when the federal government says that there should be one interstate system that covers the entire US, with one set of rules and laws... that's progress.
when Microsoft says that everyone in America ought to have a computer on their desk, and that computer should be running MS software.... that's evil.
I think that the domination of the personal and business computer industry during the 80s and 90s by Microsoft did more good for the average man and put more money in _everyones_ pockets than the US interstate system. That's a conjecture, you can agree or disagree if you like. But it's hard for me to view the actions and results of Microsoft as anything other than spectacular.
Microsoft acheived what it did without the coercive force of the state. It was therefore not evil, because everyone was a willing party.
It is a strange definition of "evil" that reads "most people didn't choose the way I wanted them to"
Read the chapter [by Alan Greenspan, no less] on Anti-trust in Ayn Rand's compendium, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal".
The law of anti-trust is absolutely and completely arbitrary. By design. Illegal in this context amounts to nothing more than "upset the wrong people".
Um, until I actually see google doing something evil, I'm going to have to not believe you here
Remember how everyone loved IBM, until they didn't? Then the darling Microsoft came along and broke the back of IBM's evil ways. Then everyone loved Microsoft for a while [no, really!]. Then MS was making money like gangbusters for a while and before you know it they were too big for peoples comfort level and only 5 years after they officially "got big", they're hauled into court for being too big. Guess who the new darling of the tech industry is, who's building share and weaving its way into your life at every point?
Google.
There is an online flash game called "pandemic". The goal is to design a pathogen that infects and kills the largest number of people possible. You get to spend points on various attributes of how the pathogen behaves -- spreading vectors, infectiousness, and symptoms/effects.
It turns out that the winning strategy is to be completely benign, showing no symptoms whatsoever. Spread very slowly, so as not to cause alarm. Then when you have infected everyone on the planet with a benign, slow moving outbreak, you spend all of your "points" on something like a "causes heart to explode" symptom or similar.
There must be some intrinsic aspect of man whereby he wants to cast aside one master for another master. He rarely considers that he ought not to have any master but himself.
I have no doubt that the Google of today displacing the VZN/AT&T/Whoever of today would be a shortterm win for people.
But for how long? The thing that makes me especially hesitant about giving google any more control over me or my data than they already have is that they are smart enough to know what to do with it. That, and they are happy to cooperate with governments. People are rightly afraid of a government that records and transcribes every single domestic phonecall in the US. People who use google voice are either unafraid or haven't thought of it. So what happens when Uncle Sam sends Google a subpeona? Are they going to be able to credibly say "oh, we don't have that", or even funnier, "no, we can't find it?". Google? The search company? Can't find what we're after?
The scary thing about uncle sam outsourcing NSA-against-its-own-citizens work to Google is just how good Google will be at doing it.
Protest the wrongdoings of the Church of Scientology all you like but do it without engaging in illegal activity
"Illegal" is a construction of the political class, and has no bearing on "right" or "wrong".
The commission of civil disobedience is one mechanism for changing the law. I think those who choose to go down this path understand what they are in for. It is often the case that people have to lean back and think, "should that man really be in jail over this?" before the laws are changed to better reflect the morality of the day.
I don't support breaking the law if it does harm gainst another entity. I try to abide by the non-aggression principle. Let's look at the application of principles in this case:
The "harm" against CoS is that a website received a lot of hits.
The "harm" CoS has done against individuals and humanity is hard to quantify. We don't know how many people have been murdered or allowed to die via negligence under the supervision of CoS, but I think it is safe to assume it is a non-zero number in both cases. I'm not very well educated on CoS and I am fortunate in that no one I know very well is wrapped up with them.
We do know that CoS has abused the law to subvert anonymity and freedom of speech on the internet, and while nothing so severe as death, that is harm and it has been done to you too, whether you realize it or not.
The CoS attacked its critics via copyright law; this is a complete perversion of the law. I'm ashamed of the courts that did not protect these people under whistle-blower or satire type protections. Nobody who was critical of CoS was attempting to profit by re-publishing their protected works, nobody was attempting to derive them of income via the dumping/distribution of their protected works. Rather, the CoS texts were spread so that people can see what a crazy mess of nonsense is really hiding behind all of those hollywood smiles, and what kind of lunatic insanity real humans with families and loved ones are getting caught up in.
I don't feel that protesting in the manner done thus far against CoS is either excessively harmful to them or the initiation of force. I think it is justifiable retaliation against an actor that has abused the protections of the state and perverted the intention of the law, and i think getting the courts and more individuals to realize that is going to have some rought spots -- like a 19 year old going to jail when you'd be hard pressed to figure out which individual he committed an aggressive act against.
I'm glad there are people that are willing to be martyrs for the ideology of freedom in this fight, and a bit ashamed that I am not currently one of them.
I figure that there is a non-zero chance that I could get a legal nasty-gram from CoS about my postings here today [and the number of anonymous posters in this and all other CoS articles on slashdot tends to support the validity of my conerns]. Is my concern irrational or justified? Is it right that I ought to worry -- even a little bit -- about my well-being, for having written any of the words I've written in this article? Does that seem like justice to you?
And because I've never died, I also do not carry life insurance of any kind. Because I've never been raped, I don't pay attention to my surroundings or the people nearby. Because I've never been hit by another car, I don't wear a seatbelt.
Of course, everything I said above is false.
Even though none of those things have happened to me, they've happened to other people who _are like me_. And as a result, I've modified my behavior and in some cases suffered a monetary loss.
This is what is known as a "chilling effect". A great tragedy befalls a handful of individuals, but all individuals realize it could have just as easily have been them. This causes massive behavioral change on a wide scale.
This is exactly the pscyhology used by terrorism, infact. The goal of terrorists isn't to kill all people or even certain people -- it's to kill enough people to effect behaviorial change on a large popupation.
The goal of Scientology [and the RIAA, and other agents of censorship that have the power of the state behind them] is similar. They know they can't get everyone or even most people. But they don't have to -- getting a few people now and then will persuade many others into changing their behavior.
I haven't done a detailed study, but everytime there is a CoS article on slashdot, a LOT of the comments are posted by Anonymous Coward. Why is that? Why are people unafraid to openly criticize the catholic church -- often with blatantly vulgar remarks, and yet so few are willing to do the same against the CoS?
Fear. Fear is the difference. If the CoS wants to rule its own members via fear, that is lamentable and a great reason not to associate with the CoS. But the CoS wants to rule non-members and specifically CoS antagonists via Fear as well.
I don't think it is unreasonable to despise an organization that has already engaged in activities designed to control me via Fear.
Personality disorders, like, extreme anti-government paranoia? Or confusing basic regulations for Stalinist policies?
What prevents Stalin the 2nd from happening in the USA? Have we just been lucky to not have anyone that mean be born here? Are Americans just a better judge of character than the Russians?
I'm not so presumptuous to think that Russia is better at making tyrants than we are, or its people are more predisposed to misjudging politicians.
The difference between everywhere else and the USA is that we wrote down a bunch of rules that the government wasn't allowed to break. That way, when our stupid citizens elected tyrants, those tyrants never had any wind in their sails and we didn't "vanish" millions of people for essentially arbitrary reasons [brown people notwithstanding]
The difference is that our government was designed to put the brakes on itself. So when someone proposes that we give the government power or control to do some act that it didn't previously have the power to do, IMO reasonalbe Americans ought to be concerned.
If we get to the point [assuming you don't think we're there yet] where the political class in this country can do whatever they like, what's to stop them? What prevents Stalin the 2nd from coming to power in the USA? Luck? An educated populace? An insightful press and critical media?
The difference between here and "not here" is that here, we don't beleive Stalin has the right to do what Stalin does, and our laws say so. Let's not be in a hurry to denigrate those who question the relaxation of limits on government power.
When was the last time you were harassed by a Scientology member?
When I woke up today and used the internet.
