While a definite point, that's not an argument that the criminals involved weren't government actors.
This is, after all, one of the things governments do. They destroy competing currencies. And we have considerable evidence that the US govt was seriously involved in researching how bitcoin exchanges worked. We don't have any particular reason to assume that they were the only one. And NO government is going to defend them.
OTOH, this is just an argument of plausibility, and is certainly not a proof. The Russian Mafia might be as plausible an explanation...but I don't really find it any more plausible. (Perhaps if I knew more about what happened, I might alter my beliefs. E.g., if it happened via internal subversion, that might make one player or another more likely...but which?)
Given the legal definition of "child porn", I am unable to accept this defense of the legal process. If they were to remove drawings, anime, manga, and similar from the category I would be much more willing to accept it. I *do* agree that actual children should not be exploited for sex, including pictures. But even pictures of actual children aren't automatically fit subjects for legal control. Most parents either take or took nude photos of their children. And drawings, unless from life, or "photoshopped images" of exploitative images, should never merit censorship...though perhaps it should be illegal to use them in advertisements.
History of human societies indicates that when cocaine is not illegal, there is much less violence associated with it. This does not mean that it is not destructive, but the destructiveness is turned in a more inwards direction. You could read Freud on his experiences with cocaine, but he was more controlled than are most people.
I mean, every year we have Hollywood movies where people get killed and so forth, but we don't go around cutting each others heads off, do we?
Watched the war news recently?
Admittedly, there is no provable connection, and I have doubts that the effect works as proposed, but it is true that people can become desensitized to what would have been horrifying images by seeing them repeatedly.
There have been some court decisions that disagree with you. Perhaps it depends on which circuit court you are under. IANAL, so/and I don't know the details.
FWIW, the current theory is that they died out because of climate change killing off their food supply...the same climate change that let us into the Americas, so their extinction at the same time doesn't have much to do with either hunting or them tasting good. Not that we didn't kill them and eat them, but there just weren't enough humans around to have a significant effect (unless you postulate something like carriers of disease...one of the prior theories).
Personally, I think they ought to blend in elephant DNA. The Mammoth DNA is probably incomplete in every particular case anyway. and there's a fairly close relationship. Just perturbing the DNA is more likely to introduce non-working genes, and maybe some of the elephant DNA has evolved to handle microbe changes. (Of course, mammoths live in a very different ecosystem than do elephants, so that may not help.)
FWIW, unless they can reconstitute mammoth mitochondria, I think that there's a decent likelihood that elephant mitochondria won't work properly with straight mammoth DNA, so this "blended" approach is probably necessary. Even within just humans some mitochondria don't work properly when transplanted to a cell with another person's genome. It's not a particularly tight linkage, but there is *some* dependency.
IIUC, you did not hunt an elephant with a spear until AFTER you had severed its Achilles tendon. With a sharp knife. Which took maximum stealth, because if it caught on to what you were up to in time it would trample you.
I suppose that a modern high compound bow combined with poisoned arrows might work, but I've never heard that approach called traditional.
There's a problem with the "40 years" story, in that the timing doesn't seem to match the Egyptian records (if the Hebrews were the Habiru). But it seems plausible that Moses and Akhenaton either knew each other, or had teachers who did...and Akhenaton may have supported the conquest of Canaan, at least passively. (There are reports from the governor asking for assistance that don't appear to have been answered, unless some records have gotten lost.)
That may be so, and perhaps they find some other place better to shop, but my sister shops there regularly, and is gluten intolerant (celiac).
P.S.: If they DON'T have gluten free bacon, why not? I could understand it not being sugar free, as I believe most bacon is cured with sugar, but I don't see any reason that it should contain gluten, unless all their bacon is cured with soy sauce or some such. (It definitely doesn't need to be.)
P.P.S: Yes, berating the clerk over this is unjust. But perhaps the manager needs to be asked. (Politely will probably get a better response.)
