This sounds like a good idea at first sight, until you realize how intrusive enforcement can become, and how much collateral damage enforcement may take.
In some countries in the EU, some lawyers have made it their business to send out letters claiming they are injured parties and demanding recompense from you if they think you violated some regulation; you have a choice of paying these bloodsuckers or wasting your time in court even if the accusations are groundless. The more senseless regulations you get, the more you are going to see abuses like that. If this law were really effective consumer protection, it might be worth it on balance, but I just don't believe it will help much.
Fuse and sshfs are great workaround for individuals, but they are not a deployable and manageable network file system solution for an organization. They're also quite slow. We need something like NFS/SMB/AFS for Linux, but it has to work correctly.
Actually, at this point, I think a kernel WebDAV module would probably the best choice all things considered.
It looks to me like Sun is going for an open source license, but not actually an open source project. What I mean by that is that, while the code is published under the GPLv3, Sun retains special commercial licensing rights to the codebase.
What are the consequences? First of all, they have a special commercial interest in the codebase, they have an interest in making sure that others can't use the codebase commercially, and they can set the future direction for Java in ways that's in accordance with their own corporate interests. Furthermore, from a practical point of view, it means that any open source contributor will have to give a commercial license to Sun if he wants his contributions to become incorporated into the official distribution.
All things being equal, I think that makes Linux and the other open source Java projects preferable to Sun because those are really 100% open source projects, with no special commercial rights reserved for some companies and not others.
Note that, in contrast to Sun, IBM's Java efforts, being under the Apache license, are true open source projects, because IBM doesn't have special commercial rights compared to other users of the code.
Using GPLv3 for Solaris likely would preclude Linux programmers from using Solaris software, and vice-versa.
Is there any evidence that GPLv3 and GPLv2 licenses are going to be incompatible with one another? I don't see any reason why they should be. In the worst case, GPLv3 might contain an exception, or Sun could easily choose a GPLv3 licenses with a v2 exception.
Absolutely not. Existing legal practice includes the 5th amendment and a ban on bills of attainder.
None of those have any relevance. The legislature could pass laws regulating how companies like YouTube do business, including requiring them to host content non-discriminatorily. Likewise, courts could find that such a requirement already follows from some existing law. That's entirely in keeping with the constitution.
Example or citations please.
Is your backyards entertainment SOX-compliant? Do you practice non-discrimination in who you let in your backyard? There are hundreds of laws that apply only to corporation and corporate behavior, not to individuals.
I support laissez-faire capitalism, which I equate with a free market.
Well, you can equate it, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, laissez-faire capitalism leads to severe market failures, which is precisely why we have the kind of stricter government regulations we have today.
Call what we have now a "free market," but that doesn't make it so.
What we have is called a free market economy; a certain degree of government regulation is part of that, whether you like it or not.
You can invent your own meanings for words, but other people simply won't follow you.
Everybody? I really wouldn't say everybody. Catholicism, for example relies on one body to set the interpretation of the works. Most sects rely on a priest, etc. for interpretation of the works.
Even Catholicism itself doesn't have a consistent interpretation of the text, neither today nor over time. For example, the Catholic church used to burn people at the stake, and now they say that the death penalty is not Christian. And US and South American Catholics practice a different kind of Catholicism from Italy or Poland.
Besides, to put forth that the interpretation of a work is static is also wrong; as if growth within cannot exist as it does with other studies.
Growth? You said that the text must be interpreted in the correct context. How can there be "growth" in the correct context? And what possible context could ever make torture, burning at the stake, or papal sex orgies moral?
And in some there is the idea of a trinity and others, none. These are questions of theology, not morality.
They illustrate, however, that there is no consistent interpretation of those texts by Christians. Furthermore, these issues do, in many cases, have moral implications.
Again, I pose to you that the problems you state are absolutely not limited to religion but are human problems in the first place.
The issue is not with fallibility or growth, the issue is the assertion by religions like Christianity and Islam that there is a set of holy texts that represent absolute truth and that they have a hierarchy of authority. That is not a human problem, it's not even a problem with religion in general, it's a problem with a specific subset of religions, including those two.
I still don't know about that. Relativism means there is no absolute truth (morality), only a personal one.
Well, and obviously there is no "absolute truth" in Christianity because many different sects derive different ethics from Christianity, and those keep changing over time. And they often keep changing according to the conveniences of church members and leaders.
