>>Palin and Bachmann associated themselves with the Tea Party movement. They give speech after speech invoking the Tea Party and they have very many Tea Party supporters.
This would be the same Tea Party that polls at 75% stating they never want to see Palin run for president?
The Tea Party was a 3rd party protest movement against the Democrat and Republican parties both (since they both supported big government), and rather cannily succeeded where most 3rd parties failed by winning Republican primary challenges.
If you don't believe me, your sense of history is being rewritten. Go back and Google the furor that happened when the GOP created a "Tea Party" page on their web site. They had to retract it.
>>Please stop spreading the nonsense that a contract is unenforceable because it was executed by way of the click of a button. Judges don't think that, and so you shouldn't.
I've always been curious how companies know *who* clicked the button.
>>If those things are permissable under the EU's charter, then I'm not sure I see how this would be any more egregious of a violation.
At least in America, we only have Democrats *proposing* to gut the 1st Amendment, instead of actually passing laws which ridiculously limit the freedom of speech.
>>They (the US) spent HALF the second world war fighting the Nazis, the other half selling them computers to help round up the jews
You didn't pay much attention in history class, did you?
America never sold a computer to the Nazis, as far as I'm aware. ENIAC wasn't finished until 1946, and by that point we certainly weren't selling them anything useful.
Also, fun fact, before computers were made out of silicon, the term was used to refer to women to calculated math problems (artillery trajectory calculations and the like). So it's very, very, very unlikely we "sold them computers" during the first half of WWII.
But don't let me interrupt a good anti-American rant.
You can't. Because they didn't like the look of the big, floor-to-ceiling look of the old XP system, they shrunk it all down so that it only shows 5-6 items at a time and has a scrollbar.
In short, they made it harder to use and less functional than the XP Start Menu, and to everyone's amazement, people stopped using it, and then they claimed it was some sort of UX triumph.
Yeah. Microsoft is batshit crazy.
The Vista / Win7 is an atrocity that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, for the reasons you mentioned (as well as the fucking horrible 'all program's list of *everything* on your computer if you can't find something by typing it), but instead of taking the proper lesson away (the XP start menu is superior), they decided to just scrap it altogether.
I fully predict that they will confirm their decision when Start Menu activity drops even further in Win8, after more or less removing it.
As always, a plug for Classic Shell is worth the time - it fixes the Vista/Win7 Start Menu to look like the superior WinXP one, or allows you to customize it however you like. (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/) Personally I kept the dubious search-by-type feature, but it only gets the focus if I type tab, which allows me to navigate through the start menu by typing, which is much faster than clicking.
>>You bought into a DRM scheme. You were stupid, now you learned the hard way. Consider this a tuition fee and don't be stupid again.
DRM scheme?
Most people bought the PS3 (or prefer buying PS3 versions of games over Xbox 360) precisely *because* multiplayer is free, and XBL always seemed to be a greedy grasp for money.
With this move (which will just annoy me, as I hate punching in those tediously long codes every time I buy a game now) the PS3 has lost its only competitive advantage over the Xbox.
Alongside the recent TOS change (secretly forcing people to agree that they won't sue or disabling their ability to update and go online), well, Fuck Sony,
>>Don't guess on the energy comparison between EVs and gasoline: Use studies.
Your link doesn't work.
But the fun part about running the numbers yourself is that you get to avoid the very real possibility that the other person is lying to you, or factually wrong.
>>California's gas prices are above average in the US, but their electricity prices are way over average, so it;s a bad comparison. The average residential power price in the US is 10-11 cents per kWh.
Sure, true on both counts, but I wanted to see how it would compare around here. The final rates I used for filling up the Tesla was 23c/kWh, so divide the electricity cost by 2, and reduce the gas cost by about a third, to get more generally applicable numbers. Tiered power rates are a very real problem for electric car owners, though. It's going to easily push you into the top tier of costs for whatever time you run your car charger.
Ironically enough, I have much much lower peak usage than off-peak, due to solar basically powering my house during the day, so the math might also be different that way, too.
Supertankers and tanker trucks both have very high efficiency ratios. 5 kWh for refining is a fair chunk of the 37kWh of a gallon of gas, but then again you lose about 7% of electricity to transmission line losses, too.
So I think my back of the envelope calculation isn't going to be too far off.
