I haven't read the entire Comcast TOS, but I assume there's nothing in it that prevents them from limiting the number of connections of certain protocols. It would be nice if they let their customers (of which I am one) know that they were doing this, but unless it's in the TOS, I doubt there's legal any requirement. As far as "see no evil" protections, they are not censoring based on content, they are throttling based on protocol.
It has nothing to do with them suspecting you of piracy. The point is to limit that type of bandwidth so there's enough for other uses. The fact that you may use bittorrent for legitimate purposes does not make it illegal for them to limit bittorrent throughput.
Yes, what Comcast is doing is probably not in compliance with RFC 793, since they are not an enpoint. However, RFC 793 is not a criminal statute, a civil statute, or even a legal contract. It is a technical contract. Technical contracts are finagled all the time to achieve various work-arounds; this specific one, for example, by Skype, to get peer to peer connections established through NAT.
People don't have to like their approach, but language like "forgery," and talk criminal charges... is typical, but silly.
* Several sections are marked as "temporary, for now"
So? That makes it bad?
* Converters will substitute arbitrary, favorable readings for the measured device if the measurement is out of range
I don't know what "favorable" means here, but I get the impression that it uses the floor or ceiling value of the actual value is out of range... and that it signals an error if there are too many such values.
* The software takes an airflow measurement at power-up, and presumes this value is the "zero line" or baseline measurement for subsequent calculations. No quality check or reasonableness test is done on this measurement
So they assume no one is breathing into it while turning it on. While I wouldn't object to adding a "reasonableness test", in what situation is this going to be a bad assumption?
* It would fail software standards for the (FAA) and (FDA), as well as commercial standards used in devices for public safety
This is total misdirection. The only software that meets formal coding standards like the ones mentioned is the software that *has to* meet it. It doesn't mean the software is necessarily better, it only means a certain formal process has been gone through. There should obviously be testing and quality control for the device and software, but examining the code does not tell you what there was or was not in that regard.
Sending a RST packet is a perfectly legitimate way to close an unallowed TCP connection. Equating this with the criminal impersonation of another human being is beyond ludicrous.
I can understand if you want some website to give you the rundown on what is in a movie so that you as a parent can make an educated decision about whether you child should see it or not.
I think the OP's point is that this may be used in such a way that the parents don't bother devising their own system for raising their child based on their own child's needs/interests/wants...basically, using someone elses "system" for raising their own child.... However, I wouldn't (and don't) agree with a service that tells you what is or isn't objectional in a movie/tv show/album. What you find to be objectional for YOUR children is not neccessarily what I find to be objectional for MY children.
Except that a common ratings system is what is currently being used for movies and TV, and this is a concept for tailored ideology-specific ratings sub-systems. In other words you can use a ratings system defined by like-minded people, as opposed to people who you don't necessarily agree with. (The left-wingers, for example, could have a rating system that makes anything where a gun is shown NC-17, while letting the gay porn come on through with a G. [I'm joking... I hope.]) Personally, we preview books, TV shows and movies, for our kids, or else use screenit.com, and don't pay much attention to the ratings given by the MPAA and whoever rates TV shows. But most parents we know don't put in that work, but go almost exclusively by the ratings.
Heck, in the book of Revelations in the Bible, Death rides a green horse in the original Greek. It's a black horse in most English translations. Why? Well, the "black death" plague and black being a symbol of death mean that's fitting symbolism in modern English. At the time, though, there wasn't embalming, and as this list of Bible translation corrections says, green's the color a dead body turns, just like any rotting meat. The symbolism is completely different, though, when green from the leaves of plants is considered the color of life.
You have the wrong horse. The "green" horse is described by the greek word "chloros." Theyer's Lexicon defines it as 1) green, 2) pale yellow. By my brief review on biblegateway, most English translations, especially the most common ones, NIV and NKJV, translate it as "pale," following the KJV, which followed the latin vulgate, which did likewise. "Pale green" is a close second, and "ashen" a close third. So if "chloros" was translated to "pale" in the 382 AD vulgate, which was a revision of multiple older latin translations, I think it's safe to assume that the earliest readers made the same inference from the context, rather than picturing a bright green horse.
