Twitter is contributing by helping them to censor. The right thing to do is simply not do business in those countries where censorship is required.
The right thing to do would be for the US government to ban all business in those countries where censorship is required, the same way the USA treats Cuba.
Individual firms can not be expected to take ethical stands except by accident. They have a duty to shareholders to pursue maximum shareholder value.
Culture clash is the the internet's #1 enemy. What is a right to a Muslim in Iran (such as "honor killings") is a felony that could have you put to death in Texas. Freedom of expression is our right in America, but drawing a picture of Muhammed could have you jailed or killed in Iran.
Barbaric practices that need to be left behind in the stone age, need to be left behind with or without the internet. Labeling them as "culture" does not make them acceptable.
Honour Killings, female genital mutilation, and censorship of government criticism are objectively wrong. They are wrong in Iran, they are wrong in Texas, they are wrong in Thailand, they are wrong everywhere.
It makes no real difference to most of the indictment if megaupload physically had servers in the US. The servers are not the ones being charged with an offense. Human beings are. whether servers or merely data was in the US is not material.
As long as you or anyone inside the US is engaged in a willful transaction with you, and you are willing to do that transaction with a person in the US, then you are having a transaction under the jurisdiction of US law, and you can be charged if that transaction is illegal in the US. But more so, certain data signals were definitely inside the US regardless of where the server was because the client computers are in the US carrying signals transmitted from megaupload. (at least that is the allegation).
the only way having servers outside the US can really take you totally out of US jurisdiction, is if the servers are not accessible except from outside the US.
He's not well respected, just well known. Many cosmologists and astro-physists say Hawking is mostly irrelevant to the fields and may have actually set them back by years with his popular but incorrect theories which get overwhelmingly too much attention by the media. Hawking is a mediocre cosmologist at best. If he weren't confined to a wheel chair and using a computer to speak for him, no-one would be paying attention to anything he says.
I'm guessing I'm a few years older than you, because the thought that's been occurring to me lately is that our nation does pretty much every single thing that was used as an argument as to why the Soviet Union was evil:
- Political and economic based prison systems. - Torture. - Wars of aggression. - Spying on our own people. - Freedoms stripped away unless you were already in an established position of power. - Propaganda media. - Secrets, secrets, secrets. - Censorship. - Not taking care of the needs of the people while an elite class skims everything worth skimming. - Diminishing rights over time.
The list goes and on....
To be fair: our elites are way better taken care of than their elites...
Software patents have been around for almost 30 years. You say they've destroyed innovation - do you have any evidence? I think computers have advanced pretty far since the 80s.
Straw man. The issue is whether 'software' has advanced, not "computers".
Computer hardware is not protected by software patents. Computer hardware is protected by patents on physical devices and physical processes.
The majority of profound changes to computing over the past 30 years have been in HARDWARE and in public software that is not covered by patents.
Your argument that "computers have advanced pretty far" is misleading and irrelevant.
I would not claim software patents have "destroyed innovation" but the onus for proving that software patents are justified is on the party who is making that claim. If you are merely claiming that software patents are LAWFUL, then perhaps you are correct, but if you are claiming software patents actually ENCOURAGE software inventions, you have no evidence and you need to provide it.
Patents are a limitation to freedom of expression and thus every single patent must be justifiable and every single law granting patents must be justifiable on the basis that it actually truly encourages the advancement of the art and knowledge into the public sphere and not merely the enrichment of private pockets.
You could probably find many software developers, myself included, who would say that software patents have done absolutely NOTHING to encourage us in this art.
The best evidence in favor of software patents would be if the vast majority of software writers (the people who actually practice the art), come forward and ask the state to grant us such monopoly rights. But it was not us who asked. Who are the famous computer scientists who made the most significant contributions to this field who have claimed it was patent law that encouraged them to invent software?
