Now to me, 25 billion is less than 73 billion, and 7.35 billion is less than 23.34 billion... so I would think if a company did that, their share price would be higher, right?
Not necessarily. Depends on the perceived future prospects of the company. Current cash flow is important but a company's value is based on FUTURE free cash flow. Investors clearly think that Microsoft's future prospects are not so rosy and have priced the stock accordingly. Microsoft has two major cash cows (Office and Windows) and the future prospects for both are unclear. There is a major move to mobile devices where Microsoft has struggled to compete. The future for gaming consoles is fuzzy at best. The company doesn't pay an amazing dividend. As a result, Microsoft doesn't look like all that great an investment looking forward.
Yet, that's exactly the position Microsoft finds itself in. Is this Microsoft's fault, or the investors who don't know basic math?
Yes I'm sure all those institutional investors have no idea how to calculate Net Present Value. The stock market is normally pretty smart. If you think you are more clever than everyone else, why are you wasting time here instead of making a killing on MSFT?
Even if GM itself shuttered and all its factories stopped cold, other car factories would pick up the slack and most of those ex-GM workers would get jobs in the expanding factories.
It wouldn't have worked like that at all. The problem with liquidating GM wasn't actually GM itself. If it was just GM it might have been better to let the company go. The problem is that there is a HUGE supply base that depends on GM. There are 3-4 workers in the supply chain for every worker for the assemblers like GM. And the supply chain among auto makers is heavily interdependent. A GM bankruptcy would have been literally catastrophic Around 40% supply only the Ford, GM and Chrysler. Even the ones that are more diversified still have Detroit as major customers. Only 10% or so supply just the foreign car makers. An auto plant can be shut down by a single part not being delivered on time and there would have been bankruptcies galore. Toyota even admitted at the time that a GM liquidation would have been very bad for them too because of the interconnected supply chain. A GM liquidation would have bankrupted Ford (possibly permanently) and put a world of hurt on everyone else. Alan Mullaly (Ford's CEO) said that a GM liquidation would be felt by Ford within days if not hours.
The other thing you aren't considering is labor mobility. Most of the workers would not be hired by other company for the most part. There simply isn't that much labor mobility in the short term. This would have been especially true if GM was liquidated. You can't really expect people to sell their houses in the recent housing market even if there happened to be jobs available, which there wouldn't be. That sort of liquidation of a major manufacturer takes years to decades to recover from.
That's not to mention other issues like the US taxpayer picking up the tab for GM pensions, loss of tax revenue, loss of other companies that depend on viable communities created by factories (like restaurants, etc). The fallout wasn't just a few tens of thousands of workers. The fallout would have been something like another Great Depression.
Jobs treated Apple customers like cattle, to be guided through narrow constricting chutes and confined in little cages, all while milking them of every last ounce.
I think it's hysterical that you think no one who uses Apple products is bright enough to make an informed decision about them. Do you really think there are no Apple users who aren't acutely aware of the alternative products available to them? Seriously? You think no one has heard of Windows or Linux or Kindle or Android? No one is trapped by Apple.
People use Apple products because they want to, not because they have to. Almost no one actually requires a Mac and the majority of computers sold are made by other vendors. You can do virtually all the same tasks perfectly well on a Windows and/or Linux machine. There are respectable quality competing products for the iPod, iPhone and iPad, widely available to anyone who wants them, often at lower price points and sometimes with features missing from Apple products or with compelling design features of their own. And yet millions still buy Apple products and have for many years now. This does not happen by accident or by marketing and Apple certainly does not (even today) have the market power to force people into buying their products.
(And before anyone starts, Apple customers are not mostly status seeking hipsters either. Nobody sells that many units over that many years on image alone. If the products sucked they wouldn't sell for long no matter how good a salesman Steve Jobs was.)
This is an ideal way of sending information when you want to report that you saw something that may need their attention, but you personally don't need a response.
