When is adequacy gonna be back BTW? That was quickly rising the chart of my favorite sites.
Re:Deja Vu all over again
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 1
This kind of talk really spooks me. You've ***granted*** Microsoft the right to do business?
Yes, we have. Ever read the Constitution? I hope you also realize that the state can revoke MS's charter if it ever feels like it. It's called Democracy.
Just because something is irreducibly complex, doesn't mean it couldn't have evolved. I wish I could find the beautiful critique I read of Behe but I can't. The best way I can think to explain it is if you looked at two cards balanced against each other, you would say "that's irreducibly complex"(i.e. neither card could stand on it's own). But what if originally there was third object, that the two cards could balance against. Then, once the two cards were in place, you could remove the object and you've got irreducible complexity.
The metaphor here is that the cards represent some irreducibly complex system(something that, before all the pieces are in place, is useless), and the third object is something that was already there serving a different purpose.
And I wish I could elaborate further, but I'm about to be hit by lightning.
Good question. Since the thing is already built though, the point is moot. Why the fuck are we mothballing something we spent $125 million creating? That's my question.
How far is the latter situation different that creating a clone for spare parts with the clone kept in a coma?
Oh, only about 10 trillion cells difference, give or take a few...
Your position seem to be that an embryo is human because it contains all the genetic material needed for a human. And yet, so does one of your skin cells, if we wished to use a cloning technique on it. And yet you don't find it too morally abhorrent to scrape of thousands of those skin cells every day in the shower.
However, there was a man, IIRC by the name of Bruno, who was burned alive for claiming that those points of lights in the sky are stars, like our Sun, and that there may be other intelligent beings on planets circling them.
Those 5 cells(actually I think it's more like 30 - in a circle) constitute a real person, huh? Just like you and me? OK then, so tell me what happens to that real person if those cells do something a little odd, and become two blastocysts instead of one. Yeah, that's right, at that point in embryonic development, that group of cells can still split off into twins.
Maybe the little soul in the little human gets split in half?
...except that Apple hasn't shipped any machines with puck mice for the past year+, so who cares? BTW, I actually like the puck mouse OK, and never found a problem with the orientation. I like the new pro mouse much better though.
also, Apple monitors are IIRC just repackaged Sony(or some company's) trinitrons. Personally I prefer my 19" Mitsubishi Diamondtron. cheaper than Apple's 17", bigger, and a nicer picture. doesn't match my machine, but who really gives a fuck?
When a normal human being says he will rephrase something, it means to state the same thing in a different way, for clarity's sake. You, instead, stated the exact opposite of your original statement. That is not rephrasing, that is backtracking and ad hoc arguing. Again, your statement was
"it is legal and (now) constitutional for politicians to take what people earn and spend it however they please."
There is no wiggle room in that.
All the rest of what you say is fairly irrelevant given that contradiction. But I will point out once again that you are mixing Constitutional and philosophical/moral arguments. You say: the government can take your money for the military, because it's in the Constitution...but the government can't take your money for welfare, because that's wrong and I don't want my money going to that.
Sorry, no. As you've already stated that welfare is Constitutional, no further argument is needed on my part. You hung yourself with your own rope.
By being a citizen of the United States, or virtually any world superpower, you need to accept the fact that you need a useful, functional military.
No I don't. Go ahead, repeat ten more times that I do. It doesn't make it true. Either I can opt in/out of any service, or you cannot argue the wrongness of any service.
My views are those of the Founding Fathers.
The founding fathers by and large supported a racist and sexist government. If you cannot distinguish between what is Constitutional and what is right you are a fool.
The Founding Fathers specifically enumerated the military as a necessary entity to maintain the public welfare.
And that makes it right?
You can not argue its Constitutionality, and Constitutionality is all that matters if you wish to call yourself an American.
And yet you said in the beginning of this discussion that things like welfare are constitutional. You know try to take it back, but it is there in black and white.
If you think it being cited in the Constitution ends the argument, then you really have no philosophy at all. As has been pointed out before in this discussion, the founders did not get everything right. It is a sign of intellectual bankruptcy for you to think that something being in the Constitution makes it right. You seem to have no concept of the difference between right and constitutional, because you mix the two indiscriminatly. Your first message in this thread says that it is now Constitutional for politicians to take our money and spend it on whatever they want, but that it is very very wrong. And now you are saying that because the military is in the Constitution, no further argument is necessary that it is acceptable for the government to take our money and use it for military purposes.
Well fine. By your own argument:
"The very fact that the military was cited in the Constitution as a necessary government service should alone end the argument."
"Yes, it is legal and (now) constitutional for politicians to take what people earn and spend it however they please."
