The internet is just a way for people to talk to each other. If you censor "the internet", it is the same as censoring what you can speak to another person.
And, guess what, governments do place limits on what you can speak to another person. They can limit speech that creates immediate danger (the "fire!" in a crowded theater scenario), they can limit false, defamatory speech (libel and slander). Most of those rules are adopted by state and local governments, which have jurisdiction over most cases. The internet, given its character, arguably is, at least in some cases, within the area subject to federal jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause in the way that, say, what you do on the street wouldn't be.
There are such things as reasonable limits on what people can say without legal consequences. Its not outrageous to suggest that that is just as true on the internet as elsewhere.
Which commentators, pundits and so on? Left wing, right wing, balanced?
Right wing, mostly. See the links below.
If you actually had evidence of this, it would be a huge story.
Indeed, it hasbeen big news when evidence came to light concerning the programs under which the Bush Administration, including the DoD, was paying pundits and news analysts to promote administration programs, or otherwise buying the news.
But you don't.
If GP didn't (which I suspect is not the case), the web certainly does, including evidence directly from the horse's mouth at the DoD link above.
So you're nothing but a mindless droning troll.
I would be careful throwing around insults like that, especially when you clearly don't know much about the subject and are just assuming that the person to whom you are responding to is wrong because of your own ignorance.
Without an aural warning, people will be killed by electric cars.
Fairly large numbers of people are killed by internal combustion cars, even with all the noise they make; anything that addresses that will also address the safety of quieter cars, and given that for the foreseeable future cars that usually move with an engine running are going to far more common than those that don't, will probably provide vastly more public benefit for the same amount of effort.
wonder if CA will try to pass a law making these jets have a noise generator so that the blind can hear them coming (you know like their trying to do with eletric cars)
CA is not "trying" pass a law that would make electric cars have noise generators (it doesn't even makes sense to talk about a state "trying" to pass a law: an interest group might lobby a state for a law, but that's not the state trying anything.)
California rejected (the legislature passed and the governor, citing that the issue was appropriately handled at the federal level, vetoed) a bill that would create a study to committee to determine what the sound requirements were for the safety of the blind around quite vehicles and to investigate means of meeting those requirements.
Presumably, the findings on this could have been used in the future to support legislative proposals for requirements, if both sound types levels which provided notable safety benefits and reasonable means of meeting those were determined; they just as easily could have provided fuel to support the argument that the necessary sound levels would have other adverse effect, be unreasonably expensive, etc., against such a future proposal.
It's true that in many places, in the East Coast and in California, advocates for the blind have lobbied for requirements for noise generators (not just study of the issue), but that's very different from any particular state passing (or even "trying to pass") a law requiring that.
And I see you're trying to be cute with anti-corporate handwaving, but [citation needed].
This isn't Wikipedia. If you care, you can look up corporate vs. individual tax rates yourself. Most business forms that don't pay corporate tax pay individual tax, either as a single individual (sole proprietorship) or as pass-through entities for several individuals (partnerships, etc.).
When you ask people (at least the western folks) about where their soul is they will point to a different part of their body (the chest) than when you ask them about the consciousness or mind (the head).
Most people I know that actually believe in the existence of souls regard a question about the physical location of a soul as simple nonsense, like asking about the square root of love or something similar.
If in our culture, the soul was a synonym for consciousness, the loss of one's soul or the lack of a soul would require the lack of or loss of consciousness...
Usually, these are viewed as being (in the case of demons) or being animated by (in the case of vampires and other undead) a different force (such as a malign spirit) that is either a soul or generally equivalent to one, but not (in the case of undead) the soul that previously inhabited the body.
Sometimes, however, they are viewed as being animated by the same soul, but that that soul is twisted or tortured by the events that produced the death of the body or which prevented the soul from going wherever it normally would go when that occurred.
Well, even in a pure recount it's possible that machine-unreadable ballots may occur with slightly higher numbers in districts that lean one way or another.
Actually, machine unreadable ballots occur in significantly higher numbers in precincts that lean Democratic, particularly in heavily minority districts; this is pretty much true nationwide.
