This point is a valid one. If the speech they seek to censor is dangerous, then who will they sacrifice into it's teeth to seek it out? Why must the Muslim countries learn the hard way that you cannot define obscenity without yourself being obscene?
If it's not wrong for them to not do something, then why should they do it?
Wait.. Let me make sure I'm getting your double negatives straight here. Are you saying that the amorality of an inaction robs motive from the corresponding action? It's not wrong for me to not eat a potato chip right now. So why eat a potato chip? Do I have to be arrested for setting the potato chip down before I can omnom with a clear conscience?
Dewd, your world sux! I am glad I don't live there.;D
Also, why shouldn't the concept of land ownership disappear entirely?
Read Phillip Hose Farmer, "To your scattered bodies go". He posits a planet called "Riverworld" where about 36 billion humans live with room to spare (70%+ of the surface area of the Earth-sized planet is habitable paradise), where everyone's food and basic needs are provided for free as if by magic, everyone is immortal and the dead are resurrected every morning; but everything still devolves into war over control of land and slaves.
I'm not trying to say our kind cannot achieve a utopic lifestyle, nor that replicator technology would harm us more than it would hurt us, I'm just trying to say we would still have a ton of problems to work out and lots of political struggles left to wrestle.:3
And would you really be replicating in a new car every time you need new break pads, or an oil change?
I'unno. I am thinking "reclaim + replicate = fix". Let the reclamator dissolve your moderately damaged or worn vehicle completely, then reassemble it good as new, and viola, it's even next year's model!;3
In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson neatly brushed the disposal problem under the rug by saying that the replicators could also take stuff apart (at an implied zero or negative entropy) so when something wore out you just put it back in the machine and had it remade for a small energy charge. That'd be awfully nice, but not very likely to actually happen so conveniently.
Yes, so the Replicators and Matter Reclamation Units in the Star Trek universe function the same way. The matter you dispose of is converted into energy, and then a portion of that energy is used to power the re-assembly of another helping back into matter. You get less material mass than you put into the system, and I suppose you would get thermal entropy as well. Though Heisenberg doesn't allow you to reach 100% efficiency in such a solution, he also doesn't dictate how inefficient you are forced to be.
Anyhow, no matter how good science fiction is there will always be some repercussions left unexplored and some loose ends swept under the rug. Realism is by definition not one of the most important elements in fiction. Believability is important, and setting the stage to explore the issues you really expect to explore. For issues that are not relevant to your metaphor, you find the least distracting method to gloss over them.
When anyone could replicate any amount of drugs, poisons, bombs, or nuclear weapons that they could get their hands on, we'd have more pressing issues than environmental concerns.
Opium and Marijuana can already be "replicated" with marginal effort and a sun lamp. Self replicating machines indeed? Natures ahead of you by several billion years there.
Please see recent issues of the Anarchist's Cookbook if you're interested to know how to make amphetamines, poisons or explosives in the privacy of your own garage. Nukes are complicated enough (heavy, exotic radioisotopes, anyone?) to be at the head of any list of products your replicator would have a hard time with. Following that on the list would be loyal standing armies and fleets of airships.
it's troubling to think that so many think that freedom can cause only desirable effects.
Sorry, fixed that for you to make it a little bit more general. But yeah, I feel your pain, brother. When you allow people to accomplish things they never could before, be it eating for free or listening to whatever music they want, they never stop to think of the agri-business or the Jonas Brothers whom they are selfishly evicting from their wallets. 8I
This is all hand-waving nonsense. Photons don't know remember their own history.
But I said nothing about photons knowing or remembering their history. I am talking about large groups of photons passing through 4 reflective surfaces. Some pass through at each stage and some reflect. Each group of photons which reflect when they are not supposed to generates visual noise. Your eyes see glare and reflection at stages when they should be seeing the image represented by the pixels.
Try looking into a pond. Do you see the fish, plants and rocks under the water? Do you see reflections of the sky and treeline above the water? Do you see foam or jetsam on the surface of the water?
Photons don't need to "have memories" besides their speed and direction in order to superimpose images. When you look into a pond, you see superimposed images from multiple sources. Some light reflects off the surface of the water, some light refracts off the surface of the water and objects there, while other light passes through and refracts off of surfaces under the water. Light from all of these sources reach your eye, each carrying distinct information by way of a cacophony of disagreeing shapes and hues. This is why aquariums always have darkened viewing rooms below water level for looking at marine life: staring down through the sunlit surface of the water makes it impossible to see anything.
Or to put it another way, if I take a camera and take a picture of a book and a picture of an ipad at identical brightness levels, and then I cropped the bezel / border of each image so it was just a page image, you would not be able to tell which was the real book and which was the ipad (assuming the resolution of the photo didn't allow you to pick up pixels versus letters).
Under absolutely no circumstances do I believe what you have just said. Please demonstrate.
As a demonstration that requires much less work, I can get a book and my laptop, turn down my laptop's backlight as far as it will go (I don't think it will turn all the way off) and tilt it back to catch the light from an overhead light source, take a photo of that alongside a book at the same angle, and see which one you can read in the photo. Hell I'll even use a book with a 12pt font and set the laptop to 72pt (or whatever renders 1 inch or larger letters). My apologies in advance if 100% of the light striking the shiny laptop screen reflects in the exact direction of the camera washing out the image, while the light striking the book is warmly refracted in every direction, none of the light striking the black lettering refracted at all, making that image easy to read at a distance.
This is completely ridiculous. Exactly how do your eyes know the difference between reflected photons and backlit photons?
It's a matter of how badly your eyes have to hurt themselves in order to gather the photons required to view the text. That's how they can "tell the difference".
The major optical difference between an LCD screen and a standard book is that the pages of a book are single, bleached, refractive surfaces with dark pigment over the letters and illustrations. No matter how much you want to believe than an LCD is identical, it is not. An LCD is instead much closer to shining a flashlight through the back of a transparency directly into your eyeballs.
Yes, you can turn down your backlight, but until you turn the backlight off you are outputting a greater number of photons into the room than were there to begin with. By comparison, you can read a book by the ambient light already in a normally lit room. Therefore, it is not possible to turn down an LCD screen's brightness to match what you need to read a book without completely switching the backlight off.
Then once the backlight is off, the reflective (not refractive) surfaces on both sides of the liquid crystal significantly impair anyone's ability to view any text. Light has to pass through the front transparent pane (some reflecting off, often into your eye drowning out the intended image with reflective noise from the room) then through the LCD pane (much of which reflects again) then the light that made it through the LCD pane reflects off the backlight, and through the LCD pane again (so every darkened LCD pixel has a distracting offset-shadow) and through the front pane again, The first two passes of reflection generate a noiseful glare that books do not have, reflecting light into your face that does not represent the intended image, and two more passes of partial reflection occur as light exists the LCD panel which simply creates interfering ambient light inside of the device, making the image still harder to see.
By comparison, any sliver of light striking an un-inked page of a book is refracted in every direction so that eyeballs from any angle can see with zero distortion that that portion of the page is "white". A sliver of light striking an area inked black is absorbed by a strikingly high percentage, and any eyeball looking in that direction perceives a very highly contrasted black from the lack of any kind of photons, refracted or reflected, emanating from that location in space.
