest to convert you and/or assert their e-dominance.
Ideologies are secular religions. You simply don't notice them as such because whatever you grew up with is "normal" to you. For West, the ideas of Christianity, Enlightenment and - to a lesser extent - Capitalism are what our civilization is built on. As are centuries of oppression, strife and domination. Our problems are caused by the conflicts and contradictions between the Big Three which gives opportunities to the darker aspects of our heritage to resurface under the guise of finding a scapegoat. Muslims currently serve as that, just like Jews did in centuries past.
No, but people who have tried to gain power through xenophobia in the past have actually come pretty close to doing just that. And it seems people like you never learn to ignore them.
Whatever "moslems" are, they haven't deleted your comment or removed your ability to post more, so it seems Slashdot will be fine under them.
From the link you provided in your linked comment:
Matthew Doyle, reportedly a partner in a London-based talent and PR agency, posted a tweet on Wednesday morning saying: "I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday in Croydon. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said 'nothing to do with me.' A mealy mouthed reply."
Frankly, I'm okay with police arresting jackasses who harass random people for things that have nothing to do with them. It's kinda what police are for.
People get passionate about their beliefs, and sometimes even carried away. That doesn't result in dead people, it results in people painting flags in their faces and throwing wicked celebrations should their team win. What does result in dead people is people having faith in violence itself.
As Tsingis Khan put it: "âoeA man's greatest joy is crushing his enemies.â No, it isn't, unless your life really sucks, but that doesn't stop people from thinking that this time they're surely get the hate-gasm, and if they don't have enemies, they'll just treat anyone who happens to be near that way. Of course, not being part of the steppe hordes they need to frame their behaviour in a way that makes it seem rational or at least understandable to themselves. For a football fan it's the rather twisted idea the rival team is "enemy", for the politically inclined politics provides the perfect excuse. But that's all they are: excuses.
As our technology keeps advancing our faith in violence has transformed from merely making life short and miserable to seriously threatening the existence of our entire species. We need to stop excusing that shit. No, people getting passionate doesn't result in dead people; people choosing to engage in violence does. And they do so not because they're passionate, but because they're murderers. And they choose to be murderers because somewhere in their hearts there's a certainty - a religious conviction - that killing their enemies will make them heroes.
Your right to be a Muslim - or, for that matter, an Atheist, a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever - is protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, no amendment protects your right to be or swear allegiance to a traitor.
Then you'd be better off starting your own than dropping 26 billion dollars on a domain name. There's nothing stopping your "products" from simply walking away. And Microsoft has a pretty bad track record when it can't abuse lock-in.
It kept being brought back because the robot series is all about how badly any attempt to mechanize ethics fails. The Three Laws were, in a sense, the villain - or at least the antagonist - of the series.
If we ever get sapient robots, and conclude that it's okay to treat them as servants, I'd suggest using "do as you think I'd want you to do" or "treat everyone as you think they'd want to be treated" as the law.
But content isn't scarce anymore, so what's the point of permanence?
How many movies are worth watching more than - or even - once? Go to a theater if you want to see big-budget special effects. For everything else, there's Youtube and endless amounts of user-generated content. And the same goes for music.
Not worrying about permanence or control is perfectly rational when the Internet makes content like the air we breath: always there, just inhale when you need it and don't worry about it otherwise. Yes, some gulps of air smell sweeter than others, but there will be others just as sweet, so why try to cling to them? It's us old farts who carefully store pressurized containers because we're haunted by our memories of pre-photosynthesis days who are the irrational ones :).
All potentially combustible material is floating in the oceans, since life has yet to reach the land at this point, because an ozone layer which filters out UV radiation can't form until atmosphere has a high oxygen content, because ozone is made from atmospheric oxygen.
Adapting to high oxygen content isn't the same as depending on it. Furthermore, a fire will deplete oxygen locally and go out while the global oxygen levels are only slightly affected by a single forest fire event. So what happens is that the increasing oxygen content causes more fires, which increase oxygen consumption until a balance is reached.
How systems are supposed to work and how they actually do work when acted out by flawed humans are not the same thing. And in real life capitalism results in corruption because political power is one of the goods which can be bought and sold.
Unfortunately, competition hurts the bottom line, so a rational actor tries to avoid it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
If memory serves, that's a pretty accurate summary of most Heinlein protagonists. The guy couldn't decide if he loved "frontier libertarianism" or militarism more.
I take it you're happy about this development, then? After all, it means the Highwayman - excuse me, Highway Patrol Officer - is free to exercise his judgement without any of that pesky oversight. Imagine if he had to clear his decision with some faceless bureaucrat who applied the formally defined rules mechanically as written without paying any attention to the "fact" that Officer Capone's gut is telling him you must be guilty. Why, under bureaucracy we'd have rule of law rather than whatever the good Officer happens to be in the mood for!
You do know what bureaucrats are and do, right?
Winds change when they hit a mountain which they can't move, thus forcing them to turn aside. They keep blowing forever if unopposed.
Nothing is ever going to change for someone who folds at the first sign of conflict.
How could that possibly happen? As rising oxygen level kills off photosynthesising organisms, its production falls, and since free oxygen is reactive and is depleted if not replenished a balance will inevitably develop. After that it's just a matter of learning to tolerate, then utilize it.
What we have is corporate plutocracy. Google will push it towards technocracy, which is probably a good thing. Furthermore, Google receives its revenue through targeted advertising, which requires making sure people have at least some disposable income and communication channels which make it possible to profile them.
You'll always have a corporate overlord as long as you have capitalism, so why not a reasonably enlightened one?
Is it just me, or is the word "property" nowadays a pretty much meaningless term? Because it's hard to see how the price of a service offered to the public fits into any reasonable definition of "property".
Not that I'm complaining; the faster that particular naked emperor gets dethroned the better off we all are.
As it happens, the past 30 years have also seen a huge shift to the right. By contrast, Finland's socialist period saw the shift from an agrarian backwater to an industrial power.
Socialism works as long as people in charge care more about building up the country more than filling their pockets or advancing their pet ideology (ironically enough, that includes socialism itself). Sadly, our current government is determined to not just loot the country for the benefit of the owning class but also destroying the very institutions that would allow it to be rebuilt, such as education, postal system, public roads, and government ownership of various industries.
In any case it doesn't matter. Capitalism nearly collapsed when Great Depression put people out of work, and thus made them unable to participate in the economy. This time the same is done by technological progress brought on by capitalism's own inexorable logic. The Age of Capital is ending, and the shadow of Soviet Union still weights down socialism as a viable alternative making peaceful transition difficult if not impossible, so I suppose we're heading for another age of turmoil and revolutions. The question is: what, if anything, will be left standing after Capitalism is done falling?
They are one step closer to not have to worry about being wheelchair-bound for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately that won't stop other people from riding them on the same roads you take. The only thing that can keep you safe here is regulation.
But if the electric engine is controlled by Windows, it just might be possible for it to develop a bug in physics, allowing perpetual motion.
Or perhaps they're counting on any observing super-advanced aliens to take pity on us and stage a benevolent takeover.