Yay,/. philosophie!
You see, we don't have a universal definition of "human". What it means to be human and all that.
Philosophy has struggled with that question for ages, and probably still is.
In the meantime, we all have to define those kind of things individually.
Now, not having a brain, or the not much of one, would make it kind of hard for those clones to do that, meaning - ignoring the possible presence of a "soul" - they would not be, nor have any way of ever becoming, human. They'd be genetically compatible lumbs of flesh, which will most likely look kind of human.
Now, people already have a problem with how livestock is treated, which, through breeding, ceased to be members of their own species either. They look like they are though, and so will those human clones. People will most likely not accept that kind of thing, at least not for a long time to come.
Now, if those human clones would look differently, that might be a different story. The question of the soul, however, remains.
That's pretty much what chicken, the kind you eat, the one that's bred extremely quickly and in huge numbers, are.
Still people get all excited about how badly those poor little animals are treated.
Also, a lot of them are holdovers from the cold war in which we prevented the soviets from taking over Europe. Or do all you Europeans want to be praising the soviet motherland?
You're making it sound like the American military presence in Western Europe during the Cold War sound was a purely altruistic act.
Nah, that can't be right. After all, you most likely do live in a country with a decent pulic school system, and naturally you paid attention in history class... right?
Interesting theory.
What you might have neglected to consider though, is that unemployment/welfare, once you get over its negative stigma, is not as such a bad thing.
I live in a city with an approximately 20% unemployment rate, and while that leads to high welfare spendings, it's also become a culturally highly relevant place - those people living of the public do contribute back. Not neccessarily in an economically measurable manner, but that doesn't matter so much, given the overproduction of pretty much anything.
Okay, those people aren't unskilled, but I would guess the average US unemployed would have some kind of training too.
It almost reads like you rate people according to their net worth or something.
My reply to the AC applies to your post too, at least in parts.
Also, there's a difference between exercising your right for free speech, expressing your political viewpoint, and acting on it.
E.g., you can talk about getting rid of immigrants all you want, but some people go a step further and create a fait accompli. It's only consequential I suppose, but I won't accept that to be a form of free speech. And that's what Germany tried to ban the NPD for.
You bring up some good points, of course, and I have no idea why you were modded down. But that might be an indication that this is not the right forum to discuss this particular topic. Moderators have their own agenda, just like everyone else.
Yes, the government changes the constition, sometimes explicitely, often implicitly. I'm not defending or condoning that behavior.
But that does not mean they're not also defending it - it's not like the government is some homogenous entity with a single goal. Case in point, while there has been downright unconstitutional behavior on the side of the government, none in recent history (that I know of, I might be ignorant there) has undone the whole constitution and established what, e.g., the NPD wants in Germany, namely a fascist state.
The important difference is, none of the governments has actually taken the step to change the form of the state. It's not just the government those radical forces intend to change, it's the entire _form of state_.
I do think that should be considered.
Well yes, Europe's states learned the hard way that they need to protect themselves from unconstitutional forces, be it political parties or nutjob politicians.
It's not "democratic" in the truest sense of the word, but why exactly whould a democracy protect those who're trying to get rid of it?
Of course it's hard to know where to draw the line between legitimate political opposition, and people out to undo the constitution. Which is part of the reason the attempt to ban the NPD in Germany failed - they wanted to really make sure the people they're banning actually need to and can be banned, and kind of overdid it, to put it mildly.
Those things are complicated, and warrant an extended (public) discussion - but this is hardly the platform to do so, and it's _not_ an free speech issue. It's about how far a state can go to protect itself.
The computer itself is just fine - they got exactly the hardware they paid for - no more, no less.
But that hardware was advertised as something else. The customer can't be expected to know if they're being lied to by looking at the specs.
They wanted Vista, it said it can run Vista on the computer's box, and it didn't work. Just giving them some other OS is silly, suggesting it is arrogant.
VLS? Well, I googled it, and assuming you mean VideoLAN streaming - it is interesting it supports multicast, but does the school's network?
I would guess not. In which case, you wouldn't be broadcasting anymore.