Scientology was the first organization I am aware of that successfully forced an internet anonymous email service to dig up and disclose information about its clients. All over copyright claims. I am referring to anon.penet.fi, the famous anonymous remailer we all used in the 90s.
In the early days when nobody cared about what "we" did with the internet, we knew that for every asshole that was up to serious evil, there were 10 smart guys who didn't care what your deal was, but hated assholes and could route around them. There were jackasses, but technology always beats jackasses.
Then the law came, and all of that got a lot harder.
Today we have the ability to make "highly" anonymous network connections but we rely on a small group of very VERY dedicated people to make that possible.. [people with the wherewithal to run TOR exit nodes, for instance].
Those entities [be they CoS or rotten governments] who want to destroy free speech must not be tolerated by us.
I remember my senior year of college when I got a takedown-letter about hosting DeCSS. And you know what? I folded, because I had a good job lined up that required I _not_ be a felon. Freedom of speech lost a little bit and I helped give it away, because a warm bed and a normal life are more convenient than principles and freedom.
Our enemies know that, and they attack the weakest of us not to get rid of one or two, but because of the chilling effect it has on the rest of us. No one can escape the law forever, and thus the law, which is supposed to protect the freedom of one man from the encroachments of another, is used as their tool for enslaving us to their desires.
I'm a fallible man and most of us are. That doesn't mean we don't deserve to hate the entites that continue to attack us by perverting the institutions we designed to protect ourselves.
I congratulate the "moralfags" [as they are called within anonymous] who are fighting back. Sometimes, it comes at a high cost, like with this guy.
The problem of humanity is one of the capture, storage, and application of energy.
Gasoline is a fantastic medium for energy storage: it's a better battery than any battery we know how to cheaply produce and service, and that's why we use it. But the energy capture function for gasoline [getting the energy into the gasoline] sucks. And the energy dispersal/application of gasoline has some environmentalists pretty upset.
Nature gives us many ways to store energy now and release it later. The chemical combustion of gasoline is one such mechanism. The desire of a compressed gas to push forcefully against its container is another such mechanism. The strong nuclear bindig energy is a particulary potent and pervasive mechanism. The specific heat of water is yet another.
The fundamental mechanisms of energy storage have been known about for a long time. Taken as a complete system to let humanity accomplish some goal, we are concerned with how we capture the energy, how much of it we can store [and at what cost], and how easy it is to get it back out in a form condusive to the sort of work we want to do with it.
As technology changes we must continually re-evaluate the end-to-end story for a particular aqcuisition/storage/application energy cycle. We may find that we are willing to tolerate a 100 fold decrease in energy storage performance for a 200 fold increase in acquisition efficiency and a qualitative improvement in application performance.
For instance, if i live in arizona and i have a sterling-engine powered air compressor that pumps my 50G tank to 100psi after 12 hours of sunlight, and this lets me go about 10 miles with no consumption of anything other than sunlight... I'm interested. If i commute 5 miles each way, I can get to work and back using nothing but solar energy. And unlike with PV panels and electrical batteries, a guy with a pipe threading die and a welder could build refueling system in his garage, out of stuff that has zero environmental impact whatsoever.
I think that's cool. I'm obviously playing fast and loose with the numbers. Since the kJ/m^2 of solar radiation is known at gridsquares all over north america, you could actually make some ballpark efficiency guesses about peices of the process and plug in real numbers to my hypothetical example. Even if reality is 1 mile @ 30mph after 8 hrs of sunlight.. that fits _some_ usage profile.
It used to be that every farm in North Dakota [where I live] had a windmill powering the farm. Then they disappeared and became an anachronism paying homage to a bygone era. Now windmills are dotting the countryside again. It didn't get windier here.
What changed?
The physics of energy capture, storage, and dispersion have always been the same; our efficiency and the context of the problem space continue to change. As such we must constantly re-evaluate what we did in the past against the realities of today.
Perhaps the State has no responsibility to act for the benefit of its citizens, but if not, then what is its purpose?
I'm glad you asked. The supreme court has decided [in several cases, i beleive] that the government is under no obligation whatsoever to protect citizens.
The purpose of the state is to define an objective and pre-documented process for what should be done when some individuals are accused of violating the intrinsic god-given rights of other individuals.
In the case of the NOLA disaster, the functions of the state are roughly the following #1 put God on trial for launching a hurricaine and doing so much property damage -- however the case is likely to be dismissed due to one of two technicalities --- either we cannot show that God exists, so there is no defendant --- if we can show that God exists, we can show that NOLA belongs to him and the destruction of his own property is squarely within his means. The city will graciously drop the trespassing charges against all of the squatters who remained. It remains to be seen if God will be hit with negligence charges due to the # of people hurt while squatting illegally on his property
#2 put anyone else on trial who knowingly misrepresented the suitability of their products or services to someone else
#3 try and convict all of those disgusting animals who were committing gross acts of violence against their neighbors and their neighbors property
I may be forgetting something, but I think that covers it.
For a good explanation of why this is false, and only tends to look true for constrained or limited versions of "socialism", please read "The Road to Serfdom", by FA Hayek.
Hayek's main insight was that central economic planning was the key inflection point that lead to absolute totalitarianism. The scandanavian countries tend to shy away from central planned economies and as such seem to have escaped the inevitable descent towards totalitarianism required to implement "the plan".
Problematically for most socialist nations is that they elevate the rights of society to a higher position than the rights of man, but tend to not enumerate either or work to constrain the power of the governors. The US was designed to avoid just such these problems, but we have had generations of reprehensible tyrants in elected [and appointed] office who have been blatantly destroying and ignoring these limitations.
Luckily the US has largely retained the fundamental individual right that most other nations who suppress individuals take away first: the right of a heavily armed citizenry. I desperately hope we in the US will fix our problems without resorting to that most basic of all individual freedoms, but I'm not very optimistic.
consider me a philosophical heretic, but i don't find the omnipotence paradox to be a paradox at all. I think its a false dilemma. It fails to account for the fact that an omnipotent being need not concern itself with satisfying rules within a framework that humans can understand.
To make a weak analogy: suppose I tell you that there are two lines which are parallel, but which also intersect at right angles. The 1st order analysis is that what I've described is paradoxical. But we find precisely this situation when considering two lines of longitude, 90 degrees apart, on the surface of a sphere. At the equator, they are truly parallel. At the poles, they intersect at 90 degree angles.
My math is a bit fuzzy but i beleive a spherical surface is a non-euclidian plane, and so the normal rules do not apply and what would normally be contradictions are not contradictory at all.
I surmise it must be so with a truly omnipotent being: the normal rules don't apply. Infact, I would claim that this is truly the definition of an omnipotent being: the breadth of our comprehension is insufficient to set boundaries around its nature.
. According to religious dogma, we had a creator[1] who designed every aspect of our being. Immediately, one asks why this creator would make organisms that did things he didn't want. If a creator made us, that creator is responsible for the things we do, right? Therefore we cannot be held responsible for our sins. That's where "free will" comes in. Our creator, when he made us, also imbued us with an independent will, one which is capable of doings things contrary to the creator's own will.
(Of course, one may ask why the creator gave us free wills that he knew [since creators are presumably omnipotent and omniscient] would make us sin, but at that point, it's turtles all the way down. The point is that "our creator gave us free will" is a satisfactory enough answer for most people most of the time.
This is pretty elementary stuff, religiously.
The Christian God created humans with "free will" (the ability to make choices contrary to what he would most prefer) because he finds it is more satisfying to be loved than to be obeyed.
I have to say that as often as I fantasized about having some kind of a sex-robot-of-servitude growing up, having a real-life human wife that __freely chooses__ me is more satisfying than any of the time I spent alone. I don't think replacing my wife with some kind of compliant automaton would be very fun at all. Infact, early in our marraige my wife made the point when she spent about 24 hours not offering any opinion, not initiating any conversation, and not objecting to anything I said. It sucked.
