I disagree. In this situation what matters is the feelings of the immediate family; the effects on wider society can go take a running jump.
Now it is definitely a big responsibility to take on yourself; to censor some things about the dead to avoid more grief for the family. But if you are in that position and find something you know will only make the family feel worse, then you have to make that decision.
Exactly what you censor would depend on the people involved. Hopefully nothing, but you have to except the possibility you will find some very dark secret when poking through someone's effects, and be prepared to deal with it if it happens.
Most murders are heat-of-the-moment acts, or the results of drunkenness. A few seconds of stupidity and spending the rest of your life in jail. For people who won't obviously murder again I don't see how this does anyone any good.
It gives 'justice' - or at least retribution - to the family and friends of the victim. This is the most elemental purpose of criminal law; not rehabilitation or even protection of the public. The law is a neutral third party which exacts retribution on your behalf, and thus prevents blood feuds.
You certainly need to tell someone they are being recorded if you are taping a phone conversation. I've never heard of that being a problem with using security camera footage, from inside your own home, as evidence in a criminal prosecution.
I think it works as well as can be reasonably expected. It'll never pick up all the worthwhile posts, or avoid all the dross, but the moderation system and the ability to sort by highest rating can allow you to get the signal to noise ratio down far enough to make slashdot a sometimes interesting read. I know if I try to read a several hundred post comment thread elsewhere - say a story in a major newspaper - I end up wishing they had a system half as good as slashdot's.
Quite frankly if students come out of education in 2008 not knowing how to evaluate source material properly then this points to a major weakness in their teachers. Seen in this light Wikipedia is an excellent teaching tool - it contains a load of good info, a load of crap info, and all in all is a fantastic way of teaching students about the pit-falls of badly sourced material.
What this professor needs to do is toddle off down to the history department, and politely ask a professor there if it would be possible to get his students (and possibly himself) an intro into proper source handling. These are not new skills - they've been the bedrock of a historian's trade for a century or so. They just happen to have become skills which are absolutely essential to everyone in the internet age.
Well maybe - but if you're a shopkeeper you have the right to pursue a thief, and shout out to your neighbors to join in the hunt. No-ones going to complain in that situation if the thief gets rugby tackled and restrained. Reading through the thread that's pretty much how I see it.
The thing is that "the authorities response" is always going to be inadequate from the point of view of someone who has just seen thousands of their own money getting nicked; the police can't and won't drop everything to get your livelihood back. And believe me, when some fucking chav steals from you it becomes personal. As I see the law (I'm British, but it seems pretty much the same in most places) you have the right to defend yourself - you have to obey the law while doing so, but there is no requirement to wait on the police.
That said it is normally prudent to do so - this case could have become a tragedy if the thief had pulled a gun.
I don't agree with this - vigilantism is concerned with extra-judicial punishment, not apprehension or even arrest. You have a right to catch a criminal and hand him over to police, although yes, you have to stay within the law yourself.
The police are not the only one's who can uphold the law - rather they're a government agency set up to assist in doing so; the law in many countries still makes explicit provision for a citizen's arrest.
How is it any more misleading than your phone company telling you you can use your phone any day, any time of the day, despite the fact that if too many people try to use it at once, you start hitting limits on the number of simultaneous active circuits? One can even argue it's less misleading, because an IP network degrades more gracefully than a circuit-switched network; even when you can't get full bandwidth, you may still get half, while with the phone network, it's all or nothing.
I'd have said that was a good argument some years back. The ISPs had been selling "unlimited bandwidth" packages based on assumptions about consumption which turned out to be false. Not really their fault.
Now, in 2008, if I buy an unlimited bandwidth it should mean what it says. ISPs have had plenty of time to adjust their offerings; cheap capped packages and expensive unlimited ones are fine. Cheap ones advertised as unlimited but in reality capped or shaped are false advertising.
Leaving aside the word theory for the moment to avoid confusion - ie the word is usually (although not exclusively) used for large very well supported ideas, which ID obviously isn't.