Again, I pose to you that historians often have one source for many historical events, one source that can be re-interpreted as time passes given new knowledge, political agendas, etc. We do not write off historians because of this do we?
Historians don't claim to be infallible and historians don't claim to present absolute moral truths. But when an organization that claims infallibility and absolute truth keeps revising their precepts and laws, then we are justified in "writing them off".
I pose to you this question. If having one "interpreted" text for the source of moral law is bad, what is having none whatsoever?
If you follow Christian or Muslim law, it is meaningless to ask whether you are behaving morally because your behavior is not of your own choice, it's simply a response to promises of rewards and punishment. When you don't kill, it's not because you made a moral choice to do so, it's because you have been told to behave that way and because you face the threat of hell if you violate that. While that keeps people in line most of the time (and I'm glad for it), it obviously stifles moral development and growth, which is probably why Christians and Muslims have been so bloody historically.
In different words, when an atheist says "killing is wrong", it's a moral statement, when a Christian says "killing is wrong", he is merely repeating doctrine.
Even if you do not have a religious conviction, at some point you will come across a universal moral truth that is held by everyone (aside from the psychotic, deranged, etc. which are abberations, defects from a medical perspective). If there is said universal truth, then doesn't that leave you in the same boat as the formal religious groups (at least in terms of what you are relying on for the basis for your moral code)?
The problem with morality derived from Christian or Muslim auth
NFS was designed for use in an environment where both client and server boxes were secure, multi-user systems.
That's what it was designed for, but such an environment never really existed, even in the most draconian, centrally managed environments. Even if it had, NFS still had gotten identity management completely wrong and had numerous other problems. NFS was just a lousy design.
SMB was designed on the assumption that the client would be an insecure single-user system. All the security is on the server, and connections are on a per-user basis.
That's a lot closer to how NFS has been used in the real world. We'd all be better off if an SMB-like system, not NFS, had become the UNIX standard.
No big loss. NFS is easier to use, has real file permissions, etc.
NFS has been a joke from day one. The design itself had poorly thought out identity mapping, complete lack of authentication, failure to implement UNIX file system semantics, incredible inefficiency, and a useless RPC layer. I think Sun has done a grave disservice to the UNIX world with NFS. To this day, we still don't have a widely used, decent, secure network file system on UNIX.
But, sadly, what they're doing appears to be legal, so perhaps the ire ought to be directed at what makes it legal, rather than shooting the messenger (dammit:-).
It may be legal, but it's still wrong. It's particularly wrong because of Microsoft's history of monopolistic practices and the fact that many of their patents would probably not stand a test in court, but Microsoft is apparently using contracts and pressure to keep those patents from getting tested in court.
Therefore, our ire is, in fact, properly directed at Microsoft.
Corporations and governments enter into contracts all the time. As for the establishment of a corporation, it's not literally a contract, since the government can revoke the corporate charter at any time. Nevertheless, the intent behind the establishment of corporations is precisely to create a legal framework that differs from that of a partnership.
Now, if the government were to tell YouTube that they couldn't censor content when such a contract had never been established by YouTube and its users, then this would be a restriction contrary to a Free Market.
Well, you can call it whatever you like, but governments impose such restrictions all the time, and they have proven that they keep markets free and efficient.
I also support [...]
You seem to favor anarcho-capitalism, not a modern free market. The Western world has had centuries of experience with that, and one of the major achievements of the 20th century was to get rid of it since such markets are neither efficient nor compatible with democratic government.
1. Tell me where these passages exist in the bible. 2. I'll tell you what they mean in an HISTORICAL CONTEXT. Then you may understand why they are there when they refer to people who were enslaved, persecuted and slaughtered. 3. Context is everything no matter how much you want to deny it.
You're absolutely right that the meaning of a text depends on context. The trouble with Christian and Muslim holy texts, however, is that everybody constructs different contexts for the texts.
In Christianity, according to some groups, resurrection is in body, according to others, it's in spirit. According to some, killing is absolutely wrong, according to others, a wide range of killing falls under self-defense. Etc.
Furthermore, many Christians and Muslims deliberately choose a modern context for what they call a "literal" interpretation of selected portions those documents, and they act accordingly.
I don't think you understand what moral relativism means. Having a set rule of moral laws is the exact opposite of moral relativism.
Oh, we agree on what moral relativism is. Unfortunately, Christians and Muslims have no moral laws or principles, they merely have a bunch of texts that get reinterpreted according to political and personal convenience.
