Excellent idea. Back in the day I was a bio major and biochem grad student/TA. We would get group projects in two situations - lab work and presentations. For in-lab stuff in the lower level classes it was pretty much "Find a partner, cut this up and answer these questions." while in the higher classes (like Gross Anatomy, which I TA'd for a semester) the group work was more involved, but the TA's were around enough to tell who earned the lab participation points and who didn't. The students often made that pretty easy - "Hey, does anybody remember so-and-so even touching a cadaver? No? OK, adios to you, buddy", but these options aren't very applicable to any decent size CS project. For the group presentations that we did, we were assigned a grade based on the whole presentation that everyone shared. Theoretically, this forced everyone to work together so we would all reap the benefits of our labor, but some groups had people who slacked off knowing that the grad student and/or pre-med major would cover the work to save the grade. This never bothered me much since I figured that the slackers would only contribute poorly anyway, but YMMV. If you combined the shared grade approach with a way to reliably track what each group member did (CVS? code commenting?), you could weight the individual students grade relative to their contribution. A way to reliably do this is left as an exercise for the reader:)
Camp David was the site of several mideast-related negotiations. Or in the view of some Islamic fundies, where the US and Israel ganged up on Arabs/Muslims and forced them to capitulate. Camp David has a larger symbolic resonance to the world than an ANG base in PA.
If you grade wars on a curve, WWII was sucessful. The Axis was stopped from taking over Europe, China and the Pacific Rim, and Germany, Japan and Italy have not invaded any countries since then. Compare this to WWI, where after the war ended without any of the major combatants being truly conquered, 25 years later there was a larger, bloodier war.
The lesson from WWII and the American Civil War is that to truly defeat an enemy, you need to crush their ability to make war, then help them rebuild economically/socially in order to reduce their desire to make war. The numbers of economically healthy democracies that have fought wars with each other is very small - US vs. UK in the War of 1812?
Actually, giving Henrietta some credit would probably be a good start. I was a bio major and did biochem research in the old days, and we talked about HeLa cells in several situations and every time I got a different, usually wrong explanation, of the name - 'Helen Lane', 'Helen Latham', etc. In science, credit is more important than cash in many ways. That's why there is usually am 'Acknowledgements' section at the end of papers, in addition to the actual references. For that matter, when I took and TA'd Gross Anatomy we knew the names of the people we dissected. It certainly would not have killed the National Academy of Sciences or the NSF to write a letter to the Lacks family to let them know that while they have lost a loved one, she is helping others.
'The High Crusade' was probably my favorite Anderson. One of the funniest books I've ever read, almost as funny as 'Good Omens'.
I'm glad that he went in the company of the people that he loved.
The left wing wackos now say that Bush isn't the president and Cheney really is.
Before this, the right-wing wackos said that Hillary was in charge and Bill wasn't.
This is the essence of American democracy.
I would argue that you are wrong. Doctors throw around antibiotics like confetti,whether or not the patient needs it, leading to strains of bacteria that are resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics. When a doctor tells you it's a virus, and then prescibes antibiotics, they're not doing anything to help you (antibiotics only affect bacteria, not viruses), and they are encouraging resistance to antibiotics, so why are they doing it?
First off, they've probably had patients throw a hissy fit if they don't get pills from the doc, so the doc is just heading you off at the pass. It's like polluting - one pop can one time is not a big deal, but if lots of people do it lots of the time, you've got a problem.
Secondly, doctors are as susceptible to marketing as any other human. They get flyers in the mail, the drug reps come by, and everybody's talking about the risks of secondary infections. The doc wonders about a patient getting sicker and suing the doc, and he presribes antibiotics. CYA now, and the future can worry about itself.
Would Pfizer sponsor research to investigate this question? Would they publish the results if they didn't like them? Would MS sponsor independent research about OS uptimes/speeds/whatever? Would they advertise the results if they didn't like them? Hell, you could make a case that for Pfizer (or MS) to do so would be bad for stockholders, and therefore they should not sponsor such research...
That said, my greatest shock at seeing how real science is done was the dependence on tin foil. It's unreal.
