Yes, I agree it is quite a job they have taken upon themselves, and showing enough results to keep the public confidence will be difficult. However, certain things that Clegg swore he would provide, he has gone against, such as the student fees
If the LibDems had ended up with a majority he might have been able to deliver on that promise. They didn't, so it was not within their power to keep all their promises. The coalition agreement decided which promises stayed and which had to go, and once that agreement was made he was right to stick by it rather than break the coalition over something he had previously agreed to. If it wasn't tuition fees they would have to have compromised on some other promise or promises instead of comparable significance, and folks would be complaining about those broken promises. I think you are right, though, that the public doesn't see it that way and will give the LibDems a hard time at the next election, which is a pity. Whatever you think they'd be like in (sole) government, in coalition they do have the effect of knocking some of the nastier edges off Tory policy, and in coalition with Labour would knock some of the crazier edges off.
The coalition agreement is why I think that the attempt to block the web censorship powers is a bad thing. It would be good it it went through, but it's against agreed policy so it's got no real chance of going through and will just sour relations within the coalition.
Wait: you seriously expect a party that is part of a coalition to not make compromises?
would be able to do everything that they said in their manifesto that they would do if they had a majority
Why in the world would anyone with half a brain expect such a thing? They have 40% of the votes in the coalition. They have 9% of the seats in the House of Commons. How, precisely, do you expect the Liberal Democrats to do this without support from either the Conservatives or Labour? Bearing in mind that apparently they're also not allowed to compromise.
People expect magic. It's the same mind set of people who blame the President of the United States for absolutely everything but never question what the Senate or HoR are doing.
Subspecies is a biological discriminant for different populations of a species that could mate, but in practice, don't. Mating, in many species, is a process that involves exactly the right place, colours, odours, rituals and whatnot. This is a condition that humans don't suffer: we stick it in anything that moves. Your argument would hold up if there were no Lenny Kravitzes or, for that matter, me. Hence, race does not exist.
Your argument would hold up if a) there were no mules, and b) it wasn't a non sequitur anyway. Perhaps you missed the rest of my posting, the bit about social constructs being real?
Race doesn't exist in the same sense as subspecies doesn't exist. In other words, it exists. And "racism" isn't about recognising the existence of race, it's about making unwarranted assumptions based on race. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that race doesn't exist is playing into the hands of the racists because it leaves them unchallenged (claiming that race doesn't exist is so ridiculous that it's no challenge to them). Yes, it's a human construct with fuzzy boundaries, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist any more than it means that "love" or "law" doesn't exist.
Oh, by the way, I and my family were forced to move to a different town in the 1990s because of threats of violence from far-right organisations and from so-called anti-Nazi organisations who considered that mixed-race marriages were still crossing the line.
Maybe it's over-self-diagnosed, but there's a proper clinical diagnosis, and it's a serious condition. The person with Asperger's does have significant strengths, though, and they tend to align with technology skills, so there's no real surprise here to those who know about Aperger's.
I did my apprenticeship there, before the "new city" of Milton Keynes had been built. The site had been taken over by the post office and the civil aviation authority, both of whom were using it as a technical training establishment. Believe me, the "remoteness" had no "romance" even then. It translated as "dullness". It was never particularly remote anyway, being only a couple of miles from Leighton Buzzard, a couple of miles from Stony Stratford, a couple of miles from Wolverton (about the only place in the area that could beat Bletchley for dullness). They were all separate towns then, although all but Leighton Buzzard have now been swallowed up by Milton Keynes.
I doubt there are many here would have the courage to see themself and their entire family tortured and killed than rather raise an arm in anger. You might well disagree with that course of action, but to call it cowardice is plain silly.
"When we went to Australia, people told us that they have winter at a different time to us. It turns out that they have winter at the same time as us, it's just that we have another one from October to March." -- Michael Flanders (or was it Donald Swann?)
Yeah, I know the UK doesn't consider itself to be EU
Er, I don't think you do know that. The larger party in our coalition government wants us out, as do most of the press, but we're still in at the moment, and there are still plenty of us who like it that way.
Did they? I can't tell from the example cited, because although there were plenty of independent clauses they were correctly joined and so didn't form a run-on sentence.
>>No, I'm not making that mistake, I'm raising that very distinction.
Okie, doke.
>>Try telling me something I don't know.
The Rocky Road to Dublin is commonly believed to be derived from the Jacobin song Cam Ye O'Er Frae France. However, this is not that case. People confuse Cam Ye O'Er Frae France with I'm O'Er Young to Marry Yet, even though the latter only bears a passing resemblance to RRTD. In fact, while several airs are somewhat similar to RRTD, no one has been able to find the tune used anywhere else prior to its creation.
