...About the only benefit cassette tapes really had/have is the ability to play them in older cars that were too old to have CD players. Plus, durable? Someone hasn't ever lost a tape due to a bad player and made the tape look like a slightly less artistic version of this (http://www.walyou.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/jimi-hendrix-casette-tape-art2.jpg).
What other browser that isn't Firefox or effectively Firefox with a different skin uses TraceMonkey (or Gecko for that matter). Really, what is Camnio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino) other than Firefox with a Coco UI? What is Prism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism) other than Firefox with almost no UI meant for browsing a single site. All Firefox basically is, is Gecko/Tracemonkey with some Chrome (browser decoration, not Google's browser) and XUL.
...But similarly its a "service" for someone to farm gold for you too. And at what point does this stop? Eventually you can charge for an expansion pack that might give you virtual items too, would that be illegal?
But China of all governments should know that whenever they start to control something it just leads to an underground movement of people who do it but they get no money from it and a communist/fascist/socialist government needs all the money they can get if they don't want to go the way of Soviet Russia. At some point they have to realize that even if the game currency is used to trade across multiple games, it will eventually surface as taxable cash.
So let me get this right, China bans a highly profitable industry from operating in China that no doubt brings in lots of revenue in the Chinese government or at the very least prevents people from having to work directly for the Chinese government. Sound really smart. While your at it why not ban the production of shoes, hard drives and cheap kids toys, it would have about the same effect.
Re:It still has quite a bit of "suckiness"
on
Unlocking Android
·
· Score: 1
Not exactly sure (I don't use it myself, don't use any DRM'd music store for that matter) I simply used that as an example to show that $15 a month for streaming wasn't a huge bargain.
But how is it any different? After all, all IE really just a shell for trident. I could in a few lines of VB "make" a browser that had a totally different UI that ran trident, would you consider that the same thing as IE? Or is my browser suddenly different? And yes, effectively the use of Gecko is more or less "using Firefox" in the fact that it uses a major component of Firefox that is the main component in Firefox itself.
Yes, and as you probably know, YouTube isn't exactly turning a huge profit. They have brand recognition and thats about it. And while YouTube was certainly competition to Google it wasn't profitable back then. Basically YouTube was a company with no business model other than "lets get a popular site going, get some ad revenue to hopefully keep up the servers, get some venture capitalists for initial funding then hope for someone (like Google) to buy them.
And really the rest of the companies weren't really competitors but rather smaller companies which are acquired by almost every business that is medium sized or large.
The thing about MJ wasn't really that he died but rather the fact that he just randomly died. He was arguably one of the most popular musicians with the general crowd to die since Elvis. Many people got texts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and wondered what exactly was going on. While no one thought MJ was in amazing health, he didn't have cancer or a long illness so many assumed it was a prank so they Googled it to get the info from a reliable source.
I don't really savour the idea of the death of "real" media, central control is bad but having actual life-long students of journalism working the stories is good
Really, what you call "real" media is worthless anyways. Most of the traditional media focuses on either A) already beaten to death stories (yes, we know Michael Jackson died, we don't need reminded of it every 10 minutes) B) pointless hype stories (we all are going to die of swine flu!!!1!1!1!) C) glorified ads for products or political agendas (lets talk to *insert prominent member of a political party* on why they supported/didn't support a bill in order to paint them in a positive to negative light for the viewers of the program). Newspapers similarly have no real content, there are a few interesting stories but the most part even that is tiny things that few people care about, things that won't affect your life, or in incredibly brief overview of something. All of those interesting bits are better done on the web.
30 years ago, I might agree with you, but today traditional print media has little to no benefit. There really is no reason for anyone tech-savvy to read the newspaper anymore, the content just isn't there.
First, The free market will (sometimes) optimize to maximize profits (though not necessarily over the long term --- see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009"). It will only "find a solution" if carbon emissions/global warming decreases profits, or if there's a clear case that developing a solution will lead to new profits. And even then, it may not actually succeed in producing an optimal outcome (see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009" for a handy set of examples.)
