This is a sweeping under the rug of past dirty actions. That doesn't mean that going forward habeas corpus hasn't been restored.
I believe the mindset is that the US government went to the "dark side" (Cheney's words) to defend itself, and that now that the heat of the crisis has past that they don't want to punish those who were acting in America's interest. I can understand it, but not condone it.
Usually a climate of fear in reaction to real or perceived threats, followed eventually by a counter-reaction after the threat has passed and the worst abuses have come to light.
What I am concerned about is the absence of any groundswell push back against the current waning
I think there has been pushback. There was a rigorous public debate over torture, and the United States has (I believe) moved away from it. We still don't have a national ID card. The AT&T wiretapping case was exposed by a whistle-blower. With regards to habeas corpus, that looks to have reversed course too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_States#Suspension_in_the_21st_Century
Only the copyright holders have the legal standing to prevent Apple from violating GPLv2. In the case of Gnu Go, FSF holds the copyright. Nothing prevents a copyright holder from violating his own license.
Apple doesn't necessarily agree with the FSF
Maybe not, but the issue over Apple's Terms of Service seems pretty clear. Additional restrictions are explicitly disallowed.
You're arguing from a very high-level, interpretive point of view, but that's not the way legal documents work. In doing so, you have mixed up TiVo (a hardware issue) with Apple's Terms of Service (legalize added by Apple which impose further restrictions). The latter is explicitly forbidden by GPLv2. The former is a loophole based on impracticality of modifying the software on the end-user device, which GPLv2 does not address at all.
My point is America has always waxed an waned on its ideals. I'm not excusing Lincoln, nor am I excusing the unconstitutional acts that occurred after 9/11. If you find a utopian country that has always lived up to its ideals, let me know.
When every last drop of energy has been squeezed out of the universe, the final super-massive black hole of everything will be made up of a giant ball of iron.
Just a layman's view here, but that is wrong. Current theories state that the energy in the Universe is a constant. Also, given the accelerated expansion, there shouldn't be a single black hole left, but many isolated ones where the galaxies used to be. I'll pass on the "ball of iron" bit.
Insofar that you cannot go back to the iris scan, finger print or facial photograph from the number
What makes you think that you won't be able to? The whole point of using biometrics is that the number is verifiable. Of course they're going to have a lookup service, which I'm sure will, if not immediately, at some point give you all the information based on any single identifier (number, fingerprint, iris, or facial photograph).
It's just as well you're finding a flimsy excuse to run away, as I can't have a rational discussion with a liar. I mean, you explicitly said "As a neopagan of the witchy type" and talked about the benefits of "Crafting". You then proceed to ignore all the rational arguments that follow and pick on one expression of scorn, after you yourself threw out such phrases like "They simply have less evolved minds.". Do these "evolved minds" lead people to become liars and ignorers of evidence?
It was your proselytizing for the dogma of science as you see it that provoked my response. I do not volunteer my beliefs, let alone assert them as something others should adopt; I do not proselytize.
The nice thing about debating on Slashdot is that the posts are archived and uneditable. You are the one who provoked my response. You did indeed volunteer your beliefs. "As a neopagan of the witchy type", "Crafting one's life", "to even talk about that role of Salmon requires dancing away from the scientific mind set and into the totemic mind set".
As you point out with some evident frustration later in your post, I do not even say what my beliefs are.
Well you did, as I showed. My "evident frustration" was an expression of scorn for the exact details about the mumbo-jumbo you were espousing.
I rather believe that Galileo would respond in the same fashion were he to see your posts, since his biographies suggest that he really hated it when anyone tried to insinuate their dogma into a discussion in such a way that others would accept it without critically assessing it.
You are the one arguing against critical assessment. You go so far as to call it "religion" and "faith". You are the one who brings up religion, yet claim not to proselytize. Yet you accuse me of an Orwellian mindset?
One of its core tenets is that each individual has the right (and for some S H believers, the obligation) to examine every belief with every tool they can bring to bear before accepting it.
It's most important core tenant is that supernatural and unverifiable beliefs have already been examined and rejected as a class of tools. And before you scream "faith" again, this is an evidence based belief, the kind of evidence that has brought us away from Gods hurling lightning bolts to knowledge of weather, biology, and the cosmos. It has brought us all kinds of technology. We have advanced so far by discarding alternative, supernatural explanations.