Funny, this article seemed to purport that criticizing Christianity was ok but criticizing Islam isn't.
True, criticizing Christianity is tolerated more in our culture, but not a whole lot.
You're not giving an example of contextual meaning, or even quoting out of context, you're merely constructing a new sentence out of a bunch of words. In different words, you've just giving another example for the dishonesty and linguistic trickery so often practiced by defenders of Christianity and Islam.
Just because an entity doesn't enjoy certain protections doesn't mean it shouldn't.
Corporations are essentially a contract between a group of shareholders and society as a whole. Like all contracts, they contain a give-and-take. Part of that is that the shareholders enjoy protection from certain kinds of liability and enforcement of various claims by the government, and in return, they accept additional restrictions on how they operate. That's the deal.
Again, why not? If my phone company started censoring my conversations, I would simply switch providers, or find other means of communication. Of course, if you are afraid of a free market, then I can see how you might want to force corporations to do your bidding.
Apparently, it is you who is afraid of the free market. A free market doesn't mean absence of government regulation of the market, it means a free exchange of goods and services within a legal framework defined by government. Without that legal framework, a free market doesn't exist; for example, there would be no way for participants to enforce contracts or for market participants to get the information they need in order to make informed decisions.
Of course, too much regulation makes a market non-free. But it's a fallacy to conclude that the freest market of them all is the one without regulations. Instead a free market has "just enough" regulations, no more and no less. As for phone companies, these regulations are the results of decades of debate and experience; apparently, the people who understand this market didn't believe that "just switch providers" was a good basis for policy.
You're getting lost in legal minutiae. The point is not whether specific, existing rules related discriminatory practices or common carrier status apply to YouTube, the point is that that corporations are, in fact, not free to do as they please in the same way you are in your back yard. It would be entirely reasonable and consistent with existing legal practice to require a company like YouTube to act in accordance with free speech principles.
Whether such a requirement can be constructed out of existing law or whether it necessitates passing new laws is a secondary question, and one neither of us knows the answer to.
Come on, this should be a no-brainer. Google, Youtube and Amazon are privately owned, privately administered and privately funded organizations.
First of all, they are publicly traded corporations, which already imposes strong requirements on their conduct, in particular with regards to discriminatory practices.
Secondly, it's not at all clear that they can do what they want. US phone companies are non-governmental, yet they can't pick and choose what kinds of speech they allow on their wires. So, it's far from clear that YouTube should have the right to pick and choose what kinds of videos they publish.
To say they don't have this right, would be like saying if someone put up a political sign in your yard of someone from the party you don't support, that you don't have a right to remove it because you're violating someone else's free speech.
Corporations are not like private, personal property; they don't enjoy the same protections, and they shouldn't. You have great latitude deciding what goes into your yard, but corporations are already far more limited in that.
Now, YouTube offers hosting to everybody, and this hosting model already gives them protection against some legal claims. It might be reasonable to impose even stronger requirements on them to get them to conform to free speech principles.
A better analogy might be if the phone company started to censor what you could say over their lines. Well, they can't, and they shouldn't be able to.
Freedom of speech doesn't imply freedom to slander, libel or incite. It rather means freedom to discuss any topic in a dry, boring, responsible, sane, adult, philosophical manner.
Yeah, and that's what the video apparently was doing. I mean, how does showing a sequence of direct quotes from the main religious text--nothing more--amount to "slander, libel, or incitement"?
In fact, the problem here is on the side of the religious nuts: they are offended by any criticism of their religion. Should we limit free speech according to whether the target of criticism is offended? I don't think so.
Didn't you know? You can't criticize Christianity or Islam because, hey, they are moral and righteous by definition.
When you try to challenge them on their texts (which many of them claim to be literally true), they say that phrases like "kill them" or "burn them with fire" don't really mean what they say because they "depend on context" or are "metaphorical". Never mind that Christians and Muslims alike have actually been practicing these words for centuries, literally killing and burning people who didn't submit to their beliefs.
It's ironic that it's right-wing Christians that have the gall to accuse others of moral relativism or trying to play word games. The Abrahamic religions invented moral relativism, morality of convenience, and redefining the meaning of words according to political and moral convenience.
I don't know anything about PEAR's methodology or data; the point is just that true random events are expected to appear nonrandom from time to time.
Yes, and that's exactly what statistical tests are designed to test for. That's why scientists regularly and confidently detect events that are far rarer than 1:10000.
