I am curious. In what way does the GPL shove anything down anyone's throat? Who is forcing anyone to use it?
If I don't like the terms of, let's say, a car rental then I am free to decide not to rent a car from that company. If I don't like a TV show, I am free to stop watching it. Likewise, if I have a problem with the terms under which code is made available to me, I am free to decide not to use that code. Why isn't that good enough for you?
I would like a real answer to this because it really looks like you have an unreasonable entitlement mentality and are trying to be both a beggar and a chooser. Not only do you want someone else to write code that you can use with no need to pay that person for their efforts, you also want to complain if they don't give it to you in the exact way that you prefer. Do you have any idea how arrogant and selfish that is?
I am a longtime user of Linux and GPL software. I have no complaints. What I have is a strong sense of gratitude. The use of GPL software has greatly benefitted me for years and has enhanced my life in many ways. The people who provide all of that do so without demanding payment. They allow me to make as many copies of their software as I like and distribute it to anyone I want with no concept of "piracy". They let me have the source code and they tell me I can do anything I want with it so long as I don't prevent the next person from enjoying the same privilege, and even that last part would only apply if I choose to distribute my modifications.
Do you think I have any reason to complain? If I have a legitimate complaint, what would be my damages? How have I been harmed by this? The answer: I haven't been harmed by this in the slightest, there is no legitimate complaint, and it's truly amazing that so many people would deliberately allow me to benefit from the fruits of their labors. The only correct response to this is gratitude and respect.
If the GPL crowd wanted to join hands with the Open Source Community they would have made their license compatible with the Mit License which is free as in free and does not try to shove it down our throats like the brain washed/dead cult called GPL.
This is a classic troll that gets rehashed from time to time. That's because those who are willing to value what the GPL does (i.e. the overwhelming majority of all Open Source developers and users) already do so. Those who do not like the GPL have a different set of needs and values and cannot be convinced unless those needs and values change. Of course you knew that, and were counting on the irreconcilability of the positions to troll the more reactive types.
I for one appreciate what the GPL does. Really the only people who would have a solid reason to dislike the GPL are those with a strong desire to use someone else's work without ever having to contribute anything in return. I don't have that desire and I reject the entitlement mentality that would cause it. Those developers who want you to be able to do that with their hard work can always use a BSD-style license. Those who don't want you to be able to do that never owed you anything in the first place and their wishes should be respected.
I do not believe it's a concidence that Open Source as a movement was never anything the average user might have heard of until the GPL. Yes, the BSD license and those like it have been around for much longer, but for a long time they were something with which only geeks would be familiar. Nor do I think it's a coincidence that the most famous and widely-used Open Source software, such as Firefox, Linux, etc. are all GPL licensed.
I don't know right now exactly what tech Microsoft has patented, but it's not in their best interest right now to destroy Mono.
Yeah, not right now. It's truly best for them to wait until their competitor is using it, then strike out with the patents.;)
That's amusing that this is modded down to Flamebait. The truth isn't flamebait even if you are unable to handle it like a mature adult.
Judging from all of the shillish posts in this discussion and related previous discussions, it's reasonable to wonder if these mods which are idiotic, absurd, yet serve the purpose of shills are coming from various sockpuppet accounts. If so, the shills are not nearly as smooth and unnoticable as they'd like to think. In fact they're amazingly amatuerish and their actions reflect a certain desperation to please their masters.
Give it up, already. Few corporations have so soundly earned a bad reputation as Microsoft has done. Hiring a bunch of cowardly liars who treat us like we're stupid only makes them look worse.
And MS-PL is not compatible with the GPL. If Microsoft really wanted to join hands with the Open Source community they wouldn't have deliberately created a license that is incompatible with the way the vast, vast majority of Open Source projects are licensed. I ignore their words. When I listen to their actions, the message is that they want to make a token gesture of openness that has severely limited practical use while discouraging community forks, all of which serves to make it possible for them to regain complete control if they later change their mind.
It's amazing how effective token gestures like this are, how impressed by them people can be. Really it's business as usual: if you want to actually benefit from the source they have provided you either do it Microsoft's way or you don't get to do it at all. Source that an Open Source developer can't use in their existing GPL projects may as well be closed source. Nowhere in here do you find any sort of community spirit, a cherishing of "free as in speech", an appreciation of compatibility, or a willingness to deal with the many Open Source developers as equals. It's either the Microsoft Way or the highway and that's why.Net is something I can easily live without, however convenient it may be.
I don't know right now exactly what tech Microsoft has patented, but it's not in their best interest right now to destroy Mono.
No, they usually wait until it becomes much more widespread and ubiquitous before they do that. They're too smart to stop playing nice this early on. A wolf in sheep's clothing doesn't reveal his fangs until he's well within the flock of sheep. They use underhanded techniques like this again and again because they work, because so many fools still don't see it coming after so many examples. Anyone who doesn't understand that this is the way Microsoft operates is either ignorant about their history and the way it repeats itself, a marketer/shill, or just plain naive.
The mutual trade and prosperity was based on the now obviously false notion that wealth trickles down.
That's how it was sold to the public. I don't think for a moment that the ones promoting it actually believe that.
Wealth might trickle down if economic power were decentralized. There was a time in the USA when most people had a trade of some kind and acted as independent proprietors, when most people owned their own family business and were not employees of gigantic corporations. The problem is that the major international corporations represent massive self-perpetuating concentrations of wealth and economic power. Not only do they have no desire to let that wealth become less concentrated, they also have the political and economic clout to stack the deck in their favor.
Corporate profits (and high income bracket profits) are at an all time high across the vast majority of industries, yet average worker salaries have been stagnant for over a decade.
Worker productivity has tripled in the last few decades but salaries have not. That tends to erode the idea of a free worker who sells labor on the open market and receives in return something resembling the value of that labor. It greatly adds to the credibility of the wage slave.
Then inflation works to prevent average workers from being more economically mobile. It's difficult to live within your means and save money and build wealth over time in order to move upwards when your savings are constantly being devalued. It is the largest hidden tax Americans pay. Meanwhile the truly wealthy tend to have their wealth in the form of investments in hard assets that retain value when currency inflates.
So that prosperity that was promised certainly did work out for some.
It worked out for those who provided the marketing, media presence, political support, and campaign financing to make it happen. The rest of us are just spectators who are allowed to feel that we have a choice in the matter. The truth is we have no choice because anyone who can get their name on a federal ballot is going to be friendly to those interests which got him there.
No, we live in a society that THINKS they have to pre-prepare texts and emails to warn students of this. To be honest considering the time it takes to fire off an email saying "get the hell away from here" having prepared messages for this is kinda dumb in my not so humble opinion.
I wonder what the odds are in fact of getting shot at school...
But schools are gun-free zones. No murderer would ever carry a gun into a gun-free zone and start shooting! It's not allowed.
Oversimplification. Those metal parts do not self-reproduce, nor is a metal watch a useful evolutionary configuration for a set of metal parts if they could. I doubt you will find any scientific disagreement with the origin of life as being anything other than a self-sustaining chemical reaction arising naturally from a potent stew of chemicals in a turbulent environment.
