There is nothing novel about your post. It is simply a rehashing of the usual craven, stupid excuses for sacrificing freedom of which this nation has already heard far too many. There are many countries in which not only does the government behave in ways which would be more to your liking, but in which there are no laws against it doing so; perhaps you should move to one of them? If you choose to stay here in the US, however, you'll have to learn to deal with the fact that many of your fellow Americans are braver and smarter than you.
Churches do not pay taxes, but they receive the same government services as everyone else (police and fire protection, roads, etc.) Therefore, yes, they are subsidized by the government. Furthermore, the "faith-based programs" started by Bush (which look like another policy which will be continued by Obama) consist of government handouts of cash to churches.
You have to define "stand-alone executable" very carefully. You can, for example, ship a "stand-alone executable" written in Python (i.e., just the.pyc or.pyo file) without the code. Of course, the user still has to have Python installed to run it... but the user must also have something installed to run a Java.jar, or for that matter a Windows.exe or OS X.app. There are really very few "stand-alone executables" in the sense of "programs that will run on the bare metal" shipped these days.
Compare the memory management models of, say, C and Java and please, oh please, try to tell me that they're the same. Each language (or family of closely related languages, as the case may be) has its own way of handling memory access, and there is no one way that you can point at and say "that's the way real programming languages do it."
I have a Master's in CS and over a decade of professional development experience in... let me think about this for a moment... C, C++, PHP, Java, Python, Javascript, Perl, and R. I've come to the conclusion over the years that it is absurd to point at two apps, say one in C and one in Python, which do the exact same thing from the user's perspective and say one is "program" and the other is a "script." Any language in which you can write programs (i.e., any Turing-complete language) is a programming language.
Wikipedia is one of the "slowest sites on the internet"? Huh? Wikipedia pages generally load very fast for me -- often faster than, e.g., similarly-sized pages on Slashdot.
There are a lot of people, here on/. as well as elsewhere, who loftily declare that Perl, Ruby, Python, and yes, JavaScript are all "scripting" languages and thus beneath the dignity of those who use "programming" languages such as C, C++, Java, etc. It's absurd, of course, since increasingly large apps are written entirely in "scripting" languages and people who pride themselves on using "programming" languages are these days just as dependent on multiple layers of abstraction as the "scripters" are, but there you go. I'm guessing that whoever came up with the distinction you mentioned falls into this camp.
Lets correct this type of behavior now before they do worst later in live, then maybe we can better their lives.
How the hell is a uniquely stigmatizing criminal record (it's probably easier to have a normal life as a convicted murderer than as a convicted child pornographer) going to "better their lives?"
Crushed to a pulp? "Surface" pressure on Neptune is 1 bar, same as Earth. For power, if you have controlled fusion there's no lack of hydrogen... Weather might be a problem, although if you stay high enough you should be able to avoid the worst of it, and float with the rest.
could it not be possible to have a planet the size of say, Neptune, with a geological makeup similar to the Earth, that has a lower mass and therefore the acceleration at the surface is exactly 1g
It's entirely possible for a gas giant -- according to Wiki, the "surface gravity" of Neptune is 1.14g, and for Uranus it's 0.886g. I put "surface gravity" in quotes here for obvious reasons, but something like the "cloud city" in The Empire Strikes Back would be quite livable on either of these planets. As for rocky planets, it seems doubtful. Anything solid that was of Neptunian size and mass would, I think, very quickly collapse into a much more compact mass with much higher surface gravity.
GPP's use of the word "they" was a little unclear. The point is that Drudge, Limbaugh, et al. are claiming that Obama's inauguration will be much more expensive than Bush's, while Media Matters (and numerous other sources) are setting the record straight. The right-wing noise machine is saying that Obama's inauguration is costing ~$160 million (true) while Bush's only cost ~$40 million (false.) They get the difference in the figures, IIRC, by leaving out the cost of security for Bush but including it for Obama. The fact is that Obama's inauguration is barely more expensive than Bush's in absolute dollars, and factoring in inflation over the last eight years, it's probably cheaper.
Those who turned 18 and were eligible to vote for the first time in 2008 were in elementary school when Bush was (s)elected. He's been in office pretty much the entire time they've been aware of politics at all. Given what a horrorshow both his terms have been, they can, I think, be forgiven for seeing Obama as something special. It's kind of like what happens to an abused kid who grows up, gets out of his parents' house, and realizes that there are people in the world who won't beat the shit out of him every time he opens his mouth -- sooner or later, he'll realize that the world contains good people and bad ones in about equal measure, but at first, just about everyone is going to seem wonderful in comparison.
growth in replacement sales, higher turnover for insurance companies etc.
