However, there are some reports I have heard that may not be encompassed in this, unless the feelings infrasound induces also result in visions. I have heard stories of objects moving, seeing ghosts and such, and other less intangible occurances.
I don't have a reference at the moment, but I did read an interesting article once where researchers described how sometimes people would experience a "waking dreaming" state, where their brain would basically perform something like a partial REM dreaming stage (sometimes including the muscle lockup), but they would be wide awake. The researchers weren't sure what would trigger this malfunction.
Apparently, the brain would try and merge the dream elements with the external stimuli from the real world, which would probably be a pretty good explanation for many alien/supernatural experiences. The people who experienced this were otherwise completely ordinary people.
When I was an undergraduate, some of my housemates would cause subsonics by stuffing our house's chimney with newspaper & lighting it all. The rush of air made the chimney vibrate like an ultra-large organ pipe.
Of course, the house frame was also shaking so violently I am completely amazed that there was no structural damage, and/or the chimney didn't get destroyed. I certainly don't recommend doing this to your own home!
Why? Criminals live in a society that is ruled by the law. They broke the law.
My reasoning is pretty simple, although you seem to have trouble following it. The law is made by human beings. Human beings are not perfect. Some human beings are corrupt. Sometimes the laws that the human beings create is not perfect and/or results from corruption. For a stable system, you need some kind of feedback to prevent these bad laws from destroying the system.
Assume you allow criminals to vote. If your laws follow common sense, and are generally perceived to be fair, then most of the people in your society will follow them without complaint. The number of people who don't (i.e., criminals) will be so insignificant that it doesn't matter whether you allow them to vote or not.
Now assume that, for ideological reasons perhaps, or maybe because of corruption, the legislators start passing laws which start criminalizing increasingly broader aspects of behavior. If they are also able to disenfranchise the very same people that they have criminalized, then there is no feedback loop - the legislators will be able to repress larger and larger groups of people until the bulk of society's citizens are second-class citizens, subjugated to laws that they do not agree with, and which they have no method of objection.
On the other hand, if you allow criminals to vote, then this provides proper feedback into the system - if the legislators try and pass anything which doesn't benefit the society as a whole, then the society has a chance to remove them from power.
Like I said, my reasoning is simple. Healthy society, it doesn't matter if criminals can vote. If somebody tries to control the society by criminalizing too much behavior, then allowing criminals to vote will discourage that.
By the way, nowhere in my message did I _ever_ mention race. In fact, I was thinking mostly in terms of economic classes, or ideological wars (like the Taliban). Apparently, _you_ seem to have a problem discussing racial issues, since you couldn't resist bringing it up and ranting about it. Even so, my reasoning with regard to racial issues (and how control has been exerted in the past by those in authority over minorities) is still sound. Criminals should be allowed to vote.
If you're a citizen, old enough and not a felon you should be able to vote.
Personally, I think "criminals" should be allowed to vote. In a healthy society, with laws based on common sense, criminals will tend to be a very small minority and their votes won't make much difference. In an unhealthy society, where so many conflicting laws have been passed that a significant portion of the population can't help but become "criminal", allowing them to vote would provide a negative feedback mechanism on our representatives that would encourage them to take into account the health of the ENTIRE society, not just those who happen to work well within the current regime.
It occurs to me that if you want to marginalize entire classes of people & prevent them from having any say in their own government, then it's pretty darn convenient to be able to pass laws that criminalize the activities of those classes disproportionately, and also prevent them from voting so that they can't object politically to their treatment.
Doesn't anyone remember the enormous protests, marches and so one of the 60's?
Anyone in the US who protests something too visibly is obviously a hippy/troublemaker-type who doesn't appreciate hard work - so they get fired from their jobs. When you're worried about your job being shipped to China in the first place, you tend to try avoid rocking the boat.
The only defense a modern society has to prevent its military from being used to control that society, is to make sure that the elements of the military are drawn representatively from that society.
In those countries where the government uses the military to brutally suppress the populace, it's almost a given that many of the forces used to perform that suppression are "elite forces", who have been isolated & trained & rewarded in ways designed to keep them from having any kind of empathy with the population they are being used to suppress.
Huh?! Just about every "ideal" form of government pretends to aim for a good and secure life for all of its citizens, even many dictatorships. Communism pays more lip service to this than most.
On the other hand, just about every government in history & in existence has had problems with implementation. I'd argue that there hasn't been anything approaching a "true" form of communism ever implemented on a country-sized scale. That doesn't mean that the ideal form of communism wasn't intended to provide a good & secure life for all of its citizens.