Notice how the WA governor race before, the Franken/Coleman race, and now this race, with each recount the vote gets closer and closer, until the Democrats decide there's no more need for recounts (when THEIR side wins).
The only of those races in which a recount was completed is the WA governor's race. The progressive tightening of this race and the Franken/Coleman race in which a recount was triggered (but has not been done yet) was the completion of the first count. Election night returns -- even that include 100% of precincts -- do not usually include 100% of the vote from each of those precincts. Various ballots (provisional ballots, absentee ballots that arrive on the day of the election, possibly early/absentee ballots in general depending on local procedures) require additional verification that prevents them from being counted until after the in-person ballots cast on election day. For a number of reasons, its not uncommon for these ballots to be more favorable to Democrats in general, and those trends may have been reinforced in this election where there were lots of new Democratic voters and a big effort by the Obama campaign to get people to vote early, so the initial election night count (which isn't a full count of all ballots cast in the election) of many races was less favorable to Democrats than the full count.
Not strictly, no. Each state has one Governor and two Senators, so the club of Governors is, in a strictly numerical sense, more exclusive. And, of course, in most states the Governor will have more power over the state government than the Senator has over the federal government. But the federal government does a lot more than most state governments and has a much wider reach, and so, for many, particularly small states, a Senator has a lot more power and influence in the world than the state's Governor.
And, if you want to build national political visibility, than being a Senator offers things that being a Governor, again particularly of a smaller state, doesn't.
I didn't RTFA (of course) but even using Windows, what computer takes 15 minutes to boot?
A computer where worse the business that owns it and directs how it is to be set up has realized that since the worker can't clock in while the system is booting, but is at work and can be given tasks to do that don't involve using the computer, the longer the boot process can be engineered to be, the more free work the business gets the worker to do.
If it truly takes 15 minutes to boot your system then your IT guy should not be getting paid at all.
As long as you aren't getting paid for that time, and your boss finds other things he can make you do while you wait for it to boot, the IT guy is doing an excellent job at protecting the financial interests of your employer. Why wouldn't they pay him for that?
Surely you mean 'quasi-religious', not 'pseudo-religious'.
"Religious", without modifiers, would be fine. "Metaphysical" might be slightly more precise.
Further, the idea of soul is not religious in origin, but philosophical.
Its certainly of religious origin, though its had some development outside of what might be considered religious thoughts by the narrowest possible definition.
It comes to us from Socrates, via Plato.
Certainly, many particular ideas about the soul that have been influential through Christianity are a result of Plato's speculations about the soul being part of the Hellenistic influence on Jewish thought of the period immediately before the Christian era and Christian thought subsequently, but, no, the idea of the soul doesn't originate with Plato. The earliest references to a soul separate from the body are much earlier, and there are also views of the soul which do not necessarily view it as distinct from the body (which certainly is the sense in which Kurzweil interpreted the question, whether it is how the questioner intended it or not) which also predate Plato, and there are many ideas of souls in religion that, whether or not they predate Plato's discussion, are clearly independent of it.
What's preventing Microsoft and open source world from understanding these "sophisticated" attacks and hardening their respective operating systems against them?
The fact that it costs money to do, and money to prove, and the number of customers willing to pay enough more money to buy systems certified at the higher levels isn't enough to justify the cost.
Higher level computer security isn't worth much if any attacker with the resources to penetrate your computer security is also going to have the capacity to bypass your computer security by compromising personnel or non-electronic information. And, even for computers, a supersecure operating system isn't worth much if its got to share data over an less secure network or use less secure applications.
The government could certainly pass a law forcing a cake factory to release its employees (at comapny expense) to work one day in five on road building, teaching or law enforcement.
We're not talking about businesses in general, we're talking about the particular special public benefits granted to corporations.
Now, I know you are trying to be cute and say that taxes are the payment here, but the problem with that argument is that, except for corporations small enough to hit by minimum taxes, the taxation of corporations isn't generally greater (to provide a payment for public benefits like liability shields, etc., that are provided to them).
Saying that companies are there only to serve their shareholders, that is, only to make profits, is just a justification for all sorts of dirty business practices.
Unfortunately, if you look at most corporate charters, that is exactly what most companies do, in theory, exist today to do.
