>>Good.. then don't have an abortion or terminate any of those embryos in your fridge. Leave the rest of us who have the responsibility for our own bodies or refrigerators alone.
Sure, we're all grown up moral relativists here -- I'll leave your bodies and refrigerators alone if you leave the bodies in my refrigerator alone.
>>"Should" is not "is". Proclaiming something as fact because you want it to be true, not because you have found it to be true is just deluding yourself and others.
The difference between is and ought is a famous one.
There's a number of various ways to discuss the topic, such as that science only deals with what is, and not with what ought to be, so it is illogical to think that science should be responsible for answering the latter sort of questions, but in this case I'll just answer the question directly: Humans should be, and are, more than just collections of atoms. There is meaning in the ordering of things, as entropy and information theory tell us -- a signal sent down an ethernet cable could be a meaningless time series of voltage potentials, as you suggest, or they could have meaning. Ordered properly, things can have a greater meaning than the ordering of their atoms or the time series of voltage potentials -- it could be an email, or a person. Hence, there is a distinguishable difference between the chaotic and the ordered, and it's logical for us to make ethical arguments making use of that difference.
>>Oh.. I know. Some chose an arbitrary point when an egg and sperm meet to decide what is human.
Seems a very reasonable threshold to me -- gametes have only half the chromosomes needed to make a person. But once you have a sperm and egg together, and bake it at 98.6 degrees for 9 months, you have yourself a baby. The threshold of fertilization makes a lot more sense than any arbitrary date after that point. Once you have a genetically complete human, you have a potential human life -- with advances in incubator technology, eventually we'll be able to grow a complete baby using nothing more than a fertilized egg (and then train them to either pilot battlemechs or become bounty hunters, but that's beside the point), which means that a scientific experiment that destroys such an embryo has destroyed a viable human life.
As you can imagine, I have very serious ethical issues with treating humans "Within X days of fertilization" as science experiments. Humans should be more than a collection of atoms; in fact, this is one of the biggest problems I have with the philosophies of materialism and scientism.
Nonsense. People care a great deal about privacy. The reason why you don't see this come into conflict with CCTV is because there really is no conflict. You are deeply confused about what privacy is. You don't have privacy when you are walking down the street in a public place. Everybody can see you. People can follow you around and watch what you do if they wish. Cameras don't take away anything, you never had privacy in a public place to begin with. Privacy is more than just being free while inside of your own house. Privacy, in general, means the government keeping its nose out of the people's businesses.
Perhaps you're right -- perhaps we need a better word than "Privacy" when talking about these things, since "Privacy" seems to only imply rights while in a public space. When I posted the previous article on Slashdot on this topic, half the responses against it were by people living in the UK saying they had plenty of "Privacy" because the cameras could only track them to their front door.
>>The Colonists rebelled because they were being taxed at a two percent rate.
You forget that the colonists actually were paying taxes (at substantial rates) to their colony governments -- they just weren't paying any to the crown. The primary taxes of the day were property taxes, IIRC, so a 2% tax rate doesn't really mean anything.
This fact is often lost in the meme you repeated that they "only were being taxed at 2%".
As I recall, they were just asked to pay tax to fund the struggle against revolutionary France, which later became the struggle against Napoleon.
The American Revolution was because of "taxes to fund the struggle against revolutionary France"??
You've been reading Howard Zinn, haven't you?
Let alone the fact that the taxes were to pay off the debt from the French and Indian War, the French Revolution came about as a *result of* the American Revolution, not before it.
The real reason for the rebellion was that the settlers wanted to murder all the native inhabitants and steal their land. Britain, in a life-or-death struggle with France, could not afford to provide the troops which would be needed when the natives retaliated, and tried to keep the peace by forbidding the settlers to expand west of the Allegheny mountains.
Definitely sounding like a Zinny. The answer is: sort of. The reason the Americans participated in the French and Indian war was to gain access to France's lands, which were in areas that America did want to expand into. After the war, the colonists bought up this land in great amounts, including Washington and Jefferson, who lost $10,000 pounds or so each when the King arbitrarily (to their perspective) ruled that the land would be forever Indian territory. While I like the fact that the King was willing to make peace with the Indians (and was willing to enforce it even), the fact remains that Americans fought and died in a major war and got nothing for it. Worse, the British had the gall to ask them to pay for a war that screwed them over (again from the colonists' perspective).