An earlier post suggested that PEAR was extracting these runs and using them as evidence. If true, that sounds like bad science, but i'm not really curious enough to check the data for myself.
There is nothing to "suggest": the methods are in their papers, including the fact that they are "extracting" the runs. There is nothing "unscientific" about that either: every discipline, from particle physics to medicine, does the same thing. That's fine as long as it is analyzed correctly (which this may not be).
My point is that one simply cannot respond to PEAR by the kind of unscientific handwaving you engage in. If there is an error in their experiments or analysis, there are accepted ways of dealing with them.
but when the best proof that somebody can come up with for ESP is that every 2 or 3 in 10,000 outcomes can be changed, I'm not impressed. Those are pretty basically standard statistical anomalies
By your argument, nobody died on 9/11, since that was only "2 or 3 in 100,000" inhabitants in the US and must have been a statistical anomaly--a measurement error.
In fact, in real life, as well as the sciences, many effects are far less frequent than "2 or 3 in 10,000".
Now, I don't believe in ESP or telekinesis, and I'm pretty sure that there is something wrong with the PEAR data. I also don't think it's high priority for science to find the flaw. Nevertheless, unscientific counterarguments like yours don't help the matter. Either someone goes through the trouble to find the flaw in their studies, or the matter remains unresolved. There is no third option.
So PEAR's huge sample sizes don't indicate manipulating data, they indicate collecting so much data you end up measuring the effects of the ventilation system causing a person's left eye to be shut a bit longer when they blink, skewing the results, or somesuch.
If shutting their left eye a little longer causes a random physical process inside a sealed box to give skewed results, well, I'd certainly call that a big result.
hat's the problem with PEAR: the things they purport to measure are so subtle as to be untestable. It's a methodology problem.
If that were true, modern physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine would be impossible to do, since those often involve events that are much rarer than 1:10000.
I don't believe in telekinesis or ESP. Nevertheless, unless someone can identify a specific flaw in the experimental procedure or analysis, there is something to be explained.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like a good idea at first sight, until you realize how intrusive enforcement can become, and how much collateral damage enforcement may take.
In some countries in the EU, some lawyers have made it their business to send out letters claiming they are injured parties and demanding recompense from you if they think you violated some regulation; you have a choice of paying these bloodsuckers or wasting your time in court even if the accusations are groundless. The more senseless regulations you get, the more you are going to see abuses like that. If this law were really effective consumer protection, it might be worth it on balance, but I just don't believe it will help much.
Fuse and sshfs are great workaround for individuals, but they are not a deployable and manageable network file system solution for an organization. They're also quite slow. We need something like NFS/SMB/AFS for Linux, but it has to work correctly.
Actually, at this point, I think a kernel WebDAV module would probably the best choice all things considered.
It looks to me like Sun is going for an open source license, but not actually an open source project. What I mean by that is that, while the code is published under the GPLv3, Sun retains special commercial licensing rights to the codebase.
What are the consequences? First of all, they have a special commercial interest in the codebase, they have an interest in making sure that others can't use the codebase commercially, and they can set the future direction for Java in ways that's in accordance with their own corporate interests. Furthermore, from a practical point of view, it means that any open source contributor will have to give a commercial license to Sun if he wants his contributions to become incorporated into the official distribution.
All things being equal, I think that makes Linux and the other open source Java projects preferable to Sun because those are really 100% open source projects, with no special commercial rights reserved for some companies and not others.
Note that, in contrast to Sun, IBM's Java efforts, being under the Apache license, are true open source projects, because IBM doesn't have special commercial rights compared to other users of the code.
Using GPLv3 for Solaris likely would preclude Linux programmers from using Solaris software, and vice-versa.
Is there any evidence that GPLv3 and GPLv2 licenses are going to be incompatible with one another? I don't see any reason why they should be. In the worst case, GPLv3 might contain an exception, or Sun could easily choose a GPLv3 licenses with a v2 exception.
Absolutely not. Existing legal practice includes the 5th amendment and a ban on bills of attainder.
None of those have any relevance. The legislature could pass laws regulating how companies like YouTube do business, including requiring them to host content non-discriminatorily. Likewise, courts could find that such a requirement already follows from some existing law. That's entirely in keeping with the constitution.
Example or citations please.
Is your backyards entertainment SOX-compliant? Do you practice non-discrimination in who you let in your backyard? There are hundreds of laws that apply only to corporation and corporate behavior, not to individuals.
