All countries of the world have governments are on a spectrum of totalitarianism ("policestatetness"). In fact, much of the world is grey in all respects, so you're saying nothing new here. The ethical universe is made of slippery slopes.
What is different about "us" is that when these things come to light(wiretapping..etc), they are considered as a scandal because they go against the values "we" build our nations on. When they happen in China, the state may or may not publish the information itself, usually with a smile. Education in the free world has the effect of getting you to be shocked when you hear this stuff; education by totalitarian states has the effect of habituating you to it. We are not China.
Human survival depends, among many things, on curiosity(ensures specimens who have it will be able to learn new things and adapt to changes) and fear of the unknown. What you don't know may be harmless, but if it shares characteristics with your predators/harmful beings, it is best to play safe and treat it as "dangerous". Huge winged thingies that have the energy to make loud sounds and are seemingly interested in you (or your territory) could be "dangerous". Warn, attack, flee..
We are likely to be more interested/curious than those guys if we, in our current state, were faced with something similar, but that is because our advance in civilization and self reflection has given us theories where other beings may wish to communicate with us. Our intellect has matured a little and governed our instinct. We are enlightened. Be happy.
You can laugh all you want, but I visited Siwa in the western Sahara and found a variety of Europeans who have been living primitive lives there for decades, starting off with a tax evasion journey and ending up with a lifetime of living in nothingness. I was stunned.
What was it like, father - what was it like to see the signs, the noodles in the sky... did He.. did He SMILE upon you? Did the Holy Sauce pore through the cockpit insulation as we heard the laymen say?
[all around the room, anxious faces lean forward in gleeful awe to hear the blessed man speak]
This is far from insightful of course. Civil aviation does use GPS but it is only a luxury, every pilot is trained on traditional IFR and a host of radio-based technologies, and every pilot also knows that when GPS disagrees with the other system you simply disregard the GPS. It is a handy tool, not a necessary one (obvious to anyone I would've thought, but you asked for it).
I'll bet there's far more military espionage use being planned. Make a version that uses solar power and has small enough satellite comm chips inside. Even better, design it to allow recharging from electric outlets (which it can connect to at night). Let them lose on a country's borders, millions of them. If they cost a $1000 each, a million bots will constitute a 1 bil $ project. Chump change. They converge on the cities with preprogrammed maps, then start communicating only after they infiltrate major government buildings, intelligence facitilies, military research, terrorist caves...etc.
This (and the butterfly mentioned in TFA) is ultimate espionage. The idea is so cool that I am forced to momentarily disregard big brother threats from the Orwellian-minded.
Yeah, but it makes for a more interesting story to tell the wife.. " director today was a robot!" is probably better than "we played the Chopin piece then got drunk as penguins at the hotel bar".
Well yes of course, but let's not assume that lack of tech familiarity is justification for getting 1984-ed by the benign government. I can't believe the general public is being used as testing grounds for civil rights abuses in jails. It's very funny if you think about it. It's also the scariest thing the big brothers in the UK have come up with in a long time.
I am not talking about the broken patent system, but only specific parts of the "copyright" concept as applied to information sharing. This sharing IS new and the industries based on the information alone (software, digital music) are new, and the means and reasons for which people share this info is new as well. Software has been around for 50 years. It is an infant industry, and the legal system understands very little about it. A program is very different from an e-book or a music file, they serve entirely different purposes from the operational (and therefore commercial) point of view. That is why licensing schemes for software are so intricately difficult. Nothing has been decided "centuries ago" - the debates only started to mature in the 80s-90s, and licenses still leave much to be desired.
Like you said, the purpose of all these schemes is to allow the creators to monopolize on the PROFITS temporarily. Nobody can sell my work, or my ideas, other than myself. Remove the financial activity from the copying by the "criminal", and you suddenly leave yourself outside the realm of this intuitive logic. We are left with "potential" and "possibility" of profit "lost" by having people not be forced to buy information - information which we have no evidence to believe they would have bought if it were not free. Similarly, if you take out the attribution (the claim of origination) and tampering issues (if someone changes something, they do not attribute it to the author) then you have no falsities or "lies" being told that you have to fight against.
