No, I don't use Vista. (But if the functionality is gone, is that really due to content protection?) I.e. - source please.
"Display High-Def content to a non-HDCP enabled display?"
No, I don't use Vista, but I would be very surprised if it was unable to display high-def content to a non-HDCP display. Does it limit maximum desktop resolution to 800x600 or something? I doubt it.
"Use speech to text software (echo cancellation doesn't work anymore, because you can't capture the digital output stream for feedback)?"
Again, no idea as I don't use either Vista, nor speech-to-text, but a source is always good to evaluate the claim.
Agree with some of your other points (I'm sticking with XP for the forseeable future...), but I have to ask about this one:
"The emerging home entertainment market hates it. Let's not mince words: One of Vista's primary design goals is Digital Rights "Management," keeping these people from doing what they want to do. Why would buy software that takes functionality away!!?"
Which functionality is taken away? IIRC, the only DRM in Vista is there to enable playback of DRM-enabled media. (I.e. HD-DVD/BluRay) It's not as if it infects all your AVI files with some vicious DRM scheme.
There are lots of variables interacting here - Sweden runs a tight drug prohibition, and our problems with drug-related turf wars are merely a fraction of those of the US. But do I believe that the vast ease of getting a cun contributes to the sheer lethality of the inner city? Yes, I do.
Michael Moore goes wrong in a number of areas with his "culture of fear" model of US gun crime. Highlights follow:
- First, while many nations (including my own, i.e. Sweden) have plenty of legal guns (hunting is a huge movement here and tens of thousands of reservists have FN-FAL assault rifles at home), those are usually of models not well suited to crime, are registered, and required to be stored in a safe fashion. The same goes for, say, Canada (his chosen comparison).
- General US gun deaths are extremely concentrated to certain demographic groups (Read: black & latino bangers in inner-cities.). For instance, a little more than half of all US killers are black, despite making up a bit more than a tenth of the population. (I.e see the bureau of justice statistics: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm) The gross murder rate for US lily-white suburbia is much closer to Europe than stats would let on, despite spillover from the inner city wars.
- In short, the main general problem with regards to guns in the US are not trigger happy rednecks in Arkansas or scared soccer moms killing people by mistake. The "culture of fear" theory just comes up short when confronted by reality.
- Gun accessibility, however, is probably important. The banger wars are hardly helped by the plentiful and easy access to guns. It is unrealistic at this point, however, to see how even a total gun ban could yield short-term results in this department. Bangers would hang on to their illegal guns no matter what laws are passed, and only a long battle of attrition could bring major crime-drop windfalls. In the meantime, the law-abiding population would be stripped of percieved and real protection, and political pressures to ease gun access would mount.
- Making things even more complicated, the main benificiaries of a gun ban would in the end be white city liberals, while the hunting 'n guns culture of the rednecks would pay a big chunk of the price. The political problems are obvious.
- Finally (lots more to be said, but I have to go to bed...;) ) - while gun control can probably not help US gun crime stats in a major way in anything approaching the short-ish run, gun access is incredibly important to events such as the Virginia Tech massacre. Kids snap all over the world over lots of silly (and not-so-silly) things - but those that have access to semi-automatic weapons when they snap are many, many times more dangerous. In the larger scheme of things, however, massacres make up a tiny proportion of murders, although they are much more spectacular (and hence garner more media attention, feeding future massacres, etc.) than the average drug hit.
"Movie theaters and HDTV may be their only saviors, in that it takes enormous (by current measure) amounts of bandwidth and storage to copy a quality movie."
100 mbit pipes are growing common in these parts - personally, I'm on a 24mbit pipe, and frequently get over 1/Mbyte (8mbit) per second download rates on the good DC++ hubs. The movie industry can't be resting easy here - they're next.
In truth, people are laying the blame at the feet of the RIAA because they want to do a bit of blameshifting. Of course music piracy is killing record stores and bleeding the record companies. I haven't bought a record in years - and I am far from alone. The RIAA is mainly guilty of trying to fend off the (almost) inevitable.
This is not primarily becasue the RIAA has "failed to adapt their business model" as the mantra goes. There is no business model that can preserve the profitability of RIAA members.
