Which is an argument that it should be abolished, since rushing the job and massively increasing the risk of executing an innocent person is not an option.
I'd propose a ban on religion. I'd be willing to settle out of the legislature if religious people would agree to also stop trying to push their legislative agendas on the rest of us.
Poor choice of words. Adults are far more bitchy when it comes to hurt feelings than kids. Kids cry it out when their feelings get hurt, 5 mins later, they've forgotten about it. Grownups make idiotic, shortsighted changes in the laws when they get their feelings hurt.
The "fear of nuclear power" loufoque mentioned usually refers to the "not in my backyard" fear that nuclear power plants are destined to explode and spew radioactive material all over the place. That fear, while stupid, still makes more sense than the fear, uncertainty, and doubt Miros brought up, which is that people will think that somehow north korea and Iran are going to get nuclear weapons from building nuclear power plants HERE. Your average voter is probably confused already about how Iran and NK say from time to time that they're building nuclear power plants, but we say they're building a bomb, and might think that nuclear power plants = nuclear weapons.
Now, ask yourself, would solar power be used for CARS or for ELECTRICITY?
Here's a hint: it's electricity. You'll be replacing coal with this, not oil. Oil has little to do with this. Oil executives might be trying to kill solar power for other reasons, (like they really like the Koch Brothers and don't want to see the Koch grandchildren have to be mere millionaires) but it's not that they fear the direct competition.
Simpletons are the only ones who like mandatory minimums. You have a mechanism to investigate crimes on a case-by-case basis, looking at all the evidence, the factors that went into the crime, and setting the punishment to fit the case. That's the job of the courts. It's not perfect, but one-size-fits-all justice is usually not justice. The mandatory minimum sentence should be zero in ALL crimes.
At least we can agree on one thing: fuck authoritarians. By far, the least popular corner of the ideological diamond. Among people who do not have power in the government that is.
Much cooler than my mental image of a giant, menacing looking asteroid coming our way, and the earth turning into a giant disco ball of asteroid-destoying laser power. I have to admit, it was heavily inspired by a stage in Rez, so there was also trippy electronic music playing and flashing lights.
To clarify Gordonjcp's statement, reading the f'ing article is not popular. The idea of zapping asteroids with lasers is probably a pretty popular idea around here.
How would that be measured? Comparing time on porn vs nonporn or just time spent on porn month to month? Or would it be an amount of bandwidth type thing? I mean, if some site starts offering higher resolution for the new ipad, that increase would be meaningless!
And what does that really mean? That they'll take a different approach next time the ACLU takes them to court for arresting someone for filming public servants in public?
Maybe because the violation of his rights is plain as day, while the slap on the wrist that really only hurts the public is a little bit more subtle.
A while back, there was a school that was fined for giving students laptops with webcams and spying on the students at home. My initial reaction was "Good!" until I read the comments, and it was similiarly pointed out that it was taxpayer money being awarded, not really punishing the school officials who made the idiotic decision to invade privacy.
Did it even invalidate similar laws in THAT state? It sounds to me (IANAL) that they just said "Alright, we messed up this time." Not "Alright, it's utterly insane that we would even try this and we'll never arrest someone for filming police in public again."
The tumor cells have more of the "I'm healthy" signals (CD47) than actual healthy cells do. If this treatment works, I suppose that means that there is a threshold effect here, if you have a normal amount of CD47 as you would on a normal cell, the immune system would ignore it.
At the very least, the side effects could be less severe than targeting all dividing cells, which is what the current generation of chemo does.
There is also the possibility to do things other than training the immune system to attack it. Antibodies are proteins that recognize and attach to a specific biological molecules, you can make antibodies to nearly any protein including some proteins found in cancer cells. You can then attach say a radioactive molecule or something toxic to the antibody and use that to specifically target cancer cells. Those approaches weren't wildly successful, but it might be that they just lacked a good general target like CD47.
I'd rather drill on land. So we can monitor it easily and if there is any spill, it is easy to contain, seal, and clean up. But environmentalists have a fit if you say "ANWR"
Bit of a false dichotomy there. You can drill on land elsewhere other than ANWR. There's so little oil there compared to what we're using that it's not worth it.
