The stigma comes from two places, one rational and one irrational.
1) It is a new medium. A lot of people have an irrational distrust of meeting people online simply because it is a new way of meeting people. In the same way people were sketched out by shopping online or distrusted cell phones, people will take some time to trust meeting online. Once meeting online achieves a critical mass, which I think it is already pretty close for younger people, this particular stigma will evaporate.
2) People lie. Humans are lie detectors. You have a disproportionately large hunk of your brain that is used for the singular purpose recognizing faces and understanding their facial expressions to see past their words. You are built to meet and read people's intentions through hundreds of subtle pieces of body language... all of which become completely useless once you are online.
People have a rational fear that people that they meet online could be blatantly lying to them. Most people will not tell big blatant lies with they are face to face with a stranger, and if they do the stranger stands a fair likelihood of detecting the lie. Online this is not the case. If I tell you the biggest lie in the world there is very little you can do just by looking at my words to see through my lie.
I can set up the biggest most hardcore hipster, show photos of me in hipster clothing and create a grand illusion about who I am with very little work. You could come meet me and find out that the my knowledge of whatever hipster music I claim to love is an inch deep, my wild stories of awesome parties are all bullshit, and my photos are doctored controlled such that you don't realize that I am a fat 14 year old boy living in my parents house, not the 24 awesome hipster I said I was living in my own crash pad in the city.
Perhaps even more then intentional deception is, there is a lot of unintentional deception. You might very well be crank out an online rant that sounds insightful and educated online when you have a few hours to work on it, but in the real world you might very well stammer your way through each sentence and freeze up if not given hours to work out your argument on paper. Your online persona might describe how you see yourself or want to see yourself, but it might be far from the real truth.
All of this said, I am not trashing meeting people online. If I ever get sick of my super hot model girlfriend from Sweden (okay, maybe she isn't from Sweden), I might give it a whirl as opposed to the alternative, which is to go the bars or cross you finger and hope for something good to come along.
I don't think that the issues with being relatively anonymous and having complete control with the information you put out will ever entirely go away. That said, I have a feeling that the superiority to the alternatives (bars, clubs, crossing your fingers) is eventually going to win out. True, the chances you getting what you want when you date online is less then perfect, but at least you know that you are getting a person that is also looking.
Additionally, technology can even solve the issue of people lying when it comes to matching services. If a matching service asks you a pile of questions, it can match you with people that are statistically likely to enjoy your company. It doesn't matter if you lie or not, it is simply matching people who answer one way with people who answer another way. You could lie on every question, but your pattern of answering could still match you up with people who like people who answer in that way.
Oh yeah, Cuba is a fairytale land. That is why people throw a sheet in a bathtub and try and sail 90 miles through dangerous currents and rough seas to get to the US where they don't speak the language and get to start from scratch. At least Mexicans share a reasonable chance of surviving the trip. Cubans are basically stating that they would rather risk a high likelihood of death rather then stay where they are.
Cuba is a mess. The best you can do is try and join the military or a few key government institutions you are going to live a life that likely won't send you in a raft across the ocean in a desperate attempt to escape.
Of course, that doesn't even address the other quality of life issues. A "good man" and "honest person" generally avoid purging their government in mass executions every few years. "Good" and "honest" men don't brutally and violently put down any form of political expression.
Maybe you and I are different, but anyone who would put a bullet between my eyes for peacefully voicing opposition to government policies is neither "good" nor "honest".
The Swedish response this election was by far some of the most mature action I have seen any electorate perform in my life. You can break the arguments down between the two sides with one side saying that things are pleasant now and there is no reason to rock the boat, and the other side asking the electorate to look farther ahead into future then an election or two and see that with the way things are going they can't do this forever and should change now.
I personally am deeply impressed that a political party ran on a very long term goal and won despite the current times being very good in Sweden. To me, that is a sign of a very mature electorate who is taking their job seriously and voting on more then just their own pet short term issues.
I personally wish that my own American electorate could look past '4 more years' and cult of personalities and think in terms of decades. The US has its own different long term dilemmas rising up on the horizon, but I have absolutely no faith in our political establishment to try and deal with them before they are upon us. I don't blame the politicians for our failure to react before disaster though. We put those assholes in power. I blame the people.
So, my hat goes off the Swedish people for their long term outlook. I can only hope (perhaps in futility) that my own people one day acquire the same sort of foresight.
Non-profit is a tax classification that carries with it a massive amount of red tape and restrictions as to what you can and can not do. If you don't want to follow those regulations you have absolutely no other choice, you MUST declare yourself for-profit and pay normal taxes. The only thing Google has done is say that don't want the restrictions that a non-profit has to follow. Non-profits are limited in how much they can reinvest in themselves, how much they have to spend, and the type of things they can invest in.
Don't let your head explode. Google is just dodging government regulations that non-profits have to follow in exchange for tax-exempt status. They can still be a charity but classified as a for-profit corporation. Unless the Google charity has an IPO, it is still a private corporation that can do whatever it damn well pleases, including not actually make a profit.
Is this a PR stunt? Sure. All corporate donations are done for PR. That isn't a bad thing so long as it actually does some good. I am more then happy to see trade money pumped into charity for good will. The fact that Google is no strapping their charity corporation down with non-profit rules adds hope if anything that it will do something good. There are a billion and one charities operating under non-profit tax status. The fact that Google is not operating under those rules should be a sign that they intend to try a model that is a little different from the norm.
Wait and see what the charity does and don't get so hung up on its tax status. "Non-profit" is a tax status that carries with it regulations, not a mission statement.
I have founded and run non-profit entities, and guess what - it is hard, even when you have money. Oversight, restrictions, tax headaches, reporting, etc. You have to actually do things that really help the public and not the owners.
You answer your own objections. If you declare yourself a non-prof you run into (by your own words) "oversight, restrictions, tax headaches, reporting, etc." That is clearly what they are trying to avoid. Non-profit is a tax classification. They don't want to be under that classification. They don't want to be forced to spend X% of their donations and be prevented from investing X% into other things. That is what being a non-profit does. The non-profit classification works great for some things and it does make sure that people who declare this tax-exempt status really are doing something. Google has said that they want to try something that doesn't pigeon hole into what the IRS and government regulators think a charity should be spending and investing. If Google wants to avoid following government regulations, then they MUST declare their charity a for-profit charity and pay taxes.
Besides, what is the worst that can happen? Google makes some investments that you disagree with? If that keeps you from sleeping at night don't take a walk down Wall Street or else your head will explode. Even if it is an utter failure it just means that there is one more investment firm investing in things I disagree with. At best, Google breaks out of the mold of charities, does something innovative, and brings something good to all of our lives. So at worst it is more of the same old, and at best peoples' lives are changed for the better.
Maybe half the reason why corporations can be so tight fisted with giving their money to charity is because every time they try and do something good with it hoping to get an ounce of good will, some jack ass gets up on a soap box and starts screaming into the wind about the evil corporations donating to fight hunger so that they have more orphan babies to eat. Maybe you should save your soap box for when they actually do something wrong.
Basically, if you declare yourself a non-profit company you get your ball shackled by the federal government in return for them not taking taxes. A non-prof has a dramatically restricted ability invest in other companies and needs follow a pile of regulations. They also are limited in whose money they can take, where they can put that money, and how much of it they can move and how much of it they can save.
By declaring themselves a for-profit charity the regulatory burden is dramatically reduced. So, when they declare themselves a 'for profit' charity, they are basically declaring they would rather taxed then live by the regulations that federal government imposes on non-profit charities.
This move does not really surprise me. Google has made itself by being more agile and quicker to adapt then its competitors. If they are going to try something innovative in the world of philanthropy, they are probably going to go for a unique model that doesn't conform well to current non-prof charity regulations.
They need to make a profit to be self-sustaining, right? There might be room for Google to do well here if there are other reasons why existing companies don't want to provide ethical products that would clearly be profitable. For a hypothetical example, if car companies and big oil together collaborated to avoid providing hybrid cars at a reasonable price for other business reasons. It seems strange that such market gaps wouldn't get filled by just any other big company though.
I think you miss the point of a for profit charity. What running for profit does is cut the strings. When you are running a non-prof you need to meet some strict regulations. These regulations dramatically restrict where you can put your money. The idea behind a for-profit charity is that your strings are cut and you can do whatever innovative investing / R&D you want.
As to how they stay "for profit", that is easy. They don't. Well, they DO, but they do not have to do it by turning a profit on investments. Google (the for profit corporation) is going to donate money one way or another. It can either donate to various non-profs or it can take some of that money and donate to themselves. They will probably do both.
The idea is this; Google is going to dump money on charity for whatever reasons (image improvement, customer relations, whatever). Google now dumps some of their money on their own charity. From the charities perspective, even if they never return a dime they are "making a profit" off of the money Google is giving them. The charities numbers are all in the black from the "income" Google provides. As an added bonus, if charity does end up investing in a winner, the charity will now suddenly be flush with cash. The charity will certainly try and invest in winners, but picking winners doesn't have to be their preoccupation so long as Google keeps giving them money as "income".
I am not arguing that they are not being "greedy". My point is that no shit they are being "greedy". Every single for-profit corporation on the face of the planet can have its motives broken down into that they are being "greedy". It is a stupid point to even bring up, adds nothing to the conversation, and completely misses the deeper question as to why Nintendo thinks that charging a higher price in the UK is the right thing to do.
