Do you think that the guilt Milgram's subjects felt has anything on the suffering the relatives of a murder victim go through?
Granted, but the point I'm trying to make is that traumatising 60% of the population is not an efficient way of preventing murder, especially since the ones who won't be traumatised are the psychos you really want to target. The trick with the Milgram experiment is that it catches the subjects off guard because they're not used to authority figures telling them to do things which are against their own morals. A decent civics class would fix that, without the trauma - but schools these days aren't (were they ever?) set up to produce independant, well rounded individuals.
The Russians on the other hand, just do their thing. Remember when they were the ONLY link to the ISS? They did not blow their trumpets one bit. If it were the Americans it would be a different story.
I don't intend to disagree with you, but I'm on an anti-big-media bender at the moment. If, hypothetically, the Russians were blowing their own trumpet, who would tell you about it? CNN? ABC? Fox?
If their worldview is broken enough that they will kill somebody for no good reason, then damaging that worldview is a good thing. I'd argue it's unethical *not* to perform the Milgram experiment on as many people as possible (before they know what it is).
But the Milgram experiment is rigged so that they never consciously decide to kill. It happens because they start off with something that seems unobjectionable then incrementally increase it until it becomes murder. It's not an experiment about willingness to kill, it's about how far much pressure authority figures can exert to make ordinary people do things that those people themselves find abhorrent.
The failure of the test subjects is a failure to draw a line when faced with authority. How many people do you think would have pressed the button if they'd been sent in cold and told "this guy's useless. We don't want him any more, so please press that button to incinerate him"?
Performing the experiment on people to innoculate them against it (which I think is what you advocate) is extreme. How many of the participants would 'kill' again if put back in the same situation? None, barring the genuinely twisted. The problem is that the participants had not previously considered where to draw the line in that situation, and were railroaded into doing more than they were comfortable with. A basic ethics class would be as effective and (most would say) less emotionally scarring;) Probably it would be enough to have simply heard of the experiment before.
You seem to think there's unethical behavior involved in Milgram's experiment. I disagree. It's just an experiment. Instead, the darkness is inside the subjects doing the dirty deeds. All the experiment does is dredge up that evil and lay it bare before all. The subject should be joyful that they didn't kill anybody since they so clearly would have. The only patholiogical part of Milgram's experiment lay deep in the minds and souls of those who flipped the switch.
You're saying that it's ethical to encourage somebody to do something they'll regret. That's a very poor point to defend. You're implying that people should have to live with the worst they are capable of, regardless of whether they would naturally do it.
Holden: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping.
Leon: What do you mean I'm not helping?
An interesting experiment. It's not really news that people can get upset about hypothetical situations, like the torturing of a computer character in the article, but there's a lot of interesting research to be done into the particulars.
As PingSpike said in another post around here somewhere, there are already computer games out there (Dungeon Keeper specifically) which put the player in a situation where they are rewarded for punishing computer characters. Some (most?) people (including me) don't feel good about slapping even imaginary characters in the context of a cartoonish game where the entire point is to be a nefarious villain. But does exposure to this kind of game make people more or less willing to torture imaginary characters? It could plausibly be either way.
### The real solution to make Linux more mainstream is to make users more computer litterate.
Good luck trying that, it won't work, ever. The simple reason for that is that computers simply don't make sense. You can teach a person math, because math makes sense and is logic, but handling a computers relies in very large part simply on learning the quicks of its broken software, on Linux just the same as everywhere else.
My favourite tactic, when asked by a user to explain why the computer doesn't make sense, is to this: when you use a program you're not really talking to the computer, you're talking to the guy who wrote the program. Computers are always logical, but programmers are often retards.
Every other time a story about this service comes up, someone points out that pedophiles can use it to track your children too. Hooray for modern technology!
The tree-hugging hippy environmentalists are a dying breed, but they make a great straw-man if you want to justify some pollutin' - and so we keep hearing about them.
The best argument for conservation is that it benefits humans to maintain the status quo. A clean, temperate environment with good biodiversity is the ideal situation, and we should be trying to maintain that even if the move away from it is 'natural'.