There are certainly men who expect to exert authoritarian control over their wife or other people they are in relationships with. But I contend that they're missing out.
People who make a lot of calls aren't going to come in at $9 per month - pre-paids are only good for people with very low usage.
Also, unlike most other services, with TracFone you don't own your number. You decide to switch carriers and your phone number goes with it. Personally keeping my number is worth quite a bit more than $350. To each his own though.
I'm on T-mobile prepaid and i __love__ it. Yeah, i don't talk much. Verizon doesn't have any kind of cost effective service for customers like me. They lost my business a few years back and it's been wonderful.
I can use any GSM phone i want to, I didn't have to tell t-mobile anything about who i am or how i plan on paying, and i think i pay less in a year than i was paying for 2 months when i had a verizon "share plan" for my wife and I.
Finally -- with google voice [and other number re-direction schemes], the concept of even knowing your mobile number is officially uninteresting. I have been telling people the random southern california phone number i got issued when i bought my SIM card from ebay for a couple years now. Nobody cares what my number is, least of all me. If i want to truly own my number i will abstract my identity from my device, carrier, and location entirely -- like google voice (or skype in, or any other service) lets me do.
Actually I think the reason that homosexuality is a "problematic" sin is that most murders, liars, and theives are willing to concede that all of those things are sinful and can be apologetic about them.
If a man beleives engaging in homosexual acts is just dandy and his church congregation feels that it is sinful, the man is at odds with his church doctrinally, and in their view, he continues to willfully and unrepentantly sin.
There are plenty of fundamentalist churches that welcome homosexuals -- provided that they beleive that they are repressing sinful urges or whatever. They are a by all indications a rare breed, but there are gay men out there who try and live in the tortured margins of beleiving that their religion tells them their desires are wrong.
To be fair, married hetero men by and large still desire, at some level, to nail all kinds of women that aren't their wives, which is naturally "not cool, Jesus-wise". But marraige provides the luxury of a biblically blessed outlet for their compansionship and sexual needs [convenient for them!]
As near as I can figure, in the fundamentalist worldview, assuming there is genetic predisposition towards homosexuality, being homosexual is akin to being born with leprosy or as a kleptomaniac. The dogma seems to be that that these people were born with a hardship that increases their proclivity for sinfulness, but they are required to condemn that temptation and recognize it for what it is.
Agreed. It certainly doesn't further the goals of the (Christian) church or the work of (the Christian) God when the _state_ uses compulsion to extract religiously compliant behavior.
If God wanted people to be forced to act a certain way, he would just shoot them with lightning all the time. And when the stupid Isralites long ago kept clammoring for a King to rule over them, God tried to talk them out of it.
God is a libertarian that wants people to voluntarily be socialists:)
That means fundamentalists who want to come down on gays suddenly don't have much in the way of Biblical evidence to support themselves
Half true, half false.
Christians don't have the authority to "come down" on _anyone_.
However, there are several places in the new testament where male adulterousness, male homosexuality, and at least one spot where female homosexuality are discussed and condemned, either by Paul or Jesus.
A quick search for "new testament homosexuality" will let you read about a variety of interpretations of a variety of new testament passages.
Naturally two groups of people can read the same text, both claim to be experts in translating the original written language, and come to different conclusions.
The question of the sinfulness of homosexuality is important not because it grants or revokes a license to stone gay people, but because if it is infact sinful, those who continue to willfully sin without repentance are condemned by God. There are other more practical and earthly ramifications: those who wilfully sin and refuse to repent are not fit for membership (much less leadership) in the church body.
I went to a state university and don't think I ended up paying anything to go there. My starting salary upon graduation was less than the range you figure a salary needs to be to be "worth it", although now it is more.
I think there is perhaps an unstated assumption here that simply going to an expensive enough university is going to turn a marginal or average person into someone that society values sufficiently to reward with a high salary. I think this is not generally true, although it certainly seems to be the case with Ivy League schools and MBA programs across the country:)
But in general, I think people need to be more realistic in this country about who should be attending universities, for what purpose, and how much that ought to cost. In every state in the US, there is a land grant university that you can _probably_ attend for less than $10k/year, assuming no academic scholarships. I'd further contend that if you don't qualify for a bunch of those scholarships (although I haven't payed attention to the climate on this in over 10 years), you aren't the person "we" are looking for to employ in a technical discipline.
Some of you will say that without a certain institution name next to the degree, the degree is worthless. I guess my response would be that if that is the case, is that really a field you want to work in? Where names and politics count more than results?
I'm a libertarian, and I support net neutrality, since oligopolies are market failures (see for example the price of cell phones in America over time).
Please turn in your libertarian credentials at the desk on your way out.
There is no such thing as a market failure. There is only government failure. Want to know why cell phone services are expensive here? Because if you start your own cell phone company, the FCC puts you in jail.
My contention is that property rights are the justification for the idea that man owns himself. The alternative is that man does not own himself, rather, that he is owned by society.
I think if one considers that man doesn't own himself, then the discussion about the meritousness of homosexual civil unions cannot have any connotation of individual rights; if man is owned by society then he has no rights; he has only the priviledges that society affords him. And thus, who may have what priviledges is a moving target depending on the whims of society.
I think at some level, we agree that man owns himself and "some" property.
Let me attempt to dissuade you from the "means of production" argument. I have been conditioned from experience to immediately associate "means of production" and "democratic ownership" as keywords that indicate socialistic thinking, and tantamount to socialistic thinking is the refutation of the individual [after all, society is superior to the individual, this in essence is the key to socialism]. The illustrative argument here is that suppression of the economic individual for the benefit of society -- undertaken as central economic planning -- must always, without fail lead to totalitarianism. This is the insight of FA Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", and I am not aware of a credible refutation of his basic argument.
But warring ideologies aside, I'd contend that the whole "means of production" line of thinking is inappropriate.
What are the means of production? I would assert that throughout the history of humanity, there has been only one means of production and one avenue of creating wealth or value. And that of course is the ingenuity of the human mind. The soil produces nothing. The factory produces nothing. The hands, ultimately, produce nothing. It is the human mind from which all production, wealth, progress, and value flow. And the key difference is that human ingenuity is [b]unbounded[/b]. This is why wealth is NOT a zero sum game [new ingenuity will always be injected wherever it is not suppressed via coercion].
The key innovation of the free market system and of property ownership is not that it penalizes the many for the benefit of the well-monied or the property owning class. Rather, it reinforces the truth that a man owns himself, and the most valuable possession of man is his intellect, and its output, his ideas.
We infact see that in highly-free socities where there is no coercive agent [be it governance, religion, or private cartels [although these latter two are typically powerless without the collusion of the first]] to suppress man's ability to act upon his intellect, that there is an explosion of wealth creation. Not wealth transfer, but new wealth created wherebefore there was none.
And as such, we also see that unlike continental europe, where the fortune 100 of today might be dominated by the same bloodlines of 100 years ago, that the turnover of wealth through the society and through classes of people is extremely fluid. Many of the richest american companies of today did not exist 50 or in some cases 10 years ago.
Intellect is a beautiful entropy source for society, as the rich of today cannot imbue their offspring with it beyond the know limits of genetics [interesting side discussion: the legality of maintaining nepotism via genetic enhancement].
The equivalence of ingenuity and wealth has done more to combat nepotism than any well-intentioned reformer has ever acheived. And so long as the agents of coerciveness -- governance -- let the intellectual man own himself and his ideas, the dystopia you speak of where the few own the many will not come to pass.
All of this -- all of the value in the history of mankind -- hinge on the ideas of man. Incentivize him to cease thinking at your own peril.
I agree with about 95% of this -- I view homosexual marraige, incestuous marraige, and polyamorous marraige as equivalence classes, and frankly think all of them should be fine.