In hindsight I admit that the tone you have used is better and more appropriate than the one I previously used that probably sounded needlessly belligerent. I realized that when going back and reading it over. I appreciate the way you responded and for what it's worth, it speaks well of you.
Regarding the quote above, what you said there reminds me of another question I find absolutely fascinating. This is not a scientific question. If life (and by extension, consciousness) is just a self-sustaining chemical reaction, could the chemicals/elements/molecules themselves have some kind of life? As in, we as highly complex conscious beings may be just a particularly organized/specialized/localized expression of a "life force" inherent in all matter and energy. This is sort of like pantheism with potential overtones of the cosmic oneness many Eastern philosophies and religions expound.
The classic alternative to this form of pantheism is the idea that our bodies made of matter and energy are just vehicles for the temporary use of some sort of soul or spirit that is our actual being and the source of consciousness, the viewer of the mental theater of Decartes. In that case matter would be "dead" and inert other than the heat and other physical forms of energy it exchanges with its environment. But that of course would mean that the self-sustaining chemical reaction is only part of the equation.
wait what? and decades of dirt cheap chinese stuff didn't improve your standards of living?
It improved my access to stuff, most of which I don't really need. That's nice, I suppose. A short-term benefit that's not too disagreeable.
It also places my country at an unsustainable trade deficit. That's a long-term downside that keeps getting worse. It gives China enough power over the USA that China could bankrupt the USA and bring the country to its knees if it wanted to do it badly enough. Now I know this term gets thrown around, but that is what would legitimately be called a national security issue.
I bet you think that world hegemony, protectionism, exporting inflation abroad and printing dollars 24/7 at 0 cost to pay for oil and real goods from China is so much better than good ol' competition, right?
Do you read different history books than I do? The more globalism in which the USA engages, the higher its rate of inflation has been. "Printing dollars 24/7 at 0 cost to pay for" anything is precisely what I consider a terribly stupid practice. It's another thing that's cool right now and looks like an easy ticket to cheap stuff, but long-term it really fucks up a nation. It's not a sustainable lifestyle for a country.
Besides, what I want isn't total protectionism and hegemony. See how I never said that? That was your clue. Having established that...
What I want is for nations to be as self-sufficient as is practical. When a relatively self-sufficient nation trades with another relatively self-sufficient nation, without massive net trade deficits, they deal as equals and can truly benefit each other. The arrangement we have right now isn't good for the USA because it's part of why the USA is heading towards economic collapse. It isn't good for China either for one of their biggest trading partners to head towards economic collapse. It's unsustainable for both and no amount of "yeah well you think America is better than everybody else, dontcha?!" spite is going to change that.
American standard of living and levels of consumption can't be supported by the current productivity of American economy, which replaced productive, wealth increasing sectors in its GDP with fluff (intellectual bullshit, financial instruments and other virtual shit useful only to inflate GDP) - standard of living has to come down.
And you think rampant consumerism largely fueled by the sudden influx of cheap imported goods had nothing to do with that, right? The reason we have replaced productive, wealth-producing sectors with fluff (and you're right about that) is that we'd rather save a few bucks on cheap imported goods and destroy our domestic production. That again is largely due to rampant consumerism.
Americans were once thrifty and frugal and hand-me-downs were common. Repairing clothes and goods instead of throwing them away and replacing them was once common. The elderly people alive today can remember this. It was not so long ago. Now it's consume, consume, consume more and more things, gotta keep up with the Jones's because that's everything, and a little cheaper is "better" even if it's a hell of a lot more expensive in the long run because it destroys our domestic industries. This is madness.
Of course economic madness will lower your standard of living. On the personal level, I bet gambling all your money away will also lead to a lower standard of living for yourself. This isn't some kind of surprising revelation.
Once the global equilibrium accounting for vast asian markets and plentiful workforce is found, it will be the way up for everyone from then on.
Ah, that's been the promise of globalism for about 20 or 30 years now. "Soon this will all be worth it," they say. Maybe you don't know the history of this movement but that has been one of i
The smart ones will say, "Yes, but the Miller Experiments never produced anything but racemates, which while interesting makes it difficult to show how an organized process could arise from something like this."
To which most smart scientists will probably grin and keep looking for more answers, since that's what new questions represent...
The problem is, too many people don't want new questions and the great possibilities they represent. They want easy answers so they can bask in the feeling of finally understanding it all. This is a deep drive, not easily uprooted. All sorts of arrogance masquerades as scientific explanation because of it. What so many really seem to want to avoid is saying "these are profoundly deep questions with no final answers, and the huge knowledge we have amassed over centuries of pursuring the scientific method are only a partial and not terribly satisfying answer."
All computers can REALLY do is shift and add. Everything you see a computer do is built on combinations of those two actions. With your computer, you are seeing several orders of magnitude of complexity of these two basic actions.
Just because something winds up becoming complex does not make it beyond comprehension. You might see it that way, but I don't in the slightest.
Sure, computers just shift and add. But the transistors that do the shifting and adding were not the products of random chance. As computers were deliberately designed by intelligent humans, this is one of the worst analogies you could use if your goal was to put forth a naturalistic no-creator-required explanation of life on Earth.
And in case you haven't been following, DNA is mostly useless and obsolete information left over from countless iterations of building and rebuilding and additions of combinations. If there was a creator behind DNA, it would likely have a great deal less "extra crap and leftovers." Where you see amazing complexity, I see a lot of inefficiencies and nonsense.
If I am misunderstanding you, please correct me. Having said that, it sounds like you refer to the great deal of "junk DNA" in a given organism's genome. The problem I have with that is that "junk DNA" is a way of saying "we don't yet know what it's for". It doesn't contain the information needed to build specific proteins and that's about all we can say for certain about it.
Creators don't set about creating people where some are born with defects like dwarfism, homosexuality (yes, I said it, it's a defect, but a biological one, not a mental one), albinoism and more. These are among the huge lists of things that frequently go wrong with animals and humans in particular. You can see all those "mistakes" and still believe your creator is perfect? Even a crappy creator would likely have created something a bit better than us.
Here is where things get interesting. This question boils down to whether a creator would want a bunch of robots who must carry out its design in perfect lock-step, never having any kind of flaw either physical or behavioral, or whether such a creator would want some kind of free will, a variable if you like. If life in the Universe is all about the most diverse exploration possible of what life is, what forms it can take, and what it can overcome, then what we call "defects" would be an essential component. The only part that could not be compromised is that the "defects" do not become so great in number as to prevent the system as a whole from continuing and perpetuating its existence. So far that has not happened, and as evidence I note that you and I are here today to talk about this.
A scientist believes the theory with the most scientific support, while still experimenting. It is not scientific or rational to look at a theory, see it is not 100% explained, and thus decide to believe an alternate hypothesis with no scientific support.
What did you suppose you were telling me there that wasn't already obvious?
Of course it's "just a theory". But a theory about life is suddenly a lot more practical when its application can actually create life the same way "nature" has done. That was my only point. You either grasp the implications of it or you reiterate the obvious -- your choice.
I take it you failed thermodynamics? The second law applies to closed systems and overall entropy, not localized entropy within a system. We can't even definitively define the universe as a closed system and you think you can assess the overall entropy in the system?