Nitrates are ok. Nitroseamines are dangerous. You get nitroseamines by heating nitrates in the presence of proteins to a high temperature...say when roasting hot dogs. (Boiling them is, I believe, safe.)
Your comments about salt are probably reasonable, but I don't know whether the concentration of heavy metals or modern chemicals in "sea salt" are high enough to be a reasonable concern. I suspect that it doesn't make any difference.
FWIW, I believe that, in a sense, God exists...though it's more accurate to say gods exist, and some of them pretend to be the only one. I believe them to be fundamental psychic structures that are shared in common by most people at a level far below the verbal level. Because they are structures of the mind (i.e., built-in and hardwired) you won't convince people they aren't there. They are rather like ROM libraries in code. The exact manifestation that you encounter will depend on how you call it, but it's really there. Additionally, they are a bit more active than the analogy to ROM code implies. There are a transducer layer between the raw neural firings and consciousness (which, of course, is also implemented via neural firings). As such their level of expressiveness is subject to modification by various genetic and epigenetic modifications. But the basic structure is shared in common by large numbers of people, perhaps by all normal people, though the exact structures will vary slightly. Because they are pre-verbal, they don't generally communicate through words, but through emotions...but these can be explicit enough to trigger common phrases (e.g. "I have been saved!").
P.S.: I know of no way to control the kind of expression of their activity. Various mediative and other devices (ritual, chants, reportedly dance, etc.) can make it more likely that SOME theistic encounter will occur, but cannot control either what form it will take, when it will happen, or even if it will happen. A variety of different approaches increases the probability that you will get multiple different encounters. And belief helps, too.
So you actually believe that Moses parted the Red Sea? Even many religious Christians (and, I assume, Jews) are more reasonable than that. The area where they crossed appears to have been a tidal swamp. Waiting for low tide is hardly miraculous...and many who saw it would not think it a miracle. (Perhaps some from inland would...but tides went a bit up the Nile, so that's a bit dubious.)
I suspect that if some people saw something that others reported as an act of the hand of God, and others didn't accept as such, I'd be inclined to be dubious. Frequently even things that are widely accepted are quite dubious. I tend to class most religious miracle reports together with alien abductions...if I see actual evidence I might be interested, but back when I was looking seriously I never saw anything that didn't have a reasonable explanation...though often the reports were sufficiently lacking in details that I had to satisfy myself with "not proven".
Well, it's not the original meaning. (OTOH, the original censor was a Roman governmental official. Later it was a Papal office. Other governments came later, and were named by analogy to the church office.)
I don't know if he's serious, but it *is* worth remembering that very few people have bothered to actually look at what the creationists are presenting as evidence. I haven't, for example.
OTOH, it's also worth remembering that few people have actually looked at the evidence that the evolutionary folk have presented. There's too much of it.
Even in local elections, plurality rules leads to inferior outcomes for most voters...even for most aware voters. And in local elections there are likely to be a number of reasonable candidates (due to the lower barrier to entry). This already gets worse as the city size increases, largely because of the increased barrier to entry, and the increased importance of election propaganda.
In majority rules voting systems you can start with several candidates, and rank them by preference. You don't need to immediately eliminate those that you don't believe have a chance, so you can vote your real interests. This can frequently produce unexpected results when you find that more people than you expected support some candidate. OTOH, it also imposes the requirement that you be informed about at least your top few preferences. So it doesn't eliminate the requirement that you make an informed choice.
Still, as far as I can tell, a lottery would be better than pluriality rules. This is a bit difficult to be sure of, however, as it would require restructuring the positions of authority slightly so that no one individual could exercise too much power, because sometimes a lottey will pick a real loser. OTOH, sometimes the current system will pick a raving lunatic...or someone with Altzheimers, so that would be a good idea anyway.
P.S.: What the HELL is happening to the message entry? It's gotten horribly worse recently. I don't know whether to blame Slashdot changes or Firefox (well, IceWeasel). But it's worse on Slashdot than on other sites.
