If Bush were impeached and removed from office, I'll bet you any amount of money that the newly sworn in President Cheney would pardon Bush before the judge even puts the Bible down.
Whether Bush gets pardoned or convicted isn't nearly as important to me as having the nation run by someone who will follow the laws of the land. Still, I agree that Cheney probably would pardon Bush, and that would be unfortunate.
before you impeach Bush and remove him from office, remember who then gets sworn in.
After an impeachment, the Executive Branch would be governed by a very careful Dick Cheney (because he would know that the American public was willing to hold the president accountable for any criminal activity). Compare that to the status quo, where the Executive Branch is being run by an unscrupulous and unaccountable Dick Cheney (because he's been able to hide in the shadows and let his sock puppet Dubya take most of the heat).
free speech is only one civil liberty. In fact, it's such a minor one
You may think it's a minor one, but that doesn't make it so. Without the right to free speech we would have no (legal) way to organize, document government abuses, or hold politicians accountable for their actions. In short, free speech is what makes all of the other freedoms enforceable, and is therefore one of the most important of our civil liberties.
The founders intentionally designed the document to account for new situations.
Yes, by including a mechanism by which it could be amended -- openly, with proper discussion and oversight. Not by allowing it to be ignored whenever following the law was inconvenient.
I want all my telephone conversation BE STORED so I will be able to use it agains whatever stupid accusation or charge they may EVER channel at me
I don't think you've thought this through all the way. Do you really think you're going to be given access to all the secret recordings the government has been making of your phone calls? It's much more likely that the only parts of those recordings that ever see the light of day will be the ones they use (possibly out of context) to try and convict you.
And btw: don't you think encryption will only make thinks worse for you? Ok, let's encrypt all my grandma talks with military strength cypher.. let's see what happens
Using encryption software is perfectly legal, at least in the USA.
BTW how is it that conservatives still have a persecution complex? I don't really understand it myself
It's pretty obvious why, isn't it? For the same reason that Bill O'Reilly keeps inventing Wars on Christmas, and Dubya has to keep linking Iraq to 9/11: convincing people they are being threatened/persecuted is an effective way to scare them into supporting you, because they think you will be the one to defend them from all the baddies that want to hurt them.
Before we went to Iraq I realized that since anti-war people were comparing Bush to Hitler and the pro-war people were comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler then both sides must be wrong
Or, the alternate explanation: both sides were right...
In short, you may truly hate George W. Bush, but he is not sending (nor would like to send) millions of innocent people to gas chambers. To compare someone to Hitler, the accusation must of that kind of gravity
Very true. On the other hand, the fact that somewhere on the order of 30,000 Iraqi civilians are dead because of his actions is nothing to sneeze at, either. Meanwhile, the number of WMDs found in Iraq stands at zero.
The snopes article linked to in the parent post makes an interesting point:
But maybe a different woman who did opt to terminate her pregnancy might have spared the world another Stalin or Hitler. This is the sort of speculative "What if?" game that neither side can win, so it's best not to play at all.
I think an assumption is being made that baby Adolf was destined from birth to become "Adolf Hitler, der Fuhrer and Killer of Millions", and that if only he hadn't been born the Holocaust would not have happened. But perhaps that's not true -- perhaps post-WWI Germany was in an inherently unstable state, and if Adolf Hitler hadn't come along to fill the role of Charismatic Leader, then the same role would have been played by somebody else. Hitler couldn't have murdered 6 million people by himself -- he had to have at least some support from the German population and government in order to do so. Without a Germany that was susceptible to his world-view, Hitler would have been just another failed artist/politician. So perhaps even if Hitler had never existed, that same support would have been available to the next guy -- who might have been better than Hitler, or worse.
and it's past time to start looking at programming tools that optimize performance by design, not destroy it
The thing is, most people don't care about performance. They have more CPU cycles than they know what to do with, and if their routine completes in 5ms instead 1ms on their 4GHz P4, they won't even notice it. What they will notice is whether it took 8 weeks to write and debug the application or 2 weeks. In short: developer time is expensive, CPU cycles are cheap.
