When I put up a website, I'm not putting up a poster; I'm setting up a news stand and handing out copies to everyone who walks by. Do I have a right to take back all of those papers I handed out, and disallow every person who took one from showing it to somebody else?
According to copyright law: yes.
Show me one legal precedent where some printed material was forcibly recalled by the person who handed it out.
"Chain of Command", a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Jean-Luc Picard is tortured in a fashion similar to that of Winston Smith. Just as Smith is repeatedly shown a hand with four fingers and tortured until he will agree that he actually sees five, Picard is tortured by a Cardassian sadist and is asked to see five lights when there are only four.
Re:The first and biggest consumer will be...
on
3D Face Cameras
·
· Score: 1
Somehow I do not think face recognition is important to the p0rn industry.
Then why have so many people pasted Brittany Spears's head onto other people's bodies.... er, I mean I've heard that happened a lot.
I've generally found that however good slashdot is for tech information, if I based investing information on what I've heard on this board I would be broke. I would have shortsold MS and SCO and sunk my money into Red Hat among other things.
Unfortunately, the responses here are so ambiguous, I don't know who to disbelieve.
First site they would take down would be/. and other blogs. No free exchange of ideas that could be negative to Allah or Mao.
The first step to this kind of censorship has almost always been a type of intellectual isolationism. Saudi Arabia or China build 'their own internet' and wall it off from the rest of the world. How often does the reverse happen, where several countries band together to enforce censorship on the rest of the world?
Well, the point is that schools should certify what people know, not separate people like eggs.
I'd like an option where, if you fail there are no consequences, but if you succeed you get the full benefit. For all courses.
I don't see the point in punishing failure with anything more than a lack of certification. And hopefully teachers would be more likely to use this option on students, helping to solve the whole 'social promotion' problem.
Several thousand dead is a political disaster only because most Americans do not consider themselves to be under mortal threat.
A nation like China can deploy any number of poorly educated, oppressed farmers at you
True, but unless they are able to blend into a population of civilians, this is going to do exactly jack. Numerical superiority is no longer the advantage that it once was.
China's biggest advantage in terms of people would be infiltrating the US and doing special ops and intelligence inside its borders. Somthing that's easier for China to do to the US than for the US to do to China.
If we have learned anything from Iraq it is how indispensable ground forces are to a successful conclusion of a war.
While I agree that 'death from above' might not conclude a war, this isn't crucial. If the US could prevent China from successfully launching a nuclear attack, destroy China's industry, and prevent itself from being invaded, it would be in a fairly favorable stalemate.
I don't want to see the US go to war with China. But I don't think it will happen unless the Chinese clearly believe that they can win. If China could take Taiwan by force, you know that they would. They've made that clear. China is going to bide its time and play with a long term strategy.
Anyway, I suspect that the rumors of US military invincibility have been greatly exaggerated, seeing how its army has been "stretched thin" after one small war in Iraq.
Except that the U.S. doesn't just have troops in Iraq, and isn't just fighting troops from Iraq in Iraq.
Why on earth would the US take on India?
America's technological edge is just fine. Fighting a war in the middle of a city is difficult because the US is trying not to harm civilians, to identify itself, etc. If America's survival were immediatly threatened, it could bomb a country flat. But that would have the same moral problems as using nukes on Japan.
More importantly, the US wants to be prepared for a massive first strike which could wipe out its millitary.
Well, I'm not sure about commercially profitable yet, but 'useful to the nation millitarily' at the very least. And viable. After all, if we want to set up a space station, we could do it (assuming we don't run out of shuttles and refuse to find some other launch method etc.)
Therefore space "property" would be high on their agenda.
Libertarians advocate private property to solve problems with allocation of scarce resources. Property only makes sense when resources are scarce. There's so much space outside of earth, it hardly fits the definition of scarce.
Ownership only matters if what you own has some value or use, and some sort of scarcity.
