I disagree with the attempts to stablish an "objective" basis for morality, were them theists or rationalists.
It's very much a rational foundation. When pondering the morality of an action I ponder things like whether having a rule followed universally would make the world a better or a worse place. That takes reasoning, hence it's rational.
First of all, you just take better or worse as granted. In fact, it is you who decides (for your morality) what is better or worse. Remember, slave owners theorised that slavery benefited the slaves "because they can not manage themselves". Many of the cruelest acts of mankind have been justified by many moralists... how can it be?
Lets think a little more... what defines an act as "good" or "bad"? Guess what: Morality! So you define morality in terms of "good" or "bad", and "good" or "bad" in terms of morality. Did you know that circular reasoning allows you to prove anything?
So, in the end, it is just each of us who makes those decisions (of course, with lots of social/cultural influences). The idea frightens a lot of people, because then "the others" maybe do not follow the same rules than us, and complexity and risk increases, but there is nothing more to it.
You can discount it. But can you disprove it?
I don't need to disprove it, the burden on proof is on you to prove it. Until you do, I will act as if it didn't exist.
IMO, the keys should be gone. I want it to read a book and be portable; the keyboard just wastes of real state, and adds to the dimension that make it more difficult to fit anywhere (if somehow you could get the keys by making it just thicker instead of longer or wider, that would be less annoying).
Of course, you could still add a few physical buttons for the more common operations (next/previous page, exit book....).
I currently have my first ebook reader and I am looking forward to something like the DX, but without the keyboard and without having to pay for a 3G connection that I won't use.
It's been a while since I read it - what is it exactly that people object to in Brave New World?
At worst, I remember it being a bit preachy.
From the article (well, linked by it):
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit
I suppose racism claims have been raised by some angry Delta (everyone knows Epsilons are not intelligent enough to fill a complaint). More seriously, perhaps the part about the reserve.
Anyway, I find the article very poor if it comes from an association of well-educated people as librarians. The "top 10" lists does not even show how many hits each of them got.
And, with less than 2000 requests for removal in a year, it does not look like it is a very serious problem (of course, TFE of TFS "forgot" to add that bit of data). Even if you accept the claim that they estimate "actual" requests to be 5x the reported requests, it looks like those attempts of censorship can easily be thwarted by ignoring the claims.
Isn't the problem with this really that robot v robot doesn't actually resolve anything? I.e., one side will simply destroy the other side's robots eventually, but then what happens? Just because their robots are gone, doesn't mean the loser of that part of the war simply surrenders. Instead the humans then pick up guns and fight the remaining robots/other humans from the other side.
E.g. if China is invading your homeland, and their robots beat your robots, does your homeland just surrender after the robot phase? I think not.
Not that I am for robot soldiers, but if robot soldiers get advanced enough, then it is viable. If losing all robots means and strategic advantage similar to what losing, say, all the air power and/or armour, then a surrender could be likely.
Of course, generalizations are bad. It would not be the same an China-USA war over Taiwan or Korea or Japan than a war with the aim of annexing one of the participants homeland. It would not be the same if the one of the sides claimed that it wanted the physical anhilation of the other side population (or if the other side feared that). It would not be the same if the people involved were highly indoctrined before and during the war to fear the enemy than if no previous tensions existed. It would not be the same if the winning side asked for inconditional surrender (even Japan was ready for a conditional surrender long before atomic bombs and soviet intervention, and Germany wanted a separate peace with the western allies). It varies also with the international situation (some historians think that the real cause for Japan's surrender was the risk of a Soviet occupation against the risk of an American one). So, apples and oranges.
They are violent and do not allow anyone else to be. Criminal gangs usually only care about profit, if someone is violent in their territory but profit is not in risk they are not concerned. Of course, powerful criminal gangs in a weak country can feel the void of power and begin working partially as a government (and becoming more like warlords).
You could argue that, in order for that monopoly to be effective, the government needs some backup from at least part of the population, and for that the government has to provide something back (subsistence, security, laws and stability, progress). But in the end, whatever the means, if you can punish anybody and nobody can punish you back, then you are the government.
First off, storage. Computational output adds up quick. You're looking at $7,000 USD for 24TB raw storage from the likes of IBM or HP or Dell. Yes, you can whitebox it for cheaper, but considering if you lose this box, nothing else matters (And I doubt you have the funds for proper backups), it pays to get hardware that's been tested and is from a vendor you can scream at when it breaks.