However, the part where I disagree is as follows:
You see, you are advocating denying people the right to marry whom they choose. That does not impact anyone else except in indirect but positive ways. You need to justify this abrogation of rights. How will denying homosexuals the rights to marry benefit society?
The effect of legalizing homosexual civil unions is the fan out effect this would have because of regulatory law [or even just convention].
To give you some perspective: i believe that an individual has absolute rights over himself, his home, and his business [collectively, "his property"]. For instance, I take the very unpopular and objectionable view that a resturant owner ought to be able to refuse to serve black people. He's a private actor, it's a private business that he owns, who is anyone to tell him how to run it?
My _preference_ is that for this business owner to be crushed in the marketplace of ideas and dollars, not to have his mind changed at gunpoint [the same gun that is behind every government regulation, law, or edict]
So it's easy to see where I would make the following statement: insurance companies shouldn't be legally required to provide any dependant coverage or benefits to people in unions that they do not approve of. Wedding photographers shouldn't be required to shoot homosexual weddings.
Yet the latter has already resulted in one lawsuit, and the former is certainly on the horizon.
Essentially, federal recognition of homosexual civil unions expands the anti-discrimination laws [or regulatory law, as is more often/ominously the case] to a new group of people. And i am against ALL anti-discrimination laws that affect private citizens operating in a non-government capacity
[quick side note: the _government_ must not do any group-identity politics of any kind. And so if some local official in Alabama wants to deny a business license to a gay man, that official ought to be out of a job. Private business does't get to shoot you, government does, and so i hold it to a higher standard and demand that it be fair and free from malice]
So while i want to agree with you and say that the state shouldn't care who gets married, it currently does, and that furthermore, who it decides is in the "married club" has many ramifications that infringe, via regulation and anti-discrimination statutes, against the rights of individual actors to conduct business according to their convictions. And as such, in today's regulatory and legal climate, I'm not in favor of it.
I don't expect many people to agree with my POV, but presumably you can surmise that it has some rational heritage, derived from my near-absolute reverence for individual property rights.
[Disclaimer: I do not work for/near the xbox team or have any non-public knowledge about what they do or why they do it]
I'd guess the issue is about control of the content and experience.
Once you make it really easy for people to move data in and out of the "closed system" of the console and the playground of the PC, certain types of attacks become possible, and other types of attacks become much, much easier. You might rightly say that that horse has left the barn, but i think it's an issue of bar-setting. I know that it is possible to take the disks out of my old Xbox 1, unlock them, and party to my hearts content on those machines. But as of yet i have not done so, as the time investment / reward ratios haven't been right. The issue of "ease/convenience of compromise" is a legimate one when your goal isn't absolute theoretical security but is instead cloesr to "we can credibly tell our content partners their stuff is pretty safe, and our customer base is dominated by legit paying customers instead of people who are skirting the rules"
You may recall that one of the first successful attacks on the original Xbox was via the action replay device -- which basically let you get savegames on and off of the Xbox. A memory-unit with an SD card that lets you do the same thing represents the same sort of attack vector and/or threat.
Furthremore, Microsoft is attempting (and at least partially succeeding) around building a digital content marketplace on the 360 platform. Making it easy to get content out of that closed system into somewhere without oversight is not a goal. Infact, keeping that content under wraps probably _is_ a goal.
So i'd wager that any 3rd party device that makes it easy to get content in/out of the 360 from the wild west of the PC is going to be discouraged by MS.
The popular wisdom [i.e. speculation] is that MS gets a bunch of revenue from everything except the 360 unit itself: - software [Xbox has highest attach rate of any current console] - peripherals [lots of these are MS 1st party and have a wide margin in them] - and of course Xbox live [it is widely assumed that this service is wildly profitable, even with all the costs involved in keeping it going].
I don't think knocking out 3rd party MU's is to protect the profits of 1st party peripheral business -- i think it's to protect xbox live.
if you RTFA, what you basically see is this - Xbox LIVE accounts are worth something, and often have CC info embedded in them - all of the techniques are for getting control of an XBOX live account or DOSing an XBOX live user - all of the non-DOS techniques are SOCIAL engineering "attacks"
The XBOX Live network is actually pretty solid, with IPsec between endpoints and servers. The successful "attacks" at the network layer are essentially ping-floods or traffic stoppages [i.e. the Halo bugs where you could turn off your cable modem and thus disconnect without killing your ELO ranking].
Finally, regarding the point about market share / attractiveness to hackers: this is stupid.
XBOX Live has more paying customers than any other console gaming network. Looking at # of consoles sold is not the same thing as attractiveness for phishers/scammers.
when i am a grandfather, and my grandkids are eating dirt, and WW3 has come and gone, and we're living in caves because they're a reasonable way to avoid nuclear winter..
Or in a slightly different scenario... after alien life has completed the invasion of earth... i'll be up on the ship, doing whatever menial labor they figure they can wring out of me before it is more energy-efficient to eliminate me... and they'll be asking me questions about why my species is so stupid.. why we were so easy to conquer.
In either case. I'll have to stare at my feet. I'll have to muster up the courage to tell them that lots of ostensibly intelligent humans...spent 25 fucking years arguing about PCs vs. Macs.
I don't think anyone is suggesting this is a good idea for all parents and all kids. Certainly the parents that want daycare are not going to make good primary educators.
The other trap you fall into is setting a false bar for alternative-school arrangements. You make it sound like there is some great risk of unschooled children turning out stupid or lazy. I have some interesting news for you: the public system has those outcomes squared away nicely for lots of kids.
I don't know that there is comprehensive data on unschooled children, but of course, homeschooled children as a group utterly devastate publicly schooled chidlren on every mechanism anyone has thought of to measure "educated". It doesn't matter what explanation you have for that [i.e. its selection bias, because only smart kids and involved parents will homeschool -- so what?]-- the point is that we're getting fantastic educational outcomes with homeschooled kids.
I also think you have some strange ideas about "qualified". I was paying attention in college to who the elementary education majors were. Lots of them were working on the Mrs. Degree, with a specialization in horizontal refreshment [just like lots of other people at state universities]. In my own K-12 education, I had a highschool physics teacher that didn't know calculus. I'll let you surmise what role I played as a freshmen in the senior-year computer programming course I sat in.
Finally, on the heels of my earlier comment about the outstanding performance of homeschooled children: the other interesting thing is that in the majority of US homeschool families, the typical primary home educator is the stay-at-home wife/mother who _never completed a 4 year college degree_, and the typical homeschooled family makes a below-average household income [it may have been median as opposed to mean -- I don't quite recall].
So there you have it -- women that never went to college are turning out smarter kids than the system full of graduate-level educated "experts", and it's not because they're exclusively from wealthy families.
The homeschooling movement basically says this: "we don't think traditional school settings are optimal for our situation", and the unschooling movement goes one step further by saying "we don't think rigorously defined curicula, steadfast times/locations, etc are optimal for our situation".
In both cases, you've got parents trying to figure out what's optimal for the only children that matter -- their own. And that constant investment and tailoring of the experience is what lets "below average" educators create above-average outcomes.
I've never heard an opposition to homeschooling that didn't boil down to statism. I'm not sold on unschooing for my own situation, but I'm currently unwilling to criticize it as a technique, especially in light of the miserable bar that many publicly schooled children are unable to meet -- intellectually, socially, and perhaps most importantly, civicly.
Every +5 post in ths whole conversation is some technocrat/policywonk/statist mantra.
Here's the problem: Poor children in China want to _eat_ more than they want to have the same level of water purity as we have in the US. They want to make $1 day at a sweatshop more than they wany to make $1 day as a __child prostitute__.
What good is a clean environment and an empty stomach? What good is a 35 hr work week when there are no jobs?
