Ah yes, the 'atheist religion' defense. Well played, sir! If you make every negative thing in the world a religion, it's easy to talk about how religions are so negative. It's not the militant atheism that caused the French and Russians to murder clergy, it's the atheist religion! Reject religion! Embrace atheism! _ If that sounds circular to you, it's because it is. =)
>>And people don't like changes, but the truth is, Ribbon is much better interface.
Eehhhhh... no.
It's been out for how long? And people still hunt around when they want to find something. 'Insert Table' is on one ribbon. 'Insert Table of Figures' is on another, and so on.
The old interface somehow managed to pack shortcuts for all of the commonly used operations onto a floating toolbar. Now we have 8 of them, plus the stupid button menu and floating save/undo/redo toolbar.
People could find things much faster in the old version than the new. The only reason they switched to ribbons was for the live preview feature, which, while sometimes useful, is not worth sacrificing the old UI of Word over.
None of them were religious, then, or more to the point killed people because of their deeply-held religious beliefs. Hitler, I guess, killed people because of THEIR religion, bit making that argument would be a weird version of Blaming the Victim.
>>Religion is one of, if not the biggest causes of war and violence.
Urban legend. Stop spreading it.
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Genghis Khan are the biggest murderers in history. None of them were Christians (though Hitler adopted appearances of it), three of them were socialists.
>>People were fucking burned alive for thought-crime - belonging, or merely being accused, to another religion or to none.
I won't say never, but I will say rarely, did Christianity do this. The Spanish Inquisition, which you're probably thinking of here, was a secular inquisition, done against the mandates of the church.
By contrast, the French Revolution, which was explicitly atheistic and very unforgiving of "thought crime" massacred thousands of people for their beliefs.
Any person can build a recording studio in their house, but all the music you hear on the radio is still professionally edited and marketed, no?
Think about the sad fact that most (not all!) Indie bands bust their asses making music, touring, and doing promotions *to get signed with a major label*.
Fanfiction.net does all this and more. Stories get rated, authors can attract alpha readers and editors if they're good, and people can leave feedback in comment threads for each story.
>>Here in NYC, the NYPD already has a licensing program for "official press". If you start asking a cop tough questions, they're liable to ask for your license. They also get priority seating in courtrooms.
Perhaps more relevant for nerds, here in San Diego, Comicon (that I ran a portion of for a number of years) had issues with the number of people claiming to be journalists to get free badges to the otherwise sold out show. So they instituted a journalist verification process that tried to make sure you were a "real" journalist (which includes TV reporters, magazine authors, bloggers, etc.) and not just some random person trying to get a free badge. A friend of mine writes for the Latino Review (which isn't a small outfit) and even he had to jump through some hoops to get his badge last year.
>>Every time I think Peta can't go any further off the deep end, they top themselves.
Actually, more to the point on war gaming, they directly protested *the killing of a rat* in the Battlefield series because it might, lead to violence against humans.
>>A national army (let's say Italy) could attack a given game that would allow players to play Italian soldiers and see them promoted for senseless killing, despite international laws violation.
>>but for some reason their home markets don't seem to be interested in reusing the old fuel stockpiles
Some reason? We have a ban on waste reprocessing here in America.
The same people that scream that there is no use for nuclear waste (http://www.wagingpeace.org/menu/issues/nuclear-energy-&-waste/nuclear-energy-fact-sheet.htm) also scream that we shouldn't be able to burn up the waste. Oh, and we can't store it either.
*That's* why we're in such a crazy situation, because we've let crazy people write the laws.
The problem with TV is the cost to get what I want. My FiOS TV costs half of my $200 Verizon Bill (Internet and Phone are also on it). Which isn't much value to me, but is to my wife and son. I watch 3 shows regularly: Daily Show w/Jon Stewart, Pawn Stars, and now for some reason American Horror Story. I also watch the NFL and sometimes Baseball. If it wasn't for my wife, I would definitely cut off TV out of the equation, but she is a stay at home mom (cost of Daycare doesn't justify her working and having someone else raise our kids). Things like Sesame St. and Disney programming are great for my son. But of 150+ channels, we maybe hit 6 or 7 of them in a week.
Here is how you improve TV: Offer A la Carte programming. Let me choose about 20 channels, and cut my bill about 70%. Right now, the Internet is a pain in the ass to watch TV on, but it's the best way to get the programming I want. If I could choose the channels I want, with the simplicity of DVR and a remote, for a cost that is reasonable, then TV would be in the golden age.