We used tons of the stuff when I was in grad school, but I was in a biochem lab. We'd put foil over flasks, beakers, chromatography columns, the undergrads, whatever. We had thick Saran Wrap-type stuff that we used too. My roomies were very disappointed to see that despite all the multisyllable words I threw around when talking shop, I used aluminum foil and plastic wrap to protect myself from E. coli.
Both these cases are extreme scenarios of gluttony and wastefulness.. not natural selection.. think of another argument.
The point is that driving another species to extinction, and driving yourself out of business at the same time (you used to be able to buy passenger pigeon by the ton), has happened in the past. It was an example of gluttony and it was extremely wasteful, that's why it was bad. Can you name a species that was driven to extinction by humans since the dawn of history that wasn't a waste? (It would be nice if there were marsupial lions and 26-foot long lizards around in wildlife parks, but I can understand why in 5000BCE they were unwanted.)
there are 9 amino acids that we get from meat that you cannot get from vegetables or fruits
Actually, you can get all your amino acids from non-animal sources, you just have to work at it, and you tend to get stuck eating certain foods all the time. You said "The point of this article is that vegetarians don't see that they aren't getting all of their 9 amino acids from plants", which sounds like you thought that there are 9 amino acids. Chemically speaking there are lots of compounds that fall into the class of amino acids ("any organic compound containing an amino (-NH2) and a carboxyl (-COOH)group"), just as there are lots of different alcohols, aldehydes, ethers, yadda yadda yadda, but there are 20 (although two of this group also have acidic forms, so sometimes you'll see 22 as the number) that are used to form proteins. These are what people usually mean when they talk about amino acids.
you don't seem to know to much about... the english language
Okay, so these nomadic, hunter-gathers would set fires that they have no way of controlling to facilitate 'hunting or travel'.
They might not have been able to control the fires, but if you are upwind or downhill of a fire you are relatively safe, even better if you can get a stream between you and the fire. 'Relatively safe' in the sense that, if starvation of your family/tribe is a likely alternative, it's worth trying, anyway.
Of course learning that fire gets pushed by the wind and races up hills was probably pretty hard on the first few people who tried it...
Actually, there are large species of animals that can only be hunted by humans, but can be hunted quite effectively with 'Stone Age' weapons. There used to be a species of giant land tortoise in North America. It was about the size of a VW bug, ims, and no contemporary predator could bust through the shell. However, when a hunting party of humans, came across one of these critters, it's standard defense (pulling in the head and legs and waiting for those pesky mammals to get bored), was exactly the wrong thing to do. The humans would flip the tortoise over (by using their spears as levers) and build a fire around it, to cook it right there. 'Them's good eatin'!'
Point is, just because they didn't have guns and cars back then, doesn't mean they were totally unable to put the smack down on big animals. Fire was probably the biggest help for that. You can use it to cook big tortoises in the shell, and to drive animals off of cliffs by the herd.
However, for me, Genesis 1:26 applies... I have dominion over everything non-human on the earth. So while I don't plan to try and make everything extinct or make the earth totally toxic, I'm still superior to my dog and to any other wildlife I see (not to mention plants, soil, etc, etc).
Unfortunately, I think lots of people use this an excuse to do whatever they want, even if it makes 'everything extinct' or 'totally toxic'. The extinction/toxification becomes a side-effect, unfortunate, but too bad, we need more strip malls, anyone who says otherwise is worshipping the earth. But where do you draw the line? If 99.99% of your state's high-quality prairie is now farmland, houses and roads, isn't putting aside that last 0.01% acceptable? Would you rather have natural areas with rare animals and plants in them, or another Kwik-E-Mart?
On a sidenote, if you were God and you saw what humanity is doing with the earth (strip malls, toxic waste dumps, wiping out species that you created) that you gave him dominion over, would you be happy?
Damn it, I hate when someone posts what is essentially my exact point(down to the examples), except better thought out, in the time it takes me to type mine.
Secondly, The commercial fishing and hunting industries do not want to kill off an entire species or even come close to it... if they did then they would have no industry; no livelihood...
