From the point of view of the Piraha, all other human languages, whether spoken by city-dwellers or nomads, are pretty much the same.
They can't read or write, they don't understand numbers, and they think all foreigners are the same... good grief, I think there are some Piraha living on my street! But why do they have English flags attached to their cars?
Morality != religion. They may be related, they serve different purposes. Religion explains the world and placates fears, morality instructs on how to treat others.
I'd argue that religion explains, placates and instructs - religious morality is a subset of morality. You're right to point out that they're not the same thing, but the existence of any kind of morality under conditions of poverty still disproves the OP's theory that morality is a luxury.
Probably because morality and religiosity, even if they aren't entirely orthogonal, are most definitely not the same thing.
Good point, they're not the same - religious moral principles are a subset of moral principles. But the existence of any kind of morality under conditions of poverty still disproves the OP's theory.
If morality is a luxury, why are some of the poorest societies on Earth also the most religious? Who's more likely to lie to you, a subsistence farmer or a stockbroker? Who's more likely to share their food with you?
People living in gang infested ghettos have to deal with problems like "Will I eat today?" and "Was that a gun shot or a jalopy with a bad engine?". How could they devote time and thought to existentialism when survival is an issue?
I assume they don't own televisions either, for the same reason.;-) Let's face it, not everybody with free time uses it to read Nietzsche.
Nah, we'd just write everything in Perl. Pretty much any sequence of characters is a valid Perl program. Don't ask me what it does, but it's a valid program.
You know, if law enforcement "fucked up your volume" as you so nicely put it, they have just destroyed whatever evidence you where trying to hide. So why would anyone using true crypt have a problem with that?
Because it took me a long time to download all that 'evidence' from Usenet in the first place!
That country is something WE ALREADY FUCKED UP. Perhaps it's our responsibility to fix it.
Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is accept that something is broken and your attempts to fix it will just make it worse. America can't "fix" the dictatorship in Iran, just like it couldn't "fix" the dictatorship in Iraq. People hate living under a dictatorship, but they hate living under foreign occupation even more.
You're confusing "is" with "ought". I didn't say the government shouldn't have any secrets - I said that if it has secrets, it can't be truly democratic. That's a major problem for people like me (and, I assume, like you) who want to live in a safe, democratic society, because it suggests that what we want can never exist.
Did you miss the part of the headline where it said "artist"? The point of the work isn't to reveal 5up3r s33kr1T g0Vt 1Nf0, it's to draw a parallel between two official denials of reality, past and present, by pointing a telescope at something that doesn't officially exist. Yes, you can see the same satellites from your own back yard - that's the whole point! Objectively they exist, but officially they don't (or rather, officially nothing is said to confirm or deny their existence - we've come a long way in 400 years).
Secrecy is a very important aspect of national security, and I wouldn't want to see it go away. That said, I want checks and balances to ensure that only things pertaining to national security are kept secret, and every other aspect of the government is kept transparent.
That's a reasonable goal, but unfortunately it's impossible to achieve. Here's the problem: censors can't be accountable to the public, because by definition the details of exactly what was censored must be kept secret. So why not set up a trusted committee to review the censors' decisions? But the committee can't be held accountable either, for the same reason. Well then, why not set up a trusted court to oversee the committee that reviews the censors' decisions? But the court can't be held accountable either... and so on.
The bottom line, unfortunately, is that censorship, including the suppression of information for national security purposes, is incompatible with public control of the government.
The idea is that you would prioritise downloads from any client on your local network.
Interesting idea - you could probably get something similar to what you described by measuring the ping time or the number of traceroute hops. I can see a couple of stumbling blocks, though. First, it's not necessarily in the users' interest to prioritise local peers - they might prefer to prioritise fast peers, or peers that don't require them to upload much. Second, current networks aren't designed to make local shortcuts - they're designed to route everything through the local hub so the provider can bill everyone appropriately and keep the intelligent equipment in a secure building. So even if Alice and Bob are neighbours, chances are that every packet from Alice to Bob has to travel quite a long way before it hits a switch that's intelligent enough to route it back towards Bob. ISPs might be able to solve that problem by installing more intelligent switches in every local junction box, but that's exactly the kind of long-term infrastructure investment they're trying to avoid. So we end up in an absurd situation where a packet sent to your next-door neighbour uses more of the ISP's last-mile bandwidth than a packet sent to the other side of the world, because it traverses the same line twice.
A while ago I read an article about how 33.6 modems would go extremely fast if the infrastructure of the internet was more up to date hardware wise. Is there any truth to that?
