As a English man who cannot really understand the arguments in favour of the 2nd Amendment can I ask a few questions to my gun loving cousins?
Where do you draw the line between what is and isn't a firearm?
Does the 2nd Amendment allow (in your mind at least) a citizen to have a rocket launcher or a laser gun?
What are you going to do when the technology of simple side arms develops to the point where you an take out a room full of people by pressing a trigger and letting you gun do all the aiming etc..?
Would genuinely like to hear from a pro gun NRA type.
OK you've convinced me now. I didn't realise there where 'shitloads' of planets out there. I'm an idiot and so are all of the scientists who have given serious thought to this matter.
Have you heard of Paul Davies or SETI or Francis Crick?
I, like most people who have thought about it think that life elsewhere is pretty damn likely, truly intelligent life much less so but still likely, but no one who has thought about the arguments ('there are shitloads of planets' isn't the only argument) would ever claim that 'it cannot possibly be that we are the only life' as you state.
The creation of life appears to have only happened on Earth once (there seems to be only one tree of life), and it seems to have taken several hundred million years. That suggests that even when conditions are right, as they obviously are here, it is pretty hard to get going.
The 'there are shitloads of planets' argunment could just as easily be applied to the question of intelligent life elsewhere and yet Drake's equation and Fermi's paradox both point to the flaws in such simplistic reasoning.
You made an overblown statement and were called out on it, not just by me, and now you won't admit you were wrong.
Is life elsewhere likely? I think so. Is it possible Earth houses the only life? Absolutely. Read Davies' book, it's very good.
I'm not saying that there isn't life elsewhere I'm just pointing out your ridiculous statement that it cannot even be possible that there isn't life out there.
The universe is big but as far as we know it isn't infinite. Multiplying the probablilities of lots of unlikely events quickly gets makes things very very unlikely.
Francis Crick once wrote 'The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions require to get it going'.
Paul Davies who I believe heads up SETI has written a whole book about this question and having read it I can tell you that he is far from convinced that there is any life elsewhere.
I have a Note and can vouch for the fact that you need two hands even to answer a call.
I don't care though as I rarely make calls so the bigger screen more than makes up for needing two hands. It also just fits in my trouser pocket, any bigger and it wouldn't.
Not sure what you mean by
it's an issue if you want to use it for say, directions
If you mean you can't use it while you are driving, then I'd say that was a good thing.
Don't mean to be rude but you'd have to have had a pretty poor history education to not know about the Storming of the Bastille.
The French Revolution is one of the key points in world history, if you don't know anything about it you're not going to understand an awful lot of references in the culture around you.
The USA is possibly the only country in the world where more men are raped than women.
The threat of rape helps force innocent people to take a plea bargain. Plea bargaining being another outrage that the USA blindly accepts but which most civilised countries severely limit.
I think 5 feet 11 is much easier to get a handle on. Humans have a much better grasp of smaller integer numbers. 5 and 11 mean something intuitively, 180 doesn't. 0.8 is too abstract.
It's probably why we use a 12 hour clock for most of the time rather than the 24 hour version.
We also split the year up into months and days rather than saying it is day 180 etc..
I'm English and although we were taught the metric system at school, we pretty much still use the imperial system in everyday life.
If I were American I'd stick with what you have. For scientific stuff use metric but for everyday stuff the old units just fit better. Get in with the whole stone thing though. I weigh 15 stones, nobody over here would instinctively know that was 210 pounds.
Any common measurement that needs 3 digits is crying out for a better unit. I'm 6 foot tall not 183 cm.
I dunno, I mean your actual atoms change throughout your life so how would this be different?
I think as long as I saw other people coming out seemingly unaffected I'd be happy to use it.
If I am anything I'm probably some kind of currently existing pattern of firing neurons. If they teleport that then they teleport me.
What's your position on sleeping? An extreme version of your argument might suggest that we do all we can to avoid falling asleep. How do you know the you that wakes up was the you that fell asleep? Certainly if I am my consciousness, do I not die everytime I become unconscious? I never remember what I was thinking when I fell asleep at the point of waking.
Yes we drink a lot more than America. There's a breakdown by countries here.
No need to feel sorry for us. We may have an established church but the only reason we have it is because disestablishing it would take up a lot of time in parliament and there are always other things more pressing. It really doesn't breach our human rights trust me.
The census results are misleading. I know from speaking to friends and family that people identify themselves on the form as 'Christian' purely because they think that's what white British people are.
