Let's not overstate the case. While I agree that the human right commission wants to have more thought police power, and I'm generally against "hate crime" legislation, the actual hate crime legislation is rather narrowly defined. It's akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre", as some have called it. Essentially, it is supposed to apply when speech is being used as an action rather than as an idea. When a religious leader stands up in a temple and tells his followers that their deity commands them to go out and kill the non-believers, that's hate speech.
When a man says that the holocaust never happened, the Jewish people in Canada start calling for him to be charged with crimes under the hate speech laws, and sometimes he even will be charged, but he shouldn't be convicted because he didn't try to use the speech as a violent weapon. I'm aware of Ahenakew, and I believe he just won an appeal, did he not?
Personally, I'd rather live in a place where people can shout fire in a crowded theatre and deal with those consequences than live in a place where there's any restriction on free speech and the consequences that entails. However, we need to stick to the facts of the case when debating this.
The idea I had was to try to use electricity as it is generated rather than storing it and using it for later. Rather than making a backup power system, just try to co-generate to reduce your electricity bill.
For instance, get a solar panel, a single 12V automotive (deep cycle) battery, and a 12VDC marine air conditioner. You can buy a device called a voltage relay that will turn on when the voltage in the battery reaches a preset value (like 13V) and turns off when it drops below a certain value (like 11V). Sun shines the most in summer, when you use the air conditioning the most. So when the sun is shining, the air conditioner runs, and cools your home. It won't be enough to keep your home cool by itself, but it will reduce the amount of energy you use for your regular central air. The advantage is that it doesn't require an inverter, and it's not tied to anything else in your house (no 120VAC). In the winter, it should be relatively easy to find a 12VDC heater instead of the air conditioner, and you'll reduce your heating bill a little. Of course, in the winter, there's far less sunlight to go around.
So is the energy (to accelerate the particles in the jets) coming from the loss of potential energy of matter that is falling into the black hole, or is the energy from the black hole itself?
Note, by the way, that placing a special value on human life is intrinsically irrational, absent the so-called "soul" - we're just another animal, after all.
The best idea I've seen regarding this is put forward by Robert M. Pirsig in his metaphysics of quality. Basically, an animal's life has value because it has better quality alive than dead. However, given the choice of an animal living vs. a human living, a human is of a higher quality (to us, obviously), so we would kill an animal to save a human. Similarly, we would kill off viruses to save ourselves, even though we don't think viruses are "evil" or anything.
He places the highest "quality" on intellectualism. Therefore, he would be ok with a society that protects intellectual freedom in defending itself, even violently, against a society that restricts intellectual freedom.
Yet he places the quality of a society above that of a single human, so he's ok with a society punishing criminals because a smooth running society has higher quality than the alternative. But when that society tries to punish someone for a thought crime, it's interfering with the higher quality of intellectualism, so he's not ok with that.
Anyway, I highly suggest it - his books are quite rational.
There are many differences. For instance, the commandment is "thou shalt not kill", but most rational people believe it's ok to kill if necessary in self defense. (I do realize that earlier translations probably used the word murder rather than kill.) How about "You shall not commit adultery". The rational mind arrives at this only because marriage is a contract, and it would be wrong to break that contract, and this is because a society that enforces contracts is a stronger society.
But there's a deeper issue with your argument. You are assuming that the commandments were handed down by God, but it's actually quite likely that they were arrived at by one or more smart people (who, after all, would have to be smart if they could read and write at the time). So your argument is just begging the question (circular logic). The reason rational morality looks so much like the judeo-christian commandments is because it was created by rational people. Heck, even if it was created by God, are you saying He's not rational? If you happen to believe the judeo-christian mythos as fact, what's wrong with also trying to understand *why* God made those commandments?
Or perhaps they'd behave LESS humanely, since they'd realize that no deity or karmic force is going to do shit TO them.
I think there are a lot of very smart and either atheist or agnostic people out there who behave very well because they can rationalize why behaving well results in a better world than the alternative. I think the "bronze age myths" persist to make sure that the stupid people in society, who are incapable of understanding a rational argument, feel like they have a reason to behave well (i.e. because if they don't, they'll burn in hell).