There are some new markets to be reached by being "green" that will require new technology to be made which will create a better outcome. For example, lower powered CPUs, just look at the netbook, if Intel hadn't made the Atom CPU, it wouldn't have been able to dominate the netbook market which required a lower powered CPU to have decent enough battery life. So even by not making a conscious decision to be "green" Intel contributed to laptops using less electricity which leads to less coal being burnt, etc. The same thing will happen with other things with enough time for them to be made cheaply enough.
Finding a solution either involves a massive change to our energy infrastructure, or some random-chance brilliant invention (try as it might, even the free market can't do more that set the right conditions for this --- it's largely blind luck and human intuition).
Sure, but as humans have proved in the past, there are tons of people with blind luck and enough intuition to take principles and turn them into products. At one time a heavier than air flying machine was deemed impossible. At one time the earth was believed to be flat. At one time people thought certain things were the future, that airships would replace jets, that PowerPC CPUs would dominate the home computer market, etc.
The only constant is change.
At present, there is minimal incentive for the market to restructure our energy (consumption/transmission/generation) infrastructure. So outside of a few edge cases, all the brilliance of the free market is doing nothing at all to solve the problem. It will probably continue to fail to solve the problem until global warming starts to become a serious threat to industry profits (i.e., customers vanishing beneath the waves). Unfortunately, the best science on this issue indicates that there'll be very little we can do about it then. Even cold fusion won't reduce the CO2 levels, and all but the most radical technological breakthroughs will be inadequate to the problem.
Thats where your wrong. For one, all this hype by the media has made a lot of people go out of their way to buy things that are "green", this creates a market for things such as home solar panels, etc. Eventually with this niche market it will become cheaper to produce giving the rise of cheap high capacity solar panels. For another this could lead to cheaper energy costs which would allow for a thriving consumer market for these things. Computers used to be a niche item too, then they got smaller and cheaper to where everything now uses a computer. They went from being only in a few science labs to being in just about every home in a few short years.
What the US government is trying to do with Cap & Trade is use the power of the free market to achieve a valuable goal now. Specifically, the purpose is to avoid radical solutions and central planning, and to simply place a price on carbon emissions. The free market, in all of its brilliance, should then adjust to those price changes and find technological alternatives that achieve the same purposes but without emitting as much carbon. In other words, the purpose of the law is simply to price the emissions and let the free market optimize them down.
Cap and trade fails for the simple thing that why should I be penalized for being productive in 2009? There is no power source that has the safety, reliability, and price of fossil fuels. Why should I be penalized for providing jobs? Until there is a real solution, this leads us down the road to where the Soviet Union ended up, in a government created mess.
Your argument that technology evolves is a red herring, and is irrelevant to the original point. Also, you never answered my question: In principle, what evidence would convince you that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and dangerous?
I never said that it wasn't. I was replying to a post that stated that we needed to take action. I never said anything abut global warming being totally fake. I simply stated that before we paralyzed our economy in some way, we needed to look at the evidence some more. For human made global warming to be proven real and dangerous there needs to be a few points. Number one would be that humans can not adapt to the changes. Throughout history there have been numerous changes in nature and humans have survived through them. Today we are better equipped to handle a changing climate than any time in the past. We have the technology that even with rising sea levels, we can still build for the same amount of living space (artificial islands or by building higher buildings). We also have the capacity that if this was such a danger to artificially house samples of "in danger" ecosystems for future use. For it to be dangerous, we can't have any capabilities to adapt. With current data, a massive solar flare which we can't control would disrupt life infinitely more than global warming would in a decade or two. Two, it needs to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans caused it, we today have too little data to prove anything more than a gradual increase of temperatures. Mix with that the fact that some of the recording stations are invalid (being in very hot areas compared to even a few miles away) or have known problems.
My problems aren't with if global warming exists or not but rather if we should paralyze the economy to do so (as that seems to be the current option with most lawmakers). If we could reduce global warming in a way that does not paralyze the economy or by ideas that might have disasterous global effects if they go wrong (like the creating clouds idea), I would be all for them.
You'll need to support that with evidence, because from where I'm sitting, the places in the world with well-regulated market economies (Western Europe, Australia, Europe, Japan) are among the best places on earth to live, and measure better on virtually every quality-of-life index than less-regulated places like China and the United States. I wouldn't quite call that "ruin".
