Unless the frozen parts weren't organs for transplant. They could have been intended for sale to, say, medical schools, for the purpose of dissections.
Good to know that you are possessed of an infinitely objective point of view. I'll be sure to ask you your omniscient opinion any time I have some sort of ethical or philosophical question; surely a man who knows what everyone else in human history has or has not experienced and why they believe or disbelieve in any number of things must qualify as a prophet of some sort.
In all seriousness, what I don't get is how this tripe gets modded +4 informative. Unless you were informing us that you're a condescending prick who hasn't the good sense to keep his closed-mindedness to himself; you've certainly made that apparent.
None. What gave you the impression that I feel astrology is not a legitimate religious belief. That said, it's common knowledge that the people who write astrology columns for periodicals are completely full of shit and simply make things up without any real regard for the craft. I can make up plausible Biblical passages, complete with book and line citations, but doing so doesn't make me a Christian cleric of any sort, it just makes me an asshole.
It would be far more accurate to say that I believe all religions to be at least partially true than to say I believe any one is all the way there. Practitioners and believers of astrology are not devoid of insight, they simply express it in a way that is anathema to the "more traditional" western religions and is far more unanimously maligned.
"I think Felten and Appel could influence some decision-makers by going to them personally and explain why third party review is a good thing and why they shouldn't put the engine of democracy into the hands of someone who prevents the governed people from understanding what is done with it."
Nice. I see you want to invoke the obvious solution effect of common decency. However, I don't think it will be effective, and here's why: the decision makers are the ones who directly benefit from Sequoia being a bunch of corrupt hacks. It would be a wonderful thing if our political system were to actually operate in an open, fair manner, devoid of cronyism or corruption, but we've been complacent for so long that they've actually managed to enshrine such bad behaviors into law.
The problem is that the believers DO have some evidence: they have observed that whatever they believe in works (in some sense, often the way that it works is that it adds some sort of meaning to their life or puts them at ease in some way). if you want to call them idiots, the burden of proof is one you to prove that they have observed incorrectly.
The problem is that we see these same sets of circumstances arriving in virtually every sector, and making these laws is completely contrary to free market economics. Capitalism makes some fundamental assumptions about how things work that are simply untrue, particularly about the values it assumes to be either infinite or zero, such as consumer population, work force, competition, supply of natural resources*, barriers to entry, consumer awareness and collusion. The fact that all of these things are limited, and more importantly are intrinsically connected, is completely contrary to classical free market theory.
*The "scarce resources" line refers to the limited availability of resources at any given time, but it is assumed that there will always be at least an equivalent scarceness (and therefore an equivalent supply), and capitalism has a great deal of trouble dealing with the notion that we could simply run out of something on a global scale.
I think it's a sign that capitalism is deeply and critically flawed that things are turning out the way they are. It's not a good sign for the free market that we have to resort to socialism in order to restore basic economic and consumer freedoms.
It's a sinking ship you cling to, just in case you hadn't noticed.
Easy, because they have a culture which prevents massive reductions to what the majority earns for the benefit of a tiny fraction of the ultra-wealthy, their economy isn't going down the shitter do to nobody being able to make any money except that same tiny fraction who don't need it because they already have so much they can't even spend it.
Step 1: fire half of the worker drones and slash the pay for the rest to increase your bottom line. Step 2: ??? Step 3: PROFIT... Hey, why isn't anyone buying our overpriced junk anymore, have they run out of money or something?
Parent never said that Italians care less about the truth, he simply noted that Italian defamation law may not be the same as American defamation law. It is entirely possible that some detail of the Wikipedia entry runs afoul of Italian law regardless of whether or not it is true.
Indeed, some of us think it may even be plausible to say that we're currently still in day 7 since God has not seen fit to start creating new things again.
IANAC, though I have picked up a great deal of, and somewhat agree with, Judeo-Christian theology.
