In reality all you've done is limit the places you can go. No crossing oceans, you cant go further then 800 KM's. What's the point of even taking a holiday if you're not going to see anything new or exciting. Might as well stay home.
For your situation, that's right. But world-wide, you're the exception. I live in the heart of Europe, and I've taken lots of business trips. I have former co-workers who would fly whenever possible because it was a status symbol to them. So they would fly coach on a 45 min. flight, adding customs and driving to/from the airport, the whole trip takes about the same time that it takes me to travel the same distance by train, first class, for less money. Plus I have power and 3G most of the way and actually have 90 minutes of uninterrupted time I can spend doing whatever I want.
Still, for most of my holiday trips, I'm with you 100%.
For some trips, the plane is the best means of transportation, for others it's the train, for still others it's the car. The decision should be made case-by-case.
His arguments are interesting, but: It is not the FAA's job to improve our social skills and teach us how to use our technology. He has a point, but he's barking up the wrong tree.
That's the propaganda I was speaking about. Read "The Golden Bough", which everyone talking about religion should've read (the one-volume summary is fine, I don't know if the 12-volume full account is even available anymore) and if you're into some interesting, but largely hypothetical, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is a fascinating read explaining one theory of the neurological sources of religion.
No, religion never came about to address moral wrongs. Not once in the history of mankind, AFAIK. The sources of history are either evolved from magical thinking (the shaman-priest transition) or as tools of power (the chief-god transition).
Moral codes were incorporated into religion after the fact, and used to organize and structure them, but they did not originate there.
And how many will die before you get that evidence?
That's a cheap argument. People die all the time. We can jump to conclusion and into action and potentially do the wrong thing, harming many more people in the progress - as has happened many times in recent history - or we can wait, gather evidence and then do the right thing, accepting that in the time we need to find out what that is, some people will die.
Given what I know about the general track record of humans when it comes to prediction and gut feelings, I'm strictly on the second alternative.
Instead consider the acts of the pulling of the trigger to kill an innocent
We're not talking about innocents here. We are talking about convicted criminals.
Ah, now you say China sentences people to death for things that shouldn't be crimes. But there's a logical mistake in there as well. Because China also sentences people to death for crimes that would yield the death sencence in the USA as well.
Just because they've been sentenced by a chinese court doesn't mean they are innocent. Don't apply inverse logic.
The Chinese government is about the closest thing to pure evil since the monstrous abuses of the Third Reich.
And of course that is all part of the absolute truth that we in the west have access to. There isn't the slightest possibility that our view might be little bit tainted. Funny how all the anti-US countries are evil bastards that oppress their own people and kill anyone who doesn't love them.
No, I don't think the chinese have a clean record. But I don't buy the "pure evil" propaganda, either. I know people who've actually been to China, and from their reports it's nothing like the Third Reich (and I have spoken to people who know that 1st hand as well - like my grandparents).
If the western world had any interest in justice and human rights, we would be toppling this heinous regime instead of bowing down and giving them most favored nation status.
Yeah, go in and overthrow an evil regime and replace it with a great democratic freedom loving one. Worked so well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Frankly, if the western world had any real interest in justice and human rights, we'd get our own shit sorted out before we claim the moral high ground. In my book, a country that runs Gitmo has exactly zero say in anything related to justice, human rights or ethics.
And you should shut your mouth about toppling regimes until you've figured out how to do it without making things worse for the people living there.
And finally, to get back on topic, a country that actually incarcerates a higher percentage of its population as China, because its justice system is entirely perverted by a for-profit prison economy, should shut up about abuses of the justice system in other countries.
If you can't understand an obvious moral problem such as involuntary organ harvesting, then I doubt you understand religion
If an ethical problem, not a religious one. If you think the two are the same, you need to listen to less religious propaganda. In fact, most religions are famous for changing their ethics around based on what this centuries moral trends say.
If I have the authority to kill you and harvest your extremely valuable organs, what keeps me from doing so? In an ethical society, we would have laws and punishments that keep me from doing so. In China, they don't have these and their government actually encourages this process.