A clean environment comes _after_ enough of the people in your society have stable food, living, and other basic needs met. When people have some basic sense of security, they start to think about other things they might like: vacations, democracy, cleaner water, better air, grass, parks, blah blah blah.
The point is this: if you told some african bushman to stop hunting lions because it was destroying the environment, hopefully he'd spear you in the face and eat your organs, becaues at least that way you'd be providing him some value. At least with the latter approach he gets to eat dinner.
Mutual Advantage makes everyone better. Otherwise one of the parties wouldn't agree to the deal.
Incidientally: countries with extremem poverty tend to have overbearing governments, and where one sees authoritarianism, one sees the worst environmental disasters in human history (i.e. USSR). The best way to fix the environment in China is to make the majority of Chinese people affluent.
Slashdot Mirror
let me see if i understand:
when the federal government says that there should be one interstate system that covers the entire US, with one set of rules and laws... that's progress.
when Microsoft says that everyone in America ought to have a computer on their desk, and that computer should be running MS software.... that's evil.
I think that the domination of the personal and business computer industry during the 80s and 90s by Microsoft did more good for the average man and put more money in _everyones_ pockets than the US interstate system. That's a conjecture, you can agree or disagree if you like. But it's hard for me to view the actions and results of Microsoft as anything other than spectacular.
Microsoft acheived what it did without the coercive force of the state. It was therefore not evil, because everyone was a willing party.
It is a strange definition of "evil" that reads "most people didn't choose the way I wanted them to"
Read the chapter [by Alan Greenspan, no less] on Anti-trust in Ayn Rand's compendium, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal".
The law of anti-trust is absolutely and completely arbitrary. By design. Illegal in this context amounts to nothing more than "upset the wrong people".
Remember how everyone loved IBM, until they didn't? Then the darling Microsoft came along and broke the back of IBM's evil ways. Then everyone loved Microsoft for a while [no, really!]. Then MS was making money like gangbusters for a while and before you know it they were too big for peoples comfort level and only 5 years after they officially "got big", they're hauled into court for being too big. Guess who the new darling of the tech industry is, who's building share and weaving its way into your life at every point?
Google.
There is an online flash game called "pandemic". The goal is to design a pathogen that infects and kills the largest number of people possible. You get to spend points on various attributes of how the pathogen behaves -- spreading vectors, infectiousness, and symptoms/effects.
It turns out that the winning strategy is to be completely benign, showing no symptoms whatsoever. Spread very slowly, so as not to cause alarm. Then when you have infected everyone on the planet with a benign, slow moving outbreak, you spend all of your "points" on something like a "causes heart to explode" symptom or similar.
There must be some intrinsic aspect of man whereby he wants to cast aside one master for another master. He rarely considers that he ought not to have any master but himself.
I have no doubt that the Google of today displacing the VZN/AT&T/Whoever of today would be a shortterm win for people.
But for how long? The thing that makes me especially hesitant about giving google any more control over me or my data than they already have is that they are smart enough to know what to do with it. That, and they are happy to cooperate with governments. People are rightly afraid of a government that records and transcribes every single domestic phonecall in the US. People who use google voice are either unafraid or haven't thought of it. So what happens when Uncle Sam sends Google a subpeona? Are they going to be able to credibly say "oh, we don't have that", or even funnier, "no, we can't find it?". Google? The search company? Can't find what we're after?
The scary thing about uncle sam outsourcing NSA-against-its-own-citizens work to Google is just how good Google will be at doing it.
"Illegal" is a construction of the political class, and has no bearing on "right" or "wrong".
The commission of civil disobedience is one mechanism for changing the law. I think those who choose to go down this path understand what they are in for. It is often the case that people have to lean back and think, "should that man really be in jail over this?" before the laws are changed to better reflect the morality of the day.
I don't support breaking the law if it does harm gainst another entity. I try to abide by the non-aggression principle. Let's look at the application of principles in this case:
The "harm" against CoS is that a website received a lot of hits.
The "harm" CoS has done against individuals and humanity is hard to quantify. We don't know how many people have been murdered or allowed to die via negligence under the supervision of CoS, but I think it is safe to assume it is a non-zero number in both cases. I'm not very well educated on CoS and I am fortunate in that no one I know very well is wrapped up with them.
We do know that CoS has abused the law to subvert anonymity and freedom of speech on the internet, and while nothing so severe as death, that is harm and it has been done to you too, whether you realize it or not.
The CoS attacked its critics via copyright law; this is a complete perversion of the law. I'm ashamed of the courts that did not protect these people under whistle-blower or satire type protections. Nobody who was critical of CoS was attempting to profit by re-publishing their protected works, nobody was attempting to derive them of income via the dumping/distribution of their protected works. Rather, the CoS texts were spread so that people can see what a crazy mess of nonsense is really hiding behind all of those hollywood smiles, and what kind of lunatic insanity real humans with families and loved ones are getting caught up in.
I don't feel that protesting in the manner done thus far against CoS is either excessively harmful to them or the initiation of force. I think it is justifiable retaliation against an actor that has abused the protections of the state and perverted the intention of the law, and i think getting the courts and more individuals to realize that is going to have some rought spots -- like a 19 year old going to jail when you'd be hard pressed to figure out which individual he committed an aggressive act against.
I'm glad there are people that are willing to be martyrs for the ideology of freedom in this fight, and a bit ashamed that I am not currently one of them.
I figure that there is a non-zero chance that I could get a legal nasty-gram from CoS about my postings here today [and the number of anonymous posters in this and all other CoS articles on slashdot tends to support the validity of my conerns]. Is my concern irrational or justified? Is it right that I ought to worry -- even a little bit -- about my well-being, for having written any of the words I've written in this article? Does that seem like justice to you?
Correct.
And because I've never died, I also do not carry life insurance of any kind.
Because I've never been raped, I don't pay attention to my surroundings or the people nearby.
Because I've never been hit by another car, I don't wear a seatbelt.
Of course, everything I said above is false.
Even though none of those things have happened to me, they've happened to other people who _are like me_. And as a result, I've modified my behavior and in some cases suffered a monetary loss.
This is what is known as a "chilling effect". A great tragedy befalls a handful of individuals, but all individuals realize it could have just as easily have been them. This causes massive behavioral change on a wide scale.
This is exactly the pscyhology used by terrorism, infact. The goal of terrorists isn't to kill all people or even certain people -- it's to kill enough people to effect behaviorial change on a large popupation.
The goal of Scientology [and the RIAA, and other agents of censorship that have the power of the state behind them] is similar. They know they can't get everyone or even most people. But they don't have to -- getting a few people now and then will persuade many others into changing their behavior.
I haven't done a detailed study, but everytime there is a CoS article on slashdot, a LOT of the comments are posted by Anonymous Coward. Why is that? Why are people unafraid to openly criticize the catholic church -- often with blatantly vulgar remarks, and yet so few are willing to do the same against the CoS?
Fear. Fear is the difference. If the CoS wants to rule its own members via fear, that is lamentable and a great reason not to associate with the CoS. But the CoS wants to rule non-members and specifically CoS antagonists via Fear as well.
I don't think it is unreasonable to despise an organization that has already engaged in activities designed to control me via Fear.
What prevents Stalin the 2nd from happening in the USA? Have we just been lucky to not have anyone that mean be born here? Are Americans just a better judge of character than the Russians?
I'm not so presumptuous to think that Russia is better at making tyrants than we are, or its people are more predisposed to misjudging politicians.
The difference between everywhere else and the USA is that we wrote down a bunch of rules that the government wasn't allowed to break. That way, when our stupid citizens elected tyrants, those tyrants never had any wind in their sails and we didn't "vanish" millions of people for essentially arbitrary reasons [brown people notwithstanding]
The difference is that our government was designed to put the brakes on itself. So when someone proposes that we give the government power or control to do some act that it didn't previously have the power to do, IMO reasonalbe Americans ought to be concerned.