Nor is it because customers are boycotting because of "RIAA tactics" or other silly debating feints. It is simple: Piracy provides the product of the RIAA members and record stores at virtually zero marginal cost, with similar or better quality with similar or better ease-of-aquisition. All other factors are merely fluff. The same goes for non-online PC games, a market that major players are slowly abandoning.
Online legal downloading (itunes) will stop some of the bleeding - but the music industry will either have to force through draconian anti-piracy measures real soon (before a popular majority have a private interest in free downloading, and it becomes politically impossible to stop it), or it will simply have to adapt to a much leaner budget. Personally, in the case of the music industry, I don't care much. The trend cycle might slow down a bit, while non-commercial music becomes a tad bigger. No huge loss. Piracy of computer programs is a far more serious problem.
It makes perfect logical sense, given your premise. I just doubt the impact of large-scale animal rights would be very large, and the cost would be *very* significant.
"From my wiki link: "However, the slippery slope claim requires independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A.
I don't recall you doing that."
We can play around with examples and counter-examples where euthanasia of the disabled or feeble-minded has been the stepping-stone to bigger things (Nazi Germany, etc.) or just a day-to-day occurance (lots of societies that have killed their babies, and we do too but in a more "clean fashion"). Recall that I merely claimed a "semi-low" risk of a slippery slope event. The spartans are a pretty bad counterexample though - they didn't exactly sanctify human life, not their own, nor those of others. The spartans had a much stronger case for infanticide as well - the cost to them of unviable offspring was much higher than for us.
"Ummm, I never once said anything about "young" disabled children. I'm suggesting you kill anyone as dumb as a chimp."
Yet you've never really provided an argument for why cognitive ability should be relevant to the discussion as all. It seems to be just taken for granted. Plus, if "dumbness" is the "strict" criteria for getting killed, we are *really* opening up for a slippery slope... ("I'm sorry, but your verbal SAT score...")
"It's not an argument. I think it's "icky" to eat, say, pig blood, but not everyone agrees."
You assume ickiness is purely arbitrary. I posit it's not - I.e killing babies will always be a touchier subject than, say, most food-related subjects for purely genetic reasons (humans invest a great deal of time, resources and genes in their babies). And, being a less mutable factor, it's one it's worth taking into account when drawing up a moral code.
From your wiki link: "The slippery slope can be valid or fallacious." And in this case, I believe it might very well be valid - especially with regards to law, precedence is valued. Also, maintaining moral boundries is easier when cases are more or less clear-cut.
"Unless you can demonstrate to me how culling mentally disabled children would result in "mission creep" (and your rhetoric about "partial birth" abortion doesn't count), you're gonna have to do better than that."
Well, going from very young heavily disabled children to somewhat older heavily disabled children wouldn't be *that* much of a stretch. It's happened. And then we have started moving - down the slippery slope. Might as well hold the line where it's easy to hold. Plus, you didn't really respond to my "ickiness" argument at all.
"So, I'll repeat my question, as I did for the other poster: why is a mentally disabled person protected, while an equally-intelligent chimp is not?"
Because preserving the (relative) sanctity of human life is valuable to human society (see above). Preserving the sanctity of chimp lives, regardless of neuron counts, has virtually* zero value to human society. Hence my stance.
"If society runs perfectly smoothly because the state murders those considered inferior, under your formulation of rights, that should be sufficient, no?"
Because once you start killing people on too flimsy grounds ("you're a jew"), all social truces start to break down, and society will in all likelyhood turn out extremely badly for most people. Ayrian Germans didn't get a great deal from the Third Reich - on the contrary, their lust for violence filled society with general fear, and consumed themselves in the end, by the millions. Which is one reason why I prefer a peaceful society that respects rights, all consensus-based moral conditioning aside.
"Alright. Then I say we kill all mentally disabled children. There's no danger in them fighting back, so it doesn't effect me in a negative way. And, let's face it, these children are a burden on society. What's the benefit of providing them rights?"
My case against killing mentally disabled children is, again, based on preventing mission creep. Granted, that likelyhood is semi-low in the case of very small children - most western societies have, thanks to advances in medical technology, been able to move infantide to before birth, I.e. abortion. Hell, in the states you have "partial birth abortion", which means, in essence "the head's not out, so we can whack it!".