It's not your week, is it? I'm an ardent folkie, too. The confusion wasn't helped by the fact that Steeleye Span's version of Cam Ye O'Er Frae France clearly was heavily influenced by The Rocky Road to Dublin.
I didn't include the water areas because most of the water areas don't need cellphone coverage. London has a few bridges and tunnels that act as choke points, especially on the eastern side. And I never drive into Central London because it takes too long and it costs a fortune to park. I don't know about New York, but the only sane way to get into Central London is public transport.
>>If you ask the Vatican for their opinion on embryonic stem cell research, do they disagree with you on a matter of science?
The mistake you're making is confusing a matter of ethics (when do humans gain inalienable rights?) with a matter of science.
No, I'm not making that mistake, I'm raising that very distinction.
It's quite possible to be an atheist scientist who would acknowledge the value of embryonic stem cell research and refuse to conduct said experiments for ethical reasons.
Agree completely. You are preaching to the choir.
The Galileo affair didn't go the way you probably thought it went. Galileo was assessed originally not on theological grounds, but on scientific ones. He was caught with a very bad forgery of his results (claiming there is only one tide per day instead of two, which everyone in the world knew wasn't true) in order to prove his heliocentric theory, and so he failed to convince the court. This court was a RCC court, and so disobeying it (and calling the Pope a simpleton in a publication) brought down the hammer of the inquisition, during which time the scriptural references were made.
Most people get it backwards.
Yes, I know all that, too. I also know that one of the inquisition was thrown out of his luxury apartment in the Vatican to make room for Galileo's house arrest, that Galileo's original offence was to teach the heliocentric model as fact before it was shown to be (in fact when the evidence was against it, as even Huxley conceded) and that the church had no problem at all with the heliocentric model when Copernicus showed evidence. I also know that the problem wasn't that the heliocentric model didn't put humanity at the centre, because humanity never was at the centre in medieval cosmology (Hell was).
Next you will be telling me that the famous face-off between Wilberforce and Huxley at the Royal Society probably never happened. Try telling me something I don't know.
So what the law is actually proposing is a way to punish commercial companies while letting open source developers off.
Not even that. It just boosts the market for obfusticators. It doesn't say that redistribution is allowed. And although you can disable DRM (if you can find it), you can't necessarily tell anybody else how to do it.
No, you just find that all software production is shifted offshore outside the jurisdiction of such a law, and you will find in the small print of your license that by purchasing the software you are acting as the importer and so accepting legal liability for any defects.
Exactly where in the Bible does it say that God is omnipotent? Oh, and if God did reach into your head and stream all of history into it that still wouldn't prove the existence of God -- you would have nothing to test it against, and I understand LSD can give a similar experience.
And yet if you actually read the article you cite then you would see that there is an issue with the translation into English.
Most trivial: from my knowledge of creation I would know how the planet was formed. I could go to any random place and know what would I find by digging there. Or I would know the internal details of how the house my grandfather built was made. I could pull a plank and verify that it indeed looks like what I saw. I could predict exactly what the Mars rovers are going to find. There's plenty evidence all over for verification.
I'm pretty sure LSD doesn't put accurate knowledge in your head.
So a well-informed Vulcan has done a mind-meld. As I said, not proof of God, and not proof of omnipotence.
If you can manage to do that, publish. Nobody else has managed yet.
I'm a programmer and not a philosopher, but something along these lines:
When people perceive they're being harmed, they attempt to resist. Enough harm eventually motivates people to take drastic measures, usually against the source of it. Also, it can be verified experimentally that other people have reactions to harm very similar to your own, that is, your own behavior is a quite reasonable predictor of the behavior of others in the same circumstances. Not identical, but close enough to be relevant.
For instance, if somebody punches me in the face, I would attempt to punch back. Based on my experience of that my reactions agree with those of other people quite often, it is very likely that if I punched some random person in the face I'd get the same sort of reaction. Therefore, I can make a pretty good guess at that punching random people in the face is probably a bad idea, without actually trying it.
Generalized, you get the golden rule: doing things you yourself wouldn't like is a bad idea because you not liking it is a good predictor of other people trying to get back at you for doing it.
Now check that argument on the two cases of the Golden Rule that you cited. For example, all you've shown is that the person about to be killed for their organs won't like it and is likely to resist, not that their killing for organs is immoral. You might like to look up "naturalistic fallacy" (yes, I did minor in philosophy at university. That doesn't make me right, but it means I've seen these arguments before and know the technical names for some of them).