And on that point, we need to stop using so much oil. Why are we subsidizing gasoline for private civilian transport again? Obviously it would be bad to suddenly raise gas prices across the board, killing the trucking industry and causing us all to starve, but why are tax dollars being used to make gas half the price it is in Europe for the guy driving his Hummer to the office every day?
Your point about different preferences for different people is well taken, but "I honor peoples' individual choices as long as they don't harm others" is off-topic. In this case, the choices by the oil industry ARE harming others. A lot of people in fact. Residents of the gulf of Mexico obviously very directly, the rest of the world through global warming, smog, and asthma indirectly (though the oil industry is of course only part of the issue.)
It's shortsighted to think of it as "cheap" energy when the externalized costs are so much higher than the alternatives.
Why is it bad that somebody in a position of authority changes their mind in light of new information?
The answer, for those of you wondering, is that it's politically bad, not actually a bad quality for a political leader. It's politically bad because the other guy, who was choosing a position based off of dogma, lobbyists, polling, or other methods that have nothing to do with truth or what is best for the country, will then use that as vindication of his position (no matter which way the change went) and will use it to paint the flip flopper as weak. Which doesn't appeal to the large contingent of voters who have no idea WHAT should be done, they just want someone who sounds like they know what they're doing.
Same thing with wanting to avoid wars. Somehow, not wanting to gamble with the lives of other people over some economic question is cowardice. Promising to commit war crimes against people who are different from us, that on the other hand is what we like to see in a leader. After two wars that left us broke and decreased our security, we still haven't learned our lesson.
It's a miracle we didn't get into a nuclear war with Russia. I don't think the JFK administration could have navigated through the Cuban missile crisis as they did without Armageddon with the political climate we have now.
I think giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests.
That's illogical, Spock. For example, someone you love smokes marijuana. A friend, a son, a cousin... in your circle of people you care about, some smoke pot.
Very interesting example, I'm glad you brought that up. I live in California, where pot is decriminalized and largely ignored (except when the police can make a profit off of it, or arrest someone who is a minority, etc.)
Last year, a proposition to fully legalize pot came up. Law enforcement was divided on the issue, with some organizations pointing out that it was a waste of time and money, was counter productive, and only served to strengthen the mexican drug cartels. Other people pointed out how California's defacto biggest product being legalized and taxed could help out with California's massive budget problems. Many conservatives, having finally started to see the light, agreed.
And it failed. Californians THEMSELVES voted to keep it illegal, voted to prevent the state from funding schools with money from a product that was being consumed anyway, voted to waste taxes fighting it, and voted to keep locking people up for a crime that no one actually thinks should be a crime.
This was not a partisan issue. The two party system had absolutely nothing to do with it. This was just voters acting against their own interests.
And it gets worse. The most vocal opponents to marijuana being legalized? The idiots who grow the stuff. They didn't want competition, they didn't want free market forces making the process more efficient, and obviously, they didn't want to pay taxes. They decided they would rather see their consumers risk going to jail for the product that they sold than compete fairly, they decided they'd rather risk law enforcement cracking down on them than actually work.
It's not just the sunshine state either. There is a strong effect from the police unions to keep their cash cow going, but that's not the only reason marijuana is illegal. The other major component of that is that the voters themselves won't vote for it. 70% of the country has smoked pot, yet there's no real political pressure to legalize it.
Pot is a key example as to why I say "Giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests."
As opposed to here in the US where the supposedly more liberal of the two parties controls half the legislative branch and the executive branch, and yet we're talking about tax cuts, invading another oil-rich middle eastern country, and pretty much doing nothing about the deficit.
I realize many slashdotters think this is a result of the two-party system, and I respect that opinion, but I still think the problem has far more to do with the voters. I think giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests.
Yes and Motor Neurones, Spinabifida, MS and a whole load of other conditions aren't disabilities now.
To be pedantic for the purposes of humor, the second and third are (not sure if you mean multiple sclerosis or microsoft) but motor neurons are in fact not a disability. Motor neuron DISEASES can be, but healthy motor neurons are definitely not.
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Which is an argument that it should be abolished, since rushing the job and massively increasing the risk of executing an innocent person is not an option.
I'd propose a ban on religion. I'd be willing to settle out of the legislature if religious people would agree to also stop trying to push their legislative agendas on the rest of us.
These people need to grow up.