I still don't see how streaming video would be a better option than TV, and can understand the parent's discontent - there are many instances where modern technology is used for its own sake, even though older technology would have done the job cheaper and better.
This is especially true for schools it seems.
The girl is stupid?
Because she wants to use her computer as the tool it's advertised to be, and found herself thrown into an OS feud she didn't know, or care, about?
I think you need to adjust your criteria for diagnosing stupidity..
And then, you're going to blame Nintendo for games made by/other companies/?
Are you for real?
Seems he's blaming portable gaming as such, and gives valid reasons. The one save slot thing is extremely annoying, and at least on the DS can (afaik) only be circumvented by piracy (by temporarily copying the savegame elsewhere).
The people that decide that one save game should be enough for everyone are a significant part of the portable gaming industry, and imho a good reason to condemn the whole thing.
But then, the US are a federation of states. How come those states don't take care of their telecommunication infrastructure on their own?
They most likely don't go to some federal entity if their road system needs an upgrade..
Blackberry doesn't market their devices as backup systems either - they just happen to be work that way. So do most MP3 players you can buy.
Apple on the other hand seems to have gone out of their way to disable that feature.
Of course MP3 players and smartphones are not backup solution, neither would iPods be, even if they would work like one would expect USB storage devices (and technically, that's what they mostly are) work. But you also want to be able to access your MP3 player from any computer you come across, and most likely not very many of them will have the tools required to access an iPod.
I don't really see the connection to the rest of your comment, but yes, people do slobber over authority. Always have, most likely always will.
That said, I don't see the British make-believe monarchy as a threat to equality, or anything really. If the taxpayers want to continue to indulge in this eloborate play, why not?
I'm not familiar with TinyCA, but if you still need to add the CA you created to the browsers list manually, how does that help?
You still need to tell your users what to do, and it's probably as much work as just accepting you selfsigned cert.
I would like to see a non-profit organization that allows people and companies to register downloadable certs for free or at a minimal cost.
Each site can create its own certs and register them with, say, mozilla.org, and browsers go there for certs rather than download them rather than from the potentially spoofed site.
That would introduce another point of failure, and be rather expensive. Giving people or browsers a way to at least check the cert's fingerprint would be cheaper and afaik just as effective.
Right now self signed certs are problematic because there is no mechanism for trusting their download, and the companies in charge of managing certs are too expensive or too restrictive for small sites or special projects.
In the case of special projects, I think they ought to have secure communication channels they could use to distribute their certs.
I don't know about small sites though. If they don't have a limited audience and therefore no way of distributing their certs securely, but absolutely must encrypt/authenticate their traffic, I guess there's no real way short of actually paying for their cert.
Self signed certs suck, they just educate the user to simply accept whatever SSL warning their browser throws at them.
Yes well, encryption loses much of its appeal if it doesn't also correctly authenticate the communicating entities.
Those policies cert issuers use or, as it seems, sometimes ignore, are a part of the encryption scheme's organization. Which is broken, breaking the scheme.
Sure, because users are so prone to pay any attention to annoying dialogs.
Not that I have a better idea, except maybe to do away with user interaction concerning SSL all together - block invalid certs by default, don't show some confusingly complicated dialog, just give some error message.
Radical, yes, but I don't see any other way.
The author's point was that he could get a signed cert the says mozilla.org.
Should have tried paypal.com, but I guess he didn't want too much legal trouble.
So you tell your browser to only trust those certs you manually accepted?
Kind of a big hassle, don't you think? You really expect the average web user to go through that process?
That being said, it is rather irrelevant to the encryption scheme if it's mathematically secure, but vulnerable to a breakdown of the way it's organized. It's broken either way.
My ASUS board has an Atheros L1 network interface, and believe me, once you get to experience that piece of crap Realtek doesn't look that bad anymore.
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Yay, /. philosophie!
You see, we don't have a universal definition of "human". What it means to be human and all that. Philosophy has struggled with that question for ages, and probably still is.
In the meantime, we all have to define those kind of things individually.