Presuming you can get sufficient detail in the message to make it useful. 911 Operators typically ask questions for a reason. I can just see a whole bunch of text like "I saw an accident on I-80" with no further detail in the messages. Then the operator may need to call to find out the details.
Can we get a non-extremist pol who thinks TSA is a bad idea and has the power to do something about it?
No. Next question.
Seriously, the TSA is going to have to do something horrendous to get reformed. (I mean like killing babies horrendous, not their usual baseline horrendous) Otherwise any politician who tries to change it will be accused of coddling terrorists. Sad but that's the political reality we live in.
True but if you gather enough evidence of sufficient quality, the difference between the two becomes negligible. For example relativity has been tested in countless ways and so far all the evidence points to the accuracy of the model. That does not mean that it cannot be proven incorrect in some manner tomorrow but it has been so well tested that for all practical purposes the body of evidence can be accepted as something akin to proof.
Regarding the existence of deities the accumulated evidence is extremely poor to non-existent. A scientific critical mind would take this as an indication that the existence of a deity is so unlikely as to be approaching proof of non-existence. They would not say it is actually proof, merely that the utter lack of evidence means that they should behave in a manner consistent with believing that a deity does not exist.
You claim that if real proof of God's existence were offered then most Atheists would recant their positions.But you also seem to be assuming that the inverse is not true. I see no basis for thinking that a religious person would not recant his position if the opposite one were proven.
A useless argument since it is is impossible to conclusively prove the non-existence of a deity. You cannot prove a negative. The best you can say is that the existence of a deity is highly improbable. Further belief in a deity is an irrational act by definition. A theist would seem more likely than most to believe in something irrational even if it was provably false and in fact there is considerable evidence that people who believe in conspiracies tend to hold on to their beliefs even stronger when they are presented with falsifying evidence.
Neither position is currently proven, and I don't foresee that happening any time soon.
It cannot happen because much religious doctrine is not falsifiable. You literally cannot disprove it. You simply have the atheists saying that deities are absurdly improbable and the theists saying that they are going to believe in them anyway no matter how unlikely.
Atheism is the belief, without evidence, in the lack of existence of any deity
No, it is absence of belief in the existence of a deity. Important distinction. Non-belief does not equal absence of belief. Atheists are typically unconcerned with whether a deity exists or not. They typically doubt the existence of a deity for the same reason they doubt the existence of unicorns that fart pixie dust. They simply find it improbable to the point of absurdity. By happenstance this matches closely with the scientific method.
Because the Federal Government is not given the power anywhere in the constitution to tell a citizen what insurance he MUST buy with HIS money.
This is an argument based on a false distinction. There is no logical difference between the government taxing me and using that money to buy an insurance versus the government forcing me to contribute directly to buying insurance. Either way it is a tax even if for political reasons you choose to call it something else. The fact that it doesn't go into a Treasury department bank account is irrelevant. The government already has the power to tax and taxes can come in many forms. This is just one more form of taxation.
Just in case that wasn't clear enough try this example. The government taxes me and buys airplanes for the military. I as a taxpayer effectively have purchased a share of that airplane. It would be NO different if the government forced me to send a check directly to Boeing for the same amount to pay for a share of that airplane. I'm still forced by a duly elected representative body to send a portion of my money to a third party. The only difference is the government doesn't handle it along the way. Saying the government doesn't force you to buy things is a load of baloney. They do it all the time and it is perfectly legal.
Edge cases affecting a vanishingly small part of the population of the US.
You are calling the number of people affected by the Uniform Code of Military Justice a "vanishingly small part of the population"? Curious definition of "small" you have there. We're talking about many millions of people who are covered under those laws. Anyway the point was that you claimed that "the laws against murder are all state laws" which is the bit that is plainly wrong. There are federal laws against murder. The fact that the states have them too simply makes having a redundant federal law unnecessary for certain cases.
That article you are so fond of has no bearing on this matter.
