Would you ban things like "Neon Genesis Evangelion"? It may surprise you that NGE has not even once caused me to go out raping 13 year olds! Shouldn't there be a greater concern for portrayals of violence and torture in film? Which category is more morally bankrupt, showing depictions of killing and torture, or depictions of sex? I'd love UK to get these priorities straight and first ban any show or cartoon with fictional violence in it since it "obviously" encourages the real thing too. Then we can get around to banning any show depicting illicit theft of property and neighbor's ass coveting and whatever's left of the 10 commandments. Maybe this will lead to nobody watching tv nor any movies nor magazines nor comics in any form except pertaining to only the most sterilized topics found in the bible as god intended.
It's also the shortest possible time anything can get from point a to point b
This is only true in the measurement of those observers not doing the traveling! First consider light traveling from E (earth) to P (pluto) (suppose the frames are still w.r.t. one another to make this easy). For any such inertial reference frame light speed is constant (on the macroscopic scale). Consider another frame S (ship) traveling very quickly from E to P. From Lorenz contraction, the distance from the ship to the target has reduced (space and time independently are not constant under different velocities). In S's frame (assume it's not accelerating at the moment) the speed of light is still constant, therefore it can certainly make this shorter distance (from it to P) more easily than measured by someone on E or P! Also the time which advances aboard S as measured at E and P is reduced. These two limitations to space travel are both working in its favor to get it from A to B as quickly as possible as measured by S!
It is a sad thing to see sci-fi or other sources forget or misrepresent this fundamental possibility. It is true that nothing (at least with mass) can cover a distance faster than light as measured by that initial and inertial frame of reference. But when you alter the frame of reference by acceleration then the conditions change to make it possible.
The "penalty" is the time discrepancies when you arrive (decel) at these places. The time measured by you (aboard S) on a trip from some A to B could be mere hours while your friends, family, loved ones back home could have experienced years, decades, or centuries of time before you get back! We could travel any distance in the universe under 'impulse drives' and more quickly forward in time after decel back to a frame, but time has moved on dramatically for those you accelerate to.
When did freedom ever come from a burning of the books?
I think in an effigial attempt to get at their bastardized copyright associations and other legalized information controls. Those are the worse things by far. Literature should not bind you, it should always remain liberating. People who rebel against such controls are a different breed from fascists. I'm in a crowd that's close but it recommends everybody use every piece of useful non-private information you can get, however you can get it, and using those to produce more information to fuel the system. The more that people know everywhere will help the system change from information controlled to information driven. If information funds should added to income tax similar to roads or other services with access and distribution available to all then things would really kick into high gear.
or if you're in denial and believe in your own superiority
Why do you assume such a thing is denial? Brilliant people are constructing and improving these absolutely wonderful free softwares every day. They are superior in result per person, and the kernel is superior, name your point lists and we can easily get more specific. People who create software without relying on information control to ensure its profitability unlike M$ get my vote as our new programming overlords any day. They win hands down. They do this because they're skilled enough to do it, and generally with a profound love for it to do it correctly. You say M$ is making serious $$$ so must be doing something right, then in the next sentence ".. nevermind their monopoly tactics.." Isn't there a strong enough connection between those two things you have stated to realize it implies that those companies using monopolistic practices to achieve profits are "doing something right"? You can't argue one side has the best software by income when that side is obviously tipping the playing field due to high market control. I don't want open source software to become mainstream too early, I don't care if it is decades away. The consumer mainstream will always make things worse if they start putting capital into an area too early because then squatter companies swarm in who are after profits only and satisfy a demand temporarily, and mainstream pays these guys to become huge whereupon they have the power to stay by lobbying and legislation and holding everyone else back from a potentially crucial point in the infrastructure.
Ok bad form to reply to myself, but to clarify:
I think 911 call information shouldn't be released publically at all except by authorization of the person who actually called 911. If it is released then using or processing the data, say by charting it on a map, shouldn't be restricted though the releasers should be able to obfuscate the data however they like.
For me, I'd toss most of the arguments into the red herring bin. I simply wouldn't want my house painted with a marker saying I called 911. Suppose I did it to report gang activity outside of my home and a few got arrested when the squad car showed up? It's just a quick trip to this site to see who ratted on them. Bad things happen outside which should be covered by the media. The whistleblowers or people afraid for their lives or having some medical trauma needn't be marked for all to see. I'd like to think things in this category should be as private as a confession to a doctor or priest, a simple information flow containing tips or whatever without becoming publically displayed at all.
