Nevertheless, I will see one big argument in favor of the idiocracy: empirically, democracy works relatively well!
In a democracy people have the power to tacitly, and anonymously, support particular policies or agendas. In addition, they also have to power to quietly and anonymously reject those same policies in the outcomes displease them. Witness the United States electorate go from re-electing the rambunctious, unilateral God Warrior Bush to selecting the calm, conciliatory law professor Obama only four years later. The population made a complete U-turn and most of them didn't even have to save face.
Among other things, democracy allows societies to experiment. Sure, you get the will of the people, but you also get their will when they come down off the kind of nonsense the GP was talking about. With secret ballots, it's easier for the silent majority to take a moment to chew their pencil before casting their ballot, and not to have to face the ire and harassment of the minority boors when the outcome is decided.
This was in broad daylight with other adults present (and no one managed to get a license plate number)
That's because everyone was too busy enjoying the street drama and sucking everything in for post crisis gossip sessions. That snatcher probably did everyone a favour by giving five minutes of excitement to otherwise terminally boring lives.
Actually that is not true. Tibet has a strong historic relation with China and both sites are manipulating history in order to use it as a propaganda weapon. Tibet has been part of China throughout history but ties were not always clear. At times there was a lot of autonomy but at important events in history it acted like a part of China.
$ sed 's/Tibet/Ireland/g' 's/China/England/g'
Ireland always had a "historic" connection to England. At times a very close connection. But that does not mean that it was inherently a part of some grater "British Empire", or that it was necessarily better off in one.
Sure, there were some benefits from being subsumed into a larger empire. But there were also drawbacks, and they outweighed the pros significantly enough for the Irish people, or most of them at least, to want to leave. And while it's true that the fortunes of the Irish state have not always been great since gaining independence, you would be hard pressed to find a significant body of people who regard independence as a net negative.
Anyway, it would be a good idea to read what the Chinese think about it.
We already know what they think about it. The great empire, strong and united. All it's people grateful and proud to be a part of such a magnificent society, with freedom, prosperity and justice for all. And they'll think that even as they occupy, persecute, terrorise and loot all the peoples under their boot.
Empires are schizophrenic entities. Everyone living under them knows this. Though people in the prime nation will never awknowladge it. The English fancied themselves as ruling a great and happy British empire too, yet one by one every nation in it decided to leave. The same will happen for the Chinese empire too; that is, if those nations still exist by the time the Beijing is done with them.
The problem is that recent history demonstrates one thing: People will gladly accept free crap of virtually no journalistic value over cheap crap that at least has a much higher value.
If recent history demonstrates one clear, concrete fact, it's that the overwhelming majority of what is passed off as journalistic value is worth less than the paper it is printed one. No one should be paying for it.
The recent Iraq War only brought sharply into focus and issue which has been building for many years. Newspapers, TV, Radio, indeed all mainstream sources of news are heavily biased, grossly inaccurate and sloppily researched and presented. The news industry has been slowly bleeding itself to death by producing naught but tripe and nonsense over the last two decades or more.
Are you seriously suggesting that millions are turning away from newspapers because there are lower quality sources which happen to be free? I put it to you that it would in fact be quite a challenge to produce a lower quality product that the mainstream media without making something unreadable and/or unpalatable. No. The reality is there are far more push factors than price which are turning people off mainstream sources.
Lee brought hypertext, or more importantly hyperlinks, to the Internet. Or at least, he brought the form of hypertext we commonly use, http, to the internet.
Those little blue links may not seem like much of a big deal, but they are in fact one of the most essential things in our modern society; almost as important as the latin characters in which they are written.
Well, there is one thing to be said about US control of DNS. Any and all attempts to change the system will be met with years of suits, counter-suits and legal quagmires of the n^th degree before such changes can even be discussed.
That is of course, when it is Americans who are adversely affected by the decisions.
You know what's funny? Dogs know dogs. They can be big, small, tall, round, thin, with or without tails, brown, red, white, spotted, yellow, shaggy, short haired, long legged, squat, etc, etc, etc. There is a massive amount of variation on display within the dog family.