I do remember quite fondly when I purchased a 386 33 MHz, and it was quite obvious how much faster a 386 66 MHz chip would be. Then there was the 486 line, and the DX2/DX4 monikers to indicate internal clock double or quadruple. Not a big deal. Then it got into Pentiums and things really got confusing, because they released the Celeron, then Pentium M, then a whole bunch of other chips since then that don't seem to give you a good understanding of exactly how much horsepower you're purchasing.
I just purchased a new desktop PC and wow, the number of options is bewildering even to me, and I have a degree in computer engineering!
There is only a fixed amount of time. You have to look at where you can do the most good with the limited resources you have (i.e. the amount of time/money available to you). In that way, it is kind of mutually exclusive. My point is that the "low hanging fruit" so to speak is in energy usage reduction, not in green power generation. I expect that in 10 years, that will be quite different.
Rather than generating more power a home, it's a lot easier to just use less. If you setup a rather simple energy monitoring system in your house (like $100 worth of equipment, etc.) you should be able to reduce your energy usage by 5% just through targetting. That includes using less water, gas, and electricity. Throw gasoline in there and you're really going to save money (and lower your carbon footprint).
If you really want to make a difference, spearhead an energy monitoring and targetting campaign at work. Disclaimer: I am in the business. Typical savings for industrial sites are in the 5 to 15% range, and for commercial sites are up to 25% savings. Find out how much your company spends on energy/utilities and you'll realize that's a big payoff. It's much bigger than installing some 0.5 m^2 swept area windmill that generates maybe 100W 30% of the time, and 500W 5% of the time, and needs an expensive inverter and lead acid batteries with limited life span.
If you are really stuck on doing something at home and you have air conditioning, you can get reasonably inexpensive 800W solar panels (they might generate 500W peak on a sunny day in northern climes) and then you could hook it directly to an old 12V marine air conditioner, with only a single 12V battery to balance the load. Then during really hot days you can generate electricity and use it immediately to cool your house, so you don't have the expense of storing the energy for later, and the expense (and maintenance and inefficiency) of an inverter to get back to 120 or 240VAC.
I would think that if new strains of plants evolved that had pollution resistant scents, they would immediately flourish down-wind of large cities, and they would be the ones getting pollinated, thus solving the problem. The question is whether or not plants will evolve fast enough. I think that in time they probably would, if necessary.
Here are some possible problems... you can have the files subpeona'd for court cases. How do you secure them against someone who wants to know anything about you? Will your employer demand you submit the recordings each day?
I might be ok with it if the constitution was changed to make privacy an absolute right, and make the punishment for taking one of these files to be extremely severe.
Please, for the love of God, open a store that sells vacuums, mail me a flyer, and if I want a vacuum *I'll come to your bloody store*!!! Go ahead and advertise house calls, and I might even invite you over. Otherwise, don't come to my house. It's a residence, not a storefront....and get off my lawn!:)
I was thinking just that, but to say that ruthlessness can have an effect on a gene doesn't make much sense to me, so I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that the gene is the independent variable, and the behavior is a dependent variable. I'm not saying it's a direct causal relationship, as there are bound to be other factors at play here.
This is interesting to those of us buying new PCs right now. I was not sure whether to go with a dual or quad core. The problem is that very few applications that I would run actually make use of quad cores, but stuff like raytracing is highly parallel, so this gives me hope that purchasing a quad core processor won't be a waste of money.
Certainly most owners I know realize that they are responsible for the actions of their animals.
However, on a purely logical level, we exist in this environment with animals. There are skunks and deer all around our village, plus the occasional sighting of a "big cat" every so often. Lots of villages up north have bears frequently wander through town. Collisions with moose are the #1 killer in some eastern Canadian provinces. Sharks kill people every year. Down in Florida, there are alligators all over the place, not to mention lots of poisonous snakes depending on the area of the country you live in. We don't go out and wipe out all the animals just because they're dangerous. Children in each of those environments grows up learning what to watch for and learns how to be careful, and for the most part they become well adjusted normal adults who don't lose a bit of sleep over it.
So yes, dogs, like most things in life, have both positive and negative traits. They provide companionship, entertainment, and sometimes a small measure of security, but some create excess noise, and some are dangerous. We should be dealing with each on a case-by-case basis, not with outright bans. I'm pretty sure that cars are much more dangerous to kids than dogs, but nobody is suggesting that we ban cars.