There are a few things wrong with those assumptions. The current economies of Europe and Japan were basically rebuilt after WWII. Thats only 65 years or so of running. And China is very, very, very heavily regulated, not so much with industrial goods, but rather with any type of ideas. The US also got an overhaul in the '30s and similarly hasn't had enough time to really prove itself. And the USA (not sure about Europe, Japan and China) really doesn't even have a decent enough economic system after the federal reserve came into play because effectively the notes are only worth the fabric of them backed by "the full faith of the US government" and thanks in part to its isolation from a lot of the world, it hasn't had any major attacks or challenges to its sovereignty.
Similarly, on "quality of life" just look at the suicide rates, (all stats taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_rates) where Japan is in the top 10. Plus, a lot of European countries, particularly western Europe rank above the US in number of suicides. Granted, Japan has a cultural attitude favorable to suicide due to the honor code of Samurai, but its interesting to look there and see a lot of developed countries with high suicide rates. While "undeveloped" countries such as Iran, Syria, and Kuwait rank near the bottom (of course part of it could be due to governments not keeping records.)
I don't see how this "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" factor appl
No. The PATRIOT Act doesn't affect free speech. No laws were ever enacted to eliminate "anti-American" speech. Not in the last 40-50 years. You should focus on what's actually true.
Oh really?
and, finally, section 215, which grants unprecedented authority to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies to obtain search warrants for business, medical, educational, library, and bookstore records merely by claiming that the desired records may be related to an ongoing terrorism investigation or intelligence activities
(from http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/patriotact.html). Being able to read what you want is a critical component of free speech, after all what good is freedom of speech if people are prohibited from listening to you? And you should be able to listen to speech with the assumption of privacy, especially when in a private place.
As for marriage, why does 3-5% of the population get to decide for the other 96% what a marriage is?
Its freedom. It doesn't affect you in the slightest. Same thing with beliefs, just because your neighbor is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Agnostic, Atheist, Polytheistic, Taoist, or believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster it doesn't matter. Similar with marriage. What difference does it make that two men or two women can get married? For that matter really it doesn't matter if two women and three men get married. It doesn't matter in the least. Myself, I disagree with the homosexual and polygamist lifestyles, however, so long as there is no abuse going on, I see no reason why you shouldn't let them do as they please just like even though I may disagree with Hinduism, I respect Hindu's rights to believe what they want and expect them to respect my beliefs too.
Every global warming theory uses the fallacy that technology does not naturally evolve. Think about it, 50 years ago who would have thought we would all be completely connected through computers back when a computer took up an entire room. Who would have thought 100 years ago that we could be safely capturing the energy of a split atom? Who would have thought 300 years ago that we would all be driving around in cars? Who (assuming the person lived in Europe) would have thought 1000 years ago that there was a landmass outside of Europe, Asia and Africa? Things evolve, things change. We know from past experiences that government mandated controls on the free economy lead to ruin. A free market will eventually make an affordable car that runs on something "greener" than gas. However, government funding traps us in the mentality of looking for a "perfect" solution (that is often impossible to work in the real world), so doable solutions that might not be 100% perfect get ignored because you get less funding from them.
I agree that there could be global warming. However government restrictions on the economy are not the answer. The free market will always have a solution to the problem.
I love it, people prefer to mod me troll then come up with a reasonable argument. So apparently (0 Troll) is a way of saying "I disagree with you but can't find any evidence to back up my claims".
What I am critical of is government regulation on these things. Really, if we ever come close to running out of oil we will find a decent enough solution. If things become really bad we will find solutions. But the fact remains that they aren't. Will eventually electric power win out over gas? Sure. But today electric powered vehicles suck. In 2020 will they? Perhaps, perhaps not. But funneling taxpayer money into them isn't the solution. Did government sponsored anything really help initial innovations? No. Did they help in refining it? Sometimes. As of 2009, we have no need for electric vehicles. Oil is cheap and pollution really isn't that bad in most places. When the next breakthrough happens it will not be because of government. The reasons being that government grants usually try to find "perfect" solutions that don't work in the real world while "good enough" solutions are ignored because they won't allow for the extra billion if they find the "perfect" solution. So its simple, do nothing and the free market will figure out a way to do it.