So while an Ipad may light up your hand and a book with an attached booklight may also light up your hand, you make no mention of how much your hand has to get lit up for text to be legible in either case. Try this test to get an idea. Make your Ipad display a fully backlit black screen, and then attach your booklight to the cover of a book with a matte black cover, such as a bible. Then see which one lights up your hand better. Oops, LCD black is weak sauce compared to pigment black, isn't it now? So that's why, even in pitch black rooms, you have to flood your eyes with a magnitude brighter light from an LCD to make out the same text as you require to read a book.
Now using less light also means using less battery-draining power. E-ink requires zero power (besides providing it ambient light) to maintain an image. Even if you turn your backlight off, your LCD is drawing power just to maintain a mixture of hard to see black and white pixels. That's why E-ink readers can provide days or weeks of active reading between charges, as a bonus beyond saving your eyes from megadoses of EM radiation.
Say you invest a fixed amount of resources to bake a huge pie. How much should you charge people for a piece of it?
I should pay for one slice and get as much pie as I want, delivered to my house or wherever I travel of course, so I can eat it wherever I want.
I mean, you've already baked the pie and it will just go to waste if you don't let me stuff my face all I want, right?
And I want to speak to your manager, anyway. When I traveled to Mexico last summer, the pie was cold and stale by the time your delivery boy got it to me. Dx
At some point, they have to understand the frustration that we get unlimited internet access via land line, but restrictions and high costs for cell data, all to the same internet and probably through the same backbone once it leaves the cell network.
No, I don't think they "have to" understand that. They also don't "have to" know how tragic mortality is for me, as an individual. They're not really in a position to change either one.
Put simply, if you think an ISP's major financial burden is backhaul infrastructure and connecting to the same internet that everyone else does, then you probably also think that a farmer's major financial burden is in purchasing seed stock. Working square miles of farmland with a quarter million dollar combine and watering it with patch-rotary sprinkler chains a half mile long must be peanuts compared to getting your hands on some seeds.
So put this in perspective. Which do you think costs more? Getting 100Megabits per second to a large building somewhere, or getting 5 megabits per second to each of 20 people in a given neighborhood? How much more would one cost than the other?
Here's a hint: getting 20 people 5mbit involves as a necessary first step getting 100Mbit through a building or switchpoint somewhere. So, the first problem is a an inevitable subset of the second.
Here's another hint: once you string cable somewhere, the cost difference per mile of 100 strands of gigabit glass fiber and 1 copper pair of cat-3 telephone wires is minuscule compared to right of way costs. Put simply, distance costs money and the width of the pipe costs very little.
So the upshot is that each backhaul to a neighborhood costs your ISP barely more than an individual user's connection does. They pay maybe double to get 100 megabits into a neighborhood switch box what they pay to get 5 megabits to the very first customer off that switchbox. That means the last mile cost exceeded the backhaul cost as soon as the second customer signed on, and 100 megabits with generous oversubscription rates will serve 50-80 5 megabit customers.
So a reasonable estimate of serving just 20 customers off of a switchbox costs 12 times as much as simply lighting up the switchbox itself. 12 times as much for the same bits and the same internet, just to get it delivered to each of those homes.
So if you want two pipes into your house, guess what: you're going to pay for two pipes because you've doubled how much you're costing the ISP. The backhaul is peanuts compared to getting those bits delivered to your doorstep. If one of the pipes you want is wireless, then you will pay for the load you are adding to the wireless distribution network and you'll pay for that shiny cable to the house, too. Nobody cares that all of the bits dump off at the same place, you want two helpings of the expensive part of the network.
You are not buying the internet, you are not purchasing bits, you are paying to have them delivered to you. It's the same as the newspaper. Read it for free at the coffee shop, or pay to have another copy printed and bicycled to your doorstep. Want a copy at home and at work? Yeah, you're paying twice. Who cares that it's the same news in each one? You're the one that wants it, and someone has to print it twice and deliver it to you two different ways.
would be nice to have a "child account" for, well, kids; one which covers communication with few selected numbers but works like prepaid for the rest (without limiting communication with few selected numbers once prepaid credit runs off)
I am just failing to wrap my head about what is the complaint in TFA.
Why pay for the same utility twice?
Because... you're buying two things from them. Right? Your buying this thing, and then ohhhhhh you also want that thing. You can get one, you can get the other, they each have a price. You want both.
They each get you to the same internet, but they do it in different ways and have completely separate associated costs behind them. I live on a lake. I like to get groceries from shop on the far side of the lake. I can boat quickly across the lake and back when the weather is good. I can drive the long way around the lake when the weather is bad or I have other stops to make away from the lake. You know what? I have to purchase and maintain a car, and then I have to purchase and maintain a boat too if I really want to do both of these things at my discretion.
If I'm a cheapskate, I might only drive the car if I don't mind the long commute for every single grocery run. Am I going to die from the inconvenience? Or simply not have a shiny boat to show off to the neighbors?
Internet users can choose to do all of their surfing or telephoning from home, fast and tethered. Or they can choose to do all of their surfing and telephoning over a mobile device, slower and possibly capped, but untethered. (Hell, they're capping home internet these days too..) Neither of these choices will kill you, it just gives you less to brag about to your neighbors and requires that you act with discretion and patience instead of always having the best of both worlds every second of the day.
If they want speed at home and flexibility on the go, they'll have to pay to maintain both the wired and the wireless pipes. It doesn't matter if one company is maintaining each pipe for you, or you have a different company for each pipe. Why would that matter? If I buy both a boat and a car from the same dealership should I get the package deal for the same price as just the car? Should every Car come with a free Boat now, on the off chance you might want one?
A dealer will sell me the boat, sell me the car, and I'd be damned lucky just to get a volume discount for bringing the extra business.
That's why I don't get this article. "Why are you paying two times for internet? I want to pay One Time!" Well, I'm sorry to hear that, I think you lack imagination. *I* want to pay zero times. You know what scratch that, I want to pay negative one times. It would make a nice little side business if someone paid me for the privilege of piping me data. Help pay for my damned Boat, doncha know.;P
Okay, I'm in LA. Show me a mobile operator that will let me just get an Internet connection for my smart phone.
Uh...... this has got to be a trick question, right? Like the carrier has to support YOUR smartphone, or you fear jailbreaking or you've already sliced it up with a chainsaw, or don't want out of a contract, or something?
Streak is a 3G GSM 850/1900 device and AT&T is the only major US carrier that supports those frequency bands.
Yeah.... except that tons of Android 3G GSM 850/900/1800/1900 devices built by HTC (desire, dream, hero, magic, passion) are on the market right now, and I don't believe any of them are sold via AT&T. I know the passion is designed to work on AT&T's network, but they don't sell it.
So what carrier is it actually selling all of those? Damn, I can't remember their name, but I pay them $75/mo for unlimited minutes and unlimited data.
Bah who cares. Whoever they are, they must not be a major US carrier, hell they only cover 48 of the 50 states. It's better to stick with AT&T, since they are a "major" network!;D
Wrong. Your power as a teacher ends at the school, unless you want to be held liable for all the actions of the children you've ever taught? Because that sword cuts both ways.
Power to discipline for certain acts germane to the teaching environment relevant to other students vs. the responsibility to discipline for all immoral behavior in perpetuity are quite different things.
In any event, "Your power as a teacher ends at the school" would make it impossible for any child to be marked down or receive detention for failing to do their homework.
I see this case as a very delicate and interesting one to try; both sides have some very good arguments behind them. One thing I think is important to keep in mind is that the school should have some latitude to apply it's punishments for actions which demonstrably effect the school, regardless of whether they were perpetrated on school grounds or using school resources.