Now, not having a brain, or the not much of one, would make it kind of hard for those clones to do that, meaning - ignoring the possible presence of a "soul" - they would not be, nor have any way of ever becoming, human. They'd be genetically compatible lumbs of flesh, which will most likely look kind of human.
Now, people already have a problem with how livestock is treated, which, through breeding, ceased to be members of their own species either. They look like they are though, and so will those human clones. People will most likely not accept that kind of thing, at least not for a long time to come.
Now, if those human clones would look differently, that might be a different story. The question of the soul, however, remains.
That's pretty much what chicken, the kind you eat, the one that's bred extremely quickly and in huge numbers, are.
Still people get all excited about how badly those poor little animals are treated.
WTF?
This reads like something the conservative yellow press would have written in the late 60s to describe the hippie movement.
Also, a lot of them are holdovers from the cold war in which we prevented the soviets from taking over Europe. Or do all you Europeans want to be praising the soviet motherland?
You're making it sound like the American military presence in Western Europe during the Cold War sound was a purely altruistic act.
Nah, that can't be right. After all, you most likely do live in a country with a decent pulic school system, and naturally you paid attention in history class... right?
Interesting theory.
What you might have neglected to consider though, is that unemployment/welfare, once you get over its negative stigma, is not as such a bad thing.
I live in a city with an approximately 20% unemployment rate, and while that leads to high welfare spendings, it's also become a culturally highly relevant place - those people living of the public do contribute back. Not neccessarily in an economically measurable manner, but that doesn't matter so much, given the overproduction of pretty much anything.
Okay, those people aren't unskilled, but I would guess the average US unemployed would have some kind of training too.
It almost reads like you rate people according to their net worth or something.
My reply to the AC applies to your post too, at least in parts.
Also, there's a difference between exercising your right for free speech, expressing your political viewpoint, and acting on it.
E.g., you can talk about getting rid of immigrants all you want, but some people go a step further and create a fait accompli. It's only consequential I suppose, but I won't accept that to be a form of free speech. And that's what Germany tried to ban the NPD for.
You bring up some good points, of course, and I have no idea why you were modded down. But that might be an indication that this is not the right forum to discuss this particular topic. Moderators have their own agenda, just like everyone else.
Yes, the government changes the constition, sometimes explicitely, often implicitly. I'm not defending or condoning that behavior.
But that does not mean they're not also defending it - it's not like the government is some homogenous entity with a single goal. Case in point, while there has been downright unconstitutional behavior on the side of the government, none in recent history (that I know of, I might be ignorant there) has undone the whole constitution and established what, e.g., the NPD wants in Germany, namely a fascist state.
The important difference is, none of the governments has actually taken the step to change the form of the state. It's not just the government those radical forces intend to change, it's the entire _form of state_.
I do think that should be considered.
Well yes, Europe's states learned the hard way that they need to protect themselves from unconstitutional forces, be it political parties or nutjob politicians.
It's not "democratic" in the truest sense of the word, but why exactly whould a democracy protect those who're trying to get rid of it?
Of course it's hard to know where to draw the line between legitimate political opposition, and people out to undo the constitution. Which is part of the reason the attempt to ban the NPD in Germany failed - they wanted to really make sure the people they're banning actually need to and can be banned, and kind of overdid it, to put it mildly.
Those things are complicated, and warrant an extended (public) discussion - but this is hardly the platform to do so, and it's _not_ an free speech issue. It's about how far a state can go to protect itself.
The computer itself is just fine - they got exactly the hardware they paid for - no more, no less.
But that hardware was advertised as something else. The customer can't be expected to know if they're being lied to by looking at the specs.
They wanted Vista, it said it can run Vista on the computer's box, and it didn't work. Just giving them some other OS is silly, suggesting it is arrogant.
VLS? Well, I googled it, and assuming you mean VideoLAN streaming - it is interesting it supports multicast, but does the school's network?
I would guess not. In which case, you wouldn't be broadcasting anymore.
I still don't see how streaming video would be a better option than TV, and can understand the parent's discontent - there are many instances where modern technology is used for its own sake, even though older technology would have done the job cheaper and better.
This is especially true for schools it seems.