What good is a 4GHz processor, that runs at 100mHz memory speeds when it's all said and done because of poor cache line usage for every word or two referenced
Hmm, that leads me to a question: when thread/process A causes a cache miss and is waiting for the data to be retrieved from RAM, can thread/process B run in the meantime? Or does the CPU simply "idle" and do nothing while waiting for the memory system to respond?
I don't wholly subscribe to the idea that I'm just meat
I think the dismissive phrase "just meat" implies that there isn't much to it. In fact you can implement some incredibly cool things using "just meat". Intelligent life, for example.
"God did it" and "Random Chance did it" are both theological statements that are logically indistinguishable from one another.
Evolution is not the same thing as "random chance". The course of evolution is guided by natural selection, which in turn is guided by other physical laws.
You claim that ID is not predictible
The problem with saying "God did it" is that it explains everything, and therefore explains nothing. Try it: Why did the sun rise this morning? God did it! Why is the sky blue? God made it that way! Why do people have ten fingers? Because God designed them so!
As you can see, saying "God did it" is a non-answer in that it doesn't give the questioner any more understanding of the Universe than he already had. Understanding the theory of evolution, on the other hand, lets you make predictions, for example: species with fewer adaptive traits will tend to die out, and species with more adaptive traits will thrive. That is a claim that one can test to see if it is true or false. There is no similar way to test for the presence or absence of God's will -- no matter what test you attempted or what results it gave you, an ID proponent could just say that you got those results because that's what God intended. That's why evolution is science and ID is not.
As far as the merits of one framework over another, the only common theme I see among many of them is intolerance for other ideas.
Well, there is at least one judgement that can be made: that teaching people things that are true is better than teaching them things that are false. I think we can all agree on that.
Of course, that leads to questions regarding what is true and what is false. I won't attempt to debate whether the frameworks of "evolution" or "intelligent design" are true or false, but I do want to note that the idea that "intelligent design is a scientific theory" is definitely false. Intelligent design can't be disproved using empirical evidence, so while it may be a nice belief, and it may be true or it may be false, it simply isn't a scientific theory.
Therefore, telling our children that it is (by teaching in science class) is deliberately misleading them and therefore is wrong.
Okay, I suggest a modification: every business transaction made in good faith makes both parties better off.
Still doesn't work. There are plenty of examples of business transactions made in good faith that still left one or both parties worse off than before, simply because they were bad ideas. Take just about any of the dot-coms, for example, or the AOL/Time-Warner merger. Or at the micro-level, take the addict who sells his car and maxes out his credit cards in order to buy more heroine. Hell, take Vegas or the lottery. The fact remains that in real life, unlike in economic theory, people can and often do make economically unsound decisions.
Showing polar bears to my grandkids is of purely romantic value, I'd say, not something I "need" from a rational POV.
Right, all you "need" is enough air, food, and water to continue living your miserable existence on the ruined hulk of a planet with little other than humans and soybeans living on it. But you wouldn't enjoy it.
Seriously, there are real psychological costs to allowing the beautiful and awe-inspiring components of our planet to be destroyed. Try giving up your nice, well-decorated house for a few years and living in a bare tin shack in a slum, and you'll get a feel for it -- the difference being that you can move away from the slum when you've had enough. The polar bears (and other extinct species), on the other hand, can't be brought back to life once they are gone.
Even ignoring the psychological/aesthetic aspects, there are practical issues: Many species play important roles in maintaining the balance of their respective ecosystems; roles which we may not even be fully aware of until the species' extinction makes them apparent by their absence. To give a (purely hypothetical) example: perhaps it is polar bears that keeps the population of seals in check. When the polar bears get wiped out, the seal population explodes. The seals wipe out the fish stocks, making it harder for people to get fish to eat. It's even possible for the problem to cascade: e.g. the reduced fish stocks can no longer control the algae population, so then we get massive algae blooms, which take so much oxygen out of the water that more species die, and so on.
Or we could just stop thwarting evolution and quit protecting idiots from themselves. That sounds a lot easier, and I'm all about the easy
It's likely that at some point in your life, the "idiot" will be you, or someone you love. When that time comes, you will be glad that nobody listened to your glib advice.
Because the legal system also takes time to adapt. I suspect that after environmental degradation claims the lives of a few million people, the environmental laws will become more stringent. (whether or not they will be able to much good at that point is debatable)
Every market transaction makes both parties better off, or else they would not engage in the transaction.
