The Government doesn't give me anything all and never will.
Quit your whining and self-pity already. The government gives you roads, protection against crime and fire, emergency medical care, protection against foreign invasion, and any number of other services that you completely take for granted.
Try getting by on one meal a day like I do and tell me I shouldn't get an exception.
Okay: you shouldn't get an exception. But since you're so poor, you won't need one, since you won't be using much energy anyway. If you're terribly poor AND buying lots of energy, then maybe it's time to make some changes to your lifestyle so that you won't need to use so much energy in the future.
There is no reason why the market can't be allowed to come up with it's own solution.
I agree -- as long as the externalities are factored in to the cost of all energy technologies. Currently, most polluting technologies get a "free ride" as far as pollution goes -- that is, they incur costs that other people have to pay. When the costs of the pollution are accurately factored into the price of the polluting energy, then the market will react appropriately. Currently the market is skewed towards polluting energy sources because the pollution is "free" to the polluters.
If there is only one button to press there is never a question "which button".
The problem is that the extra buttons haven't gone away, they've just moved over to the keyboard. So now it's control-click instead of right-click... which is even more obscure and hard to figure out that a second mouse button would have been.
Of all of the new features of Leopard, I really cannot appreciate the addition of translucency to the menu bar. As a long time Mac user this really seems like one of those "because we can" features rather than it making any sense.
I agree; what was the point of that? The first time I saw it (on my friend's dev machine) I thought their monitor was going bad. I hope at least there is some way to disable it; although I suspect it will be gone in the next release anyway.
A quick question for those of you who have been running the Leopard betas... will I need to dedicate an entire drive (or partition) for Time Machine's exclusive use, or is it possible/okay to tell Time Machine to put its data into a subdirectory inside a drive/partition that is also used for storing other data?
No, but that doesn't mean it can't try to solve the nation's problems -- especially the problems that the public want it to solve. If the people want the government to solve our energy problems through tax incentives, and they vote accordingly, then who are you to say that they shouldn't get the government they asked for?
All moves to clean up the air are good and badly needed but only if you are not cutting off the nose of every regular guy like me in the process and putting us into poverty.
Why should there be an exception for "regular guys like you"? To the extent that you are contributing to the problem and enjoying the benefits of the power produced, it seems only logical that you should be required to help fund the solution. With any luck, requiring power companies to pay for the costs of the pollution they create (and presumably pass that cost on to their consumers) will motivate both the power companies and the consumers to switch to cleaner (and hence cheaper) methods of power generation... which is of course exactly what we want to have happen.
Virus writers will write something that searches around for the right place to patch.
Ah, but how will they get their search-around code to run on the target machine? They don't know where in the hacked-TIFF file to put it now, do they?
Developers will think buffer overflows are now OK, and write worse code.
I doubt it -- a random buffer overflow will still cause your program to crash (or corrupt data), and most programmers don't think either of those are acceptable. A more likely scenario is that programmers will continue as they always have: trying to write correct code, and occasionally screwing up and writing vulnerable/buggy code. The only difference is that the vulnerabilities will now be that much harder to exploit.
Wherever we look, we find that we can explain things without using god as a non-explanation.
Of course there are also things that we can't (yet?) explain. We may at some point run across things that we'll never be able to explain (if we haven't already -- I'd argue that any one-time phenomenon that cannot be reproduced and leaves no evidence is immune to scientific investigation). The fact that we can explain a lot of things scientifically only suggests that everything can (theoretically) be explained that way; it doesn't prove it.
Sure, but what kind of stupid game is that your imaginative all-powerful, eternally-wise being is playing there? Making it impossible to spot him and yet throwing you to burn for all eternity if you don't believe, even though every rational thought process (and, according to your logic, rationality is something he provided) leads to the result that faith equals insanity?