Evidence and I'll be with you. I see the potential abuse - but I also remember that I'm on a forum where in a different context, people strongly claim that guns don't kill people and malicious software is necessary (and interesting).
Good narrative, and we all love naratives, but it doesn't deliver many new facts. Most importantly, not what you are alleging.
Since we can't make China a great place within a few days, how about accepting reality and then improving it, instead of wishing for some fancy lalaland?
I think TFA is spot-on: The practical issues happen to be the deciding factor. Funny how nobody said that in a response to my "why" so far (but it has been said in other comments). It's simple, straightforward, truthful and answers the question well.
People don't oppose taking organs from the executed because of "antiquated religious nonsense". They oppose it because it gives the government a perverse incentive to execute more people.
There's a million or so people waiting for donor organs in China right now. A thousand additional death sentences would cover less than 1%, and that's assuming every single one of them has multiple useable organs.
On the scale the government of China is concerned about, that's a rounding error, not an incentive.
And the reason the chinese prefer burrying their dead in one piece actually is religious superstition, some other comment laid out more details on that.
By the way, in the future you might want to put the tiniest modicum of effort into understanding people's positions before launching into, "hurr hurr religious people are dumb and haven't thought this through."
Actually, I have spent several years understanding religion, and the current result of my studies is that religious people are dumb and don't think things through. As always, there are exceptions, I am talking about the average.
Welcome to the global news, where crap from a country an ocean away from yours washes up on your evening news simply because that country is powerful and important to yours for political and economic reasons.
Uh, I'm talking european news including US stories, of course. Maybe.
But that's a fallacy based in unproven assumptions. You could just as well claim that donor cards make people drive less carefully and thus should be banned. The first thing you need to do is show that your assumption is correct.
You can't predict everything, but you can predict some things.
In common english, we call this guessing. And when we evaluate examples from the past, we almost always make several mistakes that lead us to believe that our past prediction performance was much better than it really was. Taleb calls that phenomenon "silent evidence", meaning that when we look back, we usually miss a lot of the errors that were made.
There is one and only one way to correctly evaluate predictions, and that is to keep a spotless record of all the predictions made. If you don't have that complete record, you are pretty much guaranteed to fall for one of the many traps.
Specifically, the examples you list are true, and I'm sure someone made those predictions. But a thousand other people have made other predictions at the same time that strike us as cute and silly today. We filter those out, or don't give them the credit they deserve, namely the same one that the prediction that came to pass has.
I'm not talking about the obvious appliances here. It was obvious to WW2-era people that computers would be useful for ballistics calculations. The fact that we use them for that today isn't what is revolutionary, the revolutionary part is the extend to which our entire world runs on computers, and the many things we use them for that nobody really thought about until someone did it. Try to explain the Facebook App on your iPhone to an imaginary WW2-era computer technician.
My point is that the really revolutionary application will very likely be something that none of us even think about.
Language includes a change in the levels of abstraction, encoding does not.
I had a lot more written here, but then I realized it all logically follows from this one point. You might need to have read Korzybski to understand, though. I can't explain it in a few sentences.
The countries that have voluntary donation programs are in a constant shortage for most organs. Taking them from people who are dead only shocks us because of antiquated remainders of religious nonsense, and not even that is thought through very well (your soul apparently doesn't need your body, so why would it need some parts?).
People who get the death sentence have a very serious debt to society. Let's ignore for the moment whether or not you agree with what people in China get the death sentence for, or the death sentence in general. Even if you don't like it, you can not deny the reality.
If you have forfeit your life to society, then why not the parts that remain? It's not like you'd have any use for them, or that taking some organs out of a corpse would be any more evil, wrong or whatever than killing someone in the first place.
The most realistic answer, but not the one you want to hear, is: Nobody really knows.
If history teaches us one thing than it is that we are horrible at predicting the outcomes of anything major. In hindsight, we can "explain" things, but our predictions suck so badly, it's a surprise we haven't given up on the subject. And that's for both experts and non-experts.
Nobody came even close to predicting the impact of computers. Or electricity. People didn't think WW1 would become the slaughterhouse it did. There are refugees around the globe who are living in "temporary" shelters, waiting to return home because the conflict will surely be over any day now. Some of them have been waiting for a decade and more.