True, I cannot define the entire Universe. Yet if I take a handful of metal parts and shake them up and toss them in the air, I don't expect that a fully-assembled, fully-functional watch is going to land in my lap. You need something like that to get life from non-life. You can excuse and dismiss all you like, but there's something special about life. Most evolutionists try to get around this by saying that in timescales of hundreds of billions of years or longer, eventually even extremely improbable things will eventually happen. That's their particular explanation -- they just throw enough time at the problem until the numbers look right. But unlike you, they at least acknowledge the problem.
Everything is very mysterious until you investigate. The scientific method is the best tool we have for such investigation. As a scientist I disagree with your characterization. By the same token you could claim gravity is very mysterious and thereby imply it is not really be happening. The only qualitative difference is that people understand the theory of gravity better than the theory of abiogenesis.
Really? If gravity is so ordinary and non-mysterious, tell me precisely what it is then. Tell me what causes it. Not how it behaves, but what its actual origin is. Can't do that? Finding that this is a controversial subject with several competing explanations? Maybe you can next tell me precisely what electricity actually is, what the "charge" of charged particles actually comes from and not merely how it behaves now that it's here. Perhaps you see my point. It is the height of arrogance to think we truly understand something merely because it happens all the time.
The only qualitative difference is that there is no qualitative difference and you have confused memorization of formulae for an actual understanding of the world around us. So you might say, gravity is caused by gravitons? Great. Now show me a laboratory experiment where we can observe actual gravitons. So you might say, mass is caused by the Higgs Boson? Great, so how much progress have we made in observing and identifying the Higgs Boson? Not so much? Again, maybe you get my point. Unless you don't want to. Then nothing I say would ever convince you.
Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.
Earth is not a closed system - it receives constant input of energy from the Sun. Therefore there is no contradiction in formation of more highly organized chemicals (and eventually life), so long as the process is driven by that external energy. The "primordial soup" theory is compatible with that.
We still don't have a complete explanation of how things went there, of course. Some prominent theories hold that something akin to "evolution" actually started before DNA was in place (with RNA, or possibly even earlier), and DNA is the result of that evolution. But the "mystery" there is largely due to our inability to conclusively prove that things happened one way or another, and not due to some missing links or somesuch.
At some point or another, you have to believe that you can shake up a a bunch of metal parts and throw them up in the air and a fully-assembled watch will land at your feet. Now, maybe you have some sort of "sun" to heat those parts until they're red-hot before you shake them up and throw them up in the air... that's still not a satisfying explanation of how they managed to form a watch.
Even if through the agent of the Sun, the heat and other energies reaching Earth are merely (somehow) reducing the entropy of Earth only to cause yet greater entropy elsewhere throughout the Universe... you still need to have such a thing as a Sun and an Earth to begin the process. And you'd have to explain why Earth is special, why heat from the Sun doesn't flow "downhill" from hot to cold, why the objects on that planet don't proceed from a more-ordered state to a more-disordered state as they radiate/reflect that Sun's heat back into space. If heat is random kinetic motion, and it is, and if DNA is highly non-random highly organized molecule(s) that store information, and it is, how do you get highly ordered DNA from chaotic disordered random kinetic motion?
Like I said in my previous post, I think the whole topic is far more mysterious than most people are willing to consider.
And yet the creationists are the ones with fairy tales? [does not compute]
Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.
Personally the part that confounds me is that DNA is highly organized information. Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe. Evolution doesn't seem to have a real answer to this question other than throwing large amounts of time at the problem. Creationism merely relocates the problem; one could ask if God created all of this then what are God's origins, or if there was never a time when God did not exist how does one even begin to comprehend that or really understand what that means? Panspermia of course has the same flaw; if Earth got its life from a visiting comet/asteriod then where did that get living organisms?
Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious. I don't share the urge some have to dismiss or gloss over that fact. I actually find it a beautiful thing to celebrate, not a nuisance to be explained away.
Yeah, teachers don't spend any time to plan classes, mark tests/assignments, keep up with their field, assist students outside of class time, etc.
Yeah, and programmers never spend any time learning new tools, learning new languages, and brushing up on their skills. Oh, except they clock in every weekday and many weekends.
Same goes for marketers. No matter how awful your product is, they can find "some study, somewhere" that has something vaguely positive to say. For instance, I'm not sure if you caught it recently, but Lucky Charms was being touted as a health food.
It reminds me of those toothpaste commercials that say "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our brand X!" What they don't say is that maybe they interviewed hundreds of dentists in groups of ten until they finally found a group out of which nine preferred brand X. I have little respect for mainstream marketers because they spend so much time and effort and money exploring the myriad ways one can use deception without technically lying.
I've posted it here a few times and it's still relevant. This is a good quote about the subject:
Television lies. All television lies. It lies persistently, instinctively and by habit. Everyone involved lies. A culture of mendacity surrounds the medium, and those who work there live it, breath it and prosper by it. I know of no area of public life -- no, not even politics -- more saturated by a professional cynicism. If you want a word that takes you to the core of it, I would offer rigged.
...is it dishonest for the presenter to imply that the pundit in the chair is free to offer any opinion, when the truth is that fifty pundits were telephoned, but only the fellow prepared to offer the requisite opinion was invited?
-- Matthew Parris
Many people are far too easily impressed by the official look and larger-than-life appearance of whatever is given a slick presentation, especially on TV. It distracts them from any serious thought about how and why the show was produced and who benefits from its message.
I'd say the other dimension of the problem is that knowing the right people is a much better way to advance than having the right skills. Because of that, what we have is far from a meritocracy. What we have is a collection of many small examples of cronyism. Having malleable principles and a willingness to wholeheartedly adopt the agenda of whoever your gatekeeper may be are the traits we most highly reward and encourage. That's part of why so many high-level managers are sociopaths, because such people feel no guilt about being completely phony and have no conflict about putting on a show solely to win the approval of others.
That and "globalism" and "free trade" always seems to mean "transfer wealth away from the US". It is not the mutual trade and prosperity that was sold to us when NAFTA and other proposals were getting off the ground.
A petition is not censorship. It is a request from customers to remove something very objectionable. Hate speech, in fact.
Did you ever see me say that "a petition is censorship?" No? Good. That's because I never said that. This is a petition to enact censorship.
Sorry but anytime I hear someone say "hate speech" I think, what a pansy. If anyone's speech bothers you for any reason or for no reason at all, my advice would be: don't listen to it. The world is insensitive. It is filled with people you won't like who say things you won't like. I for one believe in free speech. That includes the free speech of people who say things I really, really don't like and strongly disagree with.
That includes the free speech of people I believe to be 100% wrong, misguided, ignorant, hateful, you name it. I am happy when they reveal the kind of person they are up-front. It makes it easy for me to decide not to associate with a hateful person. I like that better than wasting my time getting to know them only to realize they are great at putting on a front of phony inoffensiveness. I like that a hell of a lot better than trying to use market pressure, laws, manipulation, rules, or regulations to force people to conform to my idea of what a person should think about and talk about.
The petition, and a boycott to follow, is simply the "free market" exerting its influence on corporate behavior. I can't imagine something that is a better example of free market behavior: get together and say you will not purchase a product until the company fixes something.