By civil liberties I mean the right to free speech. The PATRIOT act severely limited this and it was primary a republican-enacted law. Along with a lot of recent republican attitudes towards the elimination of speech that may be "anti-American" (such as the anti-flag burning amendments which were overwhelmingly supported by republicans) and the refusal by many republicans to allow same-sex marriage (my personal belief is that marriage is a religious ceremony and shouldn't be government by the government though). While democrats have more or less opposed these things.
Stop giving who power? The government? Yes, I am all for that. However we have a screwed up idea of a free society with a totally screwed up idea of representation that worked just fine when states made most of the laws but now we have a huge federal government with a tiny state government and the few rights states have get taken away by the federal government by extortion (make your drinking age 21 or we won't give you any money). Really, who do I vote for? I can vote libertarian which shares nearly 99% of my beliefs but probably won't get elected. I can vote for republicans which I agree with on many economic issues but disagree with their eroding of civil liberties, or I can vote for democrats who I agree with on their civil liberties but don't agree with them on the eroding of economic liberties and the right to bear arms.
Please tell me, how am I supposed to stop giving them power (with legal means of course).
Sure, lets rush into something that may or may not be true and lets totally screw up our economy because of it! We did the exact same thing with drugs, copyright and you can even look at the war on terror as the same way. You need to carefully look at the information and make informed decisions.
You have to realize too that alarmist positions are great at gaining funds, which lead to much of the research being carefully edited to lead to even more alarmist predictions to gain more funds. Which are you going to support, the study that finds that within 10 years the sea levels are going to flood New York, and many animals will die. Or the study that says that if everything continues just right now with absolutely no variation we might possibly see a 2 inch increase of the sea level in 30 years.
If you don't stop to look at these things you end up charging into things much as how Bush did in Iraq. Only rather than chasing WMDs and screwing us of some speech and privacy rights and a bunch of tax dollars, we can charge into this and screw us of our economic rights and a bunch of tax dollars.
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...About the only benefit cassette tapes really had/have is the ability to play them in older cars that were too old to have CD players. Plus, durable? Someone hasn't ever lost a tape due to a bad player and made the tape look like a slightly less artistic version of this (http://www.walyou.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/jimi-hendrix-casette-tape-art2.jpg).
And STDs are also incredibly rare too!
What other browser that isn't Firefox or effectively Firefox with a different skin uses TraceMonkey (or Gecko for that matter). Really, what is Camnio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino) other than Firefox with a Coco UI? What is Prism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism) other than Firefox with almost no UI meant for browsing a single site. All Firefox basically is, is Gecko/Tracemonkey with some Chrome (browser decoration, not Google's browser) and XUL.
So now when I call tech support I will have to wait twice as long as I usually have to because the support people are out busy on a guild dungeon run?
...But similarly its a "service" for someone to farm gold for you too. And at what point does this stop? Eventually you can charge for an expansion pack that might give you virtual items too, would that be illegal?
But China of all governments should know that whenever they start to control something it just leads to an underground movement of people who do it but they get no money from it and a communist/fascist/socialist government needs all the money they can get if they don't want to go the way of Soviet Russia. At some point they have to realize that even if the game currency is used to trade across multiple games, it will eventually surface as taxable cash.
So let me get this right, China bans a highly profitable industry from operating in China that no doubt brings in lots of revenue in the Chinese government or at the very least prevents people from having to work directly for the Chinese government. Sound really smart. While your at it why not ban the production of shoes, hard drives and cheap kids toys, it would have about the same effect.
Oh you mean
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10173146-94.html
And
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/27/android_market_shuns_unlocked_google_phones/
Not exactly sure (I don't use it myself, don't use any DRM'd music store for that matter) I simply used that as an example to show that $15 a month for streaming wasn't a huge bargain.
But how is it any different? After all, all IE really just a shell for trident. I could in a few lines of VB "make" a browser that had a totally different UI that ran trident, would you consider that the same thing as IE? Or is my browser suddenly different? And yes, effectively the use of Gecko is more or less "using Firefox" in the fact that it uses a major component of Firefox that is the main component in Firefox itself.
Yes, and as you probably know, YouTube isn't exactly turning a huge profit. They have brand recognition and thats about it. And while YouTube was certainly competition to Google it wasn't profitable back then. Basically YouTube was a company with no business model other than "lets get a popular site going, get some ad revenue to hopefully keep up the servers, get some venture capitalists for initial funding then hope for someone (like Google) to buy them.
