Yes, if you set up a police state then you would be overriding a MUCH more compelling need.
And, you are right, individuals have to weigh the pros and cons, but that's not really relevant: you may cite a compelling need to indulge in some drug or something, but public safety far outweighs your own considerations, which is why criminalizing usage makes no sense, but criminalizing dangerous usage does. This is of course an easy case because the statistics on drunk driving are fairly simple to interpret.
You asked who decides what a compelling needs is...I think when it comes down to it, whatever agency compiles and maintains information has a responsibility not to allow it to be abused. Now, there is all kinds of data available about your or me, but if I hired one of those agencies to make me a dossier on you so that I could stalk you, then that agency should be held liable (I don't know if laws and ethics are congruent here).
I would say that the need for information controls on the kind of data in question began the first time someone said to himself "Hey, now it'll be super easy to find the people I want to kill." There's plenty of other information that we keep free because the need to provide access far outweighs the potential for abuse. This is even true of FOIA-eligible information; you do have to explain why you're using it, and there is a vetting process, even though, ostensibly, every citizen has a right to read it.
Anyway, I get the impression that you agree with the principle, you just think that the need to keep sex offender data open outweighs the value saved by restricting access to it (bear in mind, I think it should be accessible, simply not on the interblags). Is this the case?
Yep, it is their problem. We don't punish the tools, we punish people.
It makes perfectly valid sense to mitigate obvious risks ahead of time. If there is no compelling need for you to own firearms, then, no, you can't have them. I believe firmly in the 2nd amendment, so that's a compelling need. Alcohol, drugs, and automobiles? Cite a compelling need for you to drive under the influence (hint: there isn't one!) so if you're caught they will act to prevent you from harming the public.
We restrict behavior because we know exactly what the outcomes are going to be. But you don't even assume that people are going to act justly. There are some foibles in your theory.
Yeah, it is very controlling, for a very obvious reason: when people get access to combined information like this, then we get violence. Maybe at some point it made sense for John Q. Citizen to have access to this kind of information under the "right to know," but then again this isn't the first time people have demonstrated that they will abuse it.
Given that, the people who currently control access to the combined info should restrict it to people who demonstrate a need to know it. I think the vast majority of people simply want to know if there is a sex offender in their neighborhood so they can mitigate risk. You really don't need to know the names, addresses, and criminal history of everyone in your city. With information so easily abused, "I'm curious" no longer cuts it.
Isn't this just a difference of opinion about what's important? If you can point to an example, what would you say might be more important features for a product?
Sure, the artists get paid regardless. We don't support them by buying CDs and we don't hurt them by "stealing."
I wonder if the *AA are using "piracy" as an excuse to negotiate lower payments for artists, though. Are they just passing the "loss" on to the artists? That would be a problem for me.
Nice, but you and Dvorak are both ignoring the point of OLPC: It is not targeted at educating starving children. We are not airlifting these into the trans-Sahel area to set up a wireless mesh network in the desert.
Instead they are going to places like Nairobi, Accra, Joburg, etc.--places that have schools, than you very much, and could very much benefit from cheap computer labs. Even Mogadishu has elementary schools ("What? You mean not every child has been conscripted and is wandering around with an AK?!") whose teachers and classrooms could use a little extra support.
Oh, it's not ONLY their ethics. The information they provide is truthful and valuable. People will pay for "data."
News articles, on the other hand, are essentially stories. I like to read them, but I read them with my morning coffee on the couch. Newspapers nowadays have lost their reputation for relevance and timeliness (typically by chasing ad revenue with sensationalist stories rather than by doing real investigative journalism) and so while they are interesting and amusing, they are not worth paying for.
Subscription journals, on the other hand, I will still pay for, just like I would pay for Consumer Reports.
Yah. Check out GK Chesterton's work on distributism--a third option between capitalism, where someone picks your pocket in the name of "free enterprise," and socialism, where pockets are outlawed. It's an economic theory that stresses small business and vigorous competition, but with some controls to discourage the rise of massive corporate chains.
People in the states really don't get how limited their consumer options are.
You are correct. I just moved to Germany and I was amazed at how few "big box" chain stores there are here. Instead there are numerous smaller "mom and pop" operations selling groceries, computer parts, books, etc.
