Nope. See the bill of rights. The government is specificially enjoined from regulating speech, religion, and the press, with only a few exceptions that are frequently and vigorously litigated.
No matter what anybody's constitution says, the very purpose of government is to defend individuals from force and fraud (fraud being a derivative of force). This is the only thing that everyone needs a government for. This is so because market mechanisms (i.e. freedom of association) cannot cope with force and fraud, short of open violence.
All other government activities are secondary, and usually optional, and for that reason usually inefficient compared to a market mechanism.
When speech constitutes fraud, for example a bogus spec sheet for a product being sold, then it automatically becomes the jurisdiction of the government.
It's entirely under your control whether you become an alcoholic. Any condition that you can 100% control entry into isn't a disease, it's a lifestyle choice.
All you're doing is shifting the uncertainty from the word 'addiction' to the word 'choice' (or 'control'). We are left still needing to explain why some people make repeated choices that damage their well-being.
To see for yourself how vacuous your usage of the word 'choice' is, consider: why would anyone choose such a lifestyle?
Free-will may be axiomatic but that doesn't mean we understand it. We don't, nobody does yet . . . and as long as choice is a mystery, so also is dyschoice (addiction et. al.).
The theory, proposed in the mid-1990s by biophysicist Luca Turin, suggests that electron tunneling initiates the smell signal being sent to the brain.
My name is Luca.
I live on the second floor.
I live upstairs from you.
Yes, I think you've seen me before.
If you smell something late at night
Some kind of molecule,
Some kind of quantum function;
Just don't ask me what it was,
Just don't ask me what it was,
Because I haven't published yet.
As quickly as you can, get in a position of supporting your own code when it goes out into the world onto customer machines. This will teach you a profoundly important set of convictions that CS professors -- having never done the aforementioned -- are clueless about:
Calls outside your own module (OS APIs, etc.) always fail, and so your code should always expect as much. You can tell a novice programmer's code because it makes SDK calls without checking the return codes.
Error messages should be in plain Enlish and contain programmer-level diagnostic information and suggest to the user the most likely cause so that he can maybe fix it himself:
bad: "Error: operation failed."
bad: "Error 0x8009000b during update!"
good: "Error: the mailslot update failed, probably because the mailbox is locked by another process; please contact technical support. (COM synchronize call returned 0x8009000b)"
Every low-quality error message equals ten calls to tech-support and probably two days of some support programmer's time and remaining hair pigmentation.
All of your programs should have a logger facility that can create round-the-clock logfiles for diagnosing those "It happens only at 3am, after it's been running 16 hours straight" problems.
Most programmers never acquire these convictions, because they never retain ownership of their code long enough to see the patterns that occur during field support. Hopefully you will be different... because honestly, in the long run it's easier to write supportable code than it is to have to check under your car for bombs every morning.
Wow, I wish I was clever enough to come up with stuff like this.
The author gets additional Cleverness Points for thinking to post the geonetric locations of the major geek sites (slashdot, digg, boingboing, etc.) in order to encourage those sites to repost links to the author's website.
Because the very existence of religion creates extremism, and if you want evidence of this then, well, you've got basically the whole of human existence to choose from. More moderate people like you perpetrate the myth that religion can be balanced and forward thinking and therefore religion is allowed to continue existing. In fact for this simple reason alone you are more dangerous than the extremists and however deluded they might be you are more so.
Yes, and the reason why is simple: religion is un-reason (and often anti-reason). Therefore, it obliterates the only common grounds that humans can find among each other.
In a world of reason, there are facts, evidence, and proof, with which we can (in principle) persuade each other to converge on a single, objective knowledge... and hence, there is no need to kill each other.
Without reason, it's just your feelings/assertion/faith/whim/tradition versus mine, and there is no mechanism for synchronizing the two databases... so, may the biggest club win.
The compulsiveness is just that, an incredibly strong compulsion to 'just check my messages'. Resisting that compulsion is almost as destructive as giving in- you have a really hard time giving your kids the attention they deserve, simply because your brain is focused on something else.
I know of what you speak.
One thing I've found that works well to tame the compulsion, is to wear one of those thick rubber-bands around your wrist. Whenever you feel the urge coming on, stretch the rubber-band and then let it snap back against your wrist. Hard. Over time, the urges will fade, or even disappear.
