You're still missing the point of his original post. He wasn't arguing that Microsoft got news of the exploit long before it went public, but that you shouldn't assume that Microsoft only heard of the exploit when it went public, as this is often not the case. The assumption that Microsoft recieved news of the exploit 3 months ahead of the rest of us is about as supported as the assertion that Microsoft only found out about it when it went public--that's the point.
If you want to be a smart ass, atleast figure out what the other person is trying to say first.
How is it not an abuse of power? Schools are given the authority to benchmark the academic performance of an individual, they aren't given that authority so that they can shield themselves from any sort of criticism. They're overstepping their authority since they're punishing the student by giving him a negative mark on his academic record which in no way reflects his academic career. He wasn't a disruptive to the studies of other students, he wasn't breaking the law or disturbing the peace, he wasn't doing poorly academically, so what right does the school have to punish him?
If this were a private social club, or a private industry, or other private institutions which aren't imparted with special privileges, then I would not care. But schools are entrusted with the power to make or break a person's academic career, and potentially their work career. Abusing that power for retribution is clearly than abuse of their role in our society.
In that case, I think those accounts reflect something about human nature, or atleast our society. It's pretty disturbing that so many pressumably intelligent people would help put humanity at such a risk to gain a military advantage. But then again, there was so much propaganda being disseminated by all sides of the war during those days that extreme behaviors can only be expected.
No, I'm just talking about the physicists. I have no doubt that many military officials and personnel probably thought the atomic bomb might destroy the world but wanted to use it anyway.
So you're saying that all those physicists helped build a bomb which they thought could kill the entire human race upon detonation? Really? I think perhaps some of the lower-ranking personnel may have though that it was a real possibility, but it's very unlikely that any of the core physicists involved actually felt this was a serious risk. They were trying to help win a war, not destroy the human race. And I think if many of them had to choose between losing the war or destroying the planet, most would have chosen to lose the war.
"My professor is a cockmaster." -- that is not libel.
"George Bush is a fucking idiot." -- that is not libel.
"Colin Powell is a nigger." -- not libel.
"Professor X is a pedophile." -- that could be libel.
"My bio professor sleeps with his students." -- that could be libel.
"My professor is an idiot. His lectures are always full of egregious errors." -- that could be libel.
See a pattern? A statement can only be libelous if it's proven to be untrue, thus misrepresentative of the subject. You can't prove statements of pure opinion to be untrue, therefore the first four, although defamatory, does not misrepresent anyone, and so are not libelous.
Exactly. Universities are justified in establishing quiet hours during finals and midterms, and punishing students which disturb others on campus because they are the responsibility of facilitating learning--which includes creating a campus environment/atmosphere which fosters learning and academic pursuits. They have the responsibility to protect students from disturbances to their studies. A blog post online is not disturbing anyone from their studies, nor is it disrupting the campus environment.
Just because schools have the right to punish students academically doesn't mean that they can't ever be guilty of abusing their power.
That's technically right. There's nothing illegal or unconstitutional about what they're doing since they're a private institution, but it's still unethical for them to abuse their power like that. Also, since many private universities still receive government funding and enjoy certain privileges as academic institutions, they have a little more social responsibility to set a good example for the rest of society. The student's actions were neither disruptive nor injurous to anyone, so the university had no right to suppress his freedom of expression under duress of academic threats. An individual should not have to forfeit their right to free speech in order to pursue an academic career.
If no one stands up to these kinds of abuses of power by our academic institutions, then the state of academia in our society will continue to degenerate in this manner--becoming more repressive, more reactionary, and eventually becoming institutions which stifle original thought and individuality instead of fostering it. This will only turn our nation's youth away from higher education and foster more anti-intellectualism in our society.
Yes, that sums it up quite nicely. I was phrasing it in terms commonly accepted by the pro-choice camp, in which an gamte, fertilized egg, embryo, fetus, etc. are distinct from an actual human being. I would consider human life to begin when the fetus actually starts exhibiting detectable brain activity which I think happens sometime in the 3rd trimester.
well, technically you are right, but going through legal channels to bar the free speech of another (the end result of the CLRCR's actions) is still censorship. There have been many instances where censorship was the end result of perfectly legal actions, that doesn't justify it in anyway. It may justify their actions in a court of law, but ethics isn't determined by law.