To lay people it hardly matters whether or not there are patents on certain technology. Patents are intended to encourage the CREATORS by giving us incentives. But software patents are shackles on us as well. The creators who are the ones who are advancing the art, are the ones who should be asked, not patent trolls, not patent lawyers. The purpose of patents is NOT so that anybody can make money. The purpose is to advance the art. The artists are the ones who know best what assistance the government can give (if any) to this objective.
PS: for the record, I'm in favor of copyright over software. (but limited to 14 years or something like that -- not the current absurd term of 70 years after death).
Can we half beat them up, then? Concluding that 1+1=2 because it rained on Saturday is not logical and a good clip round the lughole might actually help, even though the conclusion is indeed correct.
the part that I disagreed with was not necessary to reach your conclusion. We can disagree whether it rained on saturday and still both agree that the ground was wet.
But since you must know, the part I disagreed with was your statement that the net worth of a country is a meaningless concept. It *is* possible to converge on a meaningful definition/value for that concept. The value may not mean what it seems to mean to the lay person, but it is not meaningless.
if you looked at all of the property under the authority and jurisdiction of a specific state, then the sum of the "values" of all that property gives you a net worth for the entire state. And the previous poster was correct in that printing money would not increase this.
of course its is impossible to get the right answer, because you can't actually sell a country because nobody owns it.. however you can pretend. thats mostly what money is anyway.
none of that had anything to do with what you said about military spending.
The mistake you're making is arguing that military spending should be cut because it's a waste of tax money. However, there is no operational connection between tax money and any soft of spending. The correct argument is that government should not be pushing so much of the productive capacity of the country to military purposes. This is a political decision and has nothing to do with taxes.
I was going to dispute some of the statements you made about money but then you ended up with the correct conclusion anyway... so I just thought I'd end up saying your conclusion is correct.
In driving school they specifically pointed out that sneezing can cause a driver to lose focus for up to 15 seconds (or was it 5?), so if we feel we might need to sneeze we should slow down and make sure there is plenty of space in front of us and that it is safe to sneeze.
Except that it is fairly easy to demonstrate that no teapot is orbiting anywhere in the solar system. Everything that orbits must at some point be visible from Earth except for an object ~180 degrees out of phase in Earth's own orbit, and a satellite sent out of the plane of the elliptical could cover that situation. An optical telescope of sufficient power is all that's required to observe the solar system for the longest conceivable orbital period of a satellite and demonstrate that every visible object is not, according to some quantitative measurement, a teapot.
This sort of systematic searching for the presence or absence of an object is precisely what the Higgs Boson experiments are doing.
You are only talking about visible teapots. Teapots could be hiding behind objects other than the sun, and teapots could be located anyplace where you aren't pointing your telescope at a given instant. There could be a teapot in orbit behind your head this instant.
The fact that something is visible at "Some point" is not sufficient. It must be visible at some point when the telescope is actually pointing in the right direction and nothing else must be obstructing line of sight.
So you would need an infinite number of telescopes of sufficient power pointing in all directions at ALL times over the duration of the longest conceivable period of the orbits of ALL satellites in the solar system (i.e. the amount of time it takes for the entire solar system to get from state X back into State X -- which is essentially an infinite amount of time), in order to rule out that there is no teapot in orbit anywhere in the solar system.
But even that only proves there was no teapot that STAYED in orbit the entire time.
Two teapots might be in orbit right now behind jupiter, but might experience a collision with each other both be deflected into jupiter's atmosphere and burn up without ever being visible from earth again, So you could never prove there was no teapot. But you don't have an infinite number of telescopes so you can't even prove that much.
For all you can be certain of, there are thousands of orbiting teapots in the solar system and we simply haven't found any yet.
And in the great tradition of agnostics everywhere, I would posit that there is exactly a 50% chance that there are thousands of teapots in orbit in the solar system.
This really does just sound like headline grabbing nonsense; every such story makes me lose a little more respect for them. Focus on doing good works, not wasting donations discussing rubbish like this.
thats what they do. This story is almost completely made up. Maybe you should not believe everything you read.