This is obviously true. After all, thousands of commercial hunters depended on hunting passenger pigeons for their livelihood and you can see passenger pigeons any place that has a decent collection of birds. Of
course, they're stuffed and mounted, but still...
You don't have to blow away every single passenger pigeon, or Carolina parakeet, or sawfish, or blue whale to wipe out the species. If the population of a species goes below a certain point, the species will go extinct. This point is different for different species. Hunters, fishers and developers (and their lobbying groups) will say, "See there's still out there, so why protect them?" , then drive a species below the critical level.
Back in the old days, commercial fisherman often stayed close enogh to shore that they returned home every night. Now they go out for days at a time, have to use GPS and sonar to locate and track their fish. All of this requires bigger boats, which require more fish be caught to pay for them, driving down income for the fisherman, etc. The fact that commercial fishing operations are going through so much effort to locate and catch fish should be a huge red flag that there is overfishing occurring but individual fisherman have no incentive to stop fishing. They've got loans to pay off and have spent their whole lives fishing, so what else are they going to do? No industry association is going to tell it's members to stop fishing, becuase the members will revolt and ignore the industry. No lawmaker is going to be willing to shut down a major industry in their state because it's political suicide until it's too late. So, in a couple of decades, when the North Atlantic is overfished, and the fishing towns are really and truly screwed, everyone will say "How'd this happen?"
Btw, there are a bit more than 9 amino acids, but you don't really seem to know much a biology anyway. "... shut your mouth."
So, since the 1st Amendment only applies to Congress, the executive and judicial branches can do what they want, right? The FBI can just start jailing people for saying J. Edgar was a cross-dresser on the take, the FDA can start executing people who sell herbal remedies, the FTC can jail the Napsterites, right? I mean, the FBI isn't Congress, they didn't pass any laws, so if they toss you in the clink for saying mean stuff about Hoover, it's not a violation of your rights, stop complaining and eat your gruel.
The right to bitch, moan and be obnoxious is pretty fundemental to the American idea of democracy. If government bodies are actively suppressing (jail, expulsion, etc.) speech, the press, peaceable assembly, religion, petitioning 'the Government for a redress of grievances', then there is a problem. I mean look at that list (thanks for the Bill of Rights link, I would have forgotten the 'redress of grievances' bit), having a website where people exchange views on what a state institution is doing could be considered speech/press, peaceable assembly and greivance redressing. Yet, a government body, using money collected by the state of Utah and the feds, not only kicked him off of their servers/bandwidth (which would at least be reasonable with some warning), but confiscated his data and destroyed it, and is now threatening expulsion and/or arrest. Can you see why the First Amendment might apply to this?
Actually if you go to: http://www.le.state.ut.us/~code/const/htm/co_02002.htm you can see Article 1, Section 1 ("Inherent and inalienable rights.") of the Utah State Constitution which includes the phrase "to assemble peaceably, protest against wrongs, and petition for redress of grievances; to communicate freely their thoughts and opinions, being responsible for the abuse of that right." That sounds pretty similar to what the First Amendment of the US Constitution says doesn't it? The main difference is the last part - " responsible for the abuse of the that right" - which means (IANAL, of course) that libel and fraud are Bad Things. Let me say again, I don't really have a problem with the U of U kicking this guy off of their servers, but shouldn't he get some warning first? Or at least an opportunity to present his case to the school first? But expulsion? The school is practically going out of its way to make themselves look like a bunch of reactionary morons, so it would be a shame not to call them on it.
Like it or not, in the real world, you have to deal with other people, and sometimes, other people are dolts. This doesn't change the fact that you have to work with them.
They don't even have to be dolts to cause difficulties in the group. If you get two strong-willed, smart people in a group, that will cause as many problems as a smart person and a dolt, if not more. When I was in grad school (biology), I took a 1st semester biochem class with mixed grads and upperclassmen. Early on in the class, we got assigned in groups and were given a topic for our project. In my group there was me (older, strong-willed/stubborn, smart, "We're all in this together" attitude), 2 chem undergrads who were just trying to survive the class, and 1 pre-med student (also arrogant and smart, but since the class was on a curve, "me against you" attitude). We had the hardest topic and made the best project, but man, it got ugly. After hearing one of our "discussions", a complete stranger came up to me and said that she thought we were a couple breaking up in public at first, and maybe we should all calm down a bit. Eventually, we ended up doing a separation of powers thing, pre-med ran the presentation, I did the writing (pre-meds intro to our paper was longer than the rest of the paper combined - she basically tried to pre-empt everything everyone else wanted to say) and experimental design.