That particular piece of dogma assumes that everybody has perfect knowledge of all the economic factors, and an infallible ability to apply that knowledge correctly. It may make for a nice computer model, but it applies only sporadically to real life. As a counterexample, ask some ex-Enron employees how much better off they are due to their 'market transactions' with Enron regarding their retirement funds...
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Whether Bush gets pardoned or convicted isn't nearly as important to me as having the nation run by someone who will follow the laws of the land. Still, I agree that Cheney probably would pardon Bush, and that would be unfortunate.
I suppose it would be fruitless to point out that ad hominem attacks are the last resort of someone who has no meaningful arguments to offer?
You might as well log off and pound the table instead. Your pointless insults add nothing to the discussion.
After an impeachment, the Executive Branch would be governed by a very careful Dick Cheney (because he would know that the American public was willing to hold the president accountable for any criminal activity). Compare that to the status quo, where the Executive Branch is being run by an unscrupulous and unaccountable Dick Cheney (because he's been able to hide in the shadows and let his sock puppet Dubya take most of the heat).
So all in all it would be quite an improvement.
You may think it's a minor one, but that doesn't make it so. Without the right to free speech we would have no (legal) way to organize, document government abuses, or hold politicians accountable for their actions. In short, free speech is what makes all of the other freedoms enforceable, and is therefore one of the most important of our civil liberties.
Yes, by including a mechanism by which it could be amended -- openly, with proper discussion and oversight. Not by allowing it to be ignored whenever following the law was inconvenient.
I don't think you've thought this through all the way. Do you really think you're going to be given access to all the secret recordings the government has been making of your phone calls? It's much more likely that the only parts of those recordings that ever see the light of day will be the ones they use (possibly out of context) to try and convict you.
And btw: don't you think encryption will only make thinks worse for you? Ok, let's encrypt all my grandma talks with military strength cypher.. let's see what happens
Using encryption software is perfectly legal, at least in the USA.
Hmmm. Gentiles?
It's pretty obvious why, isn't it? For the same reason that Bill O'Reilly keeps inventing Wars on Christmas, and Dubya has to keep linking Iraq to 9/11: convincing people they are being threatened/persecuted is an effective way to scare them into supporting you, because they think you will be the one to defend them from all the baddies that want to hurt them.
Or, the alternate explanation: both sides were right...
send) millions of innocent people to gas chambers. To compare someone to Hitler, the accusation must of that kind of gravity
Very true. On the other hand, the fact that somewhere on the order of 30,000 Iraqi civilians are dead because of his actions is nothing to sneeze at, either. Meanwhile, the number of WMDs found in Iraq stands at zero.
But maybe a different woman who did opt to terminate her pregnancy might have
spared the world another Stalin or Hitler. This is the sort of speculative "What if?" game that neither side can win, so it's best not to play at all.
I think an assumption is being made that baby Adolf was destined from birth to become "Adolf Hitler, der Fuhrer and Killer of Millions", and that if only he hadn't been born the Holocaust would not have happened. But perhaps that's not true -- perhaps post-WWI Germany was in an inherently unstable state, and if Adolf Hitler hadn't come along to fill the role of Charismatic Leader, then the same role would have been played by somebody else. Hitler couldn't have murdered 6 million people by himself -- he had to have at least some support from the German population and government in order to do so. Without a Germany that was susceptible to his world-view, Hitler would have been just another failed artist/politician. So perhaps even if Hitler had never existed, that same support would have been available to the next guy -- who might have been better than Hitler, or worse.
Just a thought.
The thing is, most people don't care about performance. They have more CPU cycles than they know what to do with, and if their routine completes in 5ms instead 1ms on their 4GHz P4, they won't even notice it. What they will notice is whether it took 8 weeks to write and debug the application or 2 weeks. In short: developer time is expensive, CPU cycles are cheap.
What good is a 4GHz processor, that runs at 100mHz memory speeds when it's all said and done because of poor cache line usage for every word or two referenced
Hmm, that leads me to a question: when thread/process A causes a cache miss and is waiting for the data to be retrieved from RAM, can thread/process B run in the meantime? Or does the CPU simply "idle" and do nothing while waiting for the memory system to respond?