But the fact is, the oppression the British did to America was actually fairly similar to the camera system - Boston was a hotbed of unrest, so the flooded the city with soldiers so that they could watch all the comings and goings of the populace. The Quartering Act was not because they couldn't afford to build barracks, but so that they could keep an eye on people.
London is the most surveilled city in the world, so my usage was correct, even though I do admit to intentionally confusing the term. I'm Welsh, Scottish, and Irish myself, so I'm well aware of the difference. =)
Well said sir. And, as the article explains -- far more even handedly than slashdot's biased summary -- the reason that CCTV footage doesn't help solve crimes is because no-one ever looks at it.
Indeed, my summary was biased. Because I do, in fact, thing that widespread state surveillance is a Bad Thing(tm). It actually confuses me that some people would actually vote to have a government install a system that catches the average citizen on camera 300 times a day. Or even approve of it in such large numbers.
It's a cultural difference between America and the UK, I've noticed. Americans react with horror to the notion of letting the government put up millions of cameras around the country to monitor the populace. Brits, apparently, think governmental surveillance to be a good thing.
>>Yes folks, slashdot's latest evidence that the UK is a surveillance society is a report that states that no-one ever looks at the CCTV footage. But our summarisers have never let the facts get in the way of a good knee jerk.
Oh, people watch the cameras, certainly. It's just not effective stopping crimes which happen around corners from the cameras. So the citizenry has placed itself under governmental surveillance for a 3% increase in catching people who commit street crime.
The UK citizenry has spent billions of pounds, and conceded a very major civil liberty to its government, in order to get a system that doesn't work -- and without much of a fight. That's what I consider to be the most troubling.
In America, 70% of people oppose holding the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay without trial. In England, there seems to be, on the contrary, complacency or pride in losing fundamental civil liberties.
>>Except in small towns where fines becomes a revenue source.
This is one of my main objections to automated justice. Does anyone actually think that when a city begins to rely on red light cameras to "deter" traffic offenders that the accused will get a fair trial? I've gotten bullshit tickets in podunk towns, too, and know that the judges will almost never rule according to justice -- I took one to court when the cop swore under oath two wildly different speeds he "observed" me at, which the judge just sort of conveniently ignored.
With red light cams and other forms of automated justice, it eliminates the discretion that is the foundation of our legal and justice system. Worse, when there's badly engineered cams, and the legal system upholds them, then you have an injustice in place.
My father got a bullshit ticket for running a red light -- but the only photos the camera took were X and Y seconds after he crossed the line and the light turned red. The camera company did a simple linear interpolation between X and Y to conclude that he had been on the wrong side of the line when the light turned red. My father pointed out that it was making the very flawed assumption that speed stays constant through an intersection, and doesn't take into consideration acceleration (as most people do when approaching a red light). He offered to explain the math to the judge, who said, quote, "I don't care" and upheld the ticket, also stating: "Even if you're innocent here, you probably ran a red light somewhere else."
About a year later, a large lawsuit hit San Diego for this and other dirty tricks the city was doing (such as reducing the time spent in yellow lights to the legal minimum in order to catch more people on the red light cams) and a judge ordered them all turned off. My dad didn't get his three hundred dollars back though.
>>Something tells me that you don't know what you are talking about. A lot of people in UK are very happy with the cameras, and in some places the locals themselves ask for them to be introduced.
To me, this is the bigger problem. The citizenry in the UK are so inured to the pervasive surveillance that they don't see anything wrong with it. To an American like me visiting the UK, and having a police camera tracking me while walking around a plaza eating an ice-cream cone, is an amazing cultural shock. It's literally incomprehensible that a citizenry would want the government observing all public spaces - I think it has to do with a fundamentally different way that Americans view government than the brits.
While America is taking baby steps toward creating a UK system, at least here there is more resistance to the idea, and several courts (including the supreme court in my city) have struck them down as unconstitutional.
I can't imagine a situation in which I'd ever vote for blanketing America with CCTVs so the government can keep tabs on what is going on. This is regardless of cost and effectiveness, neither one of which the British system succeeds very well at.
>>Just what everyone in the world was clamoring for: games for their camera.
I have had CHDK installed on my A620 for a while now, mainly so that I can use it to do exposure bracketing so that I can take HDR photos automatically (using Photomatix Pro to piece them together).