I support laissez-faire capitalism, which I equate with a free market.
Well, you can equate it, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, laissez-faire capitalism leads to severe market failures, which is precisely why we have the kind of stricter government regulations we have today.
Call what we have now a "free market," but that doesn't make it so.
What we have is called a free market economy; a certain degree of government regulation is part of that, whether you like it or not.
You can invent your own meanings for words, but other people simply won't follow you.
Everybody? I really wouldn't say everybody. Catholicism, for example relies on one body to set the interpretation of the works. Most sects rely on a priest, etc. for interpretation of the works.
Even Catholicism itself doesn't have a consistent interpretation of the text, neither today nor over time. For example, the Catholic church used to burn people at the stake, and now they say that the death penalty is not Christian. And US and South American Catholics practice a different kind of Catholicism from Italy or Poland.
Besides, to put forth that the interpretation of a work is static is also wrong; as if growth within cannot exist as it does with other studies.
Growth? You said that the text must be interpreted in the correct context. How can there be "growth" in the correct context? And what possible context could ever make torture, burning at the stake, or papal sex orgies moral?
And in some there is the idea of a trinity and others, none. These are questions of theology, not morality.
They illustrate, however, that there is no consistent interpretation of those texts by Christians. Furthermore, these issues do, in many cases, have moral implications.
Again, I pose to you that the problems you state are absolutely not limited to religion but are human problems in the first place.
The issue is not with fallibility or growth, the issue is the assertion by religions like Christianity and Islam that there is a set of holy texts that represent absolute truth and that they have a hierarchy of authority. That is not a human problem, it's not even a problem with religion in general, it's a problem with a specific subset of religions, including those two.
I still don't know about that. Relativism means there is no absolute truth (morality), only a personal one.
Well, and obviously there is no "absolute truth" in Christianity because many different sects derive different ethics from Christianity, and those keep changing over time. And they often keep changing according to the conveniences of church members and leaders.
Again, I pose to you that historians often have one source for many historical events, one source that can be re-interpreted as time passes given new knowledge, political agendas, etc. We do not write off historians because of this do we?
Historians don't claim to be infallible and historians don't claim to present absolute moral truths. But when an organization that claims infallibility and absolute truth keeps revising their precepts and laws, then we are justified in "writing them off".
I pose to you this question. If having one "interpreted" text for the source of moral law is bad, what is having none whatsoever?
If you follow Christian or Muslim law, it is meaningless to ask whether you are behaving morally because your behavior is not of your own choice, it's simply a response to promises of rewards and punishment. When you don't kill, it's not because you made a moral choice to do so, it's because you have been told to behave that way and because you face the threat of hell if you violate that. While that keeps people in line most of the time (and I'm glad for it), it obviously stifles moral development and growth, which is probably why Christians and Muslims have been so bloody historically.
In different words, when an atheist says "killing is wrong", it's a moral statement, when a Christian says "killing is wrong", he is merely repeating doctrine.
Even if you do not have a religious conviction, at some point you will come across a universal moral truth that is held by everyone (aside from the psychotic, deranged, etc. which are abberations, defects from a medical perspective). If there is said universal truth, then doesn't that leave you in the same boat as the formal religious groups (at least in terms of what you are relying on for the basis for your moral code)?
The problem with morality derived from Christian or Muslim auth
NFS was designed for use in an environment where both client and server boxes were secure, multi-user systems.
That's what it was designed for, but such an environment never really existed, even in the most draconian, centrally managed environments. Even if it had, NFS still had gotten identity management completely wrong and had numerous other problems. NFS was just a lousy design.
SMB was designed on the assumption that the client would be an insecure single-user system. All the security is on the server, and connections are on a per-user basis.
That's a lot closer to how NFS has been used in the real world. We'd all be better off if an SMB-like system, not NFS, had become the UNIX standard.
No big loss. NFS is easier to use, has real file permissions, etc.
NFS has been a joke from day one. The design itself had poorly thought out identity mapping, complete lack of authentication, failure to implement UNIX file system semantics, incredible inefficiency, and a useless RPC layer. I think Sun has done a grave disservice to the UNIX world with NFS. To this day, we still don't have a widely used, decent, secure network file system on UNIX.
But, sadly, what they're doing appears to be legal, so perhaps the ire ought to be directed at what makes it legal, rather than shooting the messenger (dammit :-).
