If the companies can solve the problem themselves why do we need a law?
You can count on companies to do one thing well: try to make a profit. You can't depend on them for anything else, especially not to help the public good in any way that will impact the bottom line. (There might be some exceptions based on individual philanthropic owners, but in general, the larger the company gets, the more it focuses on making profits.)
The government (at least theoretically) exists to perform the functions which you can't depend on private entities to do for the good of the public. You can argue that the government isn't doing its job effectively, but the correct solution is to FIX the government "system", not to hand those functions over to unaccountable & motivationally-challenged private entities.
Investing 101 would tell you that it's all about RISK. Research intensity has little to do with it.
Economics 101 (i.e., supply & demand) says that if there is enough competition in a market, the participants are going to be barely making a profit (since they will have to keep lowering the price to compete with each other). The drug companies are making billions of dollars of _profit_ (even after all their expenses are taken into account, including the massive amount of marketing - not R&D - monies they spend), all while whining about how they need to make so much money so they can keep doing R&D to make all those new "products".
_Risk_ doesn't have much to do with their behavior either. Think more GREED.
Frankly, if anyone who is running a company making billions of dollars of profit complains about competition, you can pretty much assume they're trying to scam you.
Why would France and Germany sudden want to help John Kerry rather than George Bush?
Well, in the past, they helped us out a fair amount (both monetarily & manpower) in various areas - the 1st Persian Gulf War, Kosovo, etc. They still had good feelings toward us because of little things like WWII, the Marshall Plan, etc., plus it never hurts to have good relations with an economic "superpower".
Then Bush & Co. came along, and pretty much flushed that down the drain. Other countries will be willing to talk to Kerry, simply because he is Not Bush.
At the moment, most of the world seems to be willing to believe that it is the U.S. government which is being run by buttheads, and that the majority of American citizens are still decent folks. On the other hand, if Bush gets elected again (and fairly - not because of shenanigans with the voting machines), then it will look like American citizens approve of the way Bush is dealing with the outside world.
In that case, it'd probably be safer to never admit being an American outside of the country, or perhaps never to leave the country.
Using the "American Empire" meme to propagate criminal activity (Iraq, Afghanistan) is a means to alloy other world systems (EU, Russia, IMF, etc.) against the existing American society, paving the way for PNAC failure, opening the door for future integration of the American system into other fledgling world movements, such as the push for a One World Government (non-American).
I don't believe the principal actors (read: Bush & Co.) have enough altruism to sacrifice themselves to achieve such a goal. Based on desriptions of their past personal histories, it's easier to believe that they really _do_ believe in an American Empire, but are not intelligent enough to carry it out and have ended up with the effect that you have described ("immunizing" other cultures against American influence).
Something like a third of the prisoners released from Gitmo have been found to have involved themselves with terrorism/freedom fighting again. For them the conflict isn't over.
What do you mean "again"? Since they were apparently released from Gitmo because there wasn't enough evidence to hold them, if they are fighting against the U.S. now, it is _because_ of the way the U.S. treated them.
so that it has things like a single string of DNA coding for one gene by starting on amino base X and for a secong gene by starting on base X+1 even tho it takes 3 bases to specify one protein
This sounds exactly like some of the bit-banging techniques I've heard some assembly-gurus use when they were trying to fit some code into a 256-byte space - stuff like jumping into the middle of a multi-byte instruction (knowing that the values happen to match the op-code of a desired set of operations).
To use an analogy (for all you computer geeks), it's like a programmer trying to read poorly modularized code.
To up the level of complexity, imagine that the blocks of code are randomly ordered (although blocks of genes tend to stay on the same chromosomes), are all executing in parallel, and can trigger reordering & rewriting of themselves & each other.
Yep, that's going to be one helluva debugger!