Sorry, the animosity came first. Jews were forbidden to own real estate, so they couldn't run most businesses, and were forced into only a few businesses that didn't require setting up an immobile facility. Like monelending, gold smithing, etc. They couldn't farm, except as a serf (and, IIRC that was also often forbidden). So they bacame skilled independent tradesmen. They had no other choice. One of the professions open to them was moneylender. This was forbidden to Catholics, so most money lenders were Jews. But they were forced into those jobs by existing prejudice and laws. (Mind you, being in those jobs *did* tend to increase prejudice, so in that sense you are correct.)
How do you propose to hold them accountable? Voting doesn't do the job in a plurality wins voting system. If a majority were required it would be different. Which is why I'm in favor of either IRV or Condorcet Voting. But that's not what we have. Plurality rules if pretty much guaranteed to drift into two major parties, with nobody else having any effect, and those two parties drifting together on matters of actual importance to those with power. Perhaps if the amendment allowing presidential/vice-presidential tickets hadn't been voted in, this would not have been the dynamic, but top votes to president, second to vice president had it's own problems.
This is only true if it's reasonably possible to find reliable evidence as to which banks are safe. This is something that you can rely on banks to hide.
Bankers provide a useful and valuable service. But they are only one amoung many providers of useful and valuable services. The only reason they recieve disproportionate compensation is because they are the ones that decide what if fair compensation. That kind of decision, while necessary, does not merit the kind of compensation that is provided.
The only reasonable solution that I see is a law regulating what the maximum income someone can earn during a year as a factor of the income of the poorest individual. 5,000 would be my rough estimate of what that should be. If the poorest individual earns $1,000/year, then the income cap from all sources, including interest, rents, etc. should be $5,000,000. And I'm dubious about allowing "legitimate business expenses" to be offset from the income, because such a concept has been so often flagrantly abused. Perhaps allow some fraction of the expenses to be deducted from the calculated income, but in no case should the offset be allowed to amount to more than half the calculated income...and even that I'm dubious about. If the expenses are that heavy, let the source of the income be set up as a separate company, and firewalled against the income of the individual. And monitor the accounting agencies strictly, with penalties that are actually applied.
FWIW, it's my understanding that without agriculture, especially rice paddies (prolific sources of methane) we would be headed back into an ice age. Global warming is bad, but a major glaciation would be worse for most people living north of the tropics.
OTOH, melted permafrost can yield bogs that are worse sources of methane than are rice paddies. (I'm not sure that they are worse on an on-going basis, but while they've been frozen there's been lots of methane accumulating below the frost layer, and even, slowly, within it. When they melt this comes off fairly quickly. But this isn't as bad as if the methyl cathlates release quickly. (If there's a slow release, then most of the methane will be eaten by microorganisms living in the sea water it dissolves into.) So warming permafrost and warming oceans are quite dangerous. They may, in a series of burps, emit enough methane/year to double our rate of release. Which would set up a positive feedback loop...though it would probably break down fairly quickly. Still, an average 10 degree increase isn't out of question. And most of that would go into melting ice. Which, as it affected Greenland and Antarctica, would raise the sea levels. How quickly? I don't know. I'm not a climatologist. But most of the climate models don't include either methane from melting permafrost or from methyl cathlate release.
For that matter, some people are talking about setting fire to coal mines underground intentionally to release methane, etc. for collection. This could also have vile effects that aren't included in the current models.
I've pretty much given up hope that things will be corrected before Antarctica melts. The warmer oceans already mean that we are committed to a further increase in temperature even if we were to stop all further emmissions today.
P.S.: This doesn't mean that it will be warmer where YOU live. That depends on local weather patterns. It could mean hotter, colder, wetter or dryer. The mean location will get warmer and wetter, but no place on Earth qualifies at that location.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is sort of his point. (sorry if I missed the joke.)
While a definite point, that's not an argument that the criminals involved weren't government actors.