There is a debate over her about the wording of the question and it is likely to be changed as no one actually believes that only 25% of people are not religious.
To put it in context for you it is believed that only 10% of the UK population attend some sort of church. The figure in the USA is 43%.
For a politician to invoke God would be seen as deeply weird over here. The opposite seems to be the case in the USA where you almost have to say you believe to get elected. Tony Blair's (who is a true believer, an oddity in British politics) press officer famously stated that 'we don't do God' to make sure that Tony never said anything about his beliefs.
Again with the monarchy, the main reason we have it is that we have always had it. Getting rid of it comes up every now and then but there is no real enthusiasm for republicanism. The monarchy have no power so what's the point in worrying about it? They also mean we don't have to have an elected head of state which saves us a lot of time over worrying which self serving charlatan we should have.
I mean if we had a vote to scrap the monarchy I'd probably vote in favour but meh I'm really not fussed.
If you want to feel sorry for someone feel sorry for yourself. I'd be particularly upset about plea bargaining. I mean you took our justice system, the best in the world, and then ruined it. People pleading guilty when they're not to escape long sentences in your barbaric prisons. You also lock up more people than anywhere else in the world.
Not disagreeing with what you say but the point is that I see no evidence that people are brighter than they were 100 years ago yet the IQ scores have increased.
Someone said it might be because schools are better now. I was saying that I don't think they are.
Sure cities have been sacked throughout history but I said 'We lost out moral authority'. That 'We' represents the post enlightenment Judeo-Christian tradition based English speaking civilisation that I consider myself to be part of.
Sure plenty of terrible things have been done but officially sanctioned murder of civilians was never considered acceptable until the Allied bombing of Germany. Before then, if it happened it was considered shameful as it should be. Since then it has become almost to be acceptable, certainly you think it is.
It isn't acceptable and I'm sorry you think it is.
Also if we are at war as you claim, who exactly are we at war with, what is the aim and how will we know if we've won? Surely if you are happy to bomb small children you must be pretty certain you know why you are doing it?
I wasn't necessarily talking about the people who wrote the texts, I was talking about the content of those texts that make it clear that people haven't changed much.
I mean read the Bible and although the characters in it are unsurprisingly ignorant, they don't sound less intelligent.
Anyway the point about the Flynn effect is that it applies across the scale so the brightest people in the past would have scored more lowly even though they clearly were as intelligent as the brightest people around today. It would seem odd therefore to use the same effect to argue that the rest of the poeple have got more intelligent.
I don't really buy the idea that our education system is any better than what people had in the past anyway. Better classroom discipline and a greater incentive to study probably meant that schools were actually better in the past.
Even where there were no schools people still mostly learnt to read and write. Literacy rates have not changed much in the last 100 years in England.
Can't speak for Americans as I'm English but we are certainly not getting smarter.
Why would we be getting smarter anyway? It's pretty obvious from reading old Greek or Roman texts that people are pretty much the same now as they've always been. Shakespeare shows that nothing much has changed in England for over 400 years.
I thought the common explanation was that people are more used to thinking 'abstractly' in Western cultures. That's why people from outside the West still score more lowly even today.
I guess only you know for sure what point you were trying to make.
To me your argument seems to be that killing children is just one of those things you have to do security and that the real question is whether the drone attacks are creating more trouble than they stop.
Killing civilians is just wrong. If you can't discriminate between genuine targets and civilians you shouldn't do anything. Collateral damage is unacceptable outside of a genuine battlefield.
Our ancestors would never have accepted the things we see as routine today. We lost our moral authority when we started bombing civilians in Germany in response to the Nazis. It's time to get it back by stopping this bombing.
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Bombs and grenades are illegal though. Are you saying that self aiming guns should therefore be illegal?
As a English man who cannot really understand the arguments in favour of the 2nd Amendment can I ask a few questions to my gun loving cousins?
Where do you draw the line between what is and isn't a firearm?
Does the 2nd Amendment allow (in your mind at least) a citizen to have a rocket launcher or a laser gun?
What are you going to do when the technology of simple side arms develops to the point where you an take out a room full of people by pressing a trigger and letting you gun do all the aiming etc..?
Would genuinely like to hear from a pro gun NRA type.
OK you've convinced me now. I didn't realise there where 'shitloads' of planets out there. I'm an idiot and so are all of the scientists who have given serious thought to this matter.
Have you heard of Paul Davies or SETI or Francis Crick?
