So the moral question should be handled with: policy. Including tariffs, labor law, taxation, etc.
There's a double-talk we get from the corporate sector. They insist on their ethical character as world citizens when the alternative is some kind of regulatory framework, yet when the chips are down, they revert back to the absolute imperative of maximum profit. They cannot have it both ways.
Like many Reason pieces, that article has serious problems.
How much innovation in medical technology - that is, research - really funded by the provision of medical care? There is extensive medical research being done in Europe and Asia - Korea and Japan are especially active in it. There is nothing to link private health care to medical research. It isn't as if we shop at "Brand Y medical provider" because they've got a new technique.
The US is already paying for health care in a way that is now crippling - business! Health care costs are the reason that GM is aggressively closing its US plants. Those Americans without health coverage often defer treatment until only more costly methods can help them (the "emergency room as point of entry" problem) and the costs then still get distributed throughout the system.
The US military funds some of the most advanced research on the planet, and does so with public funds. Why do you think that publically funded medical research is impossible?
The term "liberal" has a confusing history, the term "conservative" only slightly less so. For the most part, however, their positions have moved largely based on the interests of the most powerful.
At one time, a strong centralized government helped the wealthy and powerful, and a weak government usually helped the poorer majority. The right has historically chosen policies that helped the elite - and not always for nepharious purposes, as they often believed that the most powerful were the most virtuous and moral, and responsible for universal uplift. The conservatives still hold this view: they just see the public sector as a hindrance to the group for whom they advocate.
Blocking ads won't end free content on the Web. It will lead to innovation and new opportunities.
I think that's a little naive. It is reducing free content on the web already. I see 2 types of content which will prosper:
1. content which people are really willing to produce for free, without expecting revenue from advertisers. No one posting on this site now expects a red cent. There's a lot of that on the content side: funding the hosting is another question. It may end up being content that people are will to pay to have read: the old "eyeballs as commodity" model.
2. content that people pay for, up front, in one way or another, other than in the added cost of goods to pay for the costs of advertising. I'll throw out a guess that I have maybe a 100 to 200 dollar per year threshold of what I'm willing to pay for content, max, if it's top-flight, well-written, interesting, and doesn't piss me off too much.
People with a history of broken legs may end up having fewer opportunities to reproduce. If limping is sexually selected against, and over a few generations this trend continued, in fact, bones would get stronger.
A lot of simplistic evolutionary models forget the role of sexual selection.
I don't use drugs at all, but in fact, I *will* compare drug use to those three things, because they are all about your right to do what you will with your own body - I'm hard-pressed to think how other rights can reasonably be defended without that right being protected first. Insofar as drug use is about doing what you will about your mind and body, I don't see how it is different from religious belief, forced work, or the right to control your reproduction.
There are limits to using technological solutions for social-cultural problems. A lot of Slashdot readers are poorly socialized jerks. There's no workaround for that. There are plenty of non-AC trolls.
Ultimately, the best you can do is to try to encourage people to not be jerks. User-specific blacklists might help, too.
You need residency in India to buy property. You do not need citizenship. However, you cannot buy property in India if you are a citizen of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, China, Iran, Nepal or Bhutan.
There are no restrictions to foreigners buying property in Japan. It is difficult, perhaps practically impossible, to get a home loan if you are not a long-term resident (not necessarily citizen); of course, that is also true in the US, since credit-bureau information is often not shared internationally. But if you have the cash, you can get property.
Even if you're a shareholder that votes against a company's decision, you are both benefiting from any advantage gained from that decision and sharing in the responsibility (i.e., debts) from it. You do get "I told you so" rights, though.
Again, confusing responsibility and culpability is a mistake.
The "building up" question isn't the focus of my remark - it is the fact that opportunities now exist in India for good programmers, that can offer a good standard of living. It isn't just the enterprising westerner, it's the enterprising anybody (and, yes, they will have to compete with skilled local labor, just as enterprising Indians had to compete with skilled US-born labor in Silicon Valley.)
The Irish and Italian immigrants who built up NYC did not come into a "relatively empty land." The frontier economy was quite different from the industrial economies of the east coast that were the primary beneficiaries of 19th century immigration. And profound poverty issues vexed the US for much of that history.