The one who rode the black horse, who came before, wasn't Death, but the horseman who held the balances. The greek for his horse's color is "melas" which means black or black ink.
As the article points out, the speculation that the color preference was to help women gather berries was on the part of the scientists who wrote the paper, not the journalists. And of course, if men had preferred the redder colors, they would have said it was an evolutionary adaptation to give them sensory reinforcement when spearing a woolly mammoth. I agree with the article, and I always get annoyed reading the circular, baseless speculation on the evolutionary causes of whatever is discovered. It has no place in a scientific paper. Give a little room to the unknown. Don't just throw it in the nearest a bucket like a retard.
Who cringes at stuff like this mostly out of the fact that it will be used against (intentional word choice) children/teenagers to enforce a parent/group's own set of values upon the youngster who might not even share them?
It's the right and duty of parents to determine the atmosphere most conducive to the development of their children, and moreover to instill values in them. It's not the right or duty of ABC or CNN or Fox or even the Government. Relinquishing the responsibility for your child's environment to the judgment of the TV networks, movie studios and school administrators, does not constitute leaving your child free to choose "his own" values. It does constitute neglecting your duty to your child.
I am interested in living my life on strong principles and standing up for my rights as a consumer, a U.S. citizen and a human being.
Um, NO. Living life on strong principles means being uncompromising in the rights and respect that you extend to others. Being uncompromising in the rights and respect you demand for yourself is simply being an ass.
Hell, even if you signed a CONTRACT with the store saying they had a right to search, you could still refuse. Just because it is written in a contract does not mean they can hold you against your will or physically assault you. You have simply breached the contract by refusing to allow the search. This is not without its own sort of consequences, but the point is, NO agreement EVER gives another person the right to detain or search you. EVER.
If you signed a contract (or if entering premises with a sign accomplishes the same thing), then refusing to follow through with showing the contents of your bag could reasonably be construed as cause to suspect you of shoplifting. If that is the case, the law in almost all states, DOES give the shopkeeper the right to physically detain you.
Doesn't matter if that's your "policy" doesn't matter if you have a sign, doesn't matter if you shout it from the hilltops. Your ownership of the property gives you the right to control access, not the right to force people to do as you please.
Yes it does. A sign can invoke a contract as a basis of entry. A judge can rule that the sign was not obvious enough, or that the contract is not a reasonable one. But if it is reasonable, like saying that customers must agree to letting the staff check their bag against their receipt on exit, then it is an agreement in force.
Of course Matthew 13 shows Peter being elevated above the other Apostles when it comes to running the Church (You are Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.)
Being the rock upon which the church is built = being elevated? What if Peter was the Rock, but John was the Spire? I've always wondered if Jesus first started calling Peter "the Rock" after he tried to walk on the water and sank.:-)
If the Peter being the Rock upon which God built the church applies not only to Peter but also to the Bishop of Rome, then doesn't "before the cock crows you will deny me three times" also apply to the Bishop of Rome?
Rome was one of these, and was the only Metropolitan Bishopric to never fall to a Heresy.
As defined by Rome. Dividing God into three persons is Rome's great heresy.
"Probably illegal"? Uh, ok. Based on what? That's what the independent counsel law is for. But the best thing Congress can find to investigate is if there was anything political behind a staff change at the DOJ. If you think there's something illegal that the Bush administration has done, I know a couple hundred Democratic Congressmen who would LOVE to hear about!
What the administration is doing is exactly what he told us he would do -- track down, and shut down, the money trails of Al Qaeda. It took a lot of diplomacy with our allies and international banking to allow us to actually fight the enemy this way. But elements in our own country want to squander it, and shut down this and every other effort in the "war on terror," out of personal hatred for President Bush.