Standard disclaimer applies about not trying to terraform unless you're really sure you know what you're doing.
Although I'm a CS graduate, I found Windows ME to be a superior home user product to 98SE. It booted faster and had thumbnail previews in explorer. If you only use your computer to play games, browse the web and store your digital photos that's a bonus.
I'm not saying that it wasn't craptacular in many ways, but for a lot of users it wasn't entirely without merit.
According to Some Dude On The Radio the other day (expert, not talkback), corn oil returns about 3 times as much energy as is put in, when brewed for ethanol (this is counting fuel consumed during production and harvesting). This isn't great, but if you're subsidising corn farmers anyway it makes sense. Crops which are full of cellusose give a much better return when paired with some appropriate bacteria - more like 20 times.
So in summary, corn oil may not be great but if it's a waste product anyway - go for it! Corn ethanol is more efficient, but non-food crops are the best.
I hate to nitpick (ok, I lied. I loooove to nitpick), but you probably should have written "descriptions of a fictional object". It's the object that's fictional not the description. I'm sure you are technically correct though; I doubt any fictitious descriptions of real objects have ever been used as prior art;)
True. The bit that makes me proud to be a New Zealander is that everybody has been completely ignoring the stupid, stupid laws. iPods and other music players are at least as popular here as they are in the States, and yet until now there was no legal way to put music on them...
Please keep in mind that I am not interested in something that would copy a full-length film, nor am I'm not advocating discussion on how to best pirate films. What utilities would you use to retrieve short clips from DVDs and other digital sources?"
Regardless of your good intentions, I don't think that you'll find any officially sanctioned programs that will let you copy part of a DVD. Even if you restrict yourself to the most obvious fair use, you'll still have to do it with the same tools the pirates use. Perhaps someone will prove me wrong, but I won't be holding my breath.
"When copying DVD's is outlawed, only outlaws will be able to copy DVD's."
I believe each win xp iso is unique. At least that would make sense if MS is keen on preventing piracy.
I'm no expert, but I've heard that it's a huge pain in the ass to make non-identical iso's on an industrial scale. I think commercial CD's are produced by making a 'stamp' and then: WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP - three copies.
But even if that's not how it's done any more, you'd have to use a pretty complicated solution to make watermarked iso's - it can't just be a serial number embedded somewhere or it could be pinpointed just by doing a diff of two images.
Call me stupid, but what's the milk meant to achieve? Back when I was played WoW, I'd consider 2 litres (half a gallon or so) of flavoured milk an excellent accompaniment to an afternoon of warcraft. I never noticed any ill effects.
Nuclear power is cheap and produces no carbon emissions. I understand that modern reactor designs make it pretty much impossible to start a self-sustaining reaction (i.e. no meltdown). I still have concerns about waste disposal (remember that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are also a problem of waste disposal).
If you make a pessimistic guess at the cost of nuclear waste disposal, including storage concerns after the lifetime of the plant and possible economic damage from leakage, is it still a cheap option? That's a genuine question, but don't talk to me about reducing carbon emissions if you're just emitting something worse instead.
I was assuming that in his capacity as Dr Gregory House he lives in the US these days. Never mind, nobody seems to feel like modding me up anyway. *sniffle*
I'm not interested in defending a position on this quagmire of an argument, I only keep up with it because it bumps into censorship and ethics issues that I am interested in - but I am happy to report positions that I know others take.
People will pay someone to rape and murder just so that they can get off watching a film of it (snuff films). I don't know if possessing films of real extreme violence is technically legal or illegal, but they are quite common on many sites and I have seen no effort to crack down on them.
What can I say? Pictures of scantily clad children generate more outrage than murder, so there's more political mileage for being tough on child porn. Many people have commented on the absurdity that depictions of multiple murder are standard TV fare, but nipples are R18.
