.... And I'm sure there are many other disadvantages I'm not thinking of...
It sounds to me like that is how people used to live all the centuries before these socialistic concepts and the income tax were invented. If a socialistic society imposes such a fine, then that same socialistic society may find itself in a position to take care of the person it has imposed a fine upon. It is highly likely that unless she appeals and wins in the end, she will either end up in prison or a welfare case on the public pocketbook. There has to be a better way. Right now as things stand, it would probably be cheaper for the taxpayer to pay the fine, than to take care of this person the rest of her life.
....Her only hope is to live off the grid now, but that has its own drawbacks....
I assume that you mean by living off the grid that this has nothing to do with electrical supply but instead of keeping her money in a mattress or some other place that the lawyers cannot find it.
...But that is the only way even a great artist with fairly broad appeal can make a living...
That is the way artists made a living before recordings and copyright were invented. They would to go from village to village, town to town and perform for who would ever listen and give them some money.
....Just like the rest of us who work for a living?...
Without the existence of copyright, all human creativity would cease. Oh wait... that is how it was for thousands of years before the modern age. I wonder if the ancient Egyptians had a copyright on the design plans of the pyramids.
....this woman's now on the hook for enough money...
What happens to this woman or someone like her who doesn't have a penny to her name and she simply doesn't pay? How can you squeeze blood out of a turnip? If the award had been 10 times or 100 times or 1000 times as much, what difference would it make? They might as well tell her that she must pay off the national debt. It will never get paid off either.
...Still, I can think of a whole lot of passwords that I'd be less protective of than my slashdot one....
The biggest reason I can think of protecting slashdot password is that I would not particularly like someone posting something in my name which I strongly disagree with or which could get me into trouble.
Any time a person is in debt, they are a slave whether they realize it or not. In our time slavery is not limited to one particular race, but includes everybody who is in any kind of debt.
...What choices does a poor, non-owning class person actually have in a purely free market system?....
If the choice is to work hard, deprive oneself and save religiously. My father-in-law came over with his family as a poor immigrant and was in debt for his fare and that of his family. By the time he died in a car crash he had accumulated considerable wealth and taken care of his children.
Many immigrants came to this country and took hold of the opportunities. Some of them became very wealthy, not by inheritance, but by old-fashioned hard work and sometimes a bit of luck. Even still today, although less so than in the past, it is still possible for a worker to become an owner and then provide work for others.
....The government is an agent working on your behalf....
That used to be the case maybe 50 or 60 years ago, especially for the federal and certain state governments. At all levels of government the so called civil servants are behaving increasingly like as if they were the boss and the public who pays their salary their servants. The same is true of large megacorporations. For many of their are employees the customers are not nearly as important as they used to be. They are treated as faceless consumers rather than real people in many instances. Just try to get somebody, other than a computer, on the telephone nowadays.
Do you really, I mean really care about whether they had your slashdot password? Now if they asked about your bank account and/or Social Security number, that might be something else again.
...they would either pick a crap standard (or one with a crap implementation)...
I think that any standard is better than no standard. It worked out reasonably okay for broadcasting, maybe not ideal, but can you imagine having a different receiver for different stations? There should be one national telephone network that would allow any and all receivers or handsets to work properly. After all, the Internet and its standards are worldwide. Why cannot we have a worldwide wireless telephone standard as well?
... It doesn't mean that a version of the iPhone with a different radio couldn't be developed....
Why should handset manufacturers be required to develop different handsets for different networks? Radio and television manufacturers were never required to do this. Government simply picked a standard and imposed it on everybody. It is a bit late to do that now but maybe it should be done anyway.
...Trying to adapt our network to support all the devices was quite impossible...
It is rather late in the game, but I think government should have done for the cell phone industry what they did for me broadcast industry and that is simply a standardized the technology for a single compatible system. The government should simply say to the wireless telephone industry that they must have a compatible system that all handsets and networks can use. After all, I do not have to have a special television receiver for the different stations do I? If people cannot agree upon standards, they must be imposed on them. In the long run everybody is better off that way. Also, why do phones have to be subsidized while radio and television never worked that way?
...Ah. So I'm also religious because I don't believe...
Maybe instead of saying religion I should have said World View. Another way to express this might be called your life philosophy. You apparently are convinced that this world and the time space dimension is all that exists, whereas I believe, as the Bible relates, in the dimension of the Spirit. We were created in this world to learn about respect and love and to thereby prepare us for eternity. This life is nothing more than a school from which we will graduate. Those who refuse to learn will simply flunk out.
If things really are not the way I believe, but turn out to be false, I will have lost nothing. On the other hand if reality is the way I believe and you do not prepare for that other eternal world, you will have lost everything.