I would bet that the original poster was not trying to make some profound statement about supply and demand when he declared that Nintendo charges the UK more because they are "greedy". It is pretty obvious that the implication of declaring Nintendo's motives as "greed" is because the original poster is under the delusion that Nintendo somehow had it out for the UK and is "less greedy" in other markets. This is obviously a completely wrong belief with absolutely no basis in reality.
If the original parent was a detective trying to get inside of the mind of a killer he would look at the body and conclude that the reason why the murderer shot the victim in the head was because he wanted the victim to die. Well no shit Sherlock. It misses the higher point of "why" a killer decided to shoot that victim in the head to make him die.
This isn't even getting into the fact that iTunes DRM is the most liberal DRM scheme out there, so liberal that you never notice it's there (I certainly never have), can freely make as many backups of your music as you want (so the right to fair use backups is fulfilled), and so forth.
I had an iPod. It eventually broke. Instead of buying a new one, I got a Creative Vision M which I have been very happy with. Thankfully, I was not a fool while I had my iPod and so bought nothing from the iTunes music store. If I had, my entire music collection would currently be junk.
I'll absolutely never buy DRMed music. It is stupid. It is doubly stupid if you buy it from Apple. That music will all be junk the second you decide you want a new non-Apple MP3 player. I, like most people, and not eager to hand my balls into the hands of Apple from now until the end of time by making my music worthless bits if I ever decide to get a non-Apple MP3 player. If you have implicate faith in Apple from now until the end of time, go ahead and lock yourself into their proprietary DRM.
Newton's rules work well most of the time, but you really need relativity and quantum mechanics in this day and age. For astronomical work, Newton is roughly close, but using just his rules alone you will find inaccuracies and dramatically limit what you can learn from astronomy. If you want to plot a course to the moon, you can probably do it with just Newtonian rules. If you want to understand how old the universe is estimate sizes and distances of celestial objects, you really need more then what Newton as to offer.
Perhaps even more dramatic is what happens when you get very small. If you try and build a modern computer using Newtonian rules, you are going to quickly learn that Newton's laws completely fall to pieces. Except in a few rare cases, general relativity and Newtonian physics differ only by marginal amounts. When you get down into the atomic and sub-atomic world the difference is night and day. As far as Newton is concerned, on the scale of an atom reality completely breaks down. Stuff appears and reappears at random, gravity is so weak as to be almost meaningless, and you find that you can not predict the motion of ANYTHING using Newtonian physics. You REALLY need quantum mechanics if you want to work on the scale of atoms.
Now, do not take this for shitting on Newton. Newton did some absolutely awesome stuff, especially when you consider the time he lived in. Newton explained the world with a clarity that had never been seen before. Certainly, his explanations break down as you start to achieve extremes, but in most human affairs Newton's rules are still good enough. No one cracks out general relativity or quantum mechanics when they are building an airplane or car, but they certainly bring out some of Newton's old rules.
I dont see any reason for the 15-17% price difference at all (VAT already counted out) (Well even the income of the employees is lower than what they have to pay in the IS), except for pure greed.
So let me get this straight, you attribute the price difference to "pure greed"? I am going to take a wild swing and guess that you are not an economist. Look, it is very simple. Nintendo wants to reap the most profit it can in ALL regions. "Pure greed" is their motive no matter where they sell. They are not a non-profit company altruistically spreading merriment and cheer to the videogame fanatics of the world. They sell a product for a profit. Further, they sell that product for the highest profit they can achieve. They charge the price they charge in the US, Japan, and Britain because they think that is the most profitable price to sell at. They realize that the lower the price the sell for, the more they sell. The higher price they sell for, the less they sell. Somewhere there is an equilibrium where raising or lowering the price results less profit. In Britain, they apparently think that that equilibrium price is higher then in the US.
The real question is why does Nintendo think that selling in Britain at a higher price is a good idea? The answer isn't voodoo, magic, or the equally mystical answer of "pure orphan eating, baby burning, city pillaging greed". What is the answer? I don't know for sure, but I would likely guess it is regulatory cost. The EU in general has higher environmental standards then the US on electronics. Tougher regulations translate into higher prices. The EU also has stronger anti-import measures then the US that also could contribute to your higher price.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a book on economics. The world will seem a lot less malevolent and make for more sense if you do. I suggest reading The Hidden Order. It is economics 101 in a relativly easy to digest package with good examples. It exists somewhere between a pop economics book and a text book.
We've got the traditional encyclopedias on one end, and wikipedia on the other. Now we can go a bit in the middle and see what comes of it.
That is not really true for "real" research. In real research where you cite your sources you have the wikipedia existing well off the page where you don't actually cite it, standing just beside encyclopedias that you also don't cite. Encyclopedias are generally considered to NOT be scholarly sources, and wikipedias even less so.
I don't think wikipedias will ever be something you cite in a research paper. The real value of a wikipedia is in orienting yourself. Wikipedias are great at giving a quick and dirty run down of a topic. I work in a high tech field and run into stuff that I don't know anything about all of the time. While I don't use a Wikipedia as a resource for planning future experiments or for any deep understanding, they are great for getting a quick and dirty overview. If I need to go talk to an expert on some type of memory or semiconductor device, the Wikipedia can usually get it so that we at least speak roughly the same language. It doesn't give you instant expertise, but it certainly points you in the right direction.
I imagine academics use the Wikipedia in the same way I do. As a history researcher you might run across an event you have no knowledge of. Instead of going through the pain of finding a scholarly resource, you can instead hit up the Wikipedia and get a quick blow by blow of the event.
I love the Wikipedia, but it is NOT an authoritative source on anything. It is a way to answer simple questions without wasting hours in a library.
That said, I would love to have a more 'expert oriented' wikipedia. Bonus points if they actually do good citations instead of the usual hearsay that Wikipedia some times brings to the table.
He used to be the conservative demigod. What's changed, other than his approval ratings in the polls? Did he betray conservative principles, or maybe by adhering to them too closely he merely revealed their consequences?
Pass me some of what you are smoking. If you think that Bush has been adhering to conservative principles you must be smoking some the good stuff.
Bush in no way, shape, or form follows conservative ideals. The most you can say is that he is not a democrat. Conservative American ideals basically revolve around two things. They have a weak quasi-libertarian view of the economy and government size, and they have a Christian moral authoritarian view on social issues (i.e. sex, drugs, and rock and roll). Bush pretty much fails in all regards.
A libertarian would likely kill you in, um, self defense, if you told him that Bush's handling of the government size and power was even vaguely libertarian. Bush has spent enough to make the liberals step back and wonder if we REALLY need to spend that much.
Bush's economic policy has been pretty much a straight continuation of Clinton's, which is to say that it he is a center of the road globalizationist and certainly not a right wing radical of any sort. As far as his social policy has gone, he has done absolutely NOTHING in action other then to pay lip service to the right and support a few bills that were clearly not going to pass. Clinton, yes Clinton, had a far more social regressive policy with his "defense of marriage act". Bush is no crusading social conservative. Hell, his VP flatly rejects Bush's position on gay marriage and has a lesbian daughter who runs his campaigns.
The only thing that Bush has ever had going for him as far as conservatives are concerned is that 1) he isn't a liberal (this is the equivalent to democrats liking Kerry because he isn't Bush) and 2) he got a patriotic boost because of 9/11. As far as his policies go, he has done the polar opposite of what an isolationist, morally Christian, economically quasi-libertarian, "traditional" conservative would do.
Now, you could perhaps call Bush a neo-con which is very different from a traditional conservative. Funny enough, most of the founding neo-cons were actually at one point in their lives democrats. Neo-cons are not conservatives in any way. They are an entirely different beast. Neo-con beliefs revolve around foreign policy, not domestic policy. There are democrats that easily could be tossed into the neo-con camp, with Lieberman and Clinton (when he was the president) both easily fitting all neo-con ideals. Neo-cons are really a sub-faction that crosses party lines that should not be confused for conservatives. The only reason why neo-cons got any power at all was because they were the first to stand up and say "I told you so!" after 9/11 and already had a "solution" before anyone else.
They were not proposing US armed forces personnel actually fire the weapons. It is utterly and completely forbidden by the constitution for US armed forces (outside of the national guard) to deploy inside of any American city and conduct anything that could even vaguely be considered policing action against citizens. To give you an example of how seriously they take this, the US army flatly refused to deploy in New Orleans and return law and order despite the pleas of the mayor because it would have been a constitutional violation. Now, eventually the army did show up, but only carrying aid. Even this was delayed because they wanted to be sure that they could legally deploy in such a manner. They were utterly forbidden to take arms against any citizen, no matter what the reason. The US armed forces take their constitutional bounds VERY seriously.
In this particular case, they were advocating that the weapons be used in America first before handing them over to soldiers. They were advocating that the technology be handed over the police for them to use, not armed services personal use weapons of any sort against Americans.
People were really pissed off about the twin towers because of the symbolism, not the loss of life. I am not saying that Americans don't care about loss of life, just that the fact that 5000 people died isn't enough to really send them into a rage. If you were to chart American deaths per year, the year of 9/11 wouldn't even blip. 5000 deaths is a drop in the bucket next to more mundane things like heart attacks and cancer. So, the issue wasn't loss of life. It wasn't even financial. Sure, the twin towers held a lot of financial 'stuff', but most of it had backups and in the grand scheme of things it was just a financial pinprick against the titan that is the US economy.