Very cool, I'll probably tell my family about this.
However, I've noticed that since we moved two years ago, and we got a Vonage account, we don't actually get any unsolicited calls (except for the cable company which keeps trying to sell us their home phone service, but that has mostly stopped). I think it's either because we're not in the Bell directory, or because if I go over 500 minutes a month, then I pay some per minute charge, and that technically makes it illegal for telemarketers to call me, just like cell phones.
Tits are fine here in the UK, you can see them on page 3 of the Sun(a mainstream tabloid newspaper for those who don't know. It's circulation figures are greater than that of any other in the UK despite the lack of actual news) any day of the week. It's gus and violence that get the "thinkofthechildren" brigade out in this country.
Which is actually a hell of a lot more sane than the fear-the-breast, but if-it-bleeds-it-leads mentality over on this side of the pond.
But I don't think we're talking about exposing our kids to drive-by shootings here. We're talking about exposing them to things that could hurt them, but in a safe way, so they learn to take more care. I seriously wonder how long it will be before the following are banned: dogs, soldering irons, models that you have to glue together, unpadded furniture...
Could this explain why we haven't found the universe teeming with extra terrestrial life? Every civilization becomes more and more advanced, then starts doing more and more powerful experiments, and thinks, "the chance of destroying our planet is really slight... we're perfectly safe going ahead with this." Then, poof!
Most of the "outlandish" predictions from years ago only failed because they didn't take energy and resource constraints into account. Most of the technology boom has been in things that are cheap in terms of energy and resources (like communications and computing). The things we haven't seen are flying cars, bridges over oceans, settlements on the moon, and frequent trips into space. This is mostly because computers get cheaper as technology improves, but bridges and flying cars haven't seen a similar fall in price.
We *could* build domes over our cities with current technologies, but the cost is prohibitive. We have other things to use all that steel and energy on (like SUVs apparently).
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Let's not overstate the case. While I agree that the human right commission wants to have more thought police power, and I'm generally against "hate crime" legislation, the actual hate crime legislation is rather narrowly defined. It's akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre", as some have called it. Essentially, it is supposed to apply when speech is being used as an action rather than as an idea. When a religious leader stands up in a temple and tells his followers that their deity commands them to go out and kill the non-believers, that's hate speech.
When a man says that the holocaust never happened, the Jewish people in Canada start calling for him to be charged with crimes under the hate speech laws, and sometimes he even will be charged, but he shouldn't be convicted because he didn't try to use the speech as a violent weapon. I'm aware of Ahenakew, and I believe he just won an appeal, did he not?
Personally, I'd rather live in a place where people can shout fire in a crowded theatre and deal with those consequences than live in a place where there's any restriction on free speech and the consequences that entails. However, we need to stick to the facts of the case when debating this.
The idea I had was to try to use electricity as it is generated rather than storing it and using it for later. Rather than making a backup power system, just try to co-generate to reduce your electricity bill.
For instance, get a solar panel, a single 12V automotive (deep cycle) battery, and a 12VDC marine air conditioner. You can buy a device called a voltage relay that will turn on when the voltage in the battery reaches a preset value (like 13V) and turns off when it drops below a certain value (like 11V). Sun shines the most in summer, when you use the air conditioning the most. So when the sun is shining, the air conditioner runs, and cools your home. It won't be enough to keep your home cool by itself, but it will reduce the amount of energy you use for your regular central air. The advantage is that it doesn't require an inverter, and it's not tied to anything else in your house (no 120VAC). In the winter, it should be relatively easy to find a 12VDC heater instead of the air conditioner, and you'll reduce your heating bill a little. Of course, in the winter, there's far less sunlight to go around.
Good idea. I was thinking about something like this years ago. I'm quite certain it's going to (eventually) succeed.
So is the energy (to accelerate the particles in the jets) coming from the loss of potential energy of matter that is falling into the black hole, or is the energy from the black hole itself?
Note, by the way, that placing a special value on human life is intrinsically irrational, absent the so-called "soul" - we're just another animal, after all.
The best idea I've seen regarding this is put forward by Robert M. Pirsig in his metaphysics of quality. Basically, an animal's life has value because it has better quality alive than dead. However, given the choice of an animal living vs. a human living, a human is of a higher quality (to us, obviously), so we would kill an animal to save a human. Similarly, we would kill off viruses to save ourselves, even though we don't think viruses are "evil" or anything.