I agree with everything you say. The only reason we have TV is because my wife very occasionally turns it on when she's bored. All the good shows we watch together (Dr. Who, BSG, TNG, etc.) are either streamed on Netflix, or on DVD, or loaded onto a memory card in my PS3. I subscribed to HBO to watch A Song of Ice and Fire (err, sorry, Game of Thrones) and promptly cancelled it right after. Daily Show, etc., I stream on my computer. It's a lot more convenient than DVRing it on my TV.
A la carte is indeed the answer, but cable companies have been successfully resisting it for decades now.
>>I can recall a few companies making the "we're going to double the number of employees in the next year" kind of announcement over the last few decades, but I'm trying to remember one of them that was still in business (without having collapsed and been acquired, laid off more than they hired, etc.) five years later...
Fannie Mae's CFO a while back went on a hiring spree based on the premise that Congress would write checks to cover whatever costs they incurred, and so far he's been proven right.
>>Do you mean social security? Let me remind you, that's not a hand-out; it's paid for. And it's not "100% of federal revenue". >>In any case, if you're looking at the US budget, Defense, not "the old and the poor," is the largest share. Here's the discretionary portion of the budget: http://oranges-world.com/the-federal-budget.html
That's a *wonderful* chart for your purpose, there, cupcake, because it Ignores SSN and Medicare spending. Bravo!
The only way to make defense spending look like less than entitlements is to Ignore entitlements entirely!
When you're not observing an electron, the electron ceases to have a definite position. If you'd like to imagine it as a smear, or a cloud, that's a reasonably accurate analogy. You may *think* that an electron secretly has a position when you're not looking at it, but you'd be wrong. (Unless the speed of light limitation is wrong.) The wavefunction IS the reality, at least according to certain interpretations.
>>The difference between "positive" and "negative" rights is entirely artificial.
Which means you ignore pragmatic concerns, then.
The problem is, the world is chock full of pragmatic concerns. You mentioned the banning of slavery, as if the US did it without worrying about the rights of people to property, thus revealing that the inalienable right to property WAS the entire reason for the debate. Even after the Civil War broke out, the South approach the *US Army* to ask for their escaped slaves back! Their argument was that since the US was fighting for the rule of law, and the Fugitive Slave Law was still the law of the land, the general had an obligation to return the escaped slaves to the south!
This is where the Contraband theory came from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraband_%28American_Civil_War%29), and why the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the south - to deprive them of the materials of war. It was unconstitutional to do so in the North without a constitutional amendment, which eventually followed after the end of the war.
That's how much these rights matter to people, you know, living in the real world.
>>Something does not have to contradict itself to be irrational. Self-contradictory statements are provably wrong, irrational ones are merely baseless speculation.
You're not using the correct definition for irrational, then.
>>Your government refuses to provide medical treatment to people who need it to survive, and lets insurance companies to deny it. Even after both government and insurance companies taking those people's money over a lifetime, and even considering that both government and insurance companies have sufficient resources for such treatment. I wouldn't be able to invent a more anti-right-to-life policy if I tried.
It's an interesting question if the right to life is a positive or negative right. It's traditionally been interpreted as a negative right, which means the government can't kill you except through due process of law. It wasn't until the last hundred years or so people expanded the concept to a positive right, i.e., that the government has to spend money to keep people alive. While I think there's nothing particularly wrong with the government being in the business of helping people alive, don't be facile and confuse the two concepts as you're doing.
>>Marathon was among the first (if not the first) FPS with multiplayer support (thanks to the Mac OS local networking) as well as establishing the convention of using the mouse for head-target movement
Eh, sorta. While it was an amazing, groundbreaking FPS, it's mouse controls were very very lacking. It really was designed with keyboard-look in mind.
I actually keyboard sniped for a while in Quake 1 / Team Fortress 1, and in certain areas (like the balconies in 2forts) it was actually really powerful, but now that I have 15 years of mouse look under my belt, it was too painful to go back to a system that doesn't support mouse look very well.
After posting the above, I decided I should qualify my statement by saying the total picture is more complicated than all that, especially when you look at how developed vs. developing countries are treated in Kyoto, but the 1990 start year *was* intentionally chosen as a way for certain countries (Eastern Europe, Germany, and the UK) to win free carbon credits out of the artifact of the start date, without doing anything material to actually reduce their emissions.
>>Somebody is conspicuously absent from the Kyoto Protocol. >>America, fuck yeah.
Kyoto is a terrible treaty for a number of reasons. First, it sets carbon caps on a per-country basis, not a per-capita basis, which fucks developing countries. Secondly, it picked a start date of 1990. The one guaranteed way to reduce CO2 emissions is to collapse your economy, and in 1991 the USSR collapsed like a house of cards. If you look at graphs of the CO2 output of the different regions of the earth, all sectors went up since 1990 except Eastern Europe, which plummeted.