Someone from Red Cross suggested game designers should consider implementing war crimes IN THE GAME. i.e. the GAME punishes you IN GAME for violating the law. This is just like getting a star in grand theft auto for killing a prostitute in front of a cop. It doesn't mean a real cop shows up at your door and arrests you.
Missions could easily be designed such that capturing surrendering enemy units is a possibility. most games simply cause the enemy AI to fight to the death or to run away, catch its breath and re-attack you, which is unrealistic.
I have no problem with a war game giving me rules of engagement, and then for penalizing me IN GAME for violating those. Even board games such as Supremacy have some concepts of human rights, and a Marshal who can conquer the world without using nukes or being nuked is considered the best possible kind of victory.
that actually sounds fun. Some of us are annoyed at finishing a game and seeing that we've single handedly killed 1700 people. It is ABSURD.
the computer could fast forward to within 1000 seconds (random interval) of when something interesting is about to happen, so players can get a feeling for what its like to be bored without literally being bored for 10 hours.
a standoff where it takes 30 minutes to take out 1 guy, sounds awesome! in games like final fantasy or god of war, there are boss fights that can easily take an hour to complete (usually by dying and restarting over and over) , so its not unheard of.
So.. in any case... there are some people like me who want hard-core simulation.
If someone told me they pray to the tooth fairy, I'd smile and hope that it brings them peace and happiness. There are a lot of atheists here that could use a deity to teach them not to be an asshole.
what if it makes them miserable? would that make the tooth fairy less real?
A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?
To be fair, using mathematical models on stuff we can see and measure seems a reasonable idea as opposed to inventing an invisible, incorporeal, magical material that we have no direct evidence even exists in order to compensate for our lack of understanding in how the Universe moves.
So reasonable in fact, it's a wonder no one has done it before, or maybe they have and they are keeping it a secret!.... it must be a government conspiracy!
Incidentally, this is coming from an Amazon Prime customer. I buy almost everything off of Amazon these days, with one exception: books. For that I have my Nook, which I use mainly because it reads PDFs too.
thermal plants have better efficiency than explosion engines in car.
Although the thermal plant might have more efficiency, depending on the level of NIMBY, the transmission losses and the overhead of maintaining base-load for the electric grid may make the actual net efficiency closer than anyone may like... Sadly, reality is a must-satisfy condition in this analysis...
And driving massive tanker trucks full of gasoline all over the the country, tearing up roads, to deliver fuel to gas stations is efficient?
"Red" is a much trickier concept. Even if you have a fMRI hooked up to your visual cortex and can demonstrate you're processing pure 700nm light in exactly the same fashion as your buddy, you have no idea if his experience of red is the same as yours.
Almost no one uses 'red' as to mean the experience of viewing 700 nm light. And words obtain meaning from the way they are used by speakers.
They mean the surface of the car has certain visual qualities (i.e. it reflects the same color as a tomato, or cherry). They are attempting to describe physical properties of the surface without understanding how light works.
We teach children color entirely by reference to physical examples of the color. This is the only way we teach children colors. We point at physical objects and say "Red" and then repeat this over a variety of objects until the chid understands the physical property we are referring to (as opposed to the shape of the object or size).
Interior decorators use color swatches because we need CONCRETE examples to describe color.
In lay-english, color refers to an object's physical properties. (regardless of the fact that science has subsequently determined that these physical properties are emergent, and depend on the object, the ambient light, and the structure of the observers retina).
Something isn't abstract simply because the speaker doesn't understand how it works. It is based on whether or not it is based on concrete examples.
I would argue that "color" is an abstract concept. "red" is a concrete example of a color. 'Red' it is defined by reference to real physical objects which we agree to call "red". Without those concrete examples of 'red', then the word is utterly meaningless.