There are a lot of generic DVD players that will play DVDs of any region, or have firmware upgrades for any region. The Philips DVP642 is cheap, players PAL, NTSC, and I think region free DVDs as well. It also players XviD and DivX movies as well as a few other popular video formats. I bought my friend one for $70, and it was well worth the money.
Well, certain vehicle designs lend themselves to more harmful accidents. You can't prevent accidents completely--that's why they're called accidents. But atleast you can design vehicles to minimize the risks in the case of a collision. By your argument, we shouldn't have seatbelts, and there's nothing wrong with a car that explodes when involved in a side-collision. I mean, don't blame the car, blame the driver right?
A pregnancy is considered to begin, by the medical community, when a fertilized egg is implanted into the womb. Thus, morning after pills (Emergency Contraceptive Pills), which prevent this process, are not considered abortion drugs, even though they are often used after fertilization has occured.
However, religious groups and other individuals who base their ethical judgements on religious arguments or appeals to pathos(pictures of aborted fetuses, religious rhetoric, etc.) believe that a pregnancy begins the moment an egg is fertilized. By this definition then, ECPs are abortion drugs, and women who've had sex which resulted in the fertilization of an egg, but which was never implanted for natural reasons, are also guilty of having performed an abortion (on themselves).
It's also worth noting that often when an egg is fertilized and implanted, the woman's body may still spontaneous abort the pregancy, otherwise called a miscarriage, and that this often happens so early on that the woman might not even know that they had gotten pregnant in the first place. Medically, this is called a spontaneous abortion, and about 25% of all women will experience a spontaneous abortion sometime in their life. So I guess 25% of all women are doomed to be murderers.
Well, the problem still remains since the main issue most pro-lifers have with abortion is that you are in fact destroying something that has the potential to become a human being. Most individuals who are against abortion do not make distinctions between a fertilized egg, an embryo, a fetus, and a human being. That's why many pro-life pharmacists often refuse to fill morning after pill prescriptions which are meant to prevent a pregnancy by causing any possible fertilization to be aborted before implantation into the womb. Pro-lifers consider this act an abortion even though a woman's body often does this naturally without the woman's knowledge in what's called a spontaneous abortion--this is why the medical community does not consider fertilization to be the beginning of the pregnancy, but rather when the fertilized egg is actually implanted.
So yea, if you look at the situation from a medical perspective, there are no obvious ethical dilemmas. But those against stem cell research are looking at issue in a religiously framed context using different definitions of terms and medically/scientifically unsupported premises.
Ad hominems aside, so you don't think a show that happens to be licensed to Comedy Central for distribution counts as free speech? Well, gee, let's start pulling The Catcher in the Rye off the shelves cuz Little, Brown Books, and Back Bay Books don't have a constitution protecting free speech. And I suppose it's alright for China to ban all forms of media because they don't have a Constitution protecting free speech either.
But perhaps you're right, maybe my drug-addled brain is just confused...
It should also be noted that since Linux/Unix are open source, it's easier for people to find bugs/vulnerabilities in the source code even if there are fewer in their code than there are in Windows. So while more vulnerabilities and bugs might get reported regarding Linux and Unix, that doesn't mean there aren't just as many in Windows. It just means that Linux and Unix' code will mature faster and will be secured faster.
Do a search for "south park" "bloody mary" on google. Why would a North Korean news source make up something like this? I chose the North Korea Times article cuz I thought it was funny that they even report shit like this, but more importantly, because I know a lot of/. readers would try to dismiss the story as "communist propaganda" just because it happens to also be reported in the North Korea Times. You proved me right.
Secondly, how is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the right for telling the creators of South Park that they can't even release the episode on DVD? If they don't want to watch the episode, they don't have to go out and buy the DVD. There's far more offensive material out there that's being distributed on DVDs or even shown on cable television. They're basically telling Matt Stone and Trey Parker that they can't create religious satire, and that they aren't allow to publish that episode of southpark in any form just because it contains religious icons. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have not encroached on anyone's rights, so how can the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights be justified in encroaching on their right to free speech?