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Yes, I agree it is quite a job they have taken upon themselves, and showing enough results to keep the public confidence will be difficult. However, certain things that Clegg swore he would provide, he has gone against, such as the student fees
If the LibDems had ended up with a majority he might have been able to deliver on that promise. They didn't, so it was not within their power to keep all their promises. The coalition agreement decided which promises stayed and which had to go, and once that agreement was made he was right to stick by it rather than break the coalition over something he had previously agreed to. If it wasn't tuition fees they would have to have compromised on some other promise or promises instead of comparable significance, and folks would be complaining about those broken promises. I think you are right, though, that the public doesn't see it that way and will give the LibDems a hard time at the next election, which is a pity. Whatever you think they'd be like in (sole) government, in coalition they do have the effect of knocking some of the nastier edges off Tory policy, and in coalition with Labour would knock some of the crazier edges off.
The coalition agreement is why I think that the attempt to block the web censorship powers is a bad thing. It would be good it it went through, but it's against agreed policy so it's got no real chance of going through and will just sour relations within the coalition.
Wait: you seriously expect a party that is part of a coalition to not make compromises?
Why in the world would anyone with half a brain expect such a thing? They have 40% of the votes in the coalition. They have 9% of the seats in the House of Commons. How, precisely, do you expect the Liberal Democrats to do this without support from either the Conservatives or Labour? Bearing in mind that apparently they're also not allowed to compromise. People expect magic. It's the same mind set of people who blame the President of the United States for absolutely everything but never question what the Senate or HoR are doing.
[Whoosh]
Subspecies is a biological discriminant for different populations of a species that could mate, but in practice, don't. Mating, in many species, is a process that involves exactly the right place, colours, odours, rituals and whatnot. This is a condition that humans don't suffer: we stick it in anything that moves. Your argument would hold up if there were no Lenny Kravitzes or, for that matter, me. Hence, race does not exist.
Your argument would hold up if a) there were no mules, and b) it wasn't a non sequitur anyway. Perhaps you missed the rest of my posting, the bit about social constructs being real?
Race doesn't exist in the same sense as subspecies doesn't exist. In other words, it exists. And "racism" isn't about recognising the existence of race, it's about making unwarranted assumptions based on race. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that race doesn't exist is playing into the hands of the racists because it leaves them unchallenged (claiming that race doesn't exist is so ridiculous that it's no challenge to them). Yes, it's a human construct with fuzzy boundaries, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist any more than it means that "love" or "law" doesn't exist.
Oh, by the way, I and my family were forced to move to a different town in the 1990s because of threats of violence from far-right organisations and from so-called anti-Nazi organisations who considered that mixed-race marriages were still crossing the line.
Maybe it's over-self-diagnosed, but there's a proper clinical diagnosis, and it's a serious condition. The person with Asperger's does have significant strengths, though, and they tend to align with technology skills, so there's no real surprise here to those who know about Aperger's.
I'm going to miss Bert Jansch more, but still a sad loss.
I did my apprenticeship there, before the "new city" of Milton Keynes had been built. The site had been taken over by the post office and the civil aviation authority, both of whom were using it as a technical training establishment. Believe me, the "remoteness" had no "romance" even then. It translated as "dullness". It was never particularly remote anyway, being only a couple of miles from Leighton Buzzard, a couple of miles from Stony Stratford, a couple of miles from Wolverton (about the only place in the area that could beat Bletchley for dullness). They were all separate towns then, although all but Leighton Buzzard have now been swallowed up by Milton Keynes.
I doubt there are many here would have the courage to see themself and their entire family tortured and killed than rather raise an arm in anger. You might well disagree with that course of action, but to call it cowardice is plain silly.
Hoping for a cut of the money to get it redecorated?
Even execute rights? Hmm, maybe...
APL is very concise and is famously easy to read and maintain. Oh, wait...
"When we went to Australia, people told us that they have winter at a different time to us. It turns out that they have winter at the same time as us, it's just that we have another one from October to March." -- Michael Flanders (or was it Donald Swann?)
Yeah, I know the UK doesn't consider itself to be EU
Er, I don't think you do know that. The larger party in our coalition government wants us out, as do most of the press, but we're still in at the moment, and there are still plenty of us who like it that way.
Well, the FCC can regulate all it wants, but it can't change the laws of physics.
I know that, you know that, all of /. knows that. But does the FCC know that?
Maybe they all come from Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average".
As people gain experience in government dealings you will find that expectation gets reversed.
Did they? I can't tell from the example cited, because although there were plenty of independent clauses they were correctly joined and so didn't form a run-on sentence.
What comments do you have about working with a drum machine, especially in a live setting?
All together now: "You only have to punch the rhythm into it once."
>>No, I'm not making that mistake, I'm raising that very distinction.
Okie, doke.
>>Try telling me something I don't know.