As others have pointed out, this is a classic Broken Window argument, and it's clearly wrong. The difference between "piracy" and actual theft of physical goods is scarcity. If I break into your house and steal a CD, it's gone; you don't have it any more. I've gained, but you've lost. Theft is thus at best a zero-sum game, and actually it's worse than that, because of the damage I do by breaking into your home. But if you rip the CD and put it up for download, and I download the files, you haven't lost anything -- you still have the music as well as the physical disk -- and I've still gained.
The refusal of the IP advocates (RIAA, BSA, etc.) to acknowledge this fundamental difference between intellectual and physical property is of course why it's impossible to have a rational debate on the subject.
An executive order is a quasi-law which exists as a symptom of the quasi-monarchical powers which the President has unfortunately been granted by a cooperative Congress and Supreme Court and a complacent people over almost the entire course of American history. It's really just an updated version of "the king's word is law" with a modern gloss. Some blame Lincoln for the Imperial Presidency, some blame FDR, and some blame the Cold War, but honestly the problem goes (at least) back to Jefferson, of all people -- there has almost never been a time when the President did not try to make his office into a throneroom. See also the phrase "commander in chief" and wilful misinterpretations thereof.
That's completely untrue. Say, for instance, I work for LargeMultinationalCorporation. I could have diabetes, high blood pressure and had 3 heart attacks, and I'll still get coverage because I work for LargeMultinationalCorporation. And I did it without the federal government!
That's great for employees of LMC, but you're overlooking two things:
(1) LMC was able to negotiate that kind of blanket coverage with their insurance provider because, well, they're Large. Smaller business don't have that kind of leverage.
(2) There's absolutely nothing to stop the insurance provider from telling LMC, "Right now you're paying $x million per year for blanket coverage. We can offer you the same coverage for 0.9$x million per year [which will actually cost us 50%, not 90%, of what it does now, although we're not going to mention that] if you accept our suggestions about which types of employees you might want to ease out the door." Nor is there anything to stop LMC's management from thinking this offer is a really good idea.
If you think there's a way to solve either of these problems without serious government regulation, please feel free to make a suggestion.
There's still Office Depot and similar stores, which you may have noticed are moving into consumer electronics to a degree (e.g., that's where I got my TV.) And, of course, the elephant in the living room: online competition. For items like TV's and stereos, most people are probably more comfortable buying something they can actually see and hear in the store -- but when it comes to, say, buying a printer or an external hard drive, there's really no reason to shop brick-and-mortar.
Until very recently, science was called natural philosophy.
And now it's not.
All the sciences have their origins in philosophy, and anyone who ignores this does so at their own peril (and shows their ignorance of both science and philosophy).
The historical roots really aren't the point; as I pointed out to another poster in the thread, many intellectual fields have outgrown their roots, and modern science is no more a subset of philosophy than modern literature is a subset of epic poetry.
I'd be rather careful about saying "all the sciences," BTW. Astrology led rather directly to astronomy, and alchemy to chemistry -- and while both of these brands of mysticism certainly had philosophical elements, neither was really "philosophy" in the modern understanding of the word.
Empiricism is an epistemological position that must be defended
The only defense that need be made of empiricism is that it works. Attempts by mystics to undermine this are ceaseless, but doomed. I'm not going to bother retyping my own words; please take a look at some of my posts higher up the thread.
To say that science is about observation is to be way too glib about science. Science is much, much more complicated than that, and deserves much more respect and reflection than you give it.
I never claimed that science is only about observation, any more than I claimed that philosophy is only about axioms; I merely pointed out that these are the places where the respective fields start. And after that, as I acknowledged, the thought processes of scientists and philosophers are often quite similar. But the starting point makes an enormous difference in the outcome.
Believe me, I give science a lot of "respect and reflection" every day. In fact, I probably ought to stop noodling around on/. and get back to work...
While I won't argue with you that science was largely invented by philosophers (and of course I agree entirely that it has rendered large swathes of previously philosophy obsolete) I disagree entirely that this historical curiosity makes it a subset of philosophy. Like many intellectual fields, it's grown far beyond its roots. By way of analogy, modern science is no more a subset of philosophy than modern literature is a subset of epic poetry.
Slashdot Mirror
a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches
Your post is one of the most smug, self-righteous things I've ever read on Slashdot. And that's saying something.
There is nothing novel about your post. It is simply a rehashing of the usual craven, stupid excuses for sacrificing freedom of which this nation has already heard far too many. There are many countries in which not only does the government behave in ways which would be more to your liking, but in which there are no laws against it doing so; perhaps you should move to one of them? If you choose to stay here in the US, however, you'll have to learn to deal with the fact that many of your fellow Americans are braver and smarter than you.