The problem with large stores "saving you money" is that the money does not stay in your community. A community with a lot of small stores is a wealthy one; a community with a Wal-mart is a like a dog with a fat tick on it, leeching money and funneling it to the corporate coffers.
There has to be some effort to manage risks beforehand, though, if only because history teaches that unsupervised mobs inevitably descend into immorality.
As an example, we have higher energy prices (which lead to higher prices on everything) because we have to regulate oil and coal companies because, if we do not force them to do so, they will pollute (and lie about it). Your average consumer is at a severe disadvantage because he has little to no access to information about the activities of these companies. So there needs to be an impartial and empowered body to enforce laws that exist for the good of the people, which means you need a government agency to do it.
Of course, there are some problems with this approach...your duly-appointed government agency also has to be transparent or you have only shifted the problem from the oil company to the agency. They also have to be free from corruption or else they are worse than useless.
The thing is, I would prefer to have a semi-corrupt and less-than-trustworthy government agency, since they are on some level accountable to the people. It only requires "the people" to be politically active, and to care about things like "their future" and "breathing clean air." You KNOW the company is going to be immoral, but there's nothing you can do about it. People need to stop expecting the government to run on rails, it needs constant tuning and pruning.
...most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.
As a common user, I care about 1) eye candy 2) rendering times
The last time I tried to use SuperKaramba was a joke and most of the eye-candy features seem to be designed to crash KDE more than anything else. If it now "just works" then I'll be happy. Most of the real improvements are entirely Greek to me.
My take is that US bombs work well enough that the real hurdle is getting good, timely intelligence on a potential war target.
Fine, but you were going on about how great this was compared to WW2. My take is that comparing modern warfare and technology to the state of the art in WW2 is a canard...we should be looking to improve on the last war, not the one 60 years ago.
Dude, check your history. During Iraq 1/2 & Afghanistan we STILL had pilots dropping on the wrong building, missing the target, etc. This is with laser and GPS guidance.
The comparison should not be with WW2, it should be with the last bombing exercise. That's what we're improving over.
No, there is no form of "stupidity" that has a moral component to it. People who say it does generally style themselves as smarter than everyone else, and therefore, above everyone else. Why're you doing it? Do you really feel sympathy based on whether or not someone could have "prevented" something? That's kind of the antithesis of empathy, you know? Pardon me if I'm a little skeptical about your motives, hoss.
It takes some people a while to separate "risk management" and "fault" or "blame." I can't pin down why, though I have some ideas.
I think the issue has to do with separating morally important acts with moral content from morally unimportant acts: rape has moral content, wearing this clothing or walking down that street does not.
Here's an example using street gangs: they wear different colors to identify themselves. So if you wear a red sweatshirt and the blue shirt gang shoots you, they did an immoral act, whereas your act cannot be construed as "immoral" and therefore you can't be blamed for your own shooting.
If you're going to allow such morally unimportant and therefore arbitrary factors when assigning blame, then you get a slippery slope where things that are not only unimportant but also beyond a person's control are used...such as your gender. So we find people saying, essentially, the man who raped the woman was not guilty--it was the woman's fault for A) being female and B) being around men, who cannot be expected to control themselves.
The obvious remedy is not for the law to enforce women's rights, nor for women to exercise their right as human beings to defend themselves, but rather to blame the women.
If this kind of reasoning makes sense to you, then you might be a Saudi judge.
Now, it is perfectly reasonable to advise people on risky behaviors: watch what you wear to reduce your chances of getting shot. Don't go get so drunk you can't stand up when you're all alone. Don't hold hands walking down Crime Alley in Gotham City. And so forth. But "being vulnerable" is still not an immoral act.
Some people do think it is, but they only want to justify their position of strength--alas, power doesn't justify itself, though powerful people wish it did.
Well, the problem is that the law is not a good fit for what people actually want to do. This has been a problem for a long time, at least since the labels started recording blue music: there were songs that essentially came "out of the fields," that is, they were public domain because everyone knew them and nobody knew who wrote them (and in fact they evolved through collaboration among artists). But then one person records it, and the label tries to enforce copyright.
