We have such a double standard in this country. We scream when a person who is charged with a crime, makes a choice and takes their life because they where charged with a crime, that we are to tough. The next day we scream when another person charged with the same or a different crime gets off or only gets a light sentence.
The "we" in those two cases aren't necessarily the same people. People tend to shout the loudest about the things they're unhappy about; thus in the first case you'll hear mostly from those who think the justice system is too harsh, while in the second case you'll hear mostly from those who think it's too lenient.
It sounds like Chinese workers want the same thing that American workers want: better working conditions.
Fourtunately for China, they don't have to worry about any of those evil corrupt unions getting in the way of the Free Market(tm). Imagine what a disaster it would be if Chinese workers organized and demanded to be treated like human beings. It would lead to organized crime, and executives might have to take pay cuts, and it might even start China down the road to SOCIALISM... wait, what?
Does anybody think that our enemies-du-jour (and our friends, too) aren't reading all our science journals and buying samples of all manner of products for reverse engineering?
Large, powerful nations have a habit of denigrating their enemies. Said enemies can't just be on the other side; they have to be stupid and cowardly and barbaric and, in general, barely human. What's never explained, of course, is how people who are this all-around worthless can simultaneously pose a deadly threat which must be guarded against every minute of every day.
To be fair, to some degree this is human nature and everybody does it, but superpowers seem to be particularly prone to this kind of thinking. Sooner or later it always bites them in the ass.
Here's a though experiment: imagine how Episodes 6, 1, 2, and 3 would have been if they had been done by the same writer and director who did Empire Strikes Back.
From the writing side, that would have been kind of difficult since Leigh Brackett died in 1978.
He basically turned Star Trek into a Michael Bay movie and of course the same moronic people who love the Terminator franchise rant and rave about how good his rebooted trek is.
Hey, what's wrong with the Terminator franchise? The first movie was great, the sequel was pretty good, and the TV series was brilliant. It's not like there were any more movies. I heard they did some kind of Transformers crossover thing a couple of years back, but you shouldn't judge the series by cheap imitations.
Wow. I'm not going to take the time to go through that entire site to see how it scores on the crackpot index, but just from a quick look at the first couple of pages, the author's going for an impressively high score.
Chickens are small and therefore more manageable than the larger birds, and they breed quickly. It's the same reason that mice are the main choice for mammalian models in biology, rather than say, pigs.
When people talk about "Paleocene dinosaurs," they specifically mean the non-avian kinds. Specifically, there are some fossils which may indicate that some hadrosaurs survived the extinction event.
I have always been upset that they explain how the steam engine works, but not how the time tunnel works. Maybe they think that wormholes are to advanced of a concept for per-school.
Well, it's possible to explain how steam engines work, because you know, we actually have steam engines. Wormholes may or may not exist at all, and if they do, we certainly don't know everything about them. And even if such a thing as a "time tunnel" is possible, it may or may not have anything to do with wormholes according to our current understanding. So really, there's no comparison.
Technology is making deep changes into society, and moral, ethics and laws should adapt to the new reality.
There's a certain balance to be struck. We can't completely adapt our morals, ethics and laws every time a technological change comes along. For an obvious example: murder is wrong. It's wrong whether it's committed with your bare hands, with a rock, with a club, with a spear, with a sword, with a bow, with a gun, with a remotely piloted drone, or with some weapon we can't even imagine yet. Any society that hopes to exist for any length of time has to have moral codes against killing, as a general rule, and laws to enforce those codes.
OTOH, yes, we obviously have to adapt to changing conditions. In general, as far as changes in technology goes, I'd say our morals should change the slowest, our ethics the fastest, and our laws at a pace somewhere in between.
Last time I posted this info on slashdot I was modded down to Troll in less than 30 seconds. I wonder how long it will take today?
Says the guy who's currently modded to +5. Of course. I swear, no matter what the content of the rest of the post, a line like this ought to be an automatic downmod.