Yep, that would be a stupid game. But note that when I refer to "God" I'm not referring to the traditional Christian God (the one who allegedly wrote the Bible), but rather to Some Thing Out There That Allegedly Created The Universe. If that thing exists, chances are its psychology and temperament would be quite different from that of the average human being (likely to the point of being unrecognizable!). I'd also argue that it's quite likely It doesn't know that Earth or humanity exists, and wouldn't care about either even if it did know (just like when I build a house, I won't know or care about the microscopic bacteria colony that is growing in the crawl space).
I'm not a theology expert, but how does it make God a liar?
We've built up a large array of scientific techniques for determining the age of various objects, and these techniques have been proven quite accurate for everything contemporary we've been able to test them against. We also have a good understanding of how these techniques work, and thus no reason to doubt that they can be applied to natural objects. When we apply these techniques to fossils, rocks, etc, they give consistent results suggesting those objects a millions of years old. The possibility of all the techniques yielding the same erroneous results by mere coincidence seems very slim to me. So that leaves two options: either the Earth really is millions of years old, OR God very carefully created the Earth to appear as if it was millions of years old.
If God really created the Earth 6,000 years ago, complete with pre-aged rocks, realistic dinosaur fossils already embedded in the ground, and all the other myriad signs we've seen suggesting that it's much older than that, what else could you call it but a deliberate hoax on humanity?
Err... I'm actually lost for words. You are seriously saying that evolution (things change into whatever is most appropriate at that moment, with little regard for past or future) and design (things are as they are because they were intentionally made that way) are not diametrically opposed theories?
Is there anything that rules out the possibility that God could set up a universe with the appropriate physical constants such that evolution is possible? He is supposed to be all-powerful, after all. He could even go so far as to arrange it so that all the seemingly "random" events of evolution are pre-ordained to give him a particular result he wanted, if He so chose.
Of course, none of the above would explain how God himself came to exist, but that might be an argument for another day... right now we're talking about the origins of life on Earth, not the origins of dieties elsewhere.
As Devo succinctly put it: "God made man, but he used a monkey to do it".
(note that I'm an atheist myself, but I see the original poster's point)
The argument could be made that if any divine entity could create the whole bloody universe, he might be able to make a planet older than it appears to be -- that is, the rocks were 'created' old. This does not violate physical sciences at all.
No, but it does make God out to be a liar (or at least a practical joker). I'm not sure how well that corresponds to the Christian notion of a benevolent God; it might make more sense for someone like Loki...
(And, I think, most theologists will agree that Genesis is highly metaphorical.)
No doubt, but the theologists have actually thought about the subject a lot. I get the feeling that many (most?) laymen haven't thought too deeply about any of it, as they are content to believe whatever they are told by their religious leaders. And the religious leaders themselves, whatever they may think privately, their public message is likely to be a very simple, lowest-common-demoninator message designed to appear to the largest possible audience. Hence the messages are likely going be very simple "the Bible says X, therefore X is literally true" type information.
The quick reply to that is the mis-representation/bad-intelligence that was fed to Congress, the UN, and the people. While this very well is a valid point, saying that Bush was behind it all himself, well that's assuming a lot. It very well could be that Gore would have been fed the same bad intelligence,
The critical difference is that the Bush administration wasn't just "being fed" bad intelligence, it was actively demanding that the reports be slanted in such a way that they would make a case for war, and cherry-picking everything it got, selecting only the intelligence that bolstered its case and ignoring everything else. Having finally got the "facts" it wanted (Cheney personally visited the CIA many times to make sure their people understood exactly what sort of things he wanted to see in the reports), the Bush Administration then fed their intentionally misleading reports to the media, Congress, and the people. To portray the Bush administration as an innocent receiver of faulty intelligence data is way off the mark. It doesn't matter how much of it Bush was personally responsible for and how much of it was his associates/cronies' fault -- it's the Bush Administration that came to power, not just Bush the person. Congress does take some blame in falling for the ruse, but it wasn't Congress's idea (and there is something to be said for trusting your President's judgement in times of trouble)
Say what you will about Gore, but I can't imagine he (or his associates) would have started a war by relentlessly hyping up the extremely flimsy evidence that Bush used to start his.