Some things you conveniently forgot gasoline doesn't get magically placed in your tank by the gasoline fairies it takes a massive amount of energy to get it out of the ground, ship it to a refinery, refine it (which takes TONS of electricity), ship it to a gas station, store and sell it..
The percentage of coal going into the power grid is going down, not up.
and even it that weren't true, we don't have to stage the 5th fleet in Bahrain to keep coal flowing through the Straight of Hormuz, and West Virginians have a perfect record of not flying airplanes into the world trade center.
I didn't "conveniently" forget anything. I was doing a rough estimate of the cost and CO2 production to fill up the Tesla and an equivalent car. There's plenty of other factors (transmission line losses), capital charges, and so forth, on both sides, but I think the math does show that the Tesla is about 6x cleaner in CO2 and 4x cheaper in "fuel" than an equivalent gasoline powered car.
The transport costs for gasoline aren't especially high - look at how much gas you can transport on a tanker for an equivalent amount of gas, and the ratio is quite good. Otherwise it wouldn't make much sense to use gas.
>>On the standard Tesla charger, a *full* charge (not a daily commute charge, but a "I just drove 200 miles" charge) takes 3 1/2 hours.
So you have to spend between 2x and 4x as much time driving the car charging it? That's not a good selling point.
>>the DOE has already extensively studied this (as have many, many other groups). In every case, the conclusion is that even on our current grid, EVs are notably cleaner than gasoline cars.
I'd like to see a citation for this. But in lieu of one, let's run some numbers and figure it out for ourselves.
The Tesla holds 53 kWh on a full charge and gets 300 miles. Therefore, a charge here in California will run you between $5 and $26 (depending how much energy you use a month - http://www.pge.com/tariffs/ERS.SHTML) If you're charging your car off the grid, you'll be in the $26/charge tier, but you'll probably be smart and running it off-peak, so we'll call it $13 or so. So you get about 23 miles per dollar.
A gallon of gas has 36.6 (call it 37) kWh in it. It's $3.90 a gallon right now in California. A 510 horsepower Jaguar XKR with the same 0 to 60 time gets around 20mpg, or 5 miles per dollar.
So the Tesla is cheaper as long as you charge it at night, and compare it against a gas guzzler. =)
Their data is wrong for PG&E - PG&E draws a lot of power from NG, but it lists it at 0%, which is obviously in error (Actual mix is 35% NG - http://www.pge.com/myhome/edusafety/systemworks/electric/energymix/). So we'll just use the national average instead, which is about 1 pound of CO2 per kWh.
Using the EPA and IPCC estimates of CO2 per gallon of gas, we see it's about 20 pounds per gallon (http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05001.htm). The BlueSkyModel.org website estimates it at 14 pounds per gallon, but we'll take the word of the EPA on this one, since they fucked up pretty badly on PG&E's numbers above.
The Tesla generates 53 pounds of CO2 per 300 miles, or about 6 miles per pound of CO2 generated. The Jaguar XKR drives 20 miles on a gallon of gas, so it gets a nice even 1 mile per pound of CO2 generated.
Conclusion: If you are contrasting the Tesla against a similar price and performance Jaguar, then it's about 6x better at CO2 emissions than the Jag, and costs about 4x less to "fill up". The Jag will have a much longer range, can "fill up" faster, and looks a bit more manly, but on these two stats alone, the Tesla has the advantage.
>>It's like trying to sue someone for making a Venn diagram.
The estate of Mr. Venn would like to have words with you, as their copyright on Venn diagrams has recently been extended to life of the author + 120 years, and Mr. Venn died in the early 20s.
>>Are you not a native English speaker? Because you're certainly missing the meaning of the phrase "not incompatible with a scientific mindset." (emphasis mine)
Ah, my apologies. I missed the double negative.
>>As does the Catholic Church
Hmm? St Augustine was a Doctor of the Church who thought Genesis should be interpreted allegorically. I've read some of his stuff, and while he kind of goes back and forth on it his opinion on it has served as the basis for RCC teachings over the last 1600 years. So it's hardly a modern response to recent science.
Pope John Paul II said, "Cosmogony and cosmology have always aroused great interest among peoples and religions. The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer. The Sacred Book likewise wishes to tell men that the world was not created as the seat of the gods, as was taught by other cosmogonies and cosmologies, but was rather created for the service of man and the glory of God. Any other teaching about the origin and make-up of the universe is alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven."