How long should this last? Should the heirs of Thomas Malory have veto power over every retelling of the King Arthur story, to make sure that it conforms to the "official" and "canonical" version?
It's a lot easier to calculate orbit than mass, and the latter is pretty much irrelevant to the former--Earth is so much more massive than Apophis can possibly be that the asteroid's mass can be ignored in any orbital calculation. So we'll know if it's going to hit us or not, even if we don't know how big a boom it will make if it does hit.
A pathology causes harm. A belief that there is no free lunch is helpful (since it is accurate and prevents the believer from attempting a variety of unproductive activities) and hence, not a pathology.
The pathology is in the belief that TANSTAAFL applies at all in this situation. Expecting decent pay and benefits for honest work is not in any way equivalent to expecting a "free lunch." It's a matter of basic human dignity.
There are people in this situation who are getting free lunches, of course: the people who sit at the top of the pyramid collecting rather large amounts of money from other people's labor. Fortunately for them, they can always rely on there being plenty of saps at the bottom who will throw sarcastic sayings at anyone who points out this situation.
Maybe you missed the part where the public sector only exists because it's created by funds provided by the private sector.
This is true. It is also true that without the public sector, we wouldn't have anything like "the private sector" as it's understood today; there would be a private sector, to be sure, but it would be a lot more primitive. The two grow (or shrink) together, and it's frankly mystifying to me why so many people can't seem to understand this.
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We have such a double standard in this country. We scream when a person who is charged with a crime, makes a choice and takes their life because they where charged with a crime, that we are to tough. The next day we scream when another person charged with the same or a different crime gets off or only gets a light sentence.
The "we" in those two cases aren't necessarily the same people. People tend to shout the loudest about the things they're unhappy about; thus in the first case you'll hear mostly from those who think the justice system is too harsh, while in the second case you'll hear mostly from those who think it's too lenient.
Well, okay, I'll be damned. Thanks for posting that--I honestly had no idea.
When you realise that there were programs like MacPaint and MacWrite a full decade before the Mac came out
Could you tell us about these mouse-driven graphics programs and WYSIWYG word processors, running on the desktop, from 1974?
It sounds like Chinese workers want the same thing that American workers want: better working conditions.
Fourtunately for China, they don't have to worry about any of those evil corrupt unions getting in the way of the Free Market(tm). Imagine what a disaster it would be if Chinese workers organized and demanded to be treated like human beings. It would lead to organized crime, and executives might have to take pay cuts, and it might even start China down the road to SOCIALISM ... wait, what?
It has its moments of unintentional comedy, but I'd say its more on the painful end of the scale.
[slow clap]
Does anybody think that our enemies-du-jour (and our friends, too) aren't reading all our science journals and buying samples of all manner of products for reverse engineering?
Large, powerful nations have a habit of denigrating their enemies. Said enemies can't just be on the other side; they have to be stupid and cowardly and barbaric and, in general, barely human. What's never explained, of course, is how people who are this all-around worthless can simultaneously pose a deadly threat which must be guarded against every minute of every day.
To be fair, to some degree this is human nature and everybody does it, but superpowers seem to be particularly prone to this kind of thinking. Sooner or later it always bites them in the ass.
Here's a though experiment: imagine how Episodes 6, 1, 2, and 3 would have been if they had been done by the same writer and director who did Empire Strikes Back.
From the writing side, that would have been kind of difficult since Leigh Brackett died in 1978.
He basically turned Star Trek into a Michael Bay movie and of course the same moronic people who love the Terminator franchise rant and rave about how good his rebooted trek is.
Hey, what's wrong with the Terminator franchise? The first movie was great, the sequel was pretty good, and the TV series was brilliant. It's not like there were any more movies. I heard they did some kind of Transformers crossover thing a couple of years back, but you shouldn't judge the series by cheap imitations.