Still, given plentiful abortion, our affluence (care for the mentally ill takes what, a percent of our aggregated income? If that?) and the risk of a slippery slope meaning ever more disabled people are killed, I would say the case for infanticide is weak. (Although the issue pops up from time to time in, say, Holland). In addition, there is just plain instinctive revulsion in most people when it comes to killing children. People like children, and don't like seeing them killed, or hearing about them killed - especially if they have to feel culpable about it. So, why subject them to that given the extremely slight gain?
It's more complicated. Especially when it comes to the issue killing other humans, where there probably are some rahter hardwired genetic moral safeguards in place against arbitrary killing (Non-arbitrary killing is another story entirely...)
You seem to think morality should be independent from practical considerations - which is fine, if you presume morality to have some sort of metaphysical foundation. (I.e. God)
Now, I don't think so - which leads me to believe that the system of morality enforced in society through customs and laws should serve to make society run smoothly, and to guarantee some basic rights to the people who live init. This is both because I have preferences for a reasonably peaceful and quiet life, and because I realize that there is a ceasefire aspect to morality. If I think killing my political opponents (for instance) should be A.OK, then I will myself have to sleep with a gun under my pillow, etc.
Thus, I believe in equally enforced morality for all humans - because frankly, I don't feel that much kinship with non-human apes, plus I see roughly zero benefit in granting chimps human rights (unlike the case of granting humans human rights).
"Other than a strong innate respect for those who look similar to me, why should I care about the rights of my fellow human beings? There's no rational selfish reason for me to do so, especially when it comes to those with only distant genetic relations to me. "
Largely true, although this problem has been partially solved by nature, through the evolution of morality. Now, morality is a fairly (although not infinitely) flexible system, and so can be leveraged to uphold concepts such as "human rights" that greatly reduce conflict and exploitation in society. Generally, I would say that this has been a very successful endeavour, in terms of the general welfare of most people. There is, however, virtually no benefit to including monkeys in the system. Doing so merely strains it further for no gain.
"Moreover, it's against my interests to NOT enslave and plunder weaker minorities. If someone doesn't look like my kin, and I have physical advantages over it, why shouldn't I exploit it? If they can't fight back, why shouldn't I rape them or make them work for me? If I don't, some competitor might, and I'll loose out on food, shelter, or mates."
Religion most likely played a part here, in the origins of human rights - christianity provides a strong rationale for both human rights and emancipation. The problem with that rationale, however, is that it's most likely bogus. The practical rationale (see above) holds, however, but it is true that it is more vulnerable to self-interested "cheating". Howeever, as morality is largely based on consensus, and the consensus currently favors human rights, human rights can presently survive without much of a metaphysical foundation - it runs as a closed system as long as the foundation is not seriously questioned. (Platitudes and soundbites will do nicely for maintenance)
Luckily, on the economic side, slave labor is much less valuable today, as is land - before industrialization, however, slavery and land exploitation (together with wars and pandemics) were perhaps the primary ways of increasing per-capita income, as the world was pretty much stuck in a constant-income Malthusian trap. This in turn reduces incentives to violate the human-rights ceasefire. (Sadly, many never got this memo - Hitler, for instance, was stuck in the land = wealth paradigm)...
"So we should only grant rights to those who look and act like us? Since I'm white, I can oppress black people since they aren't like me?"
Well, you *could* - it was a pretty popular option for a long time, no?
"We should grant rights to all beings proportional to their complexity and ethical ability, not their similarity to ourselves."
Why? What's your sales pitch? In the case of humans, my "social good" pitch is pretty clear: If you grant rights to me, I grant rights to you. It's a mutual thing, that can be extended to be non-direct (I.e. intertemporal) using moral commitment. (I.e. people refrain from leveraging momentary advantages to break the "truce" even if they could achieve some advantage by doing so.)
"The young and the non-human may not be able to speak, but we value their complexity enough that we should treat them well."
We value our young because they are genetically far more related to us than chimps, squids of mollusks, and so evolution has coded us to treat children (relatively) well. We do not like children because they are "complex" (Whatever that means? Number of base pairs?). We have some level of instinctual sympathy with chimps, simply because they are cute (I.e. resemble human infants to some degree) and share some behavioral similarities with ourselves. But as long as abuse of chimps is not too open or widespread, that's unlikely to bother most people much.