It's great, except for the fact that there are, literally, hundreds of millions worth of people who hold copyrights on an essentially infinite number of things, and that this system would a) require that each and every one of these things be declared and a value given or immediate release to the public be made on everything from term papers (most students retain the rights to these, although many schools place contractual restrictions on them) to snapshots to grocery lists, and that the sheer apparatus for actual enforcement is completely unmanageable and b) completely destroy self and independent-publishers for all media, forcing them to either pay taxes they cannot afford or sell IP that they have sunk a great deal of effort and time into that they must completely leave behind (imagine the harm that could be done to a writer who uses regular characters in multiple stories!) even before it may have come into its full value.
It's a good idea, just completely unworkable and FAR more hurtful to minor copyright holders who typically don't cause problems anyway than to the big guys who are the intended targets.
Many places have widespread gun ownership and do not share our gun culture (see: Switzerland).
Furthermore, asserting that a cultural norm of using firearms against other people will not result in people using guns on one another is just outwardly silly. Tell everyone that shooting people is cool (which we most certainly do) and it stands to reason that people will actually do it.
MSFT doesn't want to do that, though, because buying that much stock in a company will make the price skyrocket well past any exorbitant offer they could make to the board. In other words, these same pension funds that are currently suing would ALSO start buying up Yahoo! stock at any cost with the express intention of selling it to Microsoft later for an exponentially higher cost.
Hostile takeovers can be done to relatively small companies that nobody pays much attention to provided that they are done quickly and without any forewarning. Yahoo! is not small, it's not ignored, buying that much stock would take too long, and everybody already knows that Microsoft wants to buy them out.
See, I read it a different way altogether: the hacker was neither an employee nor a friend of an employee at the firm, and therefore [i]could not have committed insider trading[/i]. Keep in mind that the decision in question applied only to the SEC's attempt to confiscate his money for that particular crime, which he was technically unable to commit, but not to any other financial or computer crimes he may have committed. The FBI and Secret service will almost certainly find a way to confiscate everything he owns. It also does nothing to shield him from the company suing for damages related to the security breech, although they only get a crack after the agencies mentioned earlier, so there's a good chance they couldn't get anything even if they tried.
The point being that, while he clearly had solid and profitable information, he obtained it in a way that, theoretically, any outsider could have and that did not fit the definition of insider trading as currently used. He also couldn't have known if, perhaps, he had accidentally found an inaccurate draft report or if the press conference wherein the report was to be released would be delayed.
I can see that [b]you're[/b] not affiliated with one, so does that make you wrong? OH GOD THE PARADOX IS EATING MY BRAIN!
I do wonder if this applies only to universities, however. Does it apply to schools which offer bachelor's degrees, but do not offer post-graduate programs? How about community/junior colleges which only offer associate's degrees? High schools? I would posit that the faculty at all of those institutions are also educators, and that both they and the students are in equal need of research material and scholarly publications (particularly since two of them are prerequisites for a graduate degree). Where do we draw the line? What about alumni, once graduated are they no longer allowed to see this information?
You do understand that such questions are one of the primary reasons that civil courts exist, right?
As a matter of fact, I would imagine that there is already a pretty solid answer to this scenario, though I don't know what it is off-hand.
Re:Yes, but it's not always simple
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As another student of ethics (although my my course in religious ethics was extremely one-sided, I've taken intro to ethics and am currently taking an environmental ethics course), I agree completely. One of our biggest problems as a society is that we overwhelmingly tend toward dogmatism, and dogmatism is a Bad Thing no matter what side you're on because it prevents everyone involved from actually thinking or coming to rational decisions; stem cells are a great example of everybody involved simply failing to listen at all, choosing instead to call each other baby-killers or idiots respectively (and not respectfully), and both sides have done a great disservice to their cause by letting it come to that.
The key is (as parent I'm sure already knows) is to ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT IT. On virtually every issue, two moral, ethical individuals can come to well reasoned and ethically defensible positions which are completely opposed to one another, and neither of them actually has to be wrong; but if they are both honest, then they could have a serious and possibly even productive discussion about what can be done to make both of them happy. A symptom of our culture of dogmatism is that the word "compromise" has become a synonym for "selling out" or "giving up", and that politicians and activists receive criticism if they actually do it.