If we get to the point [assuming you don't think we're there yet] where the political class in this country can do whatever they like, what's to stop them? What prevents Stalin the 2nd from coming to power in the USA? Luck? An educated populace? An insightful press and critical media?
The difference between here and "not here" is that here, we don't beleive Stalin has the right to do what Stalin does, and our laws say so. Let's not be in a hurry to denigrate those who question the relaxation of limits on government power.
When I woke up today and used the internet.
Scientology was the first organization I am aware of that successfully forced an internet anonymous email service to dig up and disclose information about its clients. All over copyright claims. I am referring to anon.penet.fi, the famous anonymous remailer we all used in the 90s.
In the early days when nobody cared about what "we" did with the internet, we knew that for every asshole that was up to serious evil, there were 10 smart guys who didn't care what your deal was, but hated assholes and could route around them. There were jackasses, but technology always beats jackasses.
Then the law came, and all of that got a lot harder.
Today we have the ability to make "highly" anonymous network connections but we rely on a small group of very VERY dedicated people to make that possible.. [people with the wherewithal to run TOR exit nodes, for instance].
Those entities [be they CoS or rotten governments] who want to destroy free speech must not be tolerated by us.
I remember my senior year of college when I got a takedown-letter about hosting DeCSS. And you know what? I folded, because I had a good job lined up that required I _not_ be a felon. Freedom of speech lost a little bit and I helped give it away, because a warm bed and a normal life are more convenient than principles and freedom.
Our enemies know that, and they attack the weakest of us not to get rid of one or two, but because of the chilling effect it has on the rest of us. No one can escape the law forever, and thus the law, which is supposed to protect the freedom of one man from the encroachments of another, is used as their tool for enslaving us to their desires.
I'm a fallible man and most of us are. That doesn't mean we don't deserve to hate the entites that continue to attack us by perverting the institutions we designed to protect ourselves.
I congratulate the "moralfags" [as they are called within anonymous] who are fighting back. Sometimes, it comes at a high cost, like with this guy.
The problem of humanity is one of the capture, storage, and application of energy.
Gasoline is a fantastic medium for energy storage: it's a better battery than any battery we know how to cheaply produce and service, and that's why we use it. But the energy capture function for gasoline [getting the energy into the gasoline] sucks. And the energy dispersal/application of gasoline has some environmentalists pretty upset.
Nature gives us many ways to store energy now and release it later. The chemical combustion of gasoline is one such mechanism. The desire of a compressed gas to push forcefully against its container is another such mechanism. The strong nuclear bindig energy is a particulary potent and pervasive mechanism. The specific heat of water is yet another.
The fundamental mechanisms of energy storage have been known about for a long time. Taken as a complete system to let humanity accomplish some goal, we are concerned with how we capture the energy, how much of it we can store [and at what cost], and how easy it is to get it back out in a form condusive to the sort of work we want to do with it.
As technology changes we must continually re-evaluate the end-to-end story for a particular aqcuisition/storage/application energy cycle. We may find that we are willing to tolerate a 100 fold decrease in energy storage performance for a 200 fold increase in acquisition efficiency and a qualitative improvement in application performance.
For instance, if i live in arizona and i have a sterling-engine powered air compressor that pumps my 50G tank to 100psi after 12 hours of sunlight, and this lets me go about 10 miles with no consumption of anything other than sunlight... I'm interested. If i commute 5 miles each way, I can get to work and back using nothing but solar energy. And unlike with PV panels and electrical batteries, a guy with a pipe threading die and a welder could build refueling system in his garage, out of stuff that has zero environmental impact whatsoever.
I think that's cool. I'm obviously playing fast and loose with the numbers. Since the kJ/m^2 of solar radiation is known at gridsquares all over north america, you could actually make some ballpark efficiency guesses about peices of the process and plug in real numbers to my hypothetical example. Even if reality is 1 mile @ 30mph after 8 hrs of sunlight.. that fits _some_ usage profile.
It used to be that every farm in North Dakota [where I live] had a windmill powering the farm. Then they disappeared and became an anachronism paying homage to a bygone era. Now windmills are dotting the countryside again. It didn't get windier here.
What changed?
The physics of energy capture, storage, and dispersion have always been the same; our efficiency and the context of the problem space continue to change. As such we must constantly re-evaluate what we did in the past against the realities of today.
I'm glad you asked. The supreme court has decided [in several cases, i beleive] that the government is under no obligation whatsoever to protect citizens.
The purpose of the state is to define an objective and pre-documented process for what should be done when some individuals are accused of violating the intrinsic god-given rights of other individuals.
In the case of the NOLA disaster, the functions of the state are roughly the following
#1 put God on trial for launching a hurricaine and doing so much property damage
-- however the case is likely to be dismissed due to one of two technicalities
--- either we cannot show that God exists, so there is no defendant
--- if we can show that God exists, we can show that NOLA belongs to him and the destruction of his own property is squarely within his means. The city will graciously drop the trespassing charges against all of the squatters who remained. It remains to be seen if God will be hit with negligence charges due to the # of people hurt while squatting illegally on his property
#2 put anyone else on trial who knowingly misrepresented the suitability of their products or services to someone else
#3 try and convict all of those disgusting animals who were committing gross acts of violence against their neighbors and their neighbors property
I may be forgetting something, but I think that covers it.
For a good explanation of why this is false, and only tends to look true for constrained or limited versions of "socialism", please read "The Road to Serfdom", by FA Hayek.
Here's the short version, in comic strip form:
http://mises.org/books/TRTS/
Hayek wrote his book _prior_ to WW2.
Hayek's main insight was that central economic planning was the key inflection point that lead to absolute totalitarianism. The scandanavian countries tend to shy away from central planned economies and as such seem to have escaped the inevitable descent towards totalitarianism required to implement "the plan".
Problematically for most socialist nations is that they elevate the rights of society to a higher position than the rights of man, but tend to not enumerate either or work to constrain the power of the governors. The US was designed to avoid just such these problems, but we have had generations of reprehensible tyrants in elected [and appointed] office who have been blatantly destroying and ignoring these limitations.
Luckily the US has largely retained the fundamental individual right that most other nations who suppress individuals take away first: the right of a heavily armed citizenry. I desperately hope we in the US will fix our problems without resorting to that most basic of all individual freedoms, but I'm not very optimistic.
consider me a philosophical heretic, but i don't find the omnipotence paradox to be a paradox at all. I think its a false dilemma. It fails to account for the fact that an omnipotent being need not concern itself with satisfying rules within a framework that humans can understand.
To make a weak analogy: suppose I tell you that there are two lines which are parallel, but which also intersect at right angles. The 1st order analysis is that what I've described is paradoxical. But we find precisely this situation when considering two lines of longitude, 90 degrees apart, on the surface of a sphere. At the equator, they are truly parallel. At the poles, they intersect at 90 degree angles.
My math is a bit fuzzy but i beleive a spherical surface is a non-euclidian plane, and so the normal rules do not apply and what would normally be contradictions are not contradictory at all.
I surmise it must be so with a truly omnipotent being: the normal rules don't apply. Infact, I would claim that this is truly the definition of an omnipotent being: the breadth of our comprehension is insufficient to set boundaries around its nature.
This is pretty elementary stuff, religiously.
The Christian God created humans with "free will" (the ability to make choices contrary to what he would most prefer) because he finds it is more satisfying to be loved than to be obeyed.
I have to say that as often as I fantasized about having some kind of a sex-robot-of-servitude growing up, having a real-life human wife that __freely chooses__ me is more satisfying than any of the time I spent alone. I don't think replacing my wife with some kind of compliant automaton would be very fun at all. Infact, early in our marraige my wife made the point when she spent about 24 hours not offering any opinion, not initiating any conversation, and not objecting to anything I said. It sucked.
