1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
The source of the economic controls must be the government for it to be facism, apparrently. Try again, sir.
And watch out for anything political on Wikipedia: it's basically written by the editorial equivalent of slashdot posters. Do you accept as valid definition the things people post in the political bits of slashdot? (Hoping for a negative here)
Democracy has not been successfully instituted on anything larger than a small (by modern standards) city or township. Any bigger, and the working model is a republic, not a democracy.
Everything else is funny, why should physical limitations be immune? Comments on the subject can be just as witty or tasteless as comments on anything else.
We haven't relied on our own manufacturing for decades. We rely now, and have for a long time, on owning the production facilities indirectly and supplying the innovation end of technology. We will continue to do this for some time, I do not doubt, regardless of the silliness of our government's symbolic gestures.
Uh, I don't think any of the characters are supposed to realize how bad things are until the emperor dissolves the galactic senate (first five minutes of episode 4). Though I guess someone must have seen it coming, as they had a rebellion prepared.
Your phone book throws itself at you every time you're reading the newspaper and come to a word that exists somewhere in the yellow pages? That must be painful.
Right, cause your employer's actions are Microsoft's fault. Damn you, Microsoft, for creating a decent product that became the standard for most computing!
It's like those damned suspension bridges. I use column bridge outside my front door, damn those suspension bridge makers for evilliy limiting me to a suspension bridge to cross the bay!(/sarcasm)
Throughout humanity there is a basic standard of right and wrong.
No, there isn't. Look at your examples. Complimenting one's hosts, wether they deserve it or not, is required by a number of european cultures. throughout history, there have been people who thought it was perfectly fine to murder people (most of these people are currently in prison (in the US) or in charge of government agencies (in various semi-industrial nations)). I would come up with a similar rebuttal to stealing, but then I realized that "stealing" itself is a locally defined term that varies widely from culture to culture, and I'm not sure which one you were using.
I haven't constructed a formal proof, but my gut feeling from a few decades of human experience is that any "universal" you come up with short of biochemical ones (need food and water, break up complex carbohydrates into component sugars, etc) is going to be subject to similar counterexamples.
Of course, you can argue that only the insane deviate from some of our principles, but as the fact that they don't share our principles is what defines them as insane in the first place, that argument is ridiculously invalid.
So, yeah, unless I'm missing something important, your argument would seem to collapse at the base, leaving good and evil as a locally defined set of boolean values. So Mike is evil if he fits our section's little definition of evil, and so is Google. Since the local definition of evil includes "anything named Microsoft", that would make Microsoft evil.
Actually, my scientific impulse drives me to look more closely at things which contradict my expectation than things which support it. If you constantly defend your views, you aren't going to get anywhere. If you constantly try to rip your own views down, you'll eventually end up with something that more closely approaches truth. Just my 2 cents.
Oh, and, by the way, the sky exhibits a variety of colors depending on its local compostition and conditions. If you weren't blindly dismissive of anything that claimed the sky wasn't blue, you might have observed some of them. If you're looking for mauve, try the night sky over a lighted portion of Denton, Texas. It's pretty close.
Any setup they went with would have been hypothetical. The only way for their selection of setup to not contain inherent assumptions about the user would be for them to run every configuration possible, which is in all likelihood beyond the powers of mortal man. This does not necessarily invalidate your point about the sample space of the study being too small to provide meaningful results, but it seems important to acknowledge that simplification was needed and does not automatically make the study as contemptible and worthless as you assert it is.
Yeah, blatant censorship is definitely the way to go for a company whose success is solely dependent on its reputation for reliability as a provider of information. (/sarcasm)
I dunno, I kind of enjoy it. It has that whole "freedom" thing, where your success depends on your own skill and drive in pursuing your objectives. Better a million losers get stuck in dead-end jobs to clear the way for the occsional towering genius than for everyone to be forcibly confined to safe, stagnant mediocrity.
Google that can, perhaps, anticipate your next question.
Google that performs psychoanalytic techniques to bring you everything you want to search for before you do it.
...and sends Tom Cruise to arrest you if it feels you're considering maybe committing some sort of crime sometime in the indefinite future.
Search algorithm that finds things = good. Search algorithm that interprets things = bad. I like it the way it is, thanks (or was recently, anyhow. I've recently been getting some wierd interpretive filter for some reason.)
That's nothing. I had to cut my dog's meals by three quarters because of all the pesky rabbits and squirrels he ate, and the benefit to my garden practically paid for the dog foot by itself. Now if I can just get them to unlock and open doors like my grandmother's cat can do...
Note how five completely distinct species are discovered every time California attempts to build a power plant, always conveniently existing only in the spot that the plant would occupy. Scientists are no more immune to external agendas than anyone else. That's what the peer review system is for. And "unprecedented" statements are generally incorrect: off the top of my head, Theodore Roosevelt's administration did a lot more "monkeying around with government agencies, especially over environmental concerns" than any current administration could probably accomplish.
Slashdot Mirror
fascism n.
1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
The source of the economic controls must be the government for it to be facism, apparrently. Try again, sir.
And watch out for anything political on Wikipedia: it's basically written by the editorial equivalent of slashdot posters. Do you accept as valid definition the things people post in the political bits of slashdot? (Hoping for a negative here)
Democracy has not been successfully instituted on anything larger than a small (by modern standards) city or township. Any bigger, and the working model is a republic, not a democracy.
The editorial post just hasn't used its veto power properly since Coolidge.