The next semester's project with just the two undergrads (and one grad student) was much easier, but not quite as good. Something to keep in mind...
The police can justly dispense with irrelevant formalities because they know who's guilty. Of all the perpetrators "unjustly" clobbered by Giuliani's police force, has even a single one turned out, in retrospect, to be white? No. Not a single one, ever. City and local police do their job well. It's the federal stormtroopers who murder innocents in rural places like Idaho and Texas. That is the abuse of government power which concerns us.
FB, you are truly a gem. Thank you, you have kept me entertained. I do have a question for you though, how can someone turn out to be white in retrospect? You've got to be better and sounding like the master race when you're playing the race card...
I favor proportional representation, with the franchise scaled according to the ability of an individual to exercise it responsibly. Naturally, those smart and ethical enough to amass fortunes are correspondingly more competent to decide what laws we should have...
In other words, Britney Spears votes should count more than yours since she made more money than you this year. How about all those guys who become NFL players this weekend? How many more votes than you will they have? IIRC, minimum wage in the NFL for a rookie is about $150K for the season, but those early 1st round picks will get 10 to 100 times that as a signing bonus. But I'm sure you'd be happy to let someone who bailed out of college after 3 years of barely going to class vote a few thousand times more than you...
Thank you, I stand corrected. Actually, we both are sort of right - LBJ did ask for more 'Federal drug and narcotics control officials', but per the DEA Museum section on their website (http://www.dea.gov/deamuseum/home.htm - it's in frames under 'More on DEA' - right below the gift shop:)) 'On July 1, 1973, President Richard Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)' by combining a few federal TLAs into the DEA.
So, here's my updated version (I know you're waiting with baited breath:):
I mean you couldn't really be serious about GWB's (alleged with no supporting references) views on decriminalization unless you were totally ignorant of the history of the War on Drugs, could you? The fact that you made no mention of Nixon starting the DEA by merging its predecessor agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) with various law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies, and Reagan/Bush pushing it to the forefront both by the 'Just Say No' campaign and the creation of a 'Drug Czar', as well as creating the asset forfeiture laws that not only presume guilt, but also make money doing so, just shows how good a satirist you are.
The presumption of innocence is there so that the prosecution (governement) cannot punish citizens without proof that they have done something wrong. The Big, Bad Government must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that on April 22, 2001, Fearsome Badgers did sell narcotics to an undercover DEA agent, blah, blah, blah, before we send you to prison or execute you. However, asset forfeiture laws work this way: The Big, Bad Government says Fearsome Badgers sold foo to bar, arrests you, takes your house, car and gun collection, sells what they don't want, and then tries you. If you are acquited, you get your freedom, but you have no car to drive home in, but that's okay because you have no house to live in.
FB, as a free-market, small government fan, don't you find it odd to be saying, in essence, that government is too big and powerful, but they should be able to take things from private citizens without proof? Do you see why that makes you look like a hypocrite?
As an opponent of big government, FB, you should know that the one thing government agencies want more than anything else is more $$$ for their budgets. Is there anyone who doubts this? Do you think that there is any possibility that once the Big, Bad Government realizes that they can give themselves raises by kicking down your door, stealing your stuff, throwing you into jail, and having a garage sale - they won't? If so, please explain why you assume that all government employees are perfect, but are still so bad that they are at best a necessary evil?
If the 'public nickel' doesn't pay salaries for public officials who will? The sponsors of the bill? IIRC, the sponsors of a bill are the Congresscritters involved. Are you for private citizens and corporations paying directly for the laws that affect them? Well, I suppose it would stop all those under the table payoffs and the like, but still can you see any possible side effects of this?