He places the highest "quality" on intellectualism. Therefore, he would be ok with a society that protects intellectual freedom in defending itself, even violently, against a society that restricts intellectual freedom.
Yet he places the quality of a society above that of a single human, so he's ok with a society punishing criminals because a smooth running society has higher quality than the alternative. But when that society tries to punish someone for a thought crime, it's interfering with the higher quality of intellectualism, so he's not ok with that.
Anyway, I highly suggest it - his books are quite rational.
There are many differences. For instance, the commandment is "thou shalt not kill", but most rational people believe it's ok to kill if necessary in self defense. (I do realize that earlier translations probably used the word murder rather than kill.) How about "You shall not commit adultery". The rational mind arrives at this only because marriage is a contract, and it would be wrong to break that contract, and this is because a society that enforces contracts is a stronger society.
But there's a deeper issue with your argument. You are assuming that the commandments were handed down by God, but it's actually quite likely that they were arrived at by one or more smart people (who, after all, would have to be smart if they could read and write at the time). So your argument is just begging the question (circular logic). The reason rational morality looks so much like the judeo-christian commandments is because it was created by rational people. Heck, even if it was created by God, are you saying He's not rational? If you happen to believe the judeo-christian mythos as fact, what's wrong with also trying to understand *why* God made those commandments?
Wow. It looks like you're right!
Or perhaps they'd behave LESS humanely, since they'd realize that no deity or karmic force is going to do shit TO them.
I think there are a lot of very smart and either atheist or agnostic people out there who behave very well because they can rationalize why behaving well results in a better world than the alternative. I think the "bronze age myths" persist to make sure that the stupid people in society, who are incapable of understanding a rational argument, feel like they have a reason to behave well (i.e. because if they don't, they'll burn in hell).
I do remember quite fondly when I purchased a 386 33 MHz, and it was quite obvious how much faster a 386 66 MHz chip would be. Then there was the 486 line, and the DX2/DX4 monikers to indicate internal clock double or quadruple. Not a big deal. Then it got into Pentiums and things really got confusing, because they released the Celeron, then Pentium M, then a whole bunch of other chips since then that don't seem to give you a good understanding of exactly how much horsepower you're purchasing.
I just purchased a new desktop PC and wow, the number of options is bewildering even to me, and I have a degree in computer engineering!
There is only a fixed amount of time. You have to look at where you can do the most good with the limited resources you have (i.e. the amount of time/money available to you). In that way, it is kind of mutually exclusive. My point is that the "low hanging fruit" so to speak is in energy usage reduction, not in green power generation. I expect that in 10 years, that will be quite different.
Rather than generating more power a home, it's a lot easier to just use less. If you setup a rather simple energy monitoring system in your house (like $100 worth of equipment, etc.) you should be able to reduce your energy usage by 5% just through targetting. That includes using less water, gas, and electricity. Throw gasoline in there and you're really going to save money (and lower your carbon footprint).
If you really want to make a difference, spearhead an energy monitoring and targetting campaign at work. Disclaimer: I am in the business. Typical savings for industrial sites are in the 5 to 15% range, and for commercial sites are up to 25% savings. Find out how much your company spends on energy/utilities and you'll realize that's a big payoff. It's much bigger than installing some 0.5 m^2 swept area windmill that generates maybe 100W 30% of the time, and 500W 5% of the time, and needs an expensive inverter and lead acid batteries with limited life span.
If you are really stuck on doing something at home and you have air conditioning, you can get reasonably inexpensive 800W solar panels (they might generate 500W peak on a sunny day in northern climes) and then you could hook it directly to an old 12V marine air conditioner, with only a single 12V battery to balance the load. Then during really hot days you can generate electricity and use it immediately to cool your house, so you don't have the expense of storing the energy for later, and the expense (and maintenance and inefficiency) of an inverter to get back to 120 or 240VAC.
I would think that if new strains of plants evolved that had pollution resistant scents, they would immediately flourish down-wind of large cities, and they would be the ones getting pollinated, thus solving the problem. The question is whether or not plants will evolve fast enough. I think that in time they probably would, if necessary.