It also works for over-eating, obsessing about a lover or an Ex, procrastinating, any sort of habitoid brain malfunction.
Sun and others have been predicting this ("the network is the computer") for about a decade. Nothing significant has changed, except for the presence of broadband. It remains a stupid idea.
Do you recall that "the network is the computer" idea required ubiquitous broadband?
Only now, and over the next few years, is the idea even practical. So hold your horses, and watch.
Such are the consequences of giving human rights to corporations.
No, it's not. It's a consequence of the corporate veil and the general unwillingness to pierce it. The veil is considered sacred because it empowers the members of a corporation to take risky, productive steps in the face of possible backlash -- be it legal or financial.
The veil is further justifiable by realizing that corporations encourage sociopathic groupthink, by their very nature... and so their members are (to some degree) excused for doing so. I say "to some degree" because as the felony charges in this case demonstrate, members are not excused for the serious stuff.
Another way to look at it is to state the issue in your terms: the veil is the way that a corporation's members pool their human right to free association. The veil essentially announces to the world "If you wish to associate with any of our number, then you do agree to do so by treating us as collective and unseverable". The law gives force to this agreement by standardization, and this results in efficiency gains all around.
Of course it also results in sociopathic behavior... but that is a cost and it usually compares favorably to the yield.
"You know, it just occurred to me, we've never had a completely successful test of this equipment."
"I blame myself."
"So do I."
"Well, no sense worrying about it now. Switch me on."
...just because an asset is owned by some over-rich guy, doesn't mean that it is unproductive. Tomorrow we could send Bill Gates the title deed to all farmland in the Midwest, and that land would still continue to grow wheat for everyone's Raisin Bran.
And even if we then sent Bill Gates the profits from all those boxes of Raisin Bran, Bill would only have a pile of cash. Cash is not an asset; it represents assets, which usually remain in production somewhere.
No matter how rich Bill Gates gets, he still consumes very little, perhaps a half-million dollars a year in food, real estate, clothing, maids, butlers, and the like. Everything else that he owns is (if he is an even half-wise investor) still producing something elsewhere.
With an RFID-enabled credit card, the credit card company is the first line of defense against fraudulent usage. The customer is only secondarily responsible, and in any event does not lose any cash or interest. So, you can be certain that the security system and the implementation will be sound.
With an RFID-enabled ATM card, all of that is reversed. A fraud will cause the customer to lose his or her cash and interest... and the customer must then fight with the bank to get them back. The bank has only secondarily responsibility, and therefore only secondary incentive, to get the plan right and to maintain the implementation. It's like a config.rc file with the wrong default value: loss-paid-by = customer.
It's a given that few people in any organization (banks or otherwise) actually understand security, encryption, or the very pertinent issue of "identification versus authentication". But even if Chase or whoever has done their research, the incentives for protecting customers from atm fraud are inherently perverse.
Take care to maintain context here. This project is not about individual judgments of other individuals. This project operates on the macro level, directing limited resources where they are most likely to have the greatest benefit. Only after all the likelihoods have been maximized do we re-introduce individual attention and individual treatment. (How else would you apportion too few workers to too many cases?)
And don't worry, just because you're predictable, doesn't mean you don't have free will. You can always assert yourself and behave unpredictably, if you so will to. The point of this project is that most of the time, most of the people will not assert themselves... and this fact can help us allocate resources more efficiently.
It's like those AI rock-paper-scissors programs: you can focus your effort and behave randomly enough to trick the program, but as soon as you divert your attention, you fall back on your own internal rules, and become predictable, and the program starts kicking your ass.
It's about time that these arrogant jerks were accountable to someone other than the wall street analysts and to something other than the allmighty dollar.
Corporations are supposed to be sociopathic. They are supposed to put profit above all else.
If you work for one, you are obliged to understand this. Indeed, you are even compensated for working for a sociopath: you get a variety of benefits that are not given to employees of smaller companies. And it's remarkably easy to terminate this arrangement and never again have any dealings with them.
This reality is not entirely pleasant, sure, but then again it tends to do a good job (on a national scale) of adding resources + incentives = productivity.
The moral of the story, apparently, is: whenever someone utters the phrase "the allmighty dollar", they are usually bitching that others would not unprofitably support them.
