It's sad that some people can't trust anyone, not even their own parents. I wonder if that has something to do with so many of them turning out to become criminals. After all, it must be hard to assign any value to other people, or even understand the concept of doing so, if your own father has made clear he'd be the first one casting stones if you failed to live up to his expectations.
Oh well, I suppose it's just the logical endpoint of the "parents own their children" meme. Sucks for the kids, but they get another chance to re-examine the shit they've been fed in their childhood during mid-life crisis, so that'll have to do.
When a sentence begins with something like this, it's written by either a troll, a political tool, or a honest to goodness moron. Which one are you?
Thus, if you are asked a question of the form "Did you take pictures of nekkid kids?" then you can invoke the Fifth. However, if you are asked "Only you and Bob could have taken the pictures? Which one of you did it?" then you can only refuse to answer if you did it. If Bob did it, then you have no Fifth Amendment protection, and you must incriminate Bob, or be held in contempt. If you refuse to answer, a jury draw inference from your refusal. The Bill of Rights offers you no protection from that.
So in short, the 5th amendment has no meaning. You can only refuse to answer if you're guilty, and the jury knows that, so it's as good as a confession.
I have never head the term sovereign individual used in that manner until today. I've always seen it used as a declaration that you choose to live your life by your own rules regardless of what the law says, and in conjunction with schemes like this one, that help enable that sort of lifestyle.
From the link you provided, it seems to simply be a nicer word for a parasite.
And an unfortunate side effect of that is that you have to disclose anonymously for your own protection, and that means simply making the whole thing public from the start.
Nope, I'm giving a colony one year between the time the colony ship drops them off and when it leaves. That's enough time for a civilisation with working nanotech to scoop up enough helium and chunks of rock that they can manufacture in flight anything that they need for the rest of the journey.
There is a fundamental flaw in that argument. The original assumption that a civilization could colonize the galaxy in a few million years assumes that every colony colonizes everything nearby, and those colonies colonize everything nearby, and so on. This would cause civilization to spread as an expanding sphere, limited only by speed of light and the time it takes to build a colony from nothing to the point where it can start sending ships of its own. The rate of colonization grows exponentially.
On the other hand, a colony ship visiting stars in Milky Way one by one and starting up colonies in each it visits leads to a linear spread, a static rate of colonization. Now, there are an estimated 100 billion stars in Milky Way. If it takes 40 years to move from one to another - the time it would take to reach Proxima Centauri from Earth at 10% of speed of light without factoring in acceleration and braking - and 1 years to set up the colony, it means that the ship will be making one colony per 41 years. In other words, assuming optimal route - which requires the easy task of solving the traveling salesman problem with 100 billion cities, but let's ignore that for now - it'll take about 4.1 trillion years to colonize the galaxy.
There's a slight possibility of optimization by having each colony ship continue in straight line outward, putting the new colonies as far from each other as possible, and thus maximizing the exponential growth (since new colonies can only send out ships if all suitable close locations aren't already taken), but it's still the colony maturation rate that's going to limit the growth, as measured in colonied worlds - of course if you measure by space volume between farthest colonies, then having ships continue is really important.
This is where the Fermi Paradox comes from. Our galaxy is only about 100,000 light years across. Sending something at 1% of the speed of light is not too far off our current capability. Sending something at 10% is not difficult to conceive. At this speed, you could explore and colonise the entire galaxy in just one million years. Even if you took a year to set up each colony and didn't take the most direct route, 2-3 million years doesn't seem too long. A single Von Neumann probe could do it in about this time, maybe 5 million years to give it a bit of leeway.
Really? You're giving the colony one whole year to go from a dead ball of rock to an industrial colony with resources to send colony ships (at 10% of speed of light) to any solar system in range? Are you quite sure you're not being overly generous here? I mean, you're giving the colonist who'll be manning those colony ships a whole 3 months after birth to get ready.
Anyway, there's a very real possibility that we're the First Ones. Universe is actually pretty young, almost all of its mass is still in the form of hydrogen and helium, neither of which are good building materials. For life to exist it must be possible for complex structures to form, and that requires heavier atoms. Those are produced by stars and supernova explosions, so enriching them sufficiently for living things to appear took time. And once there was a concentration, Earth, life still took billions of years to reach the level of civilization; and let's not forget that in the 4 known cases of such concentrations - the Inner Planets - only one actually managed to develop life.