The "unbreakable social taboos" bit, I think, is suspect. There are some "traditional" practices (often a. not as traditional as thought, and b. defended as "tradition" rather than on their own merits) but to see them as unbreakable, and to see Indian culture as some unchanging, intractable, fixed entity instead of being a dynamic factor that grows out of the changes in society itself - including the economic and demographic changes - is very patronising. The formula for Orientalism is the belief that the west has "history" and the east has "culture."
I don't really think that India "needs" anyone from the outside. What I really mean is that, just as the US owes its economic development to people who came there opportunistically, it's quite reasonable to think that people could go to India if the economic opportunities (for their skill set) are there.
Because the amount they will pay you will get you a comfortable middle-class existence, including the ability to buy a nice house and car, etc. It's not as if you'd be living in poverty: in fact, you may be able to enjoy a higher standard of living than you might in, say, the San Francisco Bay Area or New York area. You'll just be in another country.
The US was built up out of immigration. Now, you can build up another country with your immigration.
It's not moral absolutism. He didn't say "you are completely morally responsible for the soldier burning the child." He says, correctly, that you are paying for it.
And thus are part of a shared responsibility for it. If we live in a society with a representative government, then the policies of that government are the responsibility, to some extent, of the people who live in it. Responsibility is not exactly the same thing as moral culpability: responsibility can be collective (e.g., a company has to honor its debts even if no person who created the debt is still there.)
But it is a problem to think that you can enjoy all the benefits of a nation-state without sharing in the responsibility for the actions of that nation-state, particularly if there is some representative system at hand.
No, what you're not getting is that if I, sometime in the future, get to access time-travel, then I can only benefit from it in such a way that it affects absolutely nothing that is known about the state of the world before I time-travel. Which means that even if I have that envelope, I couldn't know about it yet. That's the twist in this model - it's about knowledge of the state of the world. Nothing that is known (i.e., that I don't have the envelope now) can be contradicted; and if every share and dollar between the point of time that I travel to and the point of time I travel from has been accounted for, then I can do nothing that changes that. If, however, that's not the case, then, according to this model, I can affect ("change") what happens *after* the point of departure. I can recieve the envelope when I get "back to the future," but not a moment before.
The thing is that this can only be true if all issued shares are already accounted for. If there are any shares unaccounted for, then it remains possible that we already live in a world in which I bought those shares, and the value always existed.
Here's an interesting twist: I can change the past in a way that changes the future, if I do so in a way that I don't know now. I could, for example, buy some shares of a stock that I know will rise a hundred-fold in value, but make sure that I don't get the money until after the moment I depart current time. Since I don't know that I don't have an envelope worth millions of dollars hidden, with a mechanism that will inform me of it, say, a week after my time-travel tip, it does not contradict what is known about the present that I become a millionaire a week from now.
Neither Jobs nor Gates really made any great breakthroughs in science or engineering, either. Gates was a pretty good programmer, and Jobs had a friend who was a pretty clever hacker (i.e., Woz.) Gates had the connections and acumen, and Jobs had charm, a smart friend, and some cunning. Good for business. But frankly, I don't think either of them, or the other college-dropout-tech-millionaires, really go into the "great minds" category. Business success is about work, energy, networking, and leadership, things which are not the exclusive provenance of the university.
People have been convicted of capital crimes with less evidence.
The "cliches" line up too well, and frankly, to call something a cliche really means that you recall seeing it before but don't remember where. I don't consider that a defense--and I assure you that Disney wouldn't consider it a defense if it were someone else lifting from one of their properties.
The Straight Dope would never make this case more cut and dried than it did: that's not it's style. "You be the judge" is one of those quiet indictments that, in its own way, is as damning as anything.
I think Linux (and FOSS) is politically and culturally important. But I've got other fish to fry than spending a day getting the printer working, or reading the man pages for a firewall. On a server, it's fine, but on my laptop or desktop, I'd had enough a long time ago.
I've gone through Slackware, SUSE, Red Hat, and Debian. Really not interested in the fixes that are always coming "real soon now," or the one distribution that "takes care of all that." As long as I keep Linux simple and hardworking - a db + web server platform, or a mail server - I'm pretty happy with it.