Even libertarians don't claim that people should have to pay to breathe air or get sunlight. Nobody owns the water in the ocean because there's no fear of running out. These things are free because they are, at the present time, inexhastable. (Though oceans can be 'exhausted' if used as receptacles for polution, say.)
We've never had an industrial nation that wasn't founded on land in some fixed location. So a government not based on land or fixed location would be somthing essentially new, though it would probably preserve some of our present standards. Libertarian was the closest thing I could think of, inductively. i.e. if non-authoritarian, then somewhat libertarian. Rather than deductively i.e. if somewhat libertarian then ownership of certain areas of space.
Yeah, but taking your joke seriously for a moment.
So much science fiction is just an extrapolation on current trends, just like "The Internet" was going to be TV online. Most of the most popular Sci-Fi still has humans as central to the story. "The Force" is more important than technology. Data wants to be human. All of this puts human nature on a pedastal. And that makes for an engaging story, because it allows viewers to relate to the characters. But it seems likely to me that humans, using genetic engineering, AI, etc. are going to significantly alter themselves.
But you're not going to have a whole series done from the perspective of The Borg. Noone would be able to relate to them, till they started acting 'human.'
Space might have been, in time, the opening of a new frontier, to borrow a cliche. Isolation from other people would mean that a society wouldn't have to put international defense as their highest priority. And as easy as that is to forget how much of our resources go to warfare (about half of the world's GDP), that would be nearly a first in human history.
Maybe it'll still happen when we get far enough away, and can build some self-sustaining colonies. I'm hopeful. Because I can't imagine earth becoming more free if it keeps getting more crowded.
Bodies in outer space are not supposed to be used for millitary purposes. Interesting that this is essentially a 'territory' which is not a physical body.
I always thought that outer space would at least prevent people from contesting territory, since area, particularly off of the major planets, seemed so vast relative to the cost of putting things up there. I figured scarcity wouldn't be a problem and the territorial boundaries that nations are based on might be partially undermined.
I figured space would be libertarian.
I guess this just re-emphasizes that even in space there are scarce resources which people are going to end up fighting over, and which will necessitate extending national power into outer space, in order to enforce any claims on territoriality.
I'm amazed that we still have the concept of 'failing grades.' Why not just not give a student credit for the course. If someone going for the honor role wants to take an art class, why should they worry if they might be terrible at it. They'll learn more by taking it than not taking it. At the worst, they should simply not get credit for learning the material. It'd be like they never signed up.
If you really need to separate students into grades like eggs, you can still ask what grade level they're at in math, science etc.
I think teachers would be more likely to use this form of punishment.
Of course, we also have to keep in mind that if we totally do away with social promotion and have 11th graders in 8th grade class, the incidence of teen pregnancy is likely to go up even more.
The dereanged idea that it has to have meaning, relevance, etc., or it is worthless is ruining schools. I get kids ask all the time "when are we gonna use this...". It's like they have no understanding of why history matters
So teach them why history matters. Teach them why literature matters. Answer their rhetorical question and explain why they're learning the material and how they should be able to apply what they've learned. Persuade them that this stuff is worth learning. Questions like these are golden opportunities, and you transmute them to lead if you treat them as a hassle.
Knowledge _should_ have meaning and relevance, and if students don't understand how their knowledge is relevant they might as well not learn it at all.
If students learn to answer word problems, but when they come across situations in the real world they can't use the math that they know to solve the problem, what good is their knowledge. If this is what is happening, then the teacher has failed in teaching one of the most crucial lessons related to that subject. Without application, it doesn't matter if they aced their quiz, the knowledge is useless. Teachers need to get away from simply 'teaching to the test' or 'teaching to the quiz' and 'teach to the application.'
Sticking to scientific principles, existence is fundamentally meaningless, and any apparent meaning or value is a human projection.
Another way of phrasing what you've said here is "scientfic principles cannot be used to give existance meaning." They can describe physical reality, debunk false theories, etc. But they can't give life meaning.
If you use a function for somthing it wasn't designed for, it's going to give you a null value.
There can be no other foundation for morality than amoral premises, unless you think concepts such as "meaning" and "value" materialize out of the ether.