The real impact of this technology, as most, will most likely not be anything that anyone today predicts, but something that someone in the future comes up with that nobody thought of before. That includes the inventors. I don't think Graham Bell ever thought that "please turn off your mobile phones" would be a screen shown in these newfangled movie theatres that just came about in his time.
stupid error, it would of course not be 1+1=2 but 1+2=3 etc.
Unless, of course, their language encoded 1 different depending on circumstances. Like some human languages that use capital letters at the start of a sentence and small letters inside the sentence. And many of those letter are not just larger versions of each other (like s and S), but pretty different (like a and A).
If the message is encoded digitally, good luck figuring it out. First you need to find out how many bits encode one symbol, and that's already assuming that number is constant. That's the encoding part. But even if you get the symbols, how do you attribute meaning? Even lost human languages are hopeless unless you have a Rosetta's Stone or some other translation that gives you a starting point.
The same holds true for math. We think that math transports universal truth, be still, what does a succession of 5 different, equally meaningless symbols mean to you? It could be 1+1=2 or it could be e=mc2. Or any other short formula.
Even a long text tells you nothing if you don't have a starting point.
Anyway, speaking of Christians and exoplanets: Giordano Bruno, one of the first people recorded as speculating that other stars might have planets, was executed by The Catholic Church in 1600.
And that is why we should mock them. Because you really, really don't want us picking any of the more "adult" alternatives. Be happy that we're a bit childish and just mock them.
It's called robbing from the public domain and is probably one of the most common unpunished crimes in western society. Corporations literally do it all the time - just think of pretty much every Disney movie of the past 20 years.
IANAL either, but I note that they're not claiming that "by accepting this agreement you agree that Book (etc.) is our trademark and yadda yadda....", i.e. they're not actively requiring the user to accept or directly agree with the assertion that they own those trademarks.
No, they simply include as a fact that these are their trademarks.
I wonder if they really hold all those trademarks world-wide - because that agreement is valid globally.
"You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Book and Wall), or any confusingly similar marks, except as expressly permitted by our Brand Usage Guidelines or with our prior written permission."
Notice something? Yes, this goes far beyond what the trademark laws actually cover. According to trademark law, a trademark is specific. Meaning I could very well name something entirely unrelated that they don't produce and that has no potential of confusion "facebook". Say, a sausage.
Their statement contains no limitations whatsoever. Legally speaking, if you're a builder and you have a FB account, you now need to get FB's permission for your work, because you agreed to not use the word "Wall" without their permission. Or, according to #6 of their Brand Usage Guidelines, if you have a business with the word "Book" in it, say "Freddie's Used Books", you have to rename.
I understand their intentions, they want to have an easier time fighting copycats like, say, Mugbook or Assbook or Pornbook - but like lawyers do, they cast the net as wide as possible. But this is ridiculous.
IANAL, but I do have business experience reading and interpreting legal texts.
If you're not breaking the law, why wouldn't you let the cops search your car?
Because it's none of their business. This concept is called "privacy". I don't care if you're a cop, the neighbour or some random stranger - if you want to enter my space then it is me who decides if you may or may not.
I don't refuse searches out of principle. But I don't agree automatically, either. If the cop can explain to me why he either has a right or a convincing interest, I will probably go along. I don't see the police as the enemy. But I think it is important that I keep control of the situation and make a conscious decision.
That is why I didnt propose a simply if-then further down. Results need to be examined, science is actually hard to quantify on the meta-level. 50 studies can reveal nothing interesting and then one studies (that, for example, changes on parameter that turns out to be important) revolutionizes a field.
So what you need to do is look at the sources. And that is what I am getting at. You want to make a law? Show us why it is necessary and beneficial. Don't just claim, show.
Slashdot Mirror
In reality all you've done is limit the places you can go. No crossing oceans, you cant go further then 800 KM's. What's the point of even taking a holiday if you're not going to see anything new or exciting. Might as well stay home.