It is probably worthwhile to mention in passing that mysticism has a fairly precise technical definition that can be described as the recognition that the human capacity to comprehend the Universe is limited
Yet mysticism says that you can gain knowledge through spiritual means, as you yourself have been advocating. Trying to tie that in to quantum physics doesn't follow.
"The Tao of Physics was completed in December 1974, and the implications of the November Revolution one month earlier that led to the dramatic confirmations of the standard-model quantum field theory clearly had not sunk in for Capra (like many others at that time). What is harder to understand is that the book has now gone through several editions, and in each of them Capra has left intact the now out-of-date physics, including new forewords and afterwords that with a straight face deny what has happened. The foreword to the second edition of 1983 claims, "It has been very gratifying for me that none of these recent developments has invalidated anything I wrote seven years ago. In fact, most of them were anticipated in the original edition," a statement far from any relation to the reality that in 1983 the standard model was nearly universally accepted in the physics community, and the bootstrap theory was a dead idea... Even now, Capra's book, with its nutty denials of what has happened in particle theory, can be found selling well at every major bookstore. It has been joined by some other books on the same topic, most notably Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. The bootstrap philosophy, despite its complete failure as a physical theory, lives on as part of an embarrassing New Age cult, with its followers refusing to acknowledge what has happened."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Physics#Acclaim_and_criticism
You (ironically) pontificated about something you don't really know anything about (cognitive therapy).
If it looks and sounds like bullshit, I'll say so, especially if further details back it up.
You then pulled an "example" (smoking cessation) out of thin air which didn't have any bearing at all on your "criticism", which it could not have because the "criticism" was inherently substanceless (i.e. "sounds like bullshit to me". OK, I accept that, but it doesn't *mean* anything).
The point was that the "other ways to conceptualize self-discipline than in terms of willpower" wasn't anything new and already intuitively understood by using willpower. Is there really any need to dress up basic advice in fancy clothes? Why do people quit smoking if it isn't for long term benefits?
My other criticism, which several other people also made, was noting the difficulty in determining price vs quality.
I will concede, however, that I figured Cognitive Therapy was an amateur invention by a life-coach kind of person, but then I've never had that much respect for the psychiatric profession anyways, especially the psychotherapy side.
I don't see how it is any more unfair than your proselytizing, though I'm not advocating a religion. You're the one talking about witchcraft and animism or totemism or whatever the hell it is you believe in.
Your insistence that the only true model of the world is the scientific model could cause some these persons to turn their backs on an enriching source of knowledge, and that would be like poisoning another person's well. Don't do that.
Your insistence that people should believe in fantasies is dangerous. I won't insist you stop doing that, as I believe in freedom of speech. I would only ask others to think critically and skeptically, and know that lots of bullshit has been sluiced away by doing so.
What are these partnerships of which you speak?
I mean, when you see a thriving ecosystem, you speak of a "partnership", as if directed by some higher form to achieve this ecosystem. Yet deserts arise without man. Ecosystems have been created and destroyed throughout the Earth's history.
And since science is deliberately agnostic about this kind of responsibility, we do need other modes of modeling the world to guide the application of our technologies.
Appealing to mysticism doesn't sound like a good one. Science is a valid tool to give us insight into this problem. If there is no mystic force or supreme being to appeal to, we can argue over more applicable values. In short, secular humanism.
The structure of the question depends on faith: either faith in Gaea or some other Supreme Being, or an equally strong faith that no such being exists.
It's not a matter of faith, it's a matter of evidence. Applying Occcam's Razor says that the process of evolution doesn't need such a being, and there is no evidence for Gaea. There is always room for further evidence, however.
As a neopagan of the witchy type, I personally believe that the most evolved way to handle these kinds of issues is to learn to dance smoothly and quickly between the two different world views. But i recognize that the idea of deliberately Crafting one's life is not acceptable to a lot of people. For one thing, it takes a great deal of time and effort that will go unrewarded by anyone else: others don't even see what you are doing.
This is where evidence comes into play. Do you even see what you are doing? Are you just deluding yourself?