Equating the desire of fighting a frightening future of information control to one of gleefully shafting those who create interesting and useful things is misinformative to say the best. Most of those who do work to fight things that would cause an information hindered future generally advocate a variety of alternatives to paying the mob that seemed to provide these authors and writers their only chances to get off the ground. Information is the life blood of our culture and restricting it stifles and can kill interesting and useful things. Methods to route the money directly to the authors and nowhere else is high on the list, to provide pay for total access rather than per play is high on the list, and on top of that altering the absurd copyright and patent law, destroying the DMCA, reversing *AA suits, flipping casual eavesdropping on its ear, and fighting an endless variety of things that have or will have gone wrong for us or generations to come.
So, do they still think using the name the 'pirate party' is a good idea? For people unfamiliar with the party stance, such a name sounds fringe at best and has very bad implications. I don't see how calling your party something like the 'plundering murderous raping bastards on the sea party' would do anything but make being voted in impossible.
A tax is collected. Committees are elected in various categories (in technological, scientific, entertainment,...).
They can influence how the taxes are distributed. They can ensure that better ideas, better software, better music, etc. receive more funding than mediocre or dreadful ones.
This funnels a certain percentage of funds to the information producers. Perhaps another percentage comes from individual taxpayers that can select which things they like (books, bands, journals, movies, magazines) better than others. Perhaps this rate is alterable at any time through the year completely at the whim of the taxpayers.
Everybody pays yearly, the writers, artists, etc. get paid. In exchange for this, absolutely no information can be controlled whatsoever in terms of distribution. Laws like the DMCA are tossed.
This tax is analogous to taxes that pay for roads, or schools that nearly everybody uses. The alternative is to put toll booths on every road you travel and allow the price and entry / exit criteria to be set by its creator. The alternative in information is to limit what can be written, spoken and shared.
Now groups can use this system, or opt for a system where they receive no tax compensation but charge for their services. They can try to DRM or obfuscate or limit access or whatever they wish in this group. The difference is that it is still not illegal to attempt to distribute the services if it ever 'gets out'. There are no EULAs preventing unintended uses and so on. The companies are responsible for protecting their own information. Good luck with that in the face of hopefully the better quality of information using the newer scheme!
I think people make a mistake in the very beginning when they assume information must be paid for. They wrongly accuse people of immorality when they copy and distribute information on their own. It is a mistake to ever think that it should be something that they have a right to control. Controlling information in this way is at odds with a free society.
If you can't resell modified forms of the original then hardened criminals can instead use a device, say a computer, to run mplayer on with data files that cause it to skip violent / sex laden segments (or cut out everything else instead!). The files to edit it at least are distributable under GPL, just time ranges in a datafile. A website could have all of these to download that people upload (higher score by known name, trust, vote rank, whatever). Throw ads all over the site and you've now got a legal business. Modify mplayer so that instead of segment cuts it bleeps audio or alters subtitles, or puts squares filled with GPL video kittens playing covering the naughtiest bits.
But what specifically about the message is extreme? Should a "DRM ain't so bad, let's have some more!" compromise have been worked in there? I say down with ad hominem, let's bring on the facts!
Ah, I am sure you will argue about "what progress?" and tell us of how they are so terribly exploited and make only sixty cents a day in a factory - but you have missed the alternative, that they were making the equivalent of thirty cents a day doing sustainence farming beforehand.
To me, companies in a country that have laws providing minimal standards to block heinous working conditions should not be able to dodge these laws by seeking workers in countries without these minimal standards. This minimal shield should be provided everywhere the company is allowed to do business. And it is exploitation by the company in the country that profits from providing conditions below these minimal standards. Even if it improves the lives of those in the other country by some iota below the minimal shield. Because they certainly pay far less when they can find workers that will work for pennies for many hours under harsh conditions because such a minimal shield isn't in place for them. Surely a 'free economy' cannot be so free as to ignore minimal quality labor conditions for every worker? Outsourcing to gain profit by dodging minimal labor shielding should be illegal!