It may be legal, but it's still wrong. It's particularly wrong because of Microsoft's history of monopolistic practices and the fact that many of their patents would probably not stand a test in court, but Microsoft is apparently using contracts and pressure to keep those patents from getting tested in court.
Therefore, our ire is, in fact, properly directed at Microsoft.
Only individuals can enter into contracts.
Corporations and governments enter into contracts all the time. As for the establishment of a corporation, it's not literally a contract, since the government can revoke the corporate charter at any time. Nevertheless, the intent behind the establishment of corporations is precisely to create a legal framework that differs from that of a partnership.
Now, if the government were to tell YouTube that they couldn't censor content when such a contract had never been established by YouTube and its users, then this would be a restriction contrary to a Free Market.
Well, you can call it whatever you like, but governments impose such restrictions all the time, and they have proven that they keep markets free and efficient.
I also support [...]
You seem to favor anarcho-capitalism, not a modern free market. The Western world has had centuries of experience with that, and one of the major achievements of the 20th century was to get rid of it since such markets are neither efficient nor compatible with democratic government.
Well, this has some great potential for denial of service attacks by forging the source of a cyber attack.
1. Tell me where these passages exist in the bible. 2. I'll tell you what they mean in an HISTORICAL CONTEXT. Then you may understand why they are there when they refer to people who were enslaved, persecuted and slaughtered. 3. Context is everything no matter how much you want to deny it.
You're absolutely right that the meaning of a text depends on context. The trouble with Christian and Muslim holy texts, however, is that everybody constructs different contexts for the texts.
In Christianity, according to some groups, resurrection is in body, according to others, it's in spirit. According to some, killing is absolutely wrong, according to others, a wide range of killing falls under self-defense. Etc.
Furthermore, many Christians and Muslims deliberately choose a modern context for what they call a "literal" interpretation of selected portions those documents, and they act accordingly.
I don't think you understand what moral relativism means. Having a set rule of moral laws is the exact opposite of moral relativism.
Oh, we agree on what moral relativism is. Unfortunately, Christians and Muslims have no moral laws or principles, they merely have a bunch of texts that get reinterpreted according to political and personal convenience.
Funny, this article seemed to purport that criticizing Christianity was ok but criticizing Islam isn't.
True, criticizing Christianity is tolerated more in our culture, but not a whole lot.
You're not giving an example of contextual meaning, or even quoting out of context, you're merely constructing a new sentence out of a bunch of words. In different words, you've just giving another example for the dishonesty and linguistic trickery so often practiced by defenders of Christianity and Islam.
Just because an entity doesn't enjoy certain protections doesn't mean it shouldn't.
Corporations are essentially a contract between a group of shareholders and society as a whole. Like all contracts, they contain a give-and-take. Part of that is that the shareholders enjoy protection from certain kinds of liability and enforcement of various claims by the government, and in return, they accept additional restrictions on how they operate. That's the deal.
Again, why not? If my phone company started censoring my conversations, I would simply switch providers, or find other means of communication. Of course, if you are afraid of a free market, then I can see how you might want to force corporations to do your bidding.
Apparently, it is you who is afraid of the free market. A free market doesn't mean absence of government regulation of the market, it means a free exchange of goods and services within a legal framework defined by government. Without that legal framework, a free market doesn't exist; for example, there would be no way for participants to enforce contracts or for market participants to get the information they need in order to make informed decisions.
Of course, too much regulation makes a market non-free. But it's a fallacy to conclude that the freest market of them all is the one without regulations. Instead a free market has "just enough" regulations, no more and no less. As for phone companies, these regulations are the results of decades of debate and experience; apparently, the people who understand this market didn't believe that "just switch providers" was a good basis for policy.
You're getting lost in legal minutiae. The point is not whether specific, existing rules related discriminatory practices or common carrier status apply to YouTube, the point is that that corporations are, in fact, not free to do as they please in the same way you are in your back yard. It would be entirely reasonable and consistent with existing legal practice to require a company like YouTube to act in accordance with free speech principles.
Whether such a requirement can be constructed out of existing law or whether it necessitates passing new laws is a secondary question, and one neither of us knows the answer to.
Come on, this should be a no-brainer. Google, Youtube and Amazon are privately owned, privately administered and privately funded organizations.
First of all, they are publicly traded corporations, which already imposes strong requirements on their conduct, in particular with regards to discriminatory practices.