But -- while hanging out at Tahoe with some buddies of mine -- we started talking about Nethack. Without saying another word, I clicked on my camera, turned on CHDK Sokoban, and handed it to a friend of mine, who was duly impressed.
That's what hardware hacking is all about, kids - impressing your nerdy friends.
>>1) Be sure to enable whatever idle tech your motherboard/processor supports (speedstep, cool'n'quiet) so that it automatically slows down the CPU and power consumption when not under load.
Which doesn't work with overclocking on most mobos.
>>2) Try undervolting, use stability tests to find the lowest voltage your particular CPU can use, rather than simply using the default.
Which doesn't work with overclocking on most setups. OCing usually requires you to raise the voltage.
>>3) If your motherboard/processor comes with some software that lets you configure the clock speed/voltage on-the-fly, go ahead and test stability under different settings and save those configurations and use them when appropriately. I'd add that most video cards have the same type of software these days -- go ahead and overclock them when you're gaming, and be sure to slow them back down when you're done.
Sure there is. Or, if you're uncomfortable about how we apply labels to things, we can count how many atoms of various types are in my room, and then we can say I have 0 atoms of unnilhexium, quite precisely.
I'm not interested in semantic games - I consider names to be references to real objects in the same way that pointers are references to objects in code. They are not the same thing as the object, but they do share a certain relation, are useful, and point at the real object.
I have precisely 0 Jersey Cows in my room right now.
That said, your arguments mirror that of fuzzy logicians. I'd recommend Fuzzy Thinking by Bart Kosko to think more about the relation of math to the real world, and the imperfection of mapping the real world to math, even though he tends to make the mistake of assuming the truth value of any quantity in the real world is always (0..1) not [0..1] as it should me. I could quite easily not have a single atom of unnilhexium in my room right now.
What would it tell me about the future if logical positivism was true or not?
Suppose I had a definitive answer if it was bullshit or not. What would it allow me to do that I couldn't before? What could I predict? What would I gain?
Nothing, nothing, and nothing.
It's meaningless; merely a matter of philosophy, and people having too much time on their hands.
Oh, and the correct answer is that logicial positivism is "self-contradictory, and thus cannot be true".
That's the point of regulations. Or rather, why large businesses oftentimes support gov't regulation - to squeeze small businesses out so that the large corporations, who can hire people to take care of tedious things like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, monthly W-2 Payroll Withholdings, etc. I went crosseyed trying to handle all the payroll and taxes for a small corporation, and even with professionals doing it for us (costing $500/year for payroll, $1000/year for taxes), it's *still* a massive hassle. Guess who's responsible when Paychex sends out 1099s -- but instead of sending 1099s, majorly fucks up and issues checks for the amount that should be on the 1099? Hint: not Paychex.
Due to friction / barriers to entry, it's very difficult to profitably run a small S Corp on less than six digits a year.
While you always hear some left-wing people complaining about large corporations, the highly regulated environments found in socialist countries are very favorable to the large companies at the expense of the small. If you contrast the number of top-100 corporations in 1950 in France and the US vs. the ones still around decades later, the majority of the US firms had vanished, but the majority in France were still around.
>>The oil industry *doesn't earn a dime from coal power*.
No, but the oil industry is threatened by the coal industry. If nuclear replaced coal, then the price of coal would plumment, making oil liquefication extremely cheap.
I'm halfway convinced the mindless reaction against nuclear power is secretly funded by the oil companies. Nuclear reactors are safer, cheaper, and *produce less radiation than coal power plants*. In fact, they produce no radiation, but you wouldn't know that from all the hysteria over the sites.
Some rich guys got together in my city to build a nuclear reactor (woot!) but California shot them down -- it's illegal to build nuclear reactors in California. And then the same people bitch that we have rolling blackouts.
While the religious basis of the Barbary pirates' acts is contentious (as is Washington's supposed insistence that the U.S. is a specifically Christian nation), I'd highly recommend reading up about the Barbary Wars in London's Victory in Tripoli . Most Americans don't learn much about these skirmishes in school, since the usual course is just to skip from the American Revolution straight to the War of 1812 when covering wars. That's a pity, because the fight against the Barbary pirates was a big part of shaping the U.S. military into what it is today. It's not for nothing that the Marine's song references the shores of Tripoli (the Halls of Montezuma line is also a sadly forgotten episode).