Having someone to scream off may help ease some pressure, but if you do not have proper backups you are fubar no matter who you scream to.
Ok, then do not see it in as a comic expression but a moral one.
What about making a point against suicide? Certain cultures did have actions against suicides (cancelling the deceased's last will, burial in "shameful" parts of the cementery -or not burial at all-, etc.)
While I respect anyone's meditated, reasoned decision to end theirs life, and I understand the relatives'feelings, I do not find giving suicides (or crimes) too much notoriety of good taste. In the bottom line, it may even encourage "attention seeker" suicide attempts (and successes).
Granted, there are softer ways of expressing them. I just want to make a point that someone may find these
One of the interesting things about living in a culture (or microculture) where physical response is absolutely forbidden, (say, certain college campuses) is that the inhabitants tend to be really rude and emotionally abusive. Because they know they can get away with it.
Does this "finding" hold when you are talking about, say, a monastery? After all, if you need some physical action, getting out of campus to get it is easier than getting out of the monastery.
It sounds more likely than the issue "human teens are more aggressive as a way to get influence in their group. When they are conditionated not to resort to physical violence, they use emotional abuse (or just break social rules to show they are beyond them).".
Even accepting that Clinton reforms allowed/were the first to use the model (I do not have data about that, so I won't challenge it), it does not mean that the banks granting and selling junk mortgages and the agencies rating them did not know that they were running a scam.
It would be like saying that if laws in my country make it easy for me to get a handgun, and because cops in my country sometimes have to use theirs, then I am not at fault if I shot at someone because I was given the idea by the government.
In a related isssue, what computer program are you talking about? It is not that what they did was due to some sneaky program (we are talking about mortgages, not about HFT).
"Criminal" is just a definition, changed by laws. In the Soviet Union, you could be a "criminal" for opposing collectivization of your lands. Were the soviet right, then (because they were opposing "criminals")?
In medieval Japan, samurais could kill peasants at will. Opposing them would be "criminal".
Just saying: "what I like is what is right and what I do not like is criminal" sounds conforting, but adds nothing to the discussion and IMHO reflects poorly on you. Now, if you have some reasoning to do...
Bullshit. Banks loaned to everyone because they sold the mortgages at AAA+ (rated by the agencies paid for them) to somewhere else who were the ones who took the risk, without knowing it.
Found a good article a few years ago at www.csmonitor.com (could not locate it more precisely, sorry) from mortgage agents. They were forced to accept whatever proof of "liquidity" by appliants, if they did not sell enough mortgages to whoever was coming they were just fired. In one story, a man went with a photo in front of a store and just claimed that the store was his, to get his mortgage approved.
BTW, if someone has a link to the article it would be very informative.
Also, in the assembly you do not get to name the variables. You just get a chunk of the heap, and it just adds an offset to it.
You professor should teach you that instead to declare a bunch of variables (which may lead to syntax error), you must just declare one byte array and use it as a memory space, manually calculating the offset of each variables.
If your professor is telling you that you should use named variables, they're either not very good professor or you're in a 100 level CS course where they don't want to confuse you too much.
...
Why did you stop at the gotos? There are so many things that high level languages do not do *right* (i.e., as assembly code).
What you are talking about is Lamarckism ("hey, there is a problem, let's evolve about it").
Darwinism is about random mutations. If the mutations favors the individual, it prevails. I think that you will agree with me if I say that any mutation that avoids you to survive a collision at 100 km/h is not an easy one to get to (and is one random event between billions/trillions of probabilities that cause the fetus does not even born). Mutations too extreme mean the death of the individual, severe illness or even that it is not recognized as a member of the species.
If the environment changes in a way so sharp that the variability due to mutations is not enough to get some individuals to survive, the species dies. It is as simple as that. The fact that we have new challenges does not mean that they can be overcome (your offspring won't become resistent to radiation if you go to live at Fukushima. You just won't have healthy offspring).
That said, another issue is that the fact that these are the most dangerous risks does not mean that they are dangerous enough to trigger the evolutionary process. What numbers are you talking off? 1%? 0.5%? That is a rounding error.
both murder and death by car accident disproportionally affect certain segments of the population over others.
But the effect is due to genetics or because of desigual access to education, employment...?