How about the 'Free Information' party instead? Many of the comments around here defending the Pirate party name come from that other doesn't sound as good or grab the attention that is needed. That's fair but before running to call your party the Murderer's party or Rapist party, when your party has absolutely nothing to do with either of those seems counterproductive. It tips the scales against you before you've said anything. There are many more decent sounding names than ones with criminal denotations that people can rally behind. They surely would be more popular at first sight with average citizens of America than something already subverted by its incorrect literal interpretation.
Actually I put it in apostrophe quotes to try to avoid that interpretation but it didn't work! I don't mean soul in the biblical sense, say, (whatever that is) or a ghost or spirit or whatever, I wanted to dry the term out to imply exactly the whole of sensory experience regardless of what creates it.
Most definitely! Experimentation no holds barred would cause advancement many years faster than our current pace. We need medical advancement in neurological fields badly.
I'd love to see how it all turns out, but getting there without brave volunteers and an experimental kill switch is just frightening. I guess it comes down to if you would feel brave enough to donate your brain for such scientific experimentation or really feel safe that the 'soul' has already left so to speak? Or that they sliced the parts up small enough. For me a specific slice limit is not known well enough to make a safe bet. But I'd readily volunteer if my brain was already being poked around for some other medical reason and could still reasonably indicate a stop signal. For example, OW! you poked my eyeball from the inside, this experiment's over!
Brain slice experiments (this case is just in conjunction with this new chip that can measure various impulses from cultured hippocampal slice) scare the hell out of me. A brain we know already has capability at least in full to present a rich sensory representation. When we get better at using brain slices in neurocomputation or experiments (cultured, donated, harvested,...) then a line has been crossed until we know enough to know better. Who'd donate their brain if they knew some aspect of 'themselves' might be preserved while experiments were performed on it? Especially since the brain's owner is not in any condition to back out of the experiment at that point.
A brain slice is functionally inferior subset of this full brain's capability. How small a slice should it be before all sentience is lost and therefore ok to put it on a chip? Should it be for volunteers only? Are cultured samples ok to use or perhaps brain properties make them generate sensory representation just as well? Is it for example to use neural gag reflex circuitry to instead move our robotic arm and a neural 'gut punch' to alter the speed and trajectory? Repeated hundreds of times an hour? For decades on end?
Is this kind of thing ok to do to animal brains / slices over a long period of time?
Anyway, all I know is when I talk like this I'm modded into the subzero territories, so cheers to the few that see it!
more people voted in the last American Idol episode of that television show than did in the last Presidential Election.
This may seem like a dire statistic and it will be very hard to see how far from the truth it is, but there are at least two mitigating factors:
It's much easier to call a number to vote than to appear in person at a ballot booth or fill out forms to mail.
Possibly many people in the American Idol vote 'passionately' voted far more times than once! One person I know claims to have done this several times, so if they're not lying or duped by a 'thanks for your vote! (again)' -- [DISCARD] then at least it's not impossible.
The latter one is akin to the slashdot polls, the totals are probably inflated by a fair margin.
No, no mistake! The form which is independent of storage media, of transmission infrastructure, etc.. the core essential parts of it is exactly information. When something's utility comes from 'configuration' or structure as opposed to resource amounts, then its utility is its information. Information is independent of storage medium, but is holdable by them. Their states are altered to represent whatever it is. It can be spread out in various forms wherever in lossy or lossless manner. Anything you can encode as a bitstream exactly holds the property of 'information'.
Please see 'Information Theory' by Thomas Cover for some very nice info about it. For example, you say yourself some things that consist of bits are "merely programs". But you've just described a specific state encoded in that many bits. If this is not information then the definitions must be changed. Information is the capability to specify one thing over another (1 program vs. the other 2^program_bit_size possible collection of that same number of bits), the reduction of surprise in discovering the value of it, a loss of entropy in a system.
Plus I'm not saying it 'wants to be free', it wants nothing of the sort. Many people favor it to be freely 'shared' and hate laws to prevent this since fundamentally it determines how they communicate with one another. My biggest point though is that people telling others not to tell others certain public information is counterproductive at best and there's another way to keep the payments going where they should and information really free for all. A free flow of public information I think indicates things are humming along in the best possible way.
Outside of the green and white bubble of this website, the rest of the world will continue to run on capitalism, the least bad economic system on Earth, and the antithesis to the pseudo-socialist worldview of "share everything and worry about the consequences later" that permeates the discussions.