Pretty much just fundies are YECers these days.
>>Browsing your/. page, I see the majority of your essays center around Christian apologism. That puts me in the position of talking to a brick wall.
If I'm wrong about something, I admit it (see my first sentence above). But perhaps unlike most Christian apologists, the majority of my friends are atheists, and I'm (watch for the double negative!) hardly unfamiliar with the thoughts of Heinlein, having read all of his books, as well as his nonfictional Expanded Universe and Grumbles from the Grave.
Sometimes government regulations are a good thing, and sometimes they're a bad thing. I'm not a libertarian purist that thinks all regulation is evil - I think there simply needs to be a balance struck at the right point. I don't think it's unreasonable to require smoke detectors in homes (the total cost of smoke detectors is a tiny fraction of the cost of a house), but I would be opposed to mandating sprinkler systems in detached homes. Balance, common sense, all that.
I've seen regulations put the companies of two of my friends entirely out of business - one was due to a conflict between state and federal laws that made it impossible for his company to pass a safety inspection with both the FDA and the state regulatory board. If they'd been a larger corporation, they could have closed up shop here in California and moved to a more business friendly state. They were a drug manufacturing company that was the only source for several rare chemo drugs that are used as drugs-of-last-resort for people dying of cancer and have run out of alternatives, so the regulation not only put him and their 70 employees out of business, but also fucked over cancer patients across the country.
You can't pretend regulations always protect the little guy - I just hope you never get certain types of rare cancers that now have no drug manufacturers for them.
So the competition does apply pressure on governments to not overregulate. Though those benefits are more reaped by the large corporations instead of the small, if a state passes more business friendly laws, then the smaller corps benefit, too.
That said, I think something really ought to be done about Hollywood Accounting and all those tricks that multinationals play to avoid paying taxes. Google's Double Irish, and the like.
>>It's all well and good to quote-mine the bible and say everything else is just details
You're the fourth or fifth person to think that *I* was saying what was the most important bits.
I was actually paraphrasing Jesus, who was asked exactly that question (Matthew 22:37-40) and he replied 1) Love God Above All Else, 2) Love Others As Yourself, and everything else is details.
>>I've no problem with moral philosophy as such, but I have not seen anyone actually behave as if that's all they believed religion was.
It's actually a very positive moral philosophy, than even people like Jefferson (who didn't especially believe in the supernatural parts of the Bible) could get behind.
Religion, of course, is a complex entity, involving social networks, music, claims about the ultimate nature of the universe, history, and so forth. But as I said, if you boil it down to just those two things, everything else is just details.
Actually the 30% that Apple takes is analogous to the "tax" in your analogy. They take that from everyone and use it to build the infrastructure (Xcode, iOS, AppStore, etc) that allows anyone to succeed. Should we "cut taxes", and let Xcode and iOS stagnate? And then tell developers to stop freeloading and write their own tools and infrastructure? How do you think that would play out?
Nobody ever says anything bad about building up infrastructure. It's when people engage in wealth redistribution that it it strikes a lot of us libertarians as being unfair.
If 99% of apps don't make any money, does Apple or the other developers owe them something?
Yeah, but that doesn't change the fact that in the Catholic Church only the Pope and recognised saints can alter the core dogma.
Most Christians are not Roman Catholic's though, and the main reason they are not is because they reject the notion that only the Pope has a direct line to God, and can cut off people from salvation at a whim.
In other words, most Christians agree with you. =)
Well if you knew anything about them it would be obvious which I was talking about. Shinto has many gods, although they are more like what western culture would call spirits. Buddhism is organised like a religion but is really more of a philosophy, and does not have gods.
I did know which one you were probably talking about, hence the smiley face. But there's a lot of different flavors of Buddhism, and depending on which flavor you're talking about there may or may not be "gods". If there are, they tend to be polytheistic and based on the Hindu pantheon.
There's also lots of semi-divine entities in many sects of Buddhism, with a variety of classifications. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva, who are people that voluntarily delay Nirvana to help others.