There are certainly men who expect to exert authoritarian control over their wife or other people they are in relationships with. But I contend that they're missing out.
I'm on T-mobile prepaid and i __love__ it. Yeah, i don't talk much. Verizon doesn't have any kind of cost effective service for customers like me. They lost my business a few years back and it's been wonderful.
I can use any GSM phone i want to, I didn't have to tell t-mobile anything about who i am or how i plan on paying, and i think i pay less in a year than i was paying for 2 months when i had a verizon "share plan" for my wife and I.
Finally -- with google voice [and other number re-direction schemes], the concept of even knowing your mobile number is officially uninteresting. I have been telling people the random southern california phone number i got issued when i bought my SIM card from ebay for a couple years now. Nobody cares what my number is, least of all me. If i want to truly own my number i will abstract my identity from my device, carrier, and location entirely -- like google voice (or skype in, or any other service) lets me do.
Actually I think the reason that homosexuality is a "problematic" sin is that most murders, liars, and theives are willing to concede that all of those things are sinful and can be apologetic about them.
If a man beleives engaging in homosexual acts is just dandy and his church congregation feels that it is sinful, the man is at odds with his church doctrinally, and in their view, he continues to willfully and unrepentantly sin.
There are plenty of fundamentalist churches that welcome homosexuals -- provided that they beleive that they are repressing sinful urges or whatever. They are a by all indications a rare breed, but there are gay men out there who try and live in the tortured margins of beleiving that their religion tells them their desires are wrong.
To be fair, married hetero men by and large still desire, at some level, to nail all kinds of women that aren't their wives, which is naturally "not cool, Jesus-wise". But marraige provides the luxury of a biblically blessed outlet for their compansionship and sexual needs [convenient for them!]
As near as I can figure, in the fundamentalist worldview, assuming there is genetic predisposition towards homosexuality, being homosexual is akin to being born with leprosy or as a kleptomaniac. The dogma seems to be that that these people were born with a hardship that increases their proclivity for sinfulness, but they are required to condemn that temptation and recognize it for what it is.
I go to an evangelical church, btw.
Agreed. It certainly doesn't further the goals of the (Christian) church or the work of (the Christian) God when the _state_ uses compulsion to extract religiously compliant behavior.
If God wanted people to be forced to act a certain way, he would just shoot them with lightning all the time. And when the stupid Isralites long ago kept clammoring for a King to rule over them, God tried to talk them out of it.
God is a libertarian that wants people to voluntarily be socialists :)
Half true, half false.
Christians don't have the authority to "come down" on _anyone_.
However, there are several places in the new testament where male adulterousness, male homosexuality, and at least one spot where female homosexuality are discussed and condemned, either by Paul or Jesus.
A quick search for "new testament homosexuality" will let you read about a variety of interpretations of a variety of new testament passages.
Naturally two groups of people can read the same text, both claim to be experts in translating the original written language, and come to different conclusions.
The question of the sinfulness of homosexuality is important not because it grants or revokes a license to stone gay people, but because if it is infact sinful, those who continue to willfully sin without repentance are condemned by God. There are other more practical and earthly ramifications: those who wilfully sin and refuse to repent are not fit for membership (much less leadership) in the church body.
I went to a state university and don't think I ended up paying anything to go there. My starting salary upon graduation was less than the range you figure a salary needs to be to be "worth it", although now it is more.
I think there is perhaps an unstated assumption here that simply going to an expensive enough university is going to turn a marginal or average person into someone that society values sufficiently to reward with a high salary. I think this is not generally true, although it certainly seems to be the case with Ivy League schools and MBA programs across the country :)
But in general, I think people need to be more realistic in this country about who should be attending universities, for what purpose, and how much that ought to cost. In every state in the US, there is a land grant university that you can _probably_ attend for less than $10k/year, assuming no academic scholarships. I'd further contend that if you don't qualify for a bunch of those scholarships (although I haven't payed attention to the climate on this in over 10 years), you aren't the person "we" are looking for to employ in a technical discipline.
Some of you will say that without a certain institution name next to the degree, the degree is worthless. I guess my response would be that if that is the case, is that really a field you want to work in? Where names and politics count more than results?
Please turn in your libertarian credentials at the desk on your way out.
There is no such thing as a market failure. There is only government failure. Want to know why cell phone services are expensive here? Because if you start your own cell phone company, the FCC puts you in jail.
My contention is that property rights are the justification for the idea that man owns himself. The alternative is that man does not own himself, rather, that he is owned by society.
I think if one considers that man doesn't own himself, then the discussion about the meritousness of homosexual civil unions cannot have any connotation of individual rights; if man is owned by society then he has no rights; he has only the priviledges that society affords him. And thus, who may have what priviledges is a moving target depending on the whims of society.
I think at some level, we agree that man owns himself and "some" property.
Let me attempt to dissuade you from the "means of production" argument. I have been conditioned from experience to immediately associate "means of production" and "democratic ownership" as keywords that indicate socialistic thinking, and tantamount to socialistic thinking is the refutation of the individual [after all, society is superior to the individual, this in essence is the key to socialism]. The illustrative argument here is that suppression of the economic individual for the benefit of society -- undertaken as central economic planning -- must always, without fail lead to totalitarianism. This is the insight of FA Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", and I am not aware of a credible refutation of his basic argument.
But warring ideologies aside, I'd contend that the whole "means of production" line of thinking is inappropriate.
What are the means of production? I would assert that throughout the history of humanity, there has been only one means of production and one avenue of creating wealth or value. And that of course is the ingenuity of the human mind. The soil produces nothing. The factory produces nothing. The hands, ultimately, produce nothing. It is the human mind from which all production, wealth, progress, and value flow. And the key difference is that human ingenuity is [b]unbounded[/b]. This is why wealth is NOT a zero sum game [new ingenuity will always be injected wherever it is not suppressed via coercion].
The key innovation of the free market system and of property ownership is not that it penalizes the many for the benefit of the well-monied or the property owning class. Rather, it reinforces the truth that a man owns himself, and the most valuable possession of man is his intellect, and its output, his ideas.
We infact see that in highly-free socities where there is no coercive agent [be it governance, religion, or private cartels [although these latter two are typically powerless without the collusion of the first]] to suppress man's ability to act upon his intellect, that there is an explosion of wealth creation. Not wealth transfer, but new wealth created wherebefore there was none.
And as such, we also see that unlike continental europe, where the fortune 100 of today might be dominated by the same bloodlines of 100 years ago, that the turnover of wealth through the society and through classes of people is extremely fluid. Many of the richest american companies of today did not exist 50 or in some cases 10 years ago.
Intellect is a beautiful entropy source for society, as the rich of today cannot imbue their offspring with it beyond the know limits of genetics [interesting side discussion: the legality of maintaining nepotism via genetic enhancement].
The equivalence of ingenuity and wealth has done more to combat nepotism than any well-intentioned reformer has ever acheived. And so long as the agents of coerciveness -- governance -- let the intellectual man own himself and his ideas, the dystopia you speak of where the few own the many will not come to pass.
All of this -- all of the value in the history of mankind -- hinge on the ideas of man. Incentivize him to cease thinking at your own peril.
I agree with about 95% of this -- I view homosexual marraige, incestuous marraige, and polyamorous marraige as equivalence classes, and frankly think all of them should be fine.
However, the part where I disagree is as follows:
The effect of legalizing homosexual civil unions is the fan out effect this would have because of regulatory law [or even just convention].
To give you some perspective: i believe that an individual has absolute rights over himself, his home, and his business [collectively, "his property"]. For instance, I take the very unpopular and objectionable view that a resturant owner ought to be able to refuse to serve black people. He's a private actor, it's a private business that he owns, who is anyone to tell him how to run it?