"The only difference between a young child and a chimp is that that child has a slightly greater genetic complexity than the chimp."
One more slight difference: The human is... human. Which makes it much more interesting for other humans to grant rights to that human. Frankly, there's little more than annoyance to be gained from granting broad rights to chimps. The concept of human rights, on the other hand, have greatly improved the lot of most humans. Chimp rights would greatly improve the lot of chimps, of course, but why should I care?
"Rather than an ethics based on questionable categories we need one based on functions - especially cognitive capabilities relating to suffering."
Why? Human rights are broadly beneficial to almost everyone, provided that they are upheld. They are reciprocal - and let's face it, chimps can't give much in return for rights. I don't, in practice, care much for the suffering of most of humanity, much less chimps. The same goes for virtually all semi-honest humans. The "neurological response to pain = rights" is little more than a cringe reaction.
Intelligence is not the basis of human rights. Rather, people justify rights with either:
1) Pragmatism. A sort of common (often somewhat vague) understanding that it will be broadly beneficial if all individuals are granted certain rights (and obligations).
2) Divinity. God did it. (Gave us the rights, that is) The US constitution falls into this category.
Neither 1) nor 2) (unless you have a chimp-centric religion) really justifies giving human rights to chimps. There are no generalizable social benefits from bestowing chimps with human rights.
Yea, beacause we all know that roads and highways are 100% funded by private inves... erm, never mind...
Which is why it's a bit silly to expect, say, AMTRAK to be entirely self-funded. Hard to compete with a form of transportation that's subsidized if you don't get your own subsidies.
Several factors are limiting the impact of "low patience".
1. Broadband penetration is high now - even slow broadband can download most apps if you just leave it on overnight.
2. A lot of broadband isn't slow anymore, especially outside of the US. I am sitting on a 24/8 mbit line, and 10 and 100 mbit (full duplex) fiber isn't unusual. "A gig" is a few minutes worth of downloading most of the time using a decent DC hub or torrent.
3. Burning CD:s and DVD:s isn't hard.
4. Even if you find downloading and buring hard, you most likely have a geek in your circle of friends who doesn't.
5. But sure, there *is* a niche for cheap pirated stuff for those who can't/are too lazy to download. But that's much smaller than it used to be - and that was the point of the article. Stop thinking in binary.
Seriously, I am tired of hearing of the "Surrendering French", etc.
Still, there is a little more substance to the charge than you let on. The French didn't merely concede defeat (unlike, say, Norway or Poland, who then fought on in exile). France cut a deal with the Germans, and would under the influence of men like Laval move ever closer into the Axis orbit. Hell, the first US ground action in the Western theater wasn't against German troops - it was against the French in North Africa in 1942.
Granted, the British Operation Catapult in 1940 didn't help in this turn of events, but it says something of the contemporary british assessment of French loyalty that they deemed it a necessary step.
"It scares me a little seeing a lack of ethical concerns here on subjects like these. The chinese didn't develop these pigeons. Nature and evolution did. The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. No big deal and nothing really scientific."
Just "sticking wires into them" would have been unlikely to produce very cool results, aside from croaked pigeons. And that's where the science part comes into play.
"This sort of 'research' goes to show that some areas of modern science are even more bogus, bizare and pointless than some obscure spiritistic variants of alchemy from the old days."
This is either a deeply dangerous experiment for mankind OR completely bogus, pointless, etc. Pick one - you can't have both.
"If I'd be in charge these scientists would lose their funding, their job and their accreditation all at once. Unethical bullshit pseudoscience not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps, that's what this is."
Re-read the story, the subjects were "pigeons" not "people". Frankly, if the Nazis would have stuck to abusing pigeons, not many people would have given a damn.
Slashdot Mirror
"Tried to use your MIDI port under Vista?"
No, I don't use Vista. (But if the functionality is gone, is that really due to content protection?) I.e. - source please.
"Display High-Def content to a non-HDCP enabled display?"
No, I don't use Vista, but I would be very surprised if it was unable to display high-def content to a non-HDCP display. Does it limit maximum desktop resolution to 800x600 or something? I doubt it.