We created our civilization in a wink lasting the mere fifty thousand years because homo sapiens somehow managed to look outside of the box by chance.
No, we created a civilization because we can transfer information through symbolic language, which in turn allows us to function, in some ways, like a single organism, in the same way as your brain- and other cells work together as you but a lot less tightly bound, due to your internal bandwidth being much greater than external bandwidth.
All pack animals act as a single organism in some sense, but they have a hard time passing learned information between members, so the pack as a whole doesn't learn. With sumbolic language, humans overcame that, allowing concepts of any abstraction level be passed between people. The human pack began to learn, and as it learned it became better at utilizing resources, causing it to grow, which in turn made it smarter. That's why culture really took of after the invention of agriculture: the number of people, and thus their collective brain mass, exploded.
The problem humanity solved was not how to make its members more intelligent, it was how to exceed the practical size and complexity limits of the nervous system a single organism can carry with it. A single human - any human - is nowhere near smart enough to go from a cave to a skyscraper, but humanity as a whole is, especially since it's not burdened with limited lifetime.
All of this raises a question of what happens as technology increases our communication bandwidth - if I can access your thoughts as easily as I can mine, there's no real difference between the two, now is there? And if there's no difference between your thoughts or mine, are we really two different people, or a single one using two bodies? And what happens when you keep adding brains and computers and databanks and whatever?
I have no idea what makes Thailand so special, but certain slashdotters will defend Thai censorship to their dying breath.
Nothing makes Thailand special in this sense. It's simply, that for any proposition X, as the size of the population approaches infinity, the probability that at least one member of that population believes that X is true approaches 1. This is true regardless of how ludicrous X is.
In other words, the larger the group, the stupider it's stupidest person will be. And Slashdot has a large userbase.
So you're known to be lost from quite an exact moment...
No you aren't. Unless you have very paranoid associates, they won't report you as missing until quite some time.
but wait, somebody makes calls from your phone and made them since the approximate time of your dissapearence! All of them to "new" numbers!
And that gives us what useful information? You don't know who's using the phone nor who he's calling, unless he's calling innocent people for purposes of blackmail or similar.
When I see somebody holding a phone instead of driving, I call the police.
Will you stop to do that ?-)
Please don't mod me down just because you disagree.
You should be modded down for attaching this line to your every message, and not even using the tag field - which can be filtered out - to do so. Write better messages if you don't want to be modded down, don't whine that it's because you're being oppressed.
You can hold the phone with your shoulder, or if you need your hand to do so you can steer with your elbow. It should be stable enough for the second it takes to change gear with your other hand.
Or you can just lower the damn phone for a second.
So yeah..."essential liberties" that we get upset about up here north of the boarder really aren't that essential. For a place that's so close to us, it's...very, very far away.
"Essential liberties" and fighting for them whether they're being taken away by government, corporation or a gang and sticking to them when you're in a position to take them away yourself is what separates a place like this from a place like that. Nothing else does. Every place is Hell if you stop putting out the flames.
Most of Mexico's problems would disappear if drugs were legal, and handled by prescription drug companies.
Isn't it amazing how every all problems can be solved by lessening governmental control, according to libertarians, or increasing it, according to socialists? You'd almost think people are posting a thinly veiled ad for their pet ideologue as a comment!
Please don't mod me down just cause you disagree.
Did you add this because you think someone who's willing to mod you down because he disagrees with you will not do so if you ask him, or because it'll let you blame any downmodding on such people rather than the qualities of your comment, thus relieving you of responsibility?
Why do I suspect you are much closer to being a kid than to having one?
Because it's when you get one when you start rationalizing irrational behaviour regarding them?
Restrictions can tell a kid "I give a fuck about you," not just "I don't trust you."
If you suspect that he's a kid since he says it's the second message he got, implying that that's what a kid would get, why do you then turn around and assert that a kid will actually get the first one?
The purpose of restrictions is to ensure that someone with limited abilities of judgement will survive into adulthood. Choose them accordingly. If you want to send a message, try using your vocal chords; it's more efficient, less painful for all involved, and the message received is less likely to be the opposite of what you sent.
If a kid already has a dogged determination to see porn and shock sites, then yes, it's probably shutting the barn doors after the cows have gotten out. But that's seldom the issue.