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent idea. Back in the day I was a bio major and biochem grad student/TA. We would get group projects in two situations - lab work and presentations. For in-lab stuff in the lower level classes it was pretty much "Find a partner, cut this up and answer these questions." while in the higher classes (like Gross Anatomy, which I TA'd for a semester) the group work was more involved, but the TA's were around enough to tell who earned the lab participation points and who didn't. The students often made that pretty easy - "Hey, does anybody remember so-and-so even touching a cadaver? No? OK, adios to you, buddy", but these options aren't very applicable to any decent size CS project. For the group presentations that we did, we were assigned a grade based on the whole presentation that everyone shared. Theoretically, this forced everyone to work together so we would all reap the benefits of our labor, but some groups had people who slacked off knowing that the grad student and/or pre-med major would cover the work to save the grade. This never bothered me much since I figured that the slackers would only contribute poorly anyway, but YMMV. If you combined the shared grade approach with a way to reliably track what each group member did (CVS? code commenting?), you could weight the individual students grade relative to their contribution. A way to reliably do this is left as an exercise for the reader:)
Bad Slashdolt, bad!
Camp David was the site of several mideast-related negotiations. Or in the view of some Islamic fundies, where the US and Israel ganged up on Arabs/Muslims and forced them to capitulate. Camp David has a larger symbolic resonance to the world than an ANG base in PA.
If you grade wars on a curve, WWII was sucessful. The Axis was stopped from taking over Europe, China and the Pacific Rim, and Germany, Japan and Italy have not invaded any countries since then. Compare this to WWI, where after the war ended without any of the major combatants being truly conquered, 25 years later there was a larger, bloodier war.
The lesson from WWII and the American Civil War is that to truly defeat an enemy, you need to crush their ability to make war, then help them rebuild economically/socially in order to reduce their desire to make war. The numbers of economically healthy democracies that have fought wars with each other is very small - US vs. UK in the War of 1812?
Hey, if you want to make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs.
Actually, giving Henrietta some credit would probably be a good start. I was a bio major and did biochem research in the old days, and we talked about HeLa cells in several situations and every time I got a different, usually wrong explanation, of the name - 'Helen Lane', 'Helen Latham', etc. In science, credit is more important than cash in many ways. That's why there is usually am 'Acknowledgements' section at the end of papers, in addition to the actual references. For that matter, when I took and TA'd Gross Anatomy we knew the names of the people we dissected. It certainly would not have killed the National Academy of Sciences or the NSF to write a letter to the Lacks family to let them know that while they have lost a loved one, she is helping others.
'The High Crusade' was probably my favorite Anderson. One of the funniest books I've ever read, almost as funny as 'Good Omens'. I'm glad that he went in the company of the people that he loved.
The left wing wackos now say that Bush isn't the president and Cheney really is. Before this, the right-wing wackos said that Hillary was in charge and Bill wasn't. This is the essence of American democracy.
I would argue we're undermedicated.
I would argue that you are wrong. Doctors throw around antibiotics like confetti,whether or not the patient needs it, leading to strains of bacteria that are resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics. When a doctor tells you it's a virus, and then prescibes antibiotics, they're not doing anything to help you (antibiotics only affect bacteria, not viruses), and they are encouraging resistance to antibiotics, so why are they doing it?
First off, they've probably had patients throw a hissy fit if they don't get pills from the doc, so the doc is just heading you off at the pass. It's like polluting - one pop can one time is not a big deal, but if lots of people do it lots of the time, you've got a problem.
Secondly, doctors are as susceptible to marketing as any other human. They get flyers in the mail, the drug reps come by, and everybody's talking about the risks of secondary infections. The doc wonders about a patient getting sicker and suing the doc, and he presribes antibiotics. CYA now, and the future can worry about itself.
Would Pfizer sponsor research to investigate this question? Would they publish the results if they didn't like them? Would MS sponsor independent research about OS uptimes/speeds/whatever? Would they advertise the results if they didn't like them? Hell, you could make a case that for Pfizer (or MS) to do so would be bad for stockholders, and therefore they should not sponsor such research...
That said, my greatest shock at seeing how real science is done was the dependence on tin foil. It's unreal.