Spend 20 seconds looking up the term Supremacy Clause and then rethink your argument. You could not be more wrong on this point. Seriously. Stop arguing with me in public about it and go do some reading. This is an important part of the Constitution to understand. I'm trying to help you here.
The constitution says CONGRESS shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Fine. So say a state makes a law abridging the freedom of speech. That does not violate the constitution in any way.
In the event that a state makes a law that contradicts the Constitution, the Constitution takes precedence. Article Six Clause Two specifically addresses this and binds state laws to not contradict the Constitution. If the states could make whatever laws they wanted they could easily declare slavery legal again or remove the rights of women to vote within that state. The entire point of the Constitution is that it binds all levels of governments with some basic common rules. Otherwise there is no point to the document. If the Constitution does not address a specific issue then the states are free to make whatever laws the like but freedom of speech isn't one of those areas. States governments are bound the same as the Federal government in this case.
Really smart to insult someone when 20 seconds on wikipedia will refute your argument completely...
Article Six doesn't say anything about Congress; it specifically binds *judges* to rule according to the *Federal* Constitution in the event of a conflict between it and the laws or constitution of any state. Note also that it doesn't say anything about State or Federal judges--it says *judges*, period
Article Six Clause Two is informally called the Supremacy Clause and it assures that the Constitution takes precedence in any conflict between it and State or local laws AND that judges shall enforce disputes in that manner. It is not just about judges and what they can do but directing judges specifically to hold the Constitution as the highest law of the land is a critical element in ensuring that states are bound to the same rules. Not specifically referencing congress is irrelevant. As a result the first amendment applies to all levels of government, not just federal.
nobody forces you to work for any of those companies and if you actively refused to work for them if they violated your privacy
A person might not force you to work for them but circumstances very well might. Unions came into existence precisely because it was difficult for some people to find alternative employment and some companies took advantage of that face. When your choice is between your privacy and feeding your family, your privacy is going to lose most of the time. Doesn't matter if it is wrong up in your ivory tower. You have the good fortune to have choices and live in a society that (generally) protects that right. Not everyone is so lucky.
So to you holding the college degree of a MBA is shorthand for evil corporate behavior even if in reality is has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the topic at hand. You think that someone who tries to learn skills to manage a business more effectively must be simultaneously an evil and incompetent person. It must be convenient to see the world in such a way that you can easily scapegoat a group of people who aren't the cause of the problem. What you have said makes even less sense than blaming all engineers for the problem of spam. Most HR professionals don't actually have MBA degrees. But don't let actual facts intrude on your idiotic rant when there are mod points to be had by pandering to wrongheaded scapegoating.
Because the constitution bounds the powers of the FEDERAL government.
And the state governments as well via Article Six. Government at all levels is bound by the Constitution.
In fact the laws against murder are all state laws
Demonstrably not true. Perhaps you should actually read about federal law or at least spend 20 seconds on Wikipedia before posting something so easily refuted. There are federal laws concerning murder for cases where state law would not apply such as for overseas military, on federal property, situations crossing state lines, involving federal officials, ambassadors, foreign officials, and numerous other circumstances.
A state could decide not to have any law against murder as far as the constitution is concerned.
Kind of a stupid argument since they all do have laws against murder.
So the First Amendment says CONGRESS shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. It doesn't stop a state from limiting free speech.
Actually it specifically does stop states from limiting free speech via Article Six, specifically "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." Basically the First Amendment overrides any state law that contradicts it. If the Constitution was not applicable to states then it would be a useless document.
I truly don't get this. If an organization requires a law to tell it that it shouldn't do this - YOU DON'T WANT TO WORK THERE.
That is of course correct but not the point. The problem is because sometimes people need jobs that they do not want. My father is a very smart guy but he doesn't have a college degree and he worked for many years in a job with limited applicability outside of a handful of companies. He didn't really want to work there, he had to out of economic necessity. The pay was better than probably anything else he could get and he had a union to protect him from idiots who might demand unreasonable things from him. (one of the good cases for unions actually) It would have been very easy for some moron to demand some ridiculous intrusion into his personal life without some form of external protection like a union or a law.