This may be an itch/scratch problem. Developers have idiosyncratic calendaring/time management needs from everyone else. Unless they are managing a development project (particularly across groups) they just don't get what other types of users might need, or how their lives are structured. Particularly those of us who work in a numer of different "modes" over the day.
I'm interested to see how Chandler works out--Mitch Kapor's a bright guy.
There's a difference between being positively obliged to look out for the happiness of others and being obliged to not positively act against someone's happiness. There's a word for people who don't understand that. A bunch of them, actually.
I have no ethical duty to shield others from myself. So, you'd be willing to enter a relationship with someone knowing that it would be damaging for that person? Knowing that they could do better and be happier with someone else?
Finding socializing a bit tiring is one thing. There is a difference between that and aversion to others. The latter is problematic and it would be pretty unhealthy to be involved with someone with that attitude, so if you are disqualifying yourself from an intimate relationship, I have to salute your ethics.
If, however, you simply finding it draining to socialize, there are some concrete steps that can be taken to deal with it, and there are possible partners who definitely share that trait. Again, there's a difference between introversion and shyness, and yet another difference between either of those two and misanthropy.
Re: the glasses, skin, weight and dental work: the fact that some people with a lot of charisma can be socially successful without looking that good is besides the point. If you don't have that natural charisma, looking better will increase you chances of finding people who still are interested in meeting someone bright and interesting. And making yourself as attractive as you reasonably can - and keeping yourself there - is also considerate. Once you start to share a life with someone, you become part of their "view" (and vice-versa). I'm not saying you have to act like a supermodel, but just be aware that you're going to be part of the landscape.
The difference between having a smart new friend and a smart new love interest is often just that little extra bit of attraction. I'll spare you the theory why it's so (why a potential mate would screen based on that), and just say that, in practice, it's so.
Also, instead of "new hobby" think "an activity that will get you out more." The point isn't that your old hobby is bad, it's that the right kind of activities can improve your social exposure.
I think you really need to reexamine your core assumptions here: it may explain why you are a "least-likely-to-get-laid" type.
Slashdot Mirror
So the moral question should be handled with: policy. Including tariffs, labor law, taxation, etc.
There's a double-talk we get from the corporate sector. They insist on their ethical character as world citizens when the alternative is some kind of regulatory framework, yet when the chips are down, they revert back to the absolute imperative of maximum profit. They cannot have it both ways.
Like many Reason pieces, that article has serious problems.
How much innovation in medical technology - that is, research - really funded by the provision of medical care? There is extensive medical research being done in Europe and Asia - Korea and Japan are especially active in it. There is nothing to link private health care to medical research. It isn't as if we shop at "Brand Y medical provider" because they've got a new technique.
The US is already paying for health care in a way that is now crippling - business! Health care costs are the reason that GM is aggressively closing its US plants. Those Americans without health coverage often defer treatment until only more costly methods can help them (the "emergency room as point of entry" problem) and the costs then still get distributed throughout the system.
The US military funds some of the most advanced research on the planet, and does so with public funds. Why do you think that publically funded medical research is impossible?
The term "liberal" has a confusing history, the term "conservative" only slightly less so. For the most part, however, their positions have moved largely based on the interests of the most powerful.
At one time, a strong centralized government helped the wealthy and powerful, and a weak government usually helped the poorer majority. The right has historically chosen policies that helped the elite - and not always for nepharious purposes, as they often believed that the most powerful were the most virtuous and moral, and responsible for universal uplift. The conservatives still hold this view: they just see the public sector as a hindrance to the group for whom they advocate.
Blocking ads won't end free content on the Web. It will lead to innovation and new opportunities.
I think that's a little naive. It is reducing free content on the web already. I see 2 types of content which will prosper:
1. content which people are really willing to produce for free, without expecting revenue from advertisers. No one posting on this site now expects a red cent. There's a lot of that on the content side: funding the hosting is another question. It may end up being content that people are will to pay to have read: the old "eyeballs as commodity" model.
2. content that people pay for, up front, in one way or another, other than in the added cost of goods to pay for the costs of advertising. I'll throw out a guess that I have maybe a 100 to 200 dollar per year threshold of what I'm willing to pay for content, max, if it's top-flight, well-written, interesting, and doesn't piss me off too much.
