I may be yours, but you are most certainly not mine.
Your behavior says otherwise.
Quick straw poll for the others still reading this thread: how many of
you were insulted by the suggestion that you need to improve? We've
got Twisted's opinion already.
I don't doubt that the *other* participants in this thread need to
improve. Desperately.
I said you had been seen as launching the first strike *whether or not
you think you had, and whether or not you actually had*. A different
assertion entirely: for one, I can show evidence of it in how people
reacted to it.
It wasn't an actual first strike. If some delusional or hallucinating
individual saw something entirely unrelated to reality that's no skin
off my nose. The lot of you need serious professional help anyway.
*Being seen* as having attacked someone without provocation, even if
you think you had provocation or they attacked you first, is probably
more harmful for your reputation than being attacked, with or without
provocation.
There's nothing I can do about "being seen" as having done X, beyond
not doing X. So the most I can do here is not attack without
provocation. The rest is a roll of the dice. OTOH, those few loony
tunes seeing something significantly divorced from reality should not
impact my reputation much except among loonies, so I don't see much to
worry about here.
When providing advise to others? In a word, yes.
Interesting, particularly when they expect this ONLY of me, and not of
everyone else. Most people just use the knowledge they have and that,
in their experience, works, without double-checking with outside
sources every five minutes in case someone somewhere has decided
without fanfare to change something. And most people do not get
viciously attacked and subjected to a smear campaign because of this.
Your double standard is illegitimate. I do not regard myself as bound
by your expectations of me, when they are clearly a) higher than yours
of everyone else and b) ludicrous in the extreme (I'd spend all my
time googling and none doing anything productive if I followed your
suggestion).
Personal attacks are never justified
I'm glad you've come to your senses. Now shut the **** up about me and
go on about your Java-related business.
[insult deleted]
I thought you had just realized that personally attacking me was
unjustified?
In the interim, I'd appreciate if you didn't try to bait
me into posting in other threads by mentioning me by name. I can't
stop you, of course.
That's the kind of thing you people do, not the kind of thing I do.
Which is why I do not claim to be bodily exempt. Consciousness,
however, may or may not be: there are no well-supported physics
theorems supporting either argument.
Nonsense. Any junior high school student can quickly determine that
everything in the cosmos can be divided into two categories: phenomena
that follow patterns and phenomena that do not. The former can be
modeled by formalizing the patterns as laws of physics. The latter can
be modeled as noise. This leaves no room for God or other supernatural
phenomena, except arguably in one-off events (perhaps the Big Bang?)
-- everything that cannot be understood in terms of physics, at least
in principle, is indistinguishable from random noise.
That most junior high school students are brainwashed in some manner
or another, usually religiously, doesn't change that the above logic
is simple enough to follow at that level if someone is willing to
follow it.
Consciousness remains unexplained in detail, but it is undoubtedly an
emergent property of certain types of self-referential computation,
albeit as yet poorly characterized and somewhat mysterious. It won't
be for long -- a couple of decades more, tops.
They exist because the physics involved is often far, *far* too
granular to be useful.
True; they are shortcuts that give, to some degree, reasonable
approximations to what you could in principle work out exactly by
tracking every molecule (modulo the limitations imposed by quantum
uncertainty, anyway).
Studying biochemistry by way of physics would
involve studying the electrostatic and atomic forces in play on each
protein molecule and enzyme.
Which is often done when very precise modeling is required (e.g. drug
discovery). The machine I'm posting this from is doing such
calculations in the background as I write this (for a Folding@Home
type distributed computing project).
The sheer quantity of detail would
overwhelm the researcher. We have biochemistry as a distinct science
because it deals with the processes at a level where the human mind
can understand them (and, often, that does dip into atomic physics to
explain specific pieces -- but it also covers such high-level
abstractions of physics as mitosis).
I don't deny that those abstractions are useful; but they do describe
processes ultimately governed by physics.
Not that I expect you to believe this, but nobody with a working
understanding of manners would believe that silence in the face of
such a claim indicates assent, merely indifference to the statement or
the speaker.
I'm not neutral any more than I'm in agreement with BS like that.
Rather, I'm in violent disagreement.
I don't want the perception to be either that I nodded my head or that
I remained agnostic on the issue. I want it to be clear that "my side
of the story" is that the truth is diametrically opposed to whatever
the asshole said.
I don't want people to only hear you jerks' side of the story, in
short. And I think that that is quite reasonable.
True. On the other hand, the fact that the real Owen Jacobson, if he
is not me, hasn't leapt in to defend himself indicates that either he
doesn't care what I do or that he doesn't know, in which case he could
plausibly argue that the one on usenet is not him.
I don't actually think it's too likely that you're lying, but if you
were, the obvious explanation for his absence would be that he doesn't
follow cljp or ego-search with Google much. This is likely the reason
that the real Paul Derbyshire hasn't leapt in to scream bloody murder
about being badmouthed here as well as misidentified. From what I've
read about the poor guy, most of it abuse directed at him, he probably
decided years ago "to hell with that whole internet thing" and became
a schoolteacher in some quiet rural district ... in Kenya or someplace
like that.