By that logic, God also approves of cannibalism...
I think the dismissive phrase "just meat" implies that there isn't much to it. In fact you can implement some incredibly cool things using "just meat". Intelligent life, for example.
Evolution is not the same thing as "random chance". The course of evolution is guided by natural selection, which in turn is guided by other physical laws.
You claim that ID is not predictible
The problem with saying "God did it" is that it explains everything, and therefore explains nothing. Try it: Why did the sun rise this morning? God did it! Why is the sky blue? God made it that way! Why do people have ten fingers? Because God designed them so!
As you can see, saying "God did it" is a non-answer in that it doesn't give the questioner any more understanding of the Universe than he already had. Understanding the theory of evolution, on the other hand, lets you make predictions, for example: species with fewer adaptive traits will tend to die out, and species with more adaptive traits will thrive. That is a claim that one can test to see if it is true or false. There is no similar way to test for the presence or absence of God's will -- no matter what test you attempted or what results it gave you, an ID proponent could just say that you got those results because that's what God intended. That's why evolution is science and ID is not.
Here's a serious answer to your question, then: No.
Possibly, but it's got to be better than dying of heatstroke.
Personally, I'd say being in Iraq is bad for American soldiers' health... but that's just me.
Well, there is at least one judgement that can be made: that teaching people things that are true is better than teaching them things that are false. I think we can all agree on that.
Of course, that leads to questions regarding what is true and what is false. I won't attempt to debate whether the frameworks of "evolution" or "intelligent design" are true or false, but I do want to note that the idea that "intelligent design is a scientific theory" is definitely false. Intelligent design can't be disproved using empirical evidence, so while it may be a nice belief, and it may be true or it may be false, it simply isn't a scientific theory.
Therefore, telling our children that it is (by teaching in science class) is deliberately misleading them and therefore is wrong.
Still doesn't work. There are plenty of examples of business transactions made in good faith that still left one or both parties worse off than before, simply because they were bad ideas. Take just about any of the dot-coms, for example, or the AOL/Time-Warner merger.
Or at the micro-level, take the addict who sells his car and maxes out his credit cards in order to buy more heroine. Hell, take Vegas or the lottery. The fact remains that in real life, unlike in economic theory, people can and often do make economically unsound decisions.
We're already interfering. But I agree, we should stop. Reducing CO2 emissions would be a great first step.
Right, all you "need" is enough air, food, and water to continue living your miserable existence on the ruined hulk of a planet with little other than humans and soybeans living on it. But you wouldn't enjoy it.
Seriously, there are real psychological costs to allowing the beautiful and awe-inspiring components of our planet to be destroyed. Try giving up your nice, well-decorated house for a few years and living in a bare tin shack in a slum, and you'll get a feel for it -- the difference being that you can move away from the slum when you've had enough. The polar bears (and other extinct species), on the other hand, can't be brought back to life once they are gone.
Even ignoring the psychological/aesthetic aspects, there are practical issues: Many species play important roles in maintaining the balance of their respective ecosystems; roles which we may not even be fully aware of until the species' extinction makes them apparent by their absence. To give a (purely hypothetical) example: perhaps it is polar bears that keeps the population of seals in check. When the polar bears get wiped out, the seal population explodes. The seals wipe out the fish stocks, making it harder for people to get fish to eat. It's even possible for the problem to cascade: e.g. the reduced fish stocks can no longer control the algae population, so then we get massive algae blooms, which take so much oxygen out of the water that more species die, and so on.
It's likely that at some point in your life, the "idiot" will be you, or someone you love. When that time comes, you will be glad that nobody listened to your glib advice.
Okay, it sounds like you have answered your own question.
Because the legal system also takes time to adapt. I suspect that after environmental degradation claims the lives of a few million people, the environmental laws will become more stringent. (whether or not they will be able to much good at that point is debatable)
That particular piece of dogma assumes that everybody has perfect knowledge of all the economic factors, and an infallible ability to apply that knowledge correctly. It may make for a nice computer model, but it applies only sporadically to real life. As a counterexample, ask some ex-Enron employees how much better off they are due to their 'market transactions' with Enron regarding their retirement funds...