Certainly, there is an argument that the benefits granted at public expense to corporations should be given in exchange for some enforceable requirement to serve some public purpose, but that's certainly not the way the law works now. Its simply a handout in the hope that corporations will, in the aggregate, just happen to randomly do public good with the public benefit they are granted.
Sort of like the giant bank bailout, but with even less controls.
I dunno. "X is observed to exist; therefore, any complete theory of the universe must be consistent with the observation that X exists within it" would seem to be a valid example of the most fundamental process of science.
And the anthropic principle is just that, for X="We exist".
I'm just appalled that this is still the number one scientific observation being relentlessly abused and perverted by delusional people
Its not a scientific observation. Again, its a principle of reasoning, and observations, anyhow, aren't scientific (what you do with them, and perhaps how you plan to gather new ones, may be, but the observation involved in the anthropic principle—"we exist"—is not an observation derived from any kind of structured inquiry.)
And I'm not sure I understand why you'd want to get upset about its status as "one scientific observation being relentlessly abused and perverted by delusional people", even if it was a "scientific observation" and the "number one" of those "being relentlessly abused and perverted by delusional people".
I mean, does it matter which observation, principle, theory, or other thing originating in the domain of science is the most abused? Isn't the problem, insofar as there is one, that any are abused?
This new movie may not be the return to former glory that many were hoping for, but at least it's a departure from the path towards obscurity that the series has been headed down for so many years now.
Uh, what series? The franchise has been completely dead, in terms of new film or TV episodes, for several years. The last series, Enterprise, went off the air in 2005. It hasn't been "headed" anywhere.
(And, honestly, its probably ready for a decade or two off. A franchise that has good quality material but isn't making more is better than a franchise that once had good quality material but is now pumping out garbage, reducing the probability that anyone will ever want to revisit and spin off from the old, quality material.)
The Anthropic Principle in its purest form does nothing but make the observation that our surroundings obviously support lifeforms such as ourselves who in turn are able to make observations about their surroundings.
Actually, no. The "anthropic principle" has always been, from the time that it was coined by Brandon Carter, a rule of reasoning that starts with that observation and then says further that, consequently, any reasoning about the universe ought to take that rather significant observation into account. Both the original form of the Weak Anthropic Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle amount to different versions of that approach (the Weak Anthropic Principle being particular to the point from which we observe, the Strong Anthropic Principle referring to the universe as a whole.) So those are, as the original forms of the principle, what I would call its "purest" forms.
Later "anthropic principles", including Barrow and Tipler's recasting of the Weak and Strong Principles, are not only "less pure", but increasingly less defensible and often more like articles of religious faith, this is particularly true of things like Barrow and Tipler's Final Anthropic Principle ("Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out").
The latest iteration of string theory provides a natural explanation for the anthropic principle. If there are vast numbers of other universes, all with different properties, at least one of them ought to have the right combination of conditions to bring forth stars, planets, and living things
The "parallel universes" explanation of the anthropic principle certainly predates any connection with string theory (and probably predates string theory itself). And its not really an "alternative" to an intelligent designer only in that both are completely untestable speculations that explain nothing; particularly, in the case of the "parallel universes" take on the anthropic principle, it doesn't explain why there are vast numbers of other universes to start with (and, if a theory explains that, it doesn't explain why there is the set of conditions which in turn permit vast numbers of other universes, and so on.)
Really, there may be good reasons to believe in (God, String Theory, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever), but believing in anything as an excuse to get out of the problem of infinite regress that there will always be just one more thing that you need to explain, well, no one has yet found the thing to put there as "first explanation" that doesn't immediately demand an explanation of its own. And, I suspect, they never will.
True, but the number of people who can wield them effectively enough to actually do that is small.... and there's always tactical nuclear weapons for those occasions
Since phasers use antimatter power cells and can be set to overload, they essentially are, in extremis, usable as tactical nuclear* weapons.
(*Actually, not really "nuclear" but "matter-antimatter annihilation", like photon torpedoes, but that's really just one step more extreme.)
But when Hollywood does an adaptation, it generally sucks.
IME, this is no more or less true of comics than it is of recent fiction (general or genre), classic literature, or, heck, beyond adaptations to original screenplays. Its not just comic adaptations that mostly suck.