My _preference_ is that for this business owner to be crushed in the marketplace of ideas and dollars, not to have his mind changed at gunpoint [the same gun that is behind every government regulation, law, or edict]
So it's easy to see where I would make the following statement: insurance companies shouldn't be legally required to provide any dependant coverage or benefits to people in unions that they do not approve of. Wedding photographers shouldn't be required to shoot homosexual weddings.
Yet the latter has already resulted in one lawsuit, and the former is certainly on the horizon.
Essentially, federal recognition of homosexual civil unions expands the anti-discrimination laws [or regulatory law, as is more often/ominously the case] to a new group of people. And i am against ALL anti-discrimination laws that affect private citizens operating in a non-government capacity
[quick side note: the _government_ must not do any group-identity politics of any kind. And so if some local official in Alabama wants to deny a business license to a gay man, that official ought to be out of a job. Private business does't get to shoot you, government does, and so i hold it to a higher standard and demand that it be fair and free from malice]
So while i want to agree with you and say that the state shouldn't care who gets married, it currently does, and that furthermore, who it decides is in the "married club" has many ramifications that infringe, via regulation and anti-discrimination statutes, against the rights of individual actors to conduct business according to their convictions. And as such, in today's regulatory and legal climate, I'm not in favor of it.
I don't expect many people to agree with my POV, but presumably you can surmise that it has some rational heritage, derived from my near-absolute reverence for individual property rights.
[Disclaimer: I do not work for/near the xbox team or have any non-public knowledge about what they do or why they do it]
I'd guess the issue is about control of the content and experience.
Once you make it really easy for people to move data in and out of the "closed system" of the console and the playground of the PC, certain types of attacks become possible, and other types of attacks become much, much easier. You might rightly say that that horse has left the barn, but i think it's an issue of bar-setting. I know that it is possible to take the disks out of my old Xbox 1, unlock them, and party to my hearts content on those machines. But as of yet i have not done so, as the time investment / reward ratios haven't been right. The issue of "ease/convenience of compromise" is a legimate one when your goal isn't absolute theoretical security but is instead cloesr to "we can credibly tell our content partners their stuff is pretty safe, and our customer base is dominated by legit paying customers instead of people who are skirting the rules"
You may recall that one of the first successful attacks on the original Xbox was via the action replay device -- which basically let you get savegames on and off of the Xbox. A memory-unit with an SD card that lets you do the same thing represents the same sort of attack vector and/or threat.
Furthremore, Microsoft is attempting (and at least partially succeeding) around building a digital content marketplace on the 360 platform. Making it easy to get content out of that closed system into somewhere without oversight is not a goal. Infact, keeping that content under wraps probably _is_ a goal.
So i'd wager that any 3rd party device that makes it easy to get content in/out of the 360 from the wild west of the PC is going to be discouraged by MS.
The popular wisdom [i.e. speculation] is that MS gets a bunch of revenue from everything except the 360 unit itself:
- software [Xbox has highest attach rate of any current console]
- peripherals [lots of these are MS 1st party and have a wide margin in them]
- and of course Xbox live [it is widely assumed that this service is wildly profitable, even with all the costs involved in keeping it going].
I don't think knocking out 3rd party MU's is to protect the profits of 1st party peripheral business -- i think it's to protect xbox live.
if you RTFA, what you basically see is this
- Xbox LIVE accounts are worth something, and often have CC info embedded in them
- all of the techniques are for getting control of an XBOX live account or DOSing an XBOX live user
- all of the non-DOS techniques are SOCIAL engineering "attacks"
The XBOX Live network is actually pretty solid, with IPsec between endpoints and servers. The successful "attacks" at the network layer are essentially ping-floods or traffic stoppages [i.e. the Halo bugs where you could turn off your cable modem and thus disconnect without killing your ELO ranking].
Finally, regarding the point about market share / attractiveness to hackers: this is stupid.
XBOX Live has more paying customers than any other console gaming network. Looking at # of consoles sold is not the same thing as attractiveness for phishers/scammers.
So, Mod the Article (-1: Epic Fail)
when i am a grandfather, and my grandkids are eating dirt, and WW3 has come and gone, and we're living in caves because they're a reasonable way to avoid nuclear winter..
Or in a slightly different scenario... after alien life has completed the invasion of earth... i'll be up on the ship, doing whatever menial labor they figure they can wring out of me before it is more energy-efficient to eliminate me... and they'll be asking me questions about why my species is so stupid.. why we were so easy to conquer.
In either case. I'll have to stare at my feet. I'll have to muster up the courage to tell them that lots of ostensibly intelligent humans...spent 25 fucking years arguing about PCs vs. Macs.
And then I will slump over and cry.
I don't think anyone is suggesting this is a good idea for all parents and all kids. Certainly the parents that want daycare are not going to make good primary educators.
The other trap you fall into is setting a false bar for alternative-school arrangements. You make it sound like there is some great risk of unschooled children turning out stupid or lazy. I have some interesting news for you: the public system has those outcomes squared away nicely for lots of kids.
I don't know that there is comprehensive data on unschooled children, but of course, homeschooled children as a group utterly devastate publicly schooled chidlren on every mechanism anyone has thought of to measure "educated". It doesn't matter what explanation you have for that [i.e. its selection bias, because only smart kids and involved parents will homeschool -- so what?]-- the point is that we're getting fantastic educational outcomes with homeschooled kids.
I also think you have some strange ideas about "qualified". I was paying attention in college to who the elementary education majors were. Lots of them were working on the Mrs. Degree, with a specialization in horizontal refreshment [just like lots of other people at state universities]. In my own K-12 education, I had a highschool physics teacher that didn't know calculus. I'll let you surmise what role I played as a freshmen in the senior-year computer programming course I sat in.
Finally, on the heels of my earlier comment about the outstanding performance of homeschooled children: the other interesting thing is that in the majority of US homeschool families, the typical primary home educator is the stay-at-home wife/mother who _never completed a 4 year college degree_, and the typical homeschooled family makes a below-average household income [it may have been median as opposed to mean -- I don't quite recall].
So there you have it -- women that never went to college are turning out smarter kids than the system full of graduate-level educated "experts", and it's not because they're exclusively from wealthy families.
The homeschooling movement basically says this: "we don't think traditional school settings are optimal for our situation", and the unschooling movement goes one step further by saying "we don't think rigorously defined curicula, steadfast times/locations, etc are optimal for our situation".
In both cases, you've got parents trying to figure out what's optimal for the only children that matter -- their own. And that constant investment and tailoring of the experience is what lets "below average" educators create above-average outcomes.
I've never heard an opposition to homeschooling that didn't boil down to statism. I'm not sold on unschooing for my own situation, but I'm currently unwilling to criticize it as a technique, especially in light of the miserable bar that many publicly schooled children are unable to meet -- intellectually, socially, and perhaps most importantly, civicly.
*sigh*
Every +5 post in ths whole conversation is some technocrat/policywonk/statist mantra.
Here's the problem: Poor children in China want to _eat_ more than they want to have the same level of water purity as we have in the US. They want to make $1 day at a sweatshop more than they wany to make $1 day as a __child prostitute__.
What good is a clean environment and an empty stomach?
What good is a 35 hr work week when there are no jobs?
A clean environment comes _after_ enough of the people in your society have stable food, living, and other basic needs met. When people have some basic sense of security, they start to think about other things they might like: vacations, democracy, cleaner water, better air, grass, parks, blah blah blah.
The point is this: if you told some african bushman to stop hunting lions because it was destroying the environment, hopefully he'd spear you in the face and eat your organs, becaues at least that way you'd be providing him some value. At least with the latter approach he gets to eat dinner.
Mutual Advantage makes everyone better. Otherwise one of the parties wouldn't agree to the deal.
Incidientally: countries with extremem poverty tend to have overbearing governments, and where one sees authoritarianism, one sees the worst environmental disasters in human history (i.e. USSR). The best way to fix the environment in China is to make the majority of Chinese people affluent.