Uuh, apparently not. The Constitution doesn't say that it's a judge's job to interpret the Constitution. The rules of the Constitution say that the President decides what the military does, and a judge does not.
So you are saying that it's the President's job to interpret what his own legal abilities are in all matters regarding the military? What if he was to (just hypothetically of course) interpret the Constitution as saying he's allowed to use the military to kill his political opponents, stage a coup, and start a dictatorship? According to your logic, that would be perfectly acceptable. According to common sense and the framers' idea of checks and balances, however, the powers of each of the three branches of government are to be held in check by the other two. That's why a judge (and/or Congress) must have a say in the matter.
Maybe, Maybe not. It doesn't really matter all that much.
Perhaps not to you. It matters very much to me. Besides the tens of thousands of lives lost, the hundreds of thousands injured, the millions displaced, and the trillions of dollars wasted, the other real casualty is our country's honor. It used to be that you could make a serious case that the United States was a country with principles and values, and other countries were inspired by us. Now our reputation is a complete laughingstock, and over the last 5 years the US gov't has done more to discredit the very notion of 'democracy' then Al-Quaeda could ever have dreamed of doing themselves. Instead of a "beacon of freedom", we are now a symbol of torture, murder, and unjustified war and occupation. So perhaps Gore would have had a sex scandal, likely he would have doled out favors to his supporters, but I think it's unlikely he would have irrevocably desecrated the country's image the way Bush has done.
So there is a difference. It may be the difference between a stale bologna sandwhich and a dripping fresh dogshit sandwhich, but given that choice I'd much prefer the stale bologna. (Of course what I'd really prefer would be a nice tasty sandwhich, but in a winner-take-all system you generally only get two choices)
Instead the amendment itself has been used like you have suggested by the SCOTUS as an excuse to claim broad interpretational freedom over the Constitution to greatly enlarge the power of the government in that manner
How does ensuring that the government does not trample on peoples' rights "enlarge the power of the government"? It seems to me that when the court does something like declare abortion bans unconsitutional or gay marriage bans unconstitutional, they are defending the implied rights of citizens, not expanding the power of government. And that seems to be precisely the intent of the phrase "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
I guess that really boils it down right there. It begs the question of -- Why is a judge in charge of what the NSA should be doing when the Constitution says that the president is in charge?
Because the rules in the Constitution supercede the will of the President, and it's a judge's job to interpret the Constitution.
Don't they require Civics classes in high school anymore?
Also, I daresay that at the top of both the Republican and Democratic party are the same people, with the same goals. [...] This is why I do not vote in presidential elections, I know for a fact my vote is meaningless, it gets thrown away because I would never vote for a republican nor for a democrat.
Even granting your premise as largely true (and I agree that in many areas it is), do you really think we'd be mired in Iraq right now if Al Gore had become president in 2000? That seems like a bit of a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
Quit your whining and self-pity already. The government gives you roads, protection against crime and fire, emergency medical care, protection against foreign invasion, and any number of other services that you completely take for granted.
Try getting by on one meal a day like I do and tell me I shouldn't get an exception.
Okay: you shouldn't get an exception. But since you're so poor, you won't need one, since you won't be using much energy anyway. If you're terribly poor AND buying lots of energy, then maybe it's time to make some changes to your lifestyle so that you won't need to use so much energy in the future.
I agree -- as long as the externalities are factored in to the cost of all energy technologies. Currently, most polluting technologies get a "free ride" as far as pollution goes -- that is, they incur costs that other people have to pay. When the costs of the pollution are accurately factored into the price of the polluting energy, then the market will react appropriately. Currently the market is skewed towards polluting energy sources because the pollution is "free" to the polluters.
Isn't there some variant of Godwin's Law that addresses car analogies? If not, there should be.
The problem is that the extra buttons haven't gone away, they've just moved over to the keyboard. So now it's control-click instead of right-click... which is even more obscure and hard to figure out that a second mouse button would have been.
Funny, I can say the same thing about Vista...