That would make it too easy to lose sight of Salmon's partnership with Bear and Eagle to fertilize the otherwise barren heights of the Pacific Northwest with then nutrients from the ocean that make the region's forests so richly verdant.
And do you want to talk about whatever partnerships produce deserts or ice ages?
I'm speaking from a statistical point of view. Most people don't convert to Christianity in your nation because there is already a dominant religion. Most people adopt a religion based on their upbringing. And most importantly, before Christianity spread to India, nobody adopted it, because they didn't even have the chance.
And so I'll say again: "Does it sound like God really wanted one true message to be heard, and that it is Christianity? Or perhaps people were just making shit up."
"our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government, and in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every twenty years."
"They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways? That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?"
What if a Democratic candidate said something like this during elections in the Bush years? Would you have given them a free pass?
other ways to conceptualize self-discipline than in terms of willpower
What you describe is something we already know, which is why we are engaging in willpower: We are trying to resist short-term urges that are bad in the long-term. Example: Quit smoking.
Buying quality is even better than recycling.
The trick is actually knowing what the true quality of something is. Paying more isn't any guarantee. I've bought cheap furniture that has done just fine for for a number of years. Is it worth the risk to pay many times more for something that might last for 20 years?
The other trick is actually knowing what the true environmental cost of buying something is.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a sweeping under the rug of past dirty actions. That doesn't mean that going forward habeas corpus hasn't been restored.
I believe the mindset is that the US government went to the "dark side" (Cheney's words) to defend itself, and that now that the heat of the crisis has past that they don't want to punish those who were acting in America's interest. I can understand it, but not condone it.
Thanks. I'm surprised it has progressed to this level of fluidity.
From where? Given the potential for fraud, that's a suspiciously lightweight process.
What has been driving the waxing and waning?
Usually a climate of fear in reaction to real or perceived threats, followed eventually by a counter-reaction after the threat has passed and the worst abuses have come to light.
What I am concerned about is the absence of any groundswell push back against the current waning
I think there has been pushback. There was a rigorous public debate over torture, and the United States has (I believe) moved away from it. We still don't have a national ID card. The AT&T wiretapping case was exposed by a whistle-blower. With regards to habeas corpus, that looks to have reversed course too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_States#Suspension_in_the_21st_Century
With e-books, this is an artificial barrier
Copyright has always been about artificial barriers. The digital forms just make it that much more apparent.
Hm, but there's definitely GPLv2 stuff in there.
Only the copyright holders have the legal standing to prevent Apple from violating GPLv2. In the case of Gnu Go, FSF holds the copyright. Nothing prevents a copyright holder from violating his own license.
Apple doesn't necessarily agree with the FSF
Maybe not, but the issue over Apple's Terms of Service seems pretty clear. Additional restrictions are explicitly disallowed.
You're arguing from a very high-level, interpretive point of view, but that's not the way legal documents work. In doing so, you have mixed up TiVo (a hardware issue) with Apple's Terms of Service (legalize added by Apple which impose further restrictions). The latter is explicitly forbidden by GPLv2. The former is a loophole based on impracticality of modifying the software on the end-user device, which GPLv2 does not address at all.
I wish that Linux viruses and, more importantly, trojans would be restricted to just blowing away home.
I wish Linux made it easy to sandbox applications, so that I wouldn't have to worry about running a trojan.
My point is America has always waxed an waned on its ideals. I'm not excusing Lincoln, nor am I excusing the unconstitutional acts that occurred after 9/11. If you find a utopian country that has always lived up to its ideals, let me know.
When every last drop of energy has been squeezed out of the universe, the final super-massive black hole of everything will be made up of a giant ball of iron.
Just a layman's view here, but that is wrong. Current theories state that the energy in the Universe is a constant. Also, given the accelerated expansion, there shouldn't be a single black hole left, but many isolated ones where the galaxies used to be. I'll pass on the "ball of iron" bit.
You stopped being America when your government threw habeas corpuse under the bus.
You mean when Lincoln did it back in 1861?
The real scientists, I'm sure, are doing exactly that. But that's not the bullshit we get in the media.
I think you would find David Holland's Bias and Concealment In the IPCC Process: The "Hockey-Stick" Affair and Its Implications" interesting reading.