And I have a problem with anonomously-donated or anonymously-licensed Open Source, because how do you know the anonymous person actually had the right to donate and you won't run into trouble down the line.
How do you know someone who wasn't anonymous had that right, either, unless you've got proof that the identity given is accurate and proof of that identity's rights to the contribution is in question (such as a copyright registration for the contribution)?
Seems to me the biggest advantage of identified contributors (if the identification is sufficient and accurate) is that you've got someone to go to and ask questions (or just point the finger at) if you run into problems down the road, not that you actually, in most cases, can really be assured that there won't be a problem down the road.
technology doesn't fundamentally change communication (whether it be words, pictures, video, or audio).
This is pretty transparently false. How many people can be reached by a single communication, how much latency there is on the channel, how many people can transmit on the channel, the reliability of the channel, the accountability of the channel, and how high the bandwidth is on the channel all make pretty fundamental differences in communication.
It may change the style and method of delivery (the 'channel' and 'code') but the content of what is being communicated does not change.
This, again, is untrue. The content of what is transmitted over (even a scripted) TV channel is different in kind than that transmitted via print -- and that's just for one-sender-many-receiver communications channels without immediacy. Live TV is even more different, and any kind of conferencing technology where the number of potential senders is equal to the number of potential receivers and there is little latency is even more fundamentally different in the content that is distributed and received via the channel.
Slashdot Mirror
And, guess what, governments do place limits on what you can speak to another person. They can limit speech that creates immediate danger (the "fire!" in a crowded theater scenario), they can limit false, defamatory speech (libel and slander). Most of those rules are adopted by state and local governments, which have jurisdiction over most cases. The internet, given its character, arguably is, at least in some cases, within the area subject to federal jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause in the way that, say, what you do on the street wouldn't be.
There are such things as reasonable limits on what people can say without legal consequences. Its not outrageous to suggest that that is just as true on the internet as elsewhere.
Right wing, mostly. See the links below.
Indeed, it has been big news when evidence came to light concerning the programs under which the Bush Administration, including the DoD, was paying pundits and news analysts to promote administration programs, or otherwise buying the news.
If GP didn't (which I suspect is not the case), the web certainly does, including evidence directly from the horse's mouth at the DoD link above.
I would be careful throwing around insults like that, especially when you clearly don't know much about the subject and are just assuming that the person to whom you are responding to is wrong because of your own ignorance.
Fairly large numbers of people are killed by internal combustion cars, even with all the noise they make; anything that addresses that will also address the safety of quieter cars, and given that for the foreseeable future cars that usually move with an engine running are going to far more common than those that don't, will probably provide vastly more public benefit for the same amount of effort.
CA is not "trying" pass a law that would make electric cars have noise generators (it doesn't even makes sense to talk about a state "trying" to pass a law: an interest group might lobby a state for a law, but that's not the state trying anything.)
California rejected (the legislature passed and the governor, citing that the issue was appropriately handled at the federal level, vetoed) a bill that would create a study to committee to determine what the sound requirements were for the safety of the blind around quite vehicles and to investigate means of meeting those requirements.
Presumably, the findings on this could have been used in the future to support legislative proposals for requirements, if both sound types levels which provided notable safety benefits and reasonable means of meeting those were determined; they just as easily could have provided fuel to support the argument that the necessary sound levels would have other adverse effect, be unreasonably expensive, etc., against such a future proposal.
It's true that in many places, in the East Coast and in California, advocates for the blind have lobbied for requirements for noise generators (not just study of the issue), but that's very different from any particular state passing (or even "trying to pass") a law requiring that.
This isn't Wikipedia. If you care, you can look up corporate vs. individual tax rates yourself. Most business forms that don't pay corporate tax pay individual tax, either as a single individual (sole proprietorship) or as pass-through entities for several individuals (partnerships, etc.).
Most people I know that actually believe in the existence of souls regard a question about the physical location of a soul as simple nonsense, like asking about the square root of love or something similar.
Usually, these are viewed as being (in the case of demons) or being animated by (in the case of vampires and other undead) a different force (such as a malign spirit) that is either a soul or generally equivalent to one, but not (in the case of undead) the soul that previously inhabited the body.
