When I drive that car, the police see a young Spanish guy in a Honda Civic with after-market rims, and typically follow me for a while, sometimes even until I'm out of their jurisdiction (I cross counties on my way too and from work every day). When I drive my other car, which is a plain Ford Focus, police never pay any mind to me what-so-ever. They clearly profile, no matter how much they try to deny it.
They profile because they 1) are rational, and 2) have limited resources.
Some classes and races are far more likely to be bad guys than other classes and races. I'm sorry that you've been swept up in a category that you don't justifiably belong in... but it's not about you, or about *any* individual. It's about the numbers.
Would you rather they devoted their attention equally between all peoples, without regard for the statistical likelihood that the person is worth watching?
This strikes me as a way to further estrange people from each other by allowing them to filter out any dissenting views before they should be forced to confront them. Beyond being a dumb idea, it's socially harmful.
It will also be very popular. People dislike cognitive dissonance more than almost everything else.
That includes you and I. There is so much information out there, each of us has to make do with a miniscule slice of it. That means that even the most accurate and rational worldviews are still going to be full of errors, oversights, and conflicts with the rest of the world.
When two people can afford $10 and $100 respectively, the price is $100, which maximizes profit, instead of $10, which maximizes the number of people being helped.
In the long run, the maximization of profit maximizes the number of new treatments developed, which eventually maximizes everyone's health. Forcing the drug in this example to be sold for $10 is akin to ripping boards off your house in order to stoke up the fireplace. In the short run it warms up those who are shivering, but in the long run you'll soon have no house.
If you lack the courage to forego the short run, then you should admit to being a sentimentalist, and get out of the economics pontification business.
How do you decide who to fuck with, and in what order? Please don't say oil.
You decide by asking yourself these two questions:
1. Are they a credible threat to our safety?
2. Can they be valuable to us in some way?
It is difficult to justify operating on anything other than these two guiding principles.
Item 2 is where oil becomes relevant. Oil sitting in the ground belongs to nobody, because it isn't even remotely usable until it has been discovered and recovered. (No, you don't own it just because you were born nearby!) In the ground it's a wasted resource, wasted life, a missed opportunity. If a country is sitting atop an oil deposit, we can develop it, which profits everyone -- most importantly us.
Developing it may require us to make improvements in the country's government first, though, to render it at least capable of honoring international agreements. See also: the seizure (er, "nationalization") of our many oilfields in Arab countries.
So far out of 4500 images, I found exactly zero images that I think anyone would give a crap about. I'm not even sure why the vast majority of them are even bothered marking private; nobody would care about them at all.
It is done for the same reason women, including me, enjoy fretting about rape: they're flattering themselves.
One thing the internet's sheer size teaches you: you are just another nobody, who'd have to dig deep to find some trait that is simultaneously unique and valuable. On the one hand this is a Good Thing, because it blasts from Earth forever the notion that one might be a freak in some way. On the other hand, now we have to struggle to differentiate ourselves, even in our own minds.
Austrailia is a fraction above the US right now but recent events there indicate they are likely to fall faster than the US. And they already have more gun control tnan this NRA member would be able to put up with.
Funny you should mention the connection between Leftists and gun-control. We take for granted that the two will be found together... but why?
I finally figured it out. Guns represent individual moral judgment. They represent one person making a decision that, according to Leftist ideology (Plato->Descartes->Hume->Kant->Hegel->Marx) only a collective can make.
Or maybe they've realized (but cannot openly declare) that blacks + guns = bad. So in true egalitarian fashion, we've got to take them away from everyone.
That misinformation, as far as I know, comes from a misunderstanding of a passage in the Book of Mormon which describes a curse under which the Lamanites fell. The curse was losing the privilege to have the priesthood among them. The darker skin which they recieved at that point in time was simply a mark so the Nephites would be able to recognize them and avoid mixing with them (similar to the Jews being told not to intermarry with those of other faiths). Later, when the two peoples mixed freely, the curse (lack of priesthood) was removed, but the dark skin was not.
The problem is that the aforementioned misunderstanding is held by Mormons. I spent 16 years and one, 1974-1990, and it was specifically taught to me that blacks are marked for their iniquity.
