Northern Europe is MUCH more like the plains of Africa than any other planet we have ever observed. Our species evolved over millions of years and is finely tuned and adapted to living in a very narrow temperature range, a specific day length, with access to liquid water and air composed of gases in a specific ratio, eating foods of specific composition that we can chew and digest it, etc. I cannot imagine another world harboring any more than a token human outpost, and that outpost would likely need resupply from Earth from time to time. I think it best for our species if we just stay here and ride out the considerable time old Earth has left.
The sun is going to explode five billion years from now, and then having "colonized the solar system" will have been pointless. Eventually, all stars will burn out and everything in the universe will freeze, so moving off the Earth to preserve our species is really just postponing the inevitable, not preventing it.
I think we should accept that our species evolved on Earth and is therefore only really fit (in the Darwinian sense of that word) to live on this planet. All species, planets, and suns have finite lifetimes. We should acknowledge that our species will have an end just as it had a beginning, and try to make the most of life here on Earth while we're still here.
Now that's one of the few arguments I've read in this thread that makes sense. If the ISP's really want to argue that net neutrality represents a violation of their rights under the Fifth Amendment, then they should compensate the owners of private property whose ground they dug up to lay cable and fiber.
So, allowing the government to control all of my data is the "only answer"?
In order for there to be a proper free-market in web-delivered services, the web itself has to be freely accessible and not subject to the whim of huge corporations.
Really? Have you ever visited a mall or shopping center? How many government-owned malls or shopping centers have you ever seen? Does the lack of government-owned shopping centers prevent free markets? Of course it doesn't. Have you taken a look at Amazon.com lately? Have you noticed how many separate, individual suppliers of goods manage to sell their wares through Amazon's privately-controlled market? Do you see them complaining that they would prefer a government-controlled market in which to vend their goods? The entire world is filled with privately-owned markets through which third parties sell goods and services to consumers. Government-supplied markets, whether online or offline, are most definitely NOT the "only answer" to ensuring neutrality.
According to Conservative/Libtardian dogma ANY regulation of any sort is a government "taking".
Would you mind citing a source of this "dogma" you accuse others of believing? Your statement is uninformed, wrong, prejudicial, divisive, and inflammatory. Speaking for myself as a Libertarian, I welcome government regulation if it exists to prevent people from trampling on the fundamental rights of others. For example, regulation that punishes fraud does not represent for form of "taking" as far as I am concerned.
How are web sites public places? Aren't the site content, hosting software, host computers, and the buildings that house the host computers all privately owned by individuals or private companies (except for sites owned by the government)? As a web site owner, do I not have the right to permit access to my site and its content only by people who have paid me the required registration fee, and to block all other users from accessing the site? If individual site owners may block certain classes of users (i.e., those who don't pay the access fee,) why can't the owners of the ISP's computers and cables and routers do the same thing?
It's not about quality, it's about access. If the government required a water company to allow people to send their own, private water through the water company's pipes, then that would constitute a taking requiring just compensation. Similarly, if the government required the electric utility company to permit you to transmit power that you generated at home over the utility's infrastructure, that would constitute a taking. Apparently, TFA puts forth the theory that net neutrality constitutes a taking because it requires the owner of the network infrastructure to allow anyone to use it for anything they want.
Also, lack of Net Neutrality is a first amendment violation.
The First Amendment does not apply to private companies or individuals. It only applies to the federal government. Companies and individuals may block or suppress your right to free speech on property they own any time they want to, and to whatever extent they please. The Fifth Amendment would only apply if the government passed a law limiting some individuals from using the Internet.
Great questions. I'm having a hard time deciding how to form an opinion on this issue because I can't seem to come up with the right analogy to map this over to other real-world scenarios with similar questions.
I mean, if you consider Apple a "publisher", in this case a publisher of applications, why can they not control how ads get delivered? If they published books, for example, could they not make publication of an author's book contingent on the author NOT selling advertising space inside it? The author, after all, can self-publish his work and include any content he wants, whether advertisements or something else, so he still has choices. He can also seek out other publishers who might have publication rules that allow him to sell ads within his book.