You use the term "free market". I wonder if you actually understand what it means. A free market means that a willing seller does business with a willing buyer, and neither of them uses force or fraud. If a willing buyer cannot do business with a willing seller because you disapprove of the app being sold, this fails the definition of a free market. Now you're in a bit of a bind: either admit that you reject the notion of a free market or admit that your position is wrong because it is incompatible with it.
Further, a free market would work thusly: if only a tiny minority of people ever purchase this app, then the producers of this app will make little or no profit from it. A free market also works thusly: if you don't like something, don't buy it, and let others have the same freedom to make that decision.
Fact: no one is ever going to use this app unless they go out of their way to do so. You have to seek it out. This app is not going to tie you to a chair, peel your eyelids open, and force you to watch its messages. You will never see any of its content unless you make an active decision to subject yourself to it. Here's what you have such a problem with: the idea that a person would choose, of their own free will, to purchase and use this app.
The effort to get it removed from the App Store is more than choosing not to buy it. It's an attempt to make sure no one else can buy it either. That's what removing it from the App Store accomplishes that choosing not to purchase it doesn't accomplish. See how simple that is? Deny that if you can. That's why this is censorship. That's the part you want to perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid admitting, and that's too bad because it's the plain truth. I am trying to persuade you, but ultimately it is not my problem if you can't accept that.
Part of being a mature adult involves accepting that other adults are going to watch, read, and listen to things you find offensive. They're going to practice religions you don't believe in. They'll listen to music you find distasteful. They'll read books written by authors you think are looney. You want to know one of the biggest reasons why the USA is no longer a free country? Because adults no longer have the maturity to live and let live.
Lots of people want to control others, not because others
An app that encourages gay people to not be gay is hardly bashing, even if you don't approve of the underlying assumptions.
You mean an app based on the idea that homosexuality is immoral, and that such people need to be "fixed" is not gay bashing??
I'll also quote the summary prior to my response:
A petition has been launched by Truth Wins Out, which describes itself as a non-profit organisation that fights anti-gay religious extremism on the change.org website, asking Steve Jobs to intervene to remove the app.
What you and Truth Wins Out seem to desire is censorship. I really don't understand that, at all.
It's really simple. If a homosexual person does not feel that homosexuality is wrong and does not view it as a problem that needs to be fixed, his or her option is ridiculously easy and requires zero effort: don't purchase/download this app.
If a homosexual person does believe, for religious reasons, that homosexuality is wrong, why would you stop them from downloading this app by having it censored and removed from the App Store? Is this not a personal decision for that person to make? Do they not have the right to practice the religion of their choice? Or must they obtain your approval first?
How does the presence of this app prevent someone from living the lifestyle of their choice? Simple answer: it doesn't. The effort to censor this app is far worse than anything the censors would find wrong with it. It's also an insult to the homosexual people you purport to protect. You're basically suggesting that their sexual orientation is so flimsy and non-genuine that it would be threatened by the mere option of downloading this app.
Sadly, to many people "freedom" means "the freedom to do what I would approve of". I reject this notion. So long as we are talking about consenting adults, I believe people should be free to do whatever they like. It doesn't matter whether I would do the same, whether I approve of the practice, whether I endorse and support it. Anything else is just a thinly-veiled desire to control other people and force them to be like yourself. What a cowardly and pathetic desire.
Like sentiment, it has a way of compromising judgment.
Dignity has a different nature from pride and has none of its disadvantages. It's compatible with a humble outlook, primarily because it views others as essentially equal and deserving of the same respect as oneself.
For all I know, that very well could be what you meant all along.
Well, one of the reasons I'm okay with Google collecting all that info about my online activity is that unlike my creepy stalker neighbor, Google won't be coming at me with sharp implements any time soon.
For the purpose of making a point, you hypothetically mention direct, grevious harm to your person. Is that what has to be in question for you to value privacy? Nothing short of that would get you to value privacy for its own sake and not merely to protect against some immediate physical threat?
The other is that I really don't see how knowing what I look at one the web can harm me.
If you would forgive a really crude analogy... apologies in advance...
I really don't see how it would harm you for all of your neighbors to know how often you have sex, with whom, and what positions you like to use. Except that it's not their business. I don't know, maybe you are unusually "open" about your sex life, but I am guessing that if a stranger asked you these things, you'd tell them it's not their concern. Maybe you'd be less courteous than that.
With Google, it's not so much that I think they will perform some bodily injury against me by gathering my Web usage data. It's that what I read and write isn't their business. That's the minor part of it.
The major part of it is that they don't want to take "no" for an answer. I have to go to some trouble to keep Google out of my browsing. They are pushy about it. It requires active effort on my part to avoid their snooping. Not only is it not their business, but they are also trying to insist that they are entitled to this information. I disagree and I prove them wrong. If Google's tracking were strictly opt-in and required my unambiguous consent to a clearly spelled-out agreement, I'd have no problem with their practices. But it is very much opt-out and there is no easy way to opt out. That's because they do not respect my wishes. To them, I am just a form of livestock for them to harvest at will.
Maybe you don't mind being treated that way. I do. Perhaps your concept of human dignity does not include any notions of consent, of the wrongness of involuntary participation. Mine does. I refuse to go along with it.
You see, whether the data they collect is harmless or not never has to enter the picture. The very act of collecting it is a violation. If the data could be misused in a harmful way, that would be a second, parallel issue.
We (the United States) are not allowed to admit we made a mistake in Iraq and try to fix that mistake by stopping our unilateral regime-change actions and instead joining a UN action against Gaddafi?
The US never admits it made a mistake. Instead, it changes its plan and claims the new plan is what they meant to do all along. "They have terrible weapons of mass destruction and aided the 9/11 terrorists! Wait, we can't prove that? Err, we meant to liberate them all along, Saddam was a bad guy (even though we taught him everything he knew), yeah, go team go!"
If the US was willing to admit when it makes a policy error, the War on (some) Drugs would have ended at least 30 years ago. Or it would have never been started in the first place and we'd have never pretended that the lesson learned from Prohibition can only apply to ethanol.
I don't think the point was that we should never change our course of action when it's the prudent thing to do. I think the point was, we never seem to use foresight. We will let something build up for decades, during which time it would be a relatively small issue resolved with relative ease, until it becomes a crisis. When there is an insurrection someplace, or all-out war, or something else that's smack-you-in-the-face undeniable, then we say A CRISIS, WE MUST DO SOMETHING! in typical reactionary politician mode. If we paid half that amount of attention to the conditions that cause crises in the first place I think we'd have a McDonalds on Alpha Centauri by now.
Can we PLEASE stop talking about Google as if they did something wrong? I don't exactly blame my neighbors for hearing me when I stand on the top of my house screaming my personal information in all directions.
I don't blame the people at the next table when they overhear my conversation either. But they aren't deliberately listening in, recording it, transcribing it, and publishing it on the web.
And they aren't following me from restaurant to restaurant recording my conversations at each, and adding them to the web, all linked together.
They aren't writing down what I'm wearing at each meal, and then analyzing it to determine colour preferences, brand preferences, income level, social standing, peer group, etc. And then selling this information...