Well, obviously it didn't offend all religious conservatives, nor did it offend all Roman Catholics. But I agree with you on the part about AA being the main target, and having more of a right to be offended as well. But alcoholics don't have much political sway in our society.
Fox didn't choose to not air the episode--they did air the episode initially. It wasn't until certain groups exercised their political influence and used political and legal coercion did Fox pull the episode. And I can understand if the religious groups don't want the show on public television. I can even understand if the religious groups don't want the show on cable television. But to threaten Fox with legal action if they ever reproduced the episode in any form--even on DVD--that seems to fit the definition of censorship to me.
This isn't just another case of tv censors doing what they're paid to do. This is an instance of religious conservatives preventing the rendition, in any form, of a consitutionally protected form of free speech.
I found MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN's thoughts on relativism to be pretty intriguing. My thoughts on cultural relativism in ethics is that it isn't so much a statement of the innate nature of ethics or moral truths as it's an observation of de facto conditions that influence our personal observations or our subjective realities. In other words, there may be absolute moral values/imperatives but our moral standards are always skewed by cultural influences--that is why in any given society you have what is considered common sense morality, which the majority of the population adheres to, yet common sense morality may vary greatly from culture to culture. So I think this has more to do with sociology and psychology than philosophy since it's a phenomenon that arrises from human psychological development and social interactions. That allays, in me atleast, any fears of humanity descending into a pit of moral nihilism.
As far as relativism in evolution, I hadn't really read or heard of anything about this up until today. But it does seem to make some sense to me. One example that's crossed my mind is the common cold. Our body's defenses are in a constant arms race against the various strains of the cold virus floating about. Our body adapts to fight off these pathogens, and the viruses adapt to circumvent these defenses. And after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution we are still at a stalemate--why? Because although r-strategists favor small organisms that are relatively simple biologically compared to k-strategists, that's just part of their evolutionary strategy. An r-strategist like cold viruses doesn't need to retain many evolutionary changes to develop into more complex organisms over time because their biological simplicity is their evolutionary advantage, just as our biological complexity is our evolutionary advantage. Small simple r-strategists can adapt much quicker than large complex k-strategists, but k-strategists typically have lower attrition rates, and adapt more "intelligently," with fewer evolutionary changes spreading through its entire population over time than r-strategists.
By and large it seems that even though each species takes a different evolutionary path, most that live in the same environment at the same time have equally evolutionarily viable living strategies that they are biologically adapted to. Environmental changes may tip the balance from time to time, but in the grand scale of things, any two systems of genes that have survived the same amount of natural selection as each other should reasonably be equally "mature." Right now man may seem to have the upper-hand, but if nuke ourselves out of existence, the r-strategists may gain the upperhand.
This notion also carries into intraspecies evolution. Being smart, or artistic, or athletic, or aesthetically appealing are all seen as positive traits while being dumb, or uncreative, or unathetlic, or ugly are seen as negative traits. But in most of the population these traits seem to be evenly distributed in a way that there would seem to be a correlation between certain seemingly positive traits and certain negative traits. If you are beautiful and athletic in our society, you may be able to get by very well on those traits alone, but perhaps because of this you do not need to develop much intelligence to get by. Or perhaps someone who is both intelligent, athletic, and beautiful may get by very easily without treating others very nicely and as a result don't develop much empathy for others, and may even develop sociopathic characteristics. It's also proven that creative geniuses like writers and painters have a higher susceptibility to depression, while mathematical geniuses have a higher susceptibility to asperger's and autism.
I imagine that if you could assign a Net Evolutionary Desirability Coefficient to every organism in a certain population, you will find that the standard deviation of the NEDC in the population is very low compared to the standard deviation between the Evolutio
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You're still missing the point of his original post. He wasn't arguing that Microsoft got news of the exploit long before it went public, but that you shouldn't assume that Microsoft only heard of the exploit when it went public, as this is often not the case. The assumption that Microsoft recieved news of the exploit 3 months ahead of the rest of us is about as supported as the assertion that Microsoft only found out about it when it went public--that's the point.