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
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Good Bad Attitude
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kerry hasn't done anything in the Senate for almost a year are not opinions, they are facts
I think you'd find it hard to point to _any_ Democratic Senator who has managed to pass effective legislation during the past couple of years, given the extreme partisanship of the current Republican legislative leadership. I highly doubt Kerry's presence in the Senate would have had much of an effect on most of the legislation being ramrodded through Congress, and the Republicans would have probably delighted in any chance they could get to shoot down any of his proposals in flames (especially after they knew he was going to be a Presidential rival candidate).
Strategically, it was much more important that he get his name out in front of the public (particularly since he HAS been maintaining such a low profile in the Congress).
Great, that sounds like just the thing we need: more legislation protecting us from ourselves. The only way they could legislate something like this is through a direct denial of free will.
If you don't know what's happening, then how can you be expected to protect yourself?
I suppose you think that the laws which stop people from forcibly addicting people to crack or methamphetamines (by strapping them down & repeatedly exposing them until they were addicted) are an infringement on the liberty of drug dealers to open new business markets.
What's wrong with existing as a human? Why do we have to constantly "improve" upon our existence? My take on any modifications to humanity are such that it's basically pointless. We might be smarter, but will we be happier? That's what life is about.
That might be fine, as long as our machines don't out-evolve us. The moment people start creating machines that can really learn & evolve themselves, then if we aren't capable of evolving ourself (either through genetics, cybernetics, nanotechnology, whatever), then we (humans) will inevitably become evolutionary deadends and will be replaced by our creations.
You sound like you'd be willing to trade a bit of privacy
You're reading more into what I said than what was there. Under ordinary circumstances, the particular examples you used were not controversial. Businesses don't have to hire people if they can't find some evidence that the person is capable of doing the job (and not likely to cause harm). Lenders don't have to lend money to anyone unless they can find some evidence that the person is capable of repaying the loan. Of course, they are not required to do any business with anyone if such information is not forthcoming.
On the other hand, these companies shouldn't have the right to collect & _use_ this personal information about anyone without being required to get the permission of the person who the information is about. They shouldn't have the right to ask for _more_ information than they need to do business (what is your sexual orientation, for instance). And once they have used the information for its intended purpose, they shouldn't be allowed to use it for _anything else_ without the explicit permission of the person who the information is about.
As you can probably guess, I don't have much sympathy for people who insist that massive databases of personal information are the only way they can get good marketing numbers (& similar uses) with data-mining techniques & such. As far as I'm concerned, they can stick to voluntary surveys.
The only other "fair" scenario is that the public is allowed to aggregate & disseminate any & all information about those entities who are collecting information about us (i.e., Brin's Transparent Society) - and that such information can be used to organize "public retaliation" campaigns.
My basic premise is this: control of information must be equivalent in effectiveness between all entities, or you will end up with imbalances of power. If there is unequal control of information, then you (a public-policy maker) must set up robust societal feedback mechanisms (including both monitoring & reward/punishment mechanisms) to discourage abuse of such an imbalance.
Suppose, then, that former employees could not verify or deny that we used to work for them. Suppose a bank was not allowed to access the credit history of the guy who wants to buy your house. Suppose your daycare center could not check the criminal record of the kid who wants to be their new driver.
The person who the data is about can always give permission for that data to be released, and specify to whom it is released. If they refuse to release the information, then the commercial entity can refuse to do business with them.
The whole idea of a "slippery slope" isn't really a logical fallacy, since it's not meant to be a wholly logical argument.
Part of the reason that "slippery slope" arguments are so compelling is because they fit most people's intuitive knowledge of human behavior. Most people expect that if it is possible for someone to do "bad" things without fear of consequences, then eventually, someone will do those things.
Slippery slopes may be a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean they don't have historical precedent.
As the parent was trying to say, _lack_ of any activity at all is in itself suspicious.
If your data doesn't fit the profile of the "typical" citizen, including the _presence_ of common information, then you will end up standing out anyway.
I agree that there is symbolism and allegory, however it's pretty clear which is which, just as it is when you or I use it in everday speech.
No it's not. I've listened to & read about plenty of ridiculous arguments about interpretations of various passages from the Bible (from various translations). I've even heard someone twist symbolism out of the supposedly-straightforward geneologies listed from the Book of Kings.
