I think the "bullshit" defense stems not from the meaning of the word but rather the connotation. It expresses that it is the speakers opinion that someone is telling a lie and not necessarily that they are actually telling a lie. It's a bit of a silly distinction but in the US saying "I believe you are a fraud" is more defensible than "You are a fraud" because even if you aren't a fraud the first statement may still be true because I may actually believe you are a fraud. IANAL, I welcome correction if I understand wrong and I don't know if or how any of this applies in Britain.
The Law versus Morals distinction I understand. I even understand why to make the distinction between "Professional Code of Ethics" versus Moral. ("Professional Code of Ethics" versus Moral is really just a variation of Law versus Moral.) But assuming an objective, non-relativist morality, why do you want to draw a distinction between Ethics and Morality?
If what is right is right and you ought to do what is right, then there is only one moral/ethics. Peoples opinions and codifications of that right may differ and have flaws and some codifications may get more notoriety than others. Some aspects of what is right might even need to be balanced against some other part. But it seems arbitrary to try to split "what is right" into Ethics and Morals.
(This is an honest question. I've seen so many make a big deal over drawing a distinction, but they never give a good reason why that particular dichotomy is useful (except on occasion as ploy to frame the question to make relativism more attractive). I agree that morality has many aspects (e.g. personal, inter-personal, social, environmental, etc.) but why the emphasis on this particular distinction.)
In effect, most of those morals and ethics -- and the real reason why most people go along with them -- are based on that empathy. We're hard-wired to be nice to our fellow humans. Well, about 97% of us, anyway. We don't kill basically because at a hard-wired level something says "well, _I_ wouldn't like to be killed." We don't steal for the same reason. Etc.
I think you are headed in the right direction, but I'm not sure empathy is quite right.
Consider waiting at a long red light when there is no other traffic. There are no cops around and no other traffic for miles. Some people will run the red light since "it won't hurt anyone". However some people, will wait at the red light "because it's the rules" and if they did run the red light would feel guilty about it. That second group of people can't really be displaying empathy since there is no one to empathize with, but they still have some moral sense drives them.
(Note, I am not arguing whether running the red light is moral or not, but rather that some people's moral conscience says it wouldn't be moral.)
Now maybe it is the case that different people have differing aspects that drive their moral behavior. Maybe some are based on empathy and others are based on something else. But even among those that are driven by empathy, we should not assume that it is either innate or universally extended.
Regarding it being innate: Children may have a natural potential for empathy, but they aren't born with large amounts of empathy. Selfishness comes more naturally to most children (and adults) than sharing. Maybe they are boon with both and selfishness is just stronger at the start, but my point is that empathy has to be developed.
Regarding it being universally extended: Empathy is usually only extended to "us" and not the "them". This one is obvious once you think about it. Who "us" and "them" are depends on the person and the situation, but throughout history people have been willing to commit heinous acts as long at the people they were doing it "the enemy" or "the bad guy" or "sub-human" or what have you. You even see this in traditional military training, you get it drilled into your head that your buddy on your side is "us" and the enemy is "them". (This also goes to the fact that a sense that "us" includes everyone is something that is not innate and has to be learned.)
Casio has digital compasses in a number of their "Pathfinder" watches. For example the PAG40B-2V. However those watches tend to be a bit pricey ($250-$500) and bulky (in part due to the solar panel, barometer, altimeter and temperature sensors that are also in the watches).
There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
They may not be like us, but we are a lot more like "them" then we'd like to admit. Human decency and morality are slender threads keeping us from falling into the abyss. With the right motives and situation, they are easily severed (e.g. the Milgram experiment).
Well, I think we mostly understand the economic value of basic education, for example.
Note that in both the example of basic education and fire protection, these services are provided by local (city/county/state) governments not the federal government. So they argue that the health care shouldn't be nation-alized so much as city/county/state-alized. Unfortunately consideration of this option seems to be sorely lacking in the debate over health care.
Macroeconomics 101 would explain the propagating loss to the market caused by the loss of labor and consumption by the person whose arm is broken, if they don't get good care.
That argument is fallacious since you could say that about anything(*). For example, maybe the government should pay for my food and housing since without food and housing I'd be a less effective worker.