I, like most people who have thought about it think that life elsewhere is pretty damn likely, truly intelligent life much less so but still likely, but no one who has thought about the arguments ('there are shitloads of planets' isn't the only argument) would ever claim that 'it cannot possibly be that we are the only life' as you state.
The creation of life appears to have only happened on Earth once (there seems to be only one tree of life), and it seems to have taken several hundred million years. That suggests that even when conditions are right, as they obviously are here, it is pretty hard to get going.
The 'there are shitloads of planets' argunment could just as easily be applied to the question of intelligent life elsewhere and yet Drake's equation and Fermi's paradox both point to the flaws in such simplistic reasoning.
You made an overblown statement and were called out on it, not just by me, and now you won't admit you were wrong.
Is life elsewhere likely? I think so. Is it possible Earth houses the only life? Absolutely. Read Davies' book, it's very good.
I'm not saying that there isn't life elsewhere I'm just pointing out your ridiculous statement that it cannot even be possible that there isn't life out there.
The universe is big but as far as we know it isn't infinite. Multiplying the probablilities of lots of unlikely events quickly gets makes things very very unlikely.
Francis Crick once wrote 'The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions require to get it going'.
Paul Davies who I believe heads up SETI has written a whole book about this question and having read it I can tell you that he is far from convinced that there is any life elsewhere.
the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy, for which compensation was paid, was the result of incorrect coordinates for a Yugoslavian installation
At least one investigation concluded that the bombing was a deliberate attack to try and stop Stealth Fighter technology being passed back to China.
Can you back up your confident assertion that it was a mistake?
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star
Amazing logic there. Most people who have given it serious consideration think it is perfectly possible that Earth has the only life in the universe.
I don't care though as I rarely make calls so the bigger screen more than makes up for needing two hands. It also just fits in my trouser pocket, any bigger and it wouldn't.
Not sure what you mean by
it's an issue if you want to use it for say, directions
If you mean you can't use it while you are driving, then I'd say that was a good thing.
Don't mean to be rude but you'd have to have had a pretty poor history education to not know about the Storming of the Bastille.
The French Revolution is one of the key points in world history, if you don't know anything about it you're not going to understand an awful lot of references in the culture around you.
In England we have free healthcare for everyone.
It's very popular.
The media in the US says that we have death panels.
We don't have death panels. They were lying to you.
Completely agree.
The USA is possibly the only country in the world where more men are raped than women.
The threat of rape helps force innocent people to take a plea bargain. Plea bargaining being another outrage that the USA blindly accepts but which most civilised countries severely limit.
Why not use a gun to fire fuel to a rocket then?
If you fired the gun every few seconds you wouldn't have the expense of lifting all of the fuel right from the start.
You'd just need the rocket to have some way of catching the fuel. Bit tricky admittedly.
I think 5 feet 11 is much easier to get a handle on. Humans have a much better grasp of smaller integer numbers. 5 and 11 mean something intuitively, 180 doesn't. 0.8 is too abstract.
It's probably why we use a 12 hour clock for most of the time rather than the 24 hour version.
We also split the year up into months and days rather than saying it is day 180 etc..
I'm English and although we were taught the metric system at school, we pretty much still use the imperial system in everyday life.
If I were American I'd stick with what you have. For scientific stuff use metric but for everyday stuff the old units just fit better. Get in with the whole stone thing though. I weigh 15 stones, nobody over here would instinctively know that was 210 pounds.
Any common measurement that needs 3 digits is crying out for a better unit. I'm 6 foot tall not 183 cm.
Absolutely. You see new films make it into the IMDB top 250 list. They then slowly slip down until they disappear altogether.
Case in point, The Dark Knight Rises is currently at 37.
You telling me that only 36 better films have ever been made than that piece of shit? There were probably 36 better films made last month.
I dunno, I mean your actual atoms change throughout your life so how would this be different?
I think as long as I saw other people coming out seemingly unaffected I'd be happy to use it.
If I am anything I'm probably some kind of currently existing pattern of firing neurons. If they teleport that then they teleport me.
What's your position on sleeping? An extreme version of your argument might suggest that we do all we can to avoid falling asleep. How do you know the you that wakes up was the you that fell asleep? Certainly if I am my consciousness, do I not die everytime I become unconscious? I never remember what I was thinking when I fell asleep at the point of waking.
Yes we drink a lot more than America. There's a breakdown by countries here.