The current DMCA practices do not have anything to do with the original intentions of copyright and patent systems. I write software and music and literature (all on a small, vulnerable scale), and I refuse this blatant violation of people's freedoms completely.
And hereby we enter into the usual debate of whether hypothetical consumer activity of someone forced to pay money for something, can warrant the very real (non hypothetical) deprivation of basic freedoms from someone else. I'm sorry, but "potential" sales that only occur because of a law are a sign of a failed model and a backward society. We can go on now and start arguing about car analogies, and the relationship of digital information to tangible goods, and how once I've bought something I can do whatever the hell I want with it (including give it away for free)..etc. But frankly, those discussions never seem to get anywhere, because this is an ethical and constitutional matter. You want to protect somebody's supposed sales increase by preventing something that is an inherent characteristic of digital information. I see it as a violation of my right to free speech.
Sooner or later people will come to realize that information is a completely different type of product that needs its own unique business framework(s) to be traded successfully. Until then, enjoy the legislative ignorance in this still-very-young industry.
"Free will is not magic, simply an acknowledgment that we are (semi) autonomous agents."
Autonomous agents programmed, and continuously in effect of, our environment. Our decisions are not the result of something originating in us and separate from the universe... our mind (the DNA that created it, the factors that affect it)is subject to universal causality like everything else. It's either that or magic. I understand you are trying to equate sentience with "free will", and I agree with what you are saying (because that is where the illusion comes from). But none of this changes the fact that we are a the product of physical processes, and we ourselves, and our minds, are comprised of (probabilistic) physical processes that are deterministic, albeit quantum mechanical at the lowest level.
In my initial response I was trying to agree with you while making a small correction. Determinism is just science, and "free will" is just an observation on our state of affairs. See, even robots can be poets:)
I'm expecting to make millions off couples during foreplay Something sounds terribly wrong with that sentence. I immediately envision you standing in couples' bedrooms during their frolicking, and having them write big checks even as they pant in exuberant ecstasy. You sick sick man.
No, they are not the same problem at all. Provability in mathematics is axiomatic, provability in physical reality is subject to empirical satisfaction. That is why I was pointing out the distinction. Religion does not satisfy any conditions of provability, of any chosen "genre", in any SINGLE true statement, let alone all of them(which as Godel showed, is impossible given the current notion of logic).
And your answer to that is to invent immortality? There are beautiful things about the world regardless of whether they last forever or not. I will not tell you that the "meaningless" or "purposeless" universe is not grim. Heck, that's why religion exists in the first place (to counter the irrational and destructive emotional reaction to this fact). But once you delve deeply enough into meaning and "purpose" you realize that a) They are precisely what religion lacks b) you as a sentient being have the most reason to actually go through with this "life" thing. You can abstract, and learn, and write. You can love. You can do science.
It is much more worthwhile, trust me, than handing your life over to some deity and relying on fiction to comfort yourself.
What if "they" (these gods of which you speak) want us to be strong minded, independent and critical thinkers? Assuming that also means logical thinkers, then these gods want us to come to the conclusion that there is no evidence behind them, and therefore they want us to disbelieve in their very own existence. Which is rather insensible, eh. Also, there is no religion like this, religion depends on ignorance and emotional excitation to achieve "leaps of faith". That's why it's called "god of the gaps".
And if not then do they still merit no attention from us? The qustion doesn't make sense now, after my reply, but please try to understand the objection in the first place: it's not about "merit". It's about what these gods "want" from you and the fact that THEY want it, and are concerned about you giving it. We are talking about invisible beings for which there is no explanation, yet who will supposedly put you in the deepest pits of eternal hell for not believing in them, or even just questioning them. What merit, and what kind of mentality is that?