Yeah, I highly recommend to anyone to read up on this episode -- the Barbary pirates were one of the major issues facing the early presidents after Washington. Now that the new republic was independent, it no longer received protection for its ships (England paid protection money to the pirates, and American ships were included in the package deal), so it had to figure out if it wanted to pay the pirates off (indefinitely) or to go to war with them. Or make use of them in international warfare, as England and France did (they'd go to war and pay the pirates to attack the ships of the other countries). Our earliest post-Revolution heroes come from these conflicts (Stephen Decatur, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Decatur).
There was a religious element to the Barbary elements, as there was a Christian element to the founding of the Republic. It's certainly not as cut and dry as people try to make it out (on both issues). For example, one of the more famous Barbary pirates was a Dutch guy, who was a Christian. But the pirates justified their actions in part because they were preying on infidels, not the true believers. Likewise, the Republic was founded by a variety of people who ranged from Congregationalists (Puritans) to Deists (many of whom didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus). So you can't say it was explicitly one way or another -- the treaty with Algiers talked about the US as not being an explicitly Christian nation, but 1) It was a diplomatic treaty with an Islamic country and 2) Other documents do talk about the Christian roots of the US.
Ugh, I'd avoid a LA school at all costs. You just won't learn the level of tech you need to be a true CS nerd. Only go there if you're looking for chixxors.
BTW, if you're doing CS 20/7, sorry but you're either lying, incompetent, or doing something wrong. I got mainly As in my CS classes, and sure, pulled some late night projects and got tired from time to time, but if you do that so often your health is in decline, there's something wrong, and it's probably not the program. I had plenty of time for video games, martial arts, dating, hanging out with friends, illegally wiring my apartment building for ethernet, and other craziness.
I think the trouble is that most people get in a sort of mindset where they won't let themselves have fun. My fiancee (finishing pharmacy school) will lock herself up in her apartment when she's in crash-study mode, but when observing her, she still spent just as much time goofing off (watching Youtube, checking emails, etc.) as when she's in normal-study mode, but because she was locked in her apartment in a siege mentality 24/7, she'd get extremely nervous and stressed out by the end of it.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Good .. then don't have an abortion or terminate any of those embryos in your fridge. Leave the rest of us who have the responsibility for our own bodies or refrigerators alone.
Sure, we're all grown up moral relativists here -- I'll leave your bodies and refrigerators alone if you leave the bodies in my refrigerator alone.
>>"Should" is not "is". Proclaiming something as fact because you want it to be true, not because you have found it to be true is just deluding yourself and others.
The difference between is and ought is a famous one.
There's a number of various ways to discuss the topic, such as that science only deals with what is, and not with what ought to be, so it is illogical to think that science should be responsible for answering the latter sort of questions, but in this case I'll just answer the question directly:
Humans should be, and are, more than just collections of atoms. There is meaning in the ordering of things, as entropy and information theory tell us -- a signal sent down an ethernet cable could be a meaningless time series of voltage potentials, as you suggest, or they could have meaning. Ordered properly, things can have a greater meaning than the ordering of their atoms or the time series of voltage potentials -- it could be an email, or a person. Hence, there is a distinguishable difference between the chaotic and the ordered, and it's logical for us to make ethical arguments making use of that difference.
>>Oh .. I know. Some chose an arbitrary point when an egg and sperm meet to decide what is human.
Seems a very reasonable threshold to me -- gametes have only half the chromosomes needed to make a person. But once you have a sperm and egg together, and bake it at 98.6 degrees for 9 months, you have yourself a baby. The threshold of fertilization makes a lot more sense than any arbitrary date after that point. Once you have a genetically complete human, you have a potential human life -- with advances in incubator technology, eventually we'll be able to grow a complete baby using nothing more than a fertilized egg (and then train them to either pilot battlemechs or become bounty hunters, but that's beside the point), which means that a scientific experiment that destroys such an embryo has destroyed a viable human life.
As you can imagine, I have very serious ethical issues with treating humans "Within X days of fertilization" as science experiments. Humans should be more than a collection of atoms; in fact, this is one of the biggest problems I have with the philosophies of materialism and scientism.
I think the fluorescent glowing embryo is already a human case mod.
^public^private^
Nonsense. People care a great deal about privacy. The reason why you don't see this come into conflict with CCTV is because there really is no conflict. You are deeply confused about what privacy is. You don't have privacy when you are walking down the street in a public place. Everybody can see you. People can follow you around and watch what you do if they wish. Cameras don't take away anything, you never had privacy in a public place to begin with.