A well-written virus would probably also watch you type in your passphrase (or catch the secret key after it had been decoded). Once something has taken over your machine, there's no way you can keep a secret key safe.
The way that RFID will get accepted by the public is when big ticket stealable items refuse to work, and better yet 'phone home' when they are stolen.
Assuming that this doesn't stop people from selling their old stereo to their buddies, or from giving their old VCR to their kid when they go off to college.
The difference is that you create a computer program.
OK, I guess that would put it in the category as other similar "created" works, such as works of art. I still don't agree that gives anybody the "right" to control what happens to that data after it leaves their physical control.
Just to throw out another point, by your logic, everything is data, because it is perceived by our senses as such.
No, you are distorting my logic. Using your own example, the data which is GENERATED by our senses (if you had some way of encoding it for storage) would be free for copying. The actual object which was used to generate that data is still itself, and is not "free" in the sense that if the object were taken, then it would no longer be there.
I think we have a fundamental philosophical disagreement. I believe people should get paid for providing goods or services, when they provide them. Creating a program would be a "service" that should be paid for when the program is handed over.
I don't think it has been proven that giving creators a monopoly over the control of their creation provides a net benefit to society, although it seems that many people have blind faith in this concept. I have seen enough anecdotal evidence to form a personal opinion that such monopolies, as they are currently instantiated, are hurting society in the long-term (preventing the distribution of innovation which might be greatly beneficial to the society), and are being abused to make money for individuals/corporations when they didn't do any productive work to deserve such a reward.
Things will get interesting when it becomes simple for computers to "evolve" simple programs to perform tasks. Would the computers own their own programs? Or would it be the person who wrote the evolution program, even though they didn't do the work? Probably the person who owns the computer? Why would they deserve such renumeration when they didn't do any of the creation?
It's whether the person who created the work can profit by selling it. If he can't sell copies because a pirate is giving them away for free, he is definitely suffering a loss from income that he would have received if piracy wasn't an option.
In the absence of copyright law, trying to make money by selling easily-copied data would be called a poor business model. It is only the artificial scarcity imposed by copyright law (and other "intellectual property" protections) that gives people the ability to force other people to give them money for repeated copies of information. Without such enforcement, people would actually have to make money the honest way: by providing goods & services for customers.
Consider another example. Suppose that you buy a BMW. Now, for example's sake, let's suppose you have a replicating machine that will make copies of anything you want. You set up shop and start cloning your BMW. Then you start giving your BMWs away for free (or charging nominal fees for them). Don't you think that BMW would consider the act theft because you are taking away their market with pristine copies of their product?
They might call it "theft", but they would be wrong. I would call it competition, and it would be their job to figure out how to make a product that people would want to buy instead of mine. I would hazard a guess that they would probably want to know how I was cloning their cars, since it would reduce their manufacturing costs quite a bit.
You can deny if you like (in my experience, denial and justification are always used as a conscience salve for people who know what they are doing is wrong), but the fact of the matter is that depriving someone of their livelihood is theft.
Ah, so the all the car manufacturers were thieves when they deprived the buggy manufacturers of their livelihood. Somehow I doubt they thought of themselves that way.
However, much as I hope you get the point, you've probably decided that your lack of morals are superior to what you perceive as my being "brainwashed".
No, I've pretty much concluded that my viewpoint is more rational than yours. Nothing to do with morals.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you felt quite smug putting together a jab at my alias, defining me as some kind of script kiddy-type. I _was_ a young kid when I started using that alias, ever since the 'net was only at about 300 hosts, but that was a _long_ time ago. Based on your resume, our work & educational experiences seem to be around the same time periods, therefore we are probably pretty close in ages. I keep using it because a lot of my online associates are familiar with it (and yes, for a bit of nostalgia).
The difference between those and a computer program is obvious.
If it's so obvious, then you shouldn't have any problem explaining the difference to me, because I don't see it. A program is data. Data == information. About the only difference I can see being used as an argument is that a machine will do something when following the instructions encoded by that data, but that's not really an argument, since that could also be true of the types of facts that you made a list of.
That line wasn't in the English section of the EUL? Tough Titty! You clicked - You agreed - You entered a legal agreement -- You now owe!
Dunno about France, and IANAL, but at least in the United States you cannot be bound by an agreement written in a language which you don't understand. (Unfortunately, the major loophole to this is that the legal system still seems to think that Legalese is understandable by English speakers.:-(
There are home-schooling groups where 4 or 5 neighbourhood kids meet up to be taught by a single teacher/parent/whatever. There are also professional home-schooling teachers and tutors.