What it really boiled down to was symbolism. The symbolism of 9/11 for most Americans was that they knocked down two ugly yet famous buildings. It wasn't really the buildings, it was more that the attack was very visible and successful that really sent Americans into a rage. As the world saw, once poke the bear enough to wake it up, it tends to go on a tearing rampage looking for a head to rip off.
Now, if the knocking over the twin towers can provoke the toppling of two nations, I would REALLY hate to see what knocking over t he Statue of Liberty would do. You need to remember that what sends Americans into a rage is the symbolism, not the real loss of life. Knocking over the Statue of Liberty would be the absolute most potent target you could possibly hit. If you flew a plane into the White House and killed the president, you would have an enraged America on your hands, but a sizable minority wouldn't really be all that pissed because they either dislike government (far right) or dislike the man in the house (far left). Knocking over Statue of Liberty on the other hand is attacking a symbol that has its own special positive meaning to everyone. You could effectively unite the Americans into a collective rage that would make 9/11 look like pocket change. Nations would fall.
Now you need to ask yourself why you might want to do this. This is the heart of terrorists' question. What is the point of terrorism? If the point is vengeance or pseudo-religious ritualistic suicide (i.e. it has no rational goal), then the consequences of such an attack probably are not a big deal. If on the other hand your attack is trying to achieve a political goal, then the next question is "what goal".
If the goal is to make the Americans surrender and leave the Islamic world alone, knocking out the Statue of Liberty or any other non-military target is a complete waste of time and utterly counterproductive. The American response will almost assuredly be the exact opposite of what you want. The Spanish might have seen the terrorist attack against them as punishment and seek to change their behavior by pulling out of Iraq to avoid future pain, but the Americans will almost assuredly do the opposite regardless of the party controlling the government. The more devastating the symbolism of the attack, the more violent the response. If you want to make the Americans leave some place, you are far better off to achieve a steady attrition of their soldiers stationed in a foreign land. The loss of American soldiers can make the Americans want to leave a place, but attacks upon their homeland are far more likely to achieve the exact opposite response.
So why attack such symbolic targets instead of military targets that might actually break the American will to continue fighting? Why reinvigorate and intensify the American will to lash out and fight? The reason is simple. If you get the Americans to lash out, they might very well lash out in a way that benefits you. The Americans can easily destroy any non-nuclear government that they please, but as they have shown with Iraq and Afghanistan, they are far less effective at setting up a stable replacement government. If your goal is to make more radical Islamist, provoking the Americans might be the exactly right thing to do. The Americans can stomp out existing Islamist hosti
I think you misunderstand what is being proposed. All that air force guy was saying was that if we are going to give soldiers 'non-lethal' weapons, they better damn well be non-lethal. The best way to prove that they are non-lethal is to be willing to use them on your own people. It isn't like they are going to go out and 'test' them on a random crowd that is getting rowdy. They are proposing that the non-lethal weapons be able to meet US standards for use by law enforcement. If after you go through the regulations that it takes to add a new weapon to the police arsenal (like tasers, tear gas, pepper guns, water hoses, ect), then you can hand them over to soldiers and tell them that they are non-lethal.
It isn't a bad idea. The air force is basically proposing that the burden of proof that the weapons are truly 'non-lethal' be set very high. This isn't the armed forces proposing that weapons testing be conducted on civilians. This is the armed forces proposing that before we let 20 year old kids run around with "non-lethal" microwave guns zapping Iraqis that they meet US standards for non-lethal. If they don't meet US standards of what a "non-lethal" weapon is, then we probably should not be blasting pissed off crowds in other nations with them.
My only complaint against the idea is that it is probably a little too conservative. Telling a bunch of 20 year old kids with guns to hold off a crowd of pissed off civilians with armed militia in their midst in a non-violent way is pretty damn hard. People get nervous when they get shot at, civilians be damned. Better to have something that is a step below a full auto-blast from an M16 into a crowd then only an M16.
Only if you're lucky enough to avoid the 00 on the roulette wheel of life. Unlike Abstinence, none of your methods exceed 99% effective rate- even when used in combination. And their side effects are much worse than you've been told- hormonal birth control and abortions have been shown to cause death at about 3 times the rate of pregnancy, and the condoms available at Planned Parenthood and free on college campuses were shown by Consumer Reports to have a dismal 65% failure rate.
Tisk tisk. Someone skipped their stats class to go to theology class. Using two forms of 99% birth control put your chance of birth control failure at 1 in 10,000. Assuming that your girlfriend in question is fertal 1 week out of 4, that further drops your chance to 1 in 40,000. Further, "failure" of a condom does not mean that you get a full load of semen blasted into your significant other. "Failure" means that it failed is a STD control device. It is rate of failure is actually much lower then 99% as a birth control device if it is properly used. Finally, there is the old stand by of simply aborting should the stars line up despite proper birth control usage.
There's this institution that solves all of the above, called Sacramental Marriage. You should check it out sometime.
Lets go over my check list and see what sacramental marriage solves.
Effective form of birth control? Hell no. It is in fact by far one of the worst forms of birth control. It actually tends to produce babies at an alarming rate. If you don't want babies and but do want sex, sacramental marriage is almost certainly NOT what you want.
Feeling like a looser for being a 35 year old virgin? I don't know about you, but if I had a single shot at selecting a single woman from the tiny pool of women that make up the number of people that want to enter into a sacramental marriage, I would take my time. Only an idiot would pledge their life to someone for the rest of their life on anything less then a few years of knowing that person. I would also be damn picky as it is supposidly a one shot deal. If during this selection process you are not allowed to live with or have sex with any woman whom you are dating, I could very easily see 35 year old virgins. Anyone who enters a sacrimental marriage when they are still relativly young is either very lucky, very stupid, or very horney.
No significant others? See above.
Compulsive masturbation? If I was still 35 and not getting any, I would probably have built up a very strong right arm.
A dramatic increase in dull and/or fanatically religious significant others? People that refuse to have sex until they are married make up a very small pool of people. Of these people, almost all are to some degree religious fanatics. Either that, or they are very boring. Either way, enterting into a sacrimental marriage will NOT solve this side effect.
Depression? I don't know about you, but if I was not getting any sex at all until I was married and I actually took getting married seriously to ensure that I am not miserable for the rest of my life, I would be pretty damn depressed.
After all, the best birth control I know of is Abstinence- this from the father of a three year old that we made the mistake of not introducing to the crib before 3 months.
While abstinence certainly drop the chance of accidental pregnancy to near zero, it also drops you chances to scoring to absolute zero. For most sane humans, this side effect can include damage to normal social life. People who have tried abstinence as a form of birth control have reported depression, compulsive masturbation, a dramatic increase in dull and/or fanatically religious significant others, no significant others, and feeling like a looser for being a 35 year old virgin.
I have found the best form of birth control is a combinatorial treatment that does NOT include abstinence. Liberal condom usage and/or birth control pills with abortions as a final backup has proven to be extremely effective to the point of rivaling abstinence. As an added bonus, these methods of birth control have been shown to have dramatically less side effects and result in far more play.
There are a variety of choices of birth control out there. Like any treatment plan where you have many options, I suggest giving them all a shot and deciding which one fits you the best. For catholic priests, the abstinence option has proven to be effective and provide minimal interference. For those of us who don't want kids yet don't feel like being 40 year old virgins, some of the other anti-pregnancy options might work better.
I am a depression immune person who lives with and dates a bipolar woman. I swear that almost every single friend of mine through my girlfriend has some form of depression or another. The biggest difference between me and them is that I don't get irrationally depressed for long periods of time. Everyone gets sad when their dog dies. Resistance to depression doesn't mean that you don't get frustrated or sad. If you take away these emotions you would probably cease to be a truly functional human. You need a little sadness and regret now and then to keep you functional in society and able to maintain human relationships. The big difference is the duration of the depression, the depth of the depression, and the level of tragedy it takes to invoke it.
A truly depressed person can be provoked into a feeling of uselessness over trivial or simply non-existent events. The depression can result in more then just a little remorse or sadness. They can want to kill themselves or refuse to do anything. Further, such depression can last far longer then is appropriate. If you are depression resistant on the other hand, you keep on pushing forward. You never get the "lay down and die" feeling. You can still be sad, frustrated, or remorseful, but such feelings are not so over powering that you can't do anything else
Personally, I applaud any good research into depression. Despite arguments to the contrary, depression IS an illness that is completely worthy of treatment. While depression can be invoked through events in one's life, some times (if not most of the time) it is a purely physical problem in the brain that deserves treatment like any other disease. That is not to imply that psychotherapy does not have its uses, but the belief that a depressed person can simply be talked out of a depression is utterly insane and down right dangerous for some. If all that is standing between happiness in a depressed person is a flipped chemical switch in the brain, they should have the option of getting that switch flipped. I appreciate the work of tortured artists as much as anyone, but I don't want to see my loved ones suffer or pull a Kurt Cobain just to keep my MP3 player filled.
Everyone that has been sued for copyright volitions has been sued for distribution, not for possession. There has been no case of anyone being sued because they downloaded music, only cases where they were sharing music. The very reason why this is done is because of this grey area of 'proof' of ownership. I am not saying that this is good or bad, just that it is a moot legal point because no one is sued for possession of material, only distribution.