No need to feel sorry for us. We may have an established church but the only reason we have it is because disestablishing it would take up a lot of time in parliament and there are always other things more pressing. It really doesn't breach our human rights trust me.
The census results are misleading. I know from speaking to friends and family that people identify themselves on the form as 'Christian' purely because they think that's what white British people are.
There is a debate over her about the wording of the question and it is likely to be changed as no one actually believes that only 25% of people are not religious.
To put it in context for you it is believed that only 10% of the UK population attend some sort of church. The figure in the USA is 43%.
For a politician to invoke God would be seen as deeply weird over here. The opposite seems to be the case in the USA where you almost have to say you believe to get elected. Tony Blair's (who is a true believer, an oddity in British politics) press officer famously stated that 'we don't do God' to make sure that Tony never said anything about his beliefs.
Again with the monarchy, the main reason we have it is that we have always had it. Getting rid of it comes up every now and then but there is no real enthusiasm for republicanism. The monarchy have no power so what's the point in worrying about it? They also mean we don't have to have an elected head of state which saves us a lot of time over worrying which self serving charlatan we should have.
I mean if we had a vote to scrap the monarchy I'd probably vote in favour but meh I'm really not fussed.
If you want to feel sorry for someone feel sorry for yourself. I'd be particularly upset about plea bargaining. I mean you took our justice system, the best in the world, and then ruined it. People pleading guilty when they're not to escape long sentences in your barbaric prisons. You also lock up more people than anywhere else in the world.
We drink a lot more than Americans.
A lot of people would have had a few drinks before they got around to filling in the census form.
The way I see it, every country has the right to try and get nuclear weapons, but we have the right to stop them if we feel it is in out interests.
The only rules in warfare are decided by having a war. International law is just a fig leaf.
That guy let his wife die by refusing 'Western' medicine.
Used it himself though when he needed it.
Creepy egomaniac if you ask me. You ever ask people to wash your feet?
18% of world's emissions, 5% of world's population.
You really think the U.S has already done its bit?
Why are all of your cars so big? Couldn't you start there?
Not disagreeing with what you say but the point is that I see no evidence that people are brighter than they were 100 years ago yet the IQ scores have increased.
Someone said it might be because schools are better now. I was saying that I don't think they are.
Sure cities have been sacked throughout history but I said 'We lost out moral authority'. That 'We' represents the post enlightenment Judeo-Christian tradition based English speaking civilisation that I consider myself to be part of.
Sure plenty of terrible things have been done but officially sanctioned murder of civilians was never considered acceptable until the Allied bombing of Germany. Before then, if it happened it was considered shameful as it should be. Since then it has become almost to be acceptable, certainly you think it is.
It isn't acceptable and I'm sorry you think it is.
Also if we are at war as you claim, who exactly are we at war with, what is the aim and how will we know if we've won? Surely if you are happy to bomb small children you must be pretty certain you know why you are doing it?
I wasn't necessarily talking about the people who wrote the texts, I was talking about the content of those texts that make it clear that people haven't changed much.
I mean read the Bible and although the characters in it are unsurprisingly ignorant, they don't sound less intelligent.
Anyway the point about the Flynn effect is that it applies across the scale so the brightest people in the past would have scored more lowly even though they clearly were as intelligent as the brightest people around today. It would seem odd therefore to use the same effect to argue that the rest of the poeple have got more intelligent.
I don't really buy the idea that our education system is any better than what people had in the past anyway. Better classroom discipline and a greater incentive to study probably meant that schools were actually better in the past.
Even where there were no schools people still mostly learnt to read and write. Literacy rates have not changed much in the last 100 years in England.
Can't speak for Americans as I'm English but we are certainly not getting smarter.
Why would we be getting smarter anyway? It's pretty obvious from reading old Greek or Roman texts that people are pretty much the same now as they've always been. Shakespeare shows that nothing much has changed in England for over 400 years.
I thought the common explanation was that people are more used to thinking 'abstractly' in Western cultures. That's why people from outside the West still score more lowly even today.
I guess only you know for sure what point you were trying to make.
To me your argument seems to be that killing children is just one of those things you have to do security and that the real question is whether the drone attacks are creating more trouble than they stop.
Killing civilians is just wrong. If you can't discriminate between genuine targets and civilians you shouldn't do anything. Collateral damage is unacceptable outside of a genuine battlefield.
Our ancestors would never have accepted the things we see as routine today. We lost our moral authority when we started bombing civilians in Germany in response to the Nazis. It's time to get it back by stopping this bombing.