Free speech isn't the right to avoid consequences. Its the right to say what you like without government interference or punishment. Everyone else is free to ridicule you, avoid you, stop buying your products, etc.
Consider the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Red Guards would kill and torture academics they thought were bourgeois, and were nominally not working for the Chinese government, although a clear violation of free speech. This is far from the only example of such behaviour. You can't simply restrict the ban on interference to governments or they will simply get round it by having their agents claim to be independent citizens.
The entire project should be shut down, and started over, taking on board the criticisms that have been levelled at it over the years.
The concept is solid. If it wasn't the thing wouldn't work at all, or certainly not for this long and this successfully. The problem is in the details of how the community functions, or rather fails to function. It has become defensive and territorial, and has established its own POV which lies at the mean of community opinion but is quite libertarian-orientated and US/Western centred compared with the user base (theoretically, everyone).
The fact that this bias is a direct reflection of the founder of Wikipedia (An American libertarian) shows that the system does not function correctly to remove personal prejudice from the content. Despite the vast army of editors who contribute, Wikipedia hasn't gone beyond being a mouthpiece for Walesism.
Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Wales' beliefs are hardly far from the mainstream of techies - who are usually freedom-minded folk but have to by necessity follow a belief system that permits their relatively privileged position in life - however an encyclopaedia isn't a Linux distro. It has to be directed to everyone and thus it can't afford to get bogged down in the personal opinions of Wales or the techie community.
Nothing I have said here will come as a surprise to Wikipedians, seeing as these issue are mentioned by the project itself. However, my experience as an editor has shown a huge gulf between Wikipedia policy and Wikipedia reality.
As far as I see it, every exception to free speech has a potential to be abused because it requires some public body to dictate what does and does not fall under such exceptions, and such a public body would be a target for corruption by every megalomaniac out there.
Do you know where the phrase 'yelling fire in a crowded theatre' comes from? Its from the trial of a group of socialists distributing pacifist literature during WW1. In that context, the government decided that protesting the war whilst they were trying to recruit was inciting panic in the population.
It is not the speakers responsibility to refrain from yelling 'fire', it is the theatregoers responsibility to not trample other citizens to death at the first unconfirmed sign of danger.
As for credit cards, it is the responsibility of the credit card issuer to ensure that all vendors adequately check the identity of anyone trying to use the card. In real life, they do largely take this responsibility and the people I've known who have been subject to fraud have been reimbursed by the card issuer.
I had previously been under the impression that the structures in biological cells were too large to utilise quantum effects, but this seems to contradict that.
This might merit another look at Roger Penrose's theory that conciousness has a quantum origin, as the main objection to it previously was that there could not be quantum biological effects.
Hate speech is a symptom of free speech, and therefore in a perverse way we should welcome it.
Free speech and anonymous speech are basically the same thing. Free speech is the right to say what you like without consequences, and anonymous speech is the way you avoid consequences.
Liberal economists say a lot of things. For instance, they told Thatcher to fix inflation by reduction the money supply, a strategy that turned out so badly she denied any involvement with it a few years later.
Too far away and too big. Its a question of getting the delta-v as low as possible between the materials you need and your construction site. If the materials are in a rock with little gravity of its own, and both it and the construction site are in LEO the delta-v is miniscule.
I'm actually more interested in the Iron. The price of a metal orbitting the Earth is equal to not only its Earth-bound cost but also the cost of lifting it up there. This puts the value of Apophis through the roof, possibly more value than exists in all the economies on Earth at the present time.
We are developing several strategies to deflect the course of asteroids. If these mature over the next few years before our close encounters with Apophis, we may have the chance of bringing into Earth orbit, providing nearby and easily accessible resources for space construction.
Providing it with enough energy to slow from solar orbit to Earth orbit could be tricky, so I suggest the best way is to deflected in such a way it undergoes aerocapture.
People always seem concerned about the possibility of the rock just smacking into Earth, and think this is a reason not to pursue such a strategy. Tell me, am I being too Lex Luthor about this?
My future mother-in-law was telling me one day how her great-grandfather had moved to Belfast from Scotland to get a job helping build the Titanic.
He was sometimes mocked for his part in building the legendarily failed ship, so he would point out that he was in fact an electrician, and the lights were still on when it sank.
This is kind of inevitable, and IMHO overdue. Monolithic heat sinks and fans the size of jet engine intakes have been a pain in the arse for top of the range gaming machines for years. Also, I don't know about anyone else, but the air cooling of my computer is a depressingly efficient mechanism for sucking dust and fluff into the computer and keeping it there.
So whenever someone points out an event where the actions of the US made people lives much worse somewhere in the world, you have a laugh at their expense.