If a child leaves school and waits just outside school grounds to bully other children, it may be within the School's right to bring a case against the child or their family legally, but this may also be too heavy handed to have the intended effect. It could potentially be expensive to the school, fruitless as the family is judgement-proof, and too much broohah for the child to properly learn that their behavior was wrong (instead, they might be encouraged by the uproar they cause among the adults. see: Trolling)
If the school instead decides to bring their own disciplinary measures to bear, suspending such a child from school because their actions disrupt school operations instead of because of the location or resources involved would level an appropriate class of discipline against the child with a greater likelihood of allowing the child to learn the error of their ways and to separate the errant child from those whom they are disrupting for a brief period, and without tying up the legal system.
Such action would not preclude the parents of one of the accosted children from leveling a lawsuit, so this is a totally different animal from "police departments under-reacting to serious internal matters" that other posters have brought up.
Let's put this another way: If schools cannot punish for actions outside school grounds, then how can they discipline children for truancy? I say that a mandatory-enrollment public school should have the latitude to distribute internal punishment to students who both use school resources against policy and who disrupt normal school operations in a demonstrable fashion even when not using school resources to do so.
Well now I'm not sure what your point really is. Since you dont really believe that child porn and Muhammad images are equally wrong, there is nothing really to answer here.
My point is that Muslims find Mohammed images to be blasphemous and believe they cause spiritual harm not fully represented in the image itself. To them it represents an externality, just like one more needless CO2 emission or one more mp3 downloader.
They see creating and pandering in these images as hazardous enough to justify extreme acts up to and including violence.
This is a sensibility the Western World shares in the form of underage pornography. We don't give a crap what kind of cartoons you draw of Jesus or Buddha or anyone else, but wave around a topless photo of a seventeen your old and suddenly the gloves are off.
If hillbillies lynch and murder the photographer us Westerners don't get too uptight about it, we see it as two things we don't like canceling one another out. Thus, your expecting anything different from the Muslim community is just stupid. Simply take a look at your own sensitivities and you'll grok why it counterproductive to trample theirs.
If you want to follow Tit-for-Tat in the (iterated) Prisoner's Dilemma that is our society, best of luck.
Yes, yes in fact, I do! Thank you for your blessing.:D
Despite the fact that the casinos are obviously making money (which means most of the people pulling handles on the machines are saps, and even willing dupes), enough people buy into it to make the casinos work.
I certainly don't gamble myself, but I am intrigued how many people (especially religious advocates) frame casinos as though dry wagering is the only thing that happens. I'll try an illustration.
I see two buildings across the street from one another. Building A people go in and spend on average $10. Sometimes they walk out empty handed, and on some rare occasions I've seen folk walk back out with $20 or $100. I crane my ear at the door and hear music, glasses raised in toast, laughing, it's a very curious building. Everyone in my congregation says the activities in that building are immoral, and they won't go in there.
Building B across the street looks the same to me (maybe I'm illiterate, I can't read signs;D) people go in and spend an average of $10. Nobody comes out with more money whatsoever. No $20s, no $100s, very curious. I strain my ear to the door and hear music, glasses raised in toast, laughter. What is more curious is that folks from my congregation go in and out of this building without complaint.
As you can probably guess building A is a penny-ante casino, with live music, an open bar and dancing, while building B is just a bar or dance club. Albeit with more expensive food and drinks than the casino, and probably a cover charge.
So Casinos do more than trick mathematically inept suckers out of their savings, they provide entertainment value. Do you classify normal entertainment venues as evil? If not, then how is an entertainment venue where you may voluntarily experience the thrill of gambling money any more evil?
If you are a responsible individual, then games of chance are not evil. If you are a responsible individual, then beer is also not evil. I recognize a specific social quandry whereby people who cannot help it gamble themselves into the poorhouse or hurt their families. I do not however believe that either banning or shunning the gambling industry is the most effective way to help these people.
Our culture has a lot to learn about the psychology of addiction, and that is where we should be expending our resources. If moths destroy themselves entranced by a fire (and let's assume the moth's welfare is important to you), then the solution is neither to ban fire nor to load guilt upon the moth. The solution is to find out how to train the moth to overcome this compulsion. To master itself. And if you claim that this is impossible, that "the moth is inherently evil or self-destructive" or that "fire is demonic by nature", then I am afraid I could not accept your observations without some evidence to corroborate them.. and I'm fairly certain I have greater evidence that individuals (moths or humans) do the best in their ability to survive than you have that they do the best in their ability to perish. Most failings that I am aware of in human nature have to do with misunderstanding, ignorance, being easily fooled, and (since you seem so fond of game theory) being trapped by the Nash Equilibriums represented by local minima.
Like fish caught in a tidal pool or dogs with their leashes wrapped around a tree: sometimes it's not intuitive that you have to progress away from your goal temporarily in order to get the slack needed to reach it. This does not demonstrate self destructive behavior, simply beings who wish to better themselves being confounded by circumstance and lacking the wisdom or training to free themselves from certain snares.
Un-ignoring that my example was illegal because that was a major part of the point, electronically distributing images of Mohamed is illegal in many Muslim countries including Pakistan.
As a child of Western culture, you feel comfortable with the infrastructure and laws we have in the Western World, as whatever makes you uncomfortable is criminalized. You probably don't study international laws very often, and may not realize that in many countries it is perfectly legal to drink and drive or that there are countries where organized gang-style vengeance is either tacitly allowed or legally codified (dating back to the "blood avengers" of the old testament)
So you'll litter the streets — or to legalize your tactical offensiveness, perhaps erect legal billboards — displaying Mohammed in a Muslim community. Doing this, you hide behind western law that does not ban this Muslim-specific "obscenity". But then you'll go home, safe in the knowledge that they cannot retaliate by putting Goatse on one of your billboards, because whatever offends Western sensibilities is banned by Western law. If they tried, they might be prosecuted, fined, or even see jailtime (not to mention the community uproar and scandal that would be caused) Make it underaged pornography instead of goatse, and then I don't think some vigilante violence from the westerners would be too unrealistic to see happening.
Reverse this scenario in a Muslim country and the anti-westerner obscenity would still be illegal, probably getting you fined and the billboard taken down, lots of sneering looks from the locals, but barely for any reason beyond their penchant for legislating tact. The Mohammed billboard OTOH would cause roughly the same controversy as child porn would here, vigilante violence and all.
The take away is that every culture either has or manufactures some image or symbol which they find profane and cannot tolerate having displayed. While I agree with you that the Muslims ought to grow beyond their stigmas (and even their religion), I'm just saying that the Western World had better take a close look in the mirror before judging other people on the particulars of what they find profane.
Alright, so you litter their streets with Mohammed cartoons and then they come to your town and litter your streets in poloroids of goatse or child porn. Now that you are on the receiving end of the vandalism, do you feel as though you have been desensitized or that you even wish to be? What about your parents down the street (or, maybe you live in their basement, I'm not judging;D) how will they react to such images? Will there be an outlash? Lawsuits? Drama? Or will everyone feel silly about their psychological safeguards and laugh about it, debating which portly man is actually stretching his anus open the farthest?
I think we need to befriend the society and recognize that the right distribution of power is some kind of consensus which makes the society sufficiently strong, autonomous, mentally agile, while keeping all (or as many as possible) individuals reasonably happy.