However can you say that ID is not science? This is considerably more tricky. You say that the test of science is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable, but that is a definition which will catch things that most people agree are science - string theory is the one that springs to mind but I'm sure there are many more. Now you could probably refine the definition a little and get string theory on one side and ID on the other, but then something else will crop up and the definition has to be tweaked again.
This tends to be the way with any definition, you have a list of things you think should be science an a list of things which shouldn't, and you end up creating a beast of a definition to try and accommodate them all. As I said in my first post, I think it's accepted in the philosophy of science field that this is largely futile and probably impossible.
Better to allow a weak definition of 'science,' but rigorously apply the scientific method to anything that claims it. By this argument ID is simply very very bad science - it's (depending on which definition of it you use) either unfalisifiable or in fact falsified, it is clearly a case of a conclusion looking for arguments, it attempts to replace one of the best supported (and highly predictive) theories ever without having a single thing to recommend it over Evolution. In short it is a failure.
I think this is a much better, and far more supportable, stand to take than to try to say that ID is 'not science'.
Rimmer: Everyone's entitled to their beliefs, Lister. I never agreed with my parents' religion, but I wouldn't dream of knocking it.
Lister: What were they?
Rimmer: Seventh Day Advent Hop-ists. They believed that every Sunday should be spent hopping. They would hop to church, hop through the service, then hop back home again. I tell you, Sunday lunchtimes were a nightmare - we all had to wear sou'westers and asbestos underpants. You see, they took the Bible literally - Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple, took it word for word. Unfortunately, their version had a misprint. It was all based on 1 Corinthians 13: "Faith, Hop and Charity, and the greatest of these is Hop."
I don't think you're going to hell, as long as you're nice (i.e. I believe in the idea of the anonymous christian). I believe very strongly in evolution, and I think gays are perfect just the way God made them.
Where's the fun in that!?
I suppose I can wave the Evidential Objection, and the Problem of Evil at you, but it's nowhere near as satisfying as trying to convince some guy that the dinosaurs weren't buried a couple of thousand years ago by a deity who likes yanking palaeontologists chains for his own ineffable reasons.
There's got to be a nutter *somewhere* in this discussion.. I'm off to find him.
A scientific theory is a theory which conforms to very strict rules. A theory in general does not.
It's been a while since I read any philosophy of science stuff - and I'm not claiming ever to have been an expert - but I think in general that viewpoint is rejected. Basically the thinking goes that it is actually impossible to nail down what you mean by a "scientific" theory, so rejecting ID for example by saying it is "not scientific" doesn't work to well since you can't actually point to anything that disqualifies it. Much better to assess it as a scientific theory and to conclude that it is a very very bad one.
My objection to Dawkins principles is that he suggests that all theories of god should be rejected without any critical assessment. So if a theory of god appears tomorrow which conforms to scientific principles (I'm not saying it will - I am merely hypothesizing) then we must reject it because it refers to supernatural beings. I'm sorry but that lacks the plain objectivity of the scientific mind.
Hmm, my reading of the God Delusion was quite the reverse - I understood Dawkins as claiming that all religions, by their very nature, are scientific theories. They make claims about the structure of the physical world and in some cases are predictive. Therefore they must be assessed as science. Que several hundred pages about why they are very very poor science indeed;)
Possibly he rejected "supernatural" entities as part of his claim that any God must be assessed as a natural entity - should not get a free pass on the question of "what cause God then?" for example? But that is hardly the same thing.
Dawkins repeated stresses that the difference between an atheist and a theist is that an atheist is always willing to change his mind should convincing evidence of God actually come to light; hence atheism is the only logical scientific position to take in the absense of such evidence - I think there's a semantic debate about the precise meaning of atheism and agnosticism in here somewhere which can effect how some people would view that statement, but if you follow Dawkins' definitions this is the case.
Near the end of the video they have it climbing over some rubble, and it goes much more cautiously there, so it seems that they have implemented a more cautious mode. Interestingly it goes much slower there than a human would - presumably since a human would be using vision to a great extent to find likely spots to place their feet, while the robot is relying purely on feedback from previous attempts to find a footing.