People with a history of broken legs may end up having fewer opportunities to reproduce. If limping is sexually selected against, and over a few generations this trend continued, in fact, bones would get stronger.
A lot of simplistic evolutionary models forget the role of sexual selection.
I don't use drugs at all, but in fact, I *will* compare drug use to those three things, because they are all about your right to do what you will with your own body - I'm hard-pressed to think how other rights can reasonably be defended without that right being protected first. Insofar as drug use is about doing what you will about your mind and body, I don't see how it is different from religious belief, forced work, or the right to control your reproduction.
There are limits to using technological solutions for social-cultural problems. A lot of Slashdot readers are poorly socialized jerks. There's no workaround for that. There are plenty of non-AC trolls.
Ultimately, the best you can do is to try to encourage people to not be jerks. User-specific blacklists might help, too.
You need residency in India to buy property. You do not need citizenship. However, you cannot buy property in India if you are a citizen of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, China, Iran, Nepal or Bhutan.
There are no restrictions to foreigners buying property in Japan. It is difficult, perhaps practically impossible, to get a home loan if you are not a long-term resident (not necessarily citizen); of course, that is also true in the US, since credit-bureau information is often not shared internationally. But if you have the cash, you can get property.
Even if you're a shareholder that votes against a company's decision, you are both benefiting from any advantage gained from that decision and sharing in the responsibility (i.e., debts) from it. You do get "I told you so" rights, though.
Again, confusing responsibility and culpability is a mistake.
The "building up" question isn't the focus of my remark - it is the fact that opportunities now exist in India for good programmers, that can offer a good standard of living. It isn't just the enterprising westerner, it's the enterprising anybody (and, yes, they will have to compete with skilled local labor, just as enterprising Indians had to compete with skilled US-born labor in Silicon Valley.)
The Irish and Italian immigrants who built up NYC did not come into a "relatively empty land." The frontier economy was quite different from the industrial economies of the east coast that were the primary beneficiaries of 19th century immigration. And profound poverty issues vexed the US for much of that history.
The "unbreakable social taboos" bit, I think, is suspect. There are some "traditional" practices (often a. not as traditional as thought, and b. defended as "tradition" rather than on their own merits) but to see them as unbreakable, and to see Indian culture as some unchanging, intractable, fixed entity instead of being a dynamic factor that grows out of the changes in society itself - including the economic and demographic changes - is very patronising. The formula for Orientalism is the belief that the west has "history" and the east has "culture."
I don't really think that India "needs" anyone from the outside. What I really mean is that, just as the US owes its economic development to people who came there opportunistically, it's quite reasonable to think that people could go to India if the economic opportunities (for their skill set) are there.
Because the amount they will pay you will get you a comfortable middle-class existence, including the ability to buy a nice house and car, etc. It's not as if you'd be living in poverty: in fact, you may be able to enjoy a higher standard of living than you might in, say, the San Francisco Bay Area or New York area. You'll just be in another country.
The US was built up out of immigration. Now, you can build up another country with your immigration.
It's not moral absolutism. He didn't say "you are completely morally responsible for the soldier burning the child." He says, correctly, that you are paying for it.
And thus are part of a shared responsibility for it. If we live in a society with a representative government, then the policies of that government are the responsibility, to some extent, of the people who live in it. Responsibility is not exactly the same thing as moral culpability: responsibility can be collective (e.g., a company has to honor its debts even if no person who created the debt is still there.)
But it is a problem to think that you can enjoy all the benefits of a nation-state without sharing in the responsibility for the actions of that nation-state, particularly if there is some representative system at hand.
One cannot joke about a Holy Seal.
Oh, yeah? Watch me!
A rabbi, a doctor, and the Holy Seal walk into a bar...
Hmmmn, you're right. I got nothin'.
No, what you're not getting is that if I, sometime in the future, get to access time-travel, then I can only benefit from it in such a way that it affects absolutely nothing that is known about the state of the world before I time-travel. Which means that even if I have that envelope, I couldn't know about it yet. That's the twist in this model - it's about knowledge of the state of the world. Nothing that is known (i.e., that I don't have the envelope now) can be contradicted; and if every share and dollar between the point of time that I travel to and the point of time I travel from has been accounted for, then I can do nothing that changes that. If, however, that's not the case, then, according to this model, I can affect ("change") what happens *after* the point of departure. I can recieve the envelope when I get "back to the future," but not a moment before.