But despite it all, dogs know dogs. Upon seeing another, they'll wag their tails or bark for a rotweiller the same as they would for a terrier. They'll all roam about in their little packs, somehow instinctively knowing they they naturally should.
And yet, if I have a man with different skin colour, or even simply different clothing, other men will consider his life worth less than even the smallest dog.
I don't understand how people associate the word "fuck" so exclusively with sexual meaning. It seems to be a more prevalent attitude in America, affecting even supreme court justices.
"Even when used as an expletive, the F-word's power to insult and offend derives from its sexual meaning," Scalia said.
Such a conclusion is a pretty unfair typecasting of such a versatile swearword. While "fucking" or "to fuck" is often used to describe sexual intercourse, the word has a great many other meanings. "Fuck off" being the most classic and familiar example, used to gruffly tell someone to remove themselves, or to desist from an action, etc, but perhaps only to express disbelief or some such. "What the fuck" shows the ability to use the word in an undirected fashion. Alone, "Fuck" can be an effective emotional outlet. "Fuckers" turns the verb into a noun, that is, if it were ever a verb in the first place. Things like "fan-fucking-tastic" show just how versatile this unique utterance can be, as it transcends classical descriptions.
So, "Fuck" is not just a sexual swearword. Perhaps, lacking any other terms, American's take it to primarily refer to intercourse. In fact, other english speakers have many other words at their disposal for describing sexual activities. "Shag","ride", etc. Lack of such words in someones personal or cultural lexicon should not be used to imbue unwarranted meaning to a speakers words in some kind of reverse irony.
When Bono said "fucking brilliant" at the Golden Globes, it was clear to any reasonable person that he meant the word as an adjective to brilliant, not as a sexual reference. This is doubly clear to anyone from Ireland. Nevertheless the FCC claimed that the word had and "inherently has a sexual connotation", in any context. And worse, the US supreme court agreed with them.
As someone who has been told on countless occasions by friends, family and countrymen to "Fuck off", or some such like, I'm personally offended far more by the suggestion that all these people's comments had an underlying sexual meaning than I am by any of the expletives themselves. But once again I find my culture, my traditions, my airwaves, and my internets subjected to the interpretations and censorship of conservative bible bashers in rural America. It's fairly insulting.
So please accept my sincerity when I say that you, and all those that would corral honest swearwords into narrow definitions, respectfully, Can All Fuck off with Yourselves!
Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?
Apply that logic to blackmail.
It's legal to reveal something. It's legal for someone to pay you not to reveal something. But it's not legal to get someone to pay you to not reveal something. Still blackmail is illegal. It's illegal because most people would not want to be blackmailed, and think blackmailers should be punished.
Similar for prostitution. Most people do not want, or more importantly will not admit to wanting, anyone to offer or avail of prostitutes. All kinds of rationalisations are trotted out for this but ultimately it's probably because most people think very lowly of prostitutes and think they should be "punished".
You will invariably find that in any clampdown on prostitution it is only the prostitutes who are targeted by authorities. Never the clients.
I have a camera in my car at all times and I use it when I see something interesting, illegal or embarassing. That's legal. It's a public street. And the image isn't going to be stale either. So what's the difference?
The scale. The scale is the difference. Your post is exactly the kind of argument that I object to.
What you say is correct. It is legal for you to take a picture of my house, and many other house. It is legal for you post those pictures online. It is true that everyone else can legally do so to do so. Moreover, it is right and proper that it should be legal for them to do so.
But your reasoning is false. It is not right for Google to create something as grand and encompassing as Street View. You cannot inductively step from individuals snapping the odd photograph to a multinational corporation creating a comprehensive, unprecedented, worldwide, image database which is totally unaccountable to everyone it affects.
The laws of society are not a mathematical framework. The base case of one, or a few individuals doing this for a few house is fine. But the inductive step is flawed. This step assumes that if what your are doing is legal/fine/moral for k houses, then it must be legal/fine/moral for k+1 houses. It's only one extra house after all. This reasoning is inherently flawed, based as it is on a black and white, binary view of legality and rights.
The whole can be more than the sum of the parts. Sometimes, even if every single part of the whole is just and correct, the whole of the whole can be rotten to its core. It is not right for Google to do what it is doing, particularly in the way that it is doing it. Unilaterally, and without consultation or consent.