I do somewhat agree with you - I'm few years older judging by your debts so I got off relatively lightly, but I was teasing my Mum about this recently; her generation got out of being students debt free, and then went and bought houses which rocketed in value.
But there are a few flaws with this - firstly it assumes that if you had been born fifty or sixty years ago, you'd have gone to university. More likely you would have left school at 16 for hard manual work, picked up whatever health problems were the issue in your line of work, and then been chucked out by Thatcher in the eighties with nothing to look forward to but an old age pension which will let you heat your council house or eat, but not both. Graduates have it harder now then graduates back then, but there are so many more graduates now that its something of a false comparison.
And, yes, the health service has declined in terms what it provides vs the level of care you could theoretically get if there weren't any financial considerations. But that is due to the fact that health care now is massively more advanced than health care then, so there is so much more to spend money on. If I had a life threatening disease, I wouldn't want to go back to 1970 to get it treated...
So yeah, I don't think my parents' generation have the right to tell me how easy I have it, but all in all I wouldn't swap with them.
Right, and it's not like the load of special interest web sites have shut up shop or anything, they're still there writing about their niche.
There isn't any secret that the web has lead to a deluge of crap sites, or thousands of sites all writing about the same topics. But to say that because of this there is no alternative news is misinterpreting the numbers - an extra ten thousand cookie cutter sites doesn't mean there are any less unique ones, it just means that the signal to noise ratio has got worse.
To an outside observer, though, who doesn't get the references, it's all gibberish, but there actually is a lot of intelligence behind all that chatter.
Get him a slashdot account, from the sound of it he'd be an above average contributor;)
I don't think people who work tech support mind being asked basic questions - they're in the wrong line of work if they do..
What is annoying is the attitude you get from a few who simply refuse to learn. I know bugger all about housing, but I'll try an analogy - you ask a few basic questions in a building supply store, and I doubt anyone will mind answering. You ring them up and abuse them down the phone because you failed to ask the basic questions (or even refused to listen to the guy who tried to explain something to you because you thought you knew everything) and bought the wrong stuff, and they'll get annoyed.
I think you can define the death penalty as a human rights issue when you consider the fact that some innocent people will inevitably be put to death. Miscarriages of justice happen, even with the extensive appeals system that I understand the US operates.
I agree with you on prison population per head of population though - that can be used as an indicator of social problems, but it would only be a human rights issue if clearly disproportionate sentences were imposed.
There have been incidents of outright corruption, true. But if Microsoft started passing cash in brown paper envelopes they'd be in real trouble.
What Europe doesn't have is the legal "corruption" of corporations financing politicians campaigns' in exchange for favours - which is what grandparent was alluding to I think, and the primary reason Microsoft doesn't have the sort of influence it does in the US.
Yes it does, but it doesn't give him any sort of popular mandate to act for the people of this country.
But the government is formed by the largest party in the Commons (realistically one with a majority). The fact the Blair left and Brown came in doesn't change the fact that Labour won a majority at the last election and has the right to form a government.
Now you can say that Brown should have called an election - many people do and he certainly thought about it for long enough, but at the end of the day that is not a sensible *requirement* to have in a parliamentary system. In other circumstances it might have been necessary for him to go to the country, but he decided not to and his party supported him in it to the extent that he still has a working majority. It may cost them some votes come next election, but I imagine they decided that everyone and their dog knew Gordon had been scratching at the walls of number 10 for years, and would not feel particularly ill-used when he got in (I remember the Tories trialling a campaign slogan of "Vote Blair, Get Brown" at the last election, and quickly abandoning it when polling showed many people didn't mind this at all).
The fact that we had sixteen years of Tory rule breaking things one way, to the point where Labour won a landslide and then we had a decade of them breaking things another way, to me says that this very much is a huge issue.
Labour have an advantage in terms of demographics is what I meant - it's just the way that the constituencies work out; it is easier for Labour to get a majority than the Tories. The fact that we had a 16 year Conservative government shows that despite this Labour cannot govern without popular support. Let's face it, '97 was hardly a case of things "breaking the other way", it was a truly major political sea change.
where policies constantly flip-flop isn't really in the long-term interests of anyone.