Here are some possible problems... you can have the files subpeona'd for court cases. How do you secure them against someone who wants to know anything about you? Will your employer demand you submit the recordings each day?
I might be ok with it if the constitution was changed to make privacy an absolute right, and make the punishment for taking one of these files to be extremely severe.
What do you do if you're a vacuum salesman?
...and get off my lawn! :)
Please, for the love of God, open a store that sells vacuums, mail me a flyer, and if I want a vacuum *I'll come to your bloody store*!!! Go ahead and advertise house calls, and I might even invite you over. Otherwise, don't come to my house. It's a residence, not a storefront.
Correlation is not causation.
I was thinking just that, but to say that ruthlessness can have an effect on a gene doesn't make much sense to me, so I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that the gene is the independent variable, and the behavior is a dependent variable. I'm not saying it's a direct causal relationship, as there are bound to be other factors at play here.
The fact is, engineers are good at many jobs that require attention to detail.
...but alas I'm an engineer, not a lawyer. :(
This is interesting to those of us buying new PCs right now. I was not sure whether to go with a dual or quad core. The problem is that very few applications that I would run actually make use of quad cores, but stuff like raytracing is highly parallel, so this gives me hope that purchasing a quad core processor won't be a waste of money.
In all seriousness though, something does need to be done with automobiles. Too many idiots have access to them.
I absolutely agree... we should, like, require people to pass an exam before... oh wait...
Certainly most owners I know realize that they are responsible for the actions of their animals.
However, on a purely logical level, we exist in this environment with animals. There are skunks and deer all around our village, plus the occasional sighting of a "big cat" every so often. Lots of villages up north have bears frequently wander through town. Collisions with moose are the #1 killer in some eastern Canadian provinces. Sharks kill people every year. Down in Florida, there are alligators all over the place, not to mention lots of poisonous snakes depending on the area of the country you live in. We don't go out and wipe out all the animals just because they're dangerous. Children in each of those environments grows up learning what to watch for and learns how to be careful, and for the most part they become well adjusted normal adults who don't lose a bit of sleep over it.
So yes, dogs, like most things in life, have both positive and negative traits. They provide companionship, entertainment, and sometimes a small measure of security, but some create excess noise, and some are dangerous. We should be dealing with each on a case-by-case basis, not with outright bans. I'm pretty sure that cars are much more dangerous to kids than dogs, but nobody is suggesting that we ban cars.
Very cool, I'll probably tell my family about this.
However, I've noticed that since we moved two years ago, and we got a Vonage account, we don't actually get any unsolicited calls (except for the cable company which keeps trying to sell us their home phone service, but that has mostly stopped). I think it's either because we're not in the Bell directory, or because if I go over 500 minutes a month, then I pay some per minute charge, and that technically makes it illegal for telemarketers to call me, just like cell phones.
Tits are fine here in the UK, you can see them on page 3 of the Sun(a mainstream tabloid newspaper for those who don't know. It's circulation figures are greater than that of any other in the UK despite the lack of actual news) any day of the week. It's gus and violence that get the "thinkofthechildren" brigade out in this country.
Which is actually a hell of a lot more sane than the fear-the-breast, but if-it-bleeds-it-leads mentality over on this side of the pond.
But I don't think we're talking about exposing our kids to drive-by shootings here. We're talking about exposing them to things that could hurt them, but in a safe way, so they learn to take more care. I seriously wonder how long it will be before the following are banned: dogs, soldering irons, models that you have to glue together, unpadded furniture...
Hey bud, I was just making a joke. Didn't mean to offend anyone.
Could this explain why we haven't found the universe teeming with extra terrestrial life? Every civilization becomes more and more advanced, then starts doing more and more powerful experiments, and thinks, "the chance of destroying our planet is really slight... we're perfectly safe going ahead with this." Then, poof!
Most of the "outlandish" predictions from years ago only failed because they didn't take energy and resource constraints into account. Most of the technology boom has been in things that are cheap in terms of energy and resources (like communications and computing). The things we haven't seen are flying cars, bridges over oceans, settlements on the moon, and frequent trips into space. This is mostly because computers get cheaper as technology improves, but bridges and flying cars haven't seen a similar fall in price.
We *could* build domes over our cities with current technologies, but the cost is prohibitive. We have other things to use all that steel and energy on (like SUVs apparently).