I am within my rights to take a picture on a public street and then upload it to the internet. I am within my rights to publish my views, on anything, freely on the internet. I am within my rights to worship or not worship freely as I please. I am free to cast my votes for representatives in the various assemblies that pass and enact the laws of the land. So is everyone else.
But rights do not, and should not scale upwards so easily as they scale across society.
Google's ultimate objective, and they're danm well able to achieve it, is to map, index and photograph the entire world and put it all online for everyone to gawk at. One company. Worldwide coverage. Of everyone, and everything. No recourse. No appeal. It's clear that in the process of inductively scaling up the rights and freedoms we all enjoy to such gargantuan proportions, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
I am free to own a newspaper or pamphlet and to use it to express my opinions. Must it then follow that I should be free, if I had the money for it, to own as many newspapers as I like in order to disseminate my opinions?
I am free to worship in any religion that I please and ask others to follow me. Does that mean that I should be free to amass as large a host of followers as I like and have my will of all of them?
I am free to vote for my political representatives. Does this mean that I should be free to vote on every single piece of legislation they propose, or to propose and vote on legislation I or others demand at a whim?
You can't inductively keep scaling rights up and up. Eventually you will end up with highly, undesirable, outcomes. Google Street View is just such an example. I don't want my house, garden, neighborhood and face plastered all over the web for everyone to gawk at. You don't want it. Nobody wants it.
Yet we are all to accept the slow inductive argument that at each camera click and image upload, Google is always well within its rights. Yet the final outcome, colossal in its arrogance is repugnant to almost everyone involved. The inductive argument is invalid. No one should be allowed to do what Google are doing. Least of all a private corporation.
Rights do not scale up. The bigger you are, the less rights you should be entitled to. And the scope of your rights should be similarly curtailed. Allowing unfettered freedoms to the richest, largest and most powerful will only lead to them becoming overmighty, and we will all suffer for it.
Jurassic Park remains the gold standard for CGI in films. It blended seamlessly with the animatronics and shot footage and was very, very convincing. Remember the scene with the T-rex in the rain? I didn't even think they had water effect algorithms in 1993. Never mind lighting.
That standard is still there today, but you won't notice it in films like Star Trek or Star Wars. You're more likely to notice it in films like The Dark Knight or the Lord of the Rings, or more to the point, you're more likely to not notice it. Such films do make extensive use of CG effects, but as part of a more comprehensive effects library, in the tradition of Jurassic Park, not as a single solution to all effects ills like the new Star Wars.
But not so handy when you're dealing with a fraudster.
Attempting to reason with a belligerent, absolutist, overbearing and unreasonable person is less than futile. It is counterproductive. You will never persuade them of anything, and they have no real intention of persuading you. Their objective, gained on your inevitable "climbdown" is to achieve a victory for their ideology in the eyes of the undecided and uneducated. If you try to reason with them, you will only give the oxygen they crave, and you'll do lasting damage to your own society.
It's far better to simply label unreasonable people as unreasonable and let their actions prove the point. Appeal to reason and reasonable people, instead of trying to calm the hysterical unreasonable and in the process risk becoming one yourself. Most people will sympathise with you more if you talk to them directly, rather than upon seeing you at the receiving end of a farcical tirade.
Case in point. Abortion. President Obama's calm appeal to reason and reconciliation at Notre Dame have done infinitely more to discredit radicals than any amount of futile debate with them could ever have accomplished.
Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal,[...] warns that consumers should "avoid breaking the law simply for revenge."
When people feel that injustice has been done, then justice must either be provided or else the will make their own.
Saying that vigilantism is always wrong or "against the law" is no use if no other alternative is provided to those with legitimate grievance. Unfortunately our legal systems have evolved, and continue to evolve, into artifices that deny their services to the ordinary person. The courts are a closed club, open only to those with inordinate amounts of money and influence.
Faced with this growing reality, it shouldn't be surprising when people take matters into their own hands. The sad fact is that these web vigilantes didn't another more acceptable legal route because they knew full well how futile it would be. Little people often have to make their own justice nowadays.