If I want to do a movie on Vampires, should I have to pay someone? You mess Lessig's point. Culture by definition builds upon its past. Vampires, elves, bad ass action heroes, our concept of aliens, formulaic romantic comedies, guitars, a generic punk sound, a whiny emo sound, and all other pieces of "entertainment" are all "mashups" in one way or another. All of the above exist ONLY because of culture that they were built upon. None of the above have any meaning to a stone aged tribal person living in the rainforest. These are not concepts that spring magically from the human mind. These are concepts that have evolved in our culture. Lessig's point is that we are stunting culture by following back every creative idea to its source and asking permission before we use it.
If you had to go back and ask the originators punk if you could use their sound and they had an absolute veto over it, we might very well not have punk and all the other types of music that sprung from that branch in the musical tree. The same goes for more other examples. Today, you can merrily write about vampires without worry of a lawsuit, but if you try and write about another fictional villain, say a Star Wars Sith Lord, and you will find your ass sued into the ground. This SHOULD be troubling. Our ability to create new culture is being stunted by demanding that anyone wants to bud off of some other creative needs to ask the original authors permission. Instead of having an explosion of stories and mythos from worlds from our popular culture, we have tightly controlled and stunted versions.
Further, even the most pro-copyright minded person MUST see the insanity of copyrights that last CENTURIES. Lessig doesn't argue for an end to copyright. He argues for some sort of sanity in it. Giving people copyrights that exists well past their death and then some is crazy. Dead artists don't need their works protected. If you want to use a Robert Frost poem, you damn well should be able to. The guy has been dead for almost half of a centaury yet you can still find your ass sued if you post one of his poems on the Internet.
No matter what you think of copyright, you MUST agree that the current system is insane and needs fixing. Perhaps you might not want to take it as far as Lessig does, but you certainly must agree that a mean who died in 1949 doesn't need his work to continue to waste away under copyright protection.
I had the pleasure of seeing Lessig speak a year ago. If you ever have the chance to see this man, do so. Even if you hate his message, he is an absolute god when it comes to speaking and presenting. His style of presentation has earned its own title of the "Lessig" style of presentation.
While I am somewhat awed by Lessig's ability to present, my real admiration for him comes from how he has pursued his cause. Lessig argues for radical change in current laws. He is not the only person to argue for radical change. What makes Lessig different is that had has not only made attempts to work within law to bring about change, but he has gone even further and tried to implement what he advocates within a voluntary and completely legal manner without reliance on the force of government to enact the change that he seeks. Lots of people advocate some sort of radical change in society, but relatively few make a genuine attempt to bring about such change through methods other then complaining to the government to use the force of law.
The Creative Commons is an incredible accomplishment. While the CC is in no danger of displacing current media, it has certainly started to make a dent. Will the CC ever make a dent large enough for the average Joe to really sit up and take notice without legislative change? Perhaps not, but what it has done is create an ecosystem to explore the 'fair use' world that Lessig envisions. Even those who find the watering down of copyright power revolting can not honestly proclaim any sort of mal-intent from creating a way for artists who want to offer their works to the public domain a simple and easily identifiable way to do so.
I strongly encourage anyone who is even vaugly interested in this debate to check out Lessig's book, Free Culture. Keeping in tune with Lessig's philosophy on copyright, the book is freely available online. Some enterprising readers of the book also have a complete reading of the book in MP3 format. Check it out.
To argue that there is no genetic disposition towards intelligence is silly and defies even the simplest of logic. Savants, autistic, and mental retards are all born different. All of them have varied levels of "intelligence" with strengths and weaknesses. A savant for instance might be able to crunch numbers in a way that only a computer can match, yet refers to himself as "you" because he can't make the conceptual link that "you" is not a name and who "you" refers to depends upon the speaker. A savant might be utterly incapable of reading human emotions no matter how visibly they are displayed. On the other hand, someone born with Down syndrome can grasp basic grammar in a way that a savant might easily recognize when a person is sad or angry, but be unable to perform other mental functions that most of us find trivial, like basic math.
This is the old nature Vs nurture debate. Declaring that everything is nurture makes us feel warm and fuzzy because it exercises the ghosts of the vile eugenic "science" that led to the death of millions of people during World War II and it assures us that everything has a social answer. Advancements in neuroscience though have shown us that while nurture certainly matters, so does nature. Some people truly are born predisposed to varied levels of performance and dispositions on the basis of genetics alone. As the physiologist joke goes, "What is the best indicator that someone a man will develop schizophrenia? He has a schizophrenic twin."
Genes are probabilistic. Genetically identical twins, even ones separated at birth and raised in radically different environments, show shocking mental similarities. They are certainly two different people, but they have very strongly similar tendencies. Genes load the dice for sure, but we are still talking about dice. Further, there is an undeniable nurture component that strongly effects who we become. Despite this, we can't close our eyes to the fact that our minds are the products of evolution and variation because it makes us feel uncomfortable. There is likely no social cure for schizophrenia, autism, and some forms of depression, but there might very well genetic components that can point to a physical cure. We can't be afraid to look for genetic clues to our nature because we don't like the implications that some people are born with genetic leg up.
While the use of drugs is indeed a personal freedom issue the simple obstacle for me is that I would not exactly like a world were the majority of citizens are doped out.
Sorry fella, you already live in such a society. Unless you live in an Islamic theocracy, that vast majority of the people around you have easy access to mood enhancing drugs and use said drugs regularly. It is called alcohol. You can call it ethyl alcohol if that name makes it sound more like a "real" drug.
Alcohol is as much of a drug as any other drug. In fact, on the scale of drugs, it is probably one of the worst. It is absolutely lethal if you over dose, it is damaging to your body in low doses, it induces aggression in many people, and it destroys sound judgment. The only thing that keeps alcohol related deaths down compared to some drugs is that alcohol is made in a nice clean factory instead of some sketchy drug dealer's basement. If alcohol was made the same way illegal drugs are made (as it was during prohibition) you would find all the same problems that current illegal drug face in terms of purity and safety.
What would happen if the government legalized all drugs? Crime would plummet, police would have significantly more time to pursue real crimes, the prisons would empty, criminal organization would suddenly find that they are completely incapable of funding criminal activities, a handful of South American nation would become significantly more stable, and the number of drug related deaths would plummet. Drugs would be made in sanitary controlled ways by pharmaceutical companies and they would merrily compete to make the best non-addictive drug possible with the fewest side effects.
As to how society would change, other then a dramatic drop in crime and massive budget surpluses from the resulting savings in law enforcement, nothing much would change. People would still take drugs to recreate, they just might throw in some other drugs into the mix besides alcohol and caffeine. You would still get fired if you went to work, and alcoholics / drug addicts would still find themselves fucked when it comes to holding down a job. In other words, very little would change except a dramatic reduction in crime and government spending.
How about when you go to make a campaign speech and get arrested for not belonging to the republicrat party, like several of the presidential candidates in the last election?
Badnark and the Green party guy got arrested because they tried to make a speech at a place that was already being used for speeches. If they wanted to rant on the street corner instead of trying to get to a podium, they would not have been arrested. Don't get me wrong, I would love nothing more then to see the Greens and the Libertarians jump into a presidential debate, but you are over exaggerating when you say that they got arrested just for trying to make a speech. That is like say I got arrested just for swinging a knife around in the air and neglecting to mention that there was a person standing the spot I was swinging at.
As to how a non-republicrat wins, I have not the slightest clue. Personally, I think that what people fail to realize is that people are not truly that dissatisfied, which is what makes talk of "revolutions" silly. It would be one thing if the American people were really pissed off and felt that they were being violently repressed. Instead, most Americans feel slightly irritated and can't detect any real levels of repression in their lives (regardless if there is any or not).
This thread is getting too large to reply too, but let me state this simply. I don't disagree that something is rotten. I don't disagree that the system sucks. My contention is that it is purely OUR fault for the state of affairs. Democracy still works in the US. If a majority of the people that vote, vote for someone besides the two republicrats, that person wins. If a Libertarian, Green, or even one of those fruity as shit Constitutional party or Communist party guys truly won an election, the army would not step in to stop them. They would rightfully take power and that would be that.
Further, it isn't like there is a media black out. Sure, NBC might not cover the latest adventures of third party candidates, but you better believe that the Internet does. It just takes a few seconds to look up what they are doing and get yourself informed. The only people not being reached are the laziest 90% of Americans who are damn lazy.
The problem is us. The people are broken, not the system. I am not saying the system is perfect, but it certainly isn't stopping the people from rising up to reclaim whatever the fuck it is the people think they deserve. The people just don't give a shit.
Personally, I find the whole election process kind of like those stupid French Connection shirts. You know the ones I am talking about; the ones with the inane "Too busy to fcuk" logos on them. I look at those shirts and think "Man, some stupid corporation has managed smear their corporate name all over a shirt and convinced some idiot that he is trendy for wearing it." Then I think a little longer and stop feeling pissed off at the corporation, and instead feel pissed off at the idiot wearing the shirt. The corporation is a stupid mindless beast following the path of least resistance. The human is the one that should have realized that he is being a stupid tool for paying money to wear a billboard on his chest. Fuck the stupid humans.
I feel roughly the same about politics. Yeah, that guy elected is a jack ass. That said, we elected him. We could have easily elected someone else. Whose fault is it really? Do we blame the dumb bastard in office for his policies, or the stupid people that put him there? Personally, I blame the stupid people. We can overcome by spending 1 hour every couple of years in a voting booth yet we don't. Talk about fucking lazy and stuipid.