If you get the chance, go to the great temple in Nara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Ddai-ji) and walk around. You'll see statues of magical temple protectors, a giant Buddha flashing gang signs, while surrounded by his crew of bodhisattvas floating around on clouds. Or if you go to the temple in Beijing's Beihai Park (the white building in the background here - http://ellejelle.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/hpim2673.jpg) you'll see a city protector god that is "guaranteed" to protect the city as long as it's not removed from the temple. Didn't work out so well when the 8 Nation Army came rolling through, though.
>>Were he alive today, I have no doubt that Sir Fred Hoyle would accept the Big Bang as fact, just as every professional cosmologist now does.
Hoyle not only came to accept the Big Bang as a fact, but became a theist because of it, saying it was the logical conclusion to do so.
>>Again, belief in a God - or Gods - is not incompatible with a scientific mindset.
See the above sentence for a perfectly rational counterexample for someone with a scientific mindset.
>>the enormous weight of scientific evidence that Adam and Eve never existed
Again, most mainline Christian denominations do not use a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Original Sin, also, is certainly not a doctrine all Christians believe in.
>>...wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery
Some Christians might hold this belief, I don't. I don't think God "needs" anything. He probably loves his creation, in a more perfect way than you might love your characters in a game of The Sims, and take care of their needs if he feels like it, but it seems awfully blasphemous to try to look at God as "needing" prayer, or needing prayer in order to intervene in the game.
>>It's not your week, is it? I'm an ardent folkie, too. The confusion wasn't helped by the fact that Steeleye Span's version of Cam Ye O'Er Frae France clearly was heavily influenced by The Rocky Road to Dublin.
>>Not only have I not read it, I've never heard either of this book or its author. But I'm sure it's a classic amongst science fiction works based on the notion of Intelligent Design.
Sawyer is hardly a IDer - he, in fact, is quite derogatory to the YEC crowd in Calculating God, mocking them calling the Burgess Shale the "Bogus Shale". He talks quite a bit about religion and science in his books, with science always being pre-eminent. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Sawyer)
Sawyer's book Flashforward was recently turned into a short-lived TV series? No? Not ringing any bells?
Slashdot Mirror
>>Palin and Bachmann associated themselves with the Tea Party movement. They give speech after speech invoking the Tea Party and they have very many Tea Party supporters.
This would be the same Tea Party that polls at 75% stating they never want to see Palin run for president?
The Tea Party was a 3rd party protest movement against the Democrat and Republican parties both (since they both supported big government), and rather cannily succeeded where most 3rd parties failed by winning Republican primary challenges.
If you don't believe me, your sense of history is being rewritten. Go back and Google the furor that happened when the GOP created a "Tea Party" page on their web site. They had to retract it.
>>Fuck em. I'm boycotting Samsung over this bullshit. This isn't the way reasonable companies work with one another.
Yeah, me too. I've boycotted all corporations that own patents.
(Please don't ask how I'm posting this from my backcountry shack in Montana.)
>>I would even point out the town in PA that is completely uninhabitable due to an ongoing coal fire (for the last 50 years!)
Heh, that's right.
By contrast, Fukushima has already been put out.
>>Please stop spreading the nonsense that a contract is unenforceable because it was executed by way of the click of a button. Judges don't think that, and so you shouldn't.
I've always been curious how companies know *who* clicked the button.
Do they rely on psychics?
>>If those things are permissable under the EU's charter, then I'm not sure I see how this would be any more egregious of a violation.
At least in America, we only have Democrats *proposing* to gut the 1st Amendment, instead of actually passing laws which ridiculously limit the freedom of speech.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/04/219218/ny-senators-want-to-make-free-speech-a-privilege
This Italian law makes a mockery of the principle of the inherent right to free speech.
>>They (the US) spent HALF the second world war fighting the Nazis, the other half selling them computers to help round up the jews
You didn't pay much attention in history class, did you?
America never sold a computer to the Nazis, as far as I'm aware. ENIAC wasn't finished until 1946, and by that point we certainly weren't selling them anything useful.
Also, fun fact, before computers were made out of silicon, the term was used to refer to women to calculated math problems (artillery trajectory calculations and the like). So it's very, very, very unlikely we "sold them computers" during the first half of WWII.
But don't let me interrupt a good anti-American rant.
Yeah. Microsoft is batshit crazy.