While that might be true, in some cases at least, it's hardly the call of the democrat...
If you're arguing for proportional representation then you may have a point - I'm not sure where I stand on that myself. There are obvious benefits, but our entire system is premised on the fact that a single party will normally command a working majority. I think a hung parliament around about now would probably do us good, but we'd have to pretty much redesign British politics from the ground up if we were to move into an era of perpetual coalitions, and while this may sound attractive it does mean several decades of getting it blatantly wrong before we figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. In this situation what matters is the feelings of the immediate family; the effects on wider society can go take a running jump.
Now it is definitely a big responsibility to take on yourself; to censor some things about the dead to avoid more grief for the family. But if you are in that position and find something you know will only make the family feel worse, then you have to make that decision.
Exactly what you censor would depend on the people involved. Hopefully nothing, but you have to except the possibility you will find some very dark secret when poking through someone's effects, and be prepared to deal with it if it happens.
It gives 'justice' - or at least retribution - to the family and friends of the victim. This is the most elemental purpose of criminal law; not rehabilitation or even protection of the public. The law is a neutral third party which exacts retribution on your behalf, and thus prevents blood feuds.
You certainly need to tell someone they are being recorded if you are taping a phone conversation. I've never heard of that being a problem with using security camera footage, from inside your own home, as evidence in a criminal prosecution.
IANAL but it seems a little unlikely to me.
I think it works as well as can be reasonably expected. It'll never pick up all the worthwhile posts, or avoid all the dross, but the moderation system and the ability to sort by highest rating can allow you to get the signal to noise ratio down far enough to make slashdot a sometimes interesting read. I know if I try to read a several hundred post comment thread elsewhere - say a story in a major newspaper - I end up wishing they had a system half as good as slashdot's.
Quite frankly if students come out of education in 2008 not knowing how to evaluate source material properly then this points to a major weakness in their teachers. Seen in this light Wikipedia is an excellent teaching tool - it contains a load of good info, a load of crap info, and all in all is a fantastic way of teaching students about the pit-falls of badly sourced material.
What this professor needs to do is toddle off down to the history department, and politely ask a professor there if it would be possible to get his students (and possibly himself) an intro into proper source handling. These are not new skills - they've been the bedrock of a historian's trade for a century or so. They just happen to have become skills which are absolutely essential to everyone in the internet age.
In short; bad teacher, not bad Wikipedia.
Well maybe - but if you're a shopkeeper you have the right to pursue a thief, and shout out to your neighbors to join in the hunt. No-ones going to complain in that situation if the thief gets rugby tackled and restrained. Reading through the thread that's pretty much how I see it.
The thing is that "the authorities response" is always going to be inadequate from the point of view of someone who has just seen thousands of their own money getting nicked; the police can't and won't drop everything to get your livelihood back. And believe me, when some fucking chav steals from you it becomes personal. As I see the law (I'm British, but it seems pretty much the same in most places) you have the right to defend yourself - you have to obey the law while doing so, but there is no requirement to wait on the police.
That said it is normally prudent to do so - this case could have become a tragedy if the thief had pulled a gun.
I don't agree with this - vigilantism is concerned with extra-judicial punishment, not apprehension or even arrest. You have a right to catch a criminal and hand him over to police, although yes, you have to stay within the law yourself.
The police are not the only one's who can uphold the law - rather they're a government agency set up to assist in doing so; the law in many countries still makes explicit provision for a citizen's arrest.
I'd have said that was a good argument some years back. The ISPs had been selling "unlimited bandwidth" packages based on assumptions about consumption which turned out to be false. Not really their fault.
Now, in 2008, if I buy an unlimited bandwidth it should mean what it says. ISPs have had plenty of time to adjust their offerings; cheap capped packages and expensive unlimited ones are fine. Cheap ones advertised as unlimited but in reality capped or shaped are false advertising.
Leaving aside the word theory for the moment to avoid confusion - ie the word is usually (although not exclusively) used for large very well supported ideas, which ID obviously isn't.