Do you have a single shred of evidence for this? Because our ethical system arises from genetics and game-theoretical considerations due to social dynamics, and does not vary between the sexes in the way you describe.
Do you have a shred of evidence that our ethical system arises from genetics? The same genetics have given rise to far too many ethical systems over history to make that plausible. The differences in ethical systems between the sexes is well documented, in many studies on the subject, as I'm sure you'll be able to discover with a few searches on scholar.google.com.
As far as capitalism goes, we don't have pure capitalism, either. And as far as capitalism "working" really depends on where you sit. I am sure the pan handlers I see everyday on the streets of Boston would say capitalism has failed.
A Boston pan handler who has tried pan handling in a few socialist countries would probably have a lot of nice things to say about capitalism. In fact, his income would probably make him rich by world standards.
Nerds are particularly sensitive to individual liberty, because they tend to want to think and act in ways that deviate from the norm -- that is, break new ground and innovate, whether scientifically, technologically, or philosophically. So they are very aware that if society is to dictate some small number of acceptable ways of thinking or acting, then their ways, being unique, will not be among the acceptable ones. Therefore a libertarian society is the only type in which they are free to innovate.
The theory of evolution does not presume it. Nowhere in the tenets of evolution does it say "Materialist theories of mind must be true." You could conceive of natural selection never producing consciousness - but the fact is, evolution did produce consciousness, and so we have to come up with an understanding of consciousness which explains how that could be. Evolution does presume that life arises only from physical matter, but then it wouldn't be a scientific theory if it didn't. It would be intelligent design, which is patently unscientific.
How are the above statements not contradictory? It is not a "fact" that evolution produced consciousness. It is only a fact that consciousness coexists with the natural forms of life. The presumption of materialism, and of materialist evolutionary theories of the mind, is that consciousness is nothing more than the natural forms of life. But it is only an a priori presumption. And in fact, the materialist evolutionary theory should preclude the evolution of consciousness, as the only goal of such evolution could have been to produce beneficial responses to stimuli. Give one machine that performs the responses without consciousness and another, much more complex machine that performs the exact same responses but with consciousness, materialist evolution should require that the former machine is built, not the latter, as there would be no evolutionary pressure towards creating the consciousness as well. The physical responses are all that matter.
The main tenet of your argument, "We only know our own consciousness a priori" is false if you flip skepticism on its head, like Immanuel Kant did. He posited that we know that there is an external world precisely because of the reasons I have stated - you cannot locate the enduring self, the cohesive subject responsible for all your thoughts. You only know a representation of the subject, And if we know that there is an external world, we are then obliged to theorize about how consciousness is a possible occurance within this world, which is material. This seems to jibe with what science has so far discovered- you do not need to posit a second substance if a materialist theory explains all phenomena.
But this is backwards. What we know is primarily our thoughts, feelings, and inner perceptions (from which comes reason, logic, math, philosophy and religion), secondarily our sensual perceptions, and tertiarily the conclusions we form from our sensual perceptions (from which comes science). In that order. To raise tertiary knowledge above primary knowledge has no basis. To use it as a reason to argue that primary knowledge doesn't exist, is downright nutty.
Moreover, if you use Occam's razor as a guide, it makes much more sense to try to explain consciousness using one type of substance - physical substances - rather than posit a second substance which is unobservable and unnecessary. This way, all of phenemona can be explained by a single, formally consistent theory.
That would be true, except that there is no theory to explain how any workings of a machine, or the execution of any algorithm, could possibly result in consciousness. There is no theoretical framework whatsoever to connect the experience of thought and emotion with the models of physical matter. Saying "consciousness just emerges because of the complexity of the machine" no more satisfies Occam's razor than saying "consciousness just emerges because of God." Neither explains a mechanism, so neither is a theory, so Occam has no interest in either.