If you want to be a smart ass, atleast figure out what the other person is trying to say first.
How is it not an abuse of power? Schools are given the authority to benchmark the academic performance of an individual, they aren't given that authority so that they can shield themselves from any sort of criticism. They're overstepping their authority since they're punishing the student by giving him a negative mark on his academic record which in no way reflects his academic career. He wasn't a disruptive to the studies of other students, he wasn't breaking the law or disturbing the peace, he wasn't doing poorly academically, so what right does the school have to punish him?
If this were a private social club, or a private industry, or other private institutions which aren't imparted with special privileges, then I would not care. But schools are entrusted with the power to make or break a person's academic career, and potentially their work career. Abusing that power for retribution is clearly than abuse of their role in our society.
In that case, I think those accounts reflect something about human nature, or atleast our society. It's pretty disturbing that so many pressumably intelligent people would help put humanity at such a risk to gain a military advantage. But then again, there was so much propaganda being disseminated by all sides of the war during those days that extreme behaviors can only be expected.
No, I'm just talking about the physicists. I have no doubt that many military officials and personnel probably thought the atomic bomb might destroy the world but wanted to use it anyway.
So you're saying that all those physicists helped build a bomb which they thought could kill the entire human race upon detonation? Really? I think perhaps some of the lower-ranking personnel may have though that it was a real possibility, but it's very unlikely that any of the core physicists involved actually felt this was a serious risk. They were trying to help win a war, not destroy the human race. And I think if many of them had to choose between losing the war or destroying the planet, most would have chosen to lose the war.
Yea, we should also discontinue the use of kleenex for tissue, and band-aid for adhesive bandage with a gauze pad in the center.
"You are an asshole." -- that is not libel.
"My professor is a cockmaster." -- that is not libel.
"George Bush is a fucking idiot." -- that is not libel.
"Colin Powell is a nigger." -- not libel.
"Professor X is a pedophile." -- that could be libel.
"My bio professor sleeps with his students." -- that could be libel.
"My professor is an idiot. His lectures are always full of egregious errors." -- that could be libel.
See a pattern? A statement can only be libelous if it's proven to be untrue, thus misrepresentative of the subject. You can't prove statements of pure opinion to be untrue, therefore the first four, although defamatory, does not misrepresent anyone, and so are not libelous.
Exactly. Universities are justified in establishing quiet hours during finals and midterms, and punishing students which disturb others on campus because they are the responsibility of facilitating learning--which includes creating a campus environment/atmosphere which fosters learning and academic pursuits. They have the responsibility to protect students from disturbances to their studies. A blog post online is not disturbing anyone from their studies, nor is it disrupting the campus environment.
Just because schools have the right to punish students academically doesn't mean that they can't ever be guilty of abusing their power.
That's technically right. There's nothing illegal or unconstitutional about what they're doing since they're a private institution, but it's still unethical for them to abuse their power like that. Also, since many private universities still receive government funding and enjoy certain privileges as academic institutions, they have a little more social responsibility to set a good example for the rest of society. The student's actions were neither disruptive nor injurous to anyone, so the university had no right to suppress his freedom of expression under duress of academic threats. An individual should not have to forfeit their right to free speech in order to pursue an academic career.
If no one stands up to these kinds of abuses of power by our academic institutions, then the state of academia in our society will continue to degenerate in this manner--becoming more repressive, more reactionary, and eventually becoming institutions which stifle original thought and individuality instead of fostering it. This will only turn our nation's youth away from higher education and foster more anti-intellectualism in our society.
Yes, that sums it up quite nicely. I was phrasing it in terms commonly accepted by the pro-choice camp, in which an gamte, fertilized egg, embryo, fetus, etc. are distinct from an actual human being. I would consider human life to begin when the fetus actually starts exhibiting detectable brain activity which I think happens sometime in the 3rd trimester.
well, technically you are right, but going through legal channels to bar the free speech of another (the end result of the CLRCR's actions) is still censorship. There have been many instances where censorship was the end result of perfectly legal actions, that doesn't justify it in anyway. It may justify their actions in a court of law, but ethics isn't determined by law.
wow, I'm too tired to type. s/players/plays.