Basically they want to be the sole providers of a given type of media...music or movies or whatever. In trying to maximize profits they infringe on our own fair use of the media, and they prevent the processes from occurring that benefit them AND us.
We need BETTER copyright laws, not necessarily for them to go away entirely. They suck now because they are a poor fit and cannot really be enforced without violating other laws.
Pretty much all of the flashy whiz-bang functionality can be had on any operating system, which means that the slick MacOS features (most of which have been available for various Linux distros for some time) are no longer a reason to go with MacOS over Windows over Linux.
On any of these systems, I basically want the following functionality:
- multiple workspaces - useful desktop widgets - perl / bash scripting of some sort - nifty tools like grep, gawk, and sed - the usual web browser/mail client/music library manager/etc.
You can get those on any platform. So, for the average user, what's left? I know it's important that these features come ready out of the box, but what else?
"This won't allow us to break the law anymore" is a strawman.
The real argument is that some of the capabilities the police want would violate our civil rights. Imagine this: If one out of ever two people was pressed into service to be a cop, then every other citizen could be followed around all day by a law enforcement officer. That would also prevent people from breaking the law. It would also violate your rights and would be contrary to the ideals upon which this nation was founded.
Also, since you bring up the radar gun, you are aware of course of the legal battle surrounding those devices? A lot of them are inaccurate. But instead of saying, ok, let's invest in better radar guns so that's not an issue, instead they try to silence critics by threatening them. These are the people you want to have more tools? These are the same law enforcement agencies that regularly accidentally kill people by sending the SWAT team to the wrong house to execute no-knock warrants. What I want to see is my taxpayer money invested in making these guys safer for ordinary citizens, not more dangerous to criminals.
All of that said, I don't think the unmanned drone is any different from the helicopters they already have, except more available and probably cheaper in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if you set up a police state then you would be overriding a MUCH more compelling need.
And, you are right, individuals have to weigh the pros and cons, but that's not really relevant: you may cite a compelling need to indulge in some drug or something, but public safety far outweighs your own considerations, which is why criminalizing usage makes no sense, but criminalizing dangerous usage does. This is of course an easy case because the statistics on drunk driving are fairly simple to interpret.
You asked who decides what a compelling needs is...I think when it comes down to it, whatever agency compiles and maintains information has a responsibility not to allow it to be abused. Now, there is all kinds of data available about your or me, but if I hired one of those agencies to make me a dossier on you so that I could stalk you, then that agency should be held liable (I don't know if laws and ethics are congruent here).
I would say that the need for information controls on the kind of data in question began the first time someone said to himself "Hey, now it'll be super easy to find the people I want to kill." There's plenty of other information that we keep free because the need to provide access far outweighs the potential for abuse. This is even true of FOIA-eligible information; you do have to explain why you're using it, and there is a vetting process, even though, ostensibly, every citizen has a right to read it.
Anyway, I get the impression that you agree with the principle, you just think that the need to keep sex offender data open outweighs the value saved by restricting access to it (bear in mind, I think it should be accessible, simply not on the interblags). Is this the case?
Yep, it is their problem. We don't punish the tools, we punish people.
It makes perfectly valid sense to mitigate obvious risks ahead of time. If there is no compelling need for you to own firearms, then, no, you can't have them. I believe firmly in the 2nd amendment, so that's a compelling need. Alcohol, drugs, and automobiles? Cite a compelling need for you to drive under the influence (hint: there isn't one!) so if you're caught they will act to prevent you from harming the public.
We restrict behavior because we know exactly what the outcomes are going to be. But you don't even assume that people are going to act justly. There are some foibles in your theory.
Yeah, it is very controlling, for a very obvious reason: when people get access to combined information like this, then we get violence. Maybe at some point it made sense for John Q. Citizen to have access to this kind of information under the "right to know," but then again this isn't the first time people have demonstrated that they will abuse it.
Given that, the people who currently control access to the combined info should restrict it to people who demonstrate a need to know it. I think the vast majority of people simply want to know if there is a sex offender in their neighborhood so they can mitigate risk. You really don't need to know the names, addresses, and criminal history of everyone in your city. With information so easily abused, "I'm curious" no longer cuts it.
Well, it all comes down to "need to know." What express need do you have to know about your neighbor's criminal convictions?
Aside from deciding whether or not to murder them, of course...?