The creator of an application has many other platforms and devices on which he can publish his application, if he feels that Apple's advertising rules are too restrictive. So he, too, has choices.
If we look at Apple as a merchant rather than a publisher (in this case, a merchant running an App Store,) can we not make comparisons to merchants in brick and mortar stores? Wouldn't a clothing store owner be within her rights to decree that any shirt sold in her store must not advertise competitor's stores? The creator of the shirt can still go to other outlets to sell his shirt, and doesn't the proprietor of a store have a right to control the merchandise sold through that store?
In every analogous situation I can think of, I come down on the side of Apple -- having the right to decree what can and cannot be published/sold through their storefront.
in the extreme long term (5 billion years or so), this most certainly represents an evolutionary advantage over any other species living today.
I only quibble with your use of the word "certainly." We won't know whether human intelligence represents an evolutionary advantage over other Earth species until (and if) our species manages to successfully relocate to another planet.
Your comment assumes that stupidity is the lesser-fit adaptation compared with intelligence. I'm not sure nature supports that assumption. Cockroaches are significantly stupider than humans, and yet they are clearly the more successful species, at least in terms of numbers and longevity, from a Darwinian point of view. Have you noticed that "stupid" people seem to reproduce faster and in greater numbers than "intelligent" people? Personally, I think the jury remains out on whether intelligence of the kind humans possess represents an evolutionary advantage in the long term.
And they're the complementary, inverse set to the group of people who worked so hard and so fervently to prove the George Bush could not possibly have won the 2004 election.
If you're a believer in the predictive power of Google Trends, then the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was over a long time ago, and Blu-Ray's margin of victory continues to increase:
Insurance companies, as private enterprises, should have the right to charge whatever they want to whomever they want, as long as a free and open market exists (with no monopoly insurance companies, etc.)
Insurance companies already charge different rates to drivers of different ages, for example, even though this amounts to "discrimination" based on something the customer cannot control (i.e., the year in which s/he was born.) They do this because statistically, younger drivers represent a higher risk to insure than older drivers.
Again, as private enterprises, they should have the right to use any information at their disposal to assess risk and charge a premium based on that risk.
Perhaps this quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway can help clear this up: "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
That may be an accurate description of how Led Zeppelin got their start, but how can you deny the creativity and craftsmanship behind songs like "Kashmir" and "All of My Love" and "The Ocean" and "The Rain Song"?
And you must admit that the opening bars of "Good Times, Bad Times" represent one of the best -- if not THE best -- debut tracks on a debut album ever recorded.
He claims it is just a natural cycle.... If this is his argument, he leaves out a lot of things that need to be explained to me before I let it go. Like, why are polar bears suddenly on the endangered species list? What's happening to all the snow on the tops of mountains? Where are the ice glaciers (with ice that has been around for thousands if not millions of years) going?
And while you're at it: Where are all the wooly mammoths and wooly rhinocerous? What happened to the glacier that used to cover Illinois in a mile of ice? Where did the Bering land bridge go?
There are (at least) two component questions in the Global Warming debate: (1) Is the planet growing warmer? and (2) Is human activity the primary cause for the warming and/or accelerating the warming?
Because the Earth has apparently gone through many ice ages, and because the glaciers have been melting for tens of thousands of years, and because many arctic species were already extinct before humans began burning fossil fuels, and because volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts produce far more environmental devastation than humans, I fall into the camp that believes the answer to question (1) is "yes" but question (2) deserves a lot more attention and investigation. Scientists must be free to investigate whether changes in solar radiation, our planet's orbit, and other cyclical phenomenon are the primary causes of global warming, and they must be allowed to freely express the results of their investigations without being labeled "deniers" or "right-wing lackeys" by the hard-core believers in human-caused global warming.
Those who believe human activity is the only or primary cause of global warming must provide reasonable answers to questions such as "where have all the wooly mammoths gone?" and "why did the glaciers retreat from Illinois and Michigan?"