....Then I get grumpy and fearful for the future of the species....
You really have nothing to worry about because humans have been religious from the very beginning. There is not a single culture that does not have a religion of one kind or another. The fact is that humans are a stubbornly religious creature. Your atheism or whatever ism you hold to is a religion as well.
It does not settle anything, except that if you were on a jury you would evidently find that the Gospels were fraudulent. There are however millions of people who have found otherwise, coming to faith in Jesus Christ based on the EVIDENCE presented in the Gospels as well as other parts of the Bible. Someday, when we all appear before God, we will find out who is right. It is just too bad for you that by then it will be too late for you to do anything about it. On the other hand, if after death there is only extinction, but those who have put their faith in Christ will not have really lost anything.
....Not when you are working with numbers like this:...
You might want to watch the movie "Privileged Planet" or even better, read the book of that title. You will learn something of the factors that all have to come together on one planet in order to construct life. It turns out, that if you look at the whole picture as we now see it, the Earth is a very special place in the universe.
....So if that is your only metric to be used when evaluating the veracity of a claim,...
It is best to use evidence to evaluate a claim or belief. Over the years, our courts of law and legal system have refined the rules of evidence. One of the founders at Harvard Law school, Simon Greenleaf has examined the four Gospels in the light of the rules used in courts of law, and found them to be likely true. You could get that little book from Amazon and read it for yourself. It may even be on the Internet, because his writing has long since come into the public domain.
Nothing is ever proved in a court of law, but the jury is presented with evidence and now must decide whether to BELIEVE or disbelieve either the prosecutor or the defense.
....Actually I brand believers as wishfull thinkers, or brainwashed, or ignorant, or arrogant, or oppressed....
So you would then consider yourself enlightened, free and superior to all of the millions of individuals on this globe who do believe there is a God. That tree of knowledge that you mentioned was a specific kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how to discern good and evil. I believe that the early humans, specifically Adam, had knowledge and insight we have long ago lost.
Natural law tells us that nothing goes out of existence but merely changes form. In order for a human being to go completely out of existence at death, you do have to make the additional assumption, namely that this law does not apply to the human consciousness or mind.
You equate invisibility and undetectability with nonexistence. For thousands of years, before we developed detectors for them, radio waves and other components of the electromagnetic spectrum were not in existence. I am sure you don't believe that. Just because your senses or mind have not apprehended something, does not mean it does not exist. Nothing is ever proved, but you can either believe or disbelieve it.
.... so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise....
Analogy breaks down because the assumption here is that we go out of existence, that is disappear when the body ceases to function. Every human being is more than just the body, but there is an eternal part that transcends its earthly existence. This cannot be proven scientifically but it can be believed and it is believed by millions even still in our scientific age. You can brand such believers fools, but maybe in the end you may be the fool instead.
I was not talking about _self_worth, but value assigned not by another human being, but by the God of the universe himself. The nazis assigned zero worth to Jews and gassed them by the millions. Some day, other human beings may have power over you and assign less value to you than a dog and treat you like one or worse. There are also individuals who value themselves low enough to kill themselves. A human being's self-evaluation is a very poor substitute for the independent and only correct evaluation from God. Ultimately, nothing is more important than what God thinks of you, because it determines your eternal destiny.
...Change the constants a little, and other forms of life are perfectly capable of living...
As a physicist you would know that the laws of physics appear to be the same throughout the universe. The binding energies of the carbon atom are just right to make the complex structures necessary for life. There is no other chemistry that we know about that could form any life other than carbon based. Neither scientists nor theologians ever prove anything, but only believe or disbelieve in various facets of their respective discipline.
Of course, just because there is a large consensus, that has to be the truth. After all has that not been the case throughout history? The earth's average temperature is a slight upward trend at the present time. A political group with an agenda has picked this up and is trying to use it for their own purposes. The temperature has been going up and down for ages and will continue to do so or as long as man lives upon the earth.
...and I'd be willing to bet that this time is no different....
You are certainly right about that. If there is no God then you are no more valuable than a cock roach, because all life climbed out of the primordial ooze. Only a personal God can give personal value. Science can never prove or disprove God, but you may believe or disbelieve. Every every Living thing that crawled out of the primordial ooze is of equal value, but a human being is a special creation of God and is therefore extremely valuable. Scientists know that there are many parameters and constants, including the earth's magnetic field, which have to be exactly right in order to have life as we know it upon the earth. The probability that all of these came into place by any means other than thinking it is absurdly low. I don't about your God, if any, but mine is a thinking rational being, who is so far beyond man, I cannot even imagine him.
Slashdot Mirror
.... And I'm sure there are many other disadvantages I'm not thinking of...