And really the rest of the companies weren't really competitors but rather smaller companies which are acquired by almost every business that is medium sized or large.
...But for 10 Euros a month (~$15 US dollars) You can get a Zune Pass that lets you download unlimited amounts of songs (see http://www.zune.net/en-us/software/zunepass/default.htm for a reference).
The thing about MJ wasn't really that he died but rather the fact that he just randomly died. He was arguably one of the most popular musicians with the general crowd to die since Elvis. Many people got texts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and wondered what exactly was going on. While no one thought MJ was in amazing health, he didn't have cancer or a long illness so many assumed it was a prank so they Googled it to get the info from a reliable source.
Its YouTube though... Compared to YouTube, 4chan is a refuge of sanity and even /. trolls end up sounding like something out of a scientific journal.
I don't really savour the idea of the death of "real" media, central control is bad but having actual life-long students of journalism working the stories is good
Really, what you call "real" media is worthless anyways. Most of the traditional media focuses on either A) already beaten to death stories (yes, we know Michael Jackson died, we don't need reminded of it every 10 minutes) B) pointless hype stories (we all are going to die of swine flu!!!1!1!1!) C) glorified ads for products or political agendas (lets talk to *insert prominent member of a political party* on why they supported/didn't support a bill in order to paint them in a positive to negative light for the viewers of the program). Newspapers similarly have no real content, there are a few interesting stories but the most part even that is tiny things that few people care about, things that won't affect your life, or in incredibly brief overview of something. All of those interesting bits are better done on the web.
30 years ago, I might agree with you, but today traditional print media has little to no benefit. There really is no reason for anyone tech-savvy to read the newspaper anymore, the content just isn't there.
First, The free market will (sometimes) optimize to maximize profits (though not necessarily over the long term --- see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009"). It will only "find a solution" if carbon emissions/global warming decreases profits, or if there's a clear case that developing a solution will lead to new profits. And even then, it may not actually succeed in producing an optimal outcome (see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009" for a handy set of examples.)
There are some new markets to be reached by being "green" that will require new technology to be made which will create a better outcome. For example, lower powered CPUs, just look at the netbook, if Intel hadn't made the Atom CPU, it wouldn't have been able to dominate the netbook market which required a lower powered CPU to have decent enough battery life. So even by not making a conscious decision to be "green" Intel contributed to laptops using less electricity which leads to less coal being burnt, etc. The same thing will happen with other things with enough time for them to be made cheaply enough.
Finding a solution either involves a massive change to our energy infrastructure, or some random-chance brilliant invention (try as it might, even the free market can't do more that set the right conditions for this --- it's largely blind luck and human intuition).
Sure, but as humans have proved in the past, there are tons of people with blind luck and enough intuition to take principles and turn them into products. At one time a heavier than air flying machine was deemed impossible. At one time the earth was believed to be flat. At one time people thought certain things were the future, that airships would replace jets, that PowerPC CPUs would dominate the home computer market, etc.
The only constant is change.
At present, there is minimal incentive for the market to restructure our energy (consumption/transmission/generation) infrastructure. So outside of a few edge cases, all the brilliance of the free market is doing nothing at all to solve the problem. It will probably continue to fail to solve the problem until global warming starts to become a serious threat to industry profits (i.e., customers vanishing beneath the waves). Unfortunately, the best science on this issue indicates that there'll be very little we can do about it then. Even cold fusion won't reduce the CO2 levels, and all but the most radical technological breakthroughs will be inadequate to the problem.
Thats where your wrong. For one, all this hype by the media has made a lot of people go out of their way to buy things that are "green", this creates a market for things such as home solar panels, etc. Eventually with this niche market it will become cheaper to produce giving the rise of cheap high capacity solar panels. For another this could lead to cheaper energy costs which would allow for a thriving consumer market for these things. Computers used to be a niche item too, then they got smaller and cheaper to where everything now uses a computer. They went from being only in a few science labs to being in just about every home in a few short years.
What the US government is trying to do with Cap & Trade is use the power of the free market to achieve a valuable goal now. Specifically, the purpose is to avoid radical solutions and central planning, and to simply place a price on carbon emissions. The free market, in all of its brilliance, should then adjust to those price changes and find technological alternatives that achieve the same purposes but without emitting as much carbon. In other words, the purpose of the law is simply to price the emissions and let the free market optimize them down.