Churches do not pay taxes, but they receive the same government services as everyone else (police and fire protection, roads, etc.) Therefore, yes, they are subsidized by the government. Furthermore, the "faith-based programs" started by Bush (which look like another policy which will be continued by Obama) consist of government handouts of cash to churches.
What about the part where he promised to help stabilize Iraq?
Um ... let me get this straight, you're citing that as a promise he kept?
What about where he promised we'd see no new terrorist attacks on American soil?
Do the words "anthrax" and "beltway snipers" mean anything to you?
Thakk you, Comrade. Your loyalty to the People and faith in our Glorious Leaders is noted and appreciated.
You have to define "stand-alone executable" very carefully. You can, for example, ship a "stand-alone executable" written in Python (i.e., just the .pyc or .pyo file) without the code. Of course, the user still has to have Python installed to run it ... but the user must also have something installed to run a Java .jar, or for that matter a Windows .exe or OS X .app. There are really very few "stand-alone executables" in the sense of "programs that will run on the bare metal" shipped these days.
no concept of memory management
Compare the memory management models of, say, C and Java and please, oh please, try to tell me that they're the same. Each language (or family of closely related languages, as the case may be) has its own way of handling memory access, and there is no one way that you can point at and say "that's the way real programming languages do it."
perl/python/ruby/whatever-you-learned-while-NOT-getting-a-cs
I have a Master's in CS and over a decade of professional development experience in ... let me think about this for a moment ... C, C++, PHP, Java, Python, Javascript, Perl, and R. I've come to the conclusion over the years that it is absurd to point at two apps, say one in C and one in Python, which do the exact same thing from the user's perspective and say one is "program" and the other is a "script." Any language in which you can write programs (i.e., any Turing-complete language) is a programming language.
Wikipedia is one of the "slowest sites on the internet"? Huh? Wikipedia pages generally load very fast for me -- often faster than, e.g., similarly-sized pages on Slashdot.
There are a lot of people, here on /. as well as elsewhere, who loftily declare that Perl, Ruby, Python, and yes, JavaScript are all "scripting" languages and thus beneath the dignity of those who use "programming" languages such as C, C++, Java, etc. It's absurd, of course, since increasingly large apps are written entirely in "scripting" languages and people who pride themselves on using "programming" languages are these days just as dependent on multiple layers of abstraction as the "scripters" are, but there you go. I'm guessing that whoever came up with the distinction you mentioned falls into this camp.
That's all the diagnosis you need. The treatment has something to do with a penguin, I believe, or maybe a piece of fruit ...
Lets correct this type of behavior now before they do worst later in live, then maybe we can better their lives.
How the hell is a uniquely stigmatizing criminal record (it's probably easier to have a normal life as a convicted murderer than as a convicted child pornographer) going to "better their lives?"
Crushed to a pulp? "Surface" pressure on Neptune is 1 bar, same as Earth. For power, if you have controlled fusion there's no lack of hydrogen ... Weather might be a problem, although if you stay high enough you should be able to avoid the worst of it, and float with the rest.
could it not be possible to have a planet the size of say, Neptune, with a geological makeup similar to the Earth, that has a lower mass and therefore the acceleration at the surface is exactly 1g
It's entirely possible for a gas giant -- according to Wiki, the "surface gravity" of Neptune is 1.14g, and for Uranus it's 0.886g. I put "surface gravity" in quotes here for obvious reasons, but something like the "cloud city" in The Empire Strikes Back would be quite livable on either of these planets. As for rocky planets, it seems doubtful. Anything solid that was of Neptunian size and mass would, I think, very quickly collapse into a much more compact mass with much higher surface gravity.
You won't know that for sure unless you set down there on Company orders. My advice? Don't.
It sounds like it's cold enough! Stock up on rabbithorn fur.
GPP's use of the word "they" was a little unclear. The point is that Drudge, Limbaugh, et al. are claiming that Obama's inauguration will be much more expensive than Bush's, while Media Matters (and numerous other sources) are setting the record straight. The right-wing noise machine is saying that Obama's inauguration is costing ~$160 million (true) while Bush's only cost ~$40 million (false.) They get the difference in the figures, IIRC, by leaving out the cost of security for Bush but including it for Obama. The fact is that Obama's inauguration is barely more expensive than Bush's in absolute dollars, and factoring in inflation over the last eight years, it's probably cheaper.
Those who turned 18 and were eligible to vote for the first time in 2008 were in elementary school when Bush was (s)elected. He's been in office pretty much the entire time they've been aware of politics at all. Given what a horrorshow both his terms have been, they can, I think, be forgiven for seeing Obama as something special. It's kind of like what happens to an abused kid who grows up, gets out of his parents' house, and realizes that there are people in the world who won't beat the shit out of him every time he opens his mouth -- sooner or later, he'll realize that the world contains good people and bad ones in about equal measure, but at first, just about everyone is going to seem wonderful in comparison.
growth in replacement sales, higher turnover for insurance companies etc.