Mormon leaders in the past did often reinforce the idea, like Peterson in 1954:
Think of the Negro, [prohibited from holding the Mormon] Priesthood. Are we prejudiced, against him? Unjustly, sometimes we're accused of having such a prejudice. But what does the mercy of God have for him? This Negro, who in the pre-existence life lived the type of life which justified the Lord in sending him to the earth in the lineage of Cain with a black skin, and possibly being born in darkest Africa - if that Negro is willing when he hears the gospel to accept it, he may have many of the blessings of the gospel. In spite of all he did in the pre-existent life, the Lord is willing, if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost.
...and you've already distanced yourself from McConkie, who railed thus in 1966:
"Negroes in this life are denied the Priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. (Abraham 1:20-27.) The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them... negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow therefrom, but this inequality is not of man's origin. It is the Lord's doing, is based on his eternal laws of justice, and grows out of the lack of Spiritual valiance of those concerned in their first estate."
Note that the Book of Abraham was later hilariously falsified.
McConkie's book may be "widely known to contain many inaccuracies", as you say, but my own experience in Mormon circles does not bear this out. Has the Mormon church issued any official repudiation of McConkie's screed?
At least one scholar (White, 1980) has determined that the Mormons' original motivation for the ban was to distance their already-persecuted organization from the political hot-button issue at the time: freed slaves integrating into Caucasian society.
And speaking of motivations, you've omitted the motivation for the 1978 declaration: the opening of the Sao Paulo temple, which was destined to be unprofitable if browns were kept out. (There was also pressure from the NAACP, and boycotts of Mormon-owned businesses.) Three years later, in 1981, McConkie explained himself:
"Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world."
I wonder how McConkie knows that he is now blessed with light and knowledge, since he spent most of his life being (by his own admission) 180 degrees wrong yet fancying himself to be "God-breathed".
References:
McConkie, B. (1966) Mormon Doctrine, pp. 527-528.
McConkie, B. (1981) New Revelation on Priesthood. Priesthood, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, pp.126-137.
Peterson, M. (1954). Race Problems As They Affect The
Even if it's segregated "art for geeks" it may not really be art. Of course, some critics may say that it was never art to begin with. Art is not simply something that someone made that you like to look at/listen to/read/etc. Part of it is the creative process that made the art that makes that art worth taking in and thinking about.
art: n. something made by an artist.
artist: n. someone who makes art.
I'm only half joking.
You're definitely on the right track when you say that art is neither "out there" (a thing we view to achieve a desirable mental state) nor "in here" (a thing we made to be viewed). It must be both. The same also true generally, for all concepts: 'tableness' is neither "out there" (inherent in the table ala Plato's forms) nor "in here" (self-referential mental constructs ala the Skeptics). To be true, meaningful, and useful, they must be both.
With the US economy decelerating and the loss of confidence in the US dollar, the US can't afford to stop trading with China. This move would essentially crash the global economy, and the US has the most to lose due to its massive foreign debt.
That's backwards. The US has the least to lose, because a debt represents a good that we consumed but have not yet paid for. The first order of business in an economic collapse is to freeze or otherwise abate all foreign debts.
Either that, or we would just fail to make the payments. That would crash the value of all foreign debts, and so the holders would be lucky to get ten cents on the dollar by selling their paper to speculators (who are betting that we'll pull out of it).
This is why China dearly wants to avoid harming our economy. When somebody owes you an entire year of their salary, and is so far making payments on time, you don't knock them out of a job!
Indeed, in the long run, US foreign debts guarantee that other countries align their interests with our own, and look out for our well-being as one would keep an eye on one's best milk cow.
3) Amazon just downloads the stuff to your hard drive. It feels just like a purchase.
Except for the part about the watermarking. That's definitely different from a regular purchase... at least, until everything in the store has an RFID tag.
If an hypothetical spaceship entered the [antimatter] cloud, I don't know if it will be changed into pure energy almost instantly or not (the violent reaction at the surface of the hull will probably push back the antimatter cloud, and you need the same mass of antimatter to totally disintegrate the introduced matter) but it will be like putting it into a fusion reactor so the crew would die very fast anyway.
Indeed. This issue is hush-hush, but antimatter is the only thing a General Products hull isn't proof against.
So for point 2, you want encrypted wi-fi for your home systems and open unencrypted wi-fi for guests. Is that even possible without two separate access points?
Some of the newer APs have it built-in. Or you can do it by cascading two older, cheaper APs, like this.
Part of the problem is that, for some reason, it is seen as somehow more acceptable, perhaps even noble to cheat for the sake of one's company.