As for snuff films, there are plenty of faked snuff films or footage of accidental death. There are pornographers who specialise in simulated rape. I understand snuff films, in the sense of murder committed specifically to be recorded, to be an urban legend - it's so much easier just to fake it. Wikipedia agrees with me, and I'm honestly not interested in investigating any further. I leave it to you to consider whether whatever films you have seen were real or faked.
If you want to stop such crimes, you go after the people committing murder or rape, or those paying others to do it. You don't go after the people learning about the crimes by seeing recorded evidence of them. They are just consuming primary source media.
Well, one could (and many do) argue that consumers of the resulting media are 'paying', whether through cash or reknown, and fueling demand. My hazy understanding is that deliberate recording of crimes or possession of such recordings is usually illegal for the previously mentioned glorification reasons (with loopholes for legitimate researchers), but anything recorded accidentally like CCTV footage is fair game due to anti-censorship laws.
Most underage porn is produced for personal use or use among friends. If we are so afraid of commercial exploitation of young people, why not ban the sale of underage porn.
I've never heard anyone complaining about commercialism, the exploitation is the problem.
Aren't teens also being exploited by being thrown in jail when they try to take pictures of themselves?
There are many, many things wrong with age of consent laws. One of my favourite absurdities is laws which punish specifically under-age males who engange in consenting but under-age sexual activities. I don't think exploitation is quite the word you want though. From Merriam-Webster online: 2. to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage. This usage would be correct for child pornography (the children are being used for someone else's advantage), but wouldn't work for under-age people being jailed; Nobody directly benefits.
An aside: I don't think minors are ever jailed in most jurisdictions - police record, counselling, sure, but aren't minors usually exempt from jail? I'm no expert.
On a different note, what is so wrong about sharing "child" porn?
I'm no expert, but nobody else seems to have posted this so I'll chime in with what I know. The usual answer is that possession of child porn is glorifying or profiting from a criminal act, and even if the possession is not causing direct harm it should be banned because it encourages the (criminal) act of creating more. This covers rape etc. as well. This is a position that I generally agree with.
The interesting debate is around *simulated* child pornography or rape images, since they can be created without any criminal acts. IIRC, such images are usually illegal as well, but the above argument doesn't apply since the images are not 'real'. I think the usual justification then falls back on the tired old arguments about violent images leading to violent behaviour, which are not particularly persuasive. I think legislation against simulated images of illegal acts would fall over given a decent push, but it would be political suicide for anyone to champion the cause of pedophiles, so nobody will do it.
Ah, but for some people it's not so simple. Take your post, and replace "teaching" with "gassing Jews" (hi Godwin, didn't see you in the back there) and it's not obviously ethical to say "no thanks, I don't want the job but go ahead and find someone who does". I'm sure there are people, like this guy perhaps, who think it is ethical to take the teaching job and try to subvert it wherever possible.
One of the biggest problems with the world is that people always think they're doing the right thing.
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But the Milgram experiment is rigged so that they never consciously decide to kill. It happens because they start off with something that seems unobjectionable then incrementally increase it until it becomes murder. It's not an experiment about willingness to kill, it's about how far much pressure authority figures can exert to make ordinary people do things that those people themselves find abhorrent.
The failure of the test subjects is a failure to draw a line when faced with authority. How many people do you think would have pressed the button if they'd been sent in cold and told "this guy's useless. We don't want him any more, so please press that button to incinerate him"?
Performing the experiment on people to innoculate them against it (which I think is what you advocate) is extreme. How many of the participants would 'kill' again if put back in the same situation? None, barring the genuinely twisted. The problem is that the participants had not previously considered where to draw the line in that situation, and were railroaded into doing more than they were comfortable with. A basic ethics class would be as effective and (most would say) less emotionally scarring
You're saying that it's ethical to encourage somebody to do something they'll regret. That's a very poor point to defend. You're implying that people should have to live with the worst they are capable of, regardless of whether they would naturally do it.
An interesting experiment. It's not really news that people can get upset about hypothetical situations, like the torturing of a computer character in the article, but there's a lot of interesting research to be done into the particulars.