Which (a) describe government search and siezure, not private citizens
(that's forbidden by state and federal law in the US, and the criminal
code in Cannada) and (b) doesn't apply to you as you are neither in
the US nor an American citizen.
The fourth amendment specifically, no (although you have no evidence
that I lack American citizenship); the principle is what matters here.
As you yourself noted, both unreasonable government prying without a
warrant and unreasonable private prying period are outlawed in various
places and generally frowned upon worldwide. Outside communist and
fascist states, anyway.
But the line "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have
nothing to hide" is getting tired and worn-out. The fact is that
people are persecuted for harmless traits all of the time,
particularly as members of identifiable groups, and people may be
subjected to personal vendettas, stalking, and other such noxious
behavior individually without having done anything seriously egregious
to provoke it. People have the right to protect themselves, including
via anonymity or otherwise withholding information and providing it on
a need-to-know basis, from these types of problems. Gays have a right
to stay in the closet. People have a right to anonymous speech online.
People can, and will, lie on those forms that want things like their
street address, race, sex, etc., except where the information
requested is genuinely needed to provide some service (e.g. the
address, when they want something shipped; some will go so far as to
protect themselves by getting a P.O. box and using that as the
shipping address at a web site to avoid divulging their residence
address on the net. Or have something shipped to them at work instead
of at home.)
Ignoring for the moment that pseudonyms and pen names are not
analogous to cryptographic tools, I have not asked you to give up your
pseudonym, though I do find it a little silly. I *have* claimed I
believe I know your actual name, which, if I were to use your horribly-
overwrought analogy, would be akin to having *broken* your strong
crypto.
Illegitimate behavior when a person has clearly made some effort to
withhold information from you that you have no right to and no need
for or legitimate use for.
Using that as a defense is like using "he used an easy-to-guess
password" as a defense when charged with computer hacking. It might be
true, but your behavior was still wrong and you're gonna pay for it.
That defense would be laughed out of court in a hypothetical hacking
trial.
Odds are good it's somewhere in between, unless it's actually even
less hostile and dangerous than I believe it to be.
Get real. This is a world with Al Qaeda, George Bush (two of them!),
persecutors and murderers of abortion providers, crazed stalkers,
insane fans that want to show their favorite celebrity their .45 Colt
even if it's the last thing the celebrity sees, and yes, even little
jerks and pathetic losers like you lot. Of course they're playing in
the bush leagues these days. Sixty years ago we had the likes of
Hitler and Stalin setting high standards for nastiness, although even
they couldn't come close to knocking Genghis Khan off the #1 Biggest
Asshole in History spot -- said asshole having literally decimated the
population in his day. The planet's entire population, that is,
reduced about 10%. The only proportionately bigger causes of death in
human times were an impact event 5000 years ago, a violent climate
change event 10,000 years ago when the Ice Age ended, and
supervolcanic eruptions roughly 30 (Ourani) and 70 (Toba) thousand
years ago.
Nonetheless, in tenish years of using my real name on the internet,
nothing bad has happened to me because of it.
Well, aren't you lucky.
I don't trust luck myself, not when there are alternatives. But that's
just me, I guess.
Point here being that it's my goddamn choice not to trust to luck, and
it is not your right to strip me of that option, nor anyone else's.
On the other hand, a few good things
have happened: I've met people, face-to-face, I'd never have gotten a
chance to get to know if I were dead-set on hiding my identity. Some
of those people have become extremely important to me.
If I met someone online and eventually trusted them enough I might
arrange to meet them (initially somewhere neutral and fairly busy).
Obviously I would among other things need to trust them not to blab
any confidences online.
It's never come up at all. If they believed me to be gay, that
can't've lasted long.
I guess they had to find someone else to fill that quota after they
found out. The odd thing is that they didn't let you go, once they
realized you didn't help them make their quota, and given that you
surely don't do a very good job, since IT jobs by and large require
intelligence, and you've not demonstrated much of that thus far.
Please, by all means, cite an example (Message-ID will do) where I've
actively lied about something not connected with you.
I wouldn't know, since I have only concerned myself with the lies
you've told (and implied) about me.
[snip BS implying that some of the insults he's written weren't lies.
They were. All of them.]
In context, I was mocking myself for sounding like I disapproved of
other people being involved in flamewars while being in one myself.
It was a *joke*.
I, for one, am not amused. If you genuinely disapprove, practise what
you preach and shut the hell up about me already!
You can when you're about to advise someone else to engage in it.
No, you cannot. Back when I used to participate helpfully here, before
you and your friends drove me away from doing anything of the sort, I
posted enough that I'd have been googling constantly and doing nothing
else.
Furthermore, if someone posts a surprising piece
of information, you can verify it yourself easily enough before
arguing that it's false.
If it implies that I'm an idiot or anything else of the sort then it
IS false, and I need no further evidence that it's false than that it
contradicts what I know to be true about myself. Certainly I know such
matters better than anyone else does, after all.
Regardless, if accused of wrongdoing in public then I *must* argue
that the accusation is false, for reasons that ought to be obvious.