Privacy is more than just being free while inside of your own house. Privacy, in general, means the government keeping its nose out of the people's businesses.
Perhaps you're right -- perhaps we need a better word than "Privacy" when talking about these things, since "Privacy" seems to only imply rights while in a public space. When I posted the previous article on Slashdot on this topic, half the responses against it were by people living in the UK saying they had plenty of "Privacy" because the cameras could only track them to their front door.
>>The Colonists rebelled because they were being taxed at a two percent rate.
You forget that the colonists actually were paying taxes (at substantial rates) to their colony governments -- they just weren't paying any to the crown. The primary taxes of the day were property taxes, IIRC, so a 2% tax rate doesn't really mean anything.
This fact is often lost in the meme you repeated that they "only were being taxed at 2%".
As I recall, they were just asked to pay tax to fund the struggle against revolutionary France, which later became the struggle against Napoleon.
The American Revolution was because of "taxes to fund the struggle against revolutionary France"??
You've been reading Howard Zinn, haven't you?
Let alone the fact that the taxes were to pay off the debt from the French and Indian War, the French Revolution came about as a *result of* the American Revolution, not before it.
The real reason for the rebellion was that the settlers wanted to murder all the native inhabitants and steal their land. Britain, in a life-or-death struggle with France, could not afford to provide the troops which would be needed when the natives retaliated, and tried to keep the peace by forbidding the settlers to expand west of the Allegheny mountains.
Definitely sounding like a Zinny. The answer is: sort of. The reason the Americans participated in the French and Indian war was to gain access to France's lands, which were in areas that America did want to expand into. After the war, the colonists bought up this land in great amounts, including Washington and Jefferson, who lost $10,000 pounds or so each when the King arbitrarily (to their perspective) ruled that the land would be forever Indian territory. While I like the fact that the King was willing to make peace with the Indians (and was willing to enforce it even), the fact remains that Americans fought and died in a major war and got nothing for it. Worse, the British had the gall to ask them to pay for a war that screwed them over (again from the colonists' perspective).
But the fact is, the oppression the British did to America was actually fairly similar to the camera system - Boston was a hotbed of unrest, so the flooded the city with soldiers so that they could watch all the comings and goings of the populace. The Quartering Act was not because they couldn't afford to build barracks, but so that they could keep an eye on people.
>>i also see your "homepage" has been suspended just like your credability with that oh so witless retort
Hey, thanks for reminding me to update it to www.customtf.org.
>>mixed them up intentionally?
Believe it or not, us Welsh/Irish/Scottish people take amusement in such things. I do it all the time with my friends in the UK.
Have a stone of scone with some tea, and calm yourself down, laddie.
London is the most surveilled city in the world, so my usage was correct, even though I do admit to intentionally confusing the term. I'm Welsh, Scottish, and Irish myself, so I'm well aware of the difference. =)
Well said sir. And, as the article explains -- far more even handedly than slashdot's biased summary -- the reason that CCTV footage doesn't help solve crimes is because no-one ever looks at it.
Indeed, my summary was biased. Because I do, in fact, thing that widespread state surveillance is a Bad Thing(tm). It actually confuses me that some people would actually vote to have a government install a system that catches the average citizen on camera 300 times a day. Or even approve of it in such large numbers.
It's a cultural difference between America and the UK, I've noticed. Americans react with horror to the notion of letting the government put up millions of cameras around the country to monitor the populace. Brits, apparently, think governmental surveillance to be a good thing.
>>Yes folks, slashdot's latest evidence that the UK is a surveillance society is a report that states that no-one ever looks at the CCTV footage. But our summarisers have never let the facts get in the way of a good knee jerk.
Oh, people watch the cameras, certainly. It's just not effective stopping crimes which happen around corners from the cameras. So the citizenry has placed itself under governmental surveillance for a 3% increase in catching people who commit street crime.
The UK citizenry has spent billions of pounds, and conceded a very major civil liberty to its government, in order to get a system that doesn't work -- and without much of a fight. That's what I consider to be the most troubling.
In America, 70% of people oppose holding the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay without trial.
In England, there seems to be, on the contrary, complacency or pride in losing fundamental civil liberties.
>>Except in small towns where fines becomes a revenue source.