(*) It is only fallacious in the unqualified way you have stated it. I'm sure your macro textbook is more precise on when that argument is valid.
And then there's the broken-arm, I mean window, fallacy, which explains why the expense of the broken arm is not a boon to the market.
Yeah, I noticed that pun myself. But I didn't mention it since the broken-window fallacy doesn't really apply here. The broken-window fallacy just tells us that we shouldn't go out breaking people's arms (or keeping them broken) to stimulate the medical industry. It doesn't tell use who pays for it once the arm is already broken.
That would only work if they also require everyone to buy health insurance.
Even then it wouldn't really be insurance. That would be closer to a privately collected tax. Insurance is the free exchange of risk. Forcing everyone to sell off their risk would upset the fair-market price of that risk.
We don't have very many for-profit fire departments in the United States any longer, although that was once the norm. Wonder why?
ECON 101 will explain why. Fire protection (i.e. putting out the fire) has a network effect (i.e. I want your house fire put out quickly so it doesn't spread to my house) that makes funding it though taxes an economically effective system. Fire insurance (i.e. paying to replace houses or items lost in a fire) on the other hand has no such network effect and thus we see lots of for-profit fire insurance companies.
Likewise contagious diseases exhibit the network effect but a broken arm doesn't. Thus using your fire analogy, it would make perfect sense to have the city or county government pay for vaccination(*) but not for a broken arm.
(*) Though I wouldn't want the government to require vaccination, just provide it to those who want it. Some have allergies (e.g. poultry allergies can be a problem with flu vaccines) or religious objections and requiring it would probably violate some sort of medical ethics.
Given that the US copyright code only limits reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, display and transmission (17 USC 106), is there a good reason why "use", "copy", "process", "adapt", "modify" and "publish" are in that list?
(IIRC, the BSD license has the same list of terms so this question's been bugging me for a while.)
I think the AC's point was that the blog smelled of a straw man. Thus the ease with which he dismissed those arguments isn't indicative of a fair debate.
the answer lies in... advances in science to feed more people with less environmental impact
Especially given that world food production is growing exponentially faster than world population. (Google for "food production per capita". It rises if food is growing faster than population and falls when the opposite is true.)
The short answer is "It depends". It depends on what features you want. (Some crypto systems provide security but not authentication. Others do the opposite. Still others provide neither but give plausible deny-ability or even it's opposite, non-reputability.) It depends on what resources you have. (Do you have couriers to hand deliver your new keys?)
The reason quantum is scary is because it breaks a large number of public key systems. Public-key systems have been the most economical systems developed to date. Thus if quantum were to break all the public-key systems, it wouldn't necessarily kill all crypto, but it would make implementing crypto more expensive (e.g. couriers or quantum hard lines).
However, quantum might not break all public-key crypto. Public-key crypto only requires the existance of a function, f, such that f is easy to compute but the inverse, inv-f, is hard to compute. Usually "easy" is defined as "polynomial". Thus it is a trivial corollary that if someone can prove P=NP or that quantum can solve all NP in polynomial time. As far as I know no one has proven either so there is a glimmer of hope.
However, even if P=NP, I may still be possible to build a public-key crypto. While "n^100" time is technically polynomial, it really isn't computationally "easy". So even with P=NP there may exist functions that can be computed in a low-degree polynomial time (e.g. linear or quadratic) but who's inverse requires a high-degree polynomial.
All of this is a long winded way of saying "quantum breaks the public-key currently in common use but there is the theoretical possibility that someone may develop a public-key that won't be broken by quantum".
You are an engineer and you don't know you multiplication tables. How did you get through physics, calculus, diff eq? Or did you pull out your calculator every time you had to multiply 3x7?
First, it's not as if I was entirely ignorant of the multiplication tables. I just didn't sit "in a classroom with 40 other students doing multiplication tables until [I had] them all memorized".
Second, physics, calc and diff eq rarely required me to multiply 3x7. Instead they required me to multiply 423.034x567.498xPI. At that point, you bet I used a calculator. My time was better spent focusing on the actual physics/calculus/diff eq than grinding out another arithmetic problem.