As for your last statement, Kant says that having observed reality be intelligible depends on phenemona meeting certain conditions - namely, it follows certain rules that allow us to perceive it. This means that observed reality suggests that phenemona are all connected - in fact, our understanding of reality *depends* on t
I think that this is definitely the right direction to be going in, and a great start. However, the motion seems less than optimized -- it seems like they need a better genetic algorithm, if that's what they're using, so that they can find a locally optimized solution to the movement. I think for all robot motion problems, we could get a lot further faster by finding automatic solutions in virtual space first, and then applying them to physical space.
I see no other way to reconcile consciousness with a theory of evolution, which seems to demand a materialist, single substance view of mind.
The theory of evolution doesn't demand this, it presumes it. If you think from evidence, the one thing that we truly know is real is consciousness. To attribute consciousness to the workings of a machine, without any sort of conception or model of how movements of a machine could generate consciousness, is pure superstition and anti-intellectual. And it prefers simple answers to observed reality.
Like the summary says, lack of ideas are not a problem. In fact, too many ideas are a problem in a large company. There is no satisfactory way to process all the ideas of all the people in the company and pick out the good from the bad. Everyone thinks their idea is good, but most are usually wrong. And a large company, if they don't have an R&D budget to devote to such things, just doesn't have the risk tolerance for trying untested things.
That is why new small companies will always arise, and when successful, take the place of old companies. People with the REALLY good ideas are generally smart enough to see them through from the ground up, and accomplish something that no large company is even remotely flexible enough to achieve. This is also why innovation of this sort tends to happen only in the most business-friendly countries.
Well, if my kung fu education based on bruce lee movies serves, they have all renounced violence and are living in remorse for all the lives they've taken, and it will only be after this legal action fails at restoring their honor that they will be forced to once again use their deadly skills to their intended effect.
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What provision of the ToS that you read would this violate?
I haven't read the entire Comcast TOS, but I assume there's nothing in it that prevents them from limiting the number of connections of certain protocols. It would be nice if they let their customers (of which I am one) know that they were doing this, but unless it's in the TOS, I doubt there's legal any requirement. As far as "see no evil" protections, they are not censoring based on content, they are throttling based on protocol.
It has nothing to do with them suspecting you of piracy. The point is to limit that type of bandwidth so there's enough for other uses. The fact that you may use bittorrent for legitimate purposes does not make it illegal for them to limit bittorrent throughput.
Yes, what Comcast is doing is probably not in compliance with RFC 793, since they are not an enpoint. However, RFC 793 is not a criminal statute, a civil statute, or even a legal contract. It is a technical contract. Technical contracts are finagled all the time to achieve various work-arounds; this specific one, for example, by Skype, to get peer to peer connections established through NAT.
People don't have to like their approach, but language like "forgery," and talk criminal charges... is typical, but silly.
* Several sections are marked as "temporary, for now"
So? That makes it bad?
* Converters will substitute arbitrary, favorable readings for the measured device if the measurement is out of range
I don't know what "favorable" means here, but I get the impression that it uses the floor or ceiling value of the actual value is out of range... and that it signals an error if there are too many such values.
* The software takes an airflow measurement at power-up, and presumes this value is the "zero line" or baseline measurement for subsequent calculations. No quality check or reasonableness test is done on this measurement
So they assume no one is breathing into it while turning it on. While I wouldn't object to adding a "reasonableness test", in what situation is this going to be a bad assumption?
* It would fail software standards for the (FAA) and (FDA), as well as commercial standards used in devices for public safety
This is total misdirection. The only software that meets formal coding standards like the ones mentioned is the software that *has to* meet it. It doesn't mean the software is necessarily better, it only means a certain formal process has been gone through. There should obviously be testing and quality control for the device and software, but examining the code does not tell you what there was or was not in that regard.
Sending a RST packet is a perfectly legitimate way to close an unallowed TCP connection. Equating this with the criminal impersonation of another human being is beyond ludicrous.
That would be screenit.com.