If you are suggesting that individuals and large conglomerate organizations (companies, governments, cultures, etc) should learn to cooperate and recognize one another's sovereignty then I think I'll agree there. Neither is the individual master while the society is a meaningless tool, nor is the society the only important factor while the individual is a meaningless cog. Either viewpoint raises the survival instinct of whichever species is being maligned and ruins the whole project. Individual and Society should learn about and respect one another, and treat each other with dignity.
That being the case, individuals require uncensored access to publicly available empirical data in order to make healthful decisions for themselves. Some individuals subscribe to superstitions and taboos which make them seek to avoid certain kinds of data and stick their heads in the sand. This is their choice, and I look forward to my end of the gene pool winning against such strategies which I personally see as inferior.
Still, whenever a society sees fit to censor publicly available information based on moral objections (pornography, violence, blasphemy, images of Mohammed) or political objections (copyright, governmental criticism, swastikas) without the voluntary cooperation of those who get the wool over their eyes, this amounts to intelligence fraud against the citizen. In place of the real data that is available on any given subject, individuals get a picture of the world with elements Photoshopped out of it and replaced by fabrication.
The citizen can only assume the elided elements benefit them or their social contract, while the very nature of removing data is that the user cannot reliably know what the data is that was removed or why. Is the user in danger? If pornographic emails to a citizen get discreetly blackholed, does that mean the citizen is being stalked and will soon be attacked in the street? If a video is removed from Youtube citing copyright complaint from Warner Music, does that mean it was a pirate copy of a Warner song or simply a very popular track from an up and coming independent artist that someone at Warner hopes to gag?
In order to censor you must replace the censored data with something. You must replace the "ugly" or "scary" thing with an image of calm. It's like driving down the road with an intelligent windshield that can show anything as a head's up display, that chooses to censor out certain things that might distract the driver. If there is a pretty deer, the windshield covers the view of the deer with a repeating pattern from the side of the road so that the driver does not rubberneck. This spells doom for the driver when the elided deer darts in front of the car.
Alright, when it comes to human nature I think I can say I have more faith in arbitrarily chosen individuals and in loosely aggregated groups of them than you do.
For example, it seems as though the average American today is much less violent and more civilized than they were 2 generations ago for example. Our grandfathers expected fighting and physical violence as a means to "defend your honor" or to "show the schoolyard Bully which way was up". Nowadays physical altercations seem to be quite a bit less common. Most people, normal people, do just about anything to avoid a fight.
And yes, this is all from personal observation, but I wouldn't mind some hard evidence to corroborate in case someone has any.;3)
I see our civilization growing and evolving for the better over time. I see individuals in our civilization slowly growing more trustful and adept at participating in our cultural infrastructure as each generation passes. I see old fears, superstitions, and limitations melting away one by one. This is a good thing.
And when I talk about beliefs I'm not talking only about religions: for example, the knee-jerk reactions many US citizens have against 'socialist' ideas, which no amount of hard data showing how much healthier welfare societies are will change.
I perceive that the heart of this post involves your having little hope for human nature based upon your observations regarding the bruhaha over nationalized health insurance met against grassroots American Republicans.
I think the important thing to take away from this political debate is that there exist American individuals who are more "conservative" and probably less world-wise than virtually anyone outside of the middle east. These citizens do not trust "leftist progressives" and cling to the status quo as one might cling to a floating bit of wood on a turbulent sea.
This behavior is neither by definition "antisocial" nor "ignorant", and support of a bill should never be confused with support of an ideal. The passing of any given bill does not guarantee we would suddenly benefit from every highlight of European health systems, and it certainly does not guarantee that we would avoid whatever drawbacks each of those systems might silently suffer from nor that the entire bill might turn out to be some kind of subtly crafted porkbelly.
It is vital that we keep in mind that having conservative political viewpoints and being culturally sheltered do not make a person stupid or evil. It might make them cling to decisions we do not understand, but the remedy to that as always is better communication. It is also wise that we perceive that the GOP has somehow learned to troll from 4chan, and we must not hold that against the vast majority of conservative individuals who need to be led away from the circus.
As more left-leaning, technology savvy people, I think we take for granted sometimes how much we trust certain information outlets or how much we have honed our ability to weed bullshit data out of good data. If a scientist says "ZOMG carbon be cookin us all!" then we invest half a million dollars putting solar cells on our quarter million dollar homes and trade in our SUV's for Toyota Priuses whith the cheeky Hal9000 add-on that intones "I can't do that, Dave" every time you try to depress the brake pedal.
At the end of the day, there is more than one way to collect and to interpret empirical data, and I for one find it vitally important that people can publicly debate different interpretations and collection methodologies until laypeople can understand what is happening and until we can really grok what their reservations are. It requires patience, diplomacy, and really divesting oneself of thinking you have a monopoly on truth or evidence, or thinking your models of the data are the only way to model data.
All in all, none of this conflict truly besmirches natural human fidelity for me. People look out for their best interests to the best of their abil
Not all religions are meant to be opiates. The idea of the gospel of Christ is that you and your interests come last, after the interests of God and love for your fellow man. There's a reason they hung Him on a tree:-p
I don't know about that. So long as "the interests of God", which are touted as coming first, can only be understood or interpreted by whomsoever is in power anyway, who would hang such a believer from a tree? They sound like the perfect "citizen" to me, putting the interests of The State^WLORD before their own so selflessly.
The substance of the entire discussion we are having so far is, how can one determine whether a religion is "meant" to be an opiate or not. The "Bill gates is paying the first 100 people to forward this message" authors never intended it to be a decades-long evolving chain message, but that is simply how it turned out. Now what it was originally meant to be is lost in what it actually is. So it is with Religion as well.
Perhaps you look into this mirror of Erised and see selflessness, and see that as a valuable lesson for your brethren to learn. However when they gaze into the mirror they don't see selflessness. They see manifest destiny, Aryan supremacy, and the opportunity to be literally "holier than thou" at church. They see the basis for the justification of ethnic cleansing, from it's rich tradition in the old testament through the crusades and into today's conflicts.
I argue that the benefit of your seeing nice things in this mirror is drowned out by millions of other people seeing a call to arms. Based on this analysis, I would prefer to either smash such a mirror or call to my brothers to resist investing authority into such a mirror until it is rendered into a novelty.
Why cannot one craft a new doctrine emphasizing the elements you read as important from this one? You could transcribe what you see as the "substance" of Christ's teachings without mixing in his claims to divine authority or his endorsement of the old testament. You could forge a fresh doctrine focused on selflessness and loving thy neighbor and longsuffering and courage when facing opposition. Perhaps a new doctrine that does not try to doom infidels or make any overtures that might be mistaken by others as devaluing other human life.
I would imagine we could not easily do this because then it would not have the unique history and superstitious vetting of a millennial manuscript which helped shape centuries of our language and cultural cannon. It's hard to pretend a manuscript has divine origins when it is not borne from ancient, superhuman legends.
That being the case, why can we not then choose to divest ourselves of this irrational and dangerous practice of "religion" and simply test and confirm our hypothesis that selflessness and brotherhood lead to more stable societies? Why can we not weigh and practice our own moral codes based on realworld data from today, and transcribe our stories and our findings as humble data points and anecdotes instead of forging mandates to frighten future generations into following?
Slashdot Mirror
This point is a valid one. If the speech they seek to censor is dangerous, then who will they sacrifice into it's teeth to seek it out? Why must the Muslim countries learn the hard way that you cannot define obscenity without yourself being obscene?
If it's not wrong for them to not do something, then why should they do it?