However can you say that ID is not science? This is considerably more tricky. You say that the test of science is that the hypothesis must be falsifiable, but that is a definition which will catch things that most people agree are science - string theory is the one that springs to mind but I'm sure there are many more. Now you could probably refine the definition a little and get string theory on one side and ID on the other, but then something else will crop up and the definition has to be tweaked again.
This tends to be the way with any definition, you have a list of things you think should be science an a list of things which shouldn't, and you end up creating a beast of a definition to try and accommodate them all. As I said in my first post, I think it's accepted in the philosophy of science field that this is largely futile and probably impossible.
Better to allow a weak definition of 'science,' but rigorously apply the scientific method to anything that claims it. By this argument ID is simply very very bad science - it's (depending on which definition of it you use) either unfalisifiable or in fact falsified, it is clearly a case of a conclusion looking for arguments, it attempts to replace one of the best supported (and highly predictive) theories ever without having a single thing to recommend it over Evolution. In short it is a failure.
I think this is a much better, and far more supportable, stand to take than to try to say that ID is 'not science'.
My God. Its full of Oil!
Rimmer: Everyone's entitled to their beliefs, Lister. I never agreed with my parents' religion, but I wouldn't dream of knocking it.
Lister: What were they?
Rimmer: Seventh Day Advent Hop-ists. They believed that every Sunday should be spent hopping. They would hop to church, hop through the service, then hop back home again. I tell you, Sunday lunchtimes were a nightmare - we all had to wear sou'westers and asbestos underpants. You see, they took the Bible literally - Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple, took it word for word. Unfortunately, their version had a misprint. It was all based on 1 Corinthians 13: "Faith, Hop and Charity, and the greatest of these is Hop."
Where's the fun in that!?
I suppose I can wave the Evidential Objection, and the Problem of Evil at you, but it's nowhere near as satisfying as trying to convince some guy that the dinosaurs weren't buried a couple of thousand years ago by a deity who likes yanking palaeontologists chains for his own ineffable reasons.
There's got to be a nutter *somewhere* in this discussion.. I'm off to find him.
It's been a while since I read any philosophy of science stuff - and I'm not claiming ever to have been an expert - but I think in general that viewpoint is rejected. Basically the thinking goes that it is actually impossible to nail down what you mean by a "scientific" theory, so rejecting ID for example by saying it is "not scientific" doesn't work to well since you can't actually point to anything that disqualifies it. Much better to assess it as a scientific theory and to conclude that it is a very very bad one.
Hmm, my reading of the God Delusion was quite the reverse - I understood Dawkins as claiming that all religions, by their very nature, are scientific theories. They make claims about the structure of the physical world and in some cases are predictive. Therefore they must be assessed as science. Que several hundred pages about why they are very very poor science indeed ;)
Possibly he rejected "supernatural" entities as part of his claim that any God must be assessed as a natural entity - should not get a free pass on the question of "what cause God then?" for example? But that is hardly the same thing.
Dawkins repeated stresses that the difference between an atheist and a theist is that an atheist is always willing to change his mind should convincing evidence of God actually come to light; hence atheism is the only logical scientific position to take in the absense of such evidence - I think there's a semantic debate about the precise meaning of atheism and agnosticism in here somewhere which can effect how some people would view that statement, but if you follow Dawkins' definitions this is the case.
There's always NeoOffice, which is a much more mature OSX port of OpenOffice. Not used it much myself but I've heard it's pretty good.
>It is ironic that most people here who hate marketing don't sign their own checks.
So true.
You think you have a problem!
- Devlin Null
Near the end of the video they have it climbing over some rubble, and it goes much more cautiously there, so it seems that they have implemented a more cautious mode. Interestingly it goes much slower there than a human would - presumably since a human would be using vision to a great extent to find likely spots to place their feet, while the robot is relying purely on feedback from previous attempts to find a footing.
I do somewhat agree with you - I'm few years older judging by your debts so I got off relatively lightly, but I was teasing my Mum about this recently; her generation got out of being students debt free, and then went and bought houses which rocketed in value.