Likewise you don't really care that your neighbors can see and hear you outside. But you'd probably object if your neighbor started keeping "files" on you, recording your comings and goings, writing down what you are wearing, producing transcripts of everything they see and hear...while watching your home with binoculars and cameras... and then publishing and selling it all on the web.
I admire your grasp of the facts and your (quite accurate) assessment of the situation.
The problem is bigger than a matter of information. This is a religious cause for the Google apologists, unfortunately. They decide ahead of time that what Google did is acceptable. They then reject any information that would contradict this conclusion.
You are quite right that GP would almost certainly object to a neighbor who collects this level of information about him. He'd find that disturbing, violating, and downright creepy, the kind of behavior in which a stalker would engage. But he thinks it's perfectly acceptable when Google collects that much information. And doesn't see the contradiction.
I suppose it's because a neighbor wouldn't do it for purposes of advertising revenue and would likely have a harmful, evil intention while Google does it solely to enhance its services and increase its revenues. The problem that religious apologists have is simple. They think the purpose for which the information is collected somehow changes the fact that the act of collecting the information, in and of itself, is a violation. That's the hinge of this issue, the important part that the apologists are eager to gloss over and perform mental gymnastics in order to dismiss.
That's what yields the following results: "Corporation doing X == good, individual doing X == bad".
Slashdot Mirror
I am curious. In what way does the GPL shove anything down anyone's throat? Who is forcing anyone to use it?
If I don't like the terms of, let's say, a car rental then I am free to decide not to rent a car from that company. If I don't like a TV show, I am free to stop watching it. Likewise, if I have a problem with the terms under which code is made available to me, I am free to decide not to use that code. Why isn't that good enough for you?
I would like a real answer to this because it really looks like you have an unreasonable entitlement mentality and are trying to be both a beggar and a chooser. Not only do you want someone else to write code that you can use with no need to pay that person for their efforts, you also want to complain if they don't give it to you in the exact way that you prefer. Do you have any idea how arrogant and selfish that is?
I am a longtime user of Linux and GPL software. I have no complaints. What I have is a strong sense of gratitude. The use of GPL software has greatly benefitted me for years and has enhanced my life in many ways. The people who provide all of that do so without demanding payment. They allow me to make as many copies of their software as I like and distribute it to anyone I want with no concept of "piracy". They let me have the source code and they tell me I can do anything I want with it so long as I don't prevent the next person from enjoying the same privilege, and even that last part would only apply if I choose to distribute my modifications.
Do you think I have any reason to complain? If I have a legitimate complaint, what would be my damages? How have I been harmed by this? The answer: I haven't been harmed by this in the slightest, there is no legitimate complaint, and it's truly amazing that so many people would deliberately allow me to benefit from the fruits of their labors. The only correct response to this is gratitude and respect.
If the GPL crowd wanted to join hands with the Open Source Community they would have made their license compatible with the Mit License
which is free as in free and does not try to shove it down our throats like the brain washed/dead cult called GPL.
This is a classic troll that gets rehashed from time to time. That's because those who are willing to value what the GPL does (i.e. the overwhelming majority of all Open Source developers and users) already do so. Those who do not like the GPL have a different set of needs and values and cannot be convinced unless those needs and values change. Of course you knew that, and were counting on the irreconcilability of the positions to troll the more reactive types.
I for one appreciate what the GPL does. Really the only people who would have a solid reason to dislike the GPL are those with a strong desire to use someone else's work without ever having to contribute anything in return. I don't have that desire and I reject the entitlement mentality that would cause it. Those developers who want you to be able to do that with their hard work can always use a BSD-style license. Those who don't want you to be able to do that never owed you anything in the first place and their wishes should be respected.
I do not believe it's a concidence that Open Source as a movement was never anything the average user might have heard of until the GPL. Yes, the BSD license and those like it have been around for much longer, but for a long time they were something with which only geeks would be familiar. Nor do I think it's a coincidence that the most famous and widely-used Open Source software, such as Firefox, Linux, etc. are all GPL licensed.
I don't know right now exactly what tech Microsoft has patented, but it's not in their best interest right now to destroy Mono.
Yeah, not right now. It's truly best for them to wait until their competitor is using it, then strike out with the patents. ;)
That's amusing that this is modded down to Flamebait. The truth isn't flamebait even if you are unable to handle it like a mature adult.
Judging from all of the shillish posts in this discussion and related previous discussions, it's reasonable to wonder if these mods which are idiotic, absurd, yet serve the purpose of shills are coming from various sockpuppet accounts. If so, the shills are not nearly as smooth and unnoticable as they'd like to think. In fact they're amazingly amatuerish and their actions reflect a certain desperation to please their masters.
Give it up, already. Few corporations have so soundly earned a bad reputation as Microsoft has done. Hiring a bunch of cowardly liars who treat us like we're stupid only makes them look worse.
And MS-PL is not compatible with the GPL. If Microsoft really wanted to join hands with the Open Source community they wouldn't have deliberately created a license that is incompatible with the way the vast, vast majority of Open Source projects are licensed. I ignore their words. When I listen to their actions, the message is that they want to make a token gesture of openness that has severely limited practical use while discouraging community forks, all of which serves to make it possible for them to regain complete control if they later change their mind.
It's amazing how effective token gestures like this are, how impressed by them people can be. Really it's business as usual: if you want to actually benefit from the source they have provided you either do it Microsoft's way or you don't get to do it at all. Source that an Open Source developer can't use in their existing GPL projects may as well be closed source. Nowhere in here do you find any sort of community spirit, a cherishing of "free as in speech", an appreciation of compatibility, or a willingness to deal with the many Open Source developers as equals. It's either the Microsoft Way or the highway and that's why .Net is something I can easily live without, however convenient it may be.
No, they usually wait until it becomes much more widespread and ubiquitous before they do that. They're too smart to stop playing nice this early on. A wolf in sheep's clothing doesn't reveal his fangs until he's well within the flock of sheep. They use underhanded techniques like this again and again because they work, because so many fools still don't see it coming after so many examples. Anyone who doesn't understand that this is the way Microsoft operates is either ignorant about their history and the way it repeats itself, a marketer/shill, or just plain naive.
That's how it was sold to the public. I don't think for a moment that the ones promoting it actually believe that.
Wealth might trickle down if economic power were decentralized. There was a time in the USA when most people had a trade of some kind and acted as independent proprietors, when most people owned their own family business and were not employees of gigantic corporations. The problem is that the major international corporations represent massive self-perpetuating concentrations of wealth and economic power. Not only do they have no desire to let that wealth become less concentrated, they also have the political and economic clout to stack the deck in their favor.
Worker productivity has tripled in the last few decades but salaries have not. That tends to erode the idea of a free worker who sells labor on the open market and receives in return something resembling the value of that labor. It greatly adds to the credibility of the wage slave.
Then inflation works to prevent average workers from being more economically mobile. It's difficult to live within your means and save money and build wealth over time in order to move upwards when your savings are constantly being devalued. It is the largest hidden tax Americans pay. Meanwhile the truly wealthy tend to have their wealth in the form of investments in hard assets that retain value when currency inflates.