There are lots of parents who are smart and organized enough to do this. There are a bunch who are ambitious enough to do it. There are some that are even committed enough to see it through. There are a few that have the time to do it. Unfortunately, there are just a small number with all four traits.
Now "parents who choose to homeschool" is a self-selecting group. So maybe parents in general don't have those traits, but in that case the ones that don't at least have the good sense to recognize that homeschooling isn't for them.
I'm not saying home/non-schooling should be disallowed, but it's in society's best interests to educate as many kids as we can to the highest level we can reasonably achieve. So if a parent wants to do this, I'd say they should have to demonstrate the skills and commitment, then they can receive support, assistance, and above all constructive progress monitoring and feedback.
Depending on the state you live in, homeschools are held to the same standards as any private school. In fact where I'm from (Kansas), homeschools are private schools as far as the law is concerned.
Public schooling has an externally imposed structure. Homeschooling still demands structure but since it isn't imposed externally it tends to encourage more self-discipline. I'm not just theorizing here, I have experienced these effect. As a homeschooled child, the transition to college was exceptionally easy compared to what I saw in my public schooled peers.
Maths is a prerequisite for being an Engineer (with a big "E").
But multiplication tables aren't.
Who do you think is going to be a better engineer someday?
Child B.
I was child A. Twenty years later I have two Engineering degrees (4.0 with highest distinction) and am working on a Ph.D. at one of the top ten Computer Science schools in the States. If I had been taught as child B, my intellect would have died long long ago.
My guess is that attorneys for popular websites, particularly social networking sites, will be revising their TOS to comply with Wu's decision.
I hope not. The determining factor of whether Lori Drew's actions were a crime under the CFAA shouldn't be whether the lawyers put the right incantations in the TOS.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "bullshit" defense stems not from the meaning of the word but rather the connotation. It expresses that it is the speakers opinion that someone is telling a lie and not necessarily that they are actually telling a lie. It's a bit of a silly distinction but in the US saying "I believe you are a fraud" is more defensible than "You are a fraud" because even if you aren't a fraud the first statement may still be true because I may actually believe you are a fraud. IANAL, I welcome correction if I understand wrong and I don't know if or how any of this applies in Britain.
The Law versus Morals distinction I understand. I even understand why to make the distinction between "Professional Code of Ethics" versus Moral. ("Professional Code of Ethics" versus Moral is really just a variation of Law versus Moral.) But assuming an objective, non-relativist morality, why do you want to draw a distinction between Ethics and Morality?
If what is right is right and you ought to do what is right, then there is only one moral/ethics. Peoples opinions and codifications of that right may differ and have flaws and some codifications may get more notoriety than others. Some aspects of what is right might even need to be balanced against some other part. But it seems arbitrary to try to split "what is right" into Ethics and Morals.
(This is an honest question. I've seen so many make a big deal over drawing a distinction, but they never give a good reason why that particular dichotomy is useful (except on occasion as ploy to frame the question to make relativism more attractive). I agree that morality has many aspects (e.g. personal, inter-personal, social, environmental, etc.) but why the emphasis on this particular distinction.)
In effect, most of those morals and ethics -- and the real reason why most people go along with them -- are based on that empathy. We're hard-wired to be nice to our fellow humans. Well, about 97% of us, anyway. We don't kill basically because at a hard-wired level something says "well, _I_ wouldn't like to be killed." We don't steal for the same reason. Etc.
I think you are headed in the right direction, but I'm not sure empathy is quite right.
Consider waiting at a long red light when there is no other traffic. There are no cops around and no other traffic for miles. Some people will run the red light since "it won't hurt anyone". However some people, will wait at the red light "because it's the rules" and if they did run the red light would feel guilty about it. That second group of people can't really be displaying empathy since there is no one to empathize with, but they still have some moral sense drives them.
(Note, I am not arguing whether running the red light is moral or not, but rather that some people's moral conscience says it wouldn't be moral.)
Now maybe it is the case that different people have differing aspects that drive their moral behavior. Maybe some are based on empathy and others are based on something else. But even among those that are driven by empathy, we should not assume that it is either innate or universally extended.
Regarding it being innate: Children may have a natural potential for empathy, but they aren't born with large amounts of empathy. Selfishness comes more naturally to most children (and adults) than sharing. Maybe they are boon with both and selfishness is just stronger at the start, but my point is that empathy has to be developed.