It sounds to me like that is how people used to live all the centuries before these socialistic concepts and the income tax were invented. If a socialistic society imposes such a fine, then that same socialistic society may find itself in a position to take care of the person it has imposed a fine upon. It is highly likely that unless she appeals and wins in the end, she will either end up in prison or a welfare case on the public pocketbook. There has to be a better way. Right now as things stand, it would probably be cheaper for the taxpayer to pay the fine, than to take care of this person the rest of her life.
....Her only hope is to live off the grid now, but that has its own drawbacks....
I assume that you mean by living off the grid that this has nothing to do with electrical supply but instead of keeping her money in a mattress or some other place that the lawyers cannot find it.
...But that is the only way even a great artist with fairly broad appeal can make a living ...
That is the way artists made a living before recordings and copyright were invented. They would to go from village to village, town to town and perform for who would ever listen and give them some money.
....Just like the rest of us who work for a living?...
Without the existence of copyright, all human creativity would cease. Oh wait... that is how it was for thousands of years before the modern age. I wonder if the ancient Egyptians had a copyright on the design plans of the pyramids.
....this woman's now on the hook for enough money...
What happens to this woman or someone like her who doesn't have a penny to her name and she simply doesn't pay? How can you squeeze blood out of a turnip? If the award had been 10 times or 100 times or 1000 times as much, what difference would it make? They might as well tell her that she must pay off the national debt. It will never get paid off either.
...Still, I can think of a whole lot of passwords that I'd be less protective of than my slashdot one....
The biggest reason I can think of protecting slashdot password is that I would not particularly like someone posting something in my name which I strongly disagree with or which could get me into trouble.
...Oh, and slavery...
Any time a person is in debt, they are a slave whether they realize it or not. In our time slavery is not limited to one particular race, but includes everybody who is in any kind of debt.
...What choices does a poor, non-owning class person actually have in a purely free market system?....
If the choice is to work hard, deprive oneself and save religiously. My father-in-law came over with his family as a poor immigrant and was in debt for his fare and that of his family. By the time he died in a car crash he had accumulated considerable wealth and taken care of his children.
Many immigrants came to this country and took hold of the opportunities. Some of them became very wealthy, not by inheritance, but by old-fashioned hard work and sometimes a bit of luck. Even still today, although less so than in the past, it is still possible for a worker to become an owner and then provide work for others.
....The government is an agent working on your behalf....
That used to be the case maybe 50 or 60 years ago, especially for the federal and certain state governments. At all levels of government the so called civil servants are behaving increasingly like as if they were the boss and the public who pays their salary their servants. The same is true of large megacorporations. For many of their are employees the customers are not nearly as important as they used to be. They are treated as faceless consumers rather than real people in many instances. Just try to get somebody, other than a computer, on the telephone nowadays.
....slashdot, etc accounts?...
Do you really, I mean really care about whether they had your slashdot password? Now if they asked about your bank account and/or Social Security number, that might be something else again.
...they would either pick a crap standard (or one with a crap implementation)...
I think that any standard is better than no standard. It worked out reasonably okay for broadcasting, maybe not ideal, but can you imagine having a different receiver for different stations? There should be one national telephone network that would allow any and all receivers or handsets to work properly. After all, the Internet and its standards are worldwide. Why cannot we have a worldwide wireless telephone standard as well?
... It doesn't mean that a version of the iPhone with a different radio couldn't be developed....
Why should handset manufacturers be required to develop different handsets for different networks? Radio and television manufacturers were never required to do this. Government simply picked a standard and imposed it on everybody. It is a bit late to do that now but maybe it should be done anyway.
...Trying to adapt our network to support all the devices was quite impossible...
It is rather late in the game, but I think government should have done for the cell phone industry what they did for me broadcast industry and that is simply a standardized the technology for a single compatible system. The government should simply say to the wireless telephone industry that they must have a compatible system that all handsets and networks can use. After all, I do not have to have a special television receiver for the different stations do I? If people cannot agree upon standards, they must be imposed on them. In the long run everybody is better off that way. Also, why do phones have to be subsidized while radio and television never worked that way?
...Ah. So I'm also religious because I don't believe...
Maybe instead of saying religion I should have said World View. Another way to express this might be called your life philosophy. You apparently are convinced that this world and the time space dimension is all that exists, whereas I believe, as the Bible relates, in the dimension of the Spirit. We were created in this world to learn about respect and love and to thereby prepare us for eternity. This life is nothing more than a school from which we will graduate. Those who refuse to learn will simply flunk out.
If things really are not the way I believe, but turn out to be false, I will have lost nothing. On the other hand if reality is the way I believe and you do not prepare for that other eternal world, you will have lost everything.