Lets invent a new color called 'X-Ray'. This is the color of x-rays that you can't see but it is what x-rays look like to super-man when he uses his x-ray vision. I have just created an abstract color. Contrast this with 'red'.
Plenty of things have no physical reality: like abstract concepts. There is no physical quantity of "good" or "evil", for example. There's not even a physical quantity of "red" (not counting the unrelated color charge from QED). There are physical properties that make things red, but "redness" is not by itself physical.
Red is in principle, observable, measurable and quantifiable and hence it is physical.
All red objects definitely share certain physical qualities that all non-red objects lack, and whatever those qualities are, those are the qualities towards which the word 'red' refers.
I agree about 'good' and 'evil'. there are no physical qualities that all good things can be said to possess which are distinct from non-good things.
Don't forget the consumers that turn a blind eye and focus on whatever is cheapest. There's plenty of blame to go around.
That said, it would be nice if extremely profitable companies like Apple could push standards and enforce them. They have the leverage. It would also make for good marketing.
Sadly marketing is the ONLY legal justification that companies like Apple can push standards and enforce them. Anything a corporation does must legally be for the purpose of boosting profit. The directors have a legal duty only to boost shareholder's bottom line to the maximum possible extent allowed by law, and nothing else.
Will people pay 50% more for actually clean products if cheap polluting alternatives are available that have pictures of trees and flowers on the box?
Consumers do not have time to research every single purchase. it is not cost effective. the government must step in.
Why were the radiation levels not a purchasing requirement?
The point is that ANY ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer, and therefore, statistically speaking, over a large population these scanners WILL kill people, its just a matter of how many lives are we willing to sacrifice for the facade of security.
Slashdot Mirror
all I do is sit around in my living room and play video games anyway. What do I need to be able to lift 300kg over my head, or have night vision for?
this seems like a solution that is crying out for a problem.
Pft... knives are only like a D6 damage. Not much of a threat.
Thats a big knife! I think you're thinking of a short sword.
Twitter is contributing by helping them to censor. The right thing to do is simply not do business in those countries where censorship is required.
The right thing to do would be for the US government to ban all business in those countries where censorship is required, the same way the USA treats Cuba.
Individual firms can not be expected to take ethical stands except by accident. They have a duty to shareholders to pursue maximum shareholder value.
Culture clash is the the internet's #1 enemy. What is a right to a Muslim in Iran (such as "honor killings") is a felony that could have you put to death in Texas. Freedom of expression is our right in America, but drawing a picture of Muhammed could have you jailed or killed in Iran.
Barbaric practices that need to be left behind in the stone age, need to be left behind with or without the internet. Labeling them as "culture" does not make them acceptable.
Honour Killings, female genital mutilation, and censorship of government criticism are objectively wrong. They are wrong in Iran, they are wrong in Texas, they are wrong in Thailand, they are wrong everywhere.
It may not be time consuming, but I'm sure getting a warrant is a real pain in the ass when you don't have probable cause.
It really is! Without probable cause you need to shop for judges until you can find one to rubber stand your request without reading it.
It makes no real difference to most of the indictment if megaupload physically had servers in the US. The servers are not the ones being charged with an offense. Human beings are. whether servers or merely data was in the US is not material.
As long as you or anyone inside the US is engaged in a willful transaction with you, and you are willing to do that transaction with a person in the US, then you are having a transaction under the jurisdiction of US law, and you can be charged if that transaction is illegal in the US. But more so, certain data signals were definitely inside the US regardless of where the server was because the client computers are in the US carrying signals transmitted from megaupload.
(at least that is the allegation).
the only way having servers outside the US can really take you totally out of US jurisdiction, is if the servers are not accessible except from outside the US.
He's not well respected, just well known. Many cosmologists and astro-physists say Hawking is mostly irrelevant to the fields and may have actually set them back by years with his popular but incorrect theories which get overwhelmingly too much attention by the media. Hawking is a mediocre cosmologist at best. If he weren't confined to a wheel chair and using a computer to speak for him, no-one would be paying attention to anything he says.