So essentially for countries like the US, you could continue doing business as usual while writing a check each year to countries "cutting their CO2" like Romania, Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine, and so forth. Whereas they're not really doing anything to reduce CO2 emissions, it's just an artifact of a collapsed economy. Hell, when our economy collapsed in 2007, our CO2 emissions went down, too. It's not a good model for success.
America did the right thing by not signing Kyoto, and this comes from someone that really would like to see something done about global warming in his lifetime.
>>Catholics outnumber all other Christian churches taken together, so they definitely qualify as "most Christians"
Fair enough. Here in America, Protestants outnumber Catholics by about 2-to-1.
>>That's really a pot calling kettle black. Religious faith is irrational, it is even acknowledged by religious people (it is supposed to be dictated by moral obligation, not rationality).
Mmm, I wouldn't really agree with that statement. Rationality means working in a logical fashion from a set of axioms. Religious people work with a set of ethical axioms, so to speak, and rationally argue about things from there. Outside of fundamentalists, maybe, I don't think you'd find any Christians supporting belief in contradictory or irrational things. (Fundies are a whole 'nother story, of course.) CS Lewis once famously said that if he knew something was illogical or impossible, he wouldn't be able to believe in it.
You may (and probably do) disagree with some of the foundational axioms for going about life. It's harder to argue that these foundational axioms (such as "people have fundamental value") are in themselves irrational. For example, you might try to show that contradictions inherently arise from the belief that people have inherent value, perhaps by making an argument about mass-murders or Mengele or something, but I think you'd be surprised that Christians themselves have extensively argued these points over the centuries, and have a coherent, non-contradictory, rational system of thought built up around these edifices.
>>Worse yet, people are frivolously deprived of things they need for life.
As our Founding Fathers stated, inalienable rights absolutely do not mean that all governments recognize them, but rather that all governments should recognize them.
Slashdot Mirror
Either you missed the "3 out of 4" bit of my post, or you're not aware of what National Socialism really meant. =)
Ah yes, the 'atheist religion' defense. Well played, sir! If you make every negative thing in the world a religion, it's easy to talk about how religions are so negative. It's not the militant atheism that caused the French and Russians to murder clergy, it's the atheist religion! Reject religion! Embrace atheism!
_
If that sounds circular to you, it's because it is. =)
I love how dropping $33M can be read as tax evasion by you.
(Or do you really think the airport use fees at SJC will tally up to $33M? That's a LOT of flights at $40 a pop.)
>>And people don't like changes, but the truth is, Ribbon is much better interface.
Eehhhhh... no.
It's been out for how long? And people still hunt around when they want to find something. 'Insert Table' is on one ribbon. 'Insert Table of Figures' is on another, and so on.
The old interface somehow managed to pack shortcuts for all of the commonly used operations onto a floating toolbar. Now we have 8 of them, plus the stupid button menu and floating save/undo/redo toolbar.
People could find things much faster in the old version than the new. The only reason they switched to ribbons was for the live preview feature, which, while sometimes useful, is not worth sacrificing the old UI of Word over.
None of them were religious, then, or more to the point killed people because of their deeply-held religious beliefs. Hitler, I guess, killed people because of THEIR religion, bit making that argument would be a weird version of Blaming the Victim.
>>Religion is one of, if not the biggest causes of war and violence.
Urban legend. Stop spreading it.
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Genghis Khan are the biggest murderers in history. None of them were Christians (though Hitler adopted appearances of it), three of them were socialists.
>>People were fucking burned alive for thought-crime - belonging, or merely being accused, to another religion or to none.
I won't say never, but I will say rarely, did Christianity do this. The Spanish Inquisition, which you're probably thinking of here, was a secular inquisition, done against the mandates of the church.
By contrast, the French Revolution, which was explicitly atheistic and very unforgiving of "thought crime" massacred thousands of people for their beliefs.
Any person can build a recording studio in their house, but all the music you hear on the radio is still professionally edited and marketed, no?
Think about the sad fact that most (not all!) Indie bands bust their asses making music, touring, and doing promotions *to get signed with a major label*.
Fanfiction.net does all this and more. Stories get rated, authors can attract alpha readers and editors if they're good, and people can leave feedback in comment threads for each story.
If it works out to $100k-$200k per author, that's a much larger number than the expected value of sales royalties from no-name authors.
"Everything should be by indie and self marketed."
You make an ironic case for why editors are needed in the process.
Also, self-marketing means that your book sales will be in the low 1-digits.