It worked out for those who provided the marketing, media presence, political support, and campaign financing to make it happen. The rest of us are just spectators who are allowed to feel that we have a choice in the matter. The truth is we have no choice because anyone who can get their name on a federal ballot is going to be friendly to those interests which got him there.
No, we live in a society that THINKS they have to pre-prepare texts and emails to warn students of this. To be honest considering the time it takes to fire off an email saying "get the hell away from here" having prepared messages for this is kinda dumb in my not so humble opinion.
I wonder what the odds are in fact of getting shot at school...
But schools are gun-free zones. No murderer would ever carry a gun into a gun-free zone and start shooting! It's not allowed.
Citation, please?
Citation provided per request.
Nice post. It made me speculate that this is why the universe is so stupidly over-the-top more complex than it needs to be: So DNA could form. Heh.
That reminds me of some quote I once read, the attribution of which I have unfortunately forgotten: we are genes' way of making more genes.
I've also heard it rendered this way: human beings were created by water to transport itself uphill.
In hindsight I admit that the tone you have used is better and more appropriate than the one I previously used that probably sounded needlessly belligerent. I realized that when going back and reading it over. I appreciate the way you responded and for what it's worth, it speaks well of you.
Regarding the quote above, what you said there reminds me of another question I find absolutely fascinating. This is not a scientific question. If life (and by extension, consciousness) is just a self-sustaining chemical reaction, could the chemicals/elements/molecules themselves have some kind of life? As in, we as highly complex conscious beings may be just a particularly organized/specialized/localized expression of a "life force" inherent in all matter and energy. This is sort of like pantheism with potential overtones of the cosmic oneness many Eastern philosophies and religions expound.
The classic alternative to this form of pantheism is the idea that our bodies made of matter and energy are just vehicles for the temporary use of some sort of soul or spirit that is our actual being and the source of consciousness, the viewer of the mental theater of Decartes. In that case matter would be "dead" and inert other than the heat and other physical forms of energy it exchanges with its environment. But that of course would mean that the self-sustaining chemical reaction is only part of the equation.
It improved my access to stuff, most of which I don't really need. That's nice, I suppose. A short-term benefit that's not too disagreeable.
It also places my country at an unsustainable trade deficit. That's a long-term downside that keeps getting worse. It gives China enough power over the USA that China could bankrupt the USA and bring the country to its knees if it wanted to do it badly enough. Now I know this term gets thrown around, but that is what would legitimately be called a national security issue.
Do you read different history books than I do? The more globalism in which the USA engages, the higher its rate of inflation has been. "Printing dollars 24/7 at 0 cost to pay for" anything is precisely what I consider a terribly stupid practice. It's another thing that's cool right now and looks like an easy ticket to cheap stuff, but long-term it really fucks up a nation. It's not a sustainable lifestyle for a country.
Besides, what I want isn't total protectionism and hegemony. See how I never said that? That was your clue. Having established that ...
What I want is for nations to be as self-sufficient as is practical. When a relatively self-sufficient nation trades with another relatively self-sufficient nation, without massive net trade deficits, they deal as equals and can truly benefit each other. The arrangement we have right now isn't good for the USA because it's part of why the USA is heading towards economic collapse. It isn't good for China either for one of their biggest trading partners to head towards economic collapse. It's unsustainable for both and no amount of "yeah well you think America is better than everybody else, dontcha?!" spite is going to change that.
And you think rampant consumerism largely fueled by the sudden influx of cheap imported goods had nothing to do with that, right? The reason we have replaced productive, wealth-producing sectors with fluff (and you're right about that) is that we'd rather save a few bucks on cheap imported goods and destroy our domestic production. That again is largely due to rampant consumerism.
Americans were once thrifty and frugal and hand-me-downs were common. Repairing clothes and goods instead of throwing them away and replacing them was once common. The elderly people alive today can remember this. It was not so long ago. Now it's consume, consume, consume more and more things, gotta keep up with the Jones's because that's everything, and a little cheaper is "better" even if it's a hell of a lot more expensive in the long run because it destroys our domestic industries. This is madness.
Of course economic madness will lower your standard of living. On the personal level, I bet gambling all your money away will also lead to a lower standard of living for yourself. This isn't some kind of surprising revelation.
Ah, that's been the promise of globalism for about 20 or 30 years now. "Soon this will all be worth it," they say. Maybe you don't know the history of this movement but that has been one of i
The smart ones will say, "Yes, but the Miller Experiments never produced anything but racemates, which while interesting makes it difficult to show how an organized process could arise from something like this."
To which most smart scientists will probably grin and keep looking for more answers, since that's what new questions represent...
The problem is, too many people don't want new questions and the great possibilities they represent. They want easy answers so they can bask in the feeling of finally understanding it all. This is a deep drive, not easily uprooted. All sorts of arrogance masquerades as scientific explanation because of it. What so many really seem to want to avoid is saying "these are profoundly deep questions with no final answers, and the huge knowledge we have amassed over centuries of pursuring the scientific method are only a partial and not terribly satisfying answer."
Sure, computers just shift and add. But the transistors that do the shifting and adding were not the products of random chance. As computers were deliberately designed by intelligent humans, this is one of the worst analogies you could use if your goal was to put forth a naturalistic no-creator-required explanation of life on Earth.
If I am misunderstanding you, please correct me. Having said that, it sounds like you refer to the great deal of "junk DNA" in a given organism's genome. The problem I have with that is that "junk DNA" is a way of saying "we don't yet know what it's for". It doesn't contain the information needed to build specific proteins and that's about all we can say for certain about it.
Here is where things get interesting. This question boils down to whether a creator would want a bunch of robots who must carry out its design in perfect lock-step, never having any kind of flaw either physical or behavioral, or whether such a creator would want some kind of free will, a variable if you like. If life in the Universe is all about the most diverse exploration possible of what life is, what forms it can take, and what it can overcome, then what we call "defects" would be an essential component. The only part that could not be compromised is that the "defects" do not become so great in number as to prevent the system as a whole from continuing and perpetuating its existence. So far that has not happened, and as evidence I note that you and I are here today to talk about this.
What did you suppose you were telling me there that wasn't already obvious?
Of course it's "just a theory". But a theory about life is suddenly a lot more practical when its application can actually create life the same way "nature" has done. That was my only point. You either grasp the implications of it or you reiterate the obvious -- your choice.
True, I cannot define the entire Universe. Yet if I take a handful of metal parts and shake them up and toss them in the air, I don't expect that a fully-assembled, fully-functional watch is going to land in my lap. You need something like that to get life from non-life. You can excuse and dismiss all you like, but there's something special about life. Most evolutionists try to get around this by saying that in timescales of hundreds of billions of years or longer, eventually even extremely improbable things will eventually happen. That's their particular explanation -- they just throw enough time at the problem until the numbers look right. But unlike you, they at least acknowledge the problem.
Really? If gravity is so ordinary and non-mysterious, tell me precisely what it is then. Tell me what causes it. Not how it behaves, but what its actual origin is. Can't do that? Finding that this is a controversial subject with several competing explanations? Maybe you can next tell me precisely what electricity actually is, what the "charge" of charged particles actually comes from and not merely how it behaves now that it's here. Perhaps you see my point. It is the height of arrogance to think we truly understand something merely because it happens all the time.