Apart from that, why should everything you don't have a need for, need to become "a controlled substance"? I don't know about you, but I have no wish to live in a society where everything is regulated, over-regulated, and then regulated again. I'm for gun control, because guns are a big problem in todays society.
It must be nice to have a lifestyle, gender, social class, job location, and residential neighborhood such that you don't need a gun. Do you suppose that the rest of us enjoy the same oversafe status?
Someone should give this to Vladimir Putin and his FSS pals for Christmas. Just expressing my sentiment and not a true desire to see a wannabe dictator done in.
Hey, I'm as anxious as you are to see Putin finally recognized for the evil, scheming sociopath that he is. (He has to be one, in order to come to power in a quasi-statist bramble of a society.) However...
...wouldn't this have been the perfect way for the FSS or whoever to engineer his downfall, in favor of a hardliner?
So let's practice what we preach, and wait for the evidence to come in. Then, let's second- and third-guess how that evidence might've been engineered to frame somebody for framing somebody. Remember, we are dealing with spooks here. Three levels of misdirection is child's play to them.
It doesn't have to; he won't change his mind about us because we annoy him. What will get his attention is if the influential North Korean upper-classmen get pissed off at him over his policies.
The lower-class are just ballast. It's the upper-class that wields the most political power because Kim can't function without them and their thousands of separate fiefdoms. If those upper-classmen cease enjoying their lifestyle, then watch for a regime change or even a "popular uprising of the common man".
This is perilous. Our society has not yet resolved the problem of the internet's long memory. Most of our custom is built upon the now-obsolete idea that memory does not last long or spread very far. And so the birth of the Information Age has brought with it the personal catastrophes such as "Dog S*** Girl" and "Shemale Vids Guy" and that asshat Jason Fortuny. These are all examples of normal, limited outbreaks of personal information that turned into unjustified disasters for the affected persons, simply because the internet's memory is fast, broad, and permanent.
If everyone has a cellphone, and most cellphones have videocameras, and most of those videocameras are now linked up to YouTube, we'll see this memory problem greatly multiplied.
Of course that might be the antidote: put so much information out there about so many people, that it will no longer matter. It'll be a poor man's Friends of Privacy, which would be a Good Thing probably.
But I don't want to be one of the forerunners, having my personal foibles instantly broadcast all round the world, and googlable by every future employer, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc. This unholy marriage between YouTube and Verizon is fraught with peril.
"Let me go back and face the peril!"
"No, it's too perilous!"
The way I figure it, you can always put more clothes on/build more shelter if it gets cold. Harder to get more cool than "naked", though.
And what, pray tell, were you planning to eat?
Certainly we could build greenhouses, develop cold-resistant plants, set up hydroponics, and so forth, but is it feasible to do that on a worldwide scale?
There are also other ways to cool the Earth. We've only just gotten started on the problem. Consider the recent proposals to spray sunlight-blocking particles into the stratophere, the way that recent planet-cooling volcanoes did.
There's a bit of a problem with it though. There is actually little to no real evidence of patents being beneficial to the economical system. For any technological discipline.
Yes, little or no real evidence. Other than the whole economy as it stands today, with the recent decades of geometic growth -- unique in history -- in most sectors, including particularly the technological disciplines. If you insist that patents were irrelevant to that, you'll need some awfully compelling data.
Of course patents get abused, but patents are (at heart) an incentive system. Any argument against them must solve the daunting task of providing or proving an alternative incentive that works comparably well.
As well, consider that there are nearly eight million patents out there. What percent of them are acting as anti-competitive threats which a reasonable economist would object to? Whereas what percent of them are protecting past, current, and future research investments that bore fruit? If you insist that patents are more trouble than they're worth, you need to provide these numbers.
It depends on which you think is a greater threat:
global warming, which can only be stopped by decreasing atmospheric CO2, or
global cooling and the next ice age, which can only be stopped by increasing atmospheric CO2
Only one of those threats has occurred many times before, is certain to occur again, and is certain to wipe us out when vegetation falters. Guess which one?