It's seldom so that a 15-year old wants to see porn? Really?
The kids will hack their computers (either install Windows or change the root password - they have access to the hardware) and the parent will remain blissfully unaware.
And that's the best possible outcome, really: the kids get unbiased information (or rather get to view all the possible biases and compare them), making it far harder for the parent to indoctrinate them to whatever bullshit religious, economical, philosophical, political or whatever theories s/he believes in, and the parent gets to be blissfully unaware that s/he's failing to create the next generation of democrats/republicans/libertarians/communists/christians/muslims/atheists/whatever. Everyone wins.
Pity the fool who agrees to set up this system, and thus gets to be the scapegoat when the truth comes out, thought.
Similarly for child pornography then: You just have to establish that the creator of the work intended it to be sexual and that on a reasonable interpretation of the work it could be understood as sexual.
Understood as sexual by whom? Establish intent of the work how?
Establishing the intent of some text is usually pretty straightforward, because text is generated entirely by him and has pretty low information content. On the other hand, the photograph is not generated by the photographer, it's generated by light entering the camera, and the photographers role is to point the camera towards interesting scenes.
Now how do you know if the photographer found as interesting the bombing of a village, a naked little girl running scared from a bombed village, or just a naked little girl? You don't. You can't. You can only speculate. And that means that the verdict depends on the personal opinion of the judge, not on facts.
Also, there are no such things as sexual images - that is, images that are inherently sexual. There are images that, when viewed by someone, trigger arousal. Since turn-ons are so wide and varied, there's unlikely to be any image that wouldn't do that for someone. This, in turn, means that whether something should be considered pornography depends entirely on who's viewing it, or perhaps on who produced it; in other words, it's a classical thought crime.
I never said "school" was fun; I said "learning" was fun.
The discussion is specifically about doing well - and presumably learning - in school.
You have to change the schools until learning is fun.
Not only does this not make a difference, it's also something very few can afford.
Paying kids to read will not do anything in the long run other than make kids who won't move unless someone pays them.
Kids, like everyone else, do things that interest them without getting paid. If you want them to do something they don't want to - such as learn multiple tables - you use stick or carrot, reward - payment - or threat of punishment, as motivator. Payment usually works better.
So yes, paying kids to read is just fine. I liked to read, but there's plenty of people who liked to learn soccer or social skills instead. They are going to find reading boring, so either accept that they won't, or provide external motivation.
I want employees who are creative, who have incentive, and initiative.
I guess you'd better reward these traits then.
I don't want to have to pay them over and above for every little thing.
You don't want to pay them for doing those things, and they don't want to do those things, but they need money and you need someone to do them so you pay them and they do them. What, exactly speaking, do you want; that these people do things for your benefit without you having to return the favour?
Did you seriously mean your post to come accross as "I want people to work for me without getting paid, and indoctrinated for that end from early childhood"?
(And, yes, I've heard this already. "I want to get a bonus because I didn't take any sick days this year.")
Well, I'm sure he's learned his lesson about it being foolish to put in more effort than the minimum, since there's no reward for that.
Sexuality is in the eye of the beholder, and some people love the smell of napalm in the morning. If some people get their jollies watching children get raped, as our esteemed moral guardians seem to be implying, then why wouldn't they enjoy watching those same children get bombarded with napalm?
Just imagine it's an adult woman instead, and ask yourself: would no one get turned on by the hypothethical image?
Slashdot Mirror
It's sad that some people can't trust anyone, not even their own parents. I wonder if that has something to do with so many of them turning out to become criminals. After all, it must be hard to assign any value to other people, or even understand the concept of doing so, if your own father has made clear he'd be the first one casting stones if you failed to live up to his expectations.
Oh well, I suppose it's just the logical endpoint of the "parents own their children" meme. Sucks for the kids, but they get another chance to re-examine the shit they've been fed in their childhood during mid-life crisis, so that'll have to do.
She's protecting her bosses now so she can sell them out later. If she incriminated them right away she'd had nothing to bargain with.
Welcome to the wonderland of plea bargaining!
When a sentence begins with something like this, it's written by either a troll, a political tool, or a honest to goodness moron. Which one are you?
So in short, the 5th amendment has no meaning. You can only refuse to answer if you're guilty, and the jury knows that, so it's as good as a confession.