I'll bet you we see a lot more of this in the future, because internationalization has introduced an element of nationalism into the competitions between companies. Nationalism enables our tribalist ability to slaughter (i.e. rip off) any human who is from a different tribe. Wow will it be nice when genetic engineering allows us to remove the tribalism gene.
Also, the middle-class is heavily involved in the stock market now, and companies are responding by becoming increasingly short-sighted. Short-sightedness means cutting corners and selling out the long run, as we know.
Or, even better, use an updated HOSTS file which has entries to block malicious sites: (on last check, this blocked over 16,000 addresses!): http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.zip
Yes, that HOSTS file totally rocks. But be sure to review the readme file. The massive size of the file makes it sometimes necessary to disable the "DNS Client" service on Windows 2000, XP, and newer.
It's just not a useful avenue for speculation. This guy brings nothing new to the table except the kinda crap the ID people bring..."Hey, if the universe was a simulation, it would explain why everything tastes like chicken!" Just because there is no currently workable theory for some occurrence, there is no reason to invent a wild explanation that just makes it go away.
I would not be surprised at all to learn that reality is a simulation. Many of my brethren seem to be bots, executing fairly simple scripts and never really introspecting.
They were probably put here, by me or whoever, to make the game more interesting. (We'd have to temporarily forget that it was a game in order to keep it fun.) Indeed, any sufficiently advanced intelligence is going to achieve such a level of safety, comfort, and (eventually) immortality, that they will then need to invest a simulated world in which they can once again experience peril, uncertainty, risk, and death.
What would be better to do would be to actually examine what is being processed and to grant/deny based on its merits - but that would take way more $dollars
That means spending all the research effort ($thousands?) for each patent... and even then there is no guarantee that the examiners will find everything. And what happens when the inventor wants to dispute the examiner's findings? That is exactly what patent courts are for. Your proposal therefore implies that we run potentially every patent through the court system, rather than (as we do currently) only the small minority of patents that are actually challenged.
Yes, that would cut down on the amount of patent trolling -- on the amount of companies using patents to intimidate people who can't afford to take them to court. There is a certain social benefit to that, for sure... but there is also the great up-front cost I already described, which in any case is no guarantee that the relevant prior art would actually be found.
To me this is a direct result of a purely capitalistic approach - the worship of the Dollar.
"The worship of the Dollar" is a mealy-mouthed way of describing our quest for efficiency. It would be more honest for you to complain that we are sacrificing long-term efficiency (via a full prior art search upon filing) in order to gain short-term efficiency (quick patent approval, and only investigate those patents that come under fire).
It is not obvious that we should pay more now to gain more later. It might be, but it might not. When TVM is included in these calculations, long-term gains often shrivel up.
I'm afraid this is just how things go here in Africa, and as someone else pointed out, why it'll probably remain 3rd-world indefinitely. Try give a hand to Africa, and it will demand an arm, and then try kill you for not giving the entire arm. Mod me whatever, but I've lived here all my life and seen this kind of thing over and over, facts are just facts, I wouldn't expect someone who hasn't lived here to get it.
In our world there are two ways to get things: make it or take it.
Western culture blossomed once legal systems arose to reward those who "make it" and variously punish those who "take it". Meanwhile African culture, or perhaps African genetics, seems optimized for "take it".
Take, for example, the oft-cited 'I dreamt that I showed up to work/school/whatever naked/wearing only underwear.' Showing up to work naked isn't actually the real problem the brain is trying work out. The real problem is that the person is a afraid of being unprepared or being caught in an embarassing situation. They are usually insecure about something or other when they have dreams like this. This is the brain trying say "Hey, you! You're insecure about this or that, what are you doing to fix that?"
Or maybe your hands simply felt your own unclothed body in your sleep, and your mind integrated that data into your dream, the same way it integrates (for a brief period) the sound of your alarm clock. I wonder what the "Dreamer's Dictionary" says about the appearance of razors?;)
Dream interpretation, meanwhile, is not so much about interpretation of our dreams; the real intrigue comes from interpreting our interpretations of our dreams. Dream interpretation itself is a rorschach, in the same way that peoples' Halloween costumes are projections of what they wish they could be.
And what's up with the mercury? My buddy in the local Fire Dept. hazmat squad told me that my house should have been evacuated and a hazmat clean-up crew sent in after I dropped a CF bulb and broke it inside the house...
He is "zero extrapolationg", like the EPA does. If a 100-gram dose kills 100% of those exposed, then a 1-gram dose kills 1% of those exposed, right? Right?