We used tons of the stuff when I was in grad school, but I was in a biochem lab. We'd put foil over flasks, beakers, chromatography columns, the undergrads, whatever. We had thick Saran Wrap-type stuff that we used too. My roomies were very disappointed to see that despite all the multisyllable words I threw around when talking shop, I used aluminum foil and plastic wrap to protect myself from E. coli.
It's not M$'s fault, it's a driver error.
I wish I had mod points to give you, sir.
Both these cases are extreme scenarios of gluttony and wastefulness.. not natural selection.. think of another argument.
The point is that driving another species to extinction, and driving yourself out of business at the same time (you used to be able to buy passenger pigeon by the ton), has happened in the past. It was an example of gluttony and it was extremely wasteful, that's why it was bad. Can you name a species that was driven to extinction by humans since the dawn of history that wasn't a waste? (It would be nice if there were marsupial lions and 26-foot long lizards around in wildlife parks, but I can understand why in 5000BCE they were unwanted.)
there are 9 amino acids that we get from meat that you cannot get from vegetables or fruits
... the english language
Actually, you can get all your amino acids from non-animal sources, you just have to work at it, and you tend to get stuck eating certain foods all the time. You said "The point of this article is that vegetarians don't see that they aren't getting all of their 9 amino acids from plants", which sounds like you thought that there are 9 amino acids. Chemically speaking there are lots of compounds that fall into the class of amino acids ("any organic compound containing an amino (-NH2) and a carboxyl (-COOH)group"), just as there are lots of different alcohols, aldehydes, ethers, yadda yadda yadda, but there are 20 (although two of this group also have acidic forms, so sometimes you'll see 22 as the number) that are used to form proteins. These are what people usually mean when they talk about amino acids.
you don't seem to know to much about
I'll give you that one, deathscythe.
Okay, so these nomadic, hunter-gathers would set fires that they have no way of controlling to facilitate 'hunting or travel'.
They might not have been able to control the fires, but if you are upwind or downhill of a fire you are relatively safe, even better if you can get a stream between you and the fire. 'Relatively safe' in the sense that, if starvation of your family/tribe is a likely alternative, it's worth trying, anyway.
Of course learning that fire gets pushed by the wind and races up hills was probably pretty hard on the first few people who tried it...
Actually, there are large species of animals that can only be hunted by humans, but can be hunted quite effectively with 'Stone Age' weapons. There used to be a species of giant land tortoise in North America. It was about the size of a VW bug, ims, and no contemporary predator could bust through the shell. However, when a hunting party of humans, came across one of these critters, it's standard defense (pulling in the head and legs and waiting for those pesky mammals to get bored), was exactly the wrong thing to do. The humans would flip the tortoise over (by using their spears as levers) and build a fire around it, to cook it right there. 'Them's good eatin'!'
Point is, just because they didn't have guns and cars back then, doesn't mean they were totally unable to put the smack down on big animals. Fire was probably the biggest help for that. You can use it to cook big tortoises in the shell, and to drive animals off of cliffs by the herd.
However, for me, Genesis 1:26 applies... I have dominion over everything non-human on the earth. So while I don't plan to try and make everything extinct or make the earth totally toxic, I'm still superior to my dog and to any other wildlife I see (not to mention plants, soil, etc, etc).
Unfortunately, I think lots of people use this an excuse to do whatever they want, even if it makes 'everything extinct' or 'totally toxic'. The extinction/toxification becomes a side-effect, unfortunate, but too bad, we need more strip malls, anyone who says otherwise is worshipping the earth. But where do you draw the line? If 99.99% of your state's high-quality prairie is now farmland, houses and roads, isn't putting aside that last 0.01% acceptable? Would you rather have natural areas with rare animals and plants in them, or another Kwik-E-Mart?
On a sidenote, if you were God and you saw what humanity is doing with the earth (strip malls, toxic waste dumps, wiping out species that you created) that you gave him dominion over, would you be happy?
Damn it, I hate when someone posts what is essentially my exact point(down to the examples), except better thought out, in the time it takes me to type mine.
Secondly, The commercial fishing and hunting industries do not want to kill off an entire species or even come close to it... if they did then they would have no industry; no livelihood...