Troll.
I'm guessing I'm a few years older than you, because the thought that's been occurring to me lately is that our nation does pretty much every single thing that was used as an argument as to why the Soviet Union was evil:
- Political and economic based prison systems.
- Torture.
- Wars of aggression.
- Spying on our own people.
- Freedoms stripped away unless you were already in an established position of power.
- Propaganda media.
- Secrets, secrets, secrets.
- Censorship.
- Not taking care of the needs of the people while an elite class skims everything worth skimming.
- Diminishing rights over time.
The list goes and on....
To be fair: our elites are way better taken care of than their elites...
Software patents have been around for almost 30 years. You say they've destroyed innovation - do you have any evidence? I think computers have advanced pretty far since the 80s.
Straw man. The issue is whether 'software' has advanced, not "computers".
Computer hardware is not protected by software patents. Computer hardware is protected by patents on physical devices and physical processes.
The majority of profound changes to computing over the past 30 years have been in HARDWARE and in public software that is not covered by patents.
Your argument that "computers have advanced pretty far" is misleading and irrelevant.
I would not claim software patents have "destroyed innovation" but the onus for proving that software patents are justified is on the party who is making that claim. If you are merely claiming that software patents are LAWFUL, then perhaps you are correct, but if you are claiming software patents actually ENCOURAGE software inventions, you have no evidence and you need to provide it.
Patents are a limitation to freedom of expression and thus every single patent must be justifiable and every single law granting patents must be justifiable on the basis that it actually truly encourages the advancement of the art and knowledge into the public sphere and not merely the enrichment of private pockets.
You could probably find many software developers, myself included, who would say that software patents have done absolutely NOTHING to encourage us in this art.
The best evidence in favor of software patents would be if the vast majority of software writers (the people who actually practice the art), come forward and ask the state to grant us such monopoly rights. But it was not us who asked. Who are the famous computer scientists who made the most significant contributions to this field who have claimed it was patent law that encouraged them to invent software?
To lay people it hardly matters whether or not there are patents on certain technology. Patents are intended to encourage the CREATORS by giving us incentives. But software patents are shackles on us as well. The creators who are the ones who are advancing the art, are the ones who should be asked, not patent trolls, not patent lawyers. The purpose of patents is NOT so that anybody can make money. The purpose is to advance the art. The artists are the ones who know best what assistance the government can give (if any) to this objective.
PS: for the record, I'm in favor of copyright over software. (but limited to 14 years or something like that -- not the current absurd term of 70 years after death).
Can we half beat them up, then? Concluding that 1+1=2 because it rained on Saturday is not logical and a good clip round the lughole might actually help, even though the conclusion is indeed correct.
the part that I disagreed with was not necessary to reach your conclusion. We can disagree whether it rained on saturday and still both agree that the ground was wet.
But since you must know, the part I disagreed with was your statement that the net worth of a country is a meaningless concept. It *is* possible to converge on a meaningful definition/value for that concept. The value may not mean what it seems to mean to the lay person, but it is not meaningless.
if you looked at all of the property under the authority and jurisdiction of a specific state, then the sum of the "values" of all that property gives you a net worth for the entire state. And the previous poster was correct in that printing money would not increase this.
of course its is impossible to get the right answer, because you can't actually sell a country because nobody owns it.. however you can pretend. thats mostly what money is anyway.
none of that had anything to do with what you said about military spending.
The mistake you're making is arguing that military spending should be cut because it's a waste of tax money. However, there is no operational connection between tax money and any soft of spending. The correct argument is that government should not be pushing so much of the productive capacity of the country to military purposes. This is a political decision and has nothing to do with taxes.
I was going to dispute some of the statements you made about money but then you ended up with the correct conclusion anyway... so I just thought I'd end up saying your conclusion is correct.