This is one of my main objections to automated justice. Does anyone actually think that when a city begins to rely on red light cameras to "deter" traffic offenders that the accused will get a fair trial? I've gotten bullshit tickets in podunk towns, too, and know that the judges will almost never rule according to justice -- I took one to court when the cop swore under oath two wildly different speeds he "observed" me at, which the judge just sort of conveniently ignored.
With red light cams and other forms of automated justice, it eliminates the discretion that is the foundation of our legal and justice system. Worse, when there's badly engineered cams, and the legal system upholds them, then you have an injustice in place.
My father got a bullshit ticket for running a red light -- but the only photos the camera took were X and Y seconds after he crossed the line and the light turned red. The camera company did a simple linear interpolation between X and Y to conclude that he had been on the wrong side of the line when the light turned red. My father pointed out that it was making the very flawed assumption that speed stays constant through an intersection, and doesn't take into consideration acceleration (as most people do when approaching a red light). He offered to explain the math to the judge, who said, quote, "I don't care" and upheld the ticket, also stating: "Even if you're innocent here, you probably ran a red light somewhere else."
About a year later, a large lawsuit hit San Diego for this and other dirty tricks the city was doing (such as reducing the time spent in yellow lights to the legal minimum in order to catch more people on the red light cams) and a judge ordered them all turned off. My dad didn't get his three hundred dollars back though.
It was hardly ignorant. I mix up the terms intentionally to tweak the noses of my friends in the UK.
(I'm part Welsh, part Scottish and part Irish myself. But no whining nancy boy.)
>>Something tells me that you don't know what you are talking about. A lot of people in UK are very happy with the cameras, and in some places the locals themselves ask for them to be introduced.
To me, this is the bigger problem. The citizenry in the UK are so inured to the pervasive surveillance that they don't see anything wrong with it. To an American like me visiting the UK, and having a police camera tracking me while walking around a plaza eating an ice-cream cone, is an amazing cultural shock. It's literally incomprehensible that a citizenry would want the government observing all public spaces - I think it has to do with a fundamentally different way that Americans view government than the brits.
While America is taking baby steps toward creating a UK system, at least here there is more resistance to the idea, and several courts (including the supreme court in my city) have struck them down as unconstitutional.
I can't imagine a situation in which I'd ever vote for blanketing America with CCTVs so the government can keep tabs on what is going on. This is regardless of cost and effectiveness, neither one of which the British system succeeds very well at.
>>Just what everyone in the world was clamoring for: games for their camera.
I have had CHDK installed on my A620 for a while now, mainly so that I can use it to do exposure bracketing so that I can take HDR photos automatically (using Photomatix Pro to piece them together).
But -- while hanging out at Tahoe with some buddies of mine -- we started talking about Nethack. Without saying another word, I clicked on my camera, turned on CHDK Sokoban, and handed it to a friend of mine, who was duly impressed.
That's what hardware hacking is all about, kids - impressing your nerdy friends.
I've built 4 machines over the last couple years, and all of them required Cool N'Quiet to be disabled in order to overclock.
And yeah, it's pretty impractical to set a voltage that will work for normal load, but crash your system if you load it.
>>1) Be sure to enable whatever idle tech your motherboard/processor supports (speedstep, cool'n'quiet) so that it automatically slows down the CPU and power consumption when not under load.
Which doesn't work with overclocking on most mobos.
>>2) Try undervolting, use stability tests to find the lowest voltage your particular CPU can use, rather than simply using the default.
Which doesn't work with overclocking on most setups. OCing usually requires you to raise the voltage.
>>3) If your motherboard/processor comes with some software that lets you configure the clock speed/voltage on-the-fly, go ahead and test stability under different settings and save those configurations and use them when appropriately. I'd add that most video cards have the same type of software these days -- go ahead and overclock them when you're gaming, and be sure to slow them back down when you're done.
Which is completely impractical.
>>There's no such real thing as "0 Jersey Cows"
Sure there is. Or, if you're uncomfortable about how we apply labels to things, we can count how many atoms of various types are in my room, and then we can say I have 0 atoms of unnilhexium, quite precisely.
I'm not interested in semantic games - I consider names to be references to real objects in the same way that pointers are references to objects in code. They are not the same thing as the object, but they do share a certain relation, are useful, and point at the real object.
I have precisely 0 Jersey Cows in my room right now.