But there are a few flaws with this - firstly it assumes that if you had been born fifty or sixty years ago, you'd have gone to university. More likely you would have left school at 16 for hard manual work, picked up whatever health problems were the issue in your line of work, and then been chucked out by Thatcher in the eighties with nothing to look forward to but an old age pension which will let you heat your council house or eat, but not both. Graduates have it harder now then graduates back then, but there are so many more graduates now that its something of a false comparison.
And, yes, the health service has declined in terms what it provides vs the level of care you could theoretically get if there weren't any financial considerations. But that is due to the fact that health care now is massively more advanced than health care then, so there is so much more to spend money on. If I had a life threatening disease, I wouldn't want to go back to 1970 to get it treated...
So yeah, I don't think my parents' generation have the right to tell me how easy I have it, but all in all I wouldn't swap with them.
Right, and it's not like the load of special interest web sites have shut up shop or anything, they're still there writing about their niche.
There isn't any secret that the web has lead to a deluge of crap sites, or thousands of sites all writing about the same topics. But to say that because of this there is no alternative news is misinterpreting the numbers - an extra ten thousand cookie cutter sites doesn't mean there are any less unique ones, it just means that the signal to noise ratio has got worse.
I don't think people who work tech support mind being asked basic questions - they're in the wrong line of work if they do..
What is annoying is the attitude you get from a few who simply refuse to learn. I know bugger all about housing, but I'll try an analogy - you ask a few basic questions in a building supply store, and I doubt anyone will mind answering. You ring them up and abuse them down the phone because you failed to ask the basic questions (or even refused to listen to the guy who tried to explain something to you because you thought you knew everything) and bought the wrong stuff, and they'll get annoyed.
I think you can define the death penalty as a human rights issue when you consider the fact that some innocent people will inevitably be put to death. Miscarriages of justice happen, even with the extensive appeals system that I understand the US operates.
I agree with you on prison population per head of population though - that can be used as an indicator of social problems, but it would only be a human rights issue if clearly disproportionate sentences were imposed.
"Who was responsible for communism, fascism and the death camps of the 20th century?"
Who organised the fight against communism, fascism and the death camps of the 20th century?
There have been incidents of outright corruption, true. But if Microsoft started passing cash in brown paper envelopes they'd be in real trouble.
What Europe doesn't have is the legal "corruption" of corporations financing politicians campaigns' in exchange for favours - which is what grandparent was alluding to I think, and the primary reason Microsoft doesn't have the sort of influence it does in the US.
But the government is formed by the largest party in the Commons (realistically one with a majority). The fact the Blair left and Brown came in doesn't change the fact that Labour won a majority at the last election and has the right to form a government.
Now you can say that Brown should have called an election - many people do and he certainly thought about it for long enough, but at the end of the day that is not a sensible *requirement* to have in a parliamentary system. In other circumstances it might have been necessary for him to go to the country, but he decided not to and his party supported him in it to the extent that he still has a working majority. It may cost them some votes come next election, but I imagine they decided that everyone and their dog knew Gordon had been scratching at the walls of number 10 for years, and would not feel particularly ill-used when he got in (I remember the Tories trialling a campaign slogan of "Vote Blair, Get Brown" at the last election, and quickly abandoning it when polling showed many people didn't mind this at all).
Labour have an advantage in terms of demographics is what I meant - it's just the way that the constituencies work out; it is easier for Labour to get a majority than the Tories. The fact that we had a 16 year Conservative government shows that despite this Labour cannot govern without popular support. Let's face it, '97 was hardly a case of things "breaking the other way", it was a truly major political sea change.
While that might be true, in some cases at least, it's hardly the call of the democrat...
If you're arguing for proportional representation then you may have a point - I'm not sure where I stand on that myself. There are obvious benefits, but our entire system is premised on the fact that a single party will normally command a working majority. I think a hung parliament around about now would probably do us good, but we'd have to pretty much redesign British politics from the ground up if we were to move into an era of perpetual coalitions, and while this may sound attractive it does mean several decades of getting it blatantly wrong before we figure it out.