There are a lot of generic DVD players that will play DVDs of any region, or have firmware upgrades for any region. The Philips DVP642 is cheap, players PAL, NTSC, and I think region free DVDs as well. It also players XviD and DivX movies as well as a few other popular video formats. I bought my friend one for $70, and it was well worth the money.
Well, certain vehicle designs lend themselves to more harmful accidents. You can't prevent accidents completely--that's why they're called accidents. But atleast you can design vehicles to minimize the risks in the case of a collision. By your argument, we shouldn't have seatbelts, and there's nothing wrong with a car that explodes when involved in a side-collision. I mean, don't blame the car, blame the driver right?
Well, the problem lies in the fact that:
A pregnancy is considered to begin, by the medical community, when a fertilized egg is implanted into the womb. Thus, morning after pills (Emergency Contraceptive Pills), which prevent this process, are not considered abortion drugs, even though they are often used after fertilization has occured.
However, religious groups and other individuals who base their ethical judgements on religious arguments or appeals to pathos(pictures of aborted fetuses, religious rhetoric, etc.) believe that a pregnancy begins the moment an egg is fertilized. By this definition then, ECPs are abortion drugs, and women who've had sex which resulted in the fertilization of an egg, but which was never implanted for natural reasons, are also guilty of having performed an abortion (on themselves).
It's also worth noting that often when an egg is fertilized and implanted, the woman's body may still spontaneous abort the pregancy, otherwise called a miscarriage, and that this often happens so early on that the woman might not even know that they had gotten pregnant in the first place. Medically, this is called a spontaneous abortion, and about 25% of all women will experience a spontaneous abortion sometime in their life. So I guess 25% of all women are doomed to be murderers.
Well, the problem still remains since the main issue most pro-lifers have with abortion is that you are in fact destroying something that has the potential to become a human being. Most individuals who are against abortion do not make distinctions between a fertilized egg, an embryo, a fetus, and a human being. That's why many pro-life pharmacists often refuse to fill morning after pill prescriptions which are meant to prevent a pregnancy by causing any possible fertilization to be aborted before implantation into the womb. Pro-lifers consider this act an abortion even though a woman's body often does this naturally without the woman's knowledge in what's called a spontaneous abortion--this is why the medical community does not consider fertilization to be the beginning of the pregnancy, but rather when the fertilized egg is actually implanted.
So yea, if you look at the situation from a medical perspective, there are no obvious ethical dilemmas. But those against stem cell research are looking at issue in a religiously framed context using different definitions of terms and medically/scientifically unsupported premises.
Ad hominems aside, so you don't think a show that happens to be licensed to Comedy Central for distribution counts as free speech? Well, gee, let's start pulling The Catcher in the Rye off the shelves cuz Little, Brown Books, and Back Bay Books don't have a constitution protecting free speech. And I suppose it's alright for China to ban all forms of media because they don't have a Constitution protecting free speech either.
But perhaps you're right, maybe my drug-addled brain is just confused...
It should also be noted that since Linux/Unix are open source, it's easier for people to find bugs/vulnerabilities in the source code even if there are fewer in their code than there are in Windows. So while more vulnerabilities and bugs might get reported regarding Linux and Unix, that doesn't mean there aren't just as many in Windows. It just means that Linux and Unix' code will mature faster and will be secured faster.
Do a search for "south park" "bloody mary" on google. Why would a North Korean news source make up something like this? I chose the North Korea Times article cuz I thought it was funny that they even report shit like this, but more importantly, because I know a lot of /. readers would try to dismiss the story as "communist propaganda" just because it happens to also be reported in the North Korea Times. You proved me right.