In driving school they specifically pointed out that sneezing can cause a driver to lose focus for up to 15 seconds (or was it 5?), so if we feel we might need to sneeze we should slow down and make sure there is plenty of space in front of us and that it is safe to sneeze.
Now, I didn't go to college, or take any math past Algebra in high school, but I'm pretty sure 23 > 1.8.
Mod this dude up!
Except that it is fairly easy to demonstrate that no teapot is orbiting anywhere in the solar system. Everything that orbits must at some point be visible from Earth except for an object ~180 degrees out of phase in Earth's own orbit, and a satellite sent out of the plane of the elliptical could cover that situation. An optical telescope of sufficient power is all that's required to observe the solar system for the longest conceivable orbital period of a satellite and demonstrate that every visible object is not, according to some quantitative measurement, a teapot.
This sort of systematic searching for the presence or absence of an object is precisely what the Higgs Boson experiments are doing.
You are only talking about visible teapots. Teapots could be hiding behind objects other than the sun, and teapots could be located anyplace where you aren't pointing your telescope at a given instant. There could be a teapot in orbit behind your head this instant.
The fact that something is visible at "Some point" is not sufficient. It must be visible at some point when the telescope is actually pointing in the right direction and nothing else must be obstructing line of sight.
So you would need an infinite number of telescopes of sufficient power pointing in all directions at ALL times over the duration of the longest conceivable period of the orbits of ALL satellites in the solar system (i.e. the amount of time it takes for the entire solar system to get from state X back into State X -- which is essentially an infinite amount of time), in order to rule out that there is no teapot in orbit anywhere in the solar system.
But even that only proves there was no teapot that STAYED in orbit the entire time.
Two teapots might be in orbit right now behind jupiter, but might experience a collision with each other both be deflected into jupiter's atmosphere and burn up without ever being visible from earth again, So you could never prove there was no teapot. But you don't have an infinite number of telescopes so you can't even prove that much.
For all you can be certain of, there are thousands of orbiting teapots in the solar system and we simply haven't found any yet.
And in the great tradition of agnostics everywhere, I would posit that there is exactly a 50% chance that there are thousands of teapots in orbit in the solar system.
This really does just sound like headline grabbing nonsense; every such story makes me lose a little more respect for them. Focus on doing good works, not wasting donations discussing rubbish like this.
thats what they do. This story is almost completely made up. Maybe you should not believe everything you read.
Someone from Red Cross suggested game designers should consider implementing war crimes IN THE GAME. i.e. the GAME punishes you IN GAME for violating the law. This is just like getting a star in grand theft auto for killing a prostitute in front of a cop. It doesn't mean a real cop shows up at your door and arrests you.
Missions could easily be designed such that capturing surrendering enemy units is a possibility. most games simply cause the enemy AI to fight to the death or to run away, catch its breath and re-attack you, which is unrealistic.
I have no problem with a war game giving me rules of engagement, and then for penalizing me IN GAME for violating those. Even board games such as Supremacy have some concepts of human rights, and a Marshal who can conquer the world without using nukes or being nuked is considered the best possible kind of victory.
that actually sounds fun. Some of us are annoyed at finishing a game and seeing that we've single handedly killed 1700 people. It is ABSURD.
the computer could fast forward to within 1000 seconds (random interval) of when something interesting is about to happen, so players can get a feeling for what its like to be bored without literally being bored for 10 hours.
a standoff where it takes 30 minutes to take out 1 guy, sounds awesome! in games like final fantasy or god of war, there are boss fights that can easily take an hour to complete (usually by dying and restarting over and over) , so its not unheard of.
So.. in any case... there are some people like me who want hard-core simulation.
It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.
What is the difference?
If someone told me they pray to the tooth fairy, I'd smile and hope that it brings them peace and happiness. There are a lot of atheists here that could use a deity to teach them not to be an asshole.
what if it makes them miserable? would that make the tooth fairy less real?
A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?