I will say that you therefore accept the end of the argument: the government can take our money and do whatever it wants with it. If you don't like it, as you stated somewhere else in the thread, you can leave.
Think that's a cop-out? Well it is, but I'm still right. Anyway:
"The Military is (1) absolutely necessary for maintaining a country"
Talk to Costa Rica. They might disagree.
"a service that can not be provided under a private entity, out of pure logistics"
Because of 1 that is unimportant, but I see no reason why private citizens, voluntarily pooling their funds, could not create a successful military. The only difference between that system and the system we currently have is the voluntary part.
And you still have not responded to whether all people on welfare truly are capable of working but choose not to. To make the point more salient: there are people who were born with severe mental and/or physical defects that make it literally impossible for them to do any kind of productive labor. You think it is fair to let them die?
And again, what determines a required service for different people. You reject my "private army" idea. OK, so say I have cancer and have one month to live. But I stay at my job, because I really like it. When I'm down to just days to live, I get my last paycheck. The government has taken out some of my money...for the defense budget.
How is that money the government is taking from me providing a required service?
And let me just respond to your first possible objection: "no", you say, "that money was for the defense they provided *while you were doing that work*"....
OK, but what about all the R&D money?
In any case, if the money I make really belongs to me and me alone, then you are taking an anarchist position and there should be absolutely no taxes at all. If you are for even 1 cent of taxes, then your entire logical facade crumbles in the face of your hypocrisy.
Why do they think it's heating up so fast? Because that's what observations show. They show the earth heating up extremely fast, and the past few years/decades being the hottest in recorded history or in what we can determine about the time before that.
And yes, studying has nice, but considering that there are still people who don't accept the theory of evolution, how much study is necessary? More to the point, is the time it will take to satisfy you with study be less than the time it will take for irreparable harm to be done to the planet?
First off you're right on about radio waves. My guess is that there's some way to communicate (if not actually travel) FTL.
And yeah, I also doubt the idea of massive colonization. It seems likely that most civilizations able to progress to the point of having that technology would first have to stabilize their population. Without exponentially expanding population, there's no need to colonize millions of worlds(and anyway, who wants to go live on planets where the air is toxic to you - which I bet for any given life form most planets would be).
No one is asking you to prove a negative. The point is that there is now a ton of evidence *for* global warming, and if you want people to reject that evidence, you should perhaps make a case as to why we should reject the evidence. As maynard said, your assertion of knowledge that the computer models are false is dubious at best.
As to Lindzen, the earth may very well be able to "counteract such perturbations", but so what? The problem here is that the Earth's feedback systems generally work on geologic time scales. Maybe the earth will cool back down...10,000 years from now. Too bad there may not be any humans there to see it.
In the same way that I think "good samaritan" laws are appropriate(their basis being that letting someone get hurt through inaction is wrong - it's not your fault that they're in danger, but it's your responsibility to do something about it), I think laws that mandate that you give money you easily can to people who certainly need it are also.
The reason our military exists is because _every_ American benefits from it.
I just told you, I am part of the private CAA(Communist American Army), and have no need for the US military. I resent having my tax dollars taken at gunpoint, and then used to protect those too lazy and stupid to protect themselves.
If you want the poor to be fed, form a private institution that will do so, rather than force Americans to give up a portion of their paycheck to help feed the lazy and stupid.
You are saying that you think every single person in this country is capable of supporting himself through productive labor? Not just most, all???
Why do people pay property taxes in the first place? It seems to me that it's because the government protects your property. If a Hughes office building in LA catches on fire, fire trucks will come try to put it out. If someone tries to rob it, police will come and stop him. If the Chinese Army invades the country, and government will attack them and stop them from seizing Hughes's building.
Unless any of these services are being provided to a Hughes satellite in orbit, why the hell should they pay anything in property taxes?
How does the government preserve life by letting rich swin in their money bins as people starve in the street?
See, people who can't get themselves food will starve. People who can't defend themselves against the Chinese Army will die. I see no difference. If the government won't protect life in once case, why should it in another?
Free speech wasn't always considered a human right. The Bible approves of slavery and subjugation of women. How you can talk about rights as absolute, unchanging, and given to us by our Creator, is beyond me. Human rights are a human creation. If we wish to create new ones, we damn well can.
Slashdot Mirror
no one got it
When is adequacy gonna be back BTW? That was quickly rising the chart of my favorite sites.
This kind of talk really spooks me. You've ***granted*** Microsoft the right to do business?
Yes, we have. Ever read the Constitution? I hope you also realize that the state can revoke MS's charter if it ever feels like it. It's called Democracy.