For your situation, that's right. But world-wide, you're the exception. I live in the heart of Europe, and I've taken lots of business trips. I have former co-workers who would fly whenever possible because it was a status symbol to them. So they would fly coach on a 45 min. flight, adding customs and driving to/from the airport, the whole trip takes about the same time that it takes me to travel the same distance by train, first class, for less money. Plus I have power and 3G most of the way and actually have 90 minutes of uninterrupted time I can spend doing whatever I want.
Still, for most of my holiday trips, I'm with you 100%.
For some trips, the plane is the best means of transportation, for others it's the train, for still others it's the car. The decision should be made case-by-case.
His arguments are interesting, but: It is not the FAA's job to improve our social skills and teach us how to use our technology. He has a point, but he's barking up the wrong tree.
The sources of history
The sources of religion, of course.
I should start using the preview when posting to /. in the early morning.
religion is at its heart a moral code
That's the propaganda I was speaking about. Read "The Golden Bough", which everyone talking about religion should've read (the one-volume summary is fine, I don't know if the 12-volume full account is even available anymore) and if you're into some interesting, but largely hypothetical, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is a fascinating read explaining one theory of the neurological sources of religion.
No, religion never came about to address moral wrongs. Not once in the history of mankind, AFAIK. The sources of history are either evolved from magical thinking (the shaman-priest transition) or as tools of power (the chief-god transition).
Moral codes were incorporated into religion after the fact, and used to organize and structure them, but they did not originate there.
And how many will die before you get that evidence?
That's a cheap argument. People die all the time. We can jump to conclusion and into action and potentially do the wrong thing, harming many more people in the progress - as has happened many times in recent history - or we can wait, gather evidence and then do the right thing, accepting that in the time we need to find out what that is, some people will die.
Given what I know about the general track record of humans when it comes to prediction and gut feelings, I'm strictly on the second alternative.
Instead consider the acts of the pulling of the trigger to kill an innocent
We're not talking about innocents here. We are talking about convicted criminals.
Ah, now you say China sentences people to death for things that shouldn't be crimes. But there's a logical mistake in there as well. Because China also sentences people to death for crimes that would yield the death sencence in the USA as well.
Just because they've been sentenced by a chinese court doesn't mean they are innocent. Don't apply inverse logic.
The Chinese government is about the closest thing to pure evil since the monstrous abuses of the Third Reich.
And of course that is all part of the absolute truth that we in the west have access to. There isn't the slightest possibility that our view might be little bit tainted. Funny how all the anti-US countries are evil bastards that oppress their own people and kill anyone who doesn't love them.
No, I don't think the chinese have a clean record. But I don't buy the "pure evil" propaganda, either. I know people who've actually been to China, and from their reports it's nothing like the Third Reich (and I have spoken to people who know that 1st hand as well - like my grandparents).
If the western world had any interest in justice and human rights, we would be toppling this heinous regime instead of bowing down and giving them most favored nation status.
Yeah, go in and overthrow an evil regime and replace it with a great democratic freedom loving one. Worked so well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Frankly, if the western world had any real interest in justice and human rights, we'd get our own shit sorted out before we claim the moral high ground. In my book, a country that runs Gitmo has exactly zero say in anything related to justice, human rights or ethics.
And you should shut your mouth about toppling regimes until you've figured out how to do it without making things worse for the people living there.
And finally, to get back on topic, a country that actually incarcerates a higher percentage of its population as China, because its justice system is entirely perverted by a for-profit prison economy, should shut up about abuses of the justice system in other countries.
If you can't understand an obvious moral problem such as involuntary organ harvesting, then I doubt you understand religion
If an ethical problem, not a religious one. If you think the two are the same, you need to listen to less religious propaganda. In fact, most religions are famous for changing their ethics around based on what this centuries moral trends say.
If I have the authority to kill you and harvest your extremely valuable organs, what keeps me from doing so? In an ethical society, we would have laws and punishments that keep me from doing so. In China, they don't have these and their government actually encourages this process.
Evidence and I'll be with you. I see the potential abuse - but I also remember that I'm on a forum where in a different context, people strongly claim that guns don't kill people and malicious software is necessary (and interesting).