That said, your arguments mirror that of fuzzy logicians. I'd recommend Fuzzy Thinking by Bart Kosko to think more about the relation of math to the real world, and the imperfection of mapping the real world to math, even though he tends to make the mistake of assuming the truth value of any quantity in the real world is always (0..1) not [0..1] as it should me. I could quite easily not have a single atom of unnilhexium in my room right now.
What would it tell me about the future if logical positivism was true or not?
Suppose I had a definitive answer if it was bullshit or not. What would it allow me to do that I couldn't before? What could I predict? What would I gain?
Nothing, nothing, and nothing.
It's meaningless; merely a matter of philosophy, and people having too much time on their hands.
Oh, and the correct answer is that logicial positivism is "self-contradictory, and thus cannot be true".
That's the point of regulations. Or rather, why large businesses oftentimes support gov't regulation - to squeeze small businesses out so that the large corporations, who can hire people to take care of tedious things like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, monthly W-2 Payroll Withholdings, etc. I went crosseyed trying to handle all the payroll and taxes for a small corporation, and even with professionals doing it for us (costing $500/year for payroll, $1000/year for taxes), it's *still* a massive hassle. Guess who's responsible when Paychex sends out 1099s -- but instead of sending 1099s, majorly fucks up and issues checks for the amount that should be on the 1099? Hint: not Paychex.
Due to friction / barriers to entry, it's very difficult to profitably run a small S Corp on less than six digits a year.
While you always hear some left-wing people complaining about large corporations, the highly regulated environments found in socialist countries are very favorable to the large companies at the expense of the small. If you contrast the number of top-100 corporations in 1950 in France and the US vs. the ones still around decades later, the majority of the US firms had vanished, but the majority in France were still around.
>>The oil industry *doesn't earn a dime from coal power*.
No, but the oil industry is threatened by the coal industry. If nuclear replaced coal, then the price of coal would plumment, making oil liquefication extremely cheap.
I'm halfway convinced the mindless reaction against nuclear power is secretly funded by the oil companies. Nuclear reactors are safer, cheaper, and *produce less radiation than coal power plants*. In fact, they produce no radiation, but you wouldn't know that from all the hysteria over the sites.
Some rich guys got together in my city to build a nuclear reactor (woot!) but California shot them down -- it's illegal to build nuclear reactors in California. And then the same people bitch that we have rolling blackouts.
Yeah, I highly recommend to anyone to read up on this episode -- the Barbary pirates were one of the major issues facing the early presidents after Washington. Now that the new republic was independent, it no longer received protection for its ships (England paid protection money to the pirates, and American ships were included in the package deal), so it had to figure out if it wanted to pay the pirates off (indefinitely) or to go to war with them. Or make use of them in international warfare, as England and France did (they'd go to war and pay the pirates to attack the ships of the other countries). Our earliest post-Revolution heroes come from these conflicts (Stephen Decatur, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Decatur).
There was a religious element to the Barbary elements, as there was a Christian element to the founding of the Republic. It's certainly not as cut and dry as people try to make it out (on both issues). For example, one of the more famous Barbary pirates was a Dutch guy, who was a Christian. But the pirates justified their actions in part because they were preying on infidels, not the true believers. Likewise, the Republic was founded by a variety of people who ranged from Congregationalists (Puritans) to Deists (many of whom didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus). So you can't say it was explicitly one way or another -- the treaty with Algiers talked about the US as not being an explicitly Christian nation, but 1) It was a diplomatic treaty with an Islamic country and 2) Other documents do talk about the Christian roots of the US.
Ugh, I'd avoid a LA school at all costs. You just won't learn the level of tech you need to be a true CS nerd. Only go there if you're looking for chixxors.
BTW, if you're doing CS 20/7, sorry but you're either lying, incompetent, or doing something wrong. I got mainly As in my CS classes, and sure, pulled some late night projects and got tired from time to time, but if you do that so often your health is in decline, there's something wrong, and it's probably not the program. I had plenty of time for video games, martial arts, dating, hanging out with friends, illegally wiring my apartment building for ethernet, and other craziness.
I think the trouble is that most people get in a sort of mindset where they won't let themselves have fun. My fiancee (finishing pharmacy school) will lock herself up in her apartment when she's in crash-study mode, but when observing her, she still spent just as much time goofing off (watching Youtube, checking emails, etc.) as when she's in normal-study mode, but because she was locked in her apartment in a siege mentality 24/7, she'd get extremely nervous and stressed out by the end of it.