The girl is stupid?
Because she wants to use her computer as the tool it's advertised to be, and found herself thrown into an OS feud she didn't know, or care, about?
I think you need to adjust your criteria for diagnosing stupidity..
And then, you're going to blame Nintendo for games made by /other companies/?
Are you for real?
Seems he's blaming portable gaming as such, and gives valid reasons. The one save slot thing is extremely annoying, and at least on the DS can (afaik) only be circumvented by piracy (by temporarily copying the savegame elsewhere).
The people that decide that one save game should be enough for everyone are a significant part of the portable gaming industry, and imho a good reason to condemn the whole thing.
But then, the US are a federation of states. How come those states don't take care of their telecommunication infrastructure on their own?
They most likely don't go to some federal entity if their road system needs an upgrade..
Blackberry doesn't market their devices as backup systems either - they just happen to be work that way. So do most MP3 players you can buy.
Apple on the other hand seems to have gone out of their way to disable that feature.
Of course MP3 players and smartphones are not backup solution, neither would iPods be, even if they would work like one would expect USB storage devices (and technically, that's what they mostly are) work. But you also want to be able to access your MP3 player from any computer you come across, and most likely not very many of them will have the tools required to access an iPod.
I don't really see the connection to the rest of your comment, but yes, people do slobber over authority. Always have, most likely always will.
That said, I don't see the British make-believe monarchy as a threat to equality, or anything really. If the taxpayers want to continue to indulge in this eloborate play, why not?
We're outlawed? Damn, must have missed the memo..
Looks like babelfish though.
Somebody who's making his own CA will most likely not have that many certs, I'd say most of the time it's just one.
That's precisely my point, self-signed certs are far more secure in theory, but there is no mechanism to use them securely.
Why would they be more secure? Because there's no third party involved? That would change if there is a keyserver for SSL certs.
Assuming SSL is mathematically secure, what you're asking for seems to be equivalent to a single, trusted, non-profit CA.
I'm all for it.
I'm not familiar with TinyCA, but if you still need to add the CA you created to the browsers list manually, how does that help?
You still need to tell your users what to do, and it's probably as much work as just accepting you selfsigned cert.
I would like to see a non-profit organization that allows people and companies to register downloadable certs for free or at a minimal cost.
Each site can create its own certs and register them with, say, mozilla.org, and browsers go there for certs rather than download them rather than from the potentially spoofed site.
That would introduce another point of failure, and be rather expensive. Giving people or browsers a way to at least check the cert's fingerprint would be cheaper and afaik just as effective.
Right now self signed certs are problematic because there is no mechanism for trusting their download, and the companies in charge of managing certs are too expensive or too restrictive for small sites or special projects.
In the case of special projects, I think they ought to have secure communication channels they could use to distribute their certs.
I don't know about small sites though. If they don't have a limited audience and therefore no way of distributing their certs securely, but absolutely must encrypt/authenticate their traffic, I guess there's no real way short of actually paying for their cert.
Self signed certs suck, they just educate the user to simply accept whatever SSL warning their browser throws at them.
Yes well, encryption loses much of its appeal if it doesn't also correctly authenticate the communicating entities.
Those policies cert issuers use or, as it seems, sometimes ignore, are a part of the encryption scheme's organization. Which is broken, breaking the scheme.
Sure, because users are so prone to pay any attention to annoying dialogs.
Not that I have a better idea, except maybe to do away with user interaction concerning SSL all together - block invalid certs by default, don't show some confusingly complicated dialog, just give some error message.
Radical, yes, but I don't see any other way.
The author's point was that he could get a signed cert the says mozilla.org.
Should have tried paypal.com, but I guess he didn't want too much legal trouble.
So you tell your browser to only trust those certs you manually accepted?
Kind of a big hassle, don't you think? You really expect the average web user to go through that process?
That being said, it is rather irrelevant to the encryption scheme if it's mathematically secure, but vulnerable to a breakdown of the way it's organized. It's broken either way.
My ASUS board has an Atheros L1 network interface, and believe me, once you get to experience that piece of crap Realtek doesn't look that bad anymore.