Yes! You are exactly right, true capitalism is best. Think how much better the world would be if every road you drove on you should pay the road's owner. They should be able to block access at their whim, and if we don't like the service we take the competitions longer route and be happy about it. Police, fire dept., fbi, cia, nsa, house of reps, senate, should all be corporate agents working in competition with one another to better protect us all. And safety regulations for the good of society sounds awfully socialist so I don't much like that. Nasty government getting in the way of the fittest making the laws. This website with lunatics must not know what they're talking about?</bitter sarcasm>
Shit man listen up. Free flow of information BENEFITS every society, limitations on it HARM society. If information could be paid for in tax form whereby everyone cannot legally be prevented from accessing such public information, then shouldn't everyone benefit? Why force capitalism on information when other resources are freely available behind a tax screen?
Now think of this new utopian world and how much worse it is when there are heinous laws to control how we SHARE information that isn't private. There are much harsher laws these days to penalize sharing information. There is NO STEALING INFORMATION for fucks sake unless you delete the source. Think of how backwards that is, and how many years behind we are held back because of it. How many advances may be made with unfettered access to information. And there's nothing but cop-outs on the 'worth' of information in the form of mp3's or avi's. Entertainment is very useful as well.
Capitalism backfires when it treats information as a product. It works when there are producers and consumers, but for information production there are only producers and viewers. It's an incomplete analogy that causes no end of trouble as time and law 'progress' seeking how to fairly handle this. In this case it takes the form of "can we penalize transfer of TYPES of data or by source/destination". Consider this akin to copyright or patent systems as they stand today in the same category as a bastardized form of their intents. Mostly modifying how you can 'use' information in terms of EULA and DMCA enforced copy protection, etc. If corporations own infrastructure and collaborate then how can competition get rid of this problem?
1) when does the revolution begin?
2) what form should it take?
Should it be:
Ignore it and let technology progression defeat attempts at such control? Suppose we make a new Internet, say an Internet 2 (!) encrypt the hell out of everything and ban all traffic that is directly decipherable? How long before that is made illegal?
Legal pushes? I don't think there's enough of us to do this, but it's possible. Though it seems as geeks / nerds our efforts are much more beneficial to the world in doing what we do best, not having to waste our time lobbying against those people that attack information freedom and twisting it to try to make it sound like they're doing the opposite and everyone else is criminals.
The thing that makes people squeamish is that information shouldn't obey capitalistic control since it doesn't meet the analogy correctly. There is something far better that frees information and ensures those that produce it are payed appropriately. Here the only long term successful choice seems to be something like a tax system where people choose where the money goes but should have access to it all. That is, they aren't LEGALLY prevented from accessing it, sharing it, telling someone else about it, singing it, dancing it, whatever. Then tack on any sane laws addressing privacy concerns (selling med records) or claiming work is your own when it isn't, if possible.
It matters because it becomes obvious what must follow to make this effective. If CALEA is applied then the company must provide methods to tap any communication.
An interpretation of the law away implies all attempts to prevent monitoring the essential data of a call is illegal. That is, obfuscation, misdirection, encryption can be seen as circumvention attempts to CALEA. How much more ridiculous is it to prevent encryption than to make it illegal to break encryption via already existing DMCA?
And even if it can't be interpreted that far by the courts, then what of the next law as soon as it's claimed "CALEA is ineffective since all <evildoers> are communicating using encryption which is so easy over the internet!".
So the reason it's a big deal is that it shows a generalization of the POTS tapping and pushes it into the internet domain (as they're a mixture of both). After it gets there no protocol or method of communication using the Internet is safe from this march. This generalization shows no limitations to including more mundane aspects of everyday life when technology would allow it.
Google doesn't make the information disappear entirely. It doesn't "lie" in this sense.
The crucial and great aspect of google censoring links is presenting an annoying tag saying in effect 'this search has broken links due to censored content'. This type of notification upsets people since they're effectively treated like children by people in power but otherwise the same as them. Why should anybody see this information when others can't, even simply to censor it to begin with?
Censoring but tagging upsets people. Upset people cause change in the long run when they take action to correct it one way or another. Either the regional rules will change, or people dodge the rules in various ways (such as an encryption/tech vs. communication law/network isolation/spy law arms race until somebody wins). It's far more subtle, though perhaps less satisfying than a "no-censorship or the highway" style standoff, and it's effective.