There's so much symbolism & rhetoric encoded into almost every phrase, that people can "discover" intepretations from selected parts of the Bible which will fit almost any kind of desire or preconception. False "messiahs" often use Scripture to convince their followers of their authenticity.
You can't just take some part you don't like and say, oh it's not literal so I don't have to worry about it.
People do that all the time.
God's word is a constant. It is a rock.
No it's not. The value of "God's Word" is only as good as how it's being interpreted - and it gets interpreted by humans. Humans keep changing the words (and therefore the meanings in subtle ways) every time they come up with a new translation (and sometimes translations of translations). Plus, the meanings of many words change subtly through cultural & linguistic evolution over time.
150 years ago slavery was popularly accepted as an economic necessity, did that make it right?
150 years ago, many Biblical arguments were used as justification for slavery. (Some people probably still believe those arguments, even though they wouldn't dare express that belief in public.) The righteousness of slavery was even spouted from many a Southern pulpit, with complete belief that their view was backed up the Scriptures. "Modern" civilization finds the practice of slavery distasteful now, but at the time many people were convinced that it was a "sin" to help a slave escape an abusive master.
For the life of my I couldn't tell you what Kerry stands for,
He doesn't have to really "stand" for anything - even plain old boring conscientious stewardship of the duties of the Presidency would place him miles above Bush in terms of qualifications & stature.
What does Bush stand for? You have to ignore what Bush _says_ he stands for, because what he says & what he does are pretty much disconnected. So what do his actions show that he stands for? Preemptive unilateral military action? Corporate welfare? Destruction of the social state?
Touché, but I would rather the masses be somewhat informed with some non-arbitrary and non-biased (eg, if one side has 10 minutes, then so does the other side) system to control it.
My pipe dream is that public school civic classes spend quite a bit of time teaching critical thinking skills, and how recognize & defuse rhetorical devices & propaganda techniques. If everyone knows how to ignore the B.S., maybe we'd get some real information instead of attempts at manipulation.
I can't imagine Kerry never made a mistake even he could see.
I'm sure Kerry could privately admit mistakes, but if he actually described some in a public forum, the neo-con disinfo machine would have it out of context & spread all over the airwaves & in blogs in an hour or two.
Similarly, if Bush says anything that could be slightly interpreted as a way to call him a moron or out-of-touch, _his_ opponents would be jumping on it like a starving dog on fresh red meat.
Unless you have a candidate with bulletproof skin, you're not going to get _anything_ personal out of them.
You then share it with the world and deprive the retailers and copyright owner of the 10,000 sales that would have resulted if your copy hadn't been shared.
Well damn, if I can get a law passed that says everyone has to pay me $10/day for the right to breathe, and everyone refuses to pay me, then by that logic everyone would be stealing $10/day from me.
The guy switched the boombox to an FM station and told him to pound sand
I believe that you are still liable for the payments to ASCAP even if you are just listening to a radio station, as long as it's for commercial purposes (like entertaining your customers). My father tried that, and got dinged for it.
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You can count on companies to do one thing well: try to make a profit. You can't depend on them for anything else, especially not to help the public good in any way that will impact the bottom line. (There might be some exceptions based on individual philanthropic owners, but in general, the larger the company gets, the more it focuses on making profits.)
The government (at least theoretically) exists to perform the functions which you can't depend on private entities to do for the good of the public. You can argue that the government isn't doing its job effectively, but the correct solution is to FIX the government "system", not to hand those functions over to unaccountable & motivationally-challenged private entities.
Economics 101 (i.e., supply & demand) says that if there is enough competition in a market, the participants are going to be barely making a profit (since they will have to keep lowering the price to compete with each other). The drug companies are making billions of dollars of _profit_ (even after all their expenses are taken into account, including the massive amount of marketing - not R&D - monies they spend), all while whining about how they need to make so much money so they can keep doing R&D to make all those new "products".
_Risk_ doesn't have much to do with their behavior either. Think more GREED.