Poor choice of words. Adults are far more bitchy when it comes to hurt feelings than kids. Kids cry it out when their feelings get hurt, 5 mins later, they've forgotten about it. Grownups make idiotic, shortsighted changes in the laws when they get their feelings hurt.
The "fear of nuclear power" loufoque mentioned usually refers to the "not in my backyard" fear that nuclear power plants are destined to explode and spew radioactive material all over the place. That fear, while stupid, still makes more sense than the fear, uncertainty, and doubt Miros brought up, which is that people will think that somehow north korea and Iran are going to get nuclear weapons from building nuclear power plants HERE. Your average voter is probably confused already about how Iran and NK say from time to time that they're building nuclear power plants, but we say they're building a bomb, and might think that nuclear power plants = nuclear weapons.
So Miros might have a different, valid point.
Repeat after me now:
Oil powers CARS.
Coal generates ELECTRICITY.
Now, ask yourself, would solar power be used for CARS or for ELECTRICITY?
Here's a hint: it's electricity. You'll be replacing coal with this, not oil. Oil has little to do with this. Oil executives might be trying to kill solar power for other reasons, (like they really like the Koch Brothers and don't want to see the Koch grandchildren have to be mere millionaires) but it's not that they fear the direct competition.
It's kind of ironic that we subsidized our solar industry but now they want tariffs because China does the same thing, only much more
The irony would be what exactly? Nothing you said is in any way ironic. Not even in the Allanis Morisette sense.
Simpletons are the only ones who like mandatory minimums. You have a mechanism to investigate crimes on a case-by-case basis, looking at all the evidence, the factors that went into the crime, and setting the punishment to fit the case. That's the job of the courts. It's not perfect, but one-size-fits-all justice is usually not justice. The mandatory minimum sentence should be zero in ALL crimes.
At least we can agree on one thing: fuck authoritarians. By far, the least popular corner of the ideological diamond. Among people who do not have power in the government that is.
Having been to Scotland, I assume the argument revolves around getting really drunk.
Much cooler than my mental image of a giant, menacing looking asteroid coming our way, and the earth turning into a giant disco ball of asteroid-destoying laser power. I have to admit, it was heavily inspired by a stage in Rez, so there was also trippy electronic music playing and flashing lights.
Would that still apply if the source of the laser is out of the atmosphere and the human in question is within the atmosphere, quite a distance away?
To clarify Gordonjcp's statement, reading the f'ing article is not popular. The idea of zapping asteroids with lasers is probably a pretty popular idea around here.
How would that be measured? Comparing time on porn vs nonporn or just time spent on porn month to month? Or would it be an amount of bandwidth type thing? I mean, if some site starts offering higher resolution for the new ipad, that increase would be meaningless!
By the way, you're all welcome for that excuse.
And what does that really mean? That they'll take a different approach next time the ACLU takes them to court for arresting someone for filming public servants in public?
Maybe because the violation of his rights is plain as day, while the slap on the wrist that really only hurts the public is a little bit more subtle.
A while back, there was a school that was fined for giving students laptops with webcams and spying on the students at home. My initial reaction was "Good!" until I read the comments, and it was similiarly pointed out that it was taxpayer money being awarded, not really punishing the school officials who made the idiotic decision to invade privacy.
Did it even invalidate similar laws in THAT state? It sounds to me (IANAL) that they just said "Alright, we messed up this time." Not "Alright, it's utterly insane that we would even try this and we'll never arrest someone for filming police in public again."
The tumor cells have more of the "I'm healthy" signals (CD47) than actual healthy cells do. If this treatment works, I suppose that means that there is a threshold effect here, if you have a normal amount of CD47 as you would on a normal cell, the immune system would ignore it.
At the very least, the side effects could be less severe than targeting all dividing cells, which is what the current generation of chemo does.
There is also the possibility to do things other than training the immune system to attack it. Antibodies are proteins that recognize and attach to a specific biological molecules, you can make antibodies to nearly any protein including some proteins found in cancer cells. You can then attach say a radioactive molecule or something toxic to the antibody and use that to specifically target cancer cells. Those approaches weren't wildly successful, but it might be that they just lacked a good general target like CD47.
Having seen what was going on with facebook, they naturally assumed that people would happily give them that through google plus.
I'd rather drill on land. So we can monitor it easily and if there is any spill, it is easy to contain, seal, and clean up. But environmentalists have a fit if you say "ANWR"
Bit of a false dichotomy there. You can drill on land elsewhere other than ANWR. There's so little oil there compared to what we're using that it's not worth it.