Science and even mathematics are also based on certain certain assumptions. All knowledge is. That doesn't invalidate the systems. You could argue against a mathematical system saying that it was not internally consistant, or was not consistant with physical reality. You could say that it doesn't represent actual knowledge (i.e. it's tautological.) But even the notion of utility presupposes certain motivation or desire as being a valid premisis on which to base a philosophy - an "ought from is" falacy.
Saying we must start with moral premises for a moral theory is ignoring this problem at best, and circular reasoning at worst.
I didn't say you had to start with moral premises. I was saying that you weren't starting with moral premises in your argument. Where you start determines where you end up.
But what I was doing was a fair bit simpler, and doesn't require mucking about in the dark waters of first premises. Most people in our society believe that things like rape or murder are inherantly wrong. Perhaps they believe this because they've been taught to. Perhaps they believe this innately. Perhaps they believe it because they know that to publicly state otherwise would mean they get insulted. How they arrived at this conlcusion doesn't matter to me.
I'm just trying to demonstrate to people that using 'survival of the fittest' to justify things morally is almost always inconsistant with some of a person's previously held moral beliefs, so that they quit using 'evolutionary success' as a basis for their moral calculations. If they know where the path leads, they'll quit walking it.
Unlike reductionist scientific models, moral beliefs can become self fulfilling prophecies.
What do I value? Life and freedom. Just about all other logically sound morality you'd care to cite can be derived from these fundamentally amoral values.
These aren't amoral values, unless you only value your own life and freedom, and unconditionally pursue them to the detriment of other people's lives and freedoms. I think I'd make one small change to your definition of morality; morality is the pursuit of standards of value or shared principles.
Fit has absolutly nothing to do with 24-hour "fitness centers" kind of fit. The survival of the fittest simply means the one who is best able to survive in a particular environment.
I never claimed that. I just said that "survival of the fittest" is not a method of moral reasoning.
There is a difference between "being evolutionarily successful" and "being a good person."
Wouldn't you say that eating is really the original form of theft.
If plants had property rights, sure.
I guess 'theft' implies certain things about recognition of ownership that I don't really believe. Sure, animals have and defend territory. But I don't recognize their right to do so, to the exclusion of people's rights. In my view, animals have a right to freedom from pain and additional rights, perhaps, as they contribute to society. I suppose I see their 'rights' as more collective in terms of the species, as consistant with my Jewish background. So if you harvest a crop, but you save enough to plant next year, you're okay. If you destroy a species, you've failed as a caretaker and taken somthing from the world.
I can see how someone might feel differently. There are some people who refuse to eat anything except for fruit, nuts, etc. consistant with your view. But that's how I've lived my life.
Morality can fit perfectly well into "survival of the fittest", if you consider that the fitness gain of rape/murder/thieve does not take into account the fitness detriment of the resulting mass of armed police out for justice (the "enforcement arm" of morality).
But at the heart of this is the moral logic of the individual; Do you not rape because of your fear of the police, or because rape is wrong? What if you could get away with rape? Would it be 'okay' then?
A moral majority ( or even a well-organized moral minority) can certainly coerce an amoral (non-moral) or personally utilitarian minority to 'go along with things if they want to be reproductivly fit.'
Moral custom is rather useless in a world where it is not widely practiced
This is a utilitarian description of morality, rather than a moral description of morality. It is a description of morality using fundamentally amoral premises.
Slashdot Mirror
You've managed to get a GNAA post modded +1 informative!
I tip my hat to you sir.
When I put up a website, I'm not putting up a poster; I'm setting up a news stand and handing out copies to everyone who walks by. Do I have a right to take back all of those papers I handed out, and disallow every person who took one from showing it to somebody else? According to copyright law: yes.
Show me one legal precedent where some printed material was forcibly recalled by the person who handed it out.
I don't think it's real. Just an artist's conception. But then, so is Optimus Prime.
Fair's fair.
Which, in its turn, refered to 1984.