This is, after all, one of the things governments do. They destroy competing currencies. And we have considerable evidence that the US govt was seriously involved in researching how bitcoin exchanges worked. We don't have any particular reason to assume that they were the only one. And NO government is going to defend them.
OTOH, this is just an argument of plausibility, and is certainly not a proof. The Russian Mafia might be as plausible an explanation...but I don't really find it any more plausible. (Perhaps if I knew more about what happened, I might alter my beliefs. E.g., if it happened via internal subversion, that might make one player or another more likely...but which?)
First plausible defense I've heard. Now the question: Are there any grounds for assuming that GCHQ wanted his head?
If they did, then that's a plausible scenario. Or, plausibly, if they wanted his boss' head. Otherwise it's quite unlikely.
Given the legal definition of "child porn", I am unable to accept this defense of the legal process. If they were to remove drawings, anime, manga, and similar from the category I would be much more willing to accept it. I *do* agree that actual children should not be exploited for sex, including pictures. But even pictures of actual children aren't automatically fit subjects for legal control. Most parents either take or took nude photos of their children. And drawings, unless from life, or "photoshopped images" of exploitative images, should never merit censorship...though perhaps it should be illegal to use them in advertisements.
History of human societies indicates that when cocaine is not illegal, there is much less violence associated with it. This does not mean that it is not destructive, but the destructiveness is turned in a more inwards direction. You could read Freud on his experiences with cocaine, but he was more controlled than are most people.
I mean, every year we have Hollywood movies where people get killed and so forth, but we don't go around cutting each others heads off, do we?
Watched the war news recently?
Admittedly, there is no provable connection, and I have doubts that the effect works as proposed, but it is true that people can become desensitized to what would have been horrifying images by seeing them repeatedly.
There have been some court decisions that disagree with you. Perhaps it depends on which circuit court you are under. IANAL, so/and I don't know the details.
FWIW, the current theory is that they died out because of climate change killing off their food supply...the same climate change that let us into the Americas, so their extinction at the same time doesn't have much to do with either hunting or them tasting good. Not that we didn't kill them and eat them, but there just weren't enough humans around to have a significant effect (unless you postulate something like carriers of disease...one of the prior theories).
Personally, I think they ought to blend in elephant DNA. The Mammoth DNA is probably incomplete in every particular case anyway. and there's a fairly close relationship. Just perturbing the DNA is more likely to introduce non-working genes, and maybe some of the elephant DNA has evolved to handle microbe changes. (Of course, mammoths live in a very different ecosystem than do elephants, so that may not help.)
FWIW, unless they can reconstitute mammoth mitochondria, I think that there's a decent likelihood that elephant mitochondria won't work properly with straight mammoth DNA, so this "blended" approach is probably necessary. Even within just humans some mitochondria don't work properly when transplanted to a cell with another person's genome. It's not a particularly tight linkage, but there is *some* dependency.
IIUC, you did not hunt an elephant with a spear until AFTER you had severed its Achilles tendon. With a sharp knife. Which took maximum stealth, because if it caught on to what you were up to in time it would trample you.
I suppose that a modern high compound bow combined with poisoned arrows might work, but I've never heard that approach called traditional.
Good informative answer. Thank you.
There's a problem with the "40 years" story, in that the timing doesn't seem to match the Egyptian records (if the Hebrews were the Habiru). But it seems plausible that Moses and Akhenaton either knew each other, or had teachers who did...and Akhenaton may have supported the conquest of Canaan, at least passively. (There are reports from the governor asking for assistance that don't appear to have been answered, unless some records have gotten lost.)
That may be so, and perhaps they find some other place better to shop, but my sister shops there regularly, and is gluten intolerant (celiac).
P.S.: If they DON'T have gluten free bacon, why not? I could understand it not being sugar free, as I believe most bacon is cured with sugar, but I don't see any reason that it should contain gluten, unless all their bacon is cured with soy sauce or some such. (It definitely doesn't need to be.)