I know I'm going to get flagged as a troll or flamebait, but I truly believe that this sort of legislative thinking is the natural product of electing liberals into office, whether they be liberal Democrats or liberal Republicans. Unfortunately, it's an alluring illusion -- this idea that we can solve all our problems, protect everyone from everything, and ensure that everyone has an above-average income just by passing some more laws. It's like continuously enhancing and patching a system that works well but which lacks certain bells and whistles -- eventually all of the great engineering that went into the original design (e.g., The US Constitution) gets corrupted and crippled by the endless tweaking, patching, and enhancing.
True political conservatives (as opposed to moral conservatives or economic conservatives) believe that a good, basic set of principles as described in something like our Constitution should be all that we need to protect our freedoms and property. Any great body of laws beyond that is actually more likely to diminsh freedom and risk personal property than secure them. Unfortunately, the allure of the "just one more law will fix everything" siren is, for most people, irresistable.
Good gravy. Will it never, ever stop? This was supposed to be a free country, with a few laws to protect us from taking or damaging each other's life, liberty, or property. A law that prohibits using electronic devices while one crosses the street? How is that going to advance the cause of liberty or protect my person and property without infringing on the rights of others? If we're going to have more laws, why don't we pass one requiring every person elected to a government office to take and pass mandatory classes in civics, history, Constitutional law, and freaking common sense?
Okay. I feel better now. Thanks for listening. Go ahead and mod me down now.
Thanks, but I don't think patience had that much to do with it. I think my willingness to explain things simply came from the fact that it was my JOB to teach novices about computers -- in other words, explaining computers to people who have no clue about them was what I signed up for in the first place. If I were in your position -- trying to help someone fix a problem with their computer -- explaining the workings of the machine would be a secondary requirement, and I would probably not exhibit nearly as much patience.
I'm not being facetious - various editors having differing input modes, monitors have modes, most *NIX systems have a single user mode, et cetera. I'm wondering what you're referring to.
Well, to be specific -- I was teaching this class for the first time back in 1987 or 1988. We were using Apple ][ computers at the time, and you could edit a program back then by pressing ESC and then moving the cursor up to a line of code displayed on the screen. I explained to the class that pressing ESC put the computer in "edit mode," and one of my students raised her hand and asked, "what's a mode?" I was so stunned by the question that I could not come up with a good answer on the spot. I said something like, "it's a state of being -- sort of like a particular way of operating. When you have your lawn mower in "cutting mode," pushing it across your lawn will cause it to cut grass. When it's not in "cutting mode", pushing it across your lawn just moves the lawn mower. Needless to say, I was never satisfied with my answer. I remember this incident 20 years later because it raised my awareness of the kinds of things I take for granted which other people struggle with, because their mental models of how computers work are so different from mine.
I'm skeptical. Did these people also think that all the little people in their TV die when they turn it off?
No, but several of them really did have a "fear" that when their document disappeared from the screen, it was lost forever. Apparently, one of their first steps in building a mental model of the computer was to assume that the "screen" and the "computer" were equivalent. Therefore, NOT ON THE SCREEN = NOT IN THE COMPUTER = LOST.
As a user of computers from the age of 13 or so, I was -- like you -- surprised at this mental model, and surprised at how common it turned out to be.
Well said, yagu. For a good illustration of the truth of what you've written, try teaching a Computer Literacy class for adults who have never used a computer before. I got questions like "what's a mode?" and "why are these little arrow keys for?". If normal humans -- the kind who don't read Slashdot -- have trouble with concepts like modes and arrow keys, you can imagine how difficult it was for them to understand that, when their Word document disappeared from the screen when they minimized the window, it did not also disappear from "the computer", but was sitting somewhere invisible to them.
I think it would serve every programmer well to spend some time teaching novices how to use something the programmer finds simple, such as the Windows calculator, Notepad, etc., to see how "normal" users think and react.
Huh? How does this comment apply to something abstract like a programming language? The COBOL language didn't degrade over time, yet somehow everyone's perception of it went from "this is the tool we need to use to do everything" to "please let it die."