Just don't apply the same logic to any politically fashionable substances, like vitamin A, medical x-rays, iron, oxygen, water . . .
If you don't know if something is illegal you won't know if it's illegal if you don't ask a law enforcement agency if it is or not. It's fucking common sense.
You are absolutely right about the trees. You haven't yet seen the forest, though.
The forest is this: there are unconscionable laws on the books. They are laws which violate our rights -- which means that is wrong to ever enforce them against someone. If you come across a stranger who is violating such a law, reporting him to authorities who will then enforce such a law makes you a party to a very serious Wrong.
Or more generally: do you understand the difference between moral and legal? Do you, in other words, understand the crucial idea of personally judging the law before you hurl it at your brethren?
Getting back to the example at hand... Laws against teen porn are objectionable. Laws against possession of child porn are even more iffy. The guy who brought in the computer had teen porn. Are you so certain of anti-porn laws that you're willing to fark up the life of someone who is almost certainly harmless?
we keep our wireless router open, default passwords, broadcast ssid, no encryption, 50 leases, no MAC filtering, nothing. I know it sounds bad, but we figure that if we ever got a notice from one of these organizations that we could simply say that there's no way to know who downloaded these things, our wireless is open! We have neighbors and other people in our DHCP client list and it actually makes me feel more secure (I manage my actual security at my computer, not at the gateway) since I feel like it would make for a good defense.
You can add a second wireless router, locked down, cascaded through the open router. Your own machines (i.e. your own home network) can then remain secure, yet your internet connection is still anonymously shared. Details here.
Spyware must have seemed like a perfect solution: it doesn't just "do something" about the pirates, it accomplishes a long-standing goal of seizing greater control of the medium. It is not at all about "IP rights"; it's about power -- in this case, about ripping power out of the users' hands.
There are only three basic goals that humans pursue:
pride,
power (aka money), and
pussy
And deep down in our genes, the first two are little more than a means to the third. ('Novelty' may be in there too, but probably not at the same urgency level as the others.)
A corporation is a social pattern that focuses these motives from many people into one direction. It reinforces and excuses the baser ways of obtaining these things, making both perpetrators and victims faceless... but the motives are the same.
Great post. If I had mod points, I'd mod you 'insightful', but since I don't, I'm going to give you a snarky reply instead...
A lot of the "modern" forms of conflict have moved to much more political and commercial ground. Emerging country don't long anymore to conquest foreign land, only to capture their markets.
They probably long to do both, or some hybrid of the two as Britain once did to the American colonies. They will settle for merely capturing others' markets because of all the big militaries that are out there willing to resist them.
I don't think many Americans are worried about being invaded by foreign armies.
And why aren't they, exactly?
Peace and security are aberrations in the history of our species. How, then, has America achieved both? Why are the barbarians currently afraid to bang on our gate?
The world complains that America has a warlike, unpredictable leader. That, I submit, is the optimal perception for the predatory world of humans to have about one's country. It's the very cheapest way to keep the thugs restrained.
Slashdot Mirror
They profile because they 1) are rational, and 2) have limited resources.
Some classes and races are far more likely to be bad guys than other classes and races. I'm sorry that you've been swept up in a category that you don't justifiably belong in... but it's not about you, or about *any* individual. It's about the numbers.
Would you rather they devoted their attention equally between all peoples, without regard for the statistical likelihood that the person is worth watching?
It will also be very popular. People dislike cognitive dissonance more than almost everything else.
That includes you and I. There is so much information out there, each of us has to make do with a miniscule slice of it. That means that even the most accurate and rational worldviews are still going to be full of errors, oversights, and conflicts with the rest of the world.
In the long run, the maximization of profit maximizes the number of new treatments developed, which eventually maximizes everyone's health. Forcing the drug in this example to be sold for $10 is akin to ripping boards off your house in order to stoke up the fireplace. In the short run it warms up those who are shivering, but in the long run you'll soon have no house.
If you lack the courage to forego the short run, then you should admit to being a sentimentalist, and get out of the economics pontification business.
You decide by asking yourself these two questions:
1. Are they a credible threat to our safety?
2. Can they be valuable to us in some way?
It is difficult to justify operating on anything other than these two guiding principles.
Item 2 is where oil becomes relevant. Oil sitting in the ground belongs to nobody, because it isn't even remotely usable until it has been discovered and recovered. (No, you don't own it just because you were born nearby!) In the ground it's a wasted resource, wasted life, a missed opportunity. If a country is sitting atop an oil deposit, we can develop it, which profits everyone -- most importantly us.