Secondly, how is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the right for telling the creators of South Park that they can't even release the episode on DVD? If they don't want to watch the episode, they don't have to go out and buy the DVD. There's far more offensive material out there that's being distributed on DVDs or even shown on cable television. They're basically telling Matt Stone and Trey Parker that they can't create religious satire, and that they aren't allow to publish that episode of southpark in any form just because it contains religious icons. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have not encroached on anyone's rights, so how can the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights be justified in encroaching on their right to free speech?
oops, i mean Comedy Central
Well, obviously it didn't offend all religious conservatives, nor did it offend all Roman Catholics. But I agree with you on the part about AA being the main target, and having more of a right to be offended as well. But alcoholics don't have much political sway in our society.
Fox didn't choose to not air the episode--they did air the episode initially. It wasn't until certain groups exercised their political influence and used political and legal coercion did Fox pull the episode. And I can understand if the religious groups don't want the show on public television. I can even understand if the religious groups don't want the show on cable television. But to threaten Fox with legal action if they ever reproduced the episode in any form--even on DVD--that seems to fit the definition of censorship to me.
This isn't just another case of tv censors doing what they're paid to do. This is an instance of religious conservatives preventing the rendition, in any form, of a consitutionally protected form of free speech.
Yea, and sometimes eenie, meenie, minie, mo will give you the best answer too.
I found MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN's thoughts on relativism to be pretty intriguing. My thoughts on cultural relativism in ethics is that it isn't so much a statement of the innate nature of ethics or moral truths as it's an observation of de facto conditions that influence our personal observations or our subjective realities. In other words, there may be absolute moral values/imperatives but our moral standards are always skewed by cultural influences--that is why in any given society you have what is considered common sense morality, which the majority of the population adheres to, yet common sense morality may vary greatly from culture to culture. So I think this has more to do with sociology and psychology than philosophy since it's a phenomenon that arrises from human psychological development and social interactions. That allays, in me atleast, any fears of humanity descending into a pit of moral nihilism.
As far as relativism in evolution, I hadn't really read or heard of anything about this up until today. But it does seem to make some sense to me. One example that's crossed my mind is the common cold. Our body's defenses are in a constant arms race against the various strains of the cold virus floating about. Our body adapts to fight off these pathogens, and the viruses adapt to circumvent these defenses. And after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution we are still at a stalemate--why? Because although r-strategists favor small organisms that are relatively simple biologically compared to k-strategists, that's just part of their evolutionary strategy. An r-strategist like cold viruses doesn't need to retain many evolutionary changes to develop into more complex organisms over time because their biological simplicity is their evolutionary advantage, just as our biological complexity is our evolutionary advantage. Small simple r-strategists can adapt much quicker than large complex k-strategists, but k-strategists typically have lower attrition rates, and adapt more "intelligently," with fewer evolutionary changes spreading through its entire population over time than r-strategists.
By and large it seems that even though each species takes a different evolutionary path, most that live in the same environment at the same time have equally evolutionarily viable living strategies that they are biologically adapted to. Environmental changes may tip the balance from time to time, but in the grand scale of things, any two systems of genes that have survived the same amount of natural selection as each other should reasonably be equally "mature." Right now man may seem to have the upper-hand, but if nuke ourselves out of existence, the r-strategists may gain the upperhand.
This notion also carries into intraspecies evolution. Being smart, or artistic, or athletic, or aesthetically appealing are all seen as positive traits while being dumb, or uncreative, or unathetlic, or ugly are seen as negative traits. But in most of the population these traits seem to be evenly distributed in a way that there would seem to be a correlation between certain seemingly positive traits and certain negative traits. If you are beautiful and athletic in our society, you may be able to get by very well on those traits alone, but perhaps because of this you do not need to develop much intelligence to get by. Or perhaps someone who is both intelligent, athletic, and beautiful may get by very easily without treating others very nicely and as a result don't develop much empathy for others, and may even develop sociopathic characteristics. It's also proven that creative geniuses like writers and painters have a higher susceptibility to depression, while mathematical geniuses have a higher susceptibility to asperger's and autism.
I imagine that if you could assign a Net Evolutionary Desirability Coefficient to every organism in a certain population, you will find that the standard deviation of the NEDC in the population is very low compared to the standard deviation between the Evolutio
But it cost me my karma. =(