From Wikipedia.
"Chain of Command", a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Jean-Luc Picard is tortured in a fashion similar to that of Winston Smith. Just as Smith is repeatedly shown a hand with four fingers and tortured until he will agree that he actually sees five, Picard is tortured by a Cardassian sadist and is asked to see five lights when there are only four.
Somehow I do not think face recognition is important to the p0rn industry.
... er, I mean I've heard that happened a lot.
Then why have so many people pasted Brittany Spears's head onto other people's bodies.
So, how long before we get Optimus Prime's blog up on that site!
As soon as he figures out how to transform his optimus keyboard?
I've generally found that however good slashdot is for tech information, if I based investing information on what I've heard on this board I would be broke. I would have shortsold MS and SCO and sunk my money into Red Hat among other things.
Unfortunately, the responses here are so ambiguous, I don't know who to disbelieve.
First site they would take down would be /. and other blogs. No free exchange of ideas that could be negative to Allah or Mao.
The first step to this kind of censorship has almost always been a type of intellectual isolationism. Saudi Arabia or China build 'their own internet' and wall it off from the rest of the world. How often does the reverse happen, where several countries band together to enforce censorship on the rest of the world?
Studies show that 1\3rd of all slashdot posters use confusing links.
Wouldn't it make more sense to make the word "report" the hyperlink to the story as opposed to "inaccurate?"
Well, the point is that schools should certify what people know, not separate people like eggs.
I'd like an option where, if you fail there are no consequences, but if you succeed you get the full benefit. For all courses.
I don't see the point in punishing failure with anything more than a lack of certification. And hopefully teachers would be more likely to use this option on students, helping to solve the whole 'social promotion' problem.
Several thousand dead is a political disaster only because most Americans do not consider themselves to be under mortal threat.
A nation like China can deploy any number of poorly educated, oppressed farmers at you
True, but unless they are able to blend into a population of civilians, this is going to do exactly jack. Numerical superiority is no longer the advantage that it once was.
China's biggest advantage in terms of people would be infiltrating the US and doing special ops and intelligence inside its borders. Somthing that's easier for China to do to the US than for the US to do to China.
If we have learned anything from Iraq it is how indispensable ground forces are to a successful conclusion of a war.
While I agree that 'death from above' might not conclude a war, this isn't crucial. If the US could prevent China from successfully launching a nuclear attack, destroy China's industry, and prevent itself from being invaded, it would be in a fairly favorable stalemate.
I don't want to see the US go to war with China. But I don't think it will happen unless the Chinese clearly believe that they can win. If China could take Taiwan by force, you know that they would. They've made that clear. China is going to bide its time and play with a long term strategy.
Anyway, I suspect that the rumors of US military invincibility have been greatly exaggerated, seeing how its army has been "stretched thin" after one small war in Iraq.
Except that the U.S. doesn't just have troops in Iraq, and isn't just fighting troops from Iraq in Iraq.
Why on earth would the US take on India?
America's technological edge is just fine. Fighting a war in the middle of a city is difficult because the US is trying not to harm civilians, to identify itself, etc. If America's survival were immediatly threatened, it could bomb a country flat. But that would have the same moral problems as using nukes on Japan.
More importantly, the US wants to be prepared for a massive first strike which could wipe out its millitary.
I did google it and found everthing except what I was looking for, or I wouldn't be asking.
I don't really have any specific key words I can search on. Russia - space - laser - shuttle - attacked - "fired at" etc.
Oh well. Not that important I guess.
Well, I'm not sure about commercially profitable yet, but 'useful to the nation millitarily' at the very least. And viable. After all, if we want to set up a space station, we could do it (assuming we don't run out of shuttles and refuse to find some other launch method etc.)
Therefore space "property" would be high on their agenda.
Libertarians advocate private property to solve problems with allocation of scarce resources. Property only makes sense when resources are scarce. There's so much space outside of earth, it hardly fits the definition of scarce.
Ownership only matters if what you own has some value or use, and some sort of scarcity.