Like every other widely-used language, COBOL has its place. You might not want to write a video game in it, but you also wouldn't want to write a billing system in C++.
Slashdot Mirror
Northern Europe is MUCH more like the plains of Africa than any other planet we have ever observed. Our species evolved over millions of years and is finely tuned and adapted to living in a very narrow temperature range, a specific day length, with access to liquid water and air composed of gases in a specific ratio, eating foods of specific composition that we can chew and digest it, etc. I cannot imagine another world harboring any more than a token human outpost, and that outpost would likely need resupply from Earth from time to time. I think it best for our species if we just stay here and ride out the considerable time old Earth has left.
The sun is going to explode five billion years from now, and then having "colonized the solar system" will have been pointless. Eventually, all stars will burn out and everything in the universe will freeze, so moving off the Earth to preserve our species is really just postponing the inevitable, not preventing it.
I think we should accept that our species evolved on Earth and is therefore only really fit (in the Darwinian sense of that word) to live on this planet. All species, planets, and suns have finite lifetimes. We should acknowledge that our species will have an end just as it had a beginning, and try to make the most of life here on Earth while we're still here.
Now that's one of the few arguments I've read in this thread that makes sense. If the ISP's really want to argue that net neutrality represents a violation of their rights under the Fifth Amendment, then they should compensate the owners of private property whose ground they dug up to lay cable and fiber.
So, allowing the government to control all of my data is the "only answer"?
In order for there to be a proper free-market in web-delivered services, the web itself has to be freely accessible and not subject to the whim of huge corporations.
Really? Have you ever visited a mall or shopping center? How many government-owned malls or shopping centers have you ever seen? Does the lack of government-owned shopping centers prevent free markets? Of course it doesn't. Have you taken a look at Amazon.com lately? Have you noticed how many separate, individual suppliers of goods manage to sell their wares through Amazon's privately-controlled market? Do you see them complaining that they would prefer a government-controlled market in which to vend their goods? The entire world is filled with privately-owned markets through which third parties sell goods and services to consumers. Government-supplied markets, whether online or offline, are most definitely NOT the "only answer" to ensuring neutrality.
According to Conservative/Libtardian dogma ANY regulation of any sort is a government "taking".
Would you mind citing a source of this "dogma" you accuse others of believing? Your statement is uninformed, wrong, prejudicial, divisive, and inflammatory. Speaking for myself as a Libertarian, I welcome government regulation if it exists to prevent people from trampling on the fundamental rights of others. For example, regulation that punishes fraud does not represent for form of "taking" as far as I am concerned.
How are web sites public places? Aren't the site content, hosting software, host computers, and the buildings that house the host computers all privately owned by individuals or private companies (except for sites owned by the government)? As a web site owner, do I not have the right to permit access to my site and its content only by people who have paid me the required registration fee, and to block all other users from accessing the site? If individual site owners may block certain classes of users (i.e., those who don't pay the access fee,) why can't the owners of the ISP's computers and cables and routers do the same thing?
It's not about quality, it's about access. If the government required a water company to allow people to send their own, private water through the water company's pipes, then that would constitute a taking requiring just compensation. Similarly, if the government required the electric utility company to permit you to transmit power that you generated at home over the utility's infrastructure, that would constitute a taking. Apparently, TFA puts forth the theory that net neutrality constitutes a taking because it requires the owner of the network infrastructure to allow anyone to use it for anything they want.
Also, lack of Net Neutrality is a first amendment violation.
The First Amendment does not apply to private companies or individuals. It only applies to the federal government. Companies and individuals may block or suppress your right to free speech on property they own any time they want to, and to whatever extent they please. The Fifth Amendment would only apply if the government passed a law limiting some individuals from using the Internet.
Hell, most of them [Randian Libertarians] think that the IRS is "taxation without representation" if their guy doesn't win the election.
citation, please?
Great questions. I'm having a hard time deciding how to form an opinion on this issue because I can't seem to come up with the right analogy to map this over to other real-world scenarios with similar questions.