It's not sociological theory, it's economic theory. It all becomes obvious when you realize (or should I say accept?) that sex is a service which women trade on the open market. The presence of prostitutes creates a free market for sex, which puts a competitive pressure on wives. Prostitutes drive down the "fair market value" of wife-provided sex, which in turn means that wives cannot drain as many resources (emotional, physical, financial, etc.) from their husbands as they otherwise might. This is the primary reason why women oppose prostitution.
Of course they say that their oppposition is out of "concern for the prostitutes' wellbeing", but not even they believe such a claim, when it is so obvious that the illegality is precisely what makes prostitution so squalid and dangerous.
As for academic research, bear in mind that this is a Politically Incorrect subject, because we all know that Marriage Is About True Love. Nobody likes it when you prod that particular cherished belief. But for a start, read Edlund and Korn's "Theory of Prostitution" paper, in which (among other things) they attempted to explain why prostitutes are paid so much per hour. They found that a prostitute's hourly rate is comparable and proportional to the values she is sacrificing by not marrying. The rest can be inferred, and (to my eye) directly observed.
I would like to see a study of the average cost of first-date-through-marriage courtship in a country which bans prostitution versus one which allows it (e.g. Netherlands). If I'm right, the total cost will be noticeably lower in places where prostitution lowers the value of the sex she bargains with.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter what anybody's constitution says, the very purpose of government is to defend individuals from force and fraud (fraud being a derivative of force). This is the only thing that everyone needs a government for. This is so because market mechanisms (i.e. freedom of association) cannot cope with force and fraud, short of open violence.
All other government activities are secondary, and usually optional, and for that reason usually inefficient compared to a market mechanism.
When speech constitutes fraud, for example a bogus spec sheet for a product being sold, then it automatically becomes the jurisdiction of the government.
All you're doing is shifting the uncertainty from the word 'addiction' to the word 'choice' (or 'control'). We are left still needing to explain why some people make repeated choices that damage their well-being.
To see for yourself how vacuous your usage of the word 'choice' is, consider: why would anyone choose such a lifestyle?
Free-will may be axiomatic but that doesn't mean we understand it. We don't, nobody does yet . . . and as long as choice is a mystery, so also is dyschoice (addiction et. al.).
My name is Luca.
I live on the second floor.
I live upstairs from you.
Yes, I think you've seen me before.
If you smell something late at night
Some kind of molecule,
Some kind of quantum function;
Just don't ask me what it was,
Just don't ask me what it was,
Because I haven't published yet.
As quickly as you can, get in a position of supporting your own code when it goes out into the world onto customer machines. This will teach you a profoundly important set of convictions that CS professors -- having never done the aforementioned -- are clueless about:
- bad: "Error: operation failed."
- bad: "Error 0x8009000b during update!"
- good: "Error: the mailslot update failed, probably because the mailbox is locked by another process; please contact technical support. (COM synchronize call returned 0x8009000b)"
Every low-quality error message equals ten calls to tech-support and probably two days of some support programmer's time and remaining hair pigmentation.Most programmers never acquire these convictions, because they never retain ownership of their code long enough to see the patterns that occur during field support. Hopefully you will be different... because honestly, in the long run it's easier to write supportable code than it is to have to check under your car for bombs every morning.
Wow, I wish I was clever enough to come up with stuff like this.
The author gets additional Cleverness Points for thinking to post the geonetric locations of the major geek sites (slashdot, digg, boingboing, etc.) in order to encourage those sites to repost links to the author's website.
Yes, and the reason why is simple: religion is un-reason (and often anti-reason). Therefore, it obliterates the only common grounds that humans can find among each other.
In a world of reason, there are facts, evidence, and proof, with which we can (in principle) persuade each other to converge on a single, objective knowledge... and hence, there is no need to kill each other.
Without reason, it's just your feelings/assertion/faith/whim/tradition versus mine, and there is no mechanism for synchronizing the two databases... so, may the biggest club win.
In Soviet Russia, lactose evolves tolerance for YOU!
I know of what you speak.
One thing I've found that works well to tame the compulsion, is to wear one of those thick rubber-bands around your wrist. Whenever you feel the urge coming on, stretch the rubber-band and then let it snap back against your wrist. Hard. Over time, the urges will fade, or even disappear.
It also works for over-eating, obsessing about a lover or an Ex, procrastinating, any sort of habitoid brain malfunction.