As others have pointed out, this is a classic Broken Window argument, and it's clearly wrong. The difference between "piracy" and actual theft of physical goods is scarcity. If I break into your house and steal a CD, it's gone; you don't have it any more. I've gained, but you've lost. Theft is thus at best a zero-sum game, and actually it's worse than that, because of the damage I do by breaking into your home. But if you rip the CD and put it up for download, and I download the files, you haven't lost anything -- you still have the music as well as the physical disk -- and I've still gained.
The refusal of the IP advocates (RIAA, BSA, etc.) to acknowledge this fundamental difference between intellectual and physical property is of course why it's impossible to have a rational debate on the subject.
An executive order is a quasi-law which exists as a symptom of the quasi-monarchical powers which the President has unfortunately been granted by a cooperative Congress and Supreme Court and a complacent people over almost the entire course of American history. It's really just an updated version of "the king's word is law" with a modern gloss. Some blame Lincoln for the Imperial Presidency, some blame FDR, and some blame the Cold War, but honestly the problem goes (at least) back to Jefferson, of all people -- there has almost never been a time when the President did not try to make his office into a throneroom. See also the phrase "commander in chief" and wilful misinterpretations thereof.
That's completely untrue. Say, for instance, I work for LargeMultinationalCorporation. I could have diabetes, high blood pressure and had 3 heart attacks, and I'll still get coverage because I work for LargeMultinationalCorporation. And I did it without the federal government!
That's great for employees of LMC, but you're overlooking two things:
(1) LMC was able to negotiate that kind of blanket coverage with their insurance provider because, well, they're Large. Smaller business don't have that kind of leverage.
(2) There's absolutely nothing to stop the insurance provider from telling LMC, "Right now you're paying $x million per year for blanket coverage. We can offer you the same coverage for 0.9$x million per year [which will actually cost us 50%, not 90%, of what it does now, although we're not going to mention that] if you accept our suggestions about which types of employees you might want to ease out the door." Nor is there anything to stop LMC's management from thinking this offer is a really good idea.
If you think there's a way to solve either of these problems without serious government regulation, please feel free to make a suggestion.
Correlation is not the right word for something that happens (very almost) 100% of the time.
Actually, it is; what you're showing there is that the correlation is close to 1 with a high degree of confidence.
There's still Office Depot and similar stores, which you may have noticed are moving into consumer electronics to a degree (e.g., that's where I got my TV.) And, of course, the elephant in the living room: online competition. For items like TV's and stereos, most people are probably more comfortable buying something they can actually see and hear in the store -- but when it comes to, say, buying a printer or an external hard drive, there's really no reason to shop brick-and-mortar.
Until very recently, science was called natural philosophy.
And now it's not.
All the sciences have their origins in philosophy, and anyone who ignores this does so at their own peril (and shows their ignorance of both science and philosophy).
The historical roots really aren't the point; as I pointed out to another poster in the thread, many intellectual fields have outgrown their roots, and modern science is no more a subset of philosophy than modern literature is a subset of epic poetry.
I'd be rather careful about saying "all the sciences," BTW. Astrology led rather directly to astronomy, and alchemy to chemistry -- and while both of these brands of mysticism certainly had philosophical elements, neither was really "philosophy" in the modern understanding of the word.
Empiricism is an epistemological position that must be defended
The only defense that need be made of empiricism is that it works. Attempts by mystics to undermine this are ceaseless, but doomed. I'm not going to bother retyping my own words; please take a look at some of my posts higher up the thread.
To say that science is about observation is to be way too glib about science. Science is much, much more complicated than that, and deserves much more respect and reflection than you give it.
I never claimed that science is only about observation, any more than I claimed that philosophy is only about axioms; I merely pointed out that these are the places where the respective fields start. And after that, as I acknowledged, the thought processes of scientists and philosophers are often quite similar. But the starting point makes an enormous difference in the outcome.
Believe me, I give science a lot of "respect and reflection" every day. In fact, I probably ought to stop noodling around on /. and get back to work ...
While I won't argue with you that science was largely invented by philosophers (and of course I agree entirely that it has rendered large swathes of previously philosophy obsolete) I disagree entirely that this historical curiosity makes it a subset of philosophy. Like many intellectual fields, it's grown far beyond its roots. By way of analogy, modern science is no more a subset of philosophy than modern literature is a subset of epic poetry.
How do you know what your observing isn't all an illusion?
Because I'm a thinking being engaged with the world around me, not a navel-gazing mystic.