Wait.. Let me make sure I'm getting your double negatives straight here. Are you saying that the amorality of an inaction robs motive from the corresponding action? It's not wrong for me to not eat a potato chip right now. So why eat a potato chip? Do I have to be arrested for setting the potato chip down before I can omnom with a clear conscience?
Dewd, your world sux! I am glad I don't live there. ;D
GAH!!! turn it off, turn it off! :-8 is having sex with your eyeballs to reproduce itself!
Also, why shouldn't the concept of land ownership disappear entirely?
Read Phillip Hose Farmer, "To your scattered bodies go". He posits a planet called "Riverworld" where about 36 billion humans live with room to spare (70%+ of the surface area of the Earth-sized planet is habitable paradise), where everyone's food and basic needs are provided for free as if by magic, everyone is immortal and the dead are resurrected every morning; but everything still devolves into war over control of land and slaves.
I'm not trying to say our kind cannot achieve a utopic lifestyle, nor that replicator technology would harm us more than it would hurt us, I'm just trying to say we would still have a ton of problems to work out and lots of political struggles left to wrestle. :3
And would you really be replicating in a new car every time you need new break pads, or an oil change?
I'unno. I am thinking "reclaim + replicate = fix". Let the reclamator dissolve your moderately damaged or worn vehicle completely, then reassemble it good as new, and viola, it's even next year's model! ;3
In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson neatly brushed the disposal problem under the rug by saying that the replicators could also take stuff apart (at an implied zero or negative entropy) so when something wore out you just put it back in the machine and had it remade for a small energy charge. That'd be awfully nice, but not very likely to actually happen so conveniently.
Yes, so the Replicators and Matter Reclamation Units in the Star Trek universe function the same way. The matter you dispose of is converted into energy, and then a portion of that energy is used to power the re-assembly of another helping back into matter. You get less material mass than you put into the system, and I suppose you would get thermal entropy as well. Though Heisenberg doesn't allow you to reach 100% efficiency in such a solution, he also doesn't dictate how inefficient you are forced to be.
Anyhow, no matter how good science fiction is there will always be some repercussions left unexplored and some loose ends swept under the rug. Realism is by definition not one of the most important elements in fiction. Believability is important, and setting the stage to explore the issues you really expect to explore. For issues that are not relevant to your metaphor, you find the least distracting method to gloss over them.
When anyone could replicate any amount of drugs, poisons, bombs, or nuclear weapons that they could get their hands on, we'd have more pressing issues than environmental concerns.
Opium and Marijuana can already be "replicated" with marginal effort and a sun lamp. Self replicating machines indeed? Natures ahead of you by several billion years there.
Please see recent issues of the Anarchist's Cookbook if you're interested to know how to make amphetamines, poisons or explosives in the privacy of your own garage. Nukes are complicated enough (heavy, exotic radioisotopes, anyone?) to be at the head of any list of products your replicator would have a hard time with. Following that on the list would be loyal standing armies and fleets of airships.
it's troubling to think that so many think that freedom can cause only desirable effects.
Sorry, fixed that for you to make it a little bit more general. But yeah, I feel your pain, brother. When you allow people to accomplish things they never could before, be it eating for free or listening to whatever music they want, they never stop to think of the agri-business or the Jonas Brothers whom they are selfishly evicting from their wallets. 8I
This is all hand-waving nonsense. Photons don't know remember their own history.
But I said nothing about photons knowing or remembering their history. I am talking about large groups of photons passing through 4 reflective surfaces. Some pass through at each stage and some reflect. Each group of photons which reflect when they are not supposed to generates visual noise. Your eyes see glare and reflection at stages when they should be seeing the image represented by the pixels.
Try looking into a pond. Do you see the fish, plants and rocks under the water? Do you see reflections of the sky and treeline above the water? Do you see foam or jetsam on the surface of the water?
Photons don't need to "have memories" besides their speed and direction in order to superimpose images. When you look into a pond, you see superimposed images from multiple sources. Some light reflects off the surface of the water, some light refracts off the surface of the water and objects there, while other light passes through and refracts off of surfaces under the water. Light from all of these sources reach your eye, each carrying distinct information by way of a cacophony of disagreeing shapes and hues. This is why aquariums always have darkened viewing rooms below water level for looking at marine life: staring down through the sunlit surface of the water makes it impossible to see anything.
Or to put it another way, if I take a camera and take a picture of a book and a picture of an ipad at identical brightness levels, and then I cropped the bezel / border of each image so it was just a page image, you would not be able to tell which was the real book and which was the ipad (assuming the resolution of the photo didn't allow you to pick up pixels versus letters).
Under absolutely no circumstances do I believe what you have just said. Please demonstrate.
As a demonstration that requires much less work, I can get a book and my laptop, turn down my laptop's backlight as far as it will go (I don't think it will turn all the way off) and tilt it back to catch the light from an overhead light source, take a photo of that alongside a book at the same angle, and see which one you can read in the photo. Hell I'll even use a book with a 12pt font and set the laptop to 72pt (or whatever renders 1 inch or larger letters). My apologies in advance if 100% of the light striking the shiny laptop screen reflects in the exact direction of the camera washing out the image, while the light striking the book is warmly refracted in every direction, none of the light striking the black lettering refracted at all, making that image easy to read at a distance.
Actually, 75,000% of the original cost would be a 74,900% markup.
Yeah........ when you're talking about 1.5 Trillion in monopoly money though, I think it's safe to round off the third significant digit. Don't you? :P
Overprecision is deceit, you know. 8I
You don't happen to work at Verizon, do you?
No, he just needs Mr. Sagan to put more emphasis on the "B" next time around for his BBBBEnefit. :3
This is completely ridiculous. Exactly how do your eyes know the difference between reflected photons and backlit photons?
It's a matter of how badly your eyes have to hurt themselves in order to gather the photons required to view the text. That's how they can "tell the difference".
The major optical difference between an LCD screen and a standard book is that the pages of a book are single, bleached, refractive surfaces with dark pigment over the letters and illustrations. No matter how much you want to believe than an LCD is identical, it is not. An LCD is instead much closer to shining a flashlight through the back of a transparency directly into your eyeballs.
Yes, you can turn down your backlight, but until you turn the backlight off you are outputting a greater number of photons into the room than were there to begin with. By comparison, you can read a book by the ambient light already in a normally lit room. Therefore, it is not possible to turn down an LCD screen's brightness to match what you need to read a book without completely switching the backlight off.
Then once the backlight is off, the reflective (not refractive) surfaces on both sides of the liquid crystal significantly impair anyone's ability to view any text. Light has to pass through the front transparent pane (some reflecting off, often into your eye drowning out the intended image with reflective noise from the room) then through the LCD pane (much of which reflects again) then the light that made it through the LCD pane reflects off the backlight, and through the LCD pane again (so every darkened LCD pixel has a distracting offset-shadow) and through the front pane again, The first two passes of reflection generate a noiseful glare that books do not have, reflecting light into your face that does not represent the intended image, and two more passes of partial reflection occur as light exists the LCD panel which simply creates interfering ambient light inside of the device, making the image still harder to see.
By comparison, any sliver of light striking an un-inked page of a book is refracted in every direction so that eyeballs from any angle can see with zero distortion that that portion of the page is "white". A sliver of light striking an area inked black is absorbed by a strikingly high percentage, and any eyeball looking in that direction perceives a very highly contrasted black from the lack of any kind of photons, refracted or reflected, emanating from that location in space.