It's fine if Google's search results came back with a bold faced red label saying, THIS ENTRY IS CENSORED BY THIS REGION'S GOVERNMENT. It is one thing to restrict the articles from showing by replacing them with 'CENSORED' labels, it's quite another to never know they were there to begin with! If Google filters the results in a way that there is never a mention of the censored results, no disclaimer, then this is a bad, nasty, evil thing to do. It's best that the service is not offered at all rather than present misinformation by silently removing opposing opinion. A service becomes great if you can trust it, if it start lying to you then trust certainly should fall like a rock and alternative services sought and developed .
Slashdot Mirror
Would you ban things like "Neon Genesis Evangelion"? It may surprise you that NGE has not even once caused me to go out raping 13 year olds! Shouldn't there be a greater concern for portrayals of violence and torture in film? Which category is more morally bankrupt, showing depictions of killing and torture, or depictions of sex? I'd love UK to get these priorities straight and first ban any show or cartoon with fictional violence in it since it "obviously" encourages the real thing too. Then we can get around to banning any show depicting illicit theft of property and neighbor's ass coveting and whatever's left of the 10 commandments. Maybe this will lead to nobody watching tv nor any movies nor magazines nor comics in any form except pertaining to only the most sterilized topics found in the bible as god intended.
It's also the shortest possible time anything can get from point a to point b
This is only true in the measurement of those observers not doing the traveling! First consider light traveling from E (earth) to P (pluto) (suppose the frames are still w.r.t. one another to make this easy). For any such inertial reference frame light speed is constant (on the macroscopic scale). Consider another frame S (ship) traveling very quickly from E to P. From Lorenz contraction, the distance from the ship to the target has reduced (space and time independently are not constant under different velocities). In S's frame (assume it's not accelerating at the moment) the speed of light is still constant, therefore it can certainly make this shorter distance (from it to P) more easily than measured by someone on E or P! Also the time which advances aboard S as measured at E and P is reduced. These two limitations to space travel are both working in its favor to get it from A to B as quickly as possible as measured by S!
It is a sad thing to see sci-fi or other sources forget or misrepresent this fundamental possibility. It is true that nothing (at least with mass) can cover a distance faster than light as measured by that initial and inertial frame of reference. But when you alter the frame of reference by acceleration then the conditions change to make it possible.
The "penalty" is the time discrepancies when you arrive (decel) at these places. The time measured by you (aboard S) on a trip from some A to B could be mere hours while your friends, family, loved ones back home could have experienced years, decades, or centuries of time before you get back! We could travel any distance in the universe under 'impulse drives' and more quickly forward in time after decel back to a frame, but time has moved on dramatically for those you accelerate to.
When did freedom ever come from a burning of the books?
I think in an effigial attempt to get at their bastardized copyright associations and other legalized information controls. Those are the worse things by far. Literature should not bind you, it should always remain liberating. People who rebel against such controls are a different breed from fascists. I'm in a crowd that's close but it recommends everybody use every piece of useful non-private information you can get, however you can get it, and using those to produce more information to fuel the system. The more that people know everywhere will help the system change from information controlled to information driven. If information funds should added to income tax similar to roads or other services with access and distribution available to all then things would really kick into high gear.
or if you're in denial and believe in your own superiority
Why do you assume such a thing is denial? Brilliant people are constructing and improving these absolutely wonderful free softwares every day. They are superior in result per person, and the kernel is superior, name your point lists and we can easily get more specific. People who create software without relying on information control to ensure its profitability unlike M$ get my vote as our new programming overlords any day. They win hands down. They do this because they're skilled enough to do it, and generally with a profound love for it to do it correctly. You say M$ is making serious $$$ so must be doing something right, then in the next sentence ".. nevermind their monopoly tactics.." Isn't there a strong enough connection between those two things you have stated to realize it implies that those companies using monopolistic practices to achieve profits are "doing something right"? You can't argue one side has the best software by income when that side is obviously tipping the playing field due to high market control. I don't want open source software to become mainstream too early, I don't care if it is decades away. The consumer mainstream will always make things worse if they start putting capital into an area too early because then squatter companies swarm in who are after profits only and satisfy a demand temporarily, and mainstream pays these guys to become huge whereupon they have the power to stay by lobbying and legislation and holding everyone else back from a potentially crucial point in the infrastructure.