"The Internet is evolving, and is allowing for groups of people to do their own justice socially," says Mr. Silveira.
They are naive enough to believe that only "bad" things will be censored.
Very few people are that naive. Most people, most people are completely in favour of censorship becauseit would stop videos like this one from being disseminated.
The sad reality is that the majority of humans on planet earth are perfectly happy to live under a dictatorship of some kind. They support any measure that will make society more closely resemble a police state or one party state. It is not the case that people do not understand the consequences of supporting government surveillance, censorship, draconianism, etc. They understand perfectly well, and that's the reason they support it.
Some people want to live in a free society with rights for all. But sadly most people want to live in rigid , closed and unfree society with rights only for the right people, and are perfectly contented when they find themselves in one.
The internet genie is being put back in the bottle. Ironically, the main effect of this video will likely be to accelerate this process across the globe, particularly in Latin America.
I've read many comments over the years about the old Bell Labs and how a huge amount of pioneering research came out of them over the course of their existance, i.e. before they got axed.
It would seem that Google Labs is performing somewhat the same function, albeit more oriented towards software rather than physical research.
Calculations! Huh! In my day, we solved Thermodynamic Navier-Stokes equations analytically or we didn't solve 'em at all. Yes sir, if you wanted something done right you had to solve it by hand! None of these razzle dazzle calumalators. We derived systems of diffeo-integral equations from first principles, solved them using power series with Bessel's Functions and we liked it!
Boundary conditions!? Hah! We used elliptic integrals and n^th order polynomials to generate our boundaries. None of your hoi polloi "splines" and "fractals". What good's a function that's not 10^th order continuous, I ask yah?! Bunch of whippersnappers! Let's see how your spline deals with my 4^th order constraint! Hah!
Floating point?! What luxury! In those times, if you wanted some numerical results, well sir, you had to generate an asymptotic series out to fifteen terms, and calculate your answer using surds and continued fractions, uphill both ways. In the snow. Course if you were lucky, you might get your 5 minute turn with the shared slide rule. That is, if it wasn't rusted up from the damp and cold. Great days.
"Billions upon billions of variables". You youngsters and your numerical models. Nothing gained that couldn't have been got from one afternoon with a fluid dynamics problem set. No wonder the world's gettin' warmer with all the HOT AIR comin' out you an all your bippity-boppity, hankly-pankly, good for nothin' electromonic computers!!
Slashdot Mirror
In a democracy people have the power to tacitly, and anonymously, support particular policies or agendas. In addition, they also have to power to quietly and anonymously reject those same policies in the outcomes displease them. Witness the United States electorate go from re-electing the rambunctious, unilateral God Warrior Bush to selecting the calm, conciliatory law professor Obama only four years later. The population made a complete U-turn and most of them didn't even have to save face.
Among other things, democracy allows societies to experiment. Sure, you get the will of the people, but you also get their will when they come down off the kind of nonsense the GP was talking about. With secret ballots, it's easier for the silent majority to take a moment to chew their pencil before casting their ballot, and not to have to face the ire and harassment of the minority boors when the outcome is decided.
It's better than the alternative.
That's because everyone was too busy enjoying the street drama and sucking everything in for post crisis gossip sessions. That snatcher probably did everyone a favour by giving five minutes of excitement to otherwise terminally boring lives.
$ sed 's/Tibet/Ireland/g' 's/China/England/g'
Ireland always had a "historic" connection to England. At times a very close connection. But that does not mean that it was inherently a part of some grater "British Empire", or that it was necessarily better off in one.
Sure, there were some benefits from being subsumed into a larger empire. But there were also drawbacks, and they outweighed the pros significantly enough for the Irish people, or most of them at least, to want to leave. And while it's true that the fortunes of the Irish state have not always been great since gaining independence, you would be hard pressed to find a significant body of people who regard independence as a net negative.
We already know what they think about it. The great empire, strong and united. All it's people grateful and proud to be a part of such a magnificent society, with freedom, prosperity and justice for all. And they'll think that even as they occupy, persecute, terrorise and loot all the peoples under their boot.