Except that a common ratings system is what is currently being used for movies and TV, and this is a concept for tailored ideology-specific ratings sub-systems. In other words you can use a ratings system defined by like-minded people, as opposed to people who you don't necessarily agree with. (The left-wingers, for example, could have a rating system that makes anything where a gun is shown NC-17, while letting the gay porn come on through with a G. [I'm joking... I hope.]) Personally, we preview books, TV shows and movies, for our kids, or else use screenit.com, and don't pay much attention to the ratings given by the MPAA and whoever rates TV shows. But most parents we know don't put in that work, but go almost exclusively by the ratings.
You have the wrong horse. The "green" horse is described by the greek word "chloros." Theyer's Lexicon defines it as 1) green, 2) pale yellow. By my brief review on biblegateway, most English translations, especially the most common ones, NIV and NKJV, translate it as "pale," following the KJV, which followed the latin vulgate, which did likewise. "Pale green" is a close second, and "ashen" a close third. So if "chloros" was translated to "pale" in the 382 AD vulgate, which was a revision of multiple older latin translations, I think it's safe to assume that the earliest readers made the same inference from the context, rather than picturing a bright green horse.
The one who rode the black horse, who came before, wasn't Death, but the horseman who held the balances. The greek for his horse's color is "melas" which means black or black ink.
As the article points out, the speculation that the color preference was to help women gather berries was on the part of the scientists who wrote the paper, not the journalists. And of course, if men had preferred the redder colors, they would have said it was an evolutionary adaptation to give them sensory reinforcement when spearing a woolly mammoth. I agree with the article, and I always get annoyed reading the circular, baseless speculation on the evolutionary causes of whatever is discovered. It has no place in a scientific paper. Give a little room to the unknown. Don't just throw it in the nearest a bucket like a retard.
BTW, the article, with the graphs from the study, which are interesting, is here: http://www.badscience.net/?p=518
It's the right and duty of parents to determine the atmosphere most conducive to the development of their children, and moreover to instill values in them. It's not the right or duty of ABC or CNN or Fox or even the Government. Relinquishing the responsibility for your child's environment to the judgment of the TV networks, movie studios and school administrators, does not constitute leaving your child free to choose "his own" values. It does constitute neglecting your duty to your child.
Um, NO. Living life on strong principles means being uncompromising in the rights and respect that you extend to others. Being uncompromising in the rights and respect you demand for yourself is simply being an ass.
If you signed a contract (or if entering premises with a sign accomplishes the same thing), then refusing to follow through with showing the contents of your bag could reasonably be construed as cause to suspect you of shoplifting. If that is the case, the law in almost all states, DOES give the shopkeeper the right to physically detain you.
Yes it does. A sign can invoke a contract as a basis of entry. A judge can rule that the sign was not obvious enough, or that the contract is not a reasonable one. But if it is reasonable, like saying that customers must agree to letting the staff check their bag against their receipt on exit, then it is an agreement in force.
The U.S. debt crisis is finally over! We merely have to send the Pope a tax bill for 9 billion dollars, and he will apparently pay it!
Being the rock upon which the church is built = being elevated? What if Peter was the Rock, but John was the Spire? I've always wondered if Jesus first started calling Peter "the Rock" after he tried to walk on the water and sank.
If the Peter being the Rock upon which God built the church applies not only to Peter but also to the Bishop of Rome, then doesn't "before the cock crows you will deny me three times" also apply to the Bishop of Rome?
As defined by Rome. Dividing God into three persons is Rome's great heresy.
"Probably illegal"? Uh, ok. Based on what? That's what the independent counsel law is for. But the best thing Congress can find to investigate is if there was anything political behind a staff change at the DOJ. If you think there's something illegal that the Bush administration has done, I know a couple hundred Democratic Congressmen who would LOVE to hear about!
What the administration is doing is exactly what he told us he would do -- track down, and shut down, the money trails of Al Qaeda. It took a lot of diplomacy with our allies and international banking to allow us to actually fight the enemy this way. But elements in our own country want to squander it, and shut down this and every other effort in the "war on terror," out of personal hatred for President Bush.