What is this "beautiful" of which you speak? Let's grow up and forget about such things OK, be my guest. I never told you I would sadistically torture you for eternity because you refused to be happy or you want to be some freak who disklikes beautiful things (this is rhetorical, not an insult:P ). Do what you wish, it's your life. Most human beings would rather be happy and enjoy all that is beautiful around them. Laughter, good spirit, knowledge, imagination, children, love, and everything that is beautiful were never guilty of starting wars and wiping off civilizations because they believe in another deity in the sky. What does "grow up" mean to you?
Hmmmm, and what about religions that don't include deities? Should we discard them as well? Perhaps we could just call them philosophies and still keep them. Umm, ok? It's looks like you want to call anything non-definitive by nature a religion. It doesn't work that way. Religion involves gods. Gods are a stupid idea, and they often have negative impact (like murder) on people who do not believe in them. All other infinitely arguable philosophies can be kept or ignored (some will be disproved by physics in time btw)- that does not impact our discussion in the least.
There is no distinction at all between any fictional beings, except perhaps that deities happen to be less likely to exist than unicorns. With the unicorn, the FSM, or the yet unseen sub-atomic particle you only need to admit (as a skeptic) that you cannot prove or say much about it, since no evidence for the positivity of it's existence has been shown.*
With gods and such, particularly the monotheist version,you just have to sit back and ponder on the entire scheme of the religion at hand to see how bizarre the underlying philosophy is. People think it's the tenets of faith/the law that makes religion un-likable, but that's not really it. I would be willing to accept any of that, but it is the "god" bit itself that is disgusting. Thousands of religions, each thinking they are "right", the others are wrong, their god is the Truth, all of them required of "believe" that. All of them expected to live and die by those respective "beliefs", those "leaps of faith" that become a microcosm of existence for each, sending them to the limits of insane behavior. And all of them not recognizing that it is their respective god that is responsible for this sick scenario, assuming we forget everything we know about physics and the dynamics of the world. Islam, the most philosophically advanced theology of the monotheist faiths(abstract god, non-deification of humans including prophets..etc), had its second Caliph arrest and kill anyone who talked about destiny/determinism debate. He had good reason to do so. The only gods that are not six-year-old in mentality happen to be the ones that do not "want" you to do things.... they sidestep the philosophical debate entirely. And by doing so, they warrant no attention from us as well - i.e the only sensible gods do not matter. It's a catch.22 that religion cannot win.
Religion is a simplistic, silly idea that has no place in the free world of today. We have strong instincts for it, sadly, but I hope one day we no longer need them to emotionally survive. The world is beautiful without deities. Let's grow up and forget about them.
* This is in contrast to mathematical logic, where you can indeed make statements about provability, both negative (there does not exist...) and positive(there exists...).
Slashdot Mirror
All countries of the world have governments are on a spectrum of totalitarianism ("policestatetness"). In fact, much of the world is grey in all respects, so you're saying nothing new here. The ethical universe is made of slippery slopes.
What is different about "us" is that when these things come to light(wiretapping..etc), they are considered as a scandal because they go against the values "we" build our nations on. When they happen in China, the state may or may not publish the information itself, usually with a smile. Education in the free world has the effect of getting you to be shocked when you hear this stuff; education by totalitarian states has the effect of habituating you to it. We are not China.
Please see comment further up in the thread, in which poster suggests tilting the can.
Human survival depends, among many things, on curiosity(ensures specimens who have it will be able to learn new things and adapt to changes) and fear of the unknown. What you don't know may be harmless, but if it shares characteristics with your predators /harmful beings, it is best to play safe and treat it as "dangerous". Huge winged thingies that have the energy to make loud sounds and are seemingly interested in you (or your territory) could be "dangerous". Warn, attack, flee..
We are likely to be more interested/curious than those guys if we, in our current state, were faced with something similar, but that is because our advance in civilization and self reflection has given us theories where other beings may wish to communicate with us. Our intellect has matured a little and governed our instinct. We are enlightened. Be happy.
You can laugh all you want, but I visited Siwa in the western Sahara and found a variety of Europeans who have been living primitive lives there for decades, starting off with a tax evasion journey and ending up with a lifetime of living in nothingness. I was stunned.
You had millions of records with MS Access? And it worked?