When I installed XP 64, I was told by numerous people that I would have headaches and incompatibilities as well. Oddly enough, my only headache is with an el cheapo wireless card that has a very non-standard driver installer, and I have solved it by simply running a cable; incidentally, this is the first device I have encountered which actually works better and more reliably with a simpler and more straightforward driver install in Linux (I dual-boot Ubuntu) than in Windows.
I have yet to encounter a single program that will not work completely or has any particular performance issues.
I guess it's just another one of those software issues I am magically immune to, like Firefox's memory leak or OpenOffice's incompatibility.
Reasonably serious. Remember the 2000 elections when the big deal the day after was how confusing and unclear Florida's ballots were in many jurisdictions? Remember how Pat Buchanan managed to win in some communities that were primarily made up of Jewish retirees from the North (a traditionally liberal demographic, and certainly not the types to vote for somebody who is openly anti-semitic)?
So you know, the voting process that you (and I) described is exactly how voting works here in Massachusetts as well, right down to the felt-tipped markers. The fact that other places would, and apparently do, operate their elections in different AND fundamentally flawed ways is just shocking to me.
At the very least I feel that if people are to cast directly electronic votes, that the machines should then print a paper ballot which the voter can (and should) inspect for accuracy before placing it into a secure storage for later auditing.
I've got an even better one for stamping out abuse... use paper ballots designed such that each potential vote is listed on one line with a hollow oval at the far end, then have each voter fill in the appropriate dot with a provided pen and run the ballots through a machine designed to read such ballots and compile the results as appropriate.
You know, the same way that many institutions grade multiple choice exams.
The best part is that this is not only comprised entirely of existing technology, but that it is already how at least one state does things, demonstrating that the methodology works just fine. It's how I voted just yesterday.
It's completely obscene that ballot design has become so convoluted and messy that people can reasonably cast an incorrect vote, and it's just stupid to leave yourself without any means for a manual recount.
Slashdot Mirror
O RLY? I 'ardly know 'er! XKCD
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=five_shitty_moviesTom Clancy can be plenty formulaic all by himself.
Unless the frozen parts weren't organs for transplant. They could have been intended for sale to, say, medical schools, for the purpose of dissections.
Poor example, O RLY was never funny.
Good to know that you are possessed of an infinitely objective point of view. I'll be sure to ask you your omniscient opinion any time I have some sort of ethical or philosophical question; surely a man who knows what everyone else in human history has or has not experienced and why they believe or disbelieve in any number of things must qualify as a prophet of some sort.
In all seriousness, what I don't get is how this tripe gets modded +4 informative. Unless you were informing us that you're a condescending prick who hasn't the good sense to keep his closed-mindedness to himself; you've certainly made that apparent.
None. What gave you the impression that I feel astrology is not a legitimate religious belief. That said, it's common knowledge that the people who write astrology columns for periodicals are completely full of shit and simply make things up without any real regard for the craft. I can make up plausible Biblical passages, complete with book and line citations, but doing so doesn't make me a Christian cleric of any sort, it just makes me an asshole.
It would be far more accurate to say that I believe all religions to be at least partially true than to say I believe any one is all the way there. Practitioners and believers of astrology are not devoid of insight, they simply express it in a way that is anathema to the "more traditional" western religions and is far more unanimously maligned.
"I think Felten and Appel could influence some decision-makers by going to them personally and explain why third party review is a good thing and why they shouldn't put the engine of democracy into the hands of someone who prevents the governed people from understanding what is done with it."
Nice. I see you want to invoke the obvious solution effect of common decency. However, I don't think it will be effective, and here's why: the decision makers are the ones who directly benefit from Sequoia being a bunch of corrupt hacks. It would be a wonderful thing if our political system were to actually operate in an open, fair manner, devoid of cronyism or corruption, but we've been complacent for so long that they've actually managed to enshrine such bad behaviors into law.
The problem is that the believers DO have some evidence: they have observed that whatever they believe in works (in some sense, often the way that it works is that it adds some sort of meaning to their life or puts them at ease in some way). if you want to call them idiots, the burden of proof is one you to prove that they have observed incorrectly.