I'm asking for prove of your assumption. Don't pretend I speak chinese and it's not pretty clear what I'm saying.
Good narrative, and we all love naratives, but it doesn't deliver many new facts. Most importantly, not what you are alleging.
Since we can't make China a great place within a few days, how about accepting reality and then improving it, instead of wishing for some fancy lalaland?
I think TFA is spot-on: The practical issues happen to be the deciding factor. Funny how nobody said that in a response to my "why" so far (but it has been said in other comments). It's simple, straightforward, truthful and answers the question well.
People don't oppose taking organs from the executed because of "antiquated religious nonsense". They oppose it because it gives the government a perverse incentive to execute more people.
There's a million or so people waiting for donor organs in China right now. A thousand additional death sentences would cover less than 1%, and that's assuming every single one of them has multiple useable organs.
On the scale the government of China is concerned about, that's a rounding error, not an incentive.
And the reason the chinese prefer burrying their dead in one piece actually is religious superstition, some other comment laid out more details on that.
By the way, in the future you might want to put the tiniest modicum of effort into understanding people's positions before launching into, "hurr hurr religious people are dumb and haven't thought this through."
Actually, I have spent several years understanding religion, and the current result of my studies is that religious people are dumb and don't think things through. As always, there are exceptions, I am talking about the average.
More assumptions.
I'm not saying you are wrong. I am saying you haven't shown that you are right.
Welcome to the global news, where crap from a country an ocean away from yours washes up on your evening news simply because that country is powerful and important to yours for political and economic reasons.
Uh, I'm talking european news including US stories, of course. Maybe.
But that's a fallacy based in unproven assumptions. You could just as well claim that donor cards make people drive less carefully and thus should be banned. The first thing you need to do is show that your assumption is correct.
You can't predict everything, but you can predict some things.
In common english, we call this guessing. And when we evaluate examples from the past, we almost always make several mistakes that lead us to believe that our past prediction performance was much better than it really was. Taleb calls that phenomenon "silent evidence", meaning that when we look back, we usually miss a lot of the errors that were made.
There is one and only one way to correctly evaluate predictions, and that is to keep a spotless record of all the predictions made. If you don't have that complete record, you are pretty much guaranteed to fall for one of the many traps.
Specifically, the examples you list are true, and I'm sure someone made those predictions. But a thousand other people have made other predictions at the same time that strike us as cute and silly today. We filter those out, or don't give them the credit they deserve, namely the same one that the prediction that came to pass has.
I'm not talking about the obvious appliances here. It was obvious to WW2-era people that computers would be useful for ballistics calculations. The fact that we use them for that today isn't what is revolutionary, the revolutionary part is the extend to which our entire world runs on computers, and the many things we use them for that nobody really thought about until someone did it. Try to explain the Facebook App on your iPhone to an imaginary WW2-era computer technician.
My point is that the really revolutionary application will very likely be something that none of us even think about.
They are by far not the same.
Language includes a change in the levels of abstraction, encoding does not.
I had a lot more written here, but then I realized it all logically follows from this one point. You might need to have read Korzybski to understand, though. I can't explain it in a few sentences.
Seriously, why?
The countries that have voluntary donation programs are in a constant shortage for most organs. Taking them from people who are dead only shocks us because of antiquated remainders of religious nonsense, and not even that is thought through very well (your soul apparently doesn't need your body, so why would it need some parts?).
People who get the death sentence have a very serious debt to society. Let's ignore for the moment whether or not you agree with what people in China get the death sentence for, or the death sentence in general. Even if you don't like it, you can not deny the reality.
If you have forfeit your life to society, then why not the parts that remain? It's not like you'd have any use for them, or that taking some organs out of a corpse would be any more evil, wrong or whatever than killing someone in the first place.
The most realistic answer, but not the one you want to hear, is: Nobody really knows.
If history teaches us one thing than it is that we are horrible at predicting the outcomes of anything major. In hindsight, we can "explain" things, but our predictions suck so badly, it's a surprise we haven't given up on the subject. And that's for both experts and non-experts.