The Rocky Road to Dublin is commonly believed to be derived from the Jacobin song Cam Ye O'Er Frae France. However, this is not that case. People confuse Cam Ye O'Er Frae France with I'm O'Er Young to Marry Yet, even though the latter only bears a passing resemblance to RRTD. In fact, while several airs are somewhat similar to RRTD, no one has been able to find the tune used anywhere else prior to its creation.
It's not your week, is it? I'm an ardent folkie, too. The confusion wasn't helped by the fact that Steeleye Span's version of Cam Ye O'Er Frae France clearly was heavily influenced by The Rocky Road to Dublin.
Even if the god in question is Bugid Y Aiba or even Loki?
I didn't include the water areas because most of the water areas don't need cellphone coverage. London has a few bridges and tunnels that act as choke points, especially on the eastern side. And I never drive into Central London because it takes too long and it costs a fortune to park. I don't know about New York, but the only sane way to get into Central London is public transport.
>>If you ask the Vatican for their opinion on embryonic stem cell research, do they disagree with you on a matter of science?
The mistake you're making is confusing a matter of ethics (when do humans gain inalienable rights?) with a matter of science.
No, I'm not making that mistake, I'm raising that very distinction.
It's quite possible to be an atheist scientist who would acknowledge the value of embryonic stem cell research and refuse to conduct said experiments for ethical reasons.
Agree completely. You are preaching to the choir.
The Galileo affair didn't go the way you probably thought it went. Galileo was assessed originally not on theological grounds, but on scientific ones. He was caught with a very bad forgery of his results (claiming there is only one tide per day instead of two, which everyone in the world knew wasn't true) in order to prove his heliocentric theory, and so he failed to convince the court. This court was a RCC court, and so disobeying it (and calling the Pope a simpleton in a publication) brought down the hammer of the inquisition, during which time the scriptural references were made.
Most people get it backwards.
Yes, I know all that, too. I also know that one of the inquisition was thrown out of his luxury apartment in the Vatican to make room for Galileo's house arrest, that Galileo's original offence was to teach the heliocentric model as fact before it was shown to be (in fact when the evidence was against it, as even Huxley conceded) and that the church had no problem at all with the heliocentric model when Copernicus showed evidence. I also know that the problem wasn't that the heliocentric model didn't put humanity at the centre, because humanity never was at the centre in medieval cosmology (Hell was).
Next you will be telling me that the famous face-off between Wilberforce and Huxley at the Royal Society probably never happened. Try telling me something I don't know.
So what the law is actually proposing is a way to punish commercial companies while letting open source developers off.
Not even that. It just boosts the market for obfusticators. It doesn't say that redistribution is allowed. And although you can disable DRM (if you can find it), you can't necessarily tell anybody else how to do it.
No, you just find that all software production is shifted offshore outside the jurisdiction of such a law, and you will find in the small print of your license that by purchasing the software you are acting as the importer and so accepting legal liability for any defects.
Here, and there would be plenty.
And yet if you actually read the article you cite then you would see that there is an issue with the translation into English.
Most trivial: from my knowledge of creation I would know how the planet was formed. I could go to any random place and know what would I find by digging there. Or I would know the internal details of how the house my grandfather built was made. I could pull a plank and verify that it indeed looks like what I saw. I could predict exactly what the Mars rovers are going to find. There's plenty evidence all over for verification.
I'm pretty sure LSD doesn't put accurate knowledge in your head.
So a well-informed Vulcan has done a mind-meld. As I said, not proof of God, and not proof of omnipotence.
I'm a programmer and not a philosopher, but something along these lines:
When people perceive they're being harmed, they attempt to resist. Enough harm eventually motivates people to take drastic measures, usually against the source of it. Also, it can be verified experimentally that other people have reactions to harm very similar to your own, that is, your own behavior is a quite reasonable predictor of the behavior of others in the same circumstances. Not identical, but close enough to be relevant.
For instance, if somebody punches me in the face, I would attempt to punch back. Based on my experience of that my reactions agree with those of other people quite often, it is very likely that if I punched some random person in the face I'd get the same sort of reaction. Therefore, I can make a pretty good guess at that punching random people in the face is probably a bad idea, without actually trying it.
Generalized, you get the golden rule: doing things you yourself wouldn't like is a bad idea because you not liking it is a good predictor of other people trying to get back at you for doing it.
Now check that argument on the two cases of the Golden Rule that you cited. For example, all you've shown is that the person about to be killed for their organs won't like it and is likely to resist, not that their killing for organs is immoral. You might like to look up "naturalistic fallacy" (yes, I did minor in philosophy at university. That doesn't make me right, but it means I've seen these arguments before and know the technical names for some of them).