This is obviously true. After all, thousands of commercial hunters depended on hunting passenger pigeons for their livelihood and you can see passenger pigeons any place that has a decent collection of birds. Of course, they're stuffed and mounted, but still...
You don't have to blow away every single passenger pigeon, or Carolina parakeet, or sawfish, or blue whale to wipe out the species. If the population of a species goes below a certain point, the species will go extinct. This point is different for different species. Hunters, fishers and developers (and their lobbying groups) will say, "See there's still out there, so why protect them?" , then drive a species below the critical level.
Back in the old days, commercial fisherman often stayed close enogh to shore that they returned home every night. Now they go out for days at a time, have to use GPS and sonar to locate and track their fish. All of this requires bigger boats, which require more fish be caught to pay for them, driving down income for the fisherman, etc. The fact that commercial fishing operations are going through so much effort to locate and catch fish should be a huge red flag that there is overfishing occurring but individual fisherman have no incentive to stop fishing. They've got loans to pay off and have spent their whole lives fishing, so what else are they going to do? No industry association is going to tell it's members to stop fishing, becuase the members will revolt and ignore the industry. No lawmaker is going to be willing to shut down a major industry in their state because it's political suicide until it's too late. So, in a couple of decades, when the North Atlantic is overfished, and the fishing towns are really and truly screwed, everyone will say "How'd this happen?"
Btw, there are a bit more than 9 amino acids, but you don't really seem to know much a biology anyway. "... shut your mouth."
So, since the 1st Amendment only applies to Congress, the executive and judicial branches can do what they want, right? The FBI can just start jailing people for saying J. Edgar was a cross-dresser on the take, the FDA can start executing people who sell herbal remedies, the FTC can jail the Napsterites, right? I mean, the FBI isn't Congress, they didn't pass any laws, so if they toss you in the clink for saying mean stuff about Hoover, it's not a violation of your rights, stop complaining and eat your gruel.
2 .htm you can see Article 1, Section 1 ("Inherent and inalienable rights.") of the Utah State Constitution which includes the phrase "to assemble peaceably, protest against wrongs, and petition for redress of grievances; to communicate freely their thoughts and opinions, being responsible for the abuse of that right." That sounds pretty similar to what the First Amendment of the US Constitution says doesn't it? The main difference is the last part - " responsible for the abuse of the that right" - which means (IANAL, of course) that libel and fraud are Bad Things. Let me say again, I don't really have a problem with the U of U kicking this guy off of their servers, but shouldn't he get some warning first? Or at least an opportunity to present his case to the school first? But expulsion? The school is practically going out of its way to make themselves look like a bunch of reactionary morons, so it would be a shame not to call them on it.
The right to bitch, moan and be obnoxious is pretty fundemental to the American idea of democracy. If government bodies are actively suppressing (jail, expulsion, etc.) speech, the press, peaceable assembly, religion, petitioning 'the Government for a redress of grievances', then there is a problem. I mean look at that list (thanks for the Bill of Rights link, I would have forgotten the 'redress of grievances' bit), having a website where people exchange views on what a state institution is doing could be considered speech/press, peaceable assembly and greivance redressing. Yet, a government body, using money collected by the state of Utah and the feds, not only kicked him off of their servers/bandwidth (which would at least be reasonable with some warning), but confiscated his data and destroyed it, and is now threatening expulsion and/or arrest. Can you see why the First Amendment might apply to this?
Actually if you go to: http://www.le.state.ut.us/~code/const/htm/co_0200
Like it or not, in the real world, you have to deal with other people, and sometimes, other people are dolts. This doesn't change the fact that you have to work with them.
They don't even have to be dolts to cause difficulties in the group. If you get two strong-willed, smart people in a group, that will cause as many problems as a smart person and a dolt, if not more. When I was in grad school (biology), I took a 1st semester biochem class with mixed grads and upperclassmen. Early on in the class, we got assigned in groups and were given a topic for our project. In my group there was me (older, strong-willed/stubborn, smart, "We're all in this together" attitude), 2 chem undergrads who were just trying to survive the class, and 1 pre-med student (also arrogant and smart, but since the class was on a curve, "me against you" attitude). We had the hardest topic and made the best project, but man, it got ugly. After hearing one of our "discussions", a complete stranger came up to me and said that she thought we were a couple breaking up in public at first, and maybe we should all calm down a bit. Eventually, we ended up doing a separation of powers thing, pre-med ran the presentation, I did the writing (pre-meds intro to our paper was longer than the rest of the paper combined - she basically tried to pre-empt everything everyone else wanted to say) and experimental design.