The Vista / Win7 is an atrocity that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, for the reasons you mentioned (as well as the fucking horrible 'all program's list of *everything* on your computer if you can't find something by typing it), but instead of taking the proper lesson away (the XP start menu is superior), they decided to just scrap it altogether.
I fully predict that they will confirm their decision when Start Menu activity drops even further in Win8, after more or less removing it.
As always, a plug for Classic Shell is worth the time - it fixes the Vista/Win7 Start Menu to look like the superior WinXP one, or allows you to customize it however you like. (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/) Personally I kept the dubious search-by-type feature, but it only gets the focus if I type tab, which allows me to navigate through the start menu by typing, which is much faster than clicking.
>>You bought into a DRM scheme. You were stupid, now you learned the hard way. Consider this a tuition fee and don't be stupid again.
DRM scheme?
Most people bought the PS3 (or prefer buying PS3 versions of games over Xbox 360) precisely *because* multiplayer is free, and XBL always seemed to be a greedy grasp for money.
With this move (which will just annoy me, as I hate punching in those tediously long codes every time I buy a game now) the PS3 has lost its only competitive advantage over the Xbox.
Alongside the recent TOS change (secretly forcing people to agree that they won't sue or disabling their ability to update and go online), well, Fuck Sony,
>>Don't guess on the energy comparison between EVs and gasoline: Use studies.
Your link doesn't work.
But the fun part about running the numbers yourself is that you get to avoid the very real possibility that the other person is lying to you, or factually wrong.
>>California's gas prices are above average in the US, but their electricity prices are way over average, so it;s a bad comparison. The average residential power price in the US is 10-11 cents per kWh.
Sure, true on both counts, but I wanted to see how it would compare around here. The final rates I used for filling up the Tesla was 23c/kWh, so divide the electricity cost by 2, and reduce the gas cost by about a third, to get more generally applicable numbers. Tiered power rates are a very real problem for electric car owners, though. It's going to easily push you into the top tier of costs for whatever time you run your car charger.
Ironically enough, I have much much lower peak usage than off-peak, due to solar basically powering my house during the day, so the math might also be different that way, too.
>>Except gas doesn't come on a tanker, crude does
Supertankers and tanker trucks both have very high efficiency ratios. 5 kWh for refining is a fair chunk of the 37kWh of a gallon of gas, but then again you lose about 7% of electricity to transmission line losses, too.
So I think my back of the envelope calculation isn't going to be too far off.
I didn't "conveniently" forget anything. I was doing a rough estimate of the cost and CO2 production to fill up the Tesla and an equivalent car. There's plenty of other factors (transmission line losses), capital charges, and so forth, on both sides, but I think the math does show that the Tesla is about 6x cleaner in CO2 and 4x cheaper in "fuel" than an equivalent gasoline powered car.
The transport costs for gasoline aren't especially high - look at how much gas you can transport on a tanker for an equivalent amount of gas, and the ratio is quite good. Otherwise it wouldn't make much sense to use gas.
>>On the standard Tesla charger, a *full* charge (not a daily commute charge, but a "I just drove 200 miles" charge) takes 3 1/2 hours.
So you have to spend between 2x and 4x as much time driving the car charging it? That's not a good selling point.
>>the DOE has already extensively studied this (as have many, many other groups). In every case, the conclusion is that even on our current grid, EVs are notably cleaner than gasoline cars.
I'd like to see a citation for this. But in lieu of one, let's run some numbers and figure it out for ourselves.
The Tesla holds 53 kWh on a full charge and gets 300 miles.
Therefore, a charge here in California will run you between $5 and $26 (depending how much energy you use a month - http://www.pge.com/tariffs/ERS.SHTML) If you're charging your car off the grid, you'll be in the $26/charge tier, but you'll probably be smart and running it off-peak, so we'll call it $13 or so. So you get about 23 miles per dollar.
A gallon of gas has 36.6 (call it 37) kWh in it. It's $3.90 a gallon right now in California. A 510 horsepower Jaguar XKR with the same 0 to 60 time gets around 20mpg, or 5 miles per dollar.