Insofar that you cannot go back to the iris scan, finger print or facial photograph from the number
What makes you think that you won't be able to? The whole point of using biometrics is that the number is verifiable. Of course they're going to have a lookup service, which I'm sure will, if not immediately, at some point give you all the information based on any single identifier (number, fingerprint, iris, or facial photograph).
The summary states they're taking fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs. That's quite a lot to fake all at once.
Yeah, they shouldn't have printed the article since they had no way of vetting it.
As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, they could have had it reviewed by other physicists. They didn't have a peer review process.
It's just as well you're finding a flimsy excuse to run away, as I can't have a rational discussion with a liar. I mean, you explicitly said "As a neopagan of the witchy type" and talked about the benefits of "Crafting". You then proceed to ignore all the rational arguments that follow and pick on one expression of scorn, after you yourself threw out such phrases like "They simply have less evolved minds.". Do these "evolved minds" lead people to become liars and ignorers of evidence?
It was your proselytizing for the dogma of science as you see it that provoked my response. I do not volunteer my beliefs, let alone assert them as something others should adopt; I do not proselytize.
The nice thing about debating on Slashdot is that the posts are archived and uneditable. You are the one who provoked my response. You did indeed volunteer your beliefs. "As a neopagan of the witchy type", "Crafting one's life", "to even talk about that role of Salmon requires dancing away from the scientific mind set and into the totemic mind set".
As you point out with some evident frustration later in your post, I do not even say what my beliefs are.
Well you did, as I showed. My "evident frustration" was an expression of scorn for the exact details about the mumbo-jumbo you were espousing.
I rather believe that Galileo would respond in the same fashion were he to see your posts, since his biographies suggest that he really hated it when anyone tried to insinuate their dogma into a discussion in such a way that others would accept it without critically assessing it.
You are the one arguing against critical assessment. You go so far as to call it "religion" and "faith". You are the one who brings up religion, yet claim not to proselytize. Yet you accuse me of an Orwellian mindset?
One of its core tenets is that each individual has the right (and for some S H believers, the obligation) to examine every belief with every tool they can bring to bear before accepting it.
It's most important core tenant is that supernatural and unverifiable beliefs have already been examined and rejected as a class of tools. And before you scream "faith" again, this is an evidence based belief, the kind of evidence that has brought us away from Gods hurling lightning bolts to knowledge of weather, biology, and the cosmos. It has brought us all kinds of technology. We have advanced so far by discarding alternative, supernatural explanations.
It is probably worthwhile to mention in passing that mysticism has a fairly precise technical definition that can be described as the recognition that the human capacity to comprehend the Universe is limited
Yet mysticism says that you can gain knowledge through spiritual means, as you yourself have been advocating. Trying to tie that in to quantum physics doesn't follow.
"The Tao of Physics was completed in December 1974, and the implications of the November Revolution one month earlier that led to the dramatic confirmations of the standard-model quantum field theory clearly had not sunk in for Capra (like many others at that time). What is harder to understand is that the book has now gone through several editions, and in each of them Capra has left intact the now out-of-date physics, including new forewords and afterwords that with a straight face deny what has happened. The foreword to the second edition of 1983 claims, "It has been very gratifying for me that none of these recent developments has invalidated anything I wrote seven years ago. In fact, most of them were anticipated in the original edition," a statement far from any relation to the reality that in 1983 the standard model was nearly universally accepted in the physics community, and the bootstrap theory was a dead idea ... Even now, Capra's book, with its nutty denials of what has happened in particle theory, can be found selling well at every major bookstore. It has been joined by some other books on the same topic, most notably Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu-Li Masters. The bootstrap philosophy, despite its complete failure as a physical theory, lives on as part of an embarrassing New Age cult, with its followers refusing to acknowledge what has happened." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Physics#Acclaim_and_criticism
Finally, some substance.
You (ironically) pontificated about something you don't really know anything about (cognitive therapy).
If it looks and sounds like bullshit, I'll say so, especially if further details back it up.
You then pulled an "example" (smoking cessation) out of thin air which didn't have any bearing at all on your "criticism", which it could not have because the "criticism" was inherently substanceless (i.e. "sounds like bullshit to me". OK, I accept that, but it doesn't *mean* anything).