In other words, paying for private schooling? Probably works okay for those people who can afford competent teachers, but allowing rich people to "escape" the public school system doesn't exactly set up for a society based on equal opportunity.
Not going to hold my breath waiting for the public school system to improve, though.
It sure won't happen if the people who have the resources to do anything about it prefer to watch it collapse instead. Why should they worry? At least _their_ kids will get a good education.
Or, perhaps, if societal morals went up a notch and we actually respected people's right to their property
What do you mean? I respect people's property. I just don't like people telling me what I can do with MY property (as long as I'm not hurting anyone else with it).
Here's a clue, although you seem to be fairly brainwashed: intellectual property _isn't_.
Home schooler's basically have their own personal tutor that they can pester whenever they have a problem, issue, concern, etc.
The problem with this reasoning is, that no matter how much the parent(s) love their kid(s), the parents aren't necessarily competent teachers. Even teaching 30 kids, a competent teacher is going to do a lot better for those kids than an incompetent parent is going to do home schooling their own kids. (I think we can agree about the bad effects of an incompetent teacher, however.)
For home schooling to be effective for the kid(s), either the parents have to have teaching skills, or the kid(s) have to be damn intelligent & be able to act on their own initiative.
That protewst involved about 0.15% of the world's population.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that 99.85% of the world's population was in favor of the war in Iraq. It more likely means that 99%+ of the world population doesn't really give a f#$!#$ (except for the people who are in Iraq, of course).
One of the reasons that home schoolers do so much better on average than State schools (despite the absence of qualified teachers, dearth of material and limited common facilities) is that they're not a monoculture.
Gah - I'd love to see some real numbers on this; my mother (a learning-disabled-kids teacher) is perpetually complaining about the kids she has to bring up to snuff, damaged (both academically & socially) from "home-schooling". There's a reason why teachers receive training to teach - to make them better at it than most of the parents. About the only "home-schooled" kids that I've heard of that turned out to be well-adjusted adults had teachers for parents.
Of course, if you don't pay the teachers well enough for most of the good ones to stick around, then you're pretty much sabotaging your own educational system. Sometimes, I get the strong impression that this is the desired goal of some of the "conservatives" - to destroy the public educational system, since it's too secular for their tastes.
What's really obnoxious are the parents who totally screw up their kid's life, then bring them back to school to be "repaired" and blame the teacher when their kid gets poor results on the next set of exams. God forbid the PARENTS accept the responsibility.
I haven't a clue how to do that, but FedEx and UPS would love to have a go at it.... if it weren't illegal.
Ummm...no they don't. I used to work for a competitor of FedEx, UPS (and USPS), and I learned from several executives in that company that they were EXTREMELY happy to let the USPS handle single-envelope letters, especially when the USPS is required by law to deliver said single-envelope letters to all the tiny little podunk towns which can afford to print themselves some official stationary. There's no way those companies could charge what the USPS does & afford to deliver letters with the same quality of service that the USPS does.
If FedEx & UPS were required by law to deliver "packages" as small as letters, and to all the places that the USPS does, it's very doubtful they'd be able to do as well as the USPS does.
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I don't have a reference at the moment, but I did read an interesting article once where researchers described how sometimes people would experience a "waking dreaming" state, where their brain would basically perform something like a partial REM dreaming stage (sometimes including the muscle lockup), but they would be wide awake. The researchers weren't sure what would trigger this malfunction.
Apparently, the brain would try and merge the dream elements with the external stimuli from the real world, which would probably be a pretty good explanation for many alien/supernatural experiences. The people who experienced this were otherwise completely ordinary people.
When I was an undergraduate, some of my housemates would cause subsonics by stuffing our house's chimney with newspaper & lighting it all. The rush of air made the chimney vibrate like an ultra-large organ pipe.
Of course, the house frame was also shaking so violently I am completely amazed that there was no structural damage, and/or the chimney didn't get destroyed. I certainly don't recommend doing this to your own home!
My reasoning is pretty simple, although you seem to have trouble following it. The law is made by human beings. Human beings are not perfect. Some human beings are corrupt. Sometimes the laws that the human beings create is not perfect and/or results from corruption. For a stable system, you need some kind of feedback to prevent these bad laws from destroying the system.
Assume you allow criminals to vote. If your laws follow common sense, and are generally perceived to be fair, then most of the people in your society will follow them without complaint. The number of people who don't (i.e., criminals) will be so insignificant that it doesn't matter whether you allow them to vote or not.