So the Tesla is cheaper as long as you charge it at night, and compare it against a gas guzzler. =)
In terms of CO2 output per kWh -
I'm using the data from here: http://www.stewartmarion.com/carbon-footprint/html/carbon-footprint-kilowatt-hour.html
Their data is wrong for PG&E - PG&E draws a lot of power from NG, but it lists it at 0%, which is obviously in error (Actual mix is 35% NG - http://www.pge.com/myhome/edusafety/systemworks/electric/energymix/). So we'll just use the national average instead, which is about 1 pound of CO2 per kWh.
Using the EPA and IPCC estimates of CO2 per gallon of gas, we see it's about 20 pounds per gallon (http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05001.htm). The BlueSkyModel.org website estimates it at 14 pounds per gallon, but we'll take the word of the EPA on this one, since they fucked up pretty badly on PG&E's numbers above.
The Tesla generates 53 pounds of CO2 per 300 miles, or about 6 miles per pound of CO2 generated.
The Jaguar XKR drives 20 miles on a gallon of gas, so it gets a nice even 1 mile per pound of CO2 generated.
Conclusion: If you are contrasting the Tesla against a similar price and performance Jaguar, then it's about 6x better at CO2 emissions than the Jag, and costs about 4x less to "fill up". The Jag will have a much longer range, can "fill up" faster, and looks a bit more manly, but on these two stats alone, the Tesla has the advantage.
>>No, regeneration uses the electric motors to shop.
Damn, no wonder the Teslas are so expensive.
>>It's like trying to sue someone for making a Venn diagram.
The estate of Mr. Venn would like to have words with you, as their copyright on Venn diagrams has recently been extended to life of the author + 120 years, and Mr. Venn died in the early 20s.
>>Are you not a native English speaker? Because you're certainly missing the meaning of the phrase "not incompatible with a scientific mindset." (emphasis mine)
Ah, my apologies. I missed the double negative.
>>As does the Catholic Church
Hmm? St Augustine was a Doctor of the Church who thought Genesis should be interpreted allegorically. I've read some of his stuff, and while he kind of goes back and forth on it his opinion on it has served as the basis for RCC teachings over the last 1600 years. So it's hardly a modern response to recent science.
Pope John Paul II said, "Cosmogony and cosmology have always aroused great interest among peoples and religions. The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer. The Sacred Book likewise wishes to tell men that the world was not created as the seat of the gods, as was taught by other cosmogonies and cosmologies, but was rather created for the service of man and the glory of God. Any other teaching about the origin and make-up of the universe is alien to the intentions of the Bible, which does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven."
Pretty much just fundies are YECers these days.
>>Browsing your /. page, I see the majority of your essays center around Christian apologism. That puts me in the position of talking to a brick wall.
If I'm wrong about something, I admit it (see my first sentence above). But perhaps unlike most Christian apologists, the majority of my friends are atheists, and I'm (watch for the double negative!) hardly unfamiliar with the thoughts of Heinlein, having read all of his books, as well as his nonfictional Expanded Universe and Grumbles from the Grave.
Sometimes government regulations are a good thing, and sometimes they're a bad thing. I'm not a libertarian purist that thinks all regulation is evil - I think there simply needs to be a balance struck at the right point. I don't think it's unreasonable to require smoke detectors in homes (the total cost of smoke detectors is a tiny fraction of the cost of a house), but I would be opposed to mandating sprinkler systems in detached homes. Balance, common sense, all that.
I've seen regulations put the companies of two of my friends entirely out of business - one was due to a conflict between state and federal laws that made it impossible for his company to pass a safety inspection with both the FDA and the state regulatory board. If they'd been a larger corporation, they could have closed up shop here in California and moved to a more business friendly state. They were a drug manufacturing company that was the only source for several rare chemo drugs that are used as drugs-of-last-resort for people dying of cancer and have run out of alternatives, so the regulation not only put him and their 70 employees out of business, but also fucked over cancer patients across the country.
You can't pretend regulations always protect the little guy - I just hope you never get certain types of rare cancers that now have no drug manufacturers for them.
So the competition does apply pressure on governments to not overregulate. Though those benefits are more reaped by the large corporations instead of the small, if a state passes more business friendly laws, then the smaller corps benefit, too.
That said, I think something really ought to be done about Hollywood Accounting and all those tricks that multinationals play to avoid paying taxes. Google's Double Irish, and the like.
I think a bigger problem is the huge number of people that can't even get the book to launch.