Bills like this are not to protect (presumably) you or me but rather to protect people with limited options. If your options are to hand over your facebook password so that you can feed your family, you're probably going to give over the password. It's completely wrong to even ask but sometimes we have to make laws to prohibit such behavior explicitly because a few idiots can't figure out why it is wrong. A law gives protections and recourse to those who might be vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
However, go find me a COMPUTER that has a battery life of half a work week , running off the kind of batteries I'd find at Wal-Mart or 7-11. It has to be a complete, self-reliant computer - I should be able to not just install any program I want, but *write* any program I can write, all without needing any other computer.
Ok, I've got a HP calculator in my desk drawer that roughly fit that description and are VASTLY more powerful than the model 100.
The problem isn't making a computer that does what you are talking about. The problem is making one you'd actually want to use for more than extremely limited uses. We don't make general purpose computers like the model 100 anymore because we don't have to and because people don't want them, not because we couldn't. We could easily create a device today that outpeforms the model 100 for a narrow range of tasks.
Just refueling satellites with reaction mass would be worth billions.
Not if it is still cheaper to do it from Earth. If it costs a penny more than doing it from Earth, then it is worth nothing. And it is not remotely clear that it can be done cheaper than refueling from Earth even with the obscene cost of launches from the surface.
Yes, "WE are ALREADY in space", and we're going to keep going there
Barely. Orbiting the earth a few hundred miles up is kind of like sticking your toe in the ocean and claiming you have conquered the sea.
so why does trying to do it in a more efficient way make someone a 'space nutter'?
It doesn't. But most of the discussions I've seen have a rather poor grasp on the economics of the situation. There is an axiomatic assumption that mining materials in space will somehow reduce costs. Making that happen will require some rather major technological advances which no one is even seriously working on at this point as well as some economic return to the parties on Earth who are financing the whole thing.
What they WILL find, however, is a bunch of metal and such that doesn't have to be lifted out of a deep gravity well to be useful in orbit.
No, instead you have to lift all the (non-existent) processing equipment instead. Are you under the impression that a steel mill is somehow not very heavy? Of course none of this technology is being developed because even if you did get it into orbit, you need a product to return to earth to make the financing possible.
Also, the water content of those meteors is worth a fortune in and of itself. Ice chunks + solar powered electrolysis = rocket fuel worth a minimum of $10,000 per pound by virtue of not needing to be launched with the ship.
The economics are nowhere near that simple. Let's say you have a big store of rocket fuel up there and ignore (for a moment) the cost of obtaining it. Then what? You still need payload which mostly has to come from Earth and the key processing equipment which also has to come from Earth. You haven't escaped the cost of the launch, you've simply added to the complexity and thus the cost.
Then there is the problem of actually developing the technology to mine and process these resources. We don't have industrial scale factories that are space worthy. Even if we did, they still have to be launched into space. We don't even have anyone working on them because there is no reasonable prospect of a return on investment. To get financing you have to have a product you can sell back here on earth and there is very little prospect of an economic return in the reasonably near future. Most of the economic benefits to the private sector are indirect ones (spinoff technologies, etc) for the foreseeable future.
What they want is, the materials right where they are, in space, where they will provide materials to work with in space.
Ok, let's say you are correct for the sake of argument and they want to work with materials in space. Let's even say they succeed and bring a large amount of iron ore into orbit. Then what? We have essentially no technology available to work with anything close to industrial scale ore processing in space, nor any reasonable prospect of developing it anytime soon. There simply is no reasonable economic case to be made here, even taking into account the high cost of escaping Earth's gravity well.