P.P.S: Yes, berating the clerk over this is unjust. But perhaps the manager needs to be asked. (Politely will probably get a better response.)
Nitrates are ok. Nitroseamines are dangerous. You get nitroseamines by heating nitrates in the presence of proteins to a high temperature...say when roasting hot dogs. (Boiling them is, I believe, safe.)
Your comments about salt are probably reasonable, but I don't know whether the concentration of heavy metals or modern chemicals in "sea salt" are high enough to be a reasonable concern. I suspect that it doesn't make any difference.
FWIW, I believe that, in a sense, God exists...though it's more accurate to say gods exist, and some of them pretend to be the only one. I believe them to be fundamental psychic structures that are shared in common by most people at a level far below the verbal level. Because they are structures of the mind (i.e., built-in and hardwired) you won't convince people they aren't there. They are rather like ROM libraries in code. The exact manifestation that you encounter will depend on how you call it, but it's really there. Additionally, they are a bit more active than the analogy to ROM code implies. There are a transducer layer between the raw neural firings and consciousness (which, of course, is also implemented via neural firings). As such their level of expressiveness is subject to modification by various genetic and epigenetic modifications. But the basic structure is shared in common by large numbers of people, perhaps by all normal people, though the exact structures will vary slightly. Because they are pre-verbal, they don't generally communicate through words, but through emotions...but these can be explicit enough to trigger common phrases (e.g. "I have been saved!").
P.S.: I know of no way to control the kind of expression of their activity. Various mediative and other devices (ritual, chants, reportedly dance, etc.) can make it more likely that SOME theistic encounter will occur, but cannot control either what form it will take, when it will happen, or even if it will happen. A variety of different approaches increases the probability that you will get multiple different encounters. And belief helps, too.
So you actually believe that Moses parted the Red Sea? Even many religious Christians (and, I assume, Jews) are more reasonable than that. The area where they crossed appears to have been a tidal swamp. Waiting for low tide is hardly miraculous...and many who saw it would not think it a miracle. (Perhaps some from inland would...but tides went a bit up the Nile, so that's a bit dubious.)
I suspect that if some people saw something that others reported as an act of the hand of God, and others didn't accept as such, I'd be inclined to be dubious. Frequently even things that are widely accepted are quite dubious. I tend to class most religious miracle reports together with alien abductions...if I see actual evidence I might be interested, but back when I was looking seriously I never saw anything that didn't have a reasonable explanation...though often the reports were sufficiently lacking in details that I had to satisfy myself with "not proven".
Well, it's not the original meaning. (OTOH, the original censor was a Roman governmental official. Later it was a Papal office. Other governments came later, and were named by analogy to the church office.)
I don't know if he's serious, but it *is* worth remembering that very few people have bothered to actually look at what the creationists are presenting as evidence. I haven't, for example.
OTOH, it's also worth remembering that few people have actually looked at the evidence that the evolutionary folk have presented. There's too much of it.
Even in local elections, plurality rules leads to inferior outcomes for most voters...even for most aware voters. And in local elections there are likely to be a number of reasonable candidates (due to the lower barrier to entry). This already gets worse as the city size increases, largely because of the increased barrier to entry, and the increased importance of election propaganda.
In majority rules voting systems you can start with several candidates, and rank them by preference. You don't need to immediately eliminate those that you don't believe have a chance, so you can vote your real interests. This can frequently produce unexpected results when you find that more people than you expected support some candidate. OTOH, it also imposes the requirement that you be informed about at least your top few preferences. So it doesn't eliminate the requirement that you make an informed choice.
Still, as far as I can tell, a lottery would be better than pluriality rules. This is a bit difficult to be sure of, however, as it would require restructuring the positions of authority slightly so that no one individual could exercise too much power, because sometimes a lottey will pick a real loser. OTOH, sometimes the current system will pick a raving lunatic...or someone with Altzheimers, so that would be a good idea anyway.