So while an Ipad may light up your hand and a book with an attached booklight may also light up your hand, you make no mention of how much your hand has to get lit up for text to be legible in either case. Try this test to get an idea. Make your Ipad display a fully backlit black screen, and then attach your booklight to the cover of a book with a matte black cover, such as a bible. Then see which one lights up your hand better. Oops, LCD black is weak sauce compared to pigment black, isn't it now? So that's why, even in pitch black rooms, you have to flood your eyes with a magnitude brighter light from an LCD to make out the same text as you require to read a book.
Now using less light also means using less battery-draining power. E-ink requires zero power (besides providing it ambient light) to maintain an image. Even if you turn your backlight off, your LCD is drawing power just to maintain a mixture of hard to see black and white pixels. That's why E-ink readers can provide days or weeks of active reading between charges, as a bonus beyond saving your eyes from megadoses of EM radiation.
With fixed costs, billing by usage is equitable.
Say you invest a fixed amount of resources to bake a huge pie. How much should you charge people for a piece of it?
I should pay for one slice and get as much pie as I want, delivered to my house or wherever I travel of course, so I can eat it wherever I want.
I mean, you've already baked the pie and it will just go to waste if you don't let me stuff my face all I want, right?
And I want to speak to your manager, anyway. When I traveled to Mexico last summer, the pie was cold and stale by the time your delivery boy got it to me. Dx
At some point, they have to understand the frustration that we get unlimited internet access via land line, but restrictions and high costs for cell data, all to the same internet and probably through the same backbone once it leaves the cell network.
No, I don't think they "have to" understand that. They also don't "have to" know how tragic mortality is for me, as an individual. They're not really in a position to change either one.
Put simply, if you think an ISP's major financial burden is backhaul infrastructure and connecting to the same internet that everyone else does, then you probably also think that a farmer's major financial burden is in purchasing seed stock. Working square miles of farmland with a quarter million dollar combine and watering it with patch-rotary sprinkler chains a half mile long must be peanuts compared to getting your hands on some seeds.
So put this in perspective. Which do you think costs more? Getting 100Megabits per second to a large building somewhere, or getting 5 megabits per second to each of 20 people in a given neighborhood? How much more would one cost than the other?
Here's a hint: getting 20 people 5mbit involves as a necessary first step getting 100Mbit through a building or switchpoint somewhere. So, the first problem is a an inevitable subset of the second.
Here's another hint: once you string cable somewhere, the cost difference per mile of 100 strands of gigabit glass fiber and 1 copper pair of cat-3 telephone wires is minuscule compared to right of way costs. Put simply, distance costs money and the width of the pipe costs very little.
So the upshot is that each backhaul to a neighborhood costs your ISP barely more than an individual user's connection does. They pay maybe double to get 100 megabits into a neighborhood switch box what they pay to get 5 megabits to the very first customer off that switchbox. That means the last mile cost exceeded the backhaul cost as soon as the second customer signed on, and 100 megabits with generous oversubscription rates will serve 50-80 5 megabit customers.
So a reasonable estimate of serving just 20 customers off of a switchbox costs 12 times as much as simply lighting up the switchbox itself. 12 times as much for the same bits and the same internet, just to get it delivered to each of those homes.
So if you want two pipes into your house, guess what: you're going to pay for two pipes because you've doubled how much you're costing the ISP. The backhaul is peanuts compared to getting those bits delivered to your doorstep. If one of the pipes you want is wireless, then you will pay for the load you are adding to the wireless distribution network and you'll pay for that shiny cable to the house, too. Nobody cares that all of the bits dump off at the same place, you want two helpings of the expensive part of the network.
You are not buying the internet, you are not purchasing bits, you are paying to have them delivered to you. It's the same as the newspaper. Read it for free at the coffee shop, or pay to have another copy printed and bicycled to your doorstep. Want a copy at home and at work? Yeah, you're paying twice. Who cares that it's the same news in each one? You're the one that wants it, and someone has to print it twice and deliver it to you two different ways.
would be nice to have a "child account" for, well, kids; one which covers communication with few selected numbers but works like prepaid for the rest (without limiting communication with few selected numbers once prepaid credit runs off)
So, something like T-mobile Family Allowances then?
It presupposes that you, as the parent have a line on the same plan.. but that's a pretty safe assumption, rite?
I am just failing to wrap my head about what is the complaint in TFA.
Why pay for the same utility twice?
Because... you're buying two things from them. Right? Your buying this thing, and then ohhhhhh you also want that thing. You can get one, you can get the other, they each have a price. You want both.
They each get you to the same internet, but they do it in different ways and have completely separate associated costs behind them. I live on a lake. I like to get groceries from shop on the far side of the lake. I can boat quickly across the lake and back when the weather is good. I can drive the long way around the lake when the weather is bad or I have other stops to make away from the lake. You know what? I have to purchase and maintain a car, and then I have to purchase and maintain a boat too if I really want to do both of these things at my discretion.
If I'm a cheapskate, I might only drive the car if I don't mind the long commute for every single grocery run. Am I going to die from the inconvenience? Or simply not have a shiny boat to show off to the neighbors?
Internet users can choose to do all of their surfing or telephoning from home, fast and tethered. Or they can choose to do all of their surfing and telephoning over a mobile device, slower and possibly capped, but untethered. (Hell, they're capping home internet these days too..) Neither of these choices will kill you, it just gives you less to brag about to your neighbors and requires that you act with discretion and patience instead of always having the best of both worlds every second of the day.
If they want speed at home and flexibility on the go, they'll have to pay to maintain both the wired and the wireless pipes. It doesn't matter if one company is maintaining each pipe for you, or you have a different company for each pipe. Why would that matter? If I buy both a boat and a car from the same dealership should I get the package deal for the same price as just the car? Should every Car come with a free Boat now, on the off chance you might want one?
A dealer will sell me the boat, sell me the car, and I'd be damned lucky just to get a volume discount for bringing the extra business.
That's why I don't get this article. "Why are you paying two times for internet? I want to pay One Time!" Well, I'm sorry to hear that, I think you lack imagination. *I* want to pay zero times. You know what scratch that, I want to pay negative one times. It would make a nice little side business if someone paid me for the privilege of piping me data. Help pay for my damned Boat, doncha know. ;P
Okay, I'm in LA. Show me a mobile operator that will let me just get an Internet connection for my smart phone.
Uh...... this has got to be a trick question, right? Like the carrier has to support YOUR smartphone, or you fear jailbreaking or you've already sliced it up with a chainsaw, or don't want out of a contract, or something?
If not, then this is just the first thing that I found. 8I
Streak is a 3G GSM 850/1900 device and AT&T is the only major US carrier that supports those frequency bands.
Yeah.... except that tons of Android 3G GSM 850/900/1800/1900 devices built by HTC (desire, dream, hero, magic, passion) are on the market right now, and I don't believe any of them are sold via AT&T. I know the passion is designed to work on AT&T's network, but they don't sell it.
So what carrier is it actually selling all of those? Damn, I can't remember their name, but I pay them $75/mo for unlimited minutes and unlimited data.
Bah who cares. Whoever they are, they must not be a major US carrier, hell they only cover 48 of the 50 states. It's better to stick with AT&T, since they are a "major" network! ;D
Wrong. Your power as a teacher ends at the school, unless you want to be held liable for all the actions of the children you've ever taught? Because that sword cuts both ways.
Power to discipline for certain acts germane to the teaching environment relevant to other students vs. the responsibility to discipline for all immoral behavior in perpetuity are quite different things.
In any event, "Your power as a teacher ends at the school" would make it impossible for any child to be marked down or receive detention for failing to do their homework.