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The stigma comes from two places, one rational and one irrational.
1) It is a new medium. A lot of people have an irrational distrust of meeting people online simply because it is a new way of meeting people. In the same way people were sketched out by shopping online or distrusted cell phones, people will take some time to trust meeting online. Once meeting online achieves a critical mass, which I think it is already pretty close for younger people, this particular stigma will evaporate.
2) People lie. Humans are lie detectors. You have a disproportionately large hunk of your brain that is used for the singular purpose recognizing faces and understanding their facial expressions to see past their words. You are built to meet and read people's intentions through hundreds of subtle pieces of body language... all of which become completely useless once you are online.
People have a rational fear that people that they meet online could be blatantly lying to them. Most people will not tell big blatant lies with they are face to face with a stranger, and if they do the stranger stands a fair likelihood of detecting the lie. Online this is not the case. If I tell you the biggest lie in the world there is very little you can do just by looking at my words to see through my lie.
I can set up the biggest most hardcore hipster, show photos of me in hipster clothing and create a grand illusion about who I am with very little work. You could come meet me and find out that the my knowledge of whatever hipster music I claim to love is an inch deep, my wild stories of awesome parties are all bullshit, and my photos are doctored controlled such that you don't realize that I am a fat 14 year old boy living in my parents house, not the 24 awesome hipster I said I was living in my own crash pad in the city.
Perhaps even more then intentional deception is, there is a lot of unintentional deception. You might very well be crank out an online rant that sounds insightful and educated online when you have a few hours to work on it, but in the real world you might very well stammer your way through each sentence and freeze up if not given hours to work out your argument on paper. Your online persona might describe how you see yourself or want to see yourself, but it might be far from the real truth.
All of this said, I am not trashing meeting people online. If I ever get sick of my super hot model girlfriend from Sweden (okay, maybe she isn't from Sweden), I might give it a whirl as opposed to the alternative, which is to go the bars or cross you finger and hope for something good to come along.
I don't think that the issues with being relatively anonymous and having complete control with the information you put out will ever entirely go away. That said, I have a feeling that the superiority to the alternatives (bars, clubs, crossing your fingers) is eventually going to win out. True, the chances you getting what you want when you date online is less then perfect, but at least you know that you are getting a person that is also looking.
Additionally, technology can even solve the issue of people lying when it comes to matching services. If a matching service asks you a pile of questions, it can match you with people that are statistically likely to enjoy your company. It doesn't matter if you lie or not, it is simply matching people who answer one way with people who answer another way. You could lie on every question, but your pattern of answering could still match you up with people who like people who answer in that way.
Oh yeah, Cuba is a fairytale land. That is why people throw a sheet in a bathtub and try and sail 90 miles through dangerous currents and rough seas to get to the US where they don't speak the language and get to start from scratch. At least Mexicans share a reasonable chance of surviving the trip. Cubans are basically stating that they would rather risk a high likelihood of death rather then stay where they are.
Cuba is a mess. The best you can do is try and join the military or a few key government institutions you are going to live a life that likely won't send you in a raft across the ocean in a desperate attempt to escape.
Of course, that doesn't even address the other quality of life issues. A "good man" and "honest person" generally avoid purging their government in mass executions every few years. "Good" and "honest" men don't brutally and violently put down any form of political expression.
Maybe you and I are different, but anyone who would put a bullet between my eyes for peacefully voicing opposition to government policies is neither "good" nor "honest".
The Swedish response this election was by far some of the most mature action I have seen any electorate perform in my life. You can break the arguments down between the two sides with one side saying that things are pleasant now and there is no reason to rock the boat, and the other side asking the electorate to look farther ahead into future then an election or two and see that with the way things are going they can't do this forever and should change now.
I personally am deeply impressed that a political party ran on a very long term goal and won despite the current times being very good in Sweden. To me, that is a sign of a very mature electorate who is taking their job seriously and voting on more then just their own pet short term issues.
I personally wish that my own American electorate could look past '4 more years' and cult of personalities and think in terms of decades. The US has its own different long term dilemmas rising up on the horizon, but I have absolutely no faith in our political establishment to try and deal with them before they are upon us. I don't blame the politicians for our failure to react before disaster though. We put those assholes in power. I blame the people.
So, my hat goes off the Swedish people for their long term outlook. I can only hope (perhaps in futility) that my own people one day acquire the same sort of foresight.
Non-profit is a tax classification that carries with it a massive amount of red tape and restrictions as to what you can and can not do. If you don't want to follow those regulations you have absolutely no other choice, you MUST declare yourself for-profit and pay normal taxes. The only thing Google has done is say that don't want the restrictions that a non-profit has to follow. Non-profits are limited in how much they can reinvest in themselves, how much they have to spend, and the type of things they can invest in.
Don't let your head explode. Google is just dodging government regulations that non-profits have to follow in exchange for tax-exempt status. They can still be a charity but classified as a for-profit corporation. Unless the Google charity has an IPO, it is still a private corporation that can do whatever it damn well pleases, including not actually make a profit.
Is this a PR stunt? Sure. All corporate donations are done for PR. That isn't a bad thing so long as it actually does some good. I am more then happy to see trade money pumped into charity for good will. The fact that Google is no strapping their charity corporation down with non-profit rules adds hope if anything that it will do something good. There are a billion and one charities operating under non-profit tax status. The fact that Google is not operating under those rules should be a sign that they intend to try a model that is a little different from the norm.
Wait and see what the charity does and don't get so hung up on its tax status. "Non-profit" is a tax status that carries with it regulations, not a mission statement.
I have founded and run non-profit entities, and guess what - it is hard, even when you have money. Oversight, restrictions, tax headaches, reporting, etc. You have to actually do things that really help the public and not the owners.
You answer your own objections. If you declare yourself a non-prof you run into (by your own words) "oversight, restrictions, tax headaches, reporting, etc." That is clearly what they are trying to avoid. Non-profit is a tax classification. They don't want to be under that classification. They don't want to be forced to spend X% of their donations and be prevented from investing X% into other things. That is what being a non-profit does. The non-profit classification works great for some things and it does make sure that people who declare this tax-exempt status really are doing something. Google has said that they want to try something that doesn't pigeon hole into what the IRS and government regulators think a charity should be spending and investing. If Google wants to avoid following government regulations, then they MUST declare their charity a for-profit charity and pay taxes.
Besides, what is the worst that can happen? Google makes some investments that you disagree with? If that keeps you from sleeping at night don't take a walk down Wall Street or else your head will explode. Even if it is an utter failure it just means that there is one more investment firm investing in things I disagree with. At best, Google breaks out of the mold of charities, does something innovative, and brings something good to all of our lives. So at worst it is more of the same old, and at best peoples' lives are changed for the better.
Maybe half the reason why corporations can be so tight fisted with giving their money to charity is because every time they try and do something good with it hoping to get an ounce of good will, some jack ass gets up on a soap box and starts screaming into the wind about the evil corporations donating to fight hunger so that they have more orphan babies to eat. Maybe you should save your soap box for when they actually do something wrong.
Basically, if you declare yourself a non-profit company you get your ball shackled by the federal government in return for them not taking taxes. A non-prof has a dramatically restricted ability invest in other companies and needs follow a pile of regulations. They also are limited in whose money they can take, where they can put that money, and how much of it they can move and how much of it they can save.
By declaring themselves a for-profit charity the regulatory burden is dramatically reduced. So, when they declare themselves a 'for profit' charity, they are basically declaring they would rather taxed then live by the regulations that federal government imposes on non-profit charities.
This move does not really surprise me. Google has made itself by being more agile and quicker to adapt then its competitors. If they are going to try something innovative in the world of philanthropy, they are probably going to go for a unique model that doesn't conform well to current non-prof charity regulations.
They need to make a profit to be self-sustaining, right? There might be room for Google to do well here if there are other reasons why existing companies don't want to provide ethical products that would clearly be profitable. For a hypothetical example, if car companies and big oil together collaborated to avoid providing hybrid cars at a reasonable price for other business reasons. It seems strange that such market gaps wouldn't get filled by just any other big company though.
I think you miss the point of a for profit charity. What running for profit does is cut the strings. When you are running a non-prof you need to meet some strict regulations. These regulations dramatically restrict where you can put your money. The idea behind a for-profit charity is that your strings are cut and you can do whatever innovative investing / R&D you want.
As to how they stay "for profit", that is easy. They don't. Well, they DO, but they do not have to do it by turning a profit on investments. Google (the for profit corporation) is going to donate money one way or another. It can either donate to various non-profs or it can take some of that money and donate to themselves. They will probably do both.
The idea is this; Google is going to dump money on charity for whatever reasons (image improvement, customer relations, whatever). Google now dumps some of their money on their own charity. From the charities perspective, even if they never return a dime they are "making a profit" off of the money Google is giving them. The charities numbers are all in the black from the "income" Google provides. As an added bonus, if charity does end up investing in a winner, the charity will now suddenly be flush with cash. The charity will certainly try and invest in winners, but picking winners doesn't have to be their preoccupation so long as Google keeps giving them money as "income".
I am not arguing that they are not being "greedy". My point is that no shit they are being "greedy". Every single for-profit corporation on the face of the planet can have its motives broken down into that they are being "greedy". It is a stupid point to even bring up, adds nothing to the conversation, and completely misses the deeper question as to why Nintendo thinks that charging a higher price in the UK is the right thing to do.