>>Here in NYC, the NYPD already has a licensing program for "official press". If you start asking a cop tough questions, they're liable to ask for your license. They also get priority seating in courtrooms.
Perhaps more relevant for nerds, here in San Diego, Comicon (that I ran a portion of for a number of years) had issues with the number of people claiming to be journalists to get free badges to the otherwise sold out show. So they instituted a journalist verification process that tried to make sure you were a "real" journalist (which includes TV reporters, magazine authors, bloggers, etc.) and not just some random person trying to get a free badge. A friend of mine writes for the Latino Review (which isn't a small outfit) and even he had to jump through some hoops to get his badge last year.
(http://www.comic-con.org/cci/cci_press.php)
>>Every time I think Peta can't go any further off the deep end, they top themselves.
Actually, more to the point on war gaming, they directly protested *the killing of a rat* in the Battlefield series because it might, lead to violence against humans.
Like, seriously.
(bf3blog.com/2011/11/battlefield-3-criticized-by-peta-over-animal-cruelty/)
>>A national army (let's say Italy) could attack a given game that would allow players to play Italian soldiers and see them promoted for senseless killing, despite international laws violation.
You've just described every Mario game, ever.
>>but for some reason their home markets don't seem to be interested in reusing the old fuel stockpiles
Some reason? We have a ban on waste reprocessing here in America.
The same people that scream that there is no use for nuclear waste (http://www.wagingpeace.org/menu/issues/nuclear-energy-&-waste/nuclear-energy-fact-sheet.htm) also scream that we shouldn't be able to burn up the waste. Oh, and we can't store it either.
*That's* why we're in such a crazy situation, because we've let crazy people write the laws.
>>I only give cash to places I can walk in to. The EFF is happy to take walk in cash donations, BTW.
While donating to the EFF gets you on their spam list, their spam is actually worth reading most of the time.
I agree with everything you say. The only reason we have TV is because my wife very occasionally turns it on when she's bored. All the good shows we watch together (Dr. Who, BSG, TNG, etc.) are either streamed on Netflix, or on DVD, or loaded onto a memory card in my PS3. I subscribed to HBO to watch A Song of Ice and Fire (err, sorry, Game of Thrones) and promptly cancelled it right after. Daily Show, etc., I stream on my computer. It's a lot more convenient than DVRing it on my TV.
A la carte is indeed the answer, but cable companies have been successfully resisting it for decades now.
>>I can recall a few companies making the "we're going to double the number of employees in the next year" kind of announcement over the last few decades, but I'm trying to remember one of them that was still in business (without having collapsed and been acquired, laid off more than they hired, etc.) five years later...
Fannie Mae's CFO a while back went on a hiring spree based on the premise that Congress would write checks to cover whatever costs they incurred, and so far he's been proven right.
Friend of mine was hired as part of it, actually.
>>Do you mean social security? Let me remind you, that's not a hand-out; it's paid for. And it's not "100% of federal revenue".
>>In any case, if you're looking at the US budget, Defense, not "the old and the poor," is the largest share. Here's the discretionary portion of the budget: http://oranges-world.com/the-federal-budget.html
That's a *wonderful* chart for your purpose, there, cupcake, because it Ignores SSN and Medicare spending. Bravo!
The only way to make defense spending look like less than entitlements is to Ignore entitlements entirely!
>>In my example, the perception is that it's entangled until observed, but in *reality* the ball is already in one of the boxes.
Nope. (Well, in the non-quantum physical ball case, yeah, sure, one ball was in a box. But it's not a very good analogy.)
Your concept of 'realism' has to be thrown out the window. Or your belief in the speed of light as the great cosmic speed limit. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_locality
When you're not observing an electron, the electron ceases to have a definite position. If you'd like to imagine it as a smear, or a cloud, that's a reasonably accurate analogy. You may *think* that an electron secretly has a position when you're not looking at it, but you'd be wrong. (Unless the speed of light limitation is wrong.) The wavefunction IS the reality, at least according to certain interpretations.
Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos has a reasonably good explanation here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=DNd2K6mxLpIC&lpg=PA82&ots=ub6L_OJfGU&dq=mulder%20and%20scully%20quantum%20physics&pg=PA81#v=onepage&q=mulder%20and%20scully%20quantum%20physics&f=false
>>The difference between "positive" and "negative" rights is entirely artificial.
Which means you ignore pragmatic concerns, then.
The problem is, the world is chock full of pragmatic concerns. You mentioned the banning of slavery, as if the US did it without worrying about the rights of people to property, thus revealing that the inalienable right to property WAS the entire reason for the debate. Even after the Civil War broke out, the South approach the *US Army* to ask for their escaped slaves back! Their argument was that since the US was fighting for the rule of law, and the Fugitive Slave Law was still the law of the land, the general had an obligation to return the escaped slaves to the south!