The problem isn't as simple as finding the ore and mining it (which isn't simple), you also have to have a space based industrial capacity actually do the work. This technology is not only not available, no one is even developing it. Why? Because there is no reasonable prospect of a market in which to sell it. You have to have a product to bring back to earth and sell. That product might be information, or ore, or something else, but if everything stays in space no one will ever finance it. There HAS to be a return on investment ON EARTH for any of this to happen. I just don't see any of this happening without some pretty major technological leaps forward.
Sure, we'd need to put a smelter assembly in orbit to refine the metals & scavange the carbon/etc from any asteroid,
Oh, is that all? Do you know of some space worthy steel mill the rest of us don't know about? Some way to turn the iron into steel, to shape it, heat it, form it, etc? Some way to power all this? Iron by itself is of limited value in space. Bringing it into orbit is completely useless unless you have factories and tools also in orbit. We do not have that technology or even a near term prospect of developing it. And even if we did, you have to have some economically viable product to bring back to earth to finance the project. While I'm optimistic that the engineering could be worked out sooner or later, I very much doubt the economics will permit it within the lifetime of anyone reading this.
And all this of course completely ignores the danger that if a 500 ton asteroid that can be moved and aimed is essentially a weapon of mass destruction and that bringing it into orbit is actually a terrifyingly bad idea.
Not only is this a significant increase in packet overhead, but it is highly likely that some portion will identify a person.
Without additional corroborating information all you can do with IPV4 or IPV6 is identify the originating computer. It is impossible to be 100% certain of who the person actually sitting at that computer is unless they transmit other uniquely identifying information or can be identified by third party sources such as security cameras. IPv6 is not meaningfully more useful for personal identification than IPv4.
I'd say the US has a pretty massive deficiency compared to the Europe
Then you would be wrong to say that. The EU has debt of just under 10 Trillion Euros which is around $13.1 Trillon dollars at current exchange rates. US public debt currently stands at just under $15 Trillion. The difference is actually fairly minimal.
we have socialized healthcare, they have inhumanity
Couldn't you come up with a better troll than that?
So you think paying someone worth $75k $60k isn't exploitation?
No, because if they are actually worth $75K they should be able to go get it. If no one is willing to hire them for $75K, then QED they are not worth $75K. It's economics 101 that things are worth what someone is willing to pay for them. Not a penny more or a penny less.
It seems in Europe people believe the government has a place in encouraging a society that is dignified and equitable for the public at large.
People in the US feel the same way. You only have to look at the number of laws promoting social causes to see that. (medicare, social security, various tax incentives, equal rights laws, etc) The differences are really more philosophical than practical. The biggest difference in general seems to be that people in the US trust their governments less. Put succinctly I once heard someone explain it that a government that is powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take everything you have.
In America your worth and place in society is based on your value to someone else.
How is "public at large" any different from "someone else"? You are making a distinction without a difference. (actually you are simply saying "my team is better than your team" without utilizing any actual facts to back up your assertion.)
Do you really think there can be a fair discussion between an employee and their employer?
Depends on what you mean by "fair". Fair does not necessarily equal easy or comfortable. The employee is legally allowed to leave any time they like (absent a contractual obligation). Likewise, with a few important restrictions, employers have the same right. That is certainly fair. It might also be very hard but that's the way life is sometimes.
Do you really think the employer won't exploit the employee, particularly in times of high unemployment?
You think employees don't do the same whenever they can? If you do then you have never employed anyone. Employees take advantage of companies all the time. They goof off, play on the internet, conduct personal business when they are supposed to be working, sometimes steal, etc. I've gone into manufacturing plants where people sat there reading the newspaper for several hours instead of doing the work they were hired to do.
That's not to say there aren't scummy employers out there. There are plenty who will screw people every chance they get. But let's not pretend it is a one way screwing.
If your system is so great, how come it leads to so much social inequality?
No one ever claimed there was a perfect system and every system has social inequality. The only question is the degree of it.
How come people in the US can get fired for reasons other than incompetence or stealing?