I mean, if you consider Apple a "publisher", in this case a publisher of applications, why can they not control how ads get delivered? If they published books, for example, could they not make publication of an author's book contingent on the author NOT selling advertising space inside it? The author, after all, can self-publish his work and include any content he wants, whether advertisements or something else, so he still has choices. He can also seek out other publishers who might have publication rules that allow him to sell ads within his book.
The creator of an application has many other platforms and devices on which he can publish his application, if he feels that Apple's advertising rules are too restrictive. So he, too, has choices.
If we look at Apple as a merchant rather than a publisher (in this case, a merchant running an App Store,) can we not make comparisons to merchants in brick and mortar stores? Wouldn't a clothing store owner be within her rights to decree that any shirt sold in her store must not advertise competitor's stores? The creator of the shirt can still go to other outlets to sell his shirt, and doesn't the proprietor of a store have a right to control the merchandise sold through that store?
In every analogous situation I can think of, I come down on the side of Apple -- having the right to decree what can and cannot be published/sold through their storefront.
in the extreme long term (5 billion years or so), this most certainly represents an evolutionary advantage over any other species living today.
I only quibble with your use of the word "certainly." We won't know whether human intelligence represents an evolutionary advantage over other Earth species until (and if) our species manages to successfully relocate to another planet.
Your comment assumes that stupidity is the lesser-fit adaptation compared with intelligence. I'm not sure nature supports that assumption. Cockroaches are significantly stupider than humans, and yet they are clearly the more successful species, at least in terms of numbers and longevity, from a Darwinian point of view. Have you noticed that "stupid" people seem to reproduce faster and in greater numbers than "intelligent" people? Personally, I think the jury remains out on whether intelligence of the kind humans possess represents an evolutionary advantage in the long term.
And they're the complementary, inverse set to the group of people who worked so hard and so fervently to prove the George Bush could not possibly have won the 2004 election.
If you're a believer in the predictive power of Google Trends, then the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was over a long time ago, and Blu-Ray's margin of victory continues to increase:
Google Trends: HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray
Insurance companies, as private enterprises, should have the right to charge whatever they want to whomever they want, as long as a free and open market exists (with no monopoly insurance companies, etc.)
Insurance companies already charge different rates to drivers of different ages, for example, even though this amounts to "discrimination" based on something the customer cannot control (i.e., the year in which s/he was born.) They do this because statistically, younger drivers represent a higher risk to insure than older drivers.
Again, as private enterprises, they should have the right to use any information at their disposal to assess risk and charge a premium based on that risk.
Perhaps this quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway can help clear this up: "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
That may be an accurate description of how Led Zeppelin got their start, but how can you deny the creativity and craftsmanship behind songs like "Kashmir" and "All of My Love" and "The Ocean" and "The Rain Song"? And you must admit that the opening bars of "Good Times, Bad Times" represent one of the best -- if not THE best -- debut tracks on a debut album ever recorded.
And while you're at it: Where are all the wooly mammoths and wooly rhinocerous? What happened to the glacier that used to cover Illinois in a mile of ice? Where did the Bering land bridge go?
There are (at least) two component questions in the Global Warming debate: (1) Is the planet growing warmer? and (2) Is human activity the primary cause for the warming and/or accelerating the warming?
Because the Earth has apparently gone through many ice ages, and because the glaciers have been melting for tens of thousands of years, and because many arctic species were already extinct before humans began burning fossil fuels, and because volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts produce far more environmental devastation than humans, I fall into the camp that believes the answer to question (1) is "yes" but question (2) deserves a lot more attention and investigation. Scientists must be free to investigate whether changes in solar radiation, our planet's orbit, and other cyclical phenomenon are the primary causes of global warming, and they must be allowed to freely express the results of their investigations without being labeled "deniers" or "right-wing lackeys" by the hard-core believers in human-caused global warming.
Those who believe human activity is the only or primary cause of global warming must provide reasonable answers to questions such as "where have all the wooly mammoths gone?" and "why did the glaciers retreat from Illinois and Michigan?"