Maybe go scales differently than chess, but i'm pretty sure the possibilities go up a lot faster than that.
Plus, chess hasn't been solved either. We just have programs that are better at guessing outcomes than most people.
parent: 4 insightful
grandparent: 4 informative
Jesus, do the mods just refuse to mark things 'funny' because it's a thread involving partial paralysis?
Everything else is funny, why should physical limitations be immune? Comments on the subject can be just as witty or tasteless as comments on anything else.
We haven't relied on our own manufacturing for decades. We rely now, and have for a long time, on owning the production facilities indirectly and supplying the innovation end of technology. We will continue to do this for some time, I do not doubt, regardless of the silliness of our government's symbolic gestures.
Uh, I don't think any of the characters are supposed to realize how bad things are until the emperor dissolves the galactic senate (first five minutes of episode 4). Though I guess someone must have seen it coming, as they had a rebellion prepared.
Your phone book throws itself at you every time you're reading the newspaper and come to a word that exists somewhere in the yellow pages? That must be painful.
Right, cause your employer's actions are Microsoft's fault. Damn you, Microsoft, for creating a decent product that became the standard for most computing!
It's like those damned suspension bridges. I use column bridge outside my front door, damn those suspension bridge makers for evilliy limiting me to a suspension bridge to cross the bay!(/sarcasm)
Throughout humanity there is a basic standard of right and wrong.
No, there isn't. Look at your examples. Complimenting one's hosts, wether they deserve it or not, is required by a number of european cultures. throughout history, there have been people who thought it was perfectly fine to murder people (most of these people are currently in prison (in the US) or in charge of government agencies (in various semi-industrial nations)). I would come up with a similar rebuttal to stealing, but then I realized that "stealing" itself is a locally defined term that varies widely from culture to culture, and I'm not sure which one you were using.
I haven't constructed a formal proof, but my gut feeling from a few decades of human experience is that any "universal" you come up with short of biochemical ones (need food and water, break up complex carbohydrates into component sugars, etc) is going to be subject to similar counterexamples.
Of course, you can argue that only the insane deviate from some of our principles, but as the fact that they don't share our principles is what defines them as insane in the first place, that argument is ridiculously invalid.
So, yeah, unless I'm missing something important, your argument would seem to collapse at the base, leaving good and evil as a locally defined set of boolean values. So Mike is evil if he fits our section's little definition of evil, and so is Google. Since the local definition of evil includes "anything named Microsoft", that would make Microsoft evil.
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.
Actually, my scientific impulse drives me to look more closely at things which contradict my expectation than things which support it. If you constantly defend your views, you aren't going to get anywhere. If you constantly try to rip your own views down, you'll eventually end up with something that more closely approaches truth. Just my 2 cents.
Oh, and, by the way, the sky exhibits a variety of colors depending on its local compostition and conditions. If you weren't blindly dismissive of anything that claimed the sky wasn't blue, you might have observed some of them. If you're looking for mauve, try the night sky over a lighted portion of Denton, Texas. It's pretty close.
Any setup they went with would have been hypothetical. The only way for their selection of setup to not contain inherent assumptions about the user would be for them to run every configuration possible, which is in all likelihood beyond the powers of mortal man. This does not necessarily invalidate your point about the sample space of the study being too small to provide meaningful results, but it seems important to acknowledge that simplification was needed and does not automatically make the study as contemptible and worthless as you assert it is.
Separating content from questionable providers is the definition of censorship...
Yeah, blatant censorship is definitely the way to go for a company whose success is solely dependent on its reputation for reliability as a provider of information. (/sarcasm)
I dunno, I kind of enjoy it. It has that whole "freedom" thing, where your success depends on your own skill and drive in pursuing your objectives. Better a million losers get stuck in dead-end jobs to clear the way for the occsional towering genius than for everyone to be forcibly confined to safe, stagnant mediocrity.
Just my 2 cents, eh.
Google that can, perhaps, anticipate your next question.
Google that performs psychoanalytic techniques to bring you everything you want to search for before you do it.
...and sends Tom Cruise to arrest you if it feels you're considering maybe committing some sort of crime sometime in the indefinite future.
Search algorithm that finds things = good. Search algorithm that interprets things = bad. I like it the way it is, thanks (or was recently, anyhow. I've recently been getting some wierd interpretive filter for some reason.)
That's nothing. I had to cut my dog's meals by three quarters because of all the pesky rabbits and squirrels he ate, and the benefit to my garden practically paid for the dog foot by itself. Now if I can just get them to unlock and open doors like my grandmother's cat can do...
We're only asking people to stop procreating to preserve the natural resources for us to enjoy them, too.
I almost feel bad about saying that, but you were so obviously walking right into it that I figured someone would eventually anyhow.
It assumes that the human race is competent to command its own destiny: definitely not something I've often seen demonstrated.
I'm a cynical bastard regarding myself and everyone else. People tend to derive entertainment from it for some reason. Beats me.
It worked for me. After doing this about 4000 times, I finally understood what that guy in the first scene of Godfather was saying.
I dunno about should. Gotta admit random impulses lean towards helping people an amazingly large fraction of the time, though.
Note how five completely distinct species are discovered every time California attempts to build a power plant, always conveniently existing only in the spot that the plant would occupy. Scientists are no more immune to external agendas than anyone else. That's what the peer review system is for. And "unprecedented" statements are generally incorrect: off the top of my head, Theodore Roosevelt's administration did a lot more "monkeying around with government agencies, especially over environmental concerns" than any current administration could probably accomplish.