Even libertarians don't claim that people should have to pay to breathe air or get sunlight. Nobody owns the water in the ocean because there's no fear of running out. These things are free because they are, at the present time, inexhastable. (Though oceans can be 'exhausted' if used as receptacles for polution, say.)
We've never had an industrial nation that wasn't founded on land in some fixed location. So a government not based on land or fixed location would be somthing essentially new, though it would probably preserve some of our present standards. Libertarian was the closest thing I could think of, inductively. i.e. if non-authoritarian, then somewhat libertarian. Rather than deductively i.e. if somewhat libertarian then ownership of certain areas of space.
Came close tho. The USSR fired a laser at a shuttle from Siberia.
When? Why?
Yeah, but taking your joke seriously for a moment.
So much science fiction is just an extrapolation on current trends, just like "The Internet" was going to be TV online. Most of the most popular Sci-Fi still has humans as central to the story. "The Force" is more important than technology. Data wants to be human. All of this puts human nature on a pedastal. And that makes for an engaging story, because it allows viewers to relate to the characters. But it seems likely to me that humans, using genetic engineering, AI, etc. are going to significantly alter themselves.
But you're not going to have a whole series done from the perspective of The Borg. Noone would be able to relate to them, till they started acting 'human.'
Space might have been, in time, the opening of a new frontier, to borrow a cliche. Isolation from other people would mean that a society wouldn't have to put international defense as their highest priority. And as easy as that is to forget how much of our resources go to warfare (about half of the world's GDP), that would be nearly a first in human history.
Maybe it'll still happen when we get far enough away, and can build some self-sustaining colonies. I'm hopeful. Because I can't imagine earth becoming more free if it keeps getting more crowded.
Except you should still have the upside potential - if you get an A+ it should count as one. Why not?
And this should be applied to High Schools, not just colleges.
If you fail a pass-fail course, doesn't it remain on your record, though? Doesn't it affect your GPA? I'm not sure. I never took one.
Bodies in outer space are not supposed to be used for millitary purposes. Interesting that this is essentially a 'territory' which is not a physical body.
http://www.islandone.org/Treaties/BH766.html
http://www.spacelawstation.com/international.html
I always thought that outer space would at least prevent people from contesting territory, since area, particularly off of the major planets, seemed so vast relative to the cost of putting things up there. I figured scarcity wouldn't be a problem and the territorial boundaries that nations are based on might be partially undermined.
I figured space would be libertarian.
I guess this just re-emphasizes that even in space there are scarce resources which people are going to end up fighting over, and which will necessitate extending national power into outer space, in order to enforce any claims on territoriality.
I'm amazed that we still have the concept of 'failing grades.' Why not just not give a student credit for the course. If someone going for the honor role wants to take an art class, why should they worry if they might be terrible at it. They'll learn more by taking it than not taking it. At the worst, they should simply not get credit for learning the material. It'd be like they never signed up.
If you really need to separate students into grades like eggs, you can still ask what grade level they're at in math, science etc.
I think teachers would be more likely to use this form of punishment.
Of course, we also have to keep in mind that if we totally do away with social promotion and have 11th graders in 8th grade class, the incidence of teen pregnancy is likely to go up even more.
The dereanged idea that it has to have meaning, relevance, etc., or it is worthless is ruining schools. I get kids ask all the time "when are we gonna use this...". It's like they have no understanding of why history matters
So teach them why history matters. Teach them why literature matters. Answer their rhetorical question and explain why they're learning the material and how they should be able to apply what they've learned. Persuade them that this stuff is worth learning. Questions like these are golden opportunities, and you transmute them to lead if you treat them as a hassle.
Knowledge _should_ have meaning and relevance, and if students don't understand how their knowledge is relevant they might as well not learn it at all.
If students learn to answer word problems, but when they come across situations in the real world they can't use the math that they know to solve the problem, what good is their knowledge. If this is what is happening, then the teacher has failed in teaching one of the most crucial lessons related to that subject. Without application, it doesn't matter if they aced their quiz, the knowledge is useless. Teachers need to get away from simply 'teaching to the test' or 'teaching to the quiz' and 'teach to the application.'