I agree; what was the point of that? The first time I saw it (on my friend's dev machine) I thought their monitor was going bad. I hope at least there is some way to disable it; although I suspect it will be gone in the next release anyway.
A quick question for those of you who have been running the Leopard betas... will I need to dedicate an entire drive (or partition) for Time Machine's exclusive use, or is it possible/okay to tell Time Machine to put its data into a subdirectory inside a drive/partition that is also used for storing other data?
No, but that doesn't mean it can't try to solve the nation's problems -- especially the problems that the public want it to solve. If the people want the government to solve our energy problems through tax incentives, and they vote accordingly, then who are you to say that they shouldn't get the government they asked for?
Why not?
Why should there be an exception for "regular guys like you"? To the extent that you are contributing to the problem and enjoying the benefits of the power produced, it seems only logical that you should be required to help fund the solution. With any luck, requiring power companies to pay for the costs of the pollution they create (and presumably pass that cost on to their consumers) will motivate both the power companies and the consumers to switch to cleaner (and hence cheaper) methods of power generation... which is of course exactly what we want to have happen.
Well, you're in luck... Time Machine is something you have to manually activate/configure before it will do anything.
Hmm... what movies did you have in mind? Primer, perhaps?
Ah, but how will they get their search-around code to run on the target machine? They don't know where in the hacked-TIFF file to put it now, do they?
Developers will think buffer overflows are now OK, and write worse code.
I doubt it -- a random buffer overflow will still cause your program to crash (or corrupt data), and most programmers don't think either of those are acceptable. A more likely scenario is that programmers will continue as they always have: trying to write correct code, and occasionally screwing up and writing vulnerable/buggy code. The only difference is that the vulnerabilities will now be that much harder to exploit.
I think I speak for all of Slashdot when I say yes, we really could -- and thanks for bringing up such a painful subject.
Of course there are also things that we can't (yet?) explain. We may at some point run across things that we'll never be able to explain (if we haven't already -- I'd argue that any one-time phenomenon that cannot be reproduced and leaves no evidence is immune to scientific investigation). The fact that we can explain a lot of things scientifically only suggests that everything can (theoretically) be explained that way; it doesn't prove it.
Sure, but what kind of stupid game is that your imaginative all-powerful, eternally-wise being is playing there? Making it impossible to spot him and yet throwing you to burn for all eternity if you don't believe, even though every rational thought process (and, according to your logic, rationality is something he provided) leads to the result that faith equals insanity?
Yep, that would be a stupid game. But note that when I refer to "God" I'm not referring to the traditional Christian God (the one who allegedly wrote the Bible), but rather to Some Thing Out There That Allegedly Created The Universe. If that thing exists, chances are its psychology and temperament would be quite different from that of the average human being (likely to the point of being unrecognizable!). I'd also argue that it's quite likely It doesn't know that Earth or humanity exists, and wouldn't care about either even if it did know (just like when I build a house, I won't know or care about the microscopic bacteria colony that is growing in the crawl space).
We've built up a large array of scientific techniques for determining the age of various objects, and these techniques have been proven quite accurate for everything contemporary we've been able to test them against. We also have a good understanding of how these techniques work, and thus no reason to doubt that they can be applied to natural objects. When we apply these techniques to fossils, rocks, etc, they give consistent results suggesting those objects a millions of years old. The possibility of all the techniques yielding the same erroneous results by mere coincidence seems very slim to me. So that leaves two options: either the Earth really is millions of years old, OR God very carefully created the Earth to appear as if it was millions of years old.
If God really created the Earth 6,000 years ago, complete with pre-aged rocks, realistic dinosaur fossils already embedded in the ground, and all the other myriad signs we've seen suggesting that it's much older than that, what else could you call it but a deliberate hoax on humanity?
Is there anything that rules out the possibility that God could set up a universe with the appropriate physical constants such that evolution is possible? He is supposed to be all-powerful, after all. He could even go so far as to arrange it so that all the seemingly "random" events of evolution are pre-ordained to give him a particular result he wanted, if He so chose.