Ok bad form to reply to myself, but to clarify:
I think 911 call information shouldn't be released publically at all except by authorization of the person who actually called 911. If it is released then using or processing the data, say by charting it on a map, shouldn't be restricted though the releasers should be able to obfuscate the data however they like.
For me, I'd toss most of the arguments into the red herring bin. I simply wouldn't want my house painted with a marker saying I called 911. Suppose I did it to report gang activity outside of my home and a few got arrested when the squad car showed up? It's just a quick trip to this site to see who ratted on them. Bad things happen outside which should be covered by the media. The whistleblowers or people afraid for their lives or having some medical trauma needn't be marked for all to see. I'd like to think things in this category should be as private as a confession to a doctor or priest, a simple information flow containing tips or whatever without becoming publically displayed at all.
Equating the desire of fighting a frightening future of information control to one of gleefully shafting those who create interesting and useful things is misinformative to say the best. Most of those who do work to fight things that would cause an information hindered future generally advocate a variety of alternatives to paying the mob that seemed to provide these authors and writers their only chances to get off the ground. Information is the life blood of our culture and restricting it stifles and can kill interesting and useful things. Methods to route the money directly to the authors and nowhere else is high on the list, to provide pay for total access rather than per play is high on the list, and on top of that altering the absurd copyright and patent law, destroying the DMCA, reversing *AA suits, flipping casual eavesdropping on its ear, and fighting an endless variety of things that have or will have gone wrong for us or generations to come.
So, do they still think using the name the 'pirate party' is a good idea? For people unfamiliar with the party stance, such a name sounds fringe at best and has very bad implications. I don't see how calling your party something like the 'plundering murderous raping bastards on the sea party' would do anything but make being voted in impossible.
A tax is collected. Committees are elected in various categories (in technological, scientific, entertainment, ...).
They can influence how the taxes are distributed. They can ensure that better ideas, better software, better music, etc. receive more funding than mediocre or dreadful ones.
This funnels a certain percentage of funds to the information producers. Perhaps another percentage comes from individual taxpayers that can select which things they like (books, bands, journals, movies, magazines) better than others. Perhaps this rate is alterable at any time through the year completely at the whim of the taxpayers.
Everybody pays yearly, the writers, artists, etc. get paid. In exchange for this, absolutely no information can be controlled whatsoever in terms of distribution. Laws like the DMCA are tossed.
This tax is analogous to taxes that pay for roads, or schools that nearly everybody uses. The alternative is to put toll booths on every road you travel and allow the price and entry / exit criteria to be set by its creator. The alternative in information is to limit what can be written, spoken and shared.
Now groups can use this system, or opt for a system where they receive no tax compensation but charge for their services. They can try to DRM or obfuscate or limit access or whatever they wish in this group. The difference is that it is still not illegal to attempt to distribute the services if it ever 'gets out'. There are no EULAs preventing unintended uses and so on. The companies are responsible for protecting their own information. Good luck with that in the face of hopefully the better quality of information using the newer scheme!
I think people make a mistake in the very beginning when they assume information must be paid for. They wrongly accuse people of immorality when they copy and distribute information on their own. It is a mistake to ever think that it should be something that they have a right to control. Controlling information in this way is at odds with a free society.
If you can't resell modified forms of the original then hardened criminals can instead use a device, say a computer, to run mplayer on with data files that cause it to skip violent / sex laden segments (or cut out everything else instead!). The files to edit it at least are distributable under GPL, just time ranges in a datafile. A website could have all of these to download that people upload (higher score by known name, trust, vote rank, whatever). Throw ads all over the site and you've now got a legal business. Modify mplayer so that instead of segment cuts it bleeps audio or alters subtitles, or puts squares filled with GPL video kittens playing covering the naughtiest bits.
But what specifically about the message is extreme? Should a "DRM ain't so bad, let's have some more!" compromise have been worked in there? I say down with ad hominem, let's bring on the facts!
Ah, I am sure you will argue about "what progress?" and tell us of how they are so terribly exploited and make only sixty cents a day in a factory - but you have missed the alternative, that they were making the equivalent of thirty cents a day doing sustainence farming beforehand.