The only qualitative difference is that there is no qualitative difference and you have confused memorization of formulae for an actual understanding of the world around us. So you might say, gravity is caused by gravitons? Great. Now show me a laboratory experiment where we can observe actual gravitons. So you might say, mass is caused by the Higgs Boson? Great, so how much progress have we made in observing and identifying the Higgs Boson? Not so much? Again, maybe you get my point. Unless you don't want to. Then nothing I say would ever convince you.
Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe.
Earth is not a closed system - it receives constant input of energy from the Sun. Therefore there is no contradiction in formation of more highly organized chemicals (and eventually life), so long as the process is driven by that external energy. The "primordial soup" theory is compatible with that.
We still don't have a complete explanation of how things went there, of course. Some prominent theories hold that something akin to "evolution" actually started before DNA was in place (with RNA, or possibly even earlier), and DNA is the result of that evolution. But the "mystery" there is largely due to our inability to conclusively prove that things happened one way or another, and not due to some missing links or somesuch.
At some point or another, you have to believe that you can shake up a a bunch of metal parts and throw them up in the air and a fully-assembled watch will land at your feet. Now, maybe you have some sort of "sun" to heat those parts until they're red-hot before you shake them up and throw them up in the air... that's still not a satisfying explanation of how they managed to form a watch.
Even if through the agent of the Sun, the heat and other energies reaching Earth are merely (somehow) reducing the entropy of Earth only to cause yet greater entropy elsewhere throughout the Universe... you still need to have such a thing as a Sun and an Earth to begin the process. And you'd have to explain why Earth is special, why heat from the Sun doesn't flow "downhill" from hot to cold, why the objects on that planet don't proceed from a more-ordered state to a more-disordered state as they radiate/reflect that Sun's heat back into space. If heat is random kinetic motion, and it is, and if DNA is highly non-random highly organized molecule(s) that store information, and it is, how do you get highly ordered DNA from chaotic disordered random kinetic motion?
Like I said in my previous post, I think the whole topic is far more mysterious than most people are willing to consider.
1. Lightning zaps a volcano
2. Wait X [m/b]illion years
3. ...
4. Profit
And yet the creationists are the ones with fairy tales? [does not compute]
Until and unless scientists can create actual life forms in a sterile clean-room from periodic table elements, life on this planet and exactly how it got here remains quite a bit more myserious than some would have you believe despite our best efforts to understand it.
Personally the part that confounds me is that DNA is highly organized information. Assuming a starting point of a planet with no life forms and no pre-existing DNA to bootstrap the process, its formation seems like negentropy in an otherwise entropic Universe. Evolution doesn't seem to have a real answer to this question other than throwing large amounts of time at the problem. Creationism merely relocates the problem; one could ask if God created all of this then what are God's origins, or if there was never a time when God did not exist how does one even begin to comprehend that or really understand what that means? Panspermia of course has the same flaw; if Earth got its life from a visiting comet/asteriod then where did that get living organisms?
Any way you look at it, the very fact that we're here to have this discussion is incredibly mysterious. I don't share the urge some have to dismiss or gloss over that fact. I actually find it a beautiful thing to celebrate, not a nuisance to be explained away.
Yeah, teachers don't spend any time to plan classes, mark tests/assignments, keep up with their field, assist students outside of class time, etc.
Yeah, and programmers never spend any time learning new tools, learning new languages, and brushing up on their skills. Oh, except they clock in every weekday and many weekends.
Same goes for marketers. No matter how awful your product is, they can find "some study, somewhere" that has something vaguely positive to say. For instance, I'm not sure if you caught it recently, but Lucky Charms was being touted as a health food.
It reminds me of those toothpaste commercials that say "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our brand X!" What they don't say is that maybe they interviewed hundreds of dentists in groups of ten until they finally found a group out of which nine preferred brand X. I have little respect for mainstream marketers because they spend so much time and effort and money exploring the myriad ways one can use deception without technically lying.
I've posted it here a few times and it's still relevant. This is a good quote about the subject:
Television lies. All television lies. It lies persistently, instinctively and by habit. Everyone involved lies. A culture of mendacity surrounds the
medium, and those who work there live it, breath it and prosper by it. I know of no area of public life -- no, not even politics -- more saturated by
a professional cynicism. If you want a word that takes you to the core of it, I would offer rigged.
telephoned, but only the fellow prepared to offer the requisite opinion was invited?
-- Matthew Parris
Many people are far too easily impressed by the official look and larger-than-life appearance of whatever is given a slick presentation, especially on TV. It distracts them from any serious thought about how and why the show was produced and who benefits from its message.
I'd say the other dimension of the problem is that knowing the right people is a much better way to advance than having the right skills. Because of that, what we have is far from a meritocracy. What we have is a collection of many small examples of cronyism. Having malleable principles and a willingness to wholeheartedly adopt the agenda of whoever your gatekeeper may be are the traits we most highly reward and encourage. That's part of why so many high-level managers are sociopaths, because such people feel no guilt about being completely phony and have no conflict about putting on a show solely to win the approval of others.
That and "globalism" and "free trade" always seems to mean "transfer wealth away from the US". It is not the mutual trade and prosperity that was sold to us when NAFTA and other proposals were getting off the ground.
Did you ever see me say that "a petition is censorship?" No? Good. That's because I never said that. This is a petition to enact censorship.
Sorry but anytime I hear someone say "hate speech" I think, what a pansy. If anyone's speech bothers you for any reason or for no reason at all, my advice would be: don't listen to it. The world is insensitive. It is filled with people you won't like who say things you won't like. I for one believe in free speech. That includes the free speech of people who say things I really, really don't like and strongly disagree with.
That includes the free speech of people I believe to be 100% wrong, misguided, ignorant, hateful, you name it. I am happy when they reveal the kind of person they are up-front. It makes it easy for me to decide not to associate with a hateful person. I like that better than wasting my time getting to know them only to realize they are great at putting on a front of phony inoffensiveness. I like that a hell of a lot better than trying to use market pressure, laws, manipulation, rules, or regulations to force people to conform to my idea of what a person should think about and talk about.
You use the term "free market". I wonder if you actually understand what it means. A free market means that a willing seller does business with a willing buyer, and neither of them uses force or fraud. If a willing buyer cannot do business with a willing seller because you disapprove of the app being sold, this fails the definition of a free market. Now you're in a bit of a bind: either admit that you reject the notion of a free market or admit that your position is wrong because it is incompatible with it.
Further, a free market would work thusly: if only a tiny minority of people ever purchase this app, then the producers of this app will make little or no profit from it. A free market also works thusly: if you don't like something, don't buy it, and let others have the same freedom to make that decision.
Fact: no one is ever going to use this app unless they go out of their way to do so. You have to seek it out. This app is not going to tie you to a chair, peel your eyelids open, and force you to watch its messages. You will never see any of its content unless you make an active decision to subject yourself to it. Here's what you have such a problem with: the idea that a person would choose, of their own free will, to purchase and use this app.