"Use speech to text software (echo cancellation doesn't work anymore, because you can't capture the digital output stream for feedback)?"
Again, no idea as I don't use either Vista, nor speech-to-text, but a source is always good to evaluate the claim.
One word: Paper ballots.
Agree with some of your other points (I'm sticking with XP for the forseeable future...), but I have to ask about this one:
"The emerging home entertainment market hates it. Let's not mince words: One of Vista's primary design goals is Digital Rights "Management," keeping these people from doing what they want to do. Why would buy software that takes functionality away!!?"
Which functionality is taken away? IIRC, the only DRM in Vista is there to enable playback of DRM-enabled media. (I.e. HD-DVD/BluRay) It's not as if it infects all your AVI files with some vicious DRM scheme.
CTRL-SHIFT-ESC?
I was even more wrong - I was thinking of the good ol' AK-4, which is the H&K G3, not the FN-FAL. (Unless Hemvärnet have gotten AK-5 recently?)
There are lots of variables interacting here - Sweden runs a tight drug prohibition, and our problems with drug-related turf wars are merely a fraction of those of the US. But do I believe that the vast ease of getting a cun contributes to the sheer lethality of the inner city? Yes, I do.
Short on time, so short comment:
;) ) - while gun control can probably not help US gun crime stats in a major way in anything approaching the short-ish run, gun access is incredibly important to events such as the Virginia Tech massacre. Kids snap all over the world over lots of silly (and not-so-silly) things - but those that have access to semi-automatic weapons when they snap are many, many times more dangerous. In the larger scheme of things, however, massacres make up a tiny proportion of murders, although they are much more spectacular (and hence garner more media attention, feeding future massacres, etc.) than the average drug hit.
Michael Moore goes wrong in a number of areas with his "culture of fear" model of US gun crime. Highlights follow:
- First, while many nations (including my own, i.e. Sweden) have plenty of legal guns (hunting is a huge movement here and tens of thousands of reservists have FN-FAL assault rifles at home), those are usually of models not well suited to crime, are registered, and required to be stored in a safe fashion. The same goes for, say, Canada (his chosen comparison).
- General US gun deaths are extremely concentrated to certain demographic groups (Read: black & latino bangers in inner-cities.). For instance, a little more than half of all US killers are black, despite making up a bit more than a tenth of the population. (I.e see the bureau of justice statistics: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm) The gross murder rate for US lily-white suburbia is much closer to Europe than stats would let on, despite spillover from the inner city wars.
- In short, the main general problem with regards to guns in the US are not trigger happy rednecks in Arkansas or scared soccer moms killing people by mistake. The "culture of fear" theory just comes up short when confronted by reality.
- Gun accessibility, however, is probably important. The banger wars are hardly helped by the plentiful and easy access to guns. It is unrealistic at this point, however, to see how even a total gun ban could yield short-term results in this department. Bangers would hang on to their illegal guns no matter what laws are passed, and only a long battle of attrition could bring major crime-drop windfalls. In the meantime, the law-abiding population would be stripped of percieved and real protection, and political pressures to ease gun access would mount.
- Making things even more complicated, the main benificiaries of a gun ban would in the end be white city liberals, while the hunting 'n guns culture of the rednecks would pay a big chunk of the price. The political problems are obvious.
- Finally (lots more to be said, but I have to go to bed...
That it for today. Goodnight!
"Movie theaters and HDTV may be their only saviors, in that it takes enormous (by current measure) amounts of bandwidth and storage to copy a quality movie."
100 mbit pipes are growing common in these parts - personally, I'm on a 24mbit pipe, and frequently get over 1/Mbyte (8mbit) per second download rates on the good DC++ hubs. The movie industry can't be resting easy here - they're next.
In truth, people are laying the blame at the feet of the RIAA because they want to do a bit of blameshifting. Of course music piracy is killing record stores and bleeding the record companies. I haven't bought a record in years - and I am far from alone. The RIAA is mainly guilty of trying to fend off the (almost) inevitable.
This is not primarily becasue the RIAA has "failed to adapt their business model" as the mantra goes. There is no business model that can preserve the profitability of RIAA members.