What was it like, father - what was it like to see the signs, the noodles in the sky... did He.. did He SMILE upon you? Did the Holy Sauce pore through the cockpit insulation as we heard the laymen say?
[all around the room, anxious faces lean forward in gleeful awe to hear the blessed man speak]
This is far from insightful of course. Civil aviation does use GPS but it is only a luxury, every pilot is trained on traditional IFR and a host of radio-based technologies, and every pilot also knows that when GPS disagrees with the other system you simply disregard the GPS. It is a handy tool, not a necessary one (obvious to anyone I would've thought, but you asked for it).
I'll bet there's far more military espionage use being planned. Make a version that uses solar power and has small enough satellite comm chips inside. Even better, design it to allow recharging from electric outlets (which it can connect to at night). Let them lose on a country's borders, millions of them. If they cost a $1000 each, a million bots will constitute a 1 bil $ project. Chump change. They converge on the cities with preprogrammed maps, then start communicating only after they infiltrate major government buildings, intelligence facitilies, military research, terrorist caves...etc.
This (and the butterfly mentioned in TFA) is ultimate espionage. The idea is so cool that I am forced to momentarily disregard big brother threats from the Orwellian-minded.
Yeah, but it makes for a more interesting story to tell the wife.. " director today was a robot!" is probably better than "we played the Chopin piece then got drunk as penguins at the hotel bar".
I'm very... worried about you, to say the least, though I do see where you're coming from (it's hard to stroke THAT while "pondering" your "code").
Well yes of course, but let's not assume that lack of tech familiarity is justification for getting 1984-ed by the benign government. I can't believe the general public is being used as testing grounds for civil rights abuses in jails. It's very funny if you think about it. It's also the scariest thing the big brothers in the UK have come up with in a long time.
There must be a reason behind that number, any clue anyone? What was that.. RTFA? Pffffft. You're disgusting.
..its going that extra mile, reaching a little deeper If you need a partner, it's Rackspace! No comment.I am not talking about the broken patent system, but only specific parts of the "copyright" concept as applied to information sharing. This sharing IS new and the industries based on the information alone (software, digital music) are new, and the means and reasons for which people share this info is new as well. Software has been around for 50 years. It is an infant industry, and the legal system understands very little about it. A program is very different from an e-book or a music file, they serve entirely different purposes from the operational (and therefore commercial) point of view. That is why licensing schemes for software are so intricately difficult. Nothing has been decided "centuries ago" - the debates only started to mature in the 80s-90s, and licenses still leave much to be desired.
Like you said, the purpose of all these schemes is to allow the creators to monopolize on the PROFITS temporarily. Nobody can sell my work, or my ideas, other than myself. Remove the financial activity from the copying by the "criminal", and you suddenly leave yourself outside the realm of this intuitive logic. We are left with "potential" and "possibility" of profit "lost" by having people not be forced to buy information - information which we have no evidence to believe they would have bought if it were not free. Similarly, if you take out the attribution (the claim of origination) and tampering issues (if someone changes something, they do not attribute it to the author) then you have no falsities or "lies" being told that you have to fight against.
The current DMCA practices do not have anything to do with the original intentions of copyright and patent systems. I write software and music and literature (all on a small, vulnerable scale), and I refuse this blatant violation of people's freedoms completely.
And hereby we enter into the usual debate of whether hypothetical consumer activity of someone forced to pay money for something, can warrant the very real (non hypothetical) deprivation of basic freedoms from someone else. I'm sorry, but "potential" sales that only occur because of a law are a sign of a failed model and a backward society. We can go on now and start arguing about car analogies, and the relationship of digital information to tangible goods, and how once I've bought something I can do whatever the hell I want with it (including give it away for free) ..etc. But frankly, those discussions never seem to get anywhere, because this is an ethical and constitutional matter. You want to protect somebody's supposed sales increase by preventing something that is an inherent characteristic of digital information. I see it as a violation of my right to free speech.