Sticking to scientific principles, existence is fundamentally meaningless, and any apparent meaning or value is a human projection.
Another way of phrasing what you've said here is "scientfic principles cannot be used to give existance meaning." They can describe physical reality, debunk false theories, etc. But they can't give life meaning.
If you use a function for somthing it wasn't designed for, it's going to give you a null value.
There can be no other foundation for morality than amoral premises, unless you think concepts such as "meaning" and "value" materialize out of the ether.
Science and even mathematics are also based on certain certain assumptions. All knowledge is. That doesn't invalidate the systems. You could argue against a mathematical system saying that it was not internally consistant, or was not consistant with physical reality. You could say that it doesn't represent actual knowledge (i.e. it's tautological.) But even the notion of utility presupposes certain motivation or desire as being a valid premisis on which to base a philosophy - an "ought from is" falacy.
Saying we must start with moral premises for a moral theory is ignoring this problem at best, and circular reasoning at worst.
I didn't say you had to start with moral premises. I was saying that you weren't starting with moral premises in your argument. Where you start determines where you end up.
But what I was doing was a fair bit simpler, and doesn't require mucking about in the dark waters of first premises. Most people in our society believe that things like rape or murder are inherantly wrong. Perhaps they believe this because they've been taught to. Perhaps they believe this innately. Perhaps they believe it because they know that to publicly state otherwise would mean they get insulted. How they arrived at this conlcusion doesn't matter to me.
I'm just trying to demonstrate to people that using 'survival of the fittest' to justify things morally is almost always inconsistant with some of a person's previously held moral beliefs, so that they quit using 'evolutionary success' as a basis for their moral calculations. If they know where the path leads, they'll quit walking it.
Unlike reductionist scientific models, moral beliefs can become self fulfilling prophecies.
What do I value? Life and freedom. Just about all other logically sound morality you'd care to cite can be derived from these fundamentally amoral values.
These aren't amoral values, unless you only value your own life and freedom, and unconditionally pursue them to the detriment of other people's lives and freedoms. I think I'd make one small change to your definition of morality; morality is the pursuit of standards of value or shared principles.
Fit has absolutly nothing to do with 24-hour "fitness centers" kind of fit. The survival of the fittest simply means the one who is best able to survive in a particular environment.
I never claimed that. I just said that "survival of the fittest" is not a method of moral reasoning.
There is a difference between "being evolutionarily successful" and "being a good person."
Wouldn't you say that eating is really the original form of theft.
If plants had property rights, sure.
I guess 'theft' implies certain things about recognition of ownership that I don't really believe. Sure, animals have and defend territory. But I don't recognize their right to do so, to the exclusion of people's rights. In my view, animals have a right to freedom from pain and additional rights, perhaps, as they contribute to society. I suppose I see their 'rights' as more collective in terms of the species, as consistant with my Jewish background. So if you harvest a crop, but you save enough to plant next year, you're okay. If you destroy a species, you've failed as a caretaker and taken somthing from the world.
I can see how someone might feel differently. There are some people who refuse to eat anything except for fruit, nuts, etc. consistant with your view. But that's how I've lived my life.
Morality can fit perfectly well into "survival of the fittest", if you consider that the fitness gain of rape/murder/thieve does not take into account the fitness detriment of the resulting mass of armed police out for justice (the "enforcement arm" of morality).
But at the heart of this is the moral logic of the individual; Do you not rape because of your fear of the police, or because rape is wrong? What if you could get away with rape? Would it be 'okay' then?
A moral majority ( or even a well-organized moral minority) can certainly coerce an amoral (non-moral) or personally utilitarian minority to 'go along with things if they want to be reproductivly fit.'
Moral custom is rather useless in a world where it is not widely practiced
This is a utilitarian description of morality, rather than a moral description of morality. It is a description of morality using fundamentally amoral premises.