Holy crap.
I can see my house from here!

Most basic moral and political philosophy makes an appeal to intuition at some point. This is inevitable; if the fundamental assumption isn't accepted, the argument is moot. One such common moral intuition is that it is morally correct to attempt to ensure that people are as equal as possible, or alternatively (in Rawls and others) that one ( Read more... )

I'm not too familiar with HTTP headers and the like, but I suspect that there ought to be somewhere (heck, it could be in the page source) to pass a "permanence" tag. Providers or other intermediaries which perform any form of caching could read these tags and permanently cache the page (i.e., never request it again). Still, what if someone did ( Read more... )

I especially like when the courts tell Fish and Wildlife that no, it's not okay to kill more wolves.I could come up with justifications, I'm sure, but I've never really been able to explain the soft spot in my heart for the furry little bastards. But y'know, if I had to weigh the life of a grey wolf against the life of a human, it probably wouldn' ( Read more... )

Well, not quite. But apparently scientists have begun along the path to creating Buckbeak. As an avowed biophobe, I am duly disturbed. I laughed when they cloned the cat, I laughed when the Christian fundamentalists pissed themselves over stem cells, but a human kid with mice for parents? I dunno. It's down in the Uncanny Valley.

Apparently Russian lawmakers have proposed a measure aimed at outlawing Jewish organizations on the grounds that they foment anti-Semitism.That's interesting. Apparently being hated is the responsibility of the hatee for being conspicuous, rather than the hater for hating. I'm not sure about the moral standing of this, but at least now I can feel ( Read more... )

A book I've been reading on intellectual property mentioned that webpage references are of reduced usefulness because the content on them may change. Would their be any significant value in establishing a type of web document that was irrevocably static from the moment of first publication. I recognize that there are technical issues with this. ( Read more... )

Yahoo news headline: Bush Begins New Term, Vows to End Tyranny.

In certain ways I can't get past the basics of philosophy. This manifests itself in class as a tendency to ask what philosophy is really after in a different wrapper each week. This week's version was the following question ( Read more... )

The International Game Developers Association has just published a whitepaper on "persistent worlds." It focuses on the monetary angle and is, logically enough, devoted to gaming worlds, but also addresses more general world creation issues, both technical and social. It has some shoutouts to Simutronics, which makes me rather nostalgic.