While it's somewhat true to the books to kill off the game so early on, it might not be worth your $40 for the experience.
>>It's all well and good to quote-mine the bible and say everything else is just details
You're the fourth or fifth person to think that *I* was saying what was the most important bits.
I was actually paraphrasing Jesus, who was asked exactly that question (Matthew 22:37-40) and he replied 1) Love God Above All Else, 2) Love Others As Yourself, and everything else is details.
>>I've no problem with moral philosophy as such, but I have not seen anyone actually behave as if that's all they believed religion was.
It's actually a very positive moral philosophy, than even people like Jefferson (who didn't especially believe in the supernatural parts of the Bible) could get behind.
Religion, of course, is a complex entity, involving social networks, music, claims about the ultimate nature of the universe, history, and so forth. But as I said, if you boil it down to just those two things, everything else is just details.
Nobody ever says anything bad about building up infrastructure. It's when people engage in wealth redistribution that it it strikes a lot of us libertarians as being unfair.
If 99% of apps don't make any money, does Apple or the other developers owe them something?
Most Christians are not Roman Catholic's though, and the main reason they are not is because they reject the notion that only the Pope has a direct line to God, and can cut off people from salvation at a whim.
In other words, most Christians agree with you. =)
I did know which one you were probably talking about, hence the smiley face. But there's a lot of different flavors of Buddhism, and depending on which flavor you're talking about there may or may not be "gods". If there are, they tend to be polytheistic and based on the Hindu pantheon.
There's also lots of semi-divine entities in many sects of Buddhism, with a variety of classifications. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva, who are people that voluntarily delay Nirvana to help others.
If you get the chance, go to the great temple in Nara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Ddai-ji) and walk around. You'll see statues of magical temple protectors, a giant Buddha flashing gang signs, while surrounded by his crew of bodhisattvas
floating around on clouds. Or if you go to the temple in Beijing's Beihai Park (the white building in the background here - http://ellejelle.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/hpim2673.jpg) you'll see a city protector god that is "guaranteed" to protect the city as long as it's not removed from the temple. Didn't work out so well when the 8 Nation Army came rolling through, though.
>>Were he alive today, I have no doubt that Sir Fred Hoyle would accept the Big Bang as fact, just as every professional cosmologist now does.
Hoyle not only came to accept the Big Bang as a fact, but became a theist because of it, saying it was the logical conclusion to do so.
>>Again, belief in a God - or Gods - is not incompatible with a scientific mindset.
See the above sentence for a perfectly rational counterexample for someone with a scientific mindset.
>>the enormous weight of scientific evidence that Adam and Eve never existed
Again, most mainline Christian denominations do not use a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Original Sin, also, is certainly not a doctrine all Christians believe in.
>>...wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery
Some Christians might hold this belief, I don't. I don't think God "needs" anything. He probably loves his creation, in a more perfect way than you might love your characters in a game of The Sims, and take care of their needs if he feels like it, but it seems awfully blasphemous to try to look at God as "needing" prayer, or needing prayer in order to intervene in the game.
>>And then it's not DIY you stupid fuck.
Unless he's a poor schmuck stuck with a policy saying "data must be unrecoverable" but not specifying a specific method to do so.
Which, you know, is sort of the point of the article.
>>It's not your week, is it? I'm an ardent folkie, too. The confusion wasn't helped by the fact that Steeleye Span's version of Cam Ye O'Er Frae France clearly was heavily influenced by The Rocky Road to Dublin.
Dammit!
Ah, well. =)
>>If 1% making 25% isn't "large amount" then, erm, I guess you were brought up to Reaganomics.
Obviously we need to tax these "iOS fat cats" and send some of their profits to the poorer developers, eh comrade!
Developers of fart apps, rejoice! We will eliminate the iOS income inequality once and for all!
>>Not only have I not read it, I've never heard either of this book or its author. But I'm sure it's a classic amongst science fiction works based on the notion of Intelligent Design.
Sawyer is hardly a IDer - he, in fact, is quite derogatory to the YEC crowd in Calculating God, mocking them calling the Burgess Shale the "Bogus Shale". He talks quite a bit about religion and science in his books, with science always being pre-eminent. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Sawyer)
Sawyer's book Flashforward was recently turned into a short-lived TV series? No? Not ringing any bells?
Neanderthal.