This is where the Contraband theory came from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraband_%28American_Civil_War%29), and why the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the south - to deprive them of the materials of war. It was unconstitutional to do so in the North without a constitutional amendment, which eventually followed after the end of the war.
That's how much these rights matter to people, you know, living in the real world.
The rest of your statements are equally empty.
>>Something does not have to contradict itself to be irrational. Self-contradictory statements are provably wrong, irrational ones are merely baseless speculation.
You're not using the correct definition for irrational, then.
>>Your government refuses to provide medical treatment to people who need it to survive, and lets insurance companies to deny it. Even after both government and insurance companies taking those people's money over a lifetime, and even considering that both government and insurance companies have sufficient resources for such treatment. I wouldn't be able to invent a more anti-right-to-life policy if I tried.
It's an interesting question if the right to life is a positive or negative right. It's traditionally been interpreted as a negative right, which means the government can't kill you except through due process of law. It wasn't until the last hundred years or so people expanded the concept to a positive right, i.e., that the government has to spend money to keep people alive. While I think there's nothing particularly wrong with the government being in the business of helping people alive, don't be facile and confuse the two concepts as you're doing.
>>Marathon was among the first (if not the first) FPS with multiplayer support (thanks to the Mac OS local networking) as well as establishing the convention of using the mouse for head-target movement
Eh, sorta. While it was an amazing, groundbreaking FPS, it's mouse controls were very very lacking. It really was designed with keyboard-look in mind.
I actually keyboard sniped for a while in Quake 1 / Team Fortress 1, and in certain areas (like the balconies in 2forts) it was actually really powerful, but now that I have 15 years of mouse look under my belt, it was too painful to go back to a system that doesn't support mouse look very well.
Dunno if the new release fixes this.
After posting the above, I decided I should qualify my statement by saying the total picture is more complicated than all that, especially when you look at how developed vs. developing countries are treated in Kyoto, but the 1990 start year *was* intentionally chosen as a way for certain countries (Eastern Europe, Germany, and the UK) to win free carbon credits out of the artifact of the start date, without doing anything material to actually reduce their emissions.
>>Somebody is conspicuously absent from the Kyoto Protocol.
>>America, fuck yeah.
Kyoto is a terrible treaty for a number of reasons. First, it sets carbon caps on a per-country basis, not a per-capita basis, which fucks developing countries. Secondly, it picked a start date of 1990. The one guaranteed way to reduce CO2 emissions is to collapse your economy, and in 1991 the USSR collapsed like a house of cards. If you look at graphs of the CO2 output of the different regions of the earth, all sectors went up since 1990 except Eastern Europe, which plummeted.
So essentially for countries like the US, you could continue doing business as usual while writing a check each year to countries "cutting their CO2" like Romania, Estonia, Latvia, the Ukraine, and so forth. Whereas they're not really doing anything to reduce CO2 emissions, it's just an artifact of a collapsed economy. Hell, when our economy collapsed in 2007, our CO2 emissions went down, too. It's not a good model for success.
America did the right thing by not signing Kyoto, and this comes from someone that really would like to see something done about global warming in his lifetime.
>>Catholics outnumber all other Christian churches taken together, so they definitely qualify as "most Christians"
Fair enough. Here in America, Protestants outnumber Catholics by about 2-to-1.
>>That's really a pot calling kettle black. Religious faith is irrational, it is even acknowledged by religious people (it is supposed to be dictated by moral obligation, not rationality).
Mmm, I wouldn't really agree with that statement. Rationality means working in a logical fashion from a set of axioms. Religious people work with a set of ethical axioms, so to speak, and rationally argue about things from there. Outside of fundamentalists, maybe, I don't think you'd find any Christians supporting belief in contradictory or irrational things. (Fundies are a whole 'nother story, of course.) CS Lewis once famously said that if he knew something was illogical or impossible, he wouldn't be able to believe in it.
You may (and probably do) disagree with some of the foundational axioms for going about life. It's harder to argue that these foundational axioms (such as "people have fundamental value") are in themselves irrational. For example, you might try to show that contradictions inherently arise from the belief that people have inherent value, perhaps by making an argument about mass-murders or Mengele or something, but I think you'd be surprised that Christians themselves have extensively argued these points over the centuries, and have a coherent, non-contradictory, rational system of thought built up around these edifices.
>>Worse yet, people are frivolously deprived of things they need for life.
As our Founding Fathers stated, inalienable rights absolutely do not mean that all governments recognize them, but rather that all governments should recognize them.