Empires are schizophrenic entities. Everyone living under them knows this. Though people in the prime nation will never awknowladge it. The English fancied themselves as ruling a great and happy British empire too, yet one by one every nation in it decided to leave. The same will happen for the Chinese empire too; that is, if those nations still exist by the time the Beijing is done with them.
If recent history demonstrates one clear, concrete fact, it's that the overwhelming majority of what is passed off as journalistic value is worth less than the paper it is printed one. No one should be paying for it.
The recent Iraq War only brought sharply into focus and issue which has been building for many years. Newspapers, TV, Radio, indeed all mainstream sources of news are heavily biased, grossly inaccurate and sloppily researched and presented. The news industry has been slowly bleeding itself to death by producing naught but tripe and nonsense over the last two decades or more.
Are you seriously suggesting that millions are turning away from newspapers because there are lower quality sources which happen to be free? I put it to you that it would in fact be quite a challenge to produce a lower quality product that the mainstream media without making something unreadable and/or unpalatable. No. The reality is there are far more push factors than price which are turning people off mainstream sources.
Beware of viruses when making connections to untrusted hosts!
Lee brought hypertext, or more importantly hyperlinks, to the Internet. Or at least, he brought the form of hypertext we commonly use, http, to the internet.
Those little blue links may not seem like much of a big deal, but they are in fact one of the most essential things in our modern society; almost as important as the latin characters in which they are written.
And let's not forget the fact that those who do won't be able to add most encrypted pages on the web to their jetpack mashups.
Well, there is one thing to be said about US control of DNS. Any and all attempts to change the system will be met with years of suits, counter-suits and legal quagmires of the n^th degree before such changes can even be discussed.
That is of course, when it is Americans who are adversely affected by the decisions.
You know what's funny? Dogs know dogs. They can be big, small, tall, round, thin, with or without tails, brown, red, white, spotted, yellow, shaggy, short haired, long legged, squat, etc, etc, etc. There is a massive amount of variation on display within the dog family.
But despite it all, dogs know dogs. Upon seeing another, they'll wag their tails or bark for a rotweiller the same as they would for a terrier. They'll all roam about in their little packs, somehow instinctively knowing they they naturally should.
And yet, if I have a man with different skin colour, or even simply different clothing, other men will consider his life worth less than even the smallest dog.
Makes you think.
I don't understand how people associate the word "fuck" so exclusively with sexual meaning. It seems to be a more prevalent attitude in America, affecting even supreme court justices.
Such a conclusion is a pretty unfair typecasting of such a versatile swearword. While "fucking" or "to fuck" is often used to describe sexual intercourse, the word has a great many other meanings. "Fuck off" being the most classic and familiar example, used to gruffly tell someone to remove themselves, or to desist from an action, etc, but perhaps only to express disbelief or some such. "What the fuck" shows the ability to use the word in an undirected fashion. Alone, "Fuck" can be an effective emotional outlet. "Fuckers" turns the verb into a noun, that is, if it were ever a verb in the first place. Things like "fan-fucking-tastic" show just how versatile this unique utterance can be, as it transcends classical descriptions.
So, "Fuck" is not just a sexual swearword. Perhaps, lacking any other terms, American's take it to primarily refer to intercourse. In fact, other english speakers have many other words at their disposal for describing sexual activities. "Shag","ride", etc. Lack of such words in someones personal or cultural lexicon should not be used to imbue unwarranted meaning to a speakers words in some kind of reverse irony.
When Bono said "fucking brilliant" at the Golden Globes, it was clear to any reasonable person that he meant the word as an adjective to brilliant, not as a sexual reference. This is doubly clear to anyone from Ireland. Nevertheless the FCC claimed that the word had and "inherently has a sexual connotation", in any context. And worse, the US supreme court agreed with them.
As someone who has been told on countless occasions by friends, family and countrymen to "Fuck off", or some such like, I'm personally offended far more by the suggestion that all these people's comments had an underlying sexual meaning than I am by any of the expletives themselves. But once again I find my culture, my traditions, my airwaves, and my internets subjected to the interpretations and censorship of conservative bible bashers in rural America. It's fairly insulting.
So please accept my sincerity when I say that you, and all those that would corral honest swearwords into narrow definitions, respectfully, Can All Fuck off with Yourselves!