To me, companies in a country that have laws providing minimal standards to block heinous working conditions should not be able to dodge these laws by seeking workers in countries without these minimal standards. This minimal shield should be provided everywhere the company is allowed to do business. And it is exploitation by the company in the country that profits from providing conditions below these minimal standards. Even if it improves the lives of those in the other country by some iota below the minimal shield. Because they certainly pay far less when they can find workers that will work for pennies for many hours under harsh conditions because such a minimal shield isn't in place for them. Surely a 'free economy' cannot be so free as to ignore minimal quality labor conditions for every worker? Outsourcing to gain profit by dodging minimal labor shielding should be illegal!
How about the 'Free Information' party instead? Many of the comments around here defending the Pirate party name come from that other doesn't sound as good or grab the attention that is needed. That's fair but before running to call your party the Murderer's party or Rapist party, when your party has absolutely nothing to do with either of those seems counterproductive. It tips the scales against you before you've said anything. There are many more decent sounding names than ones with criminal denotations that people can rally behind. They surely would be more popular at first sight with average citizens of America than something already subverted by its incorrect literal interpretation.
Actually I put it in apostrophe quotes to try to avoid that interpretation but it didn't work! I don't mean soul in the biblical sense, say, (whatever that is) or a ghost or spirit or whatever, I wanted to dry the term out to imply exactly the whole of sensory experience regardless of what creates it.
This has obvious uses in ...
Most definitely! Experimentation no holds barred would cause advancement many years faster than our current pace. We need medical advancement in neurological fields badly.
I'd love to see how it all turns out, but getting there without brave volunteers and an experimental kill switch is just frightening. I guess it comes down to if you would feel brave enough to donate your brain for such scientific experimentation or really feel safe that the 'soul' has already left so to speak? Or that they sliced the parts up small enough. For me a specific slice limit is not known well enough to make a safe bet. But I'd readily volunteer if my brain was already being poked around for some other medical reason and could still reasonably indicate a stop signal. For example, OW! you poked my eyeball from the inside, this experiment's over!
Brain slice experiments (this case is just in conjunction with this new chip that can measure various impulses from cultured hippocampal slice) scare the hell out of me. A brain we know already has capability at least in full to present a rich sensory representation. When we get better at using brain slices in neurocomputation or experiments (cultured, donated, harvested, ...) then a line has been crossed until we know enough to know better. Who'd donate their brain if they knew some aspect of 'themselves' might be preserved while experiments were performed on it? Especially since the brain's owner is not in any condition to back out of the experiment at that point.
A brain slice is functionally inferior subset of this full brain's capability. How small a slice should it be before all sentience is lost and therefore ok to put it on a chip? Should it be for volunteers only? Are cultured samples ok to use or perhaps brain properties make them generate sensory representation just as well? Is it for example to use neural gag reflex circuitry to instead move our robotic arm and a neural 'gut punch' to alter the speed and trajectory? Repeated hundreds of times an hour? For decades on end? Is this kind of thing ok to do to animal brains / slices over a long period of time? Anyway, all I know is when I talk like this I'm modded into the subzero territories, so cheers to the few that see it!
This may seem like a dire statistic and it will be very hard to see how far from the truth it is, but there are at least two mitigating factors:
The latter one is akin to the slashdot polls, the totals are probably inflated by a fair margin.
No, no mistake! The form which is independent of storage media, of transmission infrastructure, etc.. the core essential parts of it is exactly information. When something's utility comes from 'configuration' or structure as opposed to resource amounts, then its utility is its information. Information is independent of storage medium, but is holdable by them. Their states are altered to represent whatever it is. It can be spread out in various forms wherever in lossy or lossless manner. Anything you can encode as a bitstream exactly holds the property of 'information'.
Please see 'Information Theory' by Thomas Cover for some very nice info about it. For example, you say yourself some things that consist of bits are "merely programs". But you've just described a specific state encoded in that many bits. If this is not information then the definitions must be changed. Information is the capability to specify one thing over another (1 program vs. the other 2^program_bit_size possible collection of that same number of bits), the reduction of surprise in discovering the value of it, a loss of entropy in a system.
Plus I'm not saying it 'wants to be free', it wants nothing of the sort. Many people favor it to be freely 'shared' and hate laws to prevent this since fundamentally it determines how they communicate with one another. My biggest point though is that people telling others not to tell others certain public information is counterproductive at best and there's another way to keep the payments going where they should and information really free for all. A free flow of public information I think indicates things are humming along in the best possible way.