The next semester's project with just the two undergrads (and one grad student) was much easier, but not quite as good. Something to keep in mind...
And thank you, sir.
The police can justly dispense with irrelevant formalities because they know who's guilty. Of all the perpetrators "unjustly" clobbered by Giuliani's police force, has even a single one turned out, in retrospect, to be white? No. Not a single one, ever. City and local police do their job well. It's the federal stormtroopers who murder innocents in rural places like Idaho and Texas. That is the abuse of government power which concerns us.
FB, you are truly a gem. Thank you, you have kept me entertained. I do have a question for you though, how can someone turn out to be white in retrospect? You've got to be better and sounding like the master race when you're playing the race card...
I favor proportional representation, with the franchise scaled according to the ability of an individual to exercise it responsibly. Naturally, those smart and ethical enough to amass fortunes are correspondingly more competent to decide what laws we should have...
In other words, Britney Spears votes should count more than yours since she made more money than you this year. How about all those guys who become NFL players this weekend? How many more votes than you will they have? IIRC, minimum wage in the NFL for a rookie is about $150K for the season, but those early 1st round picks will get 10 to 100 times that as a signing bonus. But I'm sure you'd be happy to let someone who bailed out of college after 3 years of barely going to class vote a few thousand times more than you...
Thank you, I stand corrected. Actually, we both are sort of right - LBJ did ask for more 'Federal drug and narcotics control officials', but per the DEA Museum section on their website (http://www.dea.gov/deamuseum/home.htm - it's in frames under 'More on DEA' - right below the gift shop:)) 'On July 1, 1973, President Richard Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)' by combining a few federal TLAs into the DEA.
So, here's my updated version (I know you're waiting with baited breath:):
I mean you couldn't really be serious about GWB's (alleged with no supporting references) views on decriminalization unless you were totally ignorant of the history of the War on Drugs, could you? The fact that you made no mention of Nixon starting the DEA by merging its predecessor agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) with various law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies, and Reagan/Bush pushing it to the forefront both by the 'Just Say No' campaign and the creation of a 'Drug Czar', as well as creating the asset forfeiture laws that not only presume guilt, but also make money doing so, just shows how good a satirist you are.
The presumption of innocence is there so that the prosecution (governement) cannot punish citizens without proof that they have done something wrong. The Big, Bad Government must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that on April 22, 2001, Fearsome Badgers did sell narcotics to an undercover DEA agent, blah, blah, blah, before we send you to prison or execute you. However, asset forfeiture laws work this way: The Big, Bad Government says Fearsome Badgers sold foo to bar, arrests you, takes your house, car and gun collection, sells what they don't want, and then tries you. If you are acquited, you get your freedom, but you have no car to drive home in, but that's okay because you have no house to live in.
FB, as a free-market, small government fan, don't you find it odd to be saying, in essence, that government is too big and powerful, but they should be able to take things from private citizens without proof? Do you see why that makes you look like a hypocrite?
As an opponent of big government, FB, you should know that the one thing government agencies want more than anything else is more $$$ for their budgets. Is there anyone who doubts this? Do you think that there is any possibility that once the Big, Bad Government realizes that they can give themselves raises by kicking down your door, stealing your stuff, throwing you into jail, and having a garage sale - they won't? If so, please explain why you assume that all government employees are perfect, but are still so bad that they are at best a necessary evil?
If the 'public nickel' doesn't pay salaries for public officials who will? The sponsors of the bill? IIRC, the sponsors of a bill are the Congresscritters involved. Are you for private citizens and corporations paying directly for the laws that affect them? Well, I suppose it would stop all those under the table payoffs and the like, but still can you see any possible side effects of this?