I know I'm going to get flagged as a troll or flamebait, but I truly believe that this sort of legislative thinking is the natural product of electing liberals into office, whether they be liberal Democrats or liberal Republicans. Unfortunately, it's an alluring illusion -- this idea that we can solve all our problems, protect everyone from everything, and ensure that everyone has an above-average income just by passing some more laws. It's like continuously enhancing and patching a system that works well but which lacks certain bells and whistles -- eventually all of the great engineering that went into the original design (e.g., The US Constitution) gets corrupted and crippled by the endless tweaking, patching, and enhancing.
True political conservatives (as opposed to moral conservatives or economic conservatives) believe that a good, basic set of principles as described in something like our Constitution should be all that we need to protect our freedoms and property. Any great body of laws beyond that is actually more likely to diminsh freedom and risk personal property than secure them. Unfortunately, the allure of the "just one more law will fix everything" siren is, for most people, irresistable.
Good gravy. Will it never, ever stop? This was supposed to be a free country, with a few laws to protect us from taking or damaging each other's life, liberty, or property. A law that prohibits using electronic devices while one crosses the street? How is that going to advance the cause of liberty or protect my person and property without infringing on the rights of others? If we're going to have more laws, why don't we pass one requiring every person elected to a government office to take and pass mandatory classes in civics, history, Constitutional law, and freaking common sense? Okay. I feel better now. Thanks for listening. Go ahead and mod me down now.
Thanks, but I don't think patience had that much to do with it. I think my willingness to explain things simply came from the fact that it was my JOB to teach novices about computers -- in other words, explaining computers to people who have no clue about them was what I signed up for in the first place. If I were in your position -- trying to help someone fix a problem with their computer -- explaining the workings of the machine would be a secondary requirement, and I would probably not exhibit nearly as much patience.
Well, to be specific -- I was teaching this class for the first time back in 1987 or 1988. We were using Apple ][ computers at the time, and you could edit a program back then by pressing ESC and then moving the cursor up to a line of code displayed on the screen. I explained to the class that pressing ESC put the computer in "edit mode," and one of my students raised her hand and asked, "what's a mode?" I was so stunned by the question that I could not come up with a good answer on the spot. I said something like, "it's a state of being -- sort of like a particular way of operating. When you have your lawn mower in "cutting mode," pushing it across your lawn will cause it to cut grass. When it's not in "cutting mode", pushing it across your lawn just moves the lawn mower. Needless to say, I was never satisfied with my answer. I remember this incident 20 years later because it raised my awareness of the kinds of things I take for granted which other people struggle with, because their mental models of how computers work are so different from mine.
No, but several of them really did have a "fear" that when their document disappeared from the screen, it was lost forever. Apparently, one of their first steps in building a mental model of the computer was to assume that the "screen" and the "computer" were equivalent. Therefore, NOT ON THE SCREEN = NOT IN THE COMPUTER = LOST.
As a user of computers from the age of 13 or so, I was -- like you -- surprised at this mental model, and surprised at how common it turned out to be.
Well said, yagu. For a good illustration of the truth of what you've written, try teaching a Computer Literacy class for adults who have never used a computer before. I got questions like "what's a mode?" and "why are these little arrow keys for?". If normal humans -- the kind who don't read Slashdot -- have trouble with concepts like modes and arrow keys, you can imagine how difficult it was for them to understand that, when their Word document disappeared from the screen when they minimized the window, it did not also disappear from "the computer", but was sitting somewhere invisible to them.
I think it would serve every programmer well to spend some time teaching novices how to use something the programmer finds simple, such as the Windows calculator, Notepad, etc., to see how "normal" users think and react.
Huh? How does this comment apply to something abstract like a programming language? The COBOL language didn't degrade over time, yet somehow everyone's perception of it went from "this is the tool we need to use to do everything" to "please let it die."
Like every other widely-used language, COBOL has its place. You might not want to write a video game in it, but you also wouldn't want to write a billing system in C++.