And on that point, we need to stop using so much oil. Why are we subsidizing gasoline for private civilian transport again? Obviously it would be bad to suddenly raise gas prices across the board, killing the trucking industry and causing us all to starve, but why are tax dollars being used to make gas half the price it is in Europe for the guy driving his Hummer to the office every day?
Your point about different preferences for different people is well taken, but "I honor peoples' individual choices as long as they don't harm others" is off-topic. In this case, the choices by the oil industry ARE harming others. A lot of people in fact. Residents of the gulf of Mexico obviously very directly, the rest of the world through global warming, smog, and asthma indirectly (though the oil industry is of course only part of the issue.)
It's shortsighted to think of it as "cheap" energy when the externalized costs are so much higher than the alternatives.
Why is it bad that somebody in a position of authority changes their mind in light of new information?
The answer, for those of you wondering, is that it's politically bad, not actually a bad quality for a political leader. It's politically bad because the other guy, who was choosing a position based off of dogma, lobbyists, polling, or other methods that have nothing to do with truth or what is best for the country, will then use that as vindication of his position (no matter which way the change went) and will use it to paint the flip flopper as weak. Which doesn't appeal to the large contingent of voters who have no idea WHAT should be done, they just want someone who sounds like they know what they're doing.
Same thing with wanting to avoid wars. Somehow, not wanting to gamble with the lives of other people over some economic question is cowardice. Promising to commit war crimes against people who are different from us, that on the other hand is what we like to see in a leader. After two wars that left us broke and decreased our security, we still haven't learned our lesson.
It's a miracle we didn't get into a nuclear war with Russia. I don't think the JFK administration could have navigated through the Cuban missile crisis as they did without Armageddon with the political climate we have now.
I think giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests.
That's illogical, Spock. For example, someone you love smokes marijuana. A friend, a son, a cousin... in your circle of people you care about, some smoke pot.
Very interesting example, I'm glad you brought that up. I live in California, where pot is decriminalized and largely ignored (except when the police can make a profit off of it, or arrest someone who is a minority, etc.)
Last year, a proposition to fully legalize pot came up. Law enforcement was divided on the issue, with some organizations pointing out that it was a waste of time and money, was counter productive, and only served to strengthen the mexican drug cartels. Other people pointed out how California's defacto biggest product being legalized and taxed could help out with California's massive budget problems. Many conservatives, having finally started to see the light, agreed.
And it failed. Californians THEMSELVES voted to keep it illegal, voted to prevent the state from funding schools with money from a product that was being consumed anyway, voted to waste taxes fighting it, and voted to keep locking people up for a crime that no one actually thinks should be a crime.
This was not a partisan issue. The two party system had absolutely nothing to do with it. This was just voters acting against their own interests.
And it gets worse. The most vocal opponents to marijuana being legalized? The idiots who grow the stuff. They didn't want competition, they didn't want free market forces making the process more efficient, and obviously, they didn't want to pay taxes. They decided they would rather see their consumers risk going to jail for the product that they sold than compete fairly, they decided they'd rather risk law enforcement cracking down on them than actually work.
It's not just the sunshine state either. There is a strong effect from the police unions to keep their cash cow going, but that's not the only reason marijuana is illegal. The other major component of that is that the voters themselves won't vote for it. 70% of the country has smoked pot, yet there's no real political pressure to legalize it.
Pot is a key example as to why I say "Giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests."
As opposed to here in the US where the supposedly more liberal of the two parties controls half the legislative branch and the executive branch, and yet we're talking about tax cuts, invading another oil-rich middle eastern country, and pretty much doing nothing about the deficit.
I realize many slashdotters think this is a result of the two-party system, and I respect that opinion, but I still think the problem has far more to do with the voters. I think giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests.
Yes and Motor Neurones, Spinabifida, MS and a whole load of other conditions aren't disabilities now.
To be pedantic for the purposes of humor, the second and third are (not sure if you mean multiple sclerosis or microsoft) but motor neurons are in fact not a disability. Motor neuron DISEASES can be, but healthy motor neurons are definitely not.
As a linux fanboi it sticks in my throat but well done Microsoft.
Odd method of typing there...