I would bet that the original poster was not trying to make some profound statement about supply and demand when he declared that Nintendo charges the UK more because they are "greedy". It is pretty obvious that the implication of declaring Nintendo's motives as "greed" is because the original poster is under the delusion that Nintendo somehow had it out for the UK and is "less greedy" in other markets. This is obviously a completely wrong belief with absolutely no basis in reality.
If the original parent was a detective trying to get inside of the mind of a killer he would look at the body and conclude that the reason why the murderer shot the victim in the head was because he wanted the victim to die. Well no shit Sherlock. It misses the higher point of "why" a killer decided to shoot that victim in the head to make him die.
This isn't even getting into the fact that iTunes DRM is the most liberal DRM scheme out there, so liberal that you never notice it's there (I certainly never have), can freely make as many backups of your music as you want (so the right to fair use backups is fulfilled), and so forth.
I had an iPod. It eventually broke. Instead of buying a new one, I got a Creative Vision M which I have been very happy with. Thankfully, I was not a fool while I had my iPod and so bought nothing from the iTunes music store. If I had, my entire music collection would currently be junk.
I'll absolutely never buy DRMed music. It is stupid. It is doubly stupid if you buy it from Apple. That music will all be junk the second you decide you want a new non-Apple MP3 player. I, like most people, and not eager to hand my balls into the hands of Apple from now until the end of time by making my music worthless bits if I ever decide to get a non-Apple MP3 player. If you have implicate faith in Apple from now until the end of time, go ahead and lock yourself into their proprietary DRM.
Newton's rules work well most of the time, but you really need relativity and quantum mechanics in this day and age. For astronomical work, Newton is roughly close, but using just his rules alone you will find inaccuracies and dramatically limit what you can learn from astronomy. If you want to plot a course to the moon, you can probably do it with just Newtonian rules. If you want to understand how old the universe is estimate sizes and distances of celestial objects, you really need more then what Newton as to offer.
Perhaps even more dramatic is what happens when you get very small. If you try and build a modern computer using Newtonian rules, you are going to quickly learn that Newton's laws completely fall to pieces. Except in a few rare cases, general relativity and Newtonian physics differ only by marginal amounts. When you get down into the atomic and sub-atomic world the difference is night and day. As far as Newton is concerned, on the scale of an atom reality completely breaks down. Stuff appears and reappears at random, gravity is so weak as to be almost meaningless, and you find that you can not predict the motion of ANYTHING using Newtonian physics. You REALLY need quantum mechanics if you want to work on the scale of atoms.
Now, do not take this for shitting on Newton. Newton did some absolutely awesome stuff, especially when you consider the time he lived in. Newton explained the world with a clarity that had never been seen before. Certainly, his explanations break down as you start to achieve extremes, but in most human affairs Newton's rules are still good enough. No one cracks out general relativity or quantum mechanics when they are building an airplane or car, but they certainly bring out some of Newton's old rules.
I dont see any reason for the 15-17% price difference at all (VAT already counted out) (Well even the income of the employees is lower than what they have to pay in the IS), except for pure greed.
So let me get this straight, you attribute the price difference to "pure greed"? I am going to take a wild swing and guess that you are not an economist. Look, it is very simple. Nintendo wants to reap the most profit it can in ALL regions. "Pure greed" is their motive no matter where they sell. They are not a non-profit company altruistically spreading merriment and cheer to the videogame fanatics of the world. They sell a product for a profit. Further, they sell that product for the highest profit they can achieve. They charge the price they charge in the US, Japan, and Britain because they think that is the most profitable price to sell at. They realize that the lower the price the sell for, the more they sell. The higher price they sell for, the less they sell. Somewhere there is an equilibrium where raising or lowering the price results less profit. In Britain, they apparently think that that equilibrium price is higher then in the US.
The real question is why does Nintendo think that selling in Britain at a higher price is a good idea? The answer isn't voodoo, magic, or the equally mystical answer of "pure orphan eating, baby burning, city pillaging greed". What is the answer? I don't know for sure, but I would likely guess it is regulatory cost. The EU in general has higher environmental standards then the US on electronics. Tougher regulations translate into higher prices. The EU also has stronger anti-import measures then the US that also could contribute to your higher price.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a book on economics. The world will seem a lot less malevolent and make for more sense if you do. I suggest reading The Hidden Order. It is economics 101 in a relativly easy to digest package with good examples. It exists somewhere between a pop economics book and a text book.
We've got the traditional encyclopedias on one end, and wikipedia on the other. Now we can go a bit in the middle and see what comes of it.
That is not really true for "real" research. In real research where you cite your sources you have the wikipedia existing well off the page where you don't actually cite it, standing just beside encyclopedias that you also don't cite. Encyclopedias are generally considered to NOT be scholarly sources, and wikipedias even less so.
I don't think wikipedias will ever be something you cite in a research paper. The real value of a wikipedia is in orienting yourself. Wikipedias are great at giving a quick and dirty run down of a topic. I work in a high tech field and run into stuff that I don't know anything about all of the time. While I don't use a Wikipedia as a resource for planning future experiments or for any deep understanding, they are great for getting a quick and dirty overview. If I need to go talk to an expert on some type of memory or semiconductor device, the Wikipedia can usually get it so that we at least speak roughly the same language. It doesn't give you instant expertise, but it certainly points you in the right direction.
I imagine academics use the Wikipedia in the same way I do. As a history researcher you might run across an event you have no knowledge of. Instead of going through the pain of finding a scholarly resource, you can instead hit up the Wikipedia and get a quick blow by blow of the event.
I love the Wikipedia, but it is NOT an authoritative source on anything. It is a way to answer simple questions without wasting hours in a library.
That said, I would love to have a more 'expert oriented' wikipedia. Bonus points if they actually do good citations instead of the usual hearsay that Wikipedia some times brings to the table.
He used to be the conservative demigod. What's changed, other than his approval ratings in the polls? Did he betray conservative principles, or maybe by adhering to them too closely he merely revealed their consequences?
Pass me some of what you are smoking. If you think that Bush has been adhering to conservative principles you must be smoking some the good stuff.
Bush in no way, shape, or form follows conservative ideals. The most you can say is that he is not a democrat. Conservative American ideals basically revolve around two things. They have a weak quasi-libertarian view of the economy and government size, and they have a Christian moral authoritarian view on social issues (i.e. sex, drugs, and rock and roll). Bush pretty much fails in all regards.
A libertarian would likely kill you in, um, self defense, if you told him that Bush's handling of the government size and power was even vaguely libertarian. Bush has spent enough to make the liberals step back and wonder if we REALLY need to spend that much.
Bush's economic policy has been pretty much a straight continuation of Clinton's, which is to say that it he is a center of the road globalizationist and certainly not a right wing radical of any sort. As far as his social policy has gone, he has done absolutely NOTHING in action other then to pay lip service to the right and support a few bills that were clearly not going to pass. Clinton, yes Clinton, had a far more social regressive policy with his "defense of marriage act". Bush is no crusading social conservative. Hell, his VP flatly rejects Bush's position on gay marriage and has a lesbian daughter who runs his campaigns.
The only thing that Bush has ever had going for him as far as conservatives are concerned is that 1) he isn't a liberal (this is the equivalent to democrats liking Kerry because he isn't Bush) and 2) he got a patriotic boost because of 9/11. As far as his policies go, he has done the polar opposite of what an isolationist, morally Christian, economically quasi-libertarian, "traditional" conservative would do.
Now, you could perhaps call Bush a neo-con which is very different from a traditional conservative. Funny enough, most of the founding neo-cons were actually at one point in their lives democrats. Neo-cons are not conservatives in any way. They are an entirely different beast. Neo-con beliefs revolve around foreign policy, not domestic policy. There are democrats that easily could be tossed into the neo-con camp, with Lieberman and Clinton (when he was the president) both easily fitting all neo-con ideals. Neo-cons are really a sub-faction that crosses party lines that should not be confused for conservatives. The only reason why neo-cons got any power at all was because they were the first to stand up and say "I told you so!" after 9/11 and already had a "solution" before anyone else.
They were not proposing US armed forces personnel actually fire the weapons. It is utterly and completely forbidden by the constitution for US armed forces (outside of the national guard) to deploy inside of any American city and conduct anything that could even vaguely be considered policing action against citizens. To give you an example of how seriously they take this, the US army flatly refused to deploy in New Orleans and return law and order despite the pleas of the mayor because it would have been a constitutional violation. Now, eventually the army did show up, but only carrying aid. Even this was delayed because they wanted to be sure that they could legally deploy in such a manner. They were utterly forbidden to take arms against any citizen, no matter what the reason. The US armed forces take their constitutional bounds VERY seriously.
In this particular case, they were advocating that the weapons be used in America first before handing them over to soldiers. They were advocating that the technology be handed over the police for them to use, not armed services personal use weapons of any sort against Americans.
People were really pissed off about the twin towers because of the symbolism, not the loss of life. I am not saying that Americans don't care about loss of life, just that the fact that 5000 people died isn't enough to really send them into a rage. If you were to chart American deaths per year, the year of 9/11 wouldn't even blip. 5000 deaths is a drop in the bucket next to more mundane things like heart attacks and cancer. So, the issue wasn't loss of life. It wasn't even financial. Sure, the twin towers held a lot of financial 'stuff', but most of it had backups and in the grand scheme of things it was just a financial pinprick against the titan that is the US economy.