Nor is it because customers are boycotting because of "RIAA tactics" or other silly debating feints. It is simple: Piracy provides the product of the RIAA members and record stores at virtually zero marginal cost, with similar or better quality with similar or better ease-of-aquisition. All other factors are merely fluff. The same goes for non-online PC games, a market that major players are slowly abandoning.
Online legal downloading (itunes) will stop some of the bleeding - but the music industry will either have to force through draconian anti-piracy measures real soon (before a popular majority have a private interest in free downloading, and it becomes politically impossible to stop it), or it will simply have to adapt to a much leaner budget. Personally, in the case of the music industry, I don't care much. The trend cycle might slow down a bit, while non-commercial music becomes a tad bigger. No huge loss. Piracy of computer programs is a far more serious problem.
It makes perfect logical sense, given your premise. I just doubt the impact of large-scale animal rights would be very large, and the cost would be *very* significant.
"From my wiki link: "However, the slippery slope claim requires independent justification to connect the inevitability of B to an occurrence of A.
I don't recall you doing that."
We can play around with examples and counter-examples where euthanasia of the disabled or feeble-minded has been the stepping-stone to bigger things (Nazi Germany, etc.) or just a day-to-day occurance (lots of societies that have killed their babies, and we do too but in a more "clean fashion"). Recall that I merely claimed a "semi-low" risk of a slippery slope event. The spartans are a pretty bad counterexample though - they didn't exactly sanctify human life, not their own, nor those of others. The spartans had a much stronger case for infanticide as well - the cost to them of unviable offspring was much higher than for us.
"Ummm, I never once said anything about "young" disabled children. I'm suggesting you kill anyone as dumb as a chimp."
Yet you've never really provided an argument for why cognitive ability should be relevant to the discussion as all. It seems to be just taken for granted. Plus, if "dumbness" is the "strict" criteria for getting killed, we are *really* opening up for a slippery slope... ("I'm sorry, but your verbal SAT score...")
"It's not an argument. I think it's "icky" to eat, say, pig blood, but not everyone agrees."
You assume ickiness is purely arbitrary. I posit it's not - I.e killing babies will always be a touchier subject than, say, most food-related subjects for purely genetic reasons (humans invest a great deal of time, resources and genes in their babies). And, being a less mutable factor, it's one it's worth taking into account when drawing up a moral code.
From your wiki link: "The slippery slope can be valid or fallacious." And in this case, I believe it might very well be valid - especially with regards to law, precedence is valued. Also, maintaining moral boundries is easier when cases are more or less clear-cut.
"Unless you can demonstrate to me how culling mentally disabled children would result in "mission creep" (and your rhetoric about "partial birth" abortion doesn't count), you're gonna have to do better than that."
Well, going from very young heavily disabled children to somewhat older heavily disabled children wouldn't be *that* much of a stretch. It's happened. And then we have started moving - down the slippery slope. Might as well hold the line where it's easy to hold. Plus, you didn't really respond to my "ickiness" argument at all.
"So, I'll repeat my question, as I did for the other poster: why is a mentally disabled person protected, while an equally-intelligent chimp is not?"
Because preserving the (relative) sanctity of human life is valuable to human society (see above). Preserving the sanctity of chimp lives, regardless of neuron counts, has virtually* zero value to human society. Hence my stance.
"If society runs perfectly smoothly because the state murders those considered inferior, under your formulation of rights, that should be sufficient, no?"
Because once you start killing people on too flimsy grounds ("you're a jew"), all social truces start to break down, and society will in all likelyhood turn out extremely badly for most people. Ayrian Germans didn't get a great deal from the Third Reich - on the contrary, their lust for violence filled society with general fear, and consumed themselves in the end, by the millions. Which is one reason why I prefer a peaceful society that respects rights, all consensus-based moral conditioning aside.
"Alright. Then I say we kill all mentally disabled children. There's no danger in them fighting back, so it doesn't effect me in a negative way. And, let's face it, these children are a burden on society. What's the benefit of providing them rights?"
My case against killing mentally disabled children is, again, based on preventing mission creep. Granted, that likelyhood is semi-low in the case of very small children - most western societies have, thanks to advances in medical technology, been able to move infantide to before birth, I.e. abortion. Hell, in the states you have "partial birth abortion", which means, in essence "the head's not out, so we can whack it!".