Regarding it being universally extended: Empathy is usually only extended to "us" and not the "them". This one is obvious once you think about it. Who "us" and "them" are depends on the person and the situation, but throughout history people have been willing to commit heinous acts as long at the people they were doing it "the enemy" or "the bad guy" or "sub-human" or what have you. You even see this in traditional military training, you get it drilled into your head that your buddy on your side is "us" and the enemy is "them". (This also goes to the fact that a sense that "us" includes everyone is something that is not innate and has to be learned.)
Casio has digital compasses in a number of their "Pathfinder" watches. For example the PAG40B-2V. However those watches tend to be a bit pricey ($250-$500) and bulky (in part due to the solar panel, barometer, altimeter and temperature sensors that are also in the watches).
Same here. In fact I prefer to use Google street view to figure out a new route and use the street names only as a backup.
There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
They may not be like us, but we are a lot more like "them" then we'd like to admit. Human decency and morality are slender threads keeping us from falling into the abyss. With the right motives and situation, they are easily severed (e.g. the Milgram experiment).
Just look at the map of the world.
By the same argument, a few years ago you could claim that royalty is the best government and slavery is a good thing.
Well, I think we mostly understand the economic value of basic education, for example.
Note that in both the example of basic education and fire protection, these services are provided by local (city/county/state) governments not the federal government. So they argue that the health care shouldn't be nation-alized so much as city/county/state-alized. Unfortunately consideration of this option seems to be sorely lacking in the debate over health care.
Macroeconomics 101 would explain the propagating loss to the market caused by the loss of labor and consumption by the person whose arm is broken, if they don't get good care.
That argument is fallacious since you could say that about anything(*). For example, maybe the government should pay for my food and housing since without food and housing I'd be a less effective worker.
(*) It is only fallacious in the unqualified way you have stated it. I'm sure your macro textbook is more precise on when that argument is valid.
And then there's the broken-arm, I mean window, fallacy, which explains why the expense of the broken arm is not a boon to the market.
Yeah, I noticed that pun myself. But I didn't mention it since the broken-window fallacy doesn't really apply here. The broken-window fallacy just tells us that we shouldn't go out breaking people's arms (or keeping them broken) to stimulate the medical industry. It doesn't tell use who pays for it once the arm is already broken.
That would only work if they also require everyone to buy health insurance.
Even then it wouldn't really be insurance. That would be closer to a privately collected tax. Insurance is the free exchange of risk. Forcing everyone to sell off their risk would upset the fair-market price of that risk.
if they require insane amounts of insurance fees for high risk personnel, they should also offer significantly lower fees for low risk people.
They already do. (I know because I'm one of the low risk people.)
We don't have very many for-profit fire departments in the United States any longer, although that was once the norm. Wonder why?
ECON 101 will explain why. Fire protection (i.e. putting out the fire) has a network effect (i.e. I want your house fire put out quickly so it doesn't spread to my house) that makes funding it though taxes an economically effective system. Fire insurance (i.e. paying to replace houses or items lost in a fire) on the other hand has no such network effect and thus we see lots of for-profit fire insurance companies.
Likewise contagious diseases exhibit the network effect but a broken arm doesn't. Thus using your fire analogy, it would make perfect sense to have the city or county government pay for vaccination(*) but not for a broken arm.
(*) Though I wouldn't want the government to require vaccination, just provide it to those who want it. Some have allergies (e.g. poultry allergies can be a problem with flu vaccines) or religious objections and requiring it would probably violate some sort of medical ethics.
use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute
Given that the US copyright code only limits reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, display and transmission (17 USC 106), is there a good reason why "use", "copy", "process", "adapt", "modify" and "publish" are in that list?
(IIRC, the BSD license has the same list of terms so this question's been bugging me for a while.)
I think the AC's point was that the blog smelled of a straw man. Thus the ease with which he dismissed those arguments isn't indicative of a fair debate.
user-defined data created by user interaction of a user
Just in case user you didn't user get user it user user user user ...
... after all they "FEL'ed" the tower didn't they?
the answer lies in ... advances in science to feed more people with less environmental impact
Especially given that world food production is growing exponentially faster than world population. (Google for "food production per capita". It rises if food is growing faster than population and falls when the opposite is true.)