As PingSpike said in another post around here somewhere, there are already computer games out there (Dungeon Keeper specifically) which put the player in a situation where they are rewarded for punishing computer characters. Some (most?) people (including me) don't feel good about slapping even imaginary characters in the context of a cartoonish game where the entire point is to be a nefarious villain. But does exposure to this kind of game make people more or less willing to torture imaginary characters? It could plausibly be either way.
My favourite tactic, when asked by a user to explain why the computer doesn't make sense, is to this: when you use a program you're not really talking to the computer, you're talking to the guy who wrote the program. Computers are always logical, but programmers are often retards.
Every other time a story about this service comes up, someone points out that pedophiles can use it to track your children too. Hooray for modern technology!
You're conflating tracking with shooting. Is there a law that says the visually impaired can't accompany shooters?
The tree-hugging hippy environmentalists are a dying breed, but they make a great straw-man if you want to justify some pollutin' - and so we keep hearing about them.
The best argument for conservation is that it benefits humans to maintain the status quo. A clean, temperate environment with good biodiversity is the ideal situation, and we should be trying to maintain that even if the move away from it is 'natural'.
Standard disclaimer applies about not trying to terraform unless you're really sure you know what you're doing.
Although I'm a CS graduate, I found Windows ME to be a superior home user product to 98SE. It booted faster and had thumbnail previews in explorer. If you only use your computer to play games, browse the web and store your digital photos that's a bonus.
I'm not saying that it wasn't craptacular in many ways, but for a lot of users it wasn't entirely without merit.
According to Some Dude On The Radio the other day (expert, not talkback), corn oil returns about 3 times as much energy as is put in, when brewed for ethanol (this is counting fuel consumed during production and harvesting). This isn't great, but if you're subsidising corn farmers anyway it makes sense. Crops which are full of cellusose give a much better return when paired with some appropriate bacteria - more like 20 times.
So in summary, corn oil may not be great but if it's a waste product anyway - go for it! Corn ethanol is more efficient, but non-food crops are the best.
I hate to nitpick (ok, I lied. I loooove to nitpick), but you probably should have written "descriptions of a fictional object". It's the object that's fictional not the description. I'm sure you are technically correct though; I doubt any fictitious descriptions of real objects have ever been used as prior art ;)
True. The bit that makes me proud to be a New Zealander is that everybody has been completely ignoring the stupid, stupid laws. iPods and other music players are at least as popular here as they are in the States, and yet until now there was no legal way to put music on them...
Regardless of your good intentions, I don't think that you'll find any officially sanctioned programs that will let you copy part of a DVD. Even if you restrict yourself to the most obvious fair use, you'll still have to do it with the same tools the pirates use. Perhaps someone will prove me wrong, but I won't be holding my breath.
"When copying DVD's is outlawed, only outlaws will be able to copy DVD's."
Not true. A casual glance will show you that FOX News uses only below average people as journalists ;)
I'm no expert, but I've heard that it's a huge pain in the ass to make non-identical iso's on an industrial scale. I think commercial CD's are produced by making a 'stamp' and then: WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP - three copies.
But even if that's not how it's done any more, you'd have to use a pretty complicated solution to make watermarked iso's - it can't just be a serial number embedded somewhere or it could be pinpointed just by doing a diff of two images.
Call me stupid, but what's the milk meant to achieve? Back when I was played WoW, I'd consider 2 litres (half a gallon or so) of flavoured milk an excellent accompaniment to an afternoon of warcraft. I never noticed any ill effects.
And hell, why not? This post is only here so I can post about Quantum Vortex Cores! Yeeeargh!
Nuclear power is cheap and produces no carbon emissions. I understand that modern reactor designs make it pretty much impossible to start a self-sustaining reaction (i.e. no meltdown). I still have concerns about waste disposal (remember that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are also a problem of waste disposal).
If you make a pessimistic guess at the cost of nuclear waste disposal, including storage concerns after the lifetime of the plant and possible economic damage from leakage, is it still a cheap option? That's a genuine question, but don't talk to me about reducing carbon emissions if you're just emitting something worse instead.