Of course, none of the above would explain how God himself came to exist, but that might be an argument for another day... right now we're talking about the origins of life on Earth, not the origins of dieties elsewhere.
As Devo succinctly put it: "God made man, but he used a monkey to do it".
(note that I'm an atheist myself, but I see the original poster's point)
No, but it does make God out to be a liar (or at least a practical joker). I'm not sure how well that corresponds to the Christian notion of a benevolent God; it might make more sense for someone like Loki...
No doubt, but the theologists have actually thought about the subject a lot. I get the feeling that many (most?) laymen haven't thought too deeply about any of it, as they are content to believe whatever they are told by their religious leaders. And the religious leaders themselves, whatever they may think privately, their public message is likely to be a very simple, lowest-common-demoninator message designed to appear to the largest possible audience. Hence the messages are likely going be very simple "the Bible says X, therefore X is literally true" type information.
The critical difference is that the Bush administration wasn't just "being fed" bad intelligence, it was actively demanding that the reports be slanted in such a way that they would make a case for war, and cherry-picking everything it got, selecting only the intelligence that bolstered its case and ignoring everything else. Having finally got the "facts" it wanted (Cheney personally visited the CIA many times to make sure their people understood exactly what sort of things he wanted to see in the reports), the Bush Administration then fed their intentionally misleading reports to the media, Congress, and the people. To portray the Bush administration as an innocent receiver of faulty intelligence data is way off the mark. It doesn't matter how much of it Bush was personally responsible for and how much of it was his associates/cronies' fault -- it's the Bush Administration that came to power, not just Bush the person. Congress does take some blame in falling for the ruse, but it wasn't Congress's idea (and there is something to be said for trusting your President's judgement in times of trouble)
Say what you will about Gore, but I can't imagine he (or his associates) would have started a war by relentlessly hyping up the extremely flimsy evidence that Bush used to start his.
So you are saying that it's the President's job to interpret what his own legal abilities are in all matters regarding the military? What if he was to (just hypothetically of course) interpret the Constitution as saying he's allowed to use the military to kill his political opponents, stage a coup, and start a dictatorship? According to your logic, that would be perfectly acceptable. According to common sense and the framers' idea of checks and balances, however, the powers of each of the three branches of government are to be held in check by the other two. That's why a judge (and/or Congress) must have a say in the matter.
Perhaps not to you. It matters very much to me. Besides the tens of thousands of lives lost, the hundreds of thousands injured, the millions displaced, and the trillions of dollars wasted, the other real casualty is our country's honor. It used to be that you could make a serious case that the United States was a country with principles and values, and other countries were inspired by us. Now our reputation is a complete laughingstock, and over the last 5 years the US gov't has done more to discredit the very notion of 'democracy' then Al-Quaeda could ever have dreamed of doing themselves. Instead of a "beacon of freedom", we are now a symbol of torture, murder, and unjustified war and occupation. So perhaps Gore would have had a sex scandal, likely he would have doled out favors to his supporters, but I think it's unlikely he would have irrevocably desecrated the country's image the way Bush has done.
So there is a difference. It may be the difference between a stale bologna sandwhich and a dripping fresh dogshit sandwhich, but given that choice I'd much prefer the stale bologna. (Of course what I'd really prefer would be a nice tasty sandwhich, but in a winner-take-all system you generally only get two choices)
How does ensuring that the government does not trample on peoples' rights "enlarge the power of the government"? It seems to me that when the court does something like declare abortion bans unconsitutional or gay marriage bans unconstitutional, they are defending the implied rights of citizens, not expanding the power of government. And that seems to be precisely the intent of the phrase "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Because the rules in the Constitution supercede the will of the President, and it's a judge's job to interpret the Constitution.
Don't they require Civics classes in high school anymore?
Even granting your premise as largely true (and I agree that in many areas it is), do you really think we'd be mired in Iraq right now if Al Gore had become president in 2000? That seems like a bit of a stretch.