....Then I get grumpy and fearful for the future of the species....
You really have nothing to worry about because humans have been religious from the very beginning. There is not a single culture that does not have a religion of one kind or another. The fact is that humans are a stubbornly religious creature. Your atheism or whatever ism you hold to is a religion as well.
...Well, that settles that...
It does not settle anything, except that if you were on a jury you would evidently find that the Gospels were fraudulent. There are however millions of people who have found otherwise, coming to faith in Jesus Christ based on the EVIDENCE presented in the Gospels as well as other parts of the Bible. Someday, when we all appear before God, we will find out who is right. It is just too bad for you that by then it will be too late for you to do anything about it. On the other hand, if after death there is only extinction, but those who have put their faith in Christ will not have really lost anything.
....Not when you are working with numbers like this:...
You might want to watch the movie "Privileged Planet" or even better, read the book of that title. You will learn something of the factors that all have to come together on one planet in order to construct life. It turns out, that if you look at the whole picture as we now see it, the Earth is a very special place in the universe.
....So if that is your only metric to be used when evaluating the veracity of a claim,...
It is best to use evidence to evaluate a claim or belief. Over the years, our courts of law and legal system have refined the rules of evidence. One of the founders at Harvard Law school, Simon Greenleaf has examined the four Gospels in the light of the rules used in courts of law, and found them to be likely true. You could get that little book from Amazon and read it for yourself. It may even be on the Internet, because his writing has long since come into the public domain.
Nothing is ever proved in a court of law, but the jury is presented with evidence and now must decide whether to BELIEVE or disbelieve either the prosecutor or the defense.
....Actually I brand believers as wishfull thinkers, or brainwashed, or ignorant, or arrogant, or oppressed....
So you would then consider yourself enlightened, free and superior to all of the millions of individuals on this globe who do believe there is a God. That tree of knowledge that you mentioned was a specific kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how to discern good and evil. I believe that the early humans, specifically Adam, had knowledge and insight we have long ago lost.
Natural law tells us that nothing goes out of existence but merely changes form. In order for a human being to go completely out of existence at death, you do have to make the additional assumption, namely that this law does not apply to the human consciousness or mind.
You equate invisibility and undetectability with nonexistence. For thousands of years, before we developed detectors for them, radio waves and other components of the electromagnetic spectrum were not in existence. I am sure you don't believe that. Just because your senses or mind have not apprehended something, does not mean it does not exist. Nothing is ever proved, but you can either believe or disbelieve it.
so then how would you classify your attitude?
.... so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise....
Analogy breaks down because the assumption here is that we go out of existence, that is disappear when the body ceases to function. Every human being is more than just the body, but there is an eternal part that transcends its earthly existence. This cannot be proven scientifically but it can be believed and it is believed by millions even still in our scientific age. You can brand such believers fools, but maybe in the end you may be the fool instead.
...who's self worth is defined....
I was not talking about _self_worth, but value assigned not by another human being, but by the God of the universe himself. The nazis assigned zero worth to Jews and gassed them by the millions. Some day, other human beings may have power over you and assign less value to you than a dog and treat you like one or worse. There are also individuals who value themselves low enough to kill themselves. A human being's self-evaluation is a very poor substitute for the independent and only correct evaluation from God. Ultimately, nothing is more important than what God thinks of you, because it determines your eternal destiny.
...Change the constants a little, and other forms of life are perfectly capable of living...
As a physicist you would know that the laws of physics appear to be the same throughout the universe. The binding energies of the carbon atom are just right to make the complex structures necessary for life. There is no other chemistry that we know about that could form any life other than carbon based. Neither scientists nor theologians ever prove anything, but only believe or disbelieve in various facets of their respective discipline.
...There is large consensus among them...
Of course, just because there is a large consensus, that has to be the truth. After all has that not been the case throughout history? The earth's average temperature is a slight upward trend at the present time. A political group with an agenda has picked this up and is trying to use it for their own purposes. The temperature has been going up and down for ages and will continue to do so or as long as man lives upon the earth.
...and I'd be willing to bet that this time is no different....
You are certainly right about that. If there is no God then you are no more valuable than a cock roach, because all life climbed out of the primordial ooze. Only a personal God can give personal value. Science can never prove or disprove God, but you may believe or disbelieve. Every every Living thing that crawled out of the primordial ooze is of equal value, but a human being is a special creation of God and is therefore extremely valuable. Scientists know that there are many parameters and constants, including the earth's magnetic field, which have to be exactly right in order to have life as we know it upon the earth. The probability that all of these came into place by any means other than thinking it is absurdly low. I don't about your God, if any, but mine is a thinking rational being, who is so far beyond man, I cannot even imagine him.