Yes.
Yes.
We live in a sick, sick world, my friend.
From the link you provided, it seems to simply be a nicer word for a parasite.
Whereas, with the 5th amendment, that's the District Attorney's job, and the process is called "plea bargain". Huge improvement.
And an unfortunate side effect of that is that you have to disclose anonymously for your own protection, and that means simply making the whole thing public from the start.
There is a fundamental flaw in that argument. The original assumption that a civilization could colonize the galaxy in a few million years assumes that every colony colonizes everything nearby, and those colonies colonize everything nearby, and so on. This would cause civilization to spread as an expanding sphere, limited only by speed of light and the time it takes to build a colony from nothing to the point where it can start sending ships of its own. The rate of colonization grows exponentially.
On the other hand, a colony ship visiting stars in Milky Way one by one and starting up colonies in each it visits leads to a linear spread, a static rate of colonization. Now, there are an estimated 100 billion stars in Milky Way. If it takes 40 years to move from one to another - the time it would take to reach Proxima Centauri from Earth at 10% of speed of light without factoring in acceleration and braking - and 1 years to set up the colony, it means that the ship will be making one colony per 41 years. In other words, assuming optimal route - which requires the easy task of solving the traveling salesman problem with 100 billion cities, but let's ignore that for now - it'll take about 4.1 trillion years to colonize the galaxy.
There's a slight possibility of optimization by having each colony ship continue in straight line outward, putting the new colonies as far from each other as possible, and thus maximizing the exponential growth (since new colonies can only send out ships if all suitable close locations aren't already taken), but it's still the colony maturation rate that's going to limit the growth, as measured in colonied worlds - of course if you measure by space volume between farthest colonies, then having ships continue is really important.
Really? You're giving the colony one whole year to go from a dead ball of rock to an industrial colony with resources to send colony ships (at 10% of speed of light) to any solar system in range? Are you quite sure you're not being overly generous here? I mean, you're giving the colonist who'll be manning those colony ships a whole 3 months after birth to get ready.
Anyway, there's a very real possibility that we're the First Ones. Universe is actually pretty young, almost all of its mass is still in the form of hydrogen and helium, neither of which are good building materials. For life to exist it must be possible for complex structures to form, and that requires heavier atoms. Those are produced by stars and supernova explosions, so enriching them sufficiently for living things to appear took time. And once there was a concentration, Earth, life still took billions of years to reach the level of civilization; and let's not forget that in the 4 known cases of such concentrations - the Inner Planets - only one actually managed to develop life.
No, we created a civilization because we can transfer information through symbolic language, which in turn allows us to function, in some ways, like a single organism, in the same way as your brain- and other cells work together as you but a lot less tightly bound, due to your internal bandwidth being much greater than external bandwidth.
All pack animals act as a single organism in some sense, but they have a hard time passing learned information between members, so the pack as a whole doesn't learn. With sumbolic language, humans overcame that, allowing concepts of any abstraction level be passed between people. The human pack began to learn, and as it learned it became better at utilizing resources, causing it to grow, which in turn made it smarter. That's why culture really took of after the invention of agriculture: the number of people, and thus their collective brain mass, exploded.
The problem humanity solved was not how to make its members more intelligent, it was how to exceed the practical size and complexity limits of the nervous system a single organism can carry with it. A single human - any human - is nowhere near smart enough to go from a cave to a skyscraper, but humanity as a whole is, especially since it's not burdened with limited lifetime.
All of this raises a question of what happens as technology increases our communication bandwidth - if I can access your thoughts as easily as I can mine, there's no real difference between the two, now is there? And if there's no difference between your thoughts or mine, are we really two different people, or a single one using two bodies? And what happens when you keep adding brains and computers and databanks and whatever?
Nothing makes Thailand special in this sense. It's simply, that for any proposition X, as the size of the population approaches infinity, the probability that at least one member of that population believes that X is true approaches 1. This is true regardless of how ludicrous X is.
In other words, the larger the group, the stupider it's stupidest person will be. And Slashdot has a large userbase.
No you aren't. Unless you have very paranoid associates, they won't report you as missing until quite some time.
And that gives us what useful information? You don't know who's using the phone nor who he's calling, unless he's calling innocent people for purposes of blackmail or similar.