A thing is worth what somebody will pay for it, and some people are morons.
Strangely, that's a commentary on the valuation of Second Life businesses, and is also the business model of said businesses.
I was assuming that in his capacity as Dr Gregory House he lives in the US these days. Never mind, nobody seems to feel like modding me up anyway. *sniffle*
Polonium is such an unlikely poison - given its rarity and inherent handling hazards - that even considering it is far-fetched.
Luckily Hugh Laurie was visiting England at the time of the autopsy, or they never would have got it.
I'm not interested in defending a position on this quagmire of an argument, I only keep up with it because it bumps into censorship and ethics issues that I am interested in - but I am happy to report positions that I know others take.
People will pay someone to rape and murder just so that they can get off watching a film of it (snuff films). I don't know if possessing films of real extreme violence is technically legal or illegal, but they are quite common on many sites and I have seen no effort to crack down on them.
What can I say? Pictures of scantily clad children generate more outrage than murder, so there's more political mileage for being tough on child porn. Many people have commented on the absurdity that depictions of multiple murder are standard TV fare, but nipples are R18.
As for snuff films, there are plenty of faked snuff films or footage of accidental death. There are pornographers who specialise in simulated rape. I understand snuff films, in the sense of murder committed specifically to be recorded, to be an urban legend - it's so much easier just to fake it. Wikipedia agrees with me, and I'm honestly not interested in investigating any further. I leave it to you to consider whether whatever films you have seen were real or faked.
If you want to stop such crimes, you go after the people committing murder or rape, or those paying others to do it. You don't go after the people learning about the crimes by seeing recorded evidence of them. They are just consuming primary source media.
Well, one could (and many do) argue that consumers of the resulting media are 'paying', whether through cash or reknown, and fueling demand. My hazy understanding is that deliberate recording of crimes or possession of such recordings is usually illegal for the previously mentioned glorification reasons (with loopholes for legitimate researchers), but anything recorded accidentally like CCTV footage is fair game due to anti-censorship laws.
Most underage porn is produced for personal use or use among friends. If we are so afraid of commercial exploitation of young people, why not ban the sale of underage porn.
I've never heard anyone complaining about commercialism, the exploitation is the problem.
Aren't teens also being exploited by being thrown in jail when they try to take pictures of themselves?
There are many, many things wrong with age of consent laws. One of my favourite absurdities is laws which punish specifically under-age males who engange in consenting but under-age sexual activities. I don't think exploitation is quite the word you want though. From Merriam-Webster online: 2. to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage. This usage would be correct for child pornography (the children are being used for someone else's advantage), but wouldn't work for under-age people being jailed; Nobody directly benefits.
An aside: I don't think minors are ever jailed in most jurisdictions - police record, counselling, sure, but aren't minors usually exempt from jail? I'm no expert.
On a different note, what is so wrong about sharing "child" porn?
I'm no expert, but nobody else seems to have posted this so I'll chime in with what I know. The usual answer is that possession of child porn is glorifying or profiting from a criminal act, and even if the possession is not causing direct harm it should be banned because it encourages the (criminal) act of creating more. This covers rape etc. as well. This is a position that I generally agree with.
The interesting debate is around *simulated* child pornography or rape images, since they can be created without any criminal acts. IIRC, such images are usually illegal as well, but the above argument doesn't apply since the images are not 'real'. I think the usual justification then falls back on the tired old arguments about violent images leading to violent behaviour, which are not particularly persuasive. I think legislation against simulated images of illegal acts would fall over given a decent push, but it would be political suicide for anyone to champion the cause of pedophiles, so nobody will do it.
Ah, but for some people it's not so simple. Take your post, and replace "teaching" with "gassing Jews" (hi Godwin, didn't see you in the back there) and it's not obviously ethical to say "no thanks, I don't want the job but go ahead and find someone who does". I'm sure there are people, like this guy perhaps, who think it is ethical to take the teaching job and try to subvert it wherever possible.
One of the biggest problems with the world is that people always think they're doing the right thing.