Of course, just saying that this is a genetic thing suits some people ("why I have to help funding the school for poors if their murder rate shows that they are inferior?"). These people will be the less interested in really studying the problem.
I find it that they have little standing against the company that did steal the photos; AFAIK they just used it as evidence and just sent them to the proper authority (the cops), without doing something stupid like posting them in youtube.
On the other hand, a police officer allowing himself to denigre a dettainee without need, just for the sake of it (am I the only who thinks that he would not have said the same, had the suspect been a 20 year old hot blonde?)... well, I hope the plaintiffs good luck with the trial.
But particle physics in particular seems to have vanished up its own asshole in the last couple of decades Every problem seems to be solved by inventing a new particle which will show up if only we spend ten times as much on the next machine
That doesn't mean they are wrong however. As a physicist friend put it to me, "The more we study the universe the only thing we can be certain about it, is that the universe is actually very fucking wierd".
I woult put it better as "the more we are studying in orders of magnitude different to those to which our brains were evolved for, the more difficult is for our brain to understand the concepts involved".
IMHO the difference is in the expectations of the public.
The general public listens of "Software Engineering" and thinks of complicated systems on complicated computers. So, first they are bareyly interested and even if they read the report, when they find that it gets complicated they are already expecting it. In the other hand, script kiddies are the one who are more vocal when saying "you do not need any of these complicated theories to do the work".
With physics, there are lots of people who are uninterested but there is also a huge chunk of people who remembers what they were taught at the school (newtonian mechanics, Mendeleiev's periodic table). They were taught some simple and elegant theories. Later they read things like changing the state by observing a particle or that an element ma be both particle and wave and their reaction is that it is not as beatiful as what they were told.
My take? Our brains evolved for eons so we get to eat some other species while not geting ate ourselves. Supposing that we can use that same tool to explore what is immensely great or ridiculously small and thinking that it will make sense is perhaps too much optimistism.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with the attempts to stablish an "objective" basis for morality, were them theists or rationalists.
First of all, you just take better or worse as granted. In fact, it is you who decides (for your morality) what is better or worse. Remember, slave owners theorised that slavery benefited the slaves "because they can not manage themselves". Many of the cruelest acts of mankind have been justified by many moralists... how can it be?
Lets think a little more... what defines an act as "good" or "bad"? Guess what: Morality! So you define morality in terms of "good" or "bad", and "good" or "bad" in terms of morality. Did you know that circular reasoning allows you to prove anything?
So, in the end, it is just each of us who makes those decisions (of course, with lots of social/cultural influences). The idea frightens a lot of people, because then "the others" maybe do not follow the same rules than us, and complexity and risk increases, but there is nothing more to it.
The burden of proof is on you too. Sorry.
IMO, the keys should be gone. I want it to read a book and be portable; the keyboard just wastes of real state, and adds to the dimension that make it more difficult to fit anywhere (if somehow you could get the keys by making it just thicker instead of longer or wider, that would be less annoying).
Of course, you could still add a few physical buttons for the more common operations (next/previous page, exit book....).
I currently have my first ebook reader and I am looking forward to something like the DX, but without the keyboard and without having to pay for a 3G connection that I won't use.
Respect for Bethesda: gone. NOT paying for Skyrim.
I somehow think that sooner than later you would have found another "ethical" reason to get to the same conclusion.
It's been a while since I read it - what is it exactly that people object to in Brave New World? At worst, I remember it being a bit preachy.
From the article (well, linked by it):
I suppose racism claims have been raised by some angry Delta (everyone knows Epsilons are not intelligent enough to fill a complaint). More seriously, perhaps the part about the reserve.
Anyway, I find the article very poor if it comes from an association of well-educated people as librarians. The "top 10" lists does not even show how many hits each of them got.
And, with less than 2000 requests for removal in a year, it does not look like it is a very serious problem (of course, TFE of TFS "forgot" to add that bit of data). Even if you accept the claim that they estimate "actual" requests to be 5x the reported requests, it looks like those attempts of censorship can easily be thwarted by ignoring the claims.
Isn't the problem with this really that robot v robot doesn't actually resolve anything? I.e., one side will simply destroy the other side's robots eventually, but then what happens? Just because their robots are gone, doesn't mean the loser of that part of the war simply surrenders. Instead the humans then pick up guns and fight the remaining robots/other humans from the other side.
E.g. if China is invading your homeland, and their robots beat your robots, does your homeland just surrender after the robot phase? I think not.