Do you recall that "the network is the computer" idea required ubiquitous broadband?
Only now, and over the next few years, is the idea even practical. So hold your horses, and watch.
No, it's not. It's a consequence of the corporate veil and the general unwillingness to pierce it. The veil is considered sacred because it empowers the members of a corporation to take risky, productive steps in the face of possible backlash -- be it legal or financial.
The veil is further justifiable by realizing that corporations encourage sociopathic groupthink, by their very nature... and so their members are (to some degree) excused for doing so. I say "to some degree" because as the felony charges in this case demonstrate, members are not excused for the serious stuff.
Another way to look at it is to state the issue in your terms: the veil is the way that a corporation's members pool their human right to free association. The veil essentially announces to the world "If you wish to associate with any of our number, then you do agree to do so by treating us as collective and unseverable". The law gives force to this agreement by standardization, and this results in efficiency gains all around.
Of course it also results in sociopathic behavior... but that is a cost and it usually compares favorably to the yield.
"You know, it just occurred to me, we've never had a completely successful test of this equipment."
"I blame myself."
"So do I."
"Well, no sense worrying about it now. Switch me on."
...just because an asset is owned by some over-rich guy, doesn't mean that it is unproductive. Tomorrow we could send Bill Gates the title deed to all farmland in the Midwest, and that land would still continue to grow wheat for everyone's Raisin Bran.
And even if we then sent Bill Gates the profits from all those boxes of Raisin Bran, Bill would only have a pile of cash. Cash is not an asset; it represents assets, which usually remain in production somewhere.
No matter how rich Bill Gates gets, he still consumes very little, perhaps a half-million dollars a year in food, real estate, clothing, maids, butlers, and the like. Everything else that he owns is (if he is an even half-wise investor) still producing something elsewhere.
With an RFID-enabled credit card, the credit card company is the first line of defense against fraudulent usage. The customer is only secondarily responsible, and in any event does not lose any cash or interest. So, you can be certain that the security system and the implementation will be sound.
With an RFID-enabled ATM card, all of that is reversed. A fraud will cause the customer to lose his or her cash and interest... and the customer must then fight with the bank to get them back. The bank has only secondarily responsibility, and therefore only secondary incentive, to get the plan right and to maintain the implementation. It's like a config.rc file with the wrong default value: loss-paid-by = customer.
It's a given that few people in any organization (banks or otherwise) actually understand security, encryption, or the very pertinent issue of "identification versus authentication". But even if Chase or whoever has done their research, the incentives for protecting customers from atm fraud are inherently perverse.
You win the thread.
Damnit, where are my mod points when I need them?!
Take care to maintain context here. This project is not about individual judgments of other individuals. This project operates on the macro level, directing limited resources where they are most likely to have the greatest benefit. Only after all the likelihoods have been maximized do we re-introduce individual attention and individual treatment. (How else would you apportion too few workers to too many cases?)
And don't worry, just because you're predictable, doesn't mean you don't have free will. You can always assert yourself and behave unpredictably, if you so will to. The point of this project is that most of the time, most of the people will not assert themselves... and this fact can help us allocate resources more efficiently.
It's like those AI rock-paper-scissors programs: you can focus your effort and behave randomly enough to trick the program, but as soon as you divert your attention, you fall back on your own internal rules, and become predictable, and the program starts kicking your ass.
Corporations are supposed to be sociopathic. They are supposed to put profit above all else.
If you work for one, you are obliged to understand this. Indeed, you are even compensated for working for a sociopath: you get a variety of benefits that are not given to employees of smaller companies. And it's remarkably easy to terminate this arrangement and never again have any dealings with them.
This reality is not entirely pleasant, sure, but then again it tends to do a good job (on a national scale) of adding resources + incentives = productivity.
The moral of the story, apparently, is: whenever someone utters the phrase "the allmighty dollar", they are usually bitching that others would not unprofitably support them.
It must be nice to have a lifestyle, gender, social class, job location, and residential neighborhood such that you don't need a gun. Do you suppose that the rest of us enjoy the same oversafe status?
Hey, I'm as anxious as you are to see Putin finally recognized for the evil, scheming sociopath that he is. (He has to be one, in order to come to power in a quasi-statist bramble of a society.) However...