Sometimes, however, they are viewed as being animated by the same soul, but that that soul is twisted or tortured by the events that produced the death of the body or which prevented the soul from going wherever it normally would go when that occurred.
Actually, machine unreadable ballots occur in significantly higher numbers in precincts that lean Democratic, particularly in heavily minority districts; this is pretty much true nationwide.
The only of those races in which a recount was completed is the WA governor's race. The progressive tightening of this race and the Franken/Coleman race in which a recount was triggered (but has not been done yet) was the completion of the first count. Election night returns -- even that include 100% of precincts -- do not usually include 100% of the vote from each of those precincts. Various ballots (provisional ballots, absentee ballots that arrive on the day of the election, possibly early/absentee ballots in general depending on local procedures) require additional verification that prevents them from being counted until after the in-person ballots cast on election day. For a number of reasons, its not uncommon for these ballots to be more favorable to Democrats in general, and those trends may have been reinforced in this election where there were lots of new Democratic voters and a big effort by the Obama campaign to get people to vote early, so the initial election night count (which isn't a full count of all ballots cast in the election) of many races was less favorable to Democrats than the full count.
Not strictly, no. Each state has one Governor and two Senators, so the club of Governors is, in a strictly numerical sense, more exclusive. And, of course, in most states the Governor will have more power over the state government than the Senator has over the federal government. But the federal government does a lot more than most state governments and has a much wider reach, and so, for many, particularly small states, a Senator has a lot more power and influence in the world than the state's Governor.
And, if you want to build national political visibility, than being a Senator offers things that being a Governor, again particularly of a smaller state, doesn't.
A computer where worse the business that owns it and directs how it is to be set up has realized that since the worker can't clock in while the system is booting, but is at work and can be given tasks to do that don't involve using the computer, the longer the boot process can be engineered to be, the more free work the business gets the worker to do.
As long as you aren't getting paid for that time, and your boss finds other things he can make you do while you wait for it to boot, the IT guy is doing an excellent job at protecting the financial interests of your employer. Why wouldn't they pay him for that?
"Religious", without modifiers, would be fine. "Metaphysical" might be slightly more precise.
Its certainly of religious origin, though its had some development outside of what might be considered religious thoughts by the narrowest possible definition.
Certainly, many particular ideas about the soul that have been influential through Christianity are a result of Plato's speculations about the soul being part of the Hellenistic influence on Jewish thought of the period immediately before the Christian era and Christian thought subsequently, but, no, the idea of the soul doesn't originate with Plato. The earliest references to a soul separate from the body are much earlier, and there are also views of the soul which do not necessarily view it as distinct from the body (which certainly is the sense in which Kurzweil interpreted the question, whether it is how the questioner intended it or not) which also predate Plato, and there are many ideas of souls in religion that, whether or not they predate Plato's discussion, are clearly independent of it.
FTFS:
The fact that it costs money to do, and money to prove, and the number of customers willing to pay enough more money to buy systems certified at the higher levels isn't enough to justify the cost.
Higher level computer security isn't worth much if any attacker with the resources to penetrate your computer security is also going to have the capacity to bypass your computer security by compromising personnel or non-electronic information. And, even for computers, a supersecure operating system isn't worth much if its got to share data over an less secure network or use less secure applications.
We're not talking about businesses in general, we're talking about the particular special public benefits granted to corporations.
Now, I know you are trying to be cute and say that taxes are the payment here, but the problem with that argument is that, except for corporations small enough to hit by minimum taxes, the taxation of corporations isn't generally greater (to provide a payment for public benefits like liability shields, etc., that are provided to them).
Unfortunately, if you look at most corporate charters, that is exactly what most companies do, in theory, exist today to do.
Certainly, there is an argument that the benefits granted at public expense to corporations should be given in exchange for some enforceable requirement to serve some public purpose, but that's certainly not the way the law works now. Its simply a handout in the hope that corporations will, in the aggregate, just happen to randomly do public good with the public benefit they are granted.
Sort of like the giant bank bailout, but with even less controls.