Developing it may require us to make improvements in the country's government first, though, to render it at least capable of honoring international agreements. See also: the seizure (er, "nationalization") of our many oilfields in Arab countries.
It is done for the same reason women, including me, enjoy fretting about rape: they're flattering themselves.
One thing the internet's sheer size teaches you: you are just another nobody, who'd have to dig deep to find some trait that is simultaneously unique and valuable. On the one hand this is a Good Thing, because it blasts from Earth forever the notion that one might be a freak in some way. On the other hand, now we have to struggle to differentiate ourselves, even in our own minds.
Funny you should mention the connection between Leftists and gun-control. We take for granted that the two will be found together... but why?
I finally figured it out. Guns represent individual moral judgment. They represent one person making a decision that, according to Leftist ideology (Plato->Descartes->Hume->Kant->Hegel->Marx) only a collective can make.
Or maybe they've realized (but cannot openly declare) that blacks + guns = bad. So in true egalitarian fashion, we've got to take them away from everyone.
The problem is that the aforementioned misunderstanding is held by Mormons. I spent 16 years and one, 1974-1990, and it was specifically taught to me that blacks are marked for their iniquity.
Mormon leaders in the past did often reinforce the idea, like Peterson in 1954:
...and you've already distanced yourself from McConkie, who railed thus in 1966:
Note that the Book of Abraham was later hilariously falsified.
McConkie's book may be "widely known to contain many inaccuracies", as you say, but my own experience in Mormon circles does not bear this out. Has the Mormon church issued any official repudiation of McConkie's screed?
At least one scholar (White, 1980) has determined that the Mormons' original motivation for the ban was to distance their already-persecuted organization from the political hot-button issue at the time: freed slaves integrating into Caucasian society.
And speaking of motivations, you've omitted the motivation for the 1978 declaration: the opening of the Sao Paulo temple, which was destined to be unprofitable if browns were kept out. (There was also pressure from the NAACP, and boycotts of Mormon-owned businesses.) Three years later, in 1981, McConkie explained himself:
I wonder how McConkie knows that he is now blessed with light and knowledge, since he spent most of his life being (by his own admission) 180 degrees wrong yet fancying himself to be "God-breathed".
References:
McConkie, B. (1966) Mormon Doctrine, pp. 527-528.
McConkie, B. (1981) New Revelation on Priesthood. Priesthood, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, pp.126-137.
Peterson, M. (1954). Race Problems As They Affect The
art: n. something made by an artist.
artist: n. someone who makes art.
I'm only half joking.
You're definitely on the right track when you say that art is neither "out there" (a thing we view to achieve a desirable mental state) nor "in here" (a thing we made to be viewed). It must be both. The same also true generally, for all concepts: 'tableness' is neither "out there" (inherent in the table ala Plato's forms) nor "in here" (self-referential mental constructs ala the Skeptics). To be true, meaningful, and useful, they must be both.
That's backwards. The US has the least to lose, because a debt represents a good that we consumed but have not yet paid for. The first order of business in an economic collapse is to freeze or otherwise abate all foreign debts.
Either that, or we would just fail to make the payments. That would crash the value of all foreign debts, and so the holders would be lucky to get ten cents on the dollar by selling their paper to speculators (who are betting that we'll pull out of it).
This is why China dearly wants to avoid harming our economy. When somebody owes you an entire year of their salary, and is so far making payments on time, you don't knock them out of a job!
Indeed, in the long run, US foreign debts guarantee that other countries align their interests with our own, and look out for our well-being as one would keep an eye on one's best milk cow.
Except for the part about the watermarking. That's definitely different from a regular purchase... at least, until everything in the store has an RFID tag.
Indeed. This issue is hush-hush, but antimatter is the only thing a General Products hull isn't proof against.
Some of the newer APs have it built-in. Or you can do it by cascading two older, cheaper APs, like this.
I'll bet you we see a lot more of this in the future, because internationalization has introduced an element of nationalism into the competitions between companies. Nationalism enables our tribalist ability to slaughter (i.e. rip off) any human who is from a different tribe. Wow will it be nice when genetic engineering allows us to remove the tribalism gene.
Also, the middle-class is heavily involved in the stock market now, and companies are responding by becoming increasingly short-sighted. Short-sightedness means cutting corners and selling out the long run, as we know.