Thank you. I needed my daily dose of Sane after a long day working in retail.
The problem is that we see these same sets of circumstances arriving in virtually every sector, and making these laws is completely contrary to free market economics. Capitalism makes some fundamental assumptions about how things work that are simply untrue, particularly about the values it assumes to be either infinite or zero, such as consumer population, work force, competition, supply of natural resources*, barriers to entry, consumer awareness and collusion. The fact that all of these things are limited, and more importantly are intrinsically connected, is completely contrary to classical free market theory.
*The "scarce resources" line refers to the limited availability of resources at any given time, but it is assumed that there will always be at least an equivalent scarceness (and therefore an equivalent supply), and capitalism has a great deal of trouble dealing with the notion that we could simply run out of something on a global scale.
(Score:-1, Insightful)
You just don't see that one everyday.
I think it's a sign that capitalism is deeply and critically flawed that things are turning out the way they are. It's not a good sign for the free market that we have to resort to socialism in order to restore basic economic and consumer freedoms.
It's a sinking ship you cling to, just in case you hadn't noticed.
Easy, because they have a culture which prevents massive reductions to what the majority earns for the benefit of a tiny fraction of the ultra-wealthy, their economy isn't going down the shitter do to nobody being able to make any money except that same tiny fraction who don't need it because they already have so much they can't even spend it.
Step 1: fire half of the worker drones and slash the pay for the rest to increase your bottom line.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: PROFIT... Hey, why isn't anyone buying our overpriced junk anymore, have they run out of money or something?
Parent never said that Italians care less about the truth, he simply noted that Italian defamation law may not be the same as American defamation law. It is entirely possible that some detail of the Wikipedia entry runs afoul of Italian law regardless of whether or not it is true.
Indeed, some of us think it may even be plausible to say that we're currently still in day 7 since God has not seen fit to start creating new things again.
IANAC, though I have picked up a great deal of, and somewhat agree with, Judeo-Christian theology.
It's great, except for the fact that there are, literally, hundreds of millions worth of people who hold copyrights on an essentially infinite number of things, and that this system would a) require that each and every one of these things be declared and a value given or immediate release to the public be made on everything from term papers (most students retain the rights to these, although many schools place contractual restrictions on them) to snapshots to grocery lists, and that the sheer apparatus for actual enforcement is completely unmanageable and b) completely destroy self and independent-publishers for all media, forcing them to either pay taxes they cannot afford or sell IP that they have sunk a great deal of effort and time into that they must completely leave behind (imagine the harm that could be done to a writer who uses regular characters in multiple stories!) even before it may have come into its full value.
It's a good idea, just completely unworkable and FAR more hurtful to minor copyright holders who typically don't cause problems anyway than to the big guys who are the intended targets.
ATTN: Gun owners
gun culture != gun ownership
Many places have widespread gun ownership and do not share our gun culture (see: Switzerland).
Furthermore, asserting that a cultural norm of using firearms against other people will not result in people using guns on one another is just outwardly silly. Tell everyone that shooting people is cool (which we most certainly do) and it stands to reason that people will actually do it.
MSFT doesn't want to do that, though, because buying that much stock in a company will make the price skyrocket well past any exorbitant offer they could make to the board. In other words, these same pension funds that are currently suing would ALSO start buying up Yahoo! stock at any cost with the express intention of selling it to Microsoft later for an exponentially higher cost.
Hostile takeovers can be done to relatively small companies that nobody pays much attention to provided that they are done quickly and without any forewarning. Yahoo! is not small, it's not ignored, buying that much stock would take too long, and everybody already knows that Microsoft wants to buy them out.
See, I read it a different way altogether: the hacker was neither an employee nor a friend of an employee at the firm, and therefore [i]could not have committed insider trading[/i]. Keep in mind that the decision in question applied only to the SEC's attempt to confiscate his money for that particular crime, which he was technically unable to commit, but not to any other financial or computer crimes he may have committed. The FBI and Secret service will almost certainly find a way to confiscate everything he owns. It also does nothing to shield him from the company suing for damages related to the security breech, although they only get a crack after the agencies mentioned earlier, so there's a good chance they couldn't get anything even if they tried.