Now assume that, for ideological reasons perhaps, or maybe because of corruption, the legislators start passing laws which start criminalizing increasingly broader aspects of behavior. If they are also able to disenfranchise the very same people that they have criminalized, then there is no feedback loop - the legislators will be able to repress larger and larger groups of people until the bulk of society's citizens are second-class citizens, subjugated to laws that they do not agree with, and which they have no method of objection.
On the other hand, if you allow criminals to vote, then this provides proper feedback into the system - if the legislators try and pass anything which doesn't benefit the society as a whole, then the society has a chance to remove them from power.
Like I said, my reasoning is simple. Healthy society, it doesn't matter if criminals can vote. If somebody tries to control the society by criminalizing too much behavior, then allowing criminals to vote will discourage that.
By the way, nowhere in my message did I _ever_ mention race. In fact, I was thinking mostly in terms of economic classes, or ideological wars (like the Taliban). Apparently, _you_ seem to have a problem discussing racial issues, since you couldn't resist bringing it up and ranting about it. Even so, my reasoning with regard to racial issues (and how control has been exerted in the past by those in authority over minorities) is still sound. Criminals should be allowed to vote.
Personally, I think "criminals" should be allowed to vote. In a healthy society, with laws based on common sense, criminals will tend to be a very small minority and their votes won't make much difference. In an unhealthy society, where so many conflicting laws have been passed that a significant portion of the population can't help but become "criminal", allowing them to vote would provide a negative feedback mechanism on our representatives that would encourage them to take into account the health of the ENTIRE society, not just those who happen to work well within the current regime.
It occurs to me that if you want to marginalize entire classes of people & prevent them from having any say in their own government, then it's pretty darn convenient to be able to pass laws that criminalize the activities of those classes disproportionately, and also prevent them from voting so that they can't object politically to their treatment.
Anyone in the US who protests something too visibly is obviously a hippy/troublemaker-type who doesn't appreciate hard work - so they get fired from their jobs. When you're worried about your job being shipped to China in the first place, you tend to try avoid rocking the boat.
You want to get rid of the lobbyists, not feed them.
The only defense a modern society has to prevent its military from being used to control that society, is to make sure that the elements of the military are drawn representatively from that society.
In those countries where the government uses the military to brutally suppress the populace, it's almost a given that many of the forces used to perform that suppression are "elite forces", who have been isolated & trained & rewarded in ways designed to keep them from having any kind of empathy with the population they are being used to suppress.
Huh?! Just about every "ideal" form of government pretends to aim for a good and secure life for all of its citizens, even many dictatorships. Communism pays more lip service to this than most.
On the other hand, just about every government in history & in existence has had problems with implementation. I'd argue that there hasn't been anything approaching a "true" form of communism ever implemented on a country-sized scale. That doesn't mean that the ideal form of communism wasn't intended to provide a good & secure life for all of its citizens.
...but not youth, skill & treachery...
A well-written virus would probably also watch you type in your passphrase (or catch the secret key after it had been decoded). Once something has taken over your machine, there's no way you can keep a secret key safe.
Tell me about it. I think my job description got rewritten as "whatever" after I joined the company...
Assuming that this doesn't stop people from selling their old stereo to their buddies, or from giving their old VCR to their kid when they go off to college.
OK, I guess that would put it in the category as other similar "created" works, such as works of art. I still don't agree that gives anybody the "right" to control what happens to that data after it leaves their physical control.
No, you are distorting my logic. Using your own example, the data which is GENERATED by our senses (if you had some way of encoding it for storage) would be free for copying. The actual object which was used to generate that data is still itself, and is not "free" in the sense that if the object were taken, then it would no longer be there.
I think we have a fundamental philosophical disagreement. I believe people should get paid for providing goods or services, when they provide them. Creating a program would be a "service" that should be paid for when the program is handed over.
I don't think it has been proven that giving creators a monopoly over the control of their creation provides a net benefit to society, although it seems that many people have blind faith in this concept. I have seen enough anecdotal evidence to form a personal opinion that such monopolies, as they are currently instantiated, are hurting society in the long-term (preventing the distribution of innovation which might be greatly beneficial to the society), and are being abused to make money for individuals/corporations when they didn't do any productive work to deserve such a reward.
Things will get interesting when it becomes simple for computers to "evolve" simple programs to perform tasks. Would the computers own their own programs? Or would it be the person who wrote the evolution program, even though they didn't do the work? Probably the person who owns the computer? Why would they deserve such renumeration when they didn't do any of the creation?