No. Modems are limited by the physical characteristics of the telephone system, including filters that prevent the lines from carrying high frequencies (the filters were originally designed to separate voice signals from control signals). If you upgraded all the phone lines you might get 56 kbps, but that's about the limit.
In principle you're right, though - ISPs could improve last-mile capacity by upgrading their infrastructure from copper to fibre, but companies are reluctant to make that kind of long-term investment. (On the other hand, it would arguably have provided quicker and larger returns than bidding for 3G wireless spectrum in Europe.)
Even if your weapon is used in a defensive mode? Remember that battles -- even attacks -- can be defensive in nature.
True, but as long as there's no way for the designer to ensure that the weapon will only be used defensively, I agree with the GP: if you knowingly put a weapon in the hands of a murderer, you are a murderer.
As technologists we like to say that technology is morally neutral, because that absolves us of responsibility. But it's not true. Swords and ploughshares are not morally equivalent: there are good uses for swords and bad uses for ploughshares, but that doesn't change the fact that one is designed for killing people and the other is designed for feeding people.
Your argument in a nutshell is: "If we optimize a counter-strategy, they will optimize their own counter-strategy, so we are better off leaving the status quo favorable to their present strategy."
The status quo isn't favourable to any strategy - that's why it's a good idea. If you increase the probability that Arabs will be searched, the terrorists can gain an advantage by using non-Arab attackers. If you increase the probability that men will be searched, they can gain an advantage by using women. The only strategy that can't be exploited in this way is random sampling.
Should we stop associating bank robbers with people who walk into a bank with ski mask and gun on the premise that this will simply let robbers without ski masks and guns slip through undetected?
Masks and guns are necessary for robbers and unnecessary for non-robbers, whereas dark skin isn't necessary for blowing up a plane.
If you can isolate a subgroup that contains 85% of your "targets," it is simply logical that 85% of your resources should be dedicated to that particular subgroup.
This has no similarity whatsoever to racism, which is the (contradicting) fallacy of replacing demographic weights with a general assumption of intrinsic character traits.
I never said it was racism, I said it was bad security.
And you are quite mistaken to suggest terrorists have so much facility in choosing the demographic to cull recruits.
They only need four or five people to carry out an attack. Do you really think they can't find four or five recruits in the whole world who don't look like stereotypical terrorists, i.e. young Middle Eastern or North African men? Islamism is an ideology, not a race.
At present, there is absolutely no doubt profiling is *efficacious*, although please do note that I am not assuming that just because it is efficacious that it is *morally right*. You can still make against profiling even if it's known to make the best use of the available resources.
I'm glad you made the distinction and I understand where you're coming from, but even in narrow resource-allocation terms, randomness is still the best strategy.
The problem with that strategy is that as soon as the terrorists realise your screening policy is based on skin colour they'll choose people with pale skin to carry out attacks. It doesn't matter if only 1% of terrorist recruits have pale skin, because the terrorists get to choose which ones to use. Statistical approaches don't work when the adversary is intelligent - you need to use game theory instead.
Slashdot Mirror
You lose out on lucrative government contracts?
Hey, that's not fair. Statistics is sane on average, it's just insane in every single instance.
They can't read or write, they don't understand numbers, and they think all foreigners are the same... good grief, I think there are some Piraha living on my street! But why do they have English flags attached to their cars?
I'd argue that religion explains, placates and instructs - religious morality is a subset of morality. You're right to point out that they're not the same thing, but the existence of any kind of morality under conditions of poverty still disproves the OP's theory that morality is a luxury.
Good point, they're not the same - religious moral principles are a subset of moral principles. But the existence of any kind of morality under conditions of poverty still disproves the OP's theory.
I assume they don't own televisions either, for the same reason. ;-) Let's face it, not everybody with free time uses it to read Nietzsche.
Nah, we'd just write everything in Perl. Pretty much any sequence of characters is a valid Perl program. Don't ask me what it does, but it's a valid program.
Okay, okay, I just have to finish my thesis and then I'll get right onto it.
Because it took me a long time to download all that 'evidence' from Usenet in the first place!
That's great until someone mistakes it for a Tic Tac and eats it.
Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is accept that something is broken and your attempts to fix it will just make it worse. America can't "fix" the dictatorship in Iran, just like it couldn't "fix" the dictatorship in Iraq. People hate living under a dictatorship, but they hate living under foreign occupation even more.
They disguise themselves as weasels.
I found it!