I love that site, but whenever I try to go to it it's down, and I have to use google's cache. Do they have some major server problems or something?
Seanbaby has great stuff. e.g. the original stupid page:
http://seanbaby.com/stupid/original.htm
and pretty much anything in the probe, like:
http://seanbaby.com/news/commonsense.htm
And of course the E3 articles, the movie reviews, etc. It's hilarious.
Just because something is irreducibly complex, doesn't mean it couldn't have evolved. I wish I could find the beautiful critique I read of Behe but I can't. The best way I can think to explain it is if you looked at two cards balanced against each other, you would say "that's irreducibly complex"(i.e. neither card could stand on it's own). But what if originally there was third object, that the two cards could balance against. Then, once the two cards were in place, you could remove the object and you've got irreducible complexity.
The metaphor here is that the cards represent some irreducibly complex system(something that, before all the pieces are in place, is useless), and the third object is something that was already there serving a different purpose.
And I wish I could elaborate further, but I'm about to be hit by lightning.
Good question. Since the thing is already built though, the point is moot. Why the fuck are we mothballing something we spent $125 million creating? That's my question.
How far is the latter situation different that creating a clone for spare parts with the clone kept in a coma?
Oh, only about 10 trillion cells difference, give or take a few...
Your position seem to be that an embryo is human because it contains all the genetic material needed for a human. And yet, so does one of your skin cells, if we wished to use a cloning technique on it. And yet you don't find it too morally abhorrent to scrape of thousands of those skin cells every day in the shower.
A fetus? Try a week-old embryo, with about 30 cells. A real model human that clump of cells is, too.
However, there was a man, IIRC by the name of Bruno, who was burned alive for claiming that those points of lights in the sky are stars, like our Sun, and that there may be other intelligent beings on planets circling them.
Those 5 cells(actually I think it's more like 30 - in a circle) constitute a real person, huh? Just like you and me? OK then, so tell me what happens to that real person if those cells do something a little odd, and become two blastocysts instead of one. Yeah, that's right, at that point in embryonic development, that group of cells can still split off into twins.
Maybe the little soul in the little human gets split in half?
...except that Apple hasn't shipped any machines with puck mice for the past year+, so who cares? BTW, I actually like the puck mouse OK, and never found a problem with the orientation. I like the new pro mouse much better though.
also, Apple monitors are IIRC just repackaged Sony(or some company's) trinitrons. Personally I prefer my 19" Mitsubishi Diamondtron. cheaper than Apple's 17", bigger, and a nicer picture. doesn't match my machine, but who really gives a fuck?
I wonder if the primate stories are any good?
I will rephrase my original argument.
When a normal human being says he will rephrase something, it means to state the same thing in a different way, for clarity's sake. You, instead, stated the exact opposite of your original statement. That is not rephrasing, that is backtracking and ad hoc arguing. Again, your statement was
"it is legal and (now) constitutional for politicians to take what people earn and spend it however they please."
There is no wiggle room in that.
All the rest of what you say is fairly irrelevant given that contradiction. But I will point out once again that you are mixing Constitutional and philosophical/moral arguments. You say: the government can take your money for the military, because it's in the Constitution...but the government can't take your money for welfare, because that's wrong and I don't want my money going to that.
Sorry, no. As you've already stated that welfare is Constitutional, no further argument is needed on my part. You hung yourself with your own rope.
By being a citizen of the United States, or virtually any world superpower, you need to accept the fact that you need a useful, functional military.
No I don't. Go ahead, repeat ten more times that I do. It doesn't make it true. Either I can opt in/out of any service, or you cannot argue the wrongness of any service.
My views are those of the Founding Fathers.
The founding fathers by and large supported a racist and sexist government. If you cannot distinguish between what is Constitutional and what is right you are a fool.
The Founding Fathers specifically enumerated the military as a necessary entity to maintain the public welfare.
And that makes it right?
You can not argue its Constitutionality, and Constitutionality is all that matters if you wish to call yourself an American.
And yet you said in the beginning of this discussion that things like welfare are constitutional. You know try to take it back, but it is there in black and white.
If you think it being cited in the Constitution ends the argument, then you really have no philosophy at all. As has been pointed out before in this discussion, the founders did not get everything right. It is a sign of intellectual bankruptcy for you to think that something being in the Constitution makes it right. You seem to have no concept of the difference between right and constitutional, because you mix the two indiscriminatly. Your first message in this thread says that it is now Constitutional for politicians to take our money and spend it on whatever they want, but that it is very very wrong. And now you are saying that because the military is in the Constitution, no further argument is necessary that it is acceptable for the government to take our money and use it for military purposes.