The point was that the "other ways to conceptualize self-discipline than in terms of willpower" wasn't anything new and already intuitively understood by using willpower. Is there really any need to dress up basic advice in fancy clothes? Why do people quit smoking if it isn't for long term benefits?
My other criticism, which several other people also made, was noting the difficulty in determining price vs quality.
I will concede, however, that I figured Cognitive Therapy was an amateur invention by a life-coach kind of person, but then I've never had that much respect for the psychiatric profession anyways, especially the psychotherapy side.
I regard that as unfair
I don't see how it is any more unfair than your proselytizing, though I'm not advocating a religion. You're the one talking about witchcraft and animism or totemism or whatever the hell it is you believe in.
Your insistence that the only true model of the world is the scientific model could cause some these persons to turn their backs on an enriching source of knowledge, and that would be like poisoning another person's well. Don't do that.
Your insistence that people should believe in fantasies is dangerous. I won't insist you stop doing that, as I believe in freedom of speech. I would only ask others to think critically and skeptically, and know that lots of bullshit has been sluiced away by doing so.
What are these partnerships of which you speak?
I mean, when you see a thriving ecosystem, you speak of a "partnership", as if directed by some higher form to achieve this ecosystem. Yet deserts arise without man. Ecosystems have been created and destroyed throughout the Earth's history.
And since science is deliberately agnostic about this kind of responsibility, we do need other modes of modeling the world to guide the application of our technologies.
Appealing to mysticism doesn't sound like a good one. Science is a valid tool to give us insight into this problem. If there is no mystic force or supreme being to appeal to, we can argue over more applicable values. In short, secular humanism.
You need substance, not one liners. I gave real examples along with my criticisms.
The structure of the question depends on faith: either faith in Gaea or some other Supreme Being, or an equally strong faith that no such being exists.
It's not a matter of faith, it's a matter of evidence. Applying Occcam's Razor says that the process of evolution doesn't need such a being, and there is no evidence for Gaea. There is always room for further evidence, however.
As a neopagan of the witchy type, I personally believe that the most evolved way to handle these kinds of issues is to learn to dance smoothly and quickly between the two different world views. But i recognize that the idea of deliberately Crafting one's life is not acceptable to a lot of people. For one thing, it takes a great deal of time and effort that will go unrewarded by anyone else: others don't even see what you are doing.
This is where evidence comes into play. Do you even see what you are doing? Are you just deluding yourself?
That would make it too easy to lose sight of Salmon's partnership with Bear and Eagle to fertilize the otherwise barren heights of the Pacific Northwest with then nutrients from the ocean that make the region's forests so richly verdant.
And do you want to talk about whatever partnerships produce deserts or ice ages?
I'm speaking from a statistical point of view. Most people don't convert to Christianity in your nation because there is already a dominant religion. Most people adopt a religion based on their upbringing. And most importantly, before Christianity spread to India, nobody adopted it, because they didn't even have the chance.
And so I'll say again: "Does it sound like God really wanted one true message to be heard, and that it is Christianity? Or perhaps people were just making shit up."
Not only did she NOT advocate any armed revolution, she said so.
She may have said "I hope that's not where we're going", but she sure did sound like advocating for it as a next step if the votes don't go her party's way: http://www.nationalreview.com/battle10/243092/new-harry-reid-ad-says-angle-over-line-second-amendment-rhetoric-elizabeth-crum
"our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government, and in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every twenty years."
"They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways? That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?"
What if a Democratic candidate said something like this during elections in the Bush years? Would you have given them a free pass?
One ought not be credulous about any such detector that operates on automatic.
It's just a warning flag. You'll note, unlike your post, I backed up my detector claims with actual criticisms.
cognitive therapist
Phrases like this set my bullshit detector off.
other ways to conceptualize self-discipline than in terms of willpower
What you describe is something we already know, which is why we are engaging in willpower: We are trying to resist short-term urges that are bad in the long-term. Example: Quit smoking.
Buying quality is even better than recycling.
The trick is actually knowing what the true quality of something is. Paying more isn't any guarantee. I've bought cheap furniture that has done just fine for for a number of years. Is it worth the risk to pay many times more for something that might last for 20 years?
The other trick is actually knowing what the true environmental cost of buying something is.