...wouldn't this have been the perfect way for the FSS or whoever to engineer his downfall, in favor of a hardliner?
So let's practice what we preach, and wait for the evidence to come in. Then, let's second- and third-guess how that evidence might've been engineered to frame somebody for framing somebody. Remember, we are dealing with spooks here. Three levels of misdirection is child's play to them.
It doesn't have to; he won't change his mind about us because we annoy him. What will get his attention is if the influential North Korean upper-classmen get pissed off at him over his policies.
The lower-class are just ballast. It's the upper-class that wields the most political power because Kim can't function without them and their thousands of separate fiefdoms. If those upper-classmen cease enjoying their lifestyle, then watch for a regime change or even a "popular uprising of the common man".
This is perilous. Our society has not yet resolved the problem of the internet's long memory. Most of our custom is built upon the now-obsolete idea that memory does not last long or spread very far. And so the birth of the Information Age has brought with it the personal catastrophes such as "Dog S*** Girl" and "Shemale Vids Guy" and that asshat Jason Fortuny. These are all examples of normal, limited outbreaks of personal information that turned into unjustified disasters for the affected persons, simply because the internet's memory is fast, broad, and permanent.
If everyone has a cellphone, and most cellphones have videocameras, and most of those videocameras are now linked up to YouTube, we'll see this memory problem greatly multiplied.
Of course that might be the antidote: put so much information out there about so many people, that it will no longer matter. It'll be a poor man's Friends of Privacy, which would be a Good Thing probably.
But I don't want to be one of the forerunners, having my personal foibles instantly broadcast all round the world, and googlable by every future employer, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc. This unholy marriage between YouTube and Verizon is fraught with peril.
"Let me go back and face the peril!"
"No, it's too perilous!"
And what, pray tell, were you planning to eat?
Certainly we could build greenhouses, develop cold-resistant plants, set up hydroponics, and so forth, but is it feasible to do that on a worldwide scale?
There are also other ways to cool the Earth. We've only just gotten started on the problem. Consider the recent proposals to spray sunlight-blocking particles into the stratophere, the way that recent planet-cooling volcanoes did.
Yes, little or no real evidence. Other than the whole economy as it stands today, with the recent decades of geometic growth -- unique in history -- in most sectors, including particularly the technological disciplines. If you insist that patents were irrelevant to that, you'll need some awfully compelling data.
Of course patents get abused, but patents are (at heart) an incentive system. Any argument against them must solve the daunting task of providing or proving an alternative incentive that works comparably well.
As well, consider that there are nearly eight million patents out there. What percent of them are acting as anti-competitive threats which a reasonable economist would object to? Whereas what percent of them are protecting past, current, and future research investments that bore fruit? If you insist that patents are more trouble than they're worth, you need to provide these numbers.
It depends on which you think is a greater threat:
Only one of those threats has occurred many times before, is certain to occur again, and is certain to wipe us out when vegetation falters. Guess which one?
Reply is given elsewhere in this thread.
It's not sociological theory, it's economic theory. It all becomes obvious when you realize (or should I say accept?) that sex is a service which women trade on the open market. The presence of prostitutes creates a free market for sex, which puts a competitive pressure on wives. Prostitutes drive down the "fair market value" of wife-provided sex, which in turn means that wives cannot drain as many resources (emotional, physical, financial, etc.) from their husbands as they otherwise might. This is the primary reason why women oppose prostitution.
Of course they say that their oppposition is out of "concern for the prostitutes' wellbeing", but not even they believe such a claim, when it is so obvious that the illegality is precisely what makes prostitution so squalid and dangerous.
As for academic research, bear in mind that this is a Politically Incorrect subject, because we all know that Marriage Is About True Love. Nobody likes it when you prod that particular cherished belief. But for a start, read Edlund and Korn's "Theory of Prostitution" paper, in which (among other things) they attempted to explain why prostitutes are paid so much per hour. They found that a prostitute's hourly rate is comparable and proportional to the values she is sacrificing by not marrying. The rest can be inferred, and (to my eye) directly observed.
I would like to see a study of the average cost of first-date-through-marriage courtship in a country which bans prostitution versus one which allows it (e.g. Netherlands). If I'm right, the total cost will be noticeably lower in places where prostitution lowers the value of the sex she bargains with.