Well fine. By your own argument:
"The very fact that the military was cited in the Constitution as a necessary government service should alone end the argument."
"Yes, it is legal and (now) constitutional for politicians to take what people earn and spend it however they please."
I will say that you therefore accept the end of the argument: the government can take our money and do whatever it wants with it. If you don't like it, as you stated somewhere else in the thread, you can leave.
Think that's a cop-out? Well it is, but I'm still right. Anyway:
"The Military is (1) absolutely necessary for maintaining a country"
Talk to Costa Rica. They might disagree.
"a service that can not be provided under a private entity, out of pure logistics"
Because of 1 that is unimportant, but I see no reason why private citizens, voluntarily pooling their funds, could not create a successful military. The only difference between that system and the system we currently have is the voluntary part.
And you still have not responded to whether all people on welfare truly are capable of working but choose not to. To make the point more salient: there are people who were born with severe mental and/or physical defects that make it literally impossible for them to do any kind of productive labor. You think it is fair to let them die?
And again, what determines a required service for different people. You reject my "private army" idea. OK, so say I have cancer and have one month to live. But I stay at my job, because I really like it. When I'm down to just days to live, I get my last paycheck. The government has taken out some of my money...for the defense budget.
How is that money the government is taking from me providing a required service?
And let me just respond to your first possible objection: "no", you say, "that money was for the defense they provided *while you were doing that work*"....
OK, but what about all the R&D money?
In any case, if the money I make really belongs to me and me alone, then you are taking an anarchist position and there should be absolutely no taxes at all. If you are for even 1 cent of taxes, then your entire logical facade crumbles in the face of your hypocrisy.
Why do they think it's heating up so fast? Because that's what observations show. They show the earth heating up extremely fast, and the past few years/decades being the hottest in recorded history or in what we can determine about the time before that.
And yes, studying has nice, but considering that there are still people who don't accept the theory of evolution, how much study is necessary? More to the point, is the time it will take to satisfy you with study be less than the time it will take for irreparable harm to be done to the planet?
First off you're right on about radio waves. My guess is that there's some way to communicate (if not actually travel) FTL.
And yeah, I also doubt the idea of massive colonization. It seems likely that most civilizations able to progress to the point of having that technology would first have to stabilize their population. Without exponentially expanding population, there's no need to colonize millions of worlds(and anyway, who wants to go live on planets where the air is toxic to you - which I bet for any given life form most planets would be).
I went for 3 1/2 years without sex.
You lost your virginity when you were three and a half years old?
No one is asking you to prove a negative. The point is that there is now a ton of evidence *for* global warming, and if you want people to reject that evidence, you should perhaps make a case as to why we should reject the evidence. As maynard said, your assertion of knowledge that the computer models are false is dubious at best.
As to Lindzen, the earth may very well be able to "counteract such perturbations", but so what? The problem here is that the Earth's feedback systems generally work on geologic time scales. Maybe the earth will cool back down...10,000 years from now. Too bad there may not be any humans there to see it.
In the same way that I think "good samaritan" laws are appropriate(their basis being that letting someone get hurt through inaction is wrong - it's not your fault that they're in danger, but it's your responsibility to do something about it), I think laws that mandate that you give money you easily can to people who certainly need it are also.
The reason our military exists is because _every_ American benefits from it.
I just told you, I am part of the private CAA(Communist American Army), and have no need for the US military. I resent having my tax dollars taken at gunpoint, and then used to protect those too lazy and stupid to protect themselves.
If you want the poor to be fed, form a private institution that will do so, rather than force Americans to give up a portion of their paycheck to help feed the lazy and stupid.
You are saying that you think every single person in this country is capable of supporting himself through productive labor? Not just most, all???
Why do people pay property taxes in the first place? It seems to me that it's because the government protects your property. If a Hughes office building in LA catches on fire, fire trucks will come try to put it out. If someone tries to rob it, police will come and stop him. If the Chinese Army invades the country, and government will attack them and stop them from seizing Hughes's building.
Unless any of these services are being provided to a Hughes satellite in orbit, why the hell should they pay anything in property taxes?
How does the government preserve life by letting rich swin in their money bins as people starve in the street?
See, people who can't get themselves food will starve. People who can't defend themselves against the Chinese Army will die. I see no difference. If the government won't protect life in once case, why should it in another?
Free speech wasn't always considered a human right. The Bible approves of slavery and subjugation of women. How you can talk about rights as absolute, unchanging, and given to us by our Creator, is beyond me. Human rights are a human creation. If we wish to create new ones, we damn well can.