Agreed. The Beeb, whilst not always repeating government propaganda, is nevertheless a mouthpiece of the status quo, and should be paid for more by those who benefit from that situation. All of these issues of enforcement vanish if you simply add it on to the income tax.
Back in the 80s, when Star Wars was all the rage, the US military was caricatured as read too much science fiction. Now their killer robot has turned against its masters and they are acting surprised, it looks like they are reading too little science fiction.
You seem to have a rather selective memory of the Thatcher era (assuming you even have a memory of it and were alive during that period of course).
Modernising the UK's industries was one of the things they actually did right, getting rid of state subsidised mining was essential because it was costing us more than it was gaining us, harming our economy heavily - this is the same thing holding France's economy back from keeping up with ours nowadays with their farming subsidies.
Watch a documentary called 'the league of gentleman'. Its on youtube but you might have to look for it a while for obvious reasons. The myth of Thatcher as some kind of economic genius who did what had to be done to save our economy is utter bullshit, even by the accounts of her allies at the time.
I know some people like to blame Thatcher still for everything that's wrong in the country but for everything they did wrong, the Falklands and modernisation of UK business and technology paths were the things her goverment did right and it is in fact the British Labour goverment that's was sponging off the groundwork they laid in this respect.
The Falklands war wasn't a success, it was an utter failure to recognise a genuine threat and downsizing the military in the face of it. Had the Argies waited about a year the Navy would've been left in no state to retake the islands.
And our industry wasn't 'modernised' it was crushed for some wacky economic theory. We now lag behind Europe in most technologies and whilst the decline started before Thatcher she if anything hastened it.
With a goverment lack of will to stand up to OFCOM and force it into pushing BT to roll out 21cn, pushing for changes in the industry to rollout fibre to home, the cuts to important physics funding and so on it's clear that our current Labour goverment is technologically illiterate and incompetent.
You can't complain that Labour followed everything Thatcher did (true) and then imply their policies are worse. Reducing public spending on things like science is textbook monetarist policy. Allowing the privatised BT to do what they hell it likes to keep milking its customers is also exactly what the conservatives would do.
Simply not true. I've had UK broadband continuously since 2002 and I have never been prevented from a router. In fact, most ADSL contracts come with a wireless router now anyway.
How about governments paying for infrastructure directly out of taxes, like they are supposed to?
You can say 'ah, but the consumer pays all the taxes' but thats just really fucking dumb. Eventually, everything is paid for by 'the consumer' so that is a completely asinine thing to say. The question is how the payment is structured.
The idea to privatise it came from the discredited market fundamentalists of the Thatcher era, and now its time to undo their foaming-at-the-mouth idealism and get the UK telecoms system back on track.
Make BT a profit-making enterprise has had the quite predictable affect that they've put profit ahead of modernising the IT industry and now we are left with a network that makes mainland Europe piss themselves laughing (I've heard of the prices and bandwidth they can get in Sweden. It makes me cry). Despite being the second largest economy in Europe, we are behind many European countries in terms of IT infrastructure:
I'm not bashing America, but this seems like a local story in science not a global one. By the end of this year we may have found the Higgs Boson, which is a big story.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire project should be shut down, and started over, taking on board the criticisms that have been levelled at it over the years.
The concept is solid. If it wasn't the thing wouldn't work at all, or certainly not for this long and this successfully. The problem is in the details of how the community functions, or rather fails to function. It has become defensive and territorial, and has established its own POV which lies at the mean of community opinion but is quite libertarian-orientated and US/Western centred compared with the user base (theoretically, everyone).
The fact that this bias is a direct reflection of the founder of Wikipedia (An American libertarian) shows that the system does not function correctly to remove personal prejudice from the content. Despite the vast army of editors who contribute, Wikipedia hasn't gone beyond being a mouthpiece for Walesism.
Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Wales' beliefs are hardly far from the mainstream of techies - who are usually freedom-minded folk but have to by necessity follow a belief system that permits their relatively privileged position in life - however an encyclopaedia isn't a Linux distro. It has to be directed to everyone and thus it can't afford to get bogged down in the personal opinions of Wales or the techie community.
Nothing I have said here will come as a surprise to Wikipedians, seeing as these issue are mentioned by the project itself. However, my experience as an editor has shown a huge gulf between Wikipedia policy and Wikipedia reality.
As far as I see it, every exception to free speech has a potential to be abused because it requires some public body to dictate what does and does not fall under such exceptions, and such a public body would be a target for corruption by every megalomaniac out there.
Do you know where the phrase 'yelling fire in a crowded theatre' comes from? Its from the trial of a group of socialists distributing pacifist literature during WW1. In that context, the government decided that protesting the war whilst they were trying to recruit was inciting panic in the population.