Because employment is "at will". The employee can leave at any time and for any reason (including no reason at all). The employer can (with some specific restrictions) terminate employment for a worker at any time and for any reason. Employment is a social contract and it's only fair that it be on reasonably similar terms for both parties.
There are many very sensible reasons why a company might let an employee go besides incompetence or stealing. There might not be enough business to justify the expense of their continued employment. The company might be moving in a direction that no longer requires their expertise. The employee might be a social problem (bad attitude, etc) or disruptive. The job might be seasonal (taxes or landscaping). The company might find a better qualified individual for that role.
Employment isn't a right. Companies hire you because the have an economic need. If that need disappears or becomes no longer economically viable, insisting that the company continue to employe excess employees is insane. My own company has customer demand that fluctuates significantly. We have a number of full time employees but also have a number of temporary employees through an agency. If we had to keep all of them on payroll all the time we'd be out of business within a year and all those employees would be worse off. Yes it can be very hard on people sometimes but that doesn't by itself make it a bad idea. If companies go bankrupt supporting unnecessary employees, everyone is worse off in the long run.
It's in fact very difficult to fire a person here if he is a good worker.
It's also difficult to fire workers in much of Europe if they are NOT good workers. We have the same problem with a lot of unions here in the US. I don't necessarily object to unions per-se but they do tend to protect a lot of dead weight. Having the ability to adjust the workforce to match product demand is a good thing for the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Now to me, 25 billion is less than 73 billion, and 7.35 billion is less than 23.34 billion... so I would think if a company did that, their share price would be higher, right?
Not necessarily. Depends on the perceived future prospects of the company. Current cash flow is important but a company's value is based on FUTURE free cash flow. Investors clearly think that Microsoft's future prospects are not so rosy and have priced the stock accordingly. Microsoft has two major cash cows (Office and Windows) and the future prospects for both are unclear. There is a major move to mobile devices where Microsoft has struggled to compete. The future for gaming consoles is fuzzy at best. The company doesn't pay an amazing dividend. As a result, Microsoft doesn't look like all that great an investment looking forward.
Yet, that's exactly the position Microsoft finds itself in. Is this Microsoft's fault, or the investors who don't know basic math?
Yes I'm sure all those institutional investors have no idea how to calculate Net Present Value. The stock market is normally pretty smart. If you think you are more clever than everyone else, why are you wasting time here instead of making a killing on MSFT?
Even if GM itself shuttered and all its factories stopped cold, other car factories would pick up the slack and most of those ex-GM workers would get jobs in the expanding factories.
It wouldn't have worked like that at all. The problem with liquidating GM wasn't actually GM itself. If it was just GM it might have been better to let the company go. The problem is that there is a HUGE supply base that depends on GM. There are 3-4 workers in the supply chain for every worker for the assemblers like GM. And the supply chain among auto makers is heavily interdependent. A GM bankruptcy would have been literally catastrophic Around 40% supply only the Ford, GM and Chrysler. Even the ones that are more diversified still have Detroit as major customers. Only 10% or so supply just the foreign car makers. An auto plant can be shut down by a single part not being delivered on time and there would have been bankruptcies galore. Toyota even admitted at the time that a GM liquidation would have been very bad for them too because of the interconnected supply chain. A GM liquidation would have bankrupted Ford (possibly permanently) and put a world of hurt on everyone else. Alan Mullaly (Ford's CEO) said that a GM liquidation would be felt by Ford within days if not hours.
The other thing you aren't considering is labor mobility. Most of the workers would not be hired by other company for the most part. There simply isn't that much labor mobility in the short term. This would have been especially true if GM was liquidated. You can't really expect people to sell their houses in the recent housing market even if there happened to be jobs available, which there wouldn't be. That sort of liquidation of a major manufacturer takes years to decades to recover from.
That's not to mention other issues like the US taxpayer picking up the tab for GM pensions, loss of tax revenue, loss of other companies that depend on viable communities created by factories (like restaurants, etc). The fallout wasn't just a few tens of thousands of workers. The fallout would have been something like another Great Depression.