Cap and trade fails for the simple thing that why should I be penalized for being productive in 2009? There is no power source that has the safety, reliability, and price of fossil fuels. Why should I be penalized for providing jobs? Until there is a real solution, this leads us down the road to where the Soviet Union ended up, in a government created mess.
Your argument that technology evolves is a red herring, and is irrelevant to the original point. Also, you never answered my question: In principle, what evidence would convince you that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and dangerous?
I never said that it wasn't. I was replying to a post that stated that we needed to take action. I never said anything abut global warming being totally fake. I simply stated that before we paralyzed our economy in some way, we needed to look at the evidence some more. For human made global warming to be proven real and dangerous there needs to be a few points. Number one would be that humans can not adapt to the changes. Throughout history there have been numerous changes in nature and humans have survived through them. Today we are better equipped to handle a changing climate than any time in the past. We have the technology that even with rising sea levels, we can still build for the same amount of living space (artificial islands or by building higher buildings). We also have the capacity that if this was such a danger to artificially house samples of "in danger" ecosystems for future use. For it to be dangerous, we can't have any capabilities to adapt. With current data, a massive solar flare which we can't control would disrupt life infinitely more than global warming would in a decade or two. Two, it needs to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans caused it, we today have too little data to prove anything more than a gradual increase of temperatures. Mix with that the fact that some of the recording stations are invalid (being in very hot areas compared to even a few miles away) or have known problems.
My problems aren't with if global warming exists or not but rather if we should paralyze the economy to do so (as that seems to be the current option with most lawmakers). If we could reduce global warming in a way that does not paralyze the economy or by ideas that might have disasterous global effects if they go wrong (like the creating clouds idea), I would be all for them.
You'll need to support that with evidence, because from where I'm sitting, the places in the world with well-regulated market economies (Western Europe, Australia, Europe, Japan) are among the best places on earth to live, and measure better on virtually every quality-of-life index than less-regulated places like China and the United States. I wouldn't quite call that "ruin".
There are a few things wrong with those assumptions. The current economies of Europe and Japan were basically rebuilt after WWII. Thats only 65 years or so of running. And China is very, very, very heavily regulated, not so much with industrial goods, but rather with any type of ideas. The US also got an overhaul in the '30s and similarly hasn't had enough time to really prove itself. And the USA (not sure about Europe, Japan and China) really doesn't even have a decent enough economic system after the federal reserve came into play because effectively the notes are only worth the fabric of them backed by "the full faith of the US government" and thanks in part to its isolation from a lot of the world, it hasn't had any major attacks or challenges to its sovereignty.
Similarly, on "quality of life" just look at the suicide rates, (all stats taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_rates) where Japan is in the top 10. Plus, a lot of European countries, particularly western Europe rank above the US in number of suicides. Granted, Japan has a cultural attitude favorable to suicide due to the honor code of Samurai, but its interesting to look there and see a lot of developed countries with high suicide rates. While "undeveloped" countries such as Iran, Syria, and Kuwait rank near the bottom (of course part of it could be due to governments not keeping records.)
I don't see how this "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" factor appl
No. The PATRIOT Act doesn't affect free speech. No laws were ever enacted to eliminate "anti-American" speech. Not in the last 40-50 years. You should focus on what's actually true.
Oh really?
and, finally, section 215, which grants unprecedented authority to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies to obtain search warrants for business, medical, educational, library, and bookstore records merely by claiming that the desired records may be related to an ongoing terrorism investigation or intelligence activities
(from http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/patriotact.html). Being able to read what you want is a critical component of free speech, after all what good is freedom of speech if people are prohibited from listening to you? And you should be able to listen to speech with the assumption of privacy, especially when in a private place.
As for marriage, why does 3-5% of the population get to decide for the other 96% what a marriage is?