What it really boiled down to was symbolism. The symbolism of 9/11 for most Americans was that they knocked down two ugly yet famous buildings. It wasn't really the buildings, it was more that the attack was very visible and successful that really sent Americans into a rage. As the world saw, once poke the bear enough to wake it up, it tends to go on a tearing rampage looking for a head to rip off.
Now, if the knocking over the twin towers can provoke the toppling of two nations, I would REALLY hate to see what knocking over t he Statue of Liberty would do. You need to remember that what sends Americans into a rage is the symbolism, not the real loss of life. Knocking over the Statue of Liberty would be the absolute most potent target you could possibly hit. If you flew a plane into the White House and killed the president, you would have an enraged America on your hands, but a sizable minority wouldn't really be all that pissed because they either dislike government (far right) or dislike the man in the house (far left). Knocking over Statue of Liberty on the other hand is attacking a symbol that has its own special positive meaning to everyone. You could effectively unite the Americans into a collective rage that would make 9/11 look like pocket change. Nations would fall.
Now you need to ask yourself why you might want to do this. This is the heart of terrorists' question. What is the point of terrorism? If the point is vengeance or pseudo-religious ritualistic suicide (i.e. it has no rational goal), then the consequences of such an attack probably are not a big deal. If on the other hand your attack is trying to achieve a political goal, then the next question is "what goal".
If the goal is to make the Americans surrender and leave the Islamic world alone, knocking out the Statue of Liberty or any other non-military target is a complete waste of time and utterly counterproductive. The American response will almost assuredly be the exact opposite of what you want. The Spanish might have seen the terrorist attack against them as punishment and seek to change their behavior by pulling out of Iraq to avoid future pain, but the Americans will almost assuredly do the opposite regardless of the party controlling the government. The more devastating the symbolism of the attack, the more violent the response. If you want to make the Americans leave some place, you are far better off to achieve a steady attrition of their soldiers stationed in a foreign land. The loss of American soldiers can make the Americans want to leave a place, but attacks upon their homeland are far more likely to achieve the exact opposite response.
So why attack such symbolic targets instead of military targets that might actually break the American will to continue fighting? Why reinvigorate and intensify the American will to lash out and fight? The reason is simple. If you get the Americans to lash out, they might very well lash out in a way that benefits you. The Americans can easily destroy any non-nuclear government that they please, but as they have shown with Iraq and Afghanistan, they are far less effective at setting up a stable replacement government. If your goal is to make more radical Islamist, provoking the Americans might be the exactly right thing to do. The Americans can stomp out existing Islamist hosti
I think you misunderstand what is being proposed. All that air force guy was saying was that if we are going to give soldiers 'non-lethal' weapons, they better damn well be non-lethal. The best way to prove that they are non-lethal is to be willing to use them on your own people. It isn't like they are going to go out and 'test' them on a random crowd that is getting rowdy. They are proposing that the non-lethal weapons be able to meet US standards for use by law enforcement. If after you go through the regulations that it takes to add a new weapon to the police arsenal (like tasers, tear gas, pepper guns, water hoses, ect), then you can hand them over to soldiers and tell them that they are non-lethal.
It isn't a bad idea. The air force is basically proposing that the burden of proof that the weapons are truly 'non-lethal' be set very high. This isn't the armed forces proposing that weapons testing be conducted on civilians. This is the armed forces proposing that before we let 20 year old kids run around with "non-lethal" microwave guns zapping Iraqis that they meet US standards for non-lethal. If they don't meet US standards of what a "non-lethal" weapon is, then we probably should not be blasting pissed off crowds in other nations with them.
My only complaint against the idea is that it is probably a little too conservative. Telling a bunch of 20 year old kids with guns to hold off a crowd of pissed off civilians with armed militia in their midst in a non-violent way is pretty damn hard. People get nervous when they get shot at, civilians be damned. Better to have something that is a step below a full auto-blast from an M16 into a crowd then only an M16.
Only if you're lucky enough to avoid the 00 on the roulette wheel of life. Unlike Abstinence, none of your methods exceed 99% effective rate- even when used in combination. And their side effects are much worse than you've been told- hormonal birth control and abortions have been shown to cause death at about 3 times the rate of pregnancy, and the condoms available at Planned Parenthood and free on college campuses were shown by Consumer Reports to have a dismal 65% failure rate.
Tisk tisk. Someone skipped their stats class to go to theology class. Using two forms of 99% birth control put your chance of birth control failure at 1 in 10,000. Assuming that your girlfriend in question is fertal 1 week out of 4, that further drops your chance to 1 in 40,000. Further, "failure" of a condom does not mean that you get a full load of semen blasted into your significant other. "Failure" means that it failed is a STD control device. It is rate of failure is actually much lower then 99% as a birth control device if it is properly used. Finally, there is the old stand by of simply aborting should the stars line up despite proper birth control usage.
There's this institution that solves all of the above, called Sacramental Marriage. You should check it out sometime.
Lets go over my check list and see what sacramental marriage solves.
Effective form of birth control? Hell no. It is in fact by far one of the worst forms of birth control. It actually tends to produce babies at an alarming rate. If you don't want babies and but do want sex, sacramental marriage is almost certainly NOT what you want.
Feeling like a looser for being a 35 year old virgin? I don't know about you, but if I had a single shot at selecting a single woman from the tiny pool of women that make up the number of people that want to enter into a sacramental marriage, I would take my time. Only an idiot would pledge their life to someone for the rest of their life on anything less then a few years of knowing that person. I would also be damn picky as it is supposidly a one shot deal. If during this selection process you are not allowed to live with or have sex with any woman whom you are dating, I could very easily see 35 year old virgins. Anyone who enters a sacrimental marriage when they are still relativly young is either very lucky, very stupid, or very horney.
No significant others? See above.
Compulsive masturbation? If I was still 35 and not getting any, I would probably have built up a very strong right arm.
A dramatic increase in dull and/or fanatically religious significant others? People that refuse to have sex until they are married make up a very small pool of people. Of these people, almost all are to some degree religious fanatics. Either that, or they are very boring. Either way, enterting into a sacrimental marriage will NOT solve this side effect.
Depression? I don't know about you, but if I was not getting any sex at all until I was married and I actually took getting married seriously to ensure that I am not miserable for the rest of my life, I would be pretty damn depressed.
After all, the best birth control I know of is Abstinence- this from the father of a three year old that we made the mistake of not introducing to the crib before 3 months.
While abstinence certainly drop the chance of accidental pregnancy to near zero, it also drops you chances to scoring to absolute zero. For most sane humans, this side effect can include damage to normal social life. People who have tried abstinence as a form of birth control have reported depression, compulsive masturbation, a dramatic increase in dull and/or fanatically religious significant others, no significant others, and feeling like a looser for being a 35 year old virgin.
I have found the best form of birth control is a combinatorial treatment that does NOT include abstinence. Liberal condom usage and/or birth control pills with abortions as a final backup has proven to be extremely effective to the point of rivaling abstinence. As an added bonus, these methods of birth control have been shown to have dramatically less side effects and result in far more play.
There are a variety of choices of birth control out there. Like any treatment plan where you have many options, I suggest giving them all a shot and deciding which one fits you the best. For catholic priests, the abstinence option has proven to be effective and provide minimal interference. For those of us who don't want kids yet don't feel like being 40 year old virgins, some of the other anti-pregnancy options might work better.
I am a depression immune person who lives with and dates a bipolar woman. I swear that almost every single friend of mine through my girlfriend has some form of depression or another. The biggest difference between me and them is that I don't get irrationally depressed for long periods of time. Everyone gets sad when their dog dies. Resistance to depression doesn't mean that you don't get frustrated or sad. If you take away these emotions you would probably cease to be a truly functional human. You need a little sadness and regret now and then to keep you functional in society and able to maintain human relationships. The big difference is the duration of the depression, the depth of the depression, and the level of tragedy it takes to invoke it.
A truly depressed person can be provoked into a feeling of uselessness over trivial or simply non-existent events. The depression can result in more then just a little remorse or sadness. They can want to kill themselves or refuse to do anything. Further, such depression can last far longer then is appropriate. If you are depression resistant on the other hand, you keep on pushing forward. You never get the "lay down and die" feeling. You can still be sad, frustrated, or remorseful, but such feelings are not so over powering that you can't do anything else
Personally, I applaud any good research into depression. Despite arguments to the contrary, depression IS an illness that is completely worthy of treatment. While depression can be invoked through events in one's life, some times (if not most of the time) it is a purely physical problem in the brain that deserves treatment like any other disease. That is not to imply that psychotherapy does not have its uses, but the belief that a depressed person can simply be talked out of a depression is utterly insane and down right dangerous for some. If all that is standing between happiness in a depressed person is a flipped chemical switch in the brain, they should have the option of getting that switch flipped. I appreciate the work of tortured artists as much as anyone, but I don't want to see my loved ones suffer or pull a Kurt Cobain just to keep my MP3 player filled.
Everyone that has been sued for copyright volitions has been sued for distribution, not for possession. There has been no case of anyone being sued because they downloaded music, only cases where they were sharing music. The very reason why this is done is because of this grey area of 'proof' of ownership. I am not saying that this is good or bad, just that it is a moot legal point because no one is sued for possession of material, only distribution.