Do you have a shred of evidence that our ethical system arises from genetics? The same genetics have given rise to far too many ethical systems over history to make that plausible. The differences in ethical systems between the sexes is well documented, in many studies on the subject, as I'm sure you'll be able to discover with a few searches on scholar.google.com.
A Boston pan handler who has tried pan handling in a few socialist countries would probably have a lot of nice things to say about capitalism. In fact, his income would probably make him rich by world standards.
Nerds are particularly sensitive to individual liberty, because they tend to want to think and act in ways that deviate from the norm -- that is, break new ground and innovate, whether scientifically, technologically, or philosophically. So they are very aware that if society is to dictate some small number of acceptable ways of thinking or acting, then their ways, being unique, will not be among the acceptable ones. Therefore a libertarian society is the only type in which they are free to innovate.
Are you implying that this guy is not a legitimate ninja?
How are the above statements not contradictory? It is not a "fact" that evolution produced consciousness. It is only a fact that consciousness coexists with the natural forms of life. The presumption of materialism, and of materialist evolutionary theories of the mind, is that consciousness is nothing more than the natural forms of life. But it is only an a priori presumption. And in fact, the materialist evolutionary theory should preclude the evolution of consciousness, as the only goal of such evolution could have been to produce beneficial responses to stimuli. Give one machine that performs the responses without consciousness and another, much more complex machine that performs the exact same responses but with consciousness, materialist evolution should require that the former machine is built, not the latter, as there would be no evolutionary pressure towards creating the consciousness as well. The physical responses are all that matter.
But this is backwards. What we know is primarily our thoughts, feelings, and inner perceptions (from which comes reason, logic, math, philosophy and religion), secondarily our sensual perceptions, and tertiarily the conclusions we form from our sensual perceptions (from which comes science). In that order. To raise tertiary knowledge above primary knowledge has no basis. To use it as a reason to argue that primary knowledge doesn't exist, is downright nutty.
That would be true, except that there is no theory to explain how any workings of a machine, or the execution of any algorithm, could possibly result in consciousness. There is no theoretical framework whatsoever to connect the experience of thought and emotion with the models of physical matter. Saying "consciousness just emerges because of the complexity of the machine" no more satisfies Occam's razor than saying "consciousness just emerges because of God." Neither explains a mechanism, so neither is a theory, so Occam has no interest in either.
I think that this is definitely the right direction to be going in, and a great start. However, the motion seems less than optimized -- it seems like they need a better genetic algorithm, if that's what they're using, so that they can find a locally optimized solution to the movement. I think for all robot motion problems, we could get a lot further faster by finding automatic solutions in virtual space first, and then applying them to physical space.
The theory of evolution doesn't demand this, it presumes it. If you think from evidence, the one thing that we truly know is real is consciousness. To attribute consciousness to the workings of a machine, without any sort of conception or model of how movements of a machine could generate consciousness, is pure superstition and anti-intellectual. And it prefers simple answers to observed reality.
Like the summary says, lack of ideas are not a problem. In fact, too many ideas are a problem in a large company. There is no satisfactory way to process all the ideas of all the people in the company and pick out the good from the bad. Everyone thinks their idea is good, but most are usually wrong. And a large company, if they don't have an R&D budget to devote to such things, just doesn't have the risk tolerance for trying untested things.
That is why new small companies will always arise, and when successful, take the place of old companies. People with the REALLY good ideas are generally smart enough to see them through from the ground up, and accomplish something that no large company is even remotely flexible enough to achieve. This is also why innovation of this sort tends to happen only in the most business-friendly countries.
Well, if my kung fu education based on bruce lee movies serves, they have all renounced violence and are living in remorse for all the lives they've taken, and it will only be after this legal action fails at restoring their honor that they will be forced to once again use their deadly skills to their intended effect.