Frankly, if anyone who is running a company making billions of dollars of profit complains about competition, you can pretty much assume they're trying to scam you.
Well, in the past, they helped us out a fair amount (both monetarily & manpower) in various areas - the 1st Persian Gulf War, Kosovo, etc. They still had good feelings toward us because of little things like WWII, the Marshall Plan, etc., plus it never hurts to have good relations with an economic "superpower".
Then Bush & Co. came along, and pretty much flushed that down the drain. Other countries will be willing to talk to Kerry, simply because he is Not Bush.
At the moment, most of the world seems to be willing to believe that it is the U.S. government which is being run by buttheads, and that the majority of American citizens are still decent folks. On the other hand, if Bush gets elected again (and fairly - not because of shenanigans with the voting machines), then it will look like American citizens approve of the way Bush is dealing with the outside world.
In that case, it'd probably be safer to never admit being an American outside of the country, or perhaps never to leave the country.
I don't believe the principal actors (read: Bush & Co.) have enough altruism to sacrifice themselves to achieve such a goal. Based on desriptions of their past personal histories, it's easier to believe that they really _do_ believe in an American Empire, but are not intelligent enough to carry it out and have ended up with the effect that you have described ("immunizing" other cultures against American influence).
I believe the RFID manufacturers have already figured out how to shield or protect their devices from this tactic.
Gitmo is a perfectly good oral shorthand for referring to Guantanamo Bay. Why do you find it annoying?
What do you mean "again"? Since they were apparently released from Gitmo because there wasn't enough evidence to hold them, if they are fighting against the U.S. now, it is _because_ of the way the U.S. treated them.
This sounds exactly like some of the bit-banging techniques I've heard some assembly-gurus use when they were trying to fit some code into a 256-byte space - stuff like jumping into the middle of a multi-byte instruction (knowing that the values happen to match the op-code of a desired set of operations).
To up the level of complexity, imagine that the blocks of code are randomly ordered (although blocks of genes tend to stay on the same chromosomes), are all executing in parallel, and can trigger reordering & rewriting of themselves & each other.
Yep, that's going to be one helluva debugger!
I think you'd find it hard to point to _any_ Democratic Senator who has managed to pass effective legislation during the past couple of years, given the extreme partisanship of the current Republican legislative leadership. I highly doubt Kerry's presence in the Senate would have had much of an effect on most of the legislation being ramrodded through Congress, and the Republicans would have probably delighted in any chance they could get to shoot down any of his proposals in flames (especially after they knew he was going to be a Presidential rival candidate).
Strategically, it was much more important that he get his name out in front of the public (particularly since he HAS been maintaining such a low profile in the Congress).
If you don't know what's happening, then how can you be expected to protect yourself?
I suppose you think that the laws which stop people from forcibly addicting people to crack or methamphetamines (by strapping them down & repeatedly exposing them until they were addicted) are an infringement on the liberty of drug dealers to open new business markets.
That might be fine, as long as our machines don't out-evolve us. The moment people start creating machines that can really learn & evolve themselves, then if we aren't capable of evolving ourself (either through genetics, cybernetics, nanotechnology, whatever), then we (humans) will inevitably become evolutionary deadends and will be replaced by our creations.
You're reading more into what I said than what was there. Under ordinary circumstances, the particular examples you used were not controversial. Businesses don't have to hire people if they can't find some evidence that the person is capable of doing the job (and not likely to cause harm). Lenders don't have to lend money to anyone unless they can find some evidence that the person is capable of repaying the loan. Of course, they are not required to do any business with anyone if such information is not forthcoming.
On the other hand, these companies shouldn't have the right to collect & _use_ this personal information about anyone without being required to get the permission of the person who the information is about. They shouldn't have the right to ask for _more_ information than they need to do business (what is your sexual orientation, for instance). And once they have used the information for its intended purpose, they shouldn't be allowed to use it for _anything else_ without the explicit permission of the person who the information is about.
As you can probably guess, I don't have much sympathy for people who insist that massive databases of personal information are the only way they can get good marketing numbers (& similar uses) with data-mining techniques & such. As far as I'm concerned, they can stick to voluntary surveys.