It is not the speakers responsibility to refrain from yelling 'fire', it is the theatregoers responsibility to not trample other citizens to death at the first unconfirmed sign of danger.
As for credit cards, it is the responsibility of the credit card issuer to ensure that all vendors adequately check the identity of anyone trying to use the card. In real life, they do largely take this responsibility and the people I've known who have been subject to fraud have been reimbursed by the card issuer.
I had previously been under the impression that the structures in biological cells were too large to utilise quantum effects, but this seems to contradict that.
This might merit another look at Roger Penrose's theory that conciousness has a quantum origin, as the main objection to it previously was that there could not be quantum biological effects.
Hate speech is a symptom of free speech, and therefore in a perverse way we should welcome it.
Free speech and anonymous speech are basically the same thing. Free speech is the right to say what you like without consequences, and anonymous speech is the way you avoid consequences.
Liberal economists say a lot of things. For instance, they told Thatcher to fix inflation by reduction the money supply, a strategy that turned out so badly she denied any involvement with it a few years later.
Too far away and too big. Its a question of getting the delta-v as low as possible between the materials you need and your construction site. If the materials are in a rock with little gravity of its own, and both it and the construction site are in LEO the delta-v is miniscule.
I'm actually more interested in the Iron. The price of a metal orbitting the Earth is equal to not only its Earth-bound cost but also the cost of lifting it up there. This puts the value of Apophis through the roof, possibly more value than exists in all the economies on Earth at the present time.
We are developing several strategies to deflect the course of asteroids. If these mature over the next few years before our close encounters with Apophis, we may have the chance of bringing into Earth orbit, providing nearby and easily accessible resources for space construction.
Providing it with enough energy to slow from solar orbit to Earth orbit could be tricky, so I suggest the best way is to deflected in such a way it undergoes aerocapture.
People always seem concerned about the possibility of the rock just smacking into Earth, and think this is a reason not to pursue such a strategy. Tell me, am I being too Lex Luthor about this?
Are you kidding? The number of people who don't know how heavy a ton is could fill a dozen football fields!
In any case, this is a US article
My future mother-in-law was telling me one day how her great-grandfather had moved to Belfast from Scotland to get a job helping build the Titanic.
He was sometimes mocked for his part in building the legendarily failed ship, so he would point out that he was in fact an electrician, and the lights were still on when it sank.
This is kind of inevitable, and IMHO overdue. Monolithic heat sinks and fans the size of jet engine intakes have been a pain in the arse for top of the range gaming machines for years. Also, I don't know about anyone else, but the air cooling of my computer is a depressingly efficient mechanism for sucking dust and fluff into the computer and keeping it there.
The headline they went for is 'Fears over pro-suicide web pages' which in headline-speak is 'Fear the pro-suicide web pages'
The article itself merely describes the study and some reactions to it that didn't sound particularlly terrified.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7341024.stmSo whenever someone points out an event where the actions of the US made people lives much worse somewhere in the world, you have a laugh at their expense.
Still trying to figure out why people hate you?
Agreed. The Beeb, whilst not always repeating government propaganda, is nevertheless a mouthpiece of the status quo, and should be paid for more by those who benefit from that situation. All of these issues of enforcement vanish if you simply add it on to the income tax.
America would start producing a lot more educated people, who would all say 'more space funding asshole!'
Not only are the machines hell-bent on killing us but now they can chase us down for 9km without a break.
Anyone know where I can buy EMP bombs?
Back in the 80s, when Star Wars was all the rage, the US military was caricatured as read too much science fiction. Now their killer robot has turned against its masters and they are acting surprised, it looks like they are reading too little science fiction.
When will they get the balance right?
Simply not true. I've had UK broadband continuously since 2002 and I have never been prevented from a router. In fact, most ADSL contracts come with a wireless router now anyway.
How about governments paying for infrastructure directly out of taxes, like they are supposed to?
You can say 'ah, but the consumer pays all the taxes' but thats just really fucking dumb. Eventually, everything is paid for by 'the consumer' so that is a completely asinine thing to say. The question is how the payment is structured.
Renationalise BT. It is the only way
The idea to privatise it came from the discredited market fundamentalists of the Thatcher era, and now its time to undo their foaming-at-the-mouth idealism and get the UK telecoms system back on track.
Make BT a profit-making enterprise has had the quite predictable affect that they've put profit ahead of modernising the IT industry and now we are left with a network that makes mainland Europe piss themselves laughing (I've heard of the prices and bandwidth they can get in Sweden. It makes me cry). Despite being the second largest economy in Europe, we are behind many European countries in terms of IT infrastructure:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7338252.stmI'm not bashing America, but this seems like a local story in science not a global one. By the end of this year we may have found the Higgs Boson, which is a big story.