Not that I am for robot soldiers, but if robot soldiers get advanced enough, then it is viable. If losing all robots means and strategic advantage similar to what losing, say, all the air power and/or armour, then a surrender could be likely.
Of course, generalizations are bad. It would not be the same an China-USA war over Taiwan or Korea or Japan than a war with the aim of annexing one of the participants homeland. It would not be the same if the one of the sides claimed that it wanted the physical anhilation of the other side population (or if the other side feared that). It would not be the same if the people involved were highly indoctrined before and during the war to fear the enemy than if no previous tensions existed. It would not be the same if the winning side asked for inconditional surrender (even Japan was ready for a conditional surrender long before atomic bombs and soviet intervention, and Germany wanted a separate peace with the western allies). It varies also with the international situation (some historians think that the real cause for Japan's surrender was the risk of a Soviet occupation against the risk of an American one). So, apples and oranges.
The more classic definition:
Government is the monopoly of violence
They are violent and do not allow anyone else to be. Criminal gangs usually only care about profit, if someone is violent in their territory but profit is not in risk they are not concerned. Of course, powerful criminal gangs in a weak country can feel the void of power and begin working partially as a government (and becoming more like warlords).
You could argue that, in order for that monopoly to be effective, the government needs some backup from at least part of the population, and for that the government has to provide something back (subsistence, security, laws and stability, progress). But in the end, whatever the means, if you can punish anybody and nobody can punish you back, then you are the government.
First off, storage. Computational output adds up quick. You're looking at $7,000 USD for 24TB raw storage from the likes of IBM or HP or Dell. Yes, you can whitebox it for cheaper, but considering if you lose this box, nothing else matters (And I doubt you have the funds for proper backups), it pays to get hardware that's been tested and is from a vendor you can scream at when it breaks.
Having someone to scream off may help ease some pressure, but if you do not have proper backups you are fubar no matter who you scream to.
Ok, then do not see it in as a comic expression but a moral one.
What about making a point against suicide? Certain cultures did have actions against suicides (cancelling the deceased's last will, burial in "shameful" parts of the cementery -or not burial at all-, etc.)
While I respect anyone's meditated, reasoned decision to end theirs life, and I understand the relatives'feelings, I do not find giving suicides (or crimes) too much notoriety of good taste. In the bottom line, it may even encourage "attention seeker" suicide attempts (and successes).
Granted, there are softer ways of expressing them. I just want to make a point that someone may find these
pages dedicated to the suicide memory
something worth to oppose to.
One of the interesting things about living in a culture (or microculture) where physical response is absolutely forbidden, (say, certain college campuses) is that the inhabitants tend to be really rude and emotionally abusive. Because they know they can get away with it.
Does this "finding" hold when you are talking about, say, a monastery? After all, if you need some physical action, getting out of campus to get it is easier than getting out of the monastery.
It sounds more likely than the issue "human teens are more aggressive as a way to get influence in their group. When they are conditionated not to resort to physical violence, they use emotional abuse (or just break social rules to show they are beyond them).".
That's just despicable...
The issue is if it should mean jail time.
As per international agreements, EM emissions from a country should not step into another country and interfere with systems there.
Of course, the USA violates these agreements, too (political guided broadcast in "enemy" countries, mainly Cuba).
Even accepting that Clinton reforms allowed/were the first to use the model (I do not have data about that, so I won't challenge it), it does not mean that the banks granting and selling junk mortgages and the agencies rating them did not know that they were running a scam.
It would be like saying that if laws in my country make it easy for me to get a handgun, and because cops in my country sometimes have to use theirs, then I am not at fault if I shot at someone because I was given the idea by the government.
In a related isssue, what computer program are you talking about? It is not that what they did was due to some sneaky program (we are talking about mortgages, not about HFT).
So? I only need to say that I do not think that the "classical definition" of liberty is a valid/useful/good one, and we are back to square one...
I already answered you, but I thought I could give you an even short answer (2 words):
Paris Hilton.
"Criminal" is just a definition, changed by laws. In the Soviet Union, you could be a "criminal" for opposing collectivization of your lands. Were the soviet right, then (because they were opposing "criminals")?
In medieval Japan, samurais could kill peasants at will. Opposing them would be "criminal".
Just saying: "what I like is what is right and what I do not like is criminal" sounds conforting, but adds nothing to the discussion and IMHO reflects poorly on you. Now, if you have some reasoning to do...