I see this case as a very delicate and interesting one to try; both sides have some very good arguments behind them. One thing I think is important to keep in mind is that the school should have some latitude to apply it's punishments for actions which demonstrably effect the school, regardless of whether they were perpetrated on school grounds or using school resources.
If a child leaves school and waits just outside school grounds to bully other children, it may be within the School's right to bring a case against the child or their family legally, but this may also be too heavy handed to have the intended effect. It could potentially be expensive to the school, fruitless as the family is judgement-proof, and too much broohah for the child to properly learn that their behavior was wrong (instead, they might be encouraged by the uproar they cause among the adults. see: Trolling)
If the school instead decides to bring their own disciplinary measures to bear, suspending such a child from school because their actions disrupt school operations instead of because of the location or resources involved would level an appropriate class of discipline against the child with a greater likelihood of allowing the child to learn the error of their ways and to separate the errant child from those whom they are disrupting for a brief period, and without tying up the legal system.
Such action would not preclude the parents of one of the accosted children from leveling a lawsuit, so this is a totally different animal from "police departments under-reacting to serious internal matters" that other posters have brought up.
Let's put this another way: If schools cannot punish for actions outside school grounds, then how can they discipline children for truancy? I say that a mandatory-enrollment public school should have the latitude to distribute internal punishment to students who both use school resources against policy and who disrupt normal school operations in a demonstrable fashion even when not using school resources to do so.
Well now I'm not sure what your point really is. Since you dont really believe that child porn and Muhammad images are equally wrong, there is nothing really to answer here.
My point is that Muslims find Mohammed images to be blasphemous and believe they cause spiritual harm not fully represented in the image itself. To them it represents an externality, just like one more needless CO2 emission or one more mp3 downloader.
They see creating and pandering in these images as hazardous enough to justify extreme acts up to and including violence.
This is a sensibility the Western World shares in the form of underage pornography. We don't give a crap what kind of cartoons you draw of Jesus or Buddha or anyone else, but wave around a topless photo of a seventeen your old and suddenly the gloves are off.
If hillbillies lynch and murder the photographer us Westerners don't get too uptight about it, we see it as two things we don't like canceling one another out. Thus, your expecting anything different from the Muslim community is just stupid. Simply take a look at your own sensitivities and you'll grok why it counterproductive to trample theirs.
If you want to follow Tit-for-Tat in the (iterated) Prisoner's Dilemma that is our society, best of luck.
Yes, yes in fact, I do! Thank you for your blessing. :D
Despite the fact that the casinos are obviously making money (which means most of the people pulling handles on the machines are saps, and even willing dupes), enough people buy into it to make the casinos work.
I certainly don't gamble myself, but I am intrigued how many people (especially religious advocates) frame casinos as though dry wagering is the only thing that happens. I'll try an illustration.
I see two buildings across the street from one another. Building A people go in and spend on average $10. Sometimes they walk out empty handed, and on some rare occasions I've seen folk walk back out with $20 or $100. I crane my ear at the door and hear music, glasses raised in toast, laughing, it's a very curious building. Everyone in my congregation says the activities in that building are immoral, and they won't go in there.
Building B across the street looks the same to me (maybe I'm illiterate, I can't read signs ;D) people go in and spend an average of $10. Nobody comes out with more money whatsoever. No $20s, no $100s, very curious. I strain my ear to the door and hear music, glasses raised in toast, laughter. What is more curious is that folks from my congregation go in and out of this building without complaint.
As you can probably guess building A is a penny-ante casino, with live music, an open bar and dancing, while building B is just a bar or dance club. Albeit with more expensive food and drinks than the casino, and probably a cover charge.
So Casinos do more than trick mathematically inept suckers out of their savings, they provide entertainment value. Do you classify normal entertainment venues as evil? If not, then how is an entertainment venue where you may voluntarily experience the thrill of gambling money any more evil?
If you are a responsible individual, then games of chance are not evil. If you are a responsible individual, then beer is also not evil. I recognize a specific social quandry whereby people who cannot help it gamble themselves into the poorhouse or hurt their families. I do not however believe that either banning or shunning the gambling industry is the most effective way to help these people.
Our culture has a lot to learn about the psychology of addiction, and that is where we should be expending our resources. If moths destroy themselves entranced by a fire (and let's assume the moth's welfare is important to you), then the solution is neither to ban fire nor to load guilt upon the moth. The solution is to find out how to train the moth to overcome this compulsion. To master itself. And if you claim that this is impossible, that "the moth is inherently evil or self-destructive" or that "fire is demonic by nature", then I am afraid I could not accept your observations without some evidence to corroborate them.. and I'm fairly certain I have greater evidence that individuals (moths or humans) do the best in their ability to survive than you have that they do the best in their ability to perish. Most failings that I am aware of in human nature have to do with misunderstanding, ignorance, being easily fooled, and (since you seem so fond of game theory) being trapped by the Nash Equilibriums represented by local minima.
Like fish caught in a tidal pool or dogs with their leashes wrapped around a tree: sometimes it's not intuitive that you have to progress away from your goal temporarily in order to get the slack needed to reach it. This does not demonstrate self destructive behavior, simply beings who wish to better themselves being confounded by circumstance and lacking the wisdom or training to free themselves from certain snares.
Ignoring that your particular example is illegal
Un-ignoring that my example was illegal because that was a major part of the point, electronically distributing images of Mohamed is illegal in many Muslim countries including Pakistan.
As a child of Western culture, you feel comfortable with the infrastructure and laws we have in the Western World, as whatever makes you uncomfortable is criminalized. You probably don't study international laws very often, and may not realize that in many countries it is perfectly legal to drink and drive or that there are countries where organized gang-style vengeance is either tacitly allowed or legally codified (dating back to the "blood avengers" of the old testament)
So you'll litter the streets — or to legalize your tactical offensiveness, perhaps erect legal billboards — displaying Mohammed in a Muslim community. Doing this, you hide behind western law that does not ban this Muslim-specific "obscenity". But then you'll go home, safe in the knowledge that they cannot retaliate by putting Goatse on one of your billboards, because whatever offends Western sensibilities is banned by Western law. If they tried, they might be prosecuted, fined, or even see jailtime (not to mention the community uproar and scandal that would be caused) Make it underaged pornography instead of goatse, and then I don't think some vigilante violence from the westerners would be too unrealistic to see happening.
Reverse this scenario in a Muslim country and the anti-westerner obscenity would still be illegal, probably getting you fined and the billboard taken down, lots of sneering looks from the locals, but barely for any reason beyond their penchant for legislating tact. The Mohammed billboard OTOH would cause roughly the same controversy as child porn would here, vigilante violence and all.
The take away is that every culture either has or manufactures some image or symbol which they find profane and cannot tolerate having displayed. While I agree with you that the Muslims ought to grow beyond their stigmas (and even their religion), I'm just saying that the Western World had better take a close look in the mirror before judging other people on the particulars of what they find profane.
Alright, so you litter their streets with Mohammed cartoons and then they come to your town and litter your streets in poloroids of goatse or child porn. Now that you are on the receiving end of the vandalism, do you feel as though you have been desensitized or that you even wish to be? What about your parents down the street (or, maybe you live in their basement, I'm not judging ;D) how will they react to such images? Will there be an outlash? Lawsuits? Drama? Or will everyone feel silly about their psychological safeguards and laugh about it, debating which portly man is actually stretching his anus open the farthest?