Isn't this just a difference of opinion about what's important? If you can point to an example, what would you say might be more important features for a product?
Sure, the artists get paid regardless. We don't support them by buying CDs and we don't hurt them by "stealing."
I wonder if the *AA are using "piracy" as an excuse to negotiate lower payments for artists, though. Are they just passing the "loss" on to the artists? That would be a problem for me.
Nice, but you and Dvorak are both ignoring the point of OLPC:
It is not targeted at educating starving children. We are not airlifting these into the trans-Sahel area to set up a wireless mesh network in the desert.
Instead they are going to places like Nairobi, Accra, Joburg, etc.--places that have schools, than you very much, and could very much benefit from cheap computer labs. Even Mogadishu has elementary schools ("What? You mean not every child has been conscripted and is wandering around with an AK?!") whose teachers and classrooms could use a little extra support.
"$200 so they can read Slashdot," indeed.
All you need to go is go somewhere besides Gamespot, Wal-mart, and Best Buy.
The CD Warehouse around the corner from my parent's place has a seven-foot wall of Wiis. They have no accessories, but they have the Wii itself.
Oh, it's not ONLY their ethics. The information they provide is truthful and valuable. People will pay for "data."
News articles, on the other hand, are essentially stories. I like to read them, but I read them with my morning coffee on the couch. Newspapers nowadays have lost their reputation for relevance and timeliness (typically by chasing ad revenue with sensationalist stories rather than by doing real investigative journalism) and so while they are interesting and amusing, they are not worth paying for.
Subscription journals, on the other hand, I will still pay for, just like I would pay for Consumer Reports.
Yah. Check out GK Chesterton's work on distributism--a third option between capitalism, where someone picks your pocket in the name of "free enterprise," and socialism, where pockets are outlawed. It's an economic theory that stresses small business and vigorous competition, but with some controls to discourage the rise of massive corporate chains.
People in the states really don't get how limited their consumer options are.
You are correct. I just moved to Germany and I was amazed at how few "big box" chain stores there are here. Instead there are numerous smaller "mom and pop" operations selling groceries, computer parts, books, etc.
The problem with large stores "saving you money" is that the money does not stay in your community. A community with a lot of small stores is a wealthy one; a community with a Wal-mart is a like a dog with a fat tick on it, leeching money and funneling it to the corporate coffers.
There has to be some effort to manage risks beforehand, though, if only because history teaches that unsupervised mobs inevitably descend into immorality.
As an example, we have higher energy prices (which lead to higher prices on everything) because we have to regulate oil and coal companies because, if we do not force them to do so, they will pollute (and lie about it). Your average consumer is at a severe disadvantage because he has little to no access to information about the activities of these companies. So there needs to be an impartial and empowered body to enforce laws that exist for the good of the people, which means you need a government agency to do it.
Of course, there are some problems with this approach...your duly-appointed government agency also has to be transparent or you have only shifted the problem from the oil company to the agency. They also have to be free from corruption or else they are worse than useless.
The thing is, I would prefer to have a semi-corrupt and less-than-trustworthy government agency, since they are on some level accountable to the people. It only requires "the people" to be politically active, and to care about things like "their future" and "breathing clean air." You KNOW the company is going to be immoral, but there's nothing you can do about it. People need to stop expecting the government to run on rails, it needs constant tuning and pruning.
...most of them are rather invisible from the common user's perspective.
As a common user, I care about
1) eye candy
2) rendering times
The last time I tried to use SuperKaramba was a joke and most of the eye-candy features seem to be designed to crash KDE more than anything else. If it now "just works" then I'll be happy. Most of the real improvements are entirely Greek to me.
Well, that's true.
My take is that US bombs work well enough that the real hurdle is getting good, timely intelligence on a potential war target.
Fine, but you were going on about how great this was compared to WW2. My take is that comparing modern warfare and technology to the state of the art in WW2 is a canard...we should be looking to improve on the last war, not the one 60 years ago.
Dude, check your history. During Iraq 1/2 & Afghanistan we STILL had pilots dropping on the wrong building, missing the target, etc. This is with laser and GPS guidance.
The comparison should not be with WW2, it should be with the last bombing exercise. That's what we're improving over.