In the absence of copyright law, trying to make money by selling easily-copied data would be called a poor business model. It is only the artificial scarcity imposed by copyright law (and other "intellectual property" protections) that gives people the ability to force other people to give them money for repeated copies of information. Without such enforcement, people would actually have to make money the honest way: by providing goods & services for customers.
They might call it "theft", but they would be wrong. I would call it competition, and it would be their job to figure out how to make a product that people would want to buy instead of mine. I would hazard a guess that they would probably want to know how I was cloning their cars, since it would reduce their manufacturing costs quite a bit.
Ah, so the all the car manufacturers were thieves when they deprived the buggy manufacturers of their livelihood. Somehow I doubt they thought of themselves that way.
No, I've pretty much concluded that my viewpoint is more rational than yours. Nothing to do with morals.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you felt quite smug putting together a jab at my alias, defining me as some kind of script kiddy-type. I _was_ a young kid when I started using that alias, ever since the 'net was only at about 300 hosts, but that was a _long_ time ago. Based on your resume, our work & educational experiences seem to be around the same time periods, therefore we are probably pretty close in ages. I keep using it because a lot of my online associates are familiar with it (and yes, for a bit of nostalgia).
If it's so obvious, then you shouldn't have any problem explaining the difference to me, because I don't see it. A program is data. Data == information. About the only difference I can see being used as an argument is that a machine will do something when following the instructions encoded by that data, but that's not really an argument, since that could also be true of the types of facts that you made a list of.
Dunno about France, and IANAL, but at least in the United States you cannot be bound by an agreement written in a language which you don't understand. (Unfortunately, the major loophole to this is that the legal system still seems to think that Legalese is understandable by English speakers. :-(
In other words, paying for private schooling? Probably works okay for those people who can afford competent teachers, but allowing rich people to "escape" the public school system doesn't exactly set up for a society based on equal opportunity.
It sure won't happen if the people who have the resources to do anything about it prefer to watch it collapse instead. Why should they worry? At least _their_ kids will get a good education.
What do you mean? I respect people's property. I just don't like people telling me what I can do with MY property (as long as I'm not hurting anyone else with it).
Here's a clue, although you seem to be fairly brainwashed: intellectual property _isn't_.
Do deaths/injuries by suicide & accidental gun-related accidents get figured into the "lower crime rate" statistics?
The problem with this reasoning is, that no matter how much the parent(s) love their kid(s), the parents aren't necessarily competent teachers. Even teaching 30 kids, a competent teacher is going to do a lot better for those kids than an incompetent parent is going to do home schooling their own kids. (I think we can agree about the bad effects of an incompetent teacher, however.)
For home schooling to be effective for the kid(s), either the parents have to have teaching skills, or the kid(s) have to be damn intelligent & be able to act on their own initiative.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that 99.85% of the world's population was in favor of the war in Iraq. It more likely means that 99%+ of the world population doesn't really give a f#$!#$ (except for the people who are in Iraq, of course).
WTF does this have to do with philosophy?! It's called _logic_, you bonehead.
Please wait for the Homeland Security agents who will be shortly arriving at your door.
Gah - I'd love to see some real numbers on this; my mother (a learning-disabled-kids teacher) is perpetually complaining about the kids she has to bring up to snuff, damaged (both academically & socially) from "home-schooling". There's a reason why teachers receive training to teach - to make them better at it than most of the parents. About the only "home-schooled" kids that I've heard of that turned out to be well-adjusted adults had teachers for parents.
Of course, if you don't pay the teachers well enough for most of the good ones to stick around, then you're pretty much sabotaging your own educational system. Sometimes, I get the strong impression that this is the desired goal of some of the "conservatives" - to destroy the public educational system, since it's too secular for their tastes.
What's really obnoxious are the parents who totally screw up their kid's life, then bring them back to school to be "repaired" and blame the teacher when their kid gets poor results on the next set of exams. God forbid the PARENTS accept the responsibility.
Ummm...no they don't. I used to work for a competitor of FedEx, UPS (and USPS), and I learned from several executives in that company that they were EXTREMELY happy to let the USPS handle single-envelope letters, especially when the USPS is required by law to deliver said single-envelope letters to all the tiny little podunk towns which can afford to print themselves some official stationary. There's no way those companies could charge what the USPS does & afford to deliver letters with the same quality of service that the USPS does.
If FedEx & UPS were required by law to deliver "packages" as small as letters, and to all the places that the USPS does, it's very doubtful they'd be able to do as well as the USPS does.