The only other "fair" scenario is that the public is allowed to aggregate & disseminate any & all information about those entities who are collecting information about us (i.e., Brin's Transparent Society) - and that such information can be used to organize "public retaliation" campaigns.
My basic premise is this: control of information must be equivalent in effectiveness between all entities, or you will end up with imbalances of power. If there is unequal control of information, then you (a public-policy maker) must set up robust societal feedback mechanisms (including both monitoring & reward/punishment mechanisms) to discourage abuse of such an imbalance.
The person who the data is about can always give permission for that data to be released, and specify to whom it is released. If they refuse to release the information, then the commercial entity can refuse to do business with them.
What's your point?
Part of the reason that "slippery slope" arguments are so compelling is because they fit most people's intuitive knowledge of human behavior. Most people expect that if it is possible for someone to do "bad" things without fear of consequences, then eventually, someone will do those things.
Slippery slopes may be a logical fallacy, but that doesn't mean they don't have historical precedent.
As the parent was trying to say, _lack_ of any activity at all is in itself suspicious.
If your data doesn't fit the profile of the "typical" citizen, including the _presence_ of common information, then you will end up standing out anyway.
No it's not. I've listened to & read about plenty of ridiculous arguments about interpretations of various passages from the Bible (from various translations). I've even heard someone twist symbolism out of the supposedly-straightforward geneologies listed from the Book of Kings.
There's so much symbolism & rhetoric encoded into almost every phrase, that people can "discover" intepretations from selected parts of the Bible which will fit almost any kind of desire or preconception. False "messiahs" often use Scripture to convince their followers of their authenticity.
People do that all the time.
No it's not. The value of "God's Word" is only as good as how it's being interpreted - and it gets interpreted by humans. Humans keep changing the words (and therefore the meanings in subtle ways) every time they come up with a new translation (and sometimes translations of translations). Plus, the meanings of many words change subtly through cultural & linguistic evolution over time.
150 years ago, many Biblical arguments were used as justification for slavery. (Some people probably still believe those arguments, even though they wouldn't dare express that belief in public.) The righteousness of slavery was even spouted from many a Southern pulpit, with complete belief that their view was backed up the Scriptures. "Modern" civilization finds the practice of slavery distasteful now, but at the time many people were convinced that it was a "sin" to help a slave escape an abusive master.
He doesn't have to really "stand" for anything - even plain old boring conscientious stewardship of the duties of the Presidency would place him miles above Bush in terms of qualifications & stature.
What does Bush stand for? You have to ignore what Bush _says_ he stands for, because what he says & what he does are pretty much disconnected. So what do his actions show that he stands for? Preemptive unilateral military action? Corporate welfare? Destruction of the social state?
My pipe dream is that public school civic classes spend quite a bit of time teaching critical thinking skills, and how recognize & defuse rhetorical devices & propaganda techniques. If everyone knows how to ignore the B.S., maybe we'd get some real information instead of attempts at manipulation.
*Sigh* Truly a pipe dream...
Maybe because of this?
I'm sure Kerry could privately admit mistakes, but if he actually described some in a public forum, the neo-con disinfo machine would have it out of context & spread all over the airwaves & in blogs in an hour or two.
Similarly, if Bush says anything that could be slightly interpreted as a way to call him a moron or out-of-touch, _his_ opponents would be jumping on it like a starving dog on fresh red meat.
Unless you have a candidate with bulletproof skin, you're not going to get _anything_ personal out of them.
Well damn, if I can get a law passed that says everyone has to pay me $10/day for the right to breathe, and everyone refuses to pay me, then by that logic everyone would be stealing $10/day from me.
A bar code which can be read without you knowing that it has been read.
I believe that you are still liable for the payments to ASCAP even if you are just listening to a radio station, as long as it's for commercial purposes (like entertaining your customers). My father tried that, and got dinged for it.
I assume that if you're short a few fingers, then you're out of luck :P