Jobs treated Apple customers like cattle, to be guided through narrow constricting chutes and confined in little cages, all while milking them of every last ounce.
I think it's hysterical that you think no one who uses Apple products is bright enough to make an informed decision about them. Do you really think there are no Apple users who aren't acutely aware of the alternative products available to them? Seriously? You think no one has heard of Windows or Linux or Kindle or Android? No one is trapped by Apple.
People use Apple products because they want to, not because they have to. Almost no one actually requires a Mac and the majority of computers sold are made by other vendors. You can do virtually all the same tasks perfectly well on a Windows and/or Linux machine. There are respectable quality competing products for the iPod, iPhone and iPad, widely available to anyone who wants them, often at lower price points and sometimes with features missing from Apple products or with compelling design features of their own. And yet millions still buy Apple products and have for many years now. This does not happen by accident or by marketing and Apple certainly does not (even today) have the market power to force people into buying their products.
(And before anyone starts, Apple customers are not mostly status seeking hipsters either. Nobody sells that many units over that many years on image alone. If the products sucked they wouldn't sell for long no matter how good a salesman Steve Jobs was.)
This is an ideal way of sending information when you want to report that you saw something that may need their attention, but you personally don't need a response.
Presuming you can get sufficient detail in the message to make it useful. 911 Operators typically ask questions for a reason. I can just see a whole bunch of text like "I saw an accident on I-80" with no further detail in the messages. Then the operator may need to call to find out the details.
Can we get a non-extremist pol who thinks TSA is a bad idea and has the power to do something about it?
No. Next question.
Seriously, the TSA is going to have to do something horrendous to get reformed. (I mean like killing babies horrendous, not their usual baseline horrendous) Otherwise any politician who tries to change it will be accused of coddling terrorists. Sad but that's the political reality we live in.
The existence of evidence does not ensure proof.
True but if you gather enough evidence of sufficient quality, the difference between the two becomes negligible. For example relativity has been tested in countless ways and so far all the evidence points to the accuracy of the model. That does not mean that it cannot be proven incorrect in some manner tomorrow but it has been so well tested that for all practical purposes the body of evidence can be accepted as something akin to proof.
Regarding the existence of deities the accumulated evidence is extremely poor to non-existent. A scientific critical mind would take this as an indication that the existence of a deity is so unlikely as to be approaching proof of non-existence. They would not say it is actually proof, merely that the utter lack of evidence means that they should behave in a manner consistent with believing that a deity does not exist.
You claim that if real proof of God's existence were offered then most Atheists would recant their positions.But you also seem to be assuming that the inverse is not true. I see no basis for thinking that a religious person would not recant his position if the opposite one were proven.
A useless argument since it is is impossible to conclusively prove the non-existence of a deity. You cannot prove a negative. The best you can say is that the existence of a deity is highly improbable. Further belief in a deity is an irrational act by definition. A theist would seem more likely than most to believe in something irrational even if it was provably false and in fact there is considerable evidence that people who believe in conspiracies tend to hold on to their beliefs even stronger when they are presented with falsifying evidence.
Neither position is currently proven, and I don't foresee that happening any time soon.
It cannot happen because much religious doctrine is not falsifiable. You literally cannot disprove it. You simply have the atheists saying that deities are absurdly improbable and the theists saying that they are going to believe in them anyway no matter how unlikely.
Atheism is the belief, without evidence, in the lack of existence of any deity
No, it is absence of belief in the existence of a deity. Important distinction. Non-belief does not equal absence of belief. Atheists are typically unconcerned with whether a deity exists or not. They typically doubt the existence of a deity for the same reason they doubt the existence of unicorns that fart pixie dust. They simply find it improbable to the point of absurdity. By happenstance this matches closely with the scientific method.
Because the Federal Government is not given the power anywhere in the constitution to tell a citizen what insurance he MUST buy with HIS money.