The point being that, while he clearly had solid and profitable information, he obtained it in a way that, theoretically, any outsider could have and that did not fit the definition of insider trading as currently used. He also couldn't have known if, perhaps, he had accidentally found an inaccurate draft report or if the press conference wherein the report was to be released would be delayed.
I can see that [b]you're[/b] not affiliated with one, so does that make you wrong? OH GOD THE PARADOX IS EATING MY BRAIN!
I do wonder if this applies only to universities, however. Does it apply to schools which offer bachelor's degrees, but do not offer post-graduate programs? How about community/junior colleges which only offer associate's degrees? High schools? I would posit that the faculty at all of those institutions are also educators, and that both they and the students are in equal need of research material and scholarly publications (particularly since two of them are prerequisites for a graduate degree). Where do we draw the line? What about alumni, once graduated are they no longer allowed to see this information?
You do understand that such questions are one of the primary reasons that civil courts exist, right?
As a matter of fact, I would imagine that there is already a pretty solid answer to this scenario, though I don't know what it is off-hand.
As another student of ethics (although my my course in religious ethics was extremely one-sided, I've taken intro to ethics and am currently taking an environmental ethics course), I agree completely. One of our biggest problems as a society is that we overwhelmingly tend toward dogmatism, and dogmatism is a Bad Thing no matter what side you're on because it prevents everyone involved from actually thinking or coming to rational decisions; stem cells are a great example of everybody involved simply failing to listen at all, choosing instead to call each other baby-killers or idiots respectively (and not respectfully), and both sides have done a great disservice to their cause by letting it come to that.
The key is (as parent I'm sure already knows) is to ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT IT. On virtually every issue, two moral, ethical individuals can come to well reasoned and ethically defensible positions which are completely opposed to one another, and neither of them actually has to be wrong; but if they are both honest, then they could have a serious and possibly even productive discussion about what can be done to make both of them happy. A symptom of our culture of dogmatism is that the word "compromise" has become a synonym for "selling out" or "giving up", and that politicians and activists receive criticism if they actually do it.
When I installed XP 64, I was told by numerous people that I would have headaches and incompatibilities as well. Oddly enough, my only headache is with an el cheapo wireless card that has a very non-standard driver installer, and I have solved it by simply running a cable; incidentally, this is the first device I have encountered which actually works better and more reliably with a simpler and more straightforward driver install in Linux (I dual-boot Ubuntu) than in Windows.
I have yet to encounter a single program that will not work completely or has any particular performance issues.
I guess it's just another one of those software issues I am magically immune to, like Firefox's memory leak or OpenOffice's incompatibility.
Reasonably serious. Remember the 2000 elections when the big deal the day after was how confusing and unclear Florida's ballots were in many jurisdictions? Remember how Pat Buchanan managed to win in some communities that were primarily made up of Jewish retirees from the North (a traditionally liberal demographic, and certainly not the types to vote for somebody who is openly anti-semitic)?
So you know, the voting process that you (and I) described is exactly how voting works here in Massachusetts as well, right down to the felt-tipped markers. The fact that other places would, and apparently do, operate their elections in different AND fundamentally flawed ways is just shocking to me.
At the very least I feel that if people are to cast directly electronic votes, that the machines should then print a paper ballot which the voter can (and should) inspect for accuracy before placing it into a secure storage for later auditing.
I've got an even better one for stamping out abuse... use paper ballots designed such that each potential vote is listed on one line with a hollow oval at the far end, then have each voter fill in the appropriate dot with a provided pen and run the ballots through a machine designed to read such ballots and compile the results as appropriate.
You know, the same way that many institutions grade multiple choice exams.
The best part is that this is not only comprised entirely of existing technology, but that it is already how at least one state does things, demonstrating that the methodology works just fine. It's how I voted just yesterday.
It's completely obscene that ballot design has become so convoluted and messy that people can reasonably cast an incorrect vote, and it's just stupid to leave yourself without any means for a manual recount.