Wow. I'm not going to take the time to go through that entire site to see how it scores on the crackpot index, but just from a quick look at the first couple of pages, the author's going for an impressively high score.
Chickens are small and therefore more manageable than the larger birds, and they breed quickly. It's the same reason that mice are the main choice for mammalian models in biology, rather than say, pigs.
When people talk about "Paleocene dinosaurs," they specifically mean the non-avian kinds. Specifically, there are some fossils which may indicate that some hadrosaurs survived the extinction event.
I have always been upset that they explain how the steam engine works, but not how the time tunnel works. Maybe they think that wormholes are to advanced of a concept for per-school.
Well, it's possible to explain how steam engines work, because you know, we actually have steam engines. Wormholes may or may not exist at all, and if they do, we certainly don't know everything about them. And even if such a thing as a "time tunnel" is possible, it may or may not have anything to do with wormholes according to our current understanding. So really, there's no comparison.
Technology is making deep changes into society, and moral, ethics and laws should adapt to the new reality.
There's a certain balance to be struck. We can't completely adapt our morals, ethics and laws every time a technological change comes along. For an obvious example: murder is wrong. It's wrong whether it's committed with your bare hands, with a rock, with a club, with a spear, with a sword, with a bow, with a gun, with a remotely piloted drone, or with some weapon we can't even imagine yet. Any society that hopes to exist for any length of time has to have moral codes against killing, as a general rule, and laws to enforce those codes.
OTOH, yes, we obviously have to adapt to changing conditions. In general, as far as changes in technology goes, I'd say our morals should change the slowest, our ethics the fastest, and our laws at a pace somewhere in between.
I was trying to make a joke. Apparently I still haven't had enough coffee.
Isn't there some law or other about headlines that end in a question mark?
No.
I pretty sure no serious (by which I mean logically sound) skeptical arguments deny that CO2 contributes to warming.
Your mistake is in assuming that "logically sound" applies to the "skeptical" arguments in question.
Last time I posted this info on slashdot I was modded down to Troll in less than 30 seconds. I wonder how long it will take today?
Says the guy who's currently modded to +5. Of course. I swear, no matter what the content of the rest of the post, a line like this ought to be an automatic downmod.
How long should this last? Should the heirs of Thomas Malory have veto power over every retelling of the King Arthur story, to make sure that it conforms to the "official" and "canonical" version?
It's a lot easier to calculate orbit than mass, and the latter is pretty much irrelevant to the former--Earth is so much more massive than Apophis can possibly be that the asteroid's mass can be ignored in any orbital calculation. So we'll know if it's going to hit us or not, even if we don't know how big a boom it will make if it does hit.
Hear that? It's the sound of a "woosh" as that joke flies past you.
The woosher woosh't!
A pathology causes harm. A belief that there is no free lunch is helpful (since it is accurate and prevents the believer from attempting a variety of unproductive activities) and hence, not a pathology.
The pathology is in the belief that TANSTAAFL applies at all in this situation. Expecting decent pay and benefits for honest work is not in any way equivalent to expecting a "free lunch." It's a matter of basic human dignity.
There are people in this situation who are getting free lunches, of course: the people who sit at the top of the pyramid collecting rather large amounts of money from other people's labor. Fortunately for them, they can always rely on there being plenty of saps at the bottom who will throw sarcastic sayings at anyone who points out this situation.
Maybe you missed the part where the public sector only exists because it's created by funds provided by the private sector.
This is true. It is also true that without the public sector, we wouldn't have anything like "the private sector" as it's understood today; there would be a private sector, to be sure, but it would be a lot more primitive. The two grow (or shrink) together, and it's frankly mystifying to me why so many people can't seem to understand this.
Commie! Terrorist! Why do you hate America?
The reality is TANSTAAFL, the private sector is hurting, and the public sector needs to tighten its belt accordingly.
Thank you for demonstrating so precisely the mental pathology OP was talking about.