Nobody came even close to predicting the impact of computers. Or electricity. People didn't think WW1 would become the slaughterhouse it did. There are refugees around the globe who are living in "temporary" shelters, waiting to return home because the conflict will surely be over any day now. Some of them have been waiting for a decade and more.
The real impact of this technology, as most, will most likely not be anything that anyone today predicts, but something that someone in the future comes up with that nobody thought of before. That includes the inventors. I don't think Graham Bell ever thought that "please turn off your mobile phones" would be a screen shown in these newfangled movie theatres that just came about in his time.
stupid error, it would of course not be 1+1=2 but 1+2=3 etc.
Unless, of course, their language encoded 1 different depending on circumstances. Like some human languages that use capital letters at the start of a sentence and small letters inside the sentence. And many of those letter are not just larger versions of each other (like s and S), but pretty different (like a and A).
Encoding isn't the issue. Language and script is.
If the message is encoded digitally, good luck figuring it out. First you need to find out how many bits encode one symbol, and that's already assuming that number is constant. That's the encoding part. But even if you get the symbols, how do you attribute meaning? Even lost human languages are hopeless unless you have a Rosetta's Stone or some other translation that gives you a starting point.
The same holds true for math. We think that math transports universal truth, be still, what does a succession of 5 different, equally meaningless symbols mean to you? It could be 1+1=2 or it could be e=mc2. Or any other short formula.
Even a long text tells you nothing if you don't have a starting point.
Anyway, speaking of Christians and exoplanets: Giordano Bruno, one of the first people recorded as speculating that other stars might have planets, was executed by The Catholic Church in 1600.
And that is why we should mock them. Because you really, really don't want us picking any of the more "adult" alternatives. Be happy that we're a bit childish and just mock them.
It's called robbing from the public domain and is probably one of the most common unpunished crimes in western society. Corporations literally do it all the time - just think of pretty much every Disney movie of the past 20 years.
IANAL either, but I note that they're not claiming that "by accepting this agreement you agree that Book (etc.) is our trademark and yadda yadda....", i.e. they're not actively requiring the user to accept or directly agree with the assertion that they own those trademarks.
No, they simply include as a fact that these are their trademarks.
I wonder if they really hold all those trademarks world-wide - because that agreement is valid globally.
Now this is brash. Read what they actually say:
"You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Book and Wall), or any confusingly similar marks, except as expressly permitted by our Brand Usage Guidelines or with our prior written permission."
Notice something? Yes, this goes far beyond what the trademark laws actually cover. According to trademark law, a trademark is specific. Meaning I could very well name something entirely unrelated that they don't produce and that has no potential of confusion "facebook". Say, a sausage.
Their statement contains no limitations whatsoever. Legally speaking, if you're a builder and you have a FB account, you now need to get FB's permission for your work, because you agreed to not use the word "Wall" without their permission. Or, according to #6 of their Brand Usage Guidelines, if you have a business with the word "Book" in it, say "Freddie's Used Books", you have to rename.
I understand their intentions, they want to have an easier time fighting copycats like, say, Mugbook or Assbook or Pornbook - but like lawyers do, they cast the net as wide as possible. But this is ridiculous.
IANAL, but I do have business experience reading and interpreting legal texts.
It's too geeky to catch on in the mainstream. Yes, I realized it exists, but it's not a good meme.
If you're not breaking the law, why wouldn't you let the cops search your car?
Because it's none of their business. This concept is called "privacy". I don't care if you're a cop, the neighbour or some random stranger - if you want to enter my space then it is me who decides if you may or may not.
I don't refuse searches out of principle. But I don't agree automatically, either. If the cop can explain to me why he either has a right or a convincing interest, I will probably go along. I don't see the police as the enemy. But I think it is important that I keep control of the situation and make a conscious decision.
That is why I didnt propose a simply if-then further down. Results need to be examined, science is actually hard to quantify on the meta-level. 50 studies can reveal nothing interesting and then one studies (that, for example, changes on parameter that turns out to be important) revolutionizes a field.
So what you need to do is look at the sources. And that is what I am getting at. You want to make a law? Show us why it is necessary and beneficial. Don't just claim, show.