The effort to get it removed from the App Store is more than choosing not to buy it. It's an attempt to make sure no one else can buy it either. That's what removing it from the App Store accomplishes that choosing not to purchase it doesn't accomplish. See how simple that is? Deny that if you can. That's why this is censorship. That's the part you want to perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid admitting, and that's too bad because it's the plain truth. I am trying to persuade you, but ultimately it is not my problem if you can't accept that.
Part of being a mature adult involves accepting that other adults are going to watch, read, and listen to things you find offensive. They're going to practice religions you don't believe in. They'll listen to music you find distasteful. They'll read books written by authors you think are looney. You want to know one of the biggest reasons why the USA is no longer a free country? Because adults no longer have the maturity to live and let live.
Lots of people want to control others, not because others
You mean an app based on the idea that homosexuality is immoral, and that such people need to be "fixed" is not gay bashing??
I'll also quote the summary prior to my response:
What you and Truth Wins Out seem to desire is censorship. I really don't understand that, at all.
It's really simple. If a homosexual person does not feel that homosexuality is wrong and does not view it as a problem that needs to be fixed, his or her option is ridiculously easy and requires zero effort: don't purchase/download this app.
If a homosexual person does believe, for religious reasons, that homosexuality is wrong, why would you stop them from downloading this app by having it censored and removed from the App Store? Is this not a personal decision for that person to make? Do they not have the right to practice the religion of their choice? Or must they obtain your approval first?
How does the presence of this app prevent someone from living the lifestyle of their choice? Simple answer: it doesn't. The effort to censor this app is far worse than anything the censors would find wrong with it. It's also an insult to the homosexual people you purport to protect. You're basically suggesting that their sexual orientation is so flimsy and non-genuine that it would be threatened by the mere option of downloading this app.
Sadly, to many people "freedom" means "the freedom to do what I would approve of". I reject this notion. So long as we are talking about consenting adults, I believe people should be free to do whatever they like. It doesn't matter whether I would do the same, whether I approve of the practice, whether I endorse and support it. Anything else is just a thinly-veiled desire to control other people and force them to be like yourself. What a cowardly and pathetic desire.
Why would you fear pride?
Like sentiment, it has a way of compromising judgment.
Dignity has a different nature from pride and has none of its disadvantages. It's compatible with a humble outlook, primarily because it views others as essentially equal and deserving of the same respect as oneself.
For all I know, that very well could be what you meant all along.
That would be the second case I offered, wouldn't it?
An elaboration thereof, yes.
For the purpose of making a point, you hypothetically mention direct, grevious harm to your person. Is that what has to be in question for you to value privacy? Nothing short of that would get you to value privacy for its own sake and not merely to protect against some immediate physical threat?
If you would forgive a really crude analogy... apologies in advance...
I really don't see how it would harm you for all of your neighbors to know how often you have sex, with whom, and what positions you like to use. Except that it's not their business. I don't know, maybe you are unusually "open" about your sex life, but I am guessing that if a stranger asked you these things, you'd tell them it's not their concern. Maybe you'd be less courteous than that.
With Google, it's not so much that I think they will perform some bodily injury against me by gathering my Web usage data. It's that what I read and write isn't their business. That's the minor part of it.
The major part of it is that they don't want to take "no" for an answer. I have to go to some trouble to keep Google out of my browsing. They are pushy about it. It requires active effort on my part to avoid their snooping. Not only is it not their business, but they are also trying to insist that they are entitled to this information. I disagree and I prove them wrong. If Google's tracking were strictly opt-in and required my unambiguous consent to a clearly spelled-out agreement, I'd have no problem with their practices. But it is very much opt-out and there is no easy way to opt out. That's because they do not respect my wishes. To them, I am just a form of livestock for them to harvest at will.
Maybe you don't mind being treated that way. I do. Perhaps your concept of human dignity does not include any notions of consent, of the wrongness of involuntary participation. Mine does. I refuse to go along with it.
You see, whether the data they collect is harmless or not never has to enter the picture. The very act of collecting it is a violation. If the data could be misused in a harmful way, that would be a second, parallel issue.
The US never admits it made a mistake. Instead, it changes its plan and claims the new plan is what they meant to do all along. "They have terrible weapons of mass destruction and aided the 9/11 terrorists! Wait, we can't prove that? Err, we meant to liberate them all along, Saddam was a bad guy (even though we taught him everything he knew), yeah, go team go!"
If the US was willing to admit when it makes a policy error, the War on (some) Drugs would have ended at least 30 years ago. Or it would have never been started in the first place and we'd have never pretended that the lesson learned from Prohibition can only apply to ethanol.
I don't think the point was that we should never change our course of action when it's the prudent thing to do. I think the point was, we never seem to use foresight. We will let something build up for decades, during which time it would be a relatively small issue resolved with relative ease, until it becomes a crisis. When there is an insurrection someplace, or all-out war, or something else that's smack-you-in-the-face undeniable, then we say A CRISIS, WE MUST DO SOMETHING! in typical reactionary politician mode. If we paid half that amount of attention to the conditions that cause crises in the first place I think we'd have a McDonalds on Alpha Centauri by now.
Can we PLEASE stop talking about Google as if they did something wrong? I don't exactly blame my neighbors for hearing me when I stand on the top of my house screaming my personal information in all directions.
I don't blame the people at the next table when they overhear my conversation either. But they aren't deliberately listening in, recording it, transcribing it, and publishing it on the web.
And they aren't following me from restaurant to restaurant recording my conversations at each, and adding them to the web, all linked together.
They aren't writing down what I'm wearing at each meal, and then analyzing it to determine colour preferences, brand preferences, income level, social standing, peer group, etc. And then selling this information...
Likewise you don't really care that your neighbors can see and hear you outside. But you'd probably object if your neighbor started keeping "files" on you, recording your comings and goings, writing down what you are wearing, producing transcripts of everything they see and hear...while watching your home with binoculars and cameras... and then publishing and selling it all on the web.
I admire your grasp of the facts and your (quite accurate) assessment of the situation.
The problem is bigger than a matter of information. This is a religious cause for the Google apologists, unfortunately. They decide ahead of time that what Google did is acceptable. They then reject any information that would contradict this conclusion.
You are quite right that GP would almost certainly object to a neighbor who collects this level of information about him. He'd find that disturbing, violating, and downright creepy, the kind of behavior in which a stalker would engage. But he thinks it's perfectly acceptable when Google collects that much information. And doesn't see the contradiction.
I suppose it's because a neighbor wouldn't do it for purposes of advertising revenue and would likely have a harmful, evil intention while Google does it solely to enhance its services and increase its revenues. The problem that religious apologists have is simple. They think the purpose for which the information is collected somehow changes the fact that the act of collecting the information, in and of itself, is a violation. That's the hinge of this issue, the important part that the apologists are eager to gloss over and perform mental gymnastics in order to dismiss.
That's what yields the following results: "Corporation doing X == good, individual doing X == bad".
OMG! It's like these people in government are human beings with nuanced opinions and conflicting constituencies!
... and no principles that consistently direct their decision-making since that would require a spine and would likely interfere with retaining power.
You really want to make excuses for that?