Its freedom. It doesn't affect you in the slightest. Same thing with beliefs, just because your neighbor is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Agnostic, Atheist, Polytheistic, Taoist, or believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster it doesn't matter. Similar with marriage. What difference does it make that two men or two women can get married? For that matter really it doesn't matter if two women and three men get married. It doesn't matter in the least. Myself, I disagree with the homosexual and polygamist lifestyles, however, so long as there is no abuse going on, I see no reason why you shouldn't let them do as they please just like even though I may disagree with Hinduism, I respect Hindu's rights to believe what they want and expect them to respect my beliefs too.
Every global warming theory uses the fallacy that technology does not naturally evolve. Think about it, 50 years ago who would have thought we would all be completely connected through computers back when a computer took up an entire room. Who would have thought 100 years ago that we could be safely capturing the energy of a split atom? Who would have thought 300 years ago that we would all be driving around in cars? Who (assuming the person lived in Europe) would have thought 1000 years ago that there was a landmass outside of Europe, Asia and Africa? Things evolve, things change. We know from past experiences that government mandated controls on the free economy lead to ruin. A free market will eventually make an affordable car that runs on something "greener" than gas. However, government funding traps us in the mentality of looking for a "perfect" solution (that is often impossible to work in the real world), so doable solutions that might not be 100% perfect get ignored because you get less funding from them.
I agree that there could be global warming. However government restrictions on the economy are not the answer. The free market will always have a solution to the problem.
I love it, people prefer to mod me troll then come up with a reasonable argument. So apparently (0 Troll) is a way of saying "I disagree with you but can't find any evidence to back up my claims".
What I am critical of is government regulation on these things. Really, if we ever come close to running out of oil we will find a decent enough solution. If things become really bad we will find solutions. But the fact remains that they aren't. Will eventually electric power win out over gas? Sure. But today electric powered vehicles suck. In 2020 will they? Perhaps, perhaps not. But funneling taxpayer money into them isn't the solution. Did government sponsored anything really help initial innovations? No. Did they help in refining it? Sometimes. As of 2009, we have no need for electric vehicles. Oil is cheap and pollution really isn't that bad in most places. When the next breakthrough happens it will not be because of government. The reasons being that government grants usually try to find "perfect" solutions that don't work in the real world while "good enough" solutions are ignored because they won't allow for the extra billion if they find the "perfect" solution. So its simple, do nothing and the free market will figure out a way to do it.
By civil liberties I mean the right to free speech. The PATRIOT act severely limited this and it was primary a republican-enacted law. Along with a lot of recent republican attitudes towards the elimination of speech that may be "anti-American" (such as the anti-flag burning amendments which were overwhelmingly supported by republicans) and the refusal by many republicans to allow same-sex marriage (my personal belief is that marriage is a religious ceremony and shouldn't be government by the government though). While democrats have more or less opposed these things.
Right, and anyone who has ideas different to "traditional American values" must be a terrorist!
If you silence people on the grounds of having a different opinion you are effectively becoming censors, no different than that of China or of Iran.
Stop giving who power? The government? Yes, I am all for that. However we have a screwed up idea of a free society with a totally screwed up idea of representation that worked just fine when states made most of the laws but now we have a huge federal government with a tiny state government and the few rights states have get taken away by the federal government by extortion (make your drinking age 21 or we won't give you any money). Really, who do I vote for? I can vote libertarian which shares nearly 99% of my beliefs but probably won't get elected. I can vote for republicans which I agree with on many economic issues but disagree with their eroding of civil liberties, or I can vote for democrats who I agree with on their civil liberties but don't agree with them on the eroding of economic liberties and the right to bear arms.
Please tell me, how am I supposed to stop giving them power (with legal means of course).
Sure, lets rush into something that may or may not be true and lets totally screw up our economy because of it! We did the exact same thing with drugs, copyright and you can even look at the war on terror as the same way. You need to carefully look at the information and make informed decisions.
You have to realize too that alarmist positions are great at gaining funds, which lead to much of the research being carefully edited to lead to even more alarmist predictions to gain more funds. Which are you going to support, the study that finds that within 10 years the sea levels are going to flood New York, and many animals will die. Or the study that says that if everything continues just right now with absolutely no variation we might possibly see a 2 inch increase of the sea level in 30 years.
If you don't stop to look at these things you end up charging into things much as how Bush did in Iraq. Only rather than chasing WMDs and screwing us of some speech and privacy rights and a bunch of tax dollars, we can charge into this and screw us of our economic rights and a bunch of tax dollars.