Just to begin with, not all the sons will have the same opportunities to even reach puberty. Not to say about access to education...
It is so bad when the real world ruins a pretty theory, isn't it?.
Bullshit. Banks loaned to everyone because they sold the mortgages at AAA+ (rated by the agencies paid for them) to somewhere else who were the ones who took the risk, without knowing it.
Found a good article a few years ago at www.csmonitor.com (could not locate it more precisely, sorry) from mortgage agents. They were forced to accept whatever proof of "liquidity" by appliants, if they did not sell enough mortgages to whoever was coming they were just fired. In one story, a man went with a photo in front of a store and just claimed that the store was his, to get his mortgage approved.
BTW, if someone has a link to the article it would be very informative.
So George Soros' sons and mine will have both the same opportunities, due only to their respective abilities?
Could you please clarify your point, sir?
Also, in the assembly you do not get to name the variables. You just get a chunk of the heap, and it just adds an offset to it.
You professor should teach you that instead to declare a bunch of variables (which may lead to syntax error), you must just declare one byte array and use it as a memory space, manually calculating the offset of each variables.
If your professor is telling you that you should use named variables, they're either not very good professor or you're in a 100 level CS course where they don't want to confuse you too much.
...
Why did you stop at the gotos? There are so many things that high level languages do not do *right* (i.e., as assembly code).
Maybe you do not get it.
What you are talking about is Lamarckism ("hey, there is a problem, let's evolve about it").
Darwinism is about random mutations. If the mutations favors the individual, it prevails. I think that you will agree with me if I say that any mutation that avoids you to survive a collision at 100 km/h is not an easy one to get to (and is one random event between billions/trillions of probabilities that cause the fetus does not even born). Mutations too extreme mean the death of the individual, severe illness or even that it is not recognized as a member of the species.
If the environment changes in a way so sharp that the variability due to mutations is not enough to get some individuals to survive, the species dies. It is as simple as that. The fact that we have new challenges does not mean that they can be overcome (your offspring won't become resistent to radiation if you go to live at Fukushima. You just won't have healthy offspring).
That said, another issue is that the fact that these are the most dangerous risks does not mean that they are dangerous enough to trigger the evolutionary process. What numbers are you talking off? 1%? 0.5%? That is a rounding error.
both murder and death by car accident disproportionally affect certain segments of the population over others.
But the effect is due to genetics or because of desigual access to education, employment...?
Of course, just saying that this is a genetic thing suits some people ("why I have to help funding the school for poors if their murder rate shows that they are inferior?"). These people will be the less interested in really studying the problem.
Believe it or not the US with it's 300 million people only represents 4% of the world population. So who gives a shit what is necessary in the US?
Perhaps the people who live in the US....
Just saying.
I find it that they have little standing against the company that did steal the photos; AFAIK they just used it as evidence and just sent them to the proper authority (the cops), without doing something stupid like posting them in youtube.
On the other hand, a police officer allowing himself to denigre a dettainee without need, just for the sake of it (am I the only who thinks that he would not have said the same, had the suspect been a 20 year old hot blonde?)... well, I hope the plaintiffs good luck with the trial.
That doesn't mean they are wrong however. As a physicist friend put it to me, "The more we study the universe the only thing we can be certain about it, is that the universe is actually very fucking wierd".
I woult put it better as "the more we are studying in orders of magnitude different to those to which our brains were evolved for, the more difficult is for our brain to understand the concepts involved".
IMHO the difference is in the expectations of the public.
The general public listens of "Software Engineering" and thinks of complicated systems on complicated computers. So, first they are bareyly interested and even if they read the report, when they find that it gets complicated they are already expecting it. In the other hand, script kiddies are the one who are more vocal when saying "you do not need any of these complicated theories to do the work".
With physics, there are lots of people who are uninterested but there is also a huge chunk of people who remembers what they were taught at the school (newtonian mechanics, Mendeleiev's periodic table). They were taught some simple and elegant theories. Later they read things like changing the state by observing a particle or that an element ma be both particle and wave and their reaction is that it is not as beatiful as what they were told.
My take? Our brains evolved for eons so we get to eat some other species while not geting ate ourselves. Supposing that we can use that same tool to explore what is immensely great or ridiculously small and thinking that it will make sense is perhaps too much optimistism.