No, there is no form of "stupidity" that has a moral component to it. People who say it does generally style themselves as smarter than everyone else, and therefore, above everyone else. Why're you doing it? Do you really feel sympathy based on whether or not someone could have "prevented" something? That's kind of the antithesis of empathy, you know? Pardon me if I'm a little skeptical about your motives, hoss.
It takes some people a while to separate "risk management" and "fault" or "blame." I can't pin down why, though I have some ideas.
I think the issue has to do with separating morally important acts with moral content from morally unimportant acts: rape has moral content, wearing this clothing or walking down that street does not.
Here's an example using street gangs: they wear different colors to identify themselves. So if you wear a red sweatshirt and the blue shirt gang shoots you, they did an immoral act, whereas your act cannot be construed as "immoral" and therefore you can't be blamed for your own shooting.
If you're going to allow such morally unimportant and therefore arbitrary factors when assigning blame, then you get a slippery slope where things that are not only unimportant but also beyond a person's control are used...such as your gender. So we find people saying, essentially, the man who raped the woman was not guilty--it was the woman's fault for A) being female and B) being around men, who cannot be expected to control themselves.
The obvious remedy is not for the law to enforce women's rights, nor for women to exercise their right as human beings to defend themselves, but rather to blame the women.
If this kind of reasoning makes sense to you, then you might be a Saudi judge.
Now, it is perfectly reasonable to advise people on risky behaviors: watch what you wear to reduce your chances of getting shot. Don't go get so drunk you can't stand up when you're all alone. Don't hold hands walking down Crime Alley in Gotham City. And so forth. But "being vulnerable" is still not an immoral act.
Some people do think it is, but they only want to justify their position of strength--alas, power doesn't justify itself, though powerful people wish it did.
Well, the problem is that the law is not a good fit for what people actually want to do. This has been a problem for a long time, at least since the labels started recording blue music: there were songs that essentially came "out of the fields," that is, they were public domain because everyone knew them and nobody knew who wrote them (and in fact they evolved through collaboration among artists). But then one person records it, and the label tries to enforce copyright.
Basically they want to be the sole providers of a given type of media...music or movies or whatever. In trying to maximize profits they infringe on our own fair use of the media, and they prevent the processes from occurring that benefit them AND us.
We need BETTER copyright laws, not necessarily for them to go away entirely. They suck now because they are a poor fit and cannot really be enforced without violating other laws.
They just ripped off existing American photos of the Moon.
Pretty much all of the flashy whiz-bang functionality can be had on any operating system, which means that the slick MacOS features (most of which have been available for various Linux distros for some time) are no longer a reason to go with MacOS over Windows over Linux.
On any of these systems, I basically want the following functionality:
- multiple workspaces
- useful desktop widgets
- perl / bash scripting of some sort
- nifty tools like grep, gawk, and sed
- the usual web browser/mail client/music library manager/etc.
You can get those on any platform. So, for the average user, what's left? I know it's important that these features come ready out of the box, but what else?
"This won't allow us to break the law anymore" is a strawman.
The real argument is that some of the capabilities the police want would violate our civil rights. Imagine this: If one out of ever two people was pressed into service to be a cop, then every other citizen could be followed around all day by a law enforcement officer. That would also prevent people from breaking the law. It would also violate your rights and would be contrary to the ideals upon which this nation was founded.
Also, since you bring up the radar gun, you are aware of course of the legal battle surrounding those devices? A lot of them are inaccurate. But instead of saying, ok, let's invest in better radar guns so that's not an issue, instead they try to silence critics by threatening them. These are the people you want to have more tools? These are the same law enforcement agencies that regularly accidentally kill people by sending the SWAT team to the wrong house to execute no-knock warrants. What I want to see is my taxpayer money invested in making these guys safer for ordinary citizens, not more dangerous to criminals.
All of that said, I don't think the unmanned drone is any different from the helicopters they already have, except more available and probably cheaper in the long run.
The current policy is awful, but the voltage policy is improving.
Yeah, it "works," but that doesn't mean it's especially great.
This is in the same way that a state that simply jails dissidents "works," but I think government should be much less coercive.
This is true for a lot of users, but what about all the ones in this thread? Do they get to claim ignorance too?