The thing is that this can only be true if all issued shares are already accounted for. If there are any shares unaccounted for, then it remains possible that we already live in a world in which I bought those shares, and the value always existed.
Here's an interesting twist: I can change the past in a way that changes the future, if I do so in a way that I don't know now. I could, for example, buy some shares of a stock that I know will rise a hundred-fold in value, but make sure that I don't get the money until after the moment I depart current time. Since I don't know that I don't have an envelope worth millions of dollars hidden, with a mechanism that will inform me of it, say, a week after my time-travel tip, it does not contradict what is known about the present that I become a millionaire a week from now.
Neither Jobs nor Gates really made any great breakthroughs in science or engineering, either. Gates was a pretty good programmer, and Jobs had a friend who was a pretty clever hacker (i.e., Woz.) Gates had the connections and acumen, and Jobs had charm, a smart friend, and some cunning. Good for business. But frankly, I don't think either of them, or the other college-dropout-tech-millionaires, really go into the "great minds" category. Business success is about work, energy, networking, and leadership, things which are not the exclusive provenance of the university.
People have been convicted of capital crimes with less evidence.
The "cliches" line up too well, and frankly, to call something a cliche really means that you recall seeing it before but don't remember where. I don't consider that a defense--and I assure you that Disney wouldn't consider it a defense if it were someone else lifting from one of their properties.
The Straight Dope would never make this case more cut and dried than it did: that's not it's style. "You be the judge" is one of those quiet indictments that, in its own way, is as damning as anything.
Absolutely correct.
I think Linux (and FOSS) is politically and culturally important. But I've got other fish to fry than spending a day getting the printer working, or reading the man pages for a firewall. On a server, it's fine, but on my laptop or desktop, I'd had enough a long time ago.
I've gone through Slackware, SUSE, Red Hat, and Debian. Really not interested in the fixes that are always coming "real soon now," or the one distribution that "takes care of all that." As long as I keep Linux simple and hardworking - a db + web server platform, or a mail server - I'm pretty happy with it.
This may be an itch/scratch problem. Developers have idiosyncratic calendaring/time management needs from everyone else. Unless they are managing a development project (particularly across groups) they just don't get what other types of users might need, or how their lives are structured. Particularly those of us who work in a numer of different "modes" over the day.
I'm interested to see how Chandler works out--Mitch Kapor's a bright guy.
There's a difference between being positively obliged to look out for the happiness of others and being obliged to not positively act against someone's happiness. There's a word for people who don't understand that. A bunch of them, actually.
I think I've figured out why you're lonely.
I have no ethical duty to shield others from myself.
So, you'd be willing to enter a relationship with someone knowing that it would be damaging for that person? Knowing that they could do better and be happier with someone else?
That's pretty pathetic.
Well, enjoy your life.
Finding socializing a bit tiring is one thing. There is a difference between that and aversion to others. The latter is problematic and it would be pretty unhealthy to be involved with someone with that attitude, so if you are disqualifying yourself from an intimate relationship, I have to salute your ethics.
If, however, you simply finding it draining to socialize, there are some concrete steps that can be taken to deal with it, and there are possible partners who definitely share that trait. Again, there's a difference between introversion and shyness, and yet another difference between either of those two and misanthropy.
Re: the glasses, skin, weight and dental work: the fact that some people with a lot of charisma can be socially successful without looking that good is besides the point. If you don't have that natural charisma, looking better will increase you chances of finding people who still are interested in meeting someone bright and interesting. And making yourself as attractive as you reasonably can - and keeping yourself there - is also considerate. Once you start to share a life with someone, you become part of their "view" (and vice-versa). I'm not saying you have to act like a supermodel, but just be aware that you're going to be part of the landscape.
The difference between having a smart new friend and a smart new love interest is often just that little extra bit of attraction. I'll spare you the theory why it's so (why a potential mate would screen based on that), and just say that, in practice, it's so.
Also, instead of "new hobby" think "an activity that will get you out more." The point isn't that your old hobby is bad, it's that the right kind of activities can improve your social exposure.
I think you really need to reexamine your core assumptions here: it may explain why you are a "least-likely-to-get-laid" type.