Case in point; Geeks and (l)users.
That is until they are caught breaking a law, whereupon their opinions of lawyers undergo a considerable revision.
You've turned him to a life of crime!!
"When you know Slack', you know Linux."
Apply that logic to blackmail.
It's legal to reveal something. It's legal for someone to pay you not to reveal something. But it's not legal to get someone to pay you to not reveal something. Still blackmail is illegal. It's illegal because most people would not want to be blackmailed, and think blackmailers should be punished.
Similar for prostitution. Most people do not want, or more importantly will not admit to wanting, anyone to offer or avail of prostitutes. All kinds of rationalisations are trotted out for this but ultimately it's probably because most people think very lowly of prostitutes and think they should be "punished".
You will invariably find that in any clampdown on prostitution it is only the prostitutes who are targeted by authorities. Never the clients.
The scale. The scale is the difference. Your post is exactly the kind of argument that I object to.
What you say is correct. It is legal for you to take a picture of my house, and many other house. It is legal for you post those pictures online. It is true that everyone else can legally do so to do so. Moreover, it is right and proper that it should be legal for them to do so.
But your reasoning is false. It is not right for Google to create something as grand and encompassing as Street View. You cannot inductively step from individuals snapping the odd photograph to a multinational corporation creating a comprehensive, unprecedented, worldwide, image database which is totally unaccountable to everyone it affects.
The laws of society are not a mathematical framework. The base case of one, or a few individuals doing this for a few house is fine. But the inductive step is flawed. This step assumes that if what your are doing is legal/fine/moral for k houses, then it must be legal/fine/moral for k+1 houses. It's only one extra house after all. This reasoning is inherently flawed, based as it is on a black and white, binary view of legality and rights.
The whole can be more than the sum of the parts. Sometimes, even if every single part of the whole is just and correct, the whole of the whole can be rotten to its core. It is not right for Google to do what it is doing, particularly in the way that it is doing it. Unilaterally, and without consultation or consent.
I am within my rights to take a picture on a public street and then upload it to the internet. I am within my rights to publish my views, on anything, freely on the internet. I am within my rights to worship or not worship freely as I please. I am free to cast my votes for representatives in the various assemblies that pass and enact the laws of the land. So is everyone else.
But rights do not, and should not scale upwards so easily as they scale across society.
Google's ultimate objective, and they're danm well able to achieve it, is to map, index and photograph the entire world and put it all online for everyone to gawk at. One company. Worldwide coverage. Of everyone, and everything. No recourse. No appeal. It's clear that in the process of inductively scaling up the rights and freedoms we all enjoy to such gargantuan proportions, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
I am free to own a newspaper or pamphlet and to use it to express my opinions. Must it then follow that I should be free, if I had the money for it, to own as many newspapers as I like in order to disseminate my opinions?
I am free to worship in any religion that I please and ask others to follow me. Does that mean that I should be free to amass as large a host of followers as I like and have my will of all of them?
I am free to vote for my political representatives. Does this mean that I should be free to vote on every single piece of legislation they propose, or to propose and vote on legislation I or others demand at a whim?
You can't inductively keep scaling rights up and up. Eventually you will end up with highly, undesirable, outcomes. Google Street View is just such an example. I don't want my house, garden, neighborhood and face plastered all over the web for everyone to gawk at. You don't want it. Nobody wants it.
Yet we are all to accept the slow inductive argument that at each camera click and image upload, Google is always well within its rights. Yet the final outcome, colossal in its arrogance is repugnant to almost everyone involved. The inductive argument is invalid. No one should be allowed to do what Google are doing. Least of all a private corporation.
Rights do not scale up. The bigger you are, the less rights you should be entitled to. And the scope of your rights should be similarly curtailed. Allowing unfettered freedoms to the richest, largest and most powerful will only lead to them becoming overmighty, and we will all suffer for it.
Jurassic Park remains the gold standard for CGI in films. It blended seamlessly with the animatronics and shot footage and was very, very convincing. Remember the scene with the T-rex in the rain? I didn't even think they had water effect algorithms in 1993. Never mind lighting.