To be fair, using mathematical models on stuff we can see and measure seems a reasonable idea as opposed to inventing an invisible, incorporeal, magical material that we have no direct evidence even exists in order to compensate for our lack of understanding in how the Universe moves.
So reasonable in fact, it's a wonder no one has done it before, or maybe they have and they are keeping it a secret! .... it must be a government conspiracy!
Incidentally, this is coming from an Amazon Prime customer. I buy almost everything off of Amazon these days, with one exception: books. For that I have my Nook, which I use mainly because it reads PDFs too.
Except that the Kindle also reads PDFs too.
thermal plants have better efficiency than explosion engines in car.
Although the thermal plant might have more efficiency, depending on the level of NIMBY, the transmission losses and the overhead of maintaining base-load for the electric grid may make the actual net efficiency closer than anyone may like... Sadly, reality is a must-satisfy condition in this analysis...
And driving massive tanker trucks full of gasoline all over the the country, tearing up roads, to deliver fuel to gas stations is efficient?
"Red" is a much trickier concept. Even if you have a fMRI hooked up to your visual cortex and can demonstrate you're processing pure 700nm light in exactly the same fashion as your buddy, you have no idea if his experience of red is the same as yours.
Almost no one uses 'red' as to mean the experience of viewing 700 nm light. And words obtain meaning from the way they are used by speakers.
They mean the surface of the car has certain visual qualities (i.e. it reflects the same color as a tomato, or cherry). They are attempting to describe physical properties of the surface without understanding how light works.
We teach children color entirely by reference to physical examples of the color. This is the only way we teach children colors. We point at physical objects and say "Red" and then repeat this over a variety of objects until the chid understands the physical property we are referring to (as opposed to the shape of the object or size).
Interior decorators use color swatches because we need CONCRETE examples to describe color.
In lay-english, color refers to an object's physical properties. (regardless of the fact that science has subsequently determined that these physical properties are emergent, and depend on the object, the ambient light, and the structure of the observers retina).
Something isn't abstract simply because the speaker doesn't understand how it works. It is based on whether or not it is based on concrete examples.
I would argue that "color" is an abstract concept. "red" is a concrete example of a color. 'Red' it is defined by reference to real physical objects which we agree to call "red". Without those concrete examples of 'red', then the word is utterly meaningless.
Lets invent a new color called 'X-Ray'. This is the color of x-rays that you can't see but it is what x-rays look like to super-man when he uses his x-ray vision. I have just created an abstract color. Contrast this with 'red'.
Plenty of things have no physical reality: like abstract concepts. There is no physical quantity of "good" or "evil", for example. There's not even a physical quantity of "red" (not counting the unrelated color charge from QED). There are physical properties that make things red, but "redness" is not by itself physical.
Red is in principle, observable, measurable and quantifiable and hence it is physical.
All red objects definitely share certain physical qualities that all non-red objects lack, and whatever those qualities are, those are the qualities towards which the word 'red' refers.
I agree about 'good' and 'evil'. there are no physical qualities that all good things can be said to possess which are distinct from non-good things.
Don't forget the consumers that turn a blind eye and focus on whatever is cheapest. There's plenty of blame to go around.
That said, it would be nice if extremely profitable companies like Apple could push standards and enforce them. They have the leverage. It would also make for good marketing.
Sadly marketing is the ONLY legal justification that companies like Apple can push standards and enforce them. Anything a corporation does must legally be for the purpose of boosting profit. The directors have a legal duty only to boost shareholder's bottom line to the maximum possible extent allowed by law, and nothing else.
Will people pay 50% more for actually clean products if cheap polluting alternatives are available that have pictures of trees and flowers on the box?
Consumers do not have time to research every single purchase. it is not cost effective. the government must step in.
Why were the radiation levels not a purchasing requirement?
The point is that ANY ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer, and therefore, statistically speaking, over a large population these scanners WILL kill people, its just a matter of how many lives are we willing to sacrifice for the facade of security.