I think we need to befriend the society and recognize that the right distribution of power is some kind of consensus which makes the society sufficiently strong, autonomous, mentally agile, while keeping all (or as many as possible) individuals reasonably happy.
If you are suggesting that individuals and large conglomerate organizations (companies, governments, cultures, etc) should learn to cooperate and recognize one another's sovereignty then I think I'll agree there. Neither is the individual master while the society is a meaningless tool, nor is the society the only important factor while the individual is a meaningless cog. Either viewpoint raises the survival instinct of whichever species is being maligned and ruins the whole project. Individual and Society should learn about and respect one another, and treat each other with dignity.
That being the case, individuals require uncensored access to publicly available empirical data in order to make healthful decisions for themselves. Some individuals subscribe to superstitions and taboos which make them seek to avoid certain kinds of data and stick their heads in the sand. This is their choice, and I look forward to my end of the gene pool winning against such strategies which I personally see as inferior.
Still, whenever a society sees fit to censor publicly available information based on moral objections (pornography, violence, blasphemy, images of Mohammed) or political objections (copyright, governmental criticism, swastikas) without the voluntary cooperation of those who get the wool over their eyes, this amounts to intelligence fraud against the citizen. In place of the real data that is available on any given subject, individuals get a picture of the world with elements Photoshopped out of it and replaced by fabrication.
The citizen can only assume the elided elements benefit them or their social contract, while the very nature of removing data is that the user cannot reliably know what the data is that was removed or why. Is the user in danger? If pornographic emails to a citizen get discreetly blackholed, does that mean the citizen is being stalked and will soon be attacked in the street? If a video is removed from Youtube citing copyright complaint from Warner Music, does that mean it was a pirate copy of a Warner song or simply a very popular track from an up and coming independent artist that someone at Warner hopes to gag?
In order to censor you must replace the censored data with something. You must replace the "ugly" or "scary" thing with an image of calm. It's like driving down the road with an intelligent windshield that can show anything as a head's up display, that chooses to censor out certain things that might distract the driver. If there is a pretty deer, the windshield covers the view of the deer with a repeating pattern from the side of the road so that the driver does not rubberneck. This spells doom for the driver when the elided deer darts in front of the car.
Alright, when it comes to human nature I think I can say I have more faith in arbitrarily chosen individuals and in loosely aggregated groups of them than you do.
For example, it seems as though the average American today is much less violent and more civilized than they were 2 generations ago for example. Our grandfathers expected fighting and physical violence as a means to "defend your honor" or to "show the schoolyard Bully which way was up". Nowadays physical altercations seem to be quite a bit less common. Most people, normal people, do just about anything to avoid a fight.
And yes, this is all from personal observation, but I wouldn't mind some hard evidence to corroborate in case someone has any. ;3)
I see our civilization growing and evolving for the better over time. I see individuals in our civilization slowly growing more trustful and adept at participating in our cultural infrastructure as each generation passes. I see old fears, superstitions, and limitations melting away one by one. This is a good thing.
And when I talk about beliefs I'm not talking only about religions: for example, the knee-jerk reactions many US citizens have against 'socialist' ideas, which no amount of hard data showing how much healthier welfare societies are will change.
I perceive that the heart of this post involves your having little hope for human nature based upon your observations regarding the bruhaha over nationalized health insurance met against grassroots American Republicans.
I think the important thing to take away from this political debate is that there exist American individuals who are more "conservative" and probably less world-wise than virtually anyone outside of the middle east. These citizens do not trust "leftist progressives" and cling to the status quo as one might cling to a floating bit of wood on a turbulent sea.
This behavior is neither by definition "antisocial" nor "ignorant", and support of a bill should never be confused with support of an ideal. The passing of any given bill does not guarantee we would suddenly benefit from every highlight of European health systems, and it certainly does not guarantee that we would avoid whatever drawbacks each of those systems might silently suffer from nor that the entire bill might turn out to be some kind of subtly crafted porkbelly.
It is vital that we keep in mind that having conservative political viewpoints and being culturally sheltered do not make a person stupid or evil. It might make them cling to decisions we do not understand, but the remedy to that as always is better communication. It is also wise that we perceive that the GOP has somehow learned to troll from 4chan, and we must not hold that against the vast majority of conservative individuals who need to be led away from the circus.
As more left-leaning, technology savvy people, I think we take for granted sometimes how much we trust certain information outlets or how much we have honed our ability to weed bullshit data out of good data. If a scientist says "ZOMG carbon be cookin us all!" then we invest half a million dollars putting solar cells on our quarter million dollar homes and trade in our SUV's for Toyota Priuses whith the cheeky Hal9000 add-on that intones "I can't do that, Dave" every time you try to depress the brake pedal.
At the end of the day, there is more than one way to collect and to interpret empirical data, and I for one find it vitally important that people can publicly debate different interpretations and collection methodologies until laypeople can understand what is happening and until we can really grok what their reservations are. It requires patience, diplomacy, and really divesting oneself of thinking you have a monopoly on truth or evidence, or thinking your models of the data are the only way to model data.
All in all, none of this conflict truly besmirches natural human fidelity for me. People look out for their best interests to the best of their abil
Not all religions are meant to be opiates. The idea of the gospel of Christ is that you and your interests come last, after the interests of God and love for your fellow man. There's a reason they hung Him on a tree :-p
I don't know about that. So long as "the interests of God", which are touted as coming first, can only be understood or interpreted by whomsoever is in power anyway, who would hang such a believer from a tree? They sound like the perfect "citizen" to me, putting the interests of The State^WLORD before their own so selflessly.
The substance of the entire discussion we are having so far is, how can one determine whether a religion is "meant" to be an opiate or not. The "Bill gates is paying the first 100 people to forward this message" authors never intended it to be a decades-long evolving chain message, but that is simply how it turned out. Now what it was originally meant to be is lost in what it actually is. So it is with Religion as well.
Perhaps you look into this mirror of Erised and see selflessness, and see that as a valuable lesson for your brethren to learn. However when they gaze into the mirror they don't see selflessness. They see manifest destiny, Aryan supremacy, and the opportunity to be literally "holier than thou" at church. They see the basis for the justification of ethnic cleansing, from it's rich tradition in the old testament through the crusades and into today's conflicts.
I argue that the benefit of your seeing nice things in this mirror is drowned out by millions of other people seeing a call to arms. Based on this analysis, I would prefer to either smash such a mirror or call to my brothers to resist investing authority into such a mirror until it is rendered into a novelty.
Why cannot one craft a new doctrine emphasizing the elements you read as important from this one? You could transcribe what you see as the "substance" of Christ's teachings without mixing in his claims to divine authority or his endorsement of the old testament. You could forge a fresh doctrine focused on selflessness and loving thy neighbor and longsuffering and courage when facing opposition. Perhaps a new doctrine that does not try to doom infidels or make any overtures that might be mistaken by others as devaluing other human life.
I would imagine we could not easily do this because then it would not have the unique history and superstitious vetting of a millennial manuscript which helped shape centuries of our language and cultural cannon. It's hard to pretend a manuscript has divine origins when it is not borne from ancient, superhuman legends.
That being the case, why can we not then choose to divest ourselves of this irrational and dangerous practice of "religion" and simply test and confirm our hypothesis that selflessness and brotherhood lead to more stable societies? Why can we not weigh and practice our own moral codes based on realworld data from today, and transcribe our stories and our findings as humble data points and anecdotes instead of forging mandates to frighten future generations into following?