Yes, that HOSTS file totally rocks. But be sure to review the readme file. The massive size of the file makes it sometimes necessary to disable the "DNS Client" service on Windows 2000, XP, and newer.
I would not be surprised at all to learn that reality is a simulation. Many of my brethren seem to be bots, executing fairly simple scripts and never really introspecting.
They were probably put here, by me or whoever, to make the game more interesting. (We'd have to temporarily forget that it was a game in order to keep it fun.) Indeed, any sufficiently advanced intelligence is going to achieve such a level of safety, comfort, and (eventually) immortality, that they will then need to invest a simulated world in which they can once again experience peril, uncertainty, risk, and death.
That means spending all the research effort ($thousands?) for each patent... and even then there is no guarantee that the examiners will find everything. And what happens when the inventor wants to dispute the examiner's findings? That is exactly what patent courts are for. Your proposal therefore implies that we run potentially every patent through the court system, rather than (as we do currently) only the small minority of patents that are actually challenged.
Yes, that would cut down on the amount of patent trolling -- on the amount of companies using patents to intimidate people who can't afford to take them to court. There is a certain social benefit to that, for sure... but there is also the great up-front cost I already described, which in any case is no guarantee that the relevant prior art would actually be found.
"The worship of the Dollar" is a mealy-mouthed way of describing our quest for efficiency. It would be more honest for you to complain that we are sacrificing long-term efficiency (via a full prior art search upon filing) in order to gain short-term efficiency (quick patent approval, and only investigate those patents that come under fire).
It is not obvious that we should pay more now to gain more later. It might be, but it might not. When TVM is included in these calculations, long-term gains often shrivel up.
I'm undone. What an excellent post. You are *so* friended. :)
In our world there are two ways to get things: make it or take it.
Western culture blossomed once legal systems arose to reward those who "make it" and variously punish those who "take it". Meanwhile African culture, or perhaps African genetics, seems optimized for "take it".
Or maybe your hands simply felt your own unclothed body in your sleep, and your mind integrated that data into your dream, the same way it integrates (for a brief period) the sound of your alarm clock. I wonder what the "Dreamer's Dictionary" says about the appearance of razors? ;)
Dream interpretation, meanwhile, is not so much about interpretation of our dreams; the real intrigue comes from interpreting our interpretations of our dreams. Dream interpretation itself is a rorschach, in the same way that peoples' Halloween costumes are projections of what they wish they could be.
He is "zero extrapolationg", like the EPA does. If a 100-gram dose kills 100% of those exposed, then a 1-gram dose kills 1% of those exposed, right? Right?
Just don't apply the same logic to any politically fashionable substances, like vitamin A, medical x-rays, iron, oxygen, water . . .
You are absolutely right about the trees. You haven't yet seen the forest, though.
The forest is this: there are unconscionable laws on the books. They are laws which violate our rights -- which means that is wrong to ever enforce them against someone. If you come across a stranger who is violating such a law, reporting him to authorities who will then enforce such a law makes you a party to a very serious Wrong.
Or more generally: do you understand the difference between moral and legal? Do you, in other words, understand the crucial idea of personally judging the law before you hurl it at your brethren?
Getting back to the example at hand... Laws against teen porn are objectionable. Laws against possession of child porn are even more iffy. The guy who brought in the computer had teen porn. Are you so certain of anti-porn laws that you're willing to fark up the life of someone who is almost certainly harmless?
You can add a second wireless router, locked down, cascaded through the open router. Your own machines (i.e. your own home network) can then remain secure, yet your internet connection is still anonymously shared. Details here.
There are only three basic goals that humans pursue:
And deep down in our genes, the first two are little more than a means to the third. ('Novelty' may be in there too, but probably not at the same urgency level as the others.)
A corporation is a social pattern that focuses these motives from many people into one direction. It reinforces and excuses the baser ways of obtaining these things, making both perpetrators and victims faceless... but the motives are the same.
Great post. If I had mod points, I'd mod you 'insightful', but since I don't, I'm going to give you a snarky reply instead...
They probably long to do both, or some hybrid of the two as Britain once did to the American colonies. They will settle for merely capturing others' markets because of all the big militaries that are out there willing to resist them.
And why aren't they, exactly?
Peace and security are aberrations in the history of our species. How, then, has America achieved both? Why are the barbarians currently afraid to bang on our gate?
The world complains that America has a warlike, unpredictable leader. That, I submit, is the optimal perception for the predatory world of humans to have about one's country. It's the very cheapest way to keep the thugs restrained.