Outside of the green and white bubble of this website, the rest of the world will continue to run on capitalism, the least bad economic system on Earth, and the antithesis to the pseudo-socialist worldview of "share everything and worry about the consequences later" that permeates the discussions.
Yes! You are exactly right, true capitalism is best. Think how much better the world would be if every road you drove on you should pay the road's owner. They should be able to block access at their whim, and if we don't like the service we take the competitions longer route and be happy about it.
Police, fire dept., fbi, cia, nsa, house of reps, senate, should all be corporate agents working in competition with one another to better protect us all. And safety regulations for the good of society sounds awfully socialist so I don't much like that. Nasty government getting in the way of the fittest making the laws. This website with lunatics must not know what they're talking about?</bitter sarcasm>
Shit man listen up. Free flow of information BENEFITS every society, limitations on it HARM society. If information could be paid for in tax form whereby everyone cannot legally be prevented from accessing such public information, then shouldn't everyone benefit? Why force capitalism on information when other resources are freely available behind a tax screen?
Now think of this new utopian world and how much worse it is when there are heinous laws to control how we SHARE information that isn't private. There are much harsher laws these days to penalize sharing information. There is NO STEALING INFORMATION for fucks sake unless you delete the source. Think of how backwards that is, and how many years behind we are held back because of it. How many advances may be made with unfettered access to information. And there's nothing but cop-outs on the 'worth' of information in the form of mp3's or avi's. Entertainment is very useful as well.
Seriously, how can this be stopped?
1) when does the revolution begin?
2) what form should it take?
Should it be:
The thing that makes people squeamish is that information shouldn't obey capitalistic control since it doesn't meet the analogy correctly. There is something far better that frees information and ensures those that produce it are payed appropriately. Here the only long term successful choice seems to be something like a tax system where people choose where the money goes but should have access to it all. That is, they aren't LEGALLY prevented from accessing it, sharing it, telling someone else about it, singing it, dancing it, whatever. Then tack on any sane laws addressing privacy concerns (selling med records) or claiming work is your own when it isn't, if possible.
Soylent grains.
It matters because it becomes obvious what must follow to make this effective. If CALEA is applied then the company must provide methods to tap any communication.
An interpretation of the law away implies all attempts to prevent monitoring the essential data of a call is illegal. That is, obfuscation, misdirection, encryption can be seen as circumvention attempts to CALEA. How much more ridiculous is it to prevent encryption than to make it illegal to break encryption via already existing DMCA?
And even if it can't be interpreted that far by the courts, then what of the next law as soon as it's claimed "CALEA is ineffective since all <evildoers> are communicating using encryption which is so easy over the internet!".
So the reason it's a big deal is that it shows a generalization of the POTS tapping and pushes it into the internet domain (as they're a mixture of both). After it gets there no protocol or method of communication using the Internet is safe from this march. This generalization shows no limitations to including more mundane aspects of everyday life when technology would allow it.
Google doesn't make the information disappear entirely. It doesn't "lie" in this sense. The crucial and great aspect of google censoring links is presenting an annoying tag saying in effect 'this search has broken links due to censored content'. This type of notification upsets people since they're effectively treated like children by people in power but otherwise the same as them. Why should anybody see this information when others can't, even simply to censor it to begin with?
Censoring but tagging upsets people. Upset people cause change in the long run when they take action to correct it one way or another. Either the regional rules will change, or people dodge the rules in various ways (such as an encryption/tech vs. communication law/network isolation/spy law arms race until somebody wins). It's far more subtle, though perhaps less satisfying than a "no-censorship or the highway" style standoff, and it's effective.
It's fine if Google's search results came back with a bold faced red label saying, THIS ENTRY IS CENSORED BY THIS REGION'S GOVERNMENT. It is one thing to restrict the articles from showing by replacing them with 'CENSORED' labels, it's quite another to never know they were there to begin with! If Google filters the results in a way that there is never a mention of the censored results, no disclaimer, then this is a bad, nasty, evil thing to do. It's best that the service is not offered at all rather than present misinformation by silently removing opposing opinion. A service becomes great if you can trust it, if it start lying to you then trust certainly should fall like a rock and alternative services sought and developed .