Still, given plentiful abortion, our affluence (care for the mentally ill takes what, a percent of our aggregated income? If that?) and the risk of a slippery slope meaning ever more disabled people are killed, I would say the case for infanticide is weak. (Although the issue pops up from time to time in, say, Holland). In addition, there is just plain instinctive revulsion in most people when it comes to killing children. People like children, and don't like seeing them killed, or hearing about them killed - especially if they have to feel culpable about it. So, why subject them to that given the extremely slight gain?
It's more complicated. Especially when it comes to the issue killing other humans, where there probably are some rahter hardwired genetic moral safeguards in place against arbitrary killing (Non-arbitrary killing is another story entirely...)
You seem to think morality should be independent from practical considerations - which is fine, if you presume morality to have some sort of metaphysical foundation. (I.e. God)
Now, I don't think so - which leads me to believe that the system of morality enforced in society through customs and laws should serve to make society run smoothly, and to guarantee some basic rights to the people who live init. This is both because I have preferences for a reasonably peaceful and quiet life, and because I realize that there is a ceasefire aspect to morality. If I think killing my political opponents (for instance) should be A.OK, then I will myself have to sleep with a gun under my pillow, etc.
Thus, I believe in equally enforced morality for all humans - because frankly, I don't feel that much kinship with non-human apes, plus I see roughly zero benefit in granting chimps human rights (unlike the case of granting humans human rights).
"Other than a strong innate respect for those who look similar to me, why should I care about the rights of my fellow human beings? There's no rational selfish reason for me to do so, especially when it comes to those with only distant genetic relations to me. "
Largely true, although this problem has been partially solved by nature, through the evolution of morality. Now, morality is a fairly (although not infinitely) flexible system, and so can be leveraged to uphold concepts such as "human rights" that greatly reduce conflict and exploitation in society. Generally, I would say that this has been a very successful endeavour, in terms of the general welfare of most people. There is, however, virtually no benefit to including monkeys in the system. Doing so merely strains it further for no gain.
"Moreover, it's against my interests to NOT enslave and plunder weaker minorities. If someone doesn't look like my kin, and I have physical advantages over it, why shouldn't I exploit it? If they can't fight back, why shouldn't I rape them or make them work for me? If I don't, some competitor might, and I'll loose out on food, shelter, or mates."
Religion most likely played a part here, in the origins of human rights - christianity provides a strong rationale for both human rights and emancipation. The problem with that rationale, however, is that it's most likely bogus. The practical rationale (see above) holds, however, but it is true that it is more vulnerable to self-interested "cheating". Howeever, as morality is largely based on consensus, and the consensus currently favors human rights, human rights can presently survive without much of a metaphysical foundation - it runs as a closed system as long as the foundation is not seriously questioned. (Platitudes and soundbites will do nicely for maintenance)
Luckily, on the economic side, slave labor is much less valuable today, as is land - before industrialization, however, slavery and land exploitation (together with wars and pandemics) were perhaps the primary ways of increasing per-capita income, as the world was pretty much stuck in a constant-income Malthusian trap. This in turn reduces incentives to violate the human-rights ceasefire. (Sadly, many never got this memo - Hitler, for instance, was stuck in the land = wealth paradigm)...
"So we should only grant rights to those who look and act like us? Since I'm white, I can oppress black people since they aren't like me?"
Well, you *could* - it was a pretty popular option for a long time, no?
"We should grant rights to all beings proportional to their complexity and ethical ability, not their similarity to ourselves."
Why? What's your sales pitch? In the case of humans, my "social good" pitch is pretty clear: If you grant rights to me, I grant rights to you. It's a mutual thing, that can be extended to be non-direct (I.e. intertemporal) using moral commitment. (I.e. people refrain from leveraging momentary advantages to break the "truce" even if they could achieve some advantage by doing so.)
"The young and the non-human may not be able to speak, but we value their complexity enough that we should treat them well."