Sooner or later people will come to realize that information is a completely different type of product that needs its own unique business framework(s) to be traded successfully. Until then, enjoy the legislative ignorance in this still-very-young industry.
Or maybe he's implying, correctly, that sharing digital information for free does not deprive anyone of anything, let alone make them penniless.
"Free will is not magic, simply an acknowledgment that we are (semi) autonomous agents."
:)
Autonomous agents programmed, and continuously in effect of, our environment. Our decisions are not the result of something originating in us and separate from the universe... our mind (the DNA that created it, the factors that affect it)is subject to universal causality like everything else. It's either that or magic. I understand you are trying to equate sentience with "free will", and I agree with what you are saying (because that is where the illusion comes from). But none of this changes the fact that we are a the product of physical processes, and we ourselves, and our minds, are comprised of (probabilistic) physical processes that are deterministic, albeit quantum mechanical at the lowest level.
In my initial response I was trying to agree with you while making a small correction. Determinism is just science, and "free will" is just an observation on our state of affairs. See, even robots can be poets
Yes, except that should be "does not invalidate the illusion of 'free will' ".
Physics works, there is no magic in the human brain (just some very complicated chemical interactions), film at 11.
No, they are not the same problem at all. Provability in mathematics is axiomatic, provability in physical reality is subject to empirical satisfaction. That is why I was pointing out the distinction. Religion does not satisfy any conditions of provability, of any chosen "genre", in any SINGLE true statement, let alone all of them(which as Godel showed, is impossible given the current notion of logic).
And your answer to that is to invent immortality? There are beautiful things about the world regardless of whether they last forever or not. I will not tell you that the "meaningless" or "purposeless" universe is not grim. Heck, that's why religion exists in the first place (to counter the irrational and destructive emotional reaction to this fact). But once you delve deeply enough into meaning and "purpose" you realize that
:)
a) They are precisely what religion lacks
b) you as a sentient being have the most reason to actually go through with this "life" thing. You can abstract, and learn, and write. You can love. You can do science.
It is much more worthwhile, trust me, than handing your life over to some deity and relying on fiction to comfort yourself.
Immortality consists largely of boredom. -- Zefrem Cochrane, "Metamorphosis", stardate 3219.8
"I've been trying without success to claim deductions for blackjack and hookers for years,"
:)
Given your nickname, I don't know what to think, really
There is no distinction at all between any fictional beings, except perhaps that deities happen to be less likely to exist than unicorns. With the unicorn, the FSM, or the yet unseen sub-atomic particle you only need to admit (as a skeptic) that you cannot prove or say much about it, since no evidence for the positivity of it's existence has been shown.*
.22 that religion cannot win.
With gods and such, particularly the monotheist version,you just have to sit back and ponder on the entire scheme of the religion at hand to see how bizarre the underlying philosophy is. People think it's the tenets of faith/the law that makes religion un-likable, but that's not really it. I would be willing to accept any of that, but it is the "god" bit itself that is disgusting. Thousands of religions, each thinking they are "right", the others are wrong, their god is the Truth, all of them required of "believe" that. All of them expected to live and die by those respective "beliefs", those "leaps of faith" that become a microcosm of existence for each, sending them to the limits of insane behavior. And all of them not recognizing that it is their respective god that is responsible for this sick scenario, assuming we forget everything we know about physics and the dynamics of the world. Islam, the most philosophically advanced theology of the monotheist faiths(abstract god, non-deification of humans including prophets..etc), had its second Caliph arrest and kill anyone who talked about destiny/determinism debate. He had good reason to do so. The only gods that are not six-year-old in mentality happen to be the ones that do not "want" you to do things.... they sidestep the philosophical debate entirely. And by doing so, they warrant no attention from us as well - i.e the only sensible gods do not matter. It's a catch
Religion is a simplistic, silly idea that has no place in the free world of today. We have strong instincts for it, sadly, but I hope one day we no longer need them to emotionally survive. The world is beautiful without deities. Let's grow up and forget about them.
* This is in contrast to mathematical logic, where you can indeed make statements about provability, both negative (there does not exist...) and positive(there exists...).