Will you stop to do that ?-)
You should be modded down for attaching this line to your every message, and not even using the tag field - which can be filtered out - to do so. Write better messages if you don't want to be modded down, don't whine that it's because you're being oppressed.
Or you can just lower the damn phone for a second.
"Essential liberties" and fighting for them whether they're being taken away by government, corporation or a gang and sticking to them when you're in a position to take them away yourself is what separates a place like this from a place like that. Nothing else does. Every place is Hell if you stop putting out the flames.
Isn't it amazing how every all problems can be solved by lessening governmental control, according to libertarians, or increasing it, according to socialists? You'd almost think people are posting a thinly veiled ad for their pet ideologue as a comment!
Did you add this because you think someone who's willing to mod you down because he disagrees with you will not do so if you ask him, or because it'll let you blame any downmodding on such people rather than the qualities of your comment, thus relieving you of responsibility?
So they kill you and hide the body. Much better.
Because it's when you get one when you start rationalizing irrational behaviour regarding them?
If you suspect that he's a kid since he says it's the second message he got, implying that that's what a kid would get, why do you then turn around and assert that a kid will actually get the first one?
The purpose of restrictions is to ensure that someone with limited abilities of judgement will survive into adulthood. Choose them accordingly. If you want to send a message, try using your vocal chords; it's more efficient, less painful for all involved, and the message received is less likely to be the opposite of what you sent.
It's seldom so that a 15-year old wants to see porn? Really?
So if the computer's off, or the Net's down, they'll get punished?
And that's the best possible outcome, really: the kids get unbiased information (or rather get to view all the possible biases and compare them), making it far harder for the parent to indoctrinate them to whatever bullshit religious, economical, philosophical, political or whatever theories s/he believes in, and the parent gets to be blissfully unaware that s/he's failing to create the next generation of democrats/republicans/libertarians/communists/christians/muslims/atheists/whatever. Everyone wins.
Pity the fool who agrees to set up this system, and thus gets to be the scapegoat when the truth comes out, thought.
So what's the point, then?
Understood as sexual by whom? Establish intent of the work how?
Establishing the intent of some text is usually pretty straightforward, because text is generated entirely by him and has pretty low information content. On the other hand, the photograph is not generated by the photographer, it's generated by light entering the camera, and the photographers role is to point the camera towards interesting scenes.
Now how do you know if the photographer found as interesting the bombing of a village, a naked little girl running scared from a bombed village, or just a naked little girl? You don't. You can't. You can only speculate. And that means that the verdict depends on the personal opinion of the judge, not on facts.
Also, there are no such things as sexual images - that is, images that are inherently sexual. There are images that, when viewed by someone, trigger arousal. Since turn-ons are so wide and varied, there's unlikely to be any image that wouldn't do that for someone. This, in turn, means that whether something should be considered pornography depends entirely on who's viewing it, or perhaps on who produced it; in other words, it's a classical thought crime.
The discussion is specifically about doing well - and presumably learning - in school.
Not only does this not make a difference, it's also something very few can afford.
Kids, like everyone else, do things that interest them without getting paid. If you want them to do something they don't want to - such as learn multiple tables - you use stick or carrot, reward - payment - or threat of punishment, as motivator. Payment usually works better.
So yes, paying kids to read is just fine. I liked to read, but there's plenty of people who liked to learn soccer or social skills instead. They are going to find reading boring, so either accept that they won't, or provide external motivation.
I guess you'd better reward these traits then.
You don't want to pay them for doing those things, and they don't want to do those things, but they need money and you need someone to do them so you pay them and they do them. What, exactly speaking, do you want; that these people do things for your benefit without you having to return the favour?
Did you seriously mean your post to come accross as "I want people to work for me without getting paid, and indoctrinated for that end from early childhood"?
Well, I'm sure he's learned his lesson about it being foolish to put in more effort than the minimum, since there's no reward for that.
Sexuality is in the eye of the beholder, and some people love the smell of napalm in the morning. If some people get their jollies watching children get raped, as our esteemed moral guardians seem to be implying, then why wouldn't they enjoy watching those same children get bombarded with napalm?
Just imagine it's an adult woman instead, and ask yourself: would no one get turned on by the hypothethical image?
No need to imagine. This scenario has happened multiple times in history, for example with Taliban destroying Buddhist statues and Christians destroying pagan temples.