The short answer is "It depends". It depends on what features you want. (Some crypto systems provide security but not authentication. Others do the opposite. Still others provide neither but give plausible deny-ability or even it's opposite, non-reputability.) It depends on what resources you have. (Do you have couriers to hand deliver your new keys?)
The reason quantum is scary is because it breaks a large number of public key systems. Public-key systems have been the most economical systems developed to date. Thus if quantum were to break all the public-key systems, it wouldn't necessarily kill all crypto, but it would make implementing crypto more expensive (e.g. couriers or quantum hard lines).
However, quantum might not break all public-key crypto. Public-key crypto only requires the existance of a function, f, such that f is easy to compute but the inverse, inv-f, is hard to compute. Usually "easy" is defined as "polynomial". Thus it is a trivial corollary that if someone can prove P=NP or that quantum can solve all NP in polynomial time. As far as I know no one has proven either so there is a glimmer of hope.
However, even if P=NP, I may still be possible to build a public-key crypto. While "n^100" time is technically polynomial, it really isn't computationally "easy". So even with P=NP there may exist functions that can be computed in a low-degree polynomial time (e.g. linear or quadratic) but who's inverse requires a high-degree polynomial.
All of this is a long winded way of saying "quantum breaks the public-key currently in common use but there is the theoretical possibility that someone may develop a public-key that won't be broken by quantum".
You are an engineer and you don't know you multiplication tables. How did you get through physics, calculus, diff eq? Or did you pull out your calculator every time you had to multiply 3x7?
First, it's not as if I was entirely ignorant of the multiplication tables. I just didn't sit "in a classroom with 40 other students doing multiplication tables until [I had] them all memorized".
Second, physics, calc and diff eq rarely required me to multiply 3x7. Instead they required me to multiply 423.034x567.498xPI. At that point, you bet I used a calculator. My time was better spent focusing on the actual physics/calculus/diff eq than grinding out another arithmetic problem.
There are lots of parents who are smart and organized enough to do this. There are a bunch who are ambitious enough to do it. There are some that are even committed enough to see it through. There are a few that have the time to do it. Unfortunately, there are just a small number with all four traits.
Apparently most parents who choose to homeschool(*) have those traits: http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200410250.asp
Now "parents who choose to homeschool" is a self-selecting group. So maybe parents in general don't have those traits, but in that case the ones that don't at least have the good sense to recognize that homeschooling isn't for them.
I'm not saying home/non-schooling should be disallowed, but it's in society's best interests to educate as many kids as we can to the highest level we can reasonably achieve. So if a parent wants to do this, I'd say they should have to demonstrate the skills and commitment, then they can receive support, assistance, and above all constructive progress monitoring and feedback.
Depending on the state you live in, homeschools are held to the same standards as any private school. In fact where I'm from (Kansas), homeschools are private schools as far as the law is concerned.
Public schooling has an externally imposed structure. Homeschooling still demands structure but since it isn't imposed externally it tends to encourage more self-discipline. I'm not just theorizing here, I have experienced these effect. As a homeschooled child, the transition to college was exceptionally easy compared to what I saw in my public schooled peers.
Maths is a prerequisite for being an Engineer (with a big "E").
But multiplication tables aren't.
Who do you think is going to be a better engineer someday?
Child B.
I was child A. Twenty years later I have two Engineering degrees (4.0 with highest distinction) and am working on a Ph.D. at one of the top ten Computer Science schools in the States. If I had been taught as child B, my intellect would have died long long ago.
What are the practical implications/applications of monopoles?
I'm not dissing the theoretical impact. I'm just curious if anyone has a use in mind for them.
My guess is that attorneys for popular websites, particularly social networking sites, will be revising their TOS to comply with Wu's decision.
I hope not. The determining factor of whether Lori Drew's actions were a crime under the CFAA shouldn't be whether the lawyers put the right incantations in the TOS.
Knowingly ... causes emotional distress to another person by anonymously making ... any electronic communication; ...
This just in. Authorities have issued a warrant for the arrest of "Anonymous Coward" on 184,495 counts of felony harassment.