That standard is still there today, but you won't notice it in films like Star Trek or Star Wars. You're more likely to notice it in films like The Dark Knight or the Lord of the Rings, or more to the point, you're more likely to not notice it. Such films do make extensive use of CG effects, but as part of a more comprehensive effects library, in the tradition of Jurassic Park, not as a single solution to all effects ills like the new Star Wars.
But not so handy when you're dealing with a fraudster.
Attempting to reason with a belligerent, absolutist, overbearing and unreasonable person is less than futile. It is counterproductive. You will never persuade them of anything, and they have no real intention of persuading you. Their objective, gained on your inevitable "climbdown" is to achieve a victory for their ideology in the eyes of the undecided and uneducated. If you try to reason with them, you will only give the oxygen they crave, and you'll do lasting damage to your own society.
It's far better to simply label unreasonable people as unreasonable and let their actions prove the point. Appeal to reason and reasonable people, instead of trying to calm the hysterical unreasonable and in the process risk becoming one yourself. Most people will sympathise with you more if you talk to them directly, rather than upon seeing you at the receiving end of a farcical tirade.
Case in point. Abortion. President Obama's calm appeal to reason and reconciliation at Notre Dame have done infinitely more to discredit radicals than any amount of futile debate with them could ever have accomplished.
And YOU dare call us cheap!
(0_0);
When people feel that injustice has been done, then justice must either be provided or else the will make their own.
Saying that vigilantism is always wrong or "against the law" is no use if no other alternative is provided to those with legitimate grievance. Unfortunately our legal systems have evolved, and continue to evolve, into artifices that deny their services to the ordinary person. The courts are a closed club, open only to those with inordinate amounts of money and influence.
Faced with this growing reality, it shouldn't be surprising when people take matters into their own hands. The sad fact is that these web vigilantes didn't another more acceptable legal route because they knew full well how futile it would be. Little people often have to make their own justice nowadays.
And now they have the means to do it.
Very few people are that naive. Most people, most people are completely in favour of censorship because it would stop videos like this one from being disseminated.
The sad reality is that the majority of humans on planet earth are perfectly happy to live under a dictatorship of some kind. They support any measure that will make society more closely resemble a police state or one party state. It is not the case that people do not understand the consequences of supporting government surveillance, censorship, draconianism, etc. They understand perfectly well, and that's the reason they support it.
Some people want to live in a free society with rights for all. But sadly most people want to live in rigid , closed and unfree society with rights only for the right people, and are perfectly contented when they find themselves in one.
The internet genie is being put back in the bottle. Ironically, the main effect of this video will likely be to accelerate this process across the globe, particularly in Latin America.
I've read many comments over the years about the old Bell Labs and how a huge amount of pioneering research came out of them over the course of their existance, i.e. before they got axed.
It would seem that Google Labs is performing somewhat the same function, albeit more oriented towards software rather than physical research.
Calculations! Huh! In my day, we solved Thermodynamic Navier-Stokes equations analytically or we didn't solve 'em at all. Yes sir, if you wanted something done right you had to solve it by hand! None of these razzle dazzle calumalators. We derived systems of diffeo-integral equations from first principles, solved them using power series with Bessel's Functions and we liked it!
Boundary conditions!? Hah! We used elliptic integrals and n^th order polynomials to generate our boundaries. None of your hoi polloi "splines" and "fractals". What good's a function that's not 10^th order continuous, I ask yah?! Bunch of whippersnappers! Let's see how your spline deals with my 4^th order constraint! Hah!
Floating point?! What luxury! In those times, if you wanted some numerical results, well sir, you had to generate an asymptotic series out to fifteen terms, and calculate your answer using surds and continued fractions, uphill both ways. In the snow. Course if you were lucky, you might get your 5 minute turn with the shared slide rule. That is, if it wasn't rusted up from the damp and cold. Great days.
"Billions upon billions of variables". You youngsters and your numerical models. Nothing gained that couldn't have been got from one afternoon with a fluid dynamics problem set. No wonder the world's gettin' warmer with all the HOT AIR comin' out you an all your bippity-boppity, hankly-pankly, good for nothin' electromonic computers !!