We value our young because they are genetically far more related to us than chimps, squids of mollusks, and so evolution has coded us to treat children (relatively) well. We do not like children because they are "complex" (Whatever that means? Number of base pairs?). We have some level of instinctual sympathy with chimps, simply because they are cute (I.e. resemble human infants to some degree) and share some behavioral similarities with ourselves. But as long as abuse of chimps is not too open or widespread, that's unlikely to bother most people much.
"The only difference between a young child and a chimp is that that child has a slightly greater genetic complexity than the chimp."
One more slight difference: The human is... human. Which makes it much more interesting for other humans to grant rights to that human. Frankly, there's little more than annoyance to be gained from granting broad rights to chimps. The concept of human rights, on the other hand, have greatly improved the lot of most humans. Chimp rights would greatly improve the lot of chimps, of course, but why should I care?
"Rather than an ethics based on questionable categories we need one based on functions - especially cognitive capabilities relating to suffering."
Why? Human rights are broadly beneficial to almost everyone, provided that they are upheld. They are reciprocal - and let's face it, chimps can't give much in return for rights. I don't, in practice, care much for the suffering of most of humanity, much less chimps. The same goes for virtually all semi-honest humans. The "neurological response to pain = rights" is little more than a cringe reaction.
Intelligence is not the basis of human rights. Rather, people justify rights with either:
1) Pragmatism. A sort of common (often somewhat vague) understanding that it will be broadly beneficial if all individuals are granted certain rights (and obligations).
2) Divinity. God did it. (Gave us the rights, that is) The US constitution falls into this category.
Neither 1) nor 2) (unless you have a chimp-centric religion) really justifies giving human rights to chimps. There are no generalizable social benefits from bestowing chimps with human rights.
Yea, beacause we all know that roads and highways are 100% funded by private inves... erm, never mind...
Which is why it's a bit silly to expect, say, AMTRAK to be entirely self-funded. Hard to compete with a form of transportation that's subsidized if you don't get your own subsidies.
I have XBMC and like it, but you forgot the (IMHO) biggest negative: It sounds like a vacuum cleaner :P
Several factors are limiting the impact of "low patience".
1. Broadband penetration is high now - even slow broadband can download most apps if you just leave it on overnight.
2. A lot of broadband isn't slow anymore, especially outside of the US. I am sitting on a 24/8 mbit line, and 10 and 100 mbit (full duplex) fiber isn't unusual. "A gig" is a few minutes worth of downloading most of the time using a decent DC hub or torrent.
3. Burning CD:s and DVD:s isn't hard.
4. Even if you find downloading and buring hard, you most likely have a geek in your circle of friends who doesn't.
5. But sure, there *is* a niche for cheap pirated stuff for those who can't/are too lazy to download. But that's much smaller than it used to be - and that was the point of the article. Stop thinking in binary.
The fewer games on the OLPC, the faster the third world can catch up to the drooling, screen-confined first ;)
...for posts as the one above ;)
Seriously, I am tired of hearing of the "Surrendering French", etc.
Still, there is a little more substance to the charge than you let on. The French didn't merely concede defeat (unlike, say, Norway or Poland, who then fought on in exile). France cut a deal with the Germans, and would under the influence of men like Laval move ever closer into the Axis orbit. Hell, the first US ground action in the Western theater wasn't against German troops - it was against the French in North Africa in 1942.
Granted, the British Operation Catapult in 1940 didn't help in this turn of events, but it says something of the contemporary british assessment of French loyalty that they deemed it a necessary step.
"It scares me a little seeing a lack of ethical concerns here on subjects like these. The chinese didn't develop these pigeons. Nature and evolution did. The chinese opened their heads and stuck wires into them. No big deal and nothing really scientific."
Just "sticking wires into them" would have been unlikely to produce very cool results, aside from croaked pigeons. And that's where the science part comes into play.
"This sort of 'research' goes to show that some areas of modern science are even more bogus, bizare and pointless than some obscure spiritistic variants of alchemy from the old days."
This is either a deeply dangerous experiment for mankind OR completely bogus, pointless, etc. Pick one - you can't have both.
"If I'd be in charge these scientists would lose their funding, their job and their accreditation all at once.
Unethical bullshit pseudoscience not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps, that's what this is."
Re-read the story, the subjects were "pigeons" not "people". Frankly, if the Nazis would have stuck to abusing pigeons, not many people would have given a damn.