Secondly, it's not at all clear that they can do what they want. US phone companies are non-governmental, yet they can't pick and choose what kinds of speech they allow on their wires. So, it's far from clear that YouTube should have the right to pick and choose what kinds of videos they publish.
To say they don't have this right, would be like saying if someone put up a political sign in your yard of someone from the party you don't support, that you don't have a right to remove it because you're violating someone else's free speech.
Corporations are not like private, personal property; they don't enjoy the same protections, and they shouldn't. You have great latitude deciding what goes into your yard, but corporations are already far more limited in that.
Now, YouTube offers hosting to everybody, and this hosting model already gives them protection against some legal claims. It might be reasonable to impose even stronger requirements on them to get them to conform to free speech principles.
A better analogy might be if the phone company started to censor what you could say over their lines. Well, they can't, and they shouldn't be able to.
Freedom of speech doesn't imply freedom to slander, libel or incite. It rather means freedom to discuss any topic in a dry, boring, responsible, sane, adult, philosophical manner.
Yeah, and that's what the video apparently was doing. I mean, how does showing a sequence of direct quotes from the main religious text--nothing more--amount to "slander, libel, or incitement"?
In fact, the problem here is on the side of the religious nuts: they are offended by any criticism of their religion. Should we limit free speech according to whether the target of criticism is offended? I don't think so.
Didn't you know? You can't criticize Christianity or Islam because, hey, they are moral and righteous by definition.
When you try to challenge them on their texts (which many of them claim to be literally true), they say that phrases like "kill them" or "burn them with fire" don't really mean what they say because they "depend on context" or are "metaphorical". Never mind that Christians and Muslims alike have actually been practicing these words for centuries, literally killing and burning people who didn't submit to their beliefs.
It's ironic that it's right-wing Christians that have the gall to accuse others of moral relativism or trying to play word games. The Abrahamic religions invented moral relativism, morality of convenience, and redefining the meaning of words according to political and moral convenience.
I don't know anything about PEAR's methodology or data; the point is just that true random events are expected to appear nonrandom from time to time.
Yes, and that's exactly what statistical tests are designed to test for. That's why scientists regularly and confidently detect events that are far rarer than 1:10000.
An earlier post suggested that PEAR was extracting these runs and using them as evidence. If true, that sounds like bad science, but i'm not really curious enough to check the data for myself.
There is nothing to "suggest": the methods are in their papers, including the fact that they are "extracting" the runs. There is nothing "unscientific" about that either: every discipline, from particle physics to medicine, does the same thing. That's fine as long as it is analyzed correctly (which this may not be).
My point is that one simply cannot respond to PEAR by the kind of unscientific handwaving you engage in. If there is an error in their experiments or analysis, there are accepted ways of dealing with them.
I agree with the sentiment, but it's not "prosecutorial misconduct" if the court convicts.
but when the best proof that somebody can come up with for ESP is that every 2 or 3 in 10,000 outcomes can be changed, I'm not impressed. Those are pretty basically standard statistical anomalies
By your argument, nobody died on 9/11, since that was only "2 or 3 in 100,000" inhabitants in the US and must have been a statistical anomaly--a measurement error.
In fact, in real life, as well as the sciences, many effects are far less frequent than "2 or 3 in 10,000".
Now, I don't believe in ESP or telekinesis, and I'm pretty sure that there is something wrong with the PEAR data. I also don't think it's high priority for science to find the flaw. Nevertheless, unscientific counterarguments like yours don't help the matter. Either someone goes through the trouble to find the flaw in their studies, or the matter remains unresolved. There is no third option.
So PEAR's huge sample sizes don't indicate manipulating data, they indicate collecting so much data you end up measuring the effects of the ventilation system causing a person's left eye to be shut a bit longer when they blink, skewing the results, or somesuch.
If shutting their left eye a little longer causes a random physical process inside a sealed box to give skewed results, well, I'd certainly call that a big result.
hat's the problem with PEAR: the things they purport to measure are so subtle as to be untestable. It's a methodology problem.
If that were true, modern physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine would be impossible to do, since those often involve events that are much rarer than 1:10000.
I don't believe in telekinesis or ESP. Nevertheless, unless someone can identify a specific flaw in the experimental procedure or analysis, there is something to be explained.
GPE is not from Troll Tech.
Furthermore, Troll Tech's mobile products cost money for phone makers, and furthermore exclude non-Troll Tech GUIs from the platform.
Troll Tech has had its chance at the mobile market and they blew it. It's time for a better open source attempt.