I dunno. "X is observed to exist; therefore, any complete theory of the universe must be consistent with the observation that X exists within it" would seem to be a valid example of the most fundamental process of science.
And the anthropic principle is just that, for X="We exist".
Its not a scientific observation. Again, its a principle of reasoning, and observations, anyhow, aren't scientific (what you do with them, and perhaps how you plan to gather new ones, may be, but the observation involved in the anthropic principle—"we exist"—is not an observation derived from any kind of structured inquiry.)
And I'm not sure I understand why you'd want to get upset about its status as "one scientific observation being relentlessly abused and perverted by delusional people", even if it was a "scientific observation" and the "number one" of those "being relentlessly abused and perverted by delusional people".
I mean, does it matter which observation, principle, theory, or other thing originating in the domain of science is the most abused? Isn't the problem, insofar as there is one, that any are abused?
Uh, what series? The franchise has been completely dead, in terms of new film or TV episodes, for several years. The last series, Enterprise, went off the air in 2005. It hasn't been "headed" anywhere.
(And, honestly, its probably ready for a decade or two off. A franchise that has good quality material but isn't making more is better than a franchise that once had good quality material but is now pumping out garbage, reducing the probability that anyone will ever want to revisit and spin off from the old, quality material.)
Actually, no. The "anthropic principle" has always been, from the time that it was coined by Brandon Carter, a rule of reasoning that starts with that observation and then says further that, consequently, any reasoning about the universe ought to take that rather significant observation into account. Both the original form of the Weak Anthropic Principle and the Strong Anthropic Principle amount to different versions of that approach (the Weak Anthropic Principle being particular to the point from which we observe, the Strong Anthropic Principle referring to the universe as a whole.) So those are, as the original forms of the principle, what I would call its "purest" forms.
Later "anthropic principles", including Barrow and Tipler's recasting of the Weak and Strong Principles, are not only "less pure", but increasingly less defensible and often more like articles of religious faith, this is particularly true of things like Barrow and Tipler's Final Anthropic Principle ("Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out").
The "parallel universes" explanation of the anthropic principle certainly predates any connection with string theory (and probably predates string theory itself). And its not really an "alternative" to an intelligent designer only in that both are completely untestable speculations that explain nothing; particularly, in the case of the "parallel universes" take on the anthropic principle, it doesn't explain why there are vast numbers of other universes to start with (and, if a theory explains that, it doesn't explain why there is the set of conditions which in turn permit vast numbers of other universes, and so on.)
Really, there may be good reasons to believe in (God, String Theory, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever), but believing in anything as an excuse to get out of the problem of infinite regress that there will always be just one more thing that you need to explain, well, no one has yet found the thing to put there as "first explanation" that doesn't immediately demand an explanation of its own. And, I suspect, they never will.
Since phasers use antimatter power cells and can be set to overload, they essentially are, in extremis, usable as tactical nuclear* weapons.
(*Actually, not really "nuclear" but "matter-antimatter annihilation", like photon torpedoes, but that's really just one step more extreme.)
IME, this is no more or less true of comics than it is of recent fiction (general or genre), classic literature, or, heck, beyond adaptations to original screenplays. Its not just comic adaptations that mostly suck.
How do you know someone who wasn't anonymous had that right, either, unless you've got proof that the identity given is accurate and proof of that identity's rights to the contribution is in question (such as a copyright registration for the contribution)?
Seems to me the biggest advantage of identified contributors (if the identification is sufficient and accurate) is that you've got someone to go to and ask questions (or just point the finger at) if you run into problems down the road, not that you actually, in most cases, can really be assured that there won't be a problem down the road.
This is pretty transparently false. How many people can be reached by a single communication, how much latency there is on the channel, how many people can transmit on the channel, the reliability of the channel, the accountability of the channel, and how high the bandwidth is on the channel all make pretty fundamental differences in communication.
This, again, is untrue. The content of what is transmitted over (even a scripted) TV channel is different in kind than that transmitted via print -- and that's just for one-sender-many-receiver communications channels without immediacy. Live TV is even more different, and any kind of conferencing technology where the number of potential senders is equal to the number of potential receivers and there is little latency is even more fundamentally different in the content that is distributed and received via the channel.