P.S.: What the HELL is happening to the message entry? It's gotten horribly worse recently. I don't know whether to blame Slashdot changes or Firefox (well, IceWeasel). But it's worse on Slashdot than on other sites.
Sorry, the animosity came first. Jews were forbidden to own real estate, so they couldn't run most businesses, and were forced into only a few businesses that didn't require setting up an immobile facility. Like monelending, gold smithing, etc. They couldn't farm, except as a serf (and, IIRC that was also often forbidden). So they bacame skilled independent tradesmen. They had no other choice. One of the professions open to them was moneylender. This was forbidden to Catholics, so most money lenders were Jews. But they were forced into those jobs by existing prejudice and laws. (Mind you, being in those jobs *did* tend to increase prejudice, so in that sense you are correct.)
How do you propose to hold them accountable? Voting doesn't do the job in a plurality wins voting system. If a majority were required it would be different. Which is why I'm in favor of either IRV or Condorcet Voting. But that's not what we have. Plurality rules if pretty much guaranteed to drift into two major parties, with nobody else having any effect, and those two parties drifting together on matters of actual importance to those with power. Perhaps if the amendment allowing presidential/vice-presidential tickets hadn't been voted in, this would not have been the dynamic, but top votes to president, second to vice president had it's own problems.
This is only true if it's reasonably possible to find reliable evidence as to which banks are safe. This is something that you can rely on banks to hide.
Bankers provide a useful and valuable service. But they are only one amoung many providers of useful and valuable services. The only reason they recieve disproportionate compensation is because they are the ones that decide what if fair compensation. That kind of decision, while necessary, does not merit the kind of compensation that is provided.
The only reasonable solution that I see is a law regulating what the maximum income someone can earn during a year as a factor of the income of the poorest individual. 5,000 would be my rough estimate of what that should be. If the poorest individual earns $1,000/year, then the income cap from all sources, including interest, rents, etc. should be $5,000,000. And I'm dubious about allowing "legitimate business expenses" to be offset from the income, because such a concept has been so often flagrantly abused. Perhaps allow some fraction of the expenses to be deducted from the calculated income, but in no case should the offset be allowed to amount to more than half the calculated income...and even that I'm dubious about. If the expenses are that heavy, let the source of the income be set up as a separate company, and firewalled against the income of the individual. And monitor the accounting agencies strictly, with penalties that are actually applied.
IIRC, he figured to get his income out of stock value. I think it worked.
FWIW, it's my understanding that without agriculture, especially rice paddies (prolific sources of methane) we would be headed back into an ice age. Global warming is bad, but a major glaciation would be worse for most people living north of the tropics.
OTOH, melted permafrost can yield bogs that are worse sources of methane than are rice paddies. (I'm not sure that they are worse on an on-going basis, but while they've been frozen there's been lots of methane accumulating below the frost layer, and even, slowly, within it. When they melt this comes off fairly quickly. But this isn't as bad as if the methyl cathlates release quickly. (If there's a slow release, then most of the methane will be eaten by microorganisms living in the sea water it dissolves into.) So warming permafrost and warming oceans are quite dangerous. They may, in a series of burps, emit enough methane/year to double our rate of release. Which would set up a positive feedback loop...though it would probably break down fairly quickly. Still, an average 10 degree increase isn't out of question. And most of that would go into melting ice. Which, as it affected Greenland and Antarctica, would raise the sea levels. How quickly? I don't know. I'm not a climatologist. But most of the climate models don't include either methane from melting permafrost or from methyl cathlate release.
For that matter, some people are talking about setting fire to coal mines underground intentionally to release methane, etc. for collection. This could also have vile effects that aren't included in the current models.
I've pretty much given up hope that things will be corrected before Antarctica melts. The warmer oceans already mean that we are committed to a further increase in temperature even if we were to stop all further emmissions today.
P.S.: This doesn't mean that it will be warmer where YOU live. That depends on local weather patterns. It could mean hotter, colder, wetter or dryer. The mean location will get warmer and wetter, but no place on Earth qualifies at that location.