OK, good luck enforcing that constitution when there's no way to find out what the laws are. ;)
You're confusing "is" with "ought". I didn't say the government shouldn't have any secrets - I said that if it has secrets, it can't be truly democratic. That's a major problem for people like me (and, I assume, like you) who want to live in a safe, democratic society, because it suggests that what we want can never exist.
Did you miss the part of the headline where it said "artist"? The point of the work isn't to reveal 5up3r s33kr1T g0Vt 1Nf0, it's to draw a parallel between two official denials of reality, past and present, by pointing a telescope at something that doesn't officially exist. Yes, you can see the same satellites from your own back yard - that's the whole point! Objectively they exist, but officially they don't (or rather, officially nothing is said to confirm or deny their existence - we've come a long way in 400 years).
You mean they're using Double Secret Censorship?
That's a reasonable goal, but unfortunately it's impossible to achieve. Here's the problem: censors can't be accountable to the public, because by definition the details of exactly what was censored must be kept secret. So why not set up a trusted committee to review the censors' decisions? But the committee can't be held accountable either, for the same reason. Well then, why not set up a trusted court to oversee the committee that reviews the censors' decisions? But the court can't be held accountable either... and so on.
The bottom line, unfortunately, is that censorship, including the suppression of information for national security purposes, is incompatible with public control of the government.
Interesting idea - you could probably get something similar to what you described by measuring the ping time or the number of traceroute hops. I can see a couple of stumbling blocks, though. First, it's not necessarily in the users' interest to prioritise local peers - they might prefer to prioritise fast peers, or peers that don't require them to upload much. Second, current networks aren't designed to make local shortcuts - they're designed to route everything through the local hub so the provider can bill everyone appropriately and keep the intelligent equipment in a secure building. So even if Alice and Bob are neighbours, chances are that every packet from Alice to Bob has to travel quite a long way before it hits a switch that's intelligent enough to route it back towards Bob. ISPs might be able to solve that problem by installing more intelligent switches in every local junction box, but that's exactly the kind of long-term infrastructure investment they're trying to avoid. So we end up in an absurd situation where a packet sent to your next-door neighbour uses more of the ISP's last-mile bandwidth than a packet sent to the other side of the world, because it traverses the same line twice.
No. Modems are limited by the physical characteristics of the telephone system, including filters that prevent the lines from carrying high frequencies (the filters were originally designed to separate voice signals from control signals). If you upgraded all the phone lines you might get 56 kbps, but that's about the limit.
In principle you're right, though - ISPs could improve last-mile capacity by upgrading their infrastructure from copper to fibre, but companies are reluctant to make that kind of long-term investment. (On the other hand, it would arguably have provided quicker and larger returns than bidding for 3G wireless spectrum in Europe.)
True, but as long as there's no way for the designer to ensure that the weapon will only be used defensively, I agree with the GP: if you knowingly put a weapon in the hands of a murderer, you are a murderer.
As technologists we like to say that technology is morally neutral, because that absolves us of responsibility. But it's not true. Swords and ploughshares are not morally equivalent: there are good uses for swords and bad uses for ploughshares, but that doesn't change the fact that one is designed for killing people and the other is designed for feeding people.
The status quo isn't favourable to any strategy - that's why it's a good idea. If you increase the probability that Arabs will be searched, the terrorists can gain an advantage by using non-Arab attackers. If you increase the probability that men will be searched, they can gain an advantage by using women. The only strategy that can't be exploited in this way is random sampling.
Masks and guns are necessary for robbers and unnecessary for non-robbers, whereas dark skin isn't necessary for blowing up a plane.
No, that strategy can be exploited.
I never said it was racism, I said it was bad security.
They only need four or five people to carry out an attack. Do you really think they can't find four or five recruits in the whole world who don't look like stereotypical terrorists, i.e. young Middle Eastern or North African men? Islamism is an ideology, not a race.
I'm glad you made the distinction and I understand where you're coming from, but even in narrow resource-allocation terms, randomness is still the best strategy.
Did you hear the one about the OpenBSD coffee maker?
Theo De Raadt makes a perfect cup of espresso and then throws it over your shirt.
You don't need a transmitter or even a reflector - just put a penny in orbit and use it to shoot down the space shuttle.
The problem with that strategy is that as soon as the terrorists realise your screening policy is based on skin colour they'll choose people with pale skin to carry out attacks. It doesn't matter if only 1% of terrorist recruits have pale skin, because the terrorists get to choose which ones to use. Statistical approaches don't work when the adversary is intelligent - you need to use game theory instead.