If I want to do a movie on Vampires, should I have to pay someone? You mess Lessig's point. Culture by definition builds upon its past. Vampires, elves, bad ass action heroes, our concept of aliens, formulaic romantic comedies, guitars, a generic punk sound, a whiny emo sound, and all other pieces of "entertainment" are all "mashups" in one way or another. All of the above exist ONLY because of culture that they were built upon. None of the above have any meaning to a stone aged tribal person living in the rainforest. These are not concepts that spring magically from the human mind. These are concepts that have evolved in our culture. Lessig's point is that we are stunting culture by following back every creative idea to its source and asking permission before we use it.
If you had to go back and ask the originators punk if you could use their sound and they had an absolute veto over it, we might very well not have punk and all the other types of music that sprung from that branch in the musical tree. The same goes for more other examples. Today, you can merrily write about vampires without worry of a lawsuit, but if you try and write about another fictional villain, say a Star Wars Sith Lord, and you will find your ass sued into the ground. This SHOULD be troubling. Our ability to create new culture is being stunted by demanding that anyone wants to bud off of some other creative needs to ask the original authors permission. Instead of having an explosion of stories and mythos from worlds from our popular culture, we have tightly controlled and stunted versions.
Further, even the most pro-copyright minded person MUST see the insanity of copyrights that last CENTURIES. Lessig doesn't argue for an end to copyright. He argues for some sort of sanity in it. Giving people copyrights that exists well past their death and then some is crazy. Dead artists don't need their works protected. If you want to use a Robert Frost poem, you damn well should be able to. The guy has been dead for almost half of a centaury yet you can still find your ass sued if you post one of his poems on the Internet.
No matter what you think of copyright, you MUST agree that the current system is insane and needs fixing. Perhaps you might not want to take it as far as Lessig does, but you certainly must agree that a mean who died in 1949 doesn't need his work to continue to waste away under copyright protection.
I had the pleasure of seeing Lessig speak a year ago. If you ever have the chance to see this man, do so. Even if you hate his message, he is an absolute god when it comes to speaking and presenting. His style of presentation has earned its own title of the "Lessig" style of presentation.
While I am somewhat awed by Lessig's ability to present, my real admiration for him comes from how he has pursued his cause. Lessig argues for radical change in current laws. He is not the only person to argue for radical change. What makes Lessig different is that had has not only made attempts to work within law to bring about change, but he has gone even further and tried to implement what he advocates within a voluntary and completely legal manner without reliance on the force of government to enact the change that he seeks. Lots of people advocate some sort of radical change in society, but relatively few make a genuine attempt to bring about such change through methods other then complaining to the government to use the force of law.
The Creative Commons is an incredible accomplishment. While the CC is in no danger of displacing current media, it has certainly started to make a dent. Will the CC ever make a dent large enough for the average Joe to really sit up and take notice without legislative change? Perhaps not, but what it has done is create an ecosystem to explore the 'fair use' world that Lessig envisions. Even those who find the watering down of copyright power revolting can not honestly proclaim any sort of mal-intent from creating a way for artists who want to offer their works to the public domain a simple and easily identifiable way to do so.
I strongly encourage anyone who is even vaugly interested in this debate to check out Lessig's book, Free Culture. Keeping in tune with Lessig's philosophy on copyright, the book is freely available online. Some enterprising readers of the book also have a complete reading of the book in MP3 format. Check it out.
To argue that there is no genetic disposition towards intelligence is silly and defies even the simplest of logic. Savants, autistic, and mental retards are all born different. All of them have varied levels of "intelligence" with strengths and weaknesses. A savant for instance might be able to crunch numbers in a way that only a computer can match, yet refers to himself as "you" because he can't make the conceptual link that "you" is not a name and who "you" refers to depends upon the speaker. A savant might be utterly incapable of reading human emotions no matter how visibly they are displayed. On the other hand, someone born with Down syndrome can grasp basic grammar in a way that a savant might easily recognize when a person is sad or angry, but be unable to perform other mental functions that most of us find trivial, like basic math.
This is the old nature Vs nurture debate. Declaring that everything is nurture makes us feel warm and fuzzy because it exercises the ghosts of the vile eugenic "science" that led to the death of millions of people during World War II and it assures us that everything has a social answer. Advancements in neuroscience though have shown us that while nurture certainly matters, so does nature. Some people truly are born predisposed to varied levels of performance and dispositions on the basis of genetics alone. As the physiologist joke goes, "What is the best indicator that someone a man will develop schizophrenia? He has a schizophrenic twin."
Genes are probabilistic. Genetically identical twins, even ones separated at birth and raised in radically different environments, show shocking mental similarities. They are certainly two different people, but they have very strongly similar tendencies. Genes load the dice for sure, but we are still talking about dice. Further, there is an undeniable nurture component that strongly effects who we become. Despite this, we can't close our eyes to the fact that our minds are the products of evolution and variation because it makes us feel uncomfortable. There is likely no social cure for schizophrenia, autism, and some forms of depression, but there might very well genetic components that can point to a physical cure. We can't be afraid to look for genetic clues to our nature because we don't like the implications that some people are born with genetic leg up.
While the use of drugs is indeed a personal freedom issue the simple obstacle for me is that I would not exactly like a world were the majority of citizens are doped out.
Sorry fella, you already live in such a society. Unless you live in an Islamic theocracy, that vast majority of the people around you have easy access to mood enhancing drugs and use said drugs regularly. It is called alcohol. You can call it ethyl alcohol if that name makes it sound more like a "real" drug.
Alcohol is as much of a drug as any other drug. In fact, on the scale of drugs, it is probably one of the worst. It is absolutely lethal if you over dose, it is damaging to your body in low doses, it induces aggression in many people, and it destroys sound judgment. The only thing that keeps alcohol related deaths down compared to some drugs is that alcohol is made in a nice clean factory instead of some sketchy drug dealer's basement. If alcohol was made the same way illegal drugs are made (as it was during prohibition) you would find all the same problems that current illegal drug face in terms of purity and safety.
What would happen if the government legalized all drugs? Crime would plummet, police would have significantly more time to pursue real crimes, the prisons would empty, criminal organization would suddenly find that they are completely incapable of funding criminal activities, a handful of South American nation would become significantly more stable, and the number of drug related deaths would plummet. Drugs would be made in sanitary controlled ways by pharmaceutical companies and they would merrily compete to make the best non-addictive drug possible with the fewest side effects.
As to how society would change, other then a dramatic drop in crime and massive budget surpluses from the resulting savings in law enforcement, nothing much would change. People would still take drugs to recreate, they just might throw in some other drugs into the mix besides alcohol and caffeine. You would still get fired if you went to work, and alcoholics / drug addicts would still find themselves fucked when it comes to holding down a job. In other words, very little would change except a dramatic reduction in crime and government spending.
How about when you go to make a campaign speech and get arrested for not belonging to the republicrat party, like several of the presidential candidates in the last election?
Badnark and the Green party guy got arrested because they tried to make a speech at a place that was already being used for speeches. If they wanted to rant on the street corner instead of trying to get to a podium, they would not have been arrested. Don't get me wrong, I would love nothing more then to see the Greens and the Libertarians jump into a presidential debate, but you are over exaggerating when you say that they got arrested just for trying to make a speech. That is like say I got arrested just for swinging a knife around in the air and neglecting to mention that there was a person standing the spot I was swinging at.
As to how a non-republicrat wins, I have not the slightest clue. Personally, I think that what people fail to realize is that people are not truly that dissatisfied, which is what makes talk of "revolutions" silly. It would be one thing if the American people were really pissed off and felt that they were being violently repressed. Instead, most Americans feel slightly irritated and can't detect any real levels of repression in their lives (regardless if there is any or not).
This thread is getting too large to reply too, but let me state this simply. I don't disagree that something is rotten. I don't disagree that the system sucks. My contention is that it is purely OUR fault for the state of affairs. Democracy still works in the US. If a majority of the people that vote, vote for someone besides the two republicrats, that person wins. If a Libertarian, Green, or even one of those fruity as shit Constitutional party or Communist party guys truly won an election, the army would not step in to stop them. They would rightfully take power and that would be that.
Further, it isn't like there is a media black out. Sure, NBC might not cover the latest adventures of third party candidates, but you better believe that the Internet does. It just takes a few seconds to look up what they are doing and get yourself informed. The only people not being reached are the laziest 90% of Americans who are damn lazy.
The problem is us. The people are broken, not the system. I am not saying the system is perfect, but it certainly isn't stopping the people from rising up to reclaim whatever the fuck it is the people think they deserve. The people just don't give a shit.
Personally, I find the whole election process kind of like those stupid French Connection shirts. You know the ones I am talking about; the ones with the inane "Too busy to fcuk" logos on them. I look at those shirts and think "Man, some stupid corporation has managed smear their corporate name all over a shirt and convinced some idiot that he is trendy for wearing it." Then I think a little longer and stop feeling pissed off at the corporation, and instead feel pissed off at the idiot wearing the shirt. The corporation is a stupid mindless beast following the path of least resistance. The human is the one that should have realized that he is being a stupid tool for paying money to wear a billboard on his chest. Fuck the stupid humans.
I feel roughly the same about politics. Yeah, that guy elected is a jack ass. That said, we elected him. We could have easily elected someone else. Whose fault is it really? Do we blame the dumb bastard in office for his policies, or the stupid people that put him there? Personally, I blame the stupid people. We can overcome by spending 1 hour every couple of years in a voting booth yet we don't. Talk about fucking lazy and stuipid.