This is an argument based on a false distinction. There is no logical difference between the government taxing me and using that money to buy an insurance versus the government forcing me to contribute directly to buying insurance. Either way it is a tax even if for political reasons you choose to call it something else. The fact that it doesn't go into a Treasury department bank account is irrelevant. The government already has the power to tax and taxes can come in many forms. This is just one more form of taxation.
Just in case that wasn't clear enough try this example. The government taxes me and buys airplanes for the military. I as a taxpayer effectively have purchased a share of that airplane. It would be NO different if the government forced me to send a check directly to Boeing for the same amount to pay for a share of that airplane. I'm still forced by a duly elected representative body to send a portion of my money to a third party. The only difference is the government doesn't handle it along the way. Saying the government doesn't force you to buy things is a load of baloney. They do it all the time and it is perfectly legal.
Edge cases affecting a vanishingly small part of the population of the US.
You are calling the number of people affected by the Uniform Code of Military Justice a "vanishingly small part of the population"? Curious definition of "small" you have there. We're talking about many millions of people who are covered under those laws. Anyway the point was that you claimed that "the laws against murder are all state laws" which is the bit that is plainly wrong. There are federal laws against murder. The fact that the states have them too simply makes having a redundant federal law unnecessary for certain cases.
That article you are so fond of has no bearing on this matter.
Spend 20 seconds looking up the term Supremacy Clause and then rethink your argument. You could not be more wrong on this point. Seriously. Stop arguing with me in public about it and go do some reading. This is an important part of the Constitution to understand. I'm trying to help you here.
The constitution says CONGRESS shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Fine. So say a state makes a law abridging the freedom of speech. That does not violate the constitution in any way.
In the event that a state makes a law that contradicts the Constitution, the Constitution takes precedence. Article Six Clause Two specifically addresses this and binds state laws to not contradict the Constitution. If the states could make whatever laws they wanted they could easily declare slavery legal again or remove the rights of women to vote within that state. The entire point of the Constitution is that it binds all levels of governments with some basic common rules. Otherwise there is no point to the document. If the Constitution does not address a specific issue then the states are free to make whatever laws the like but freedom of speech isn't one of those areas. States governments are bound the same as the Federal government in this case.
Evidently you failed high school civics class
Really smart to insult someone when 20 seconds on wikipedia will refute your argument completely...
Article Six doesn't say anything about Congress; it specifically binds *judges* to rule according to the *Federal* Constitution in the event of a conflict between it and the laws or constitution of any state. Note also that it doesn't say anything about State or Federal judges--it says *judges*, period
Article Six Clause Two is informally called the Supremacy Clause and it assures that the Constitution takes precedence in any conflict between it and State or local laws AND that judges shall enforce disputes in that manner. It is not just about judges and what they can do but directing judges specifically to hold the Constitution as the highest law of the land is a critical element in ensuring that states are bound to the same rules. Not specifically referencing congress is irrelevant. As a result the first amendment applies to all levels of government, not just federal.
nobody forces you to work for any of those companies and if you actively refused to work for them if they violated your privacy
A person might not force you to work for them but circumstances very well might. Unions came into existence precisely because it was difficult for some people to find alternative employment and some companies took advantage of that face. When your choice is between your privacy and feeding your family, your privacy is going to lose most of the time. Doesn't matter if it is wrong up in your ivory tower. You have the good fortune to have choices and live in a society that (generally) protects that right. Not everyone is so lucky.
I just love MBAs.
So to you holding the college degree of a MBA is shorthand for evil corporate behavior even if in reality is has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the topic at hand. You think that someone who tries to learn skills to manage a business more effectively must be simultaneously an evil and incompetent person. It must be convenient to see the world in such a way that you can easily scapegoat a group of people who aren't the cause of the problem. What you have said makes even less sense than blaming all engineers for the problem of spam. Most HR professionals don't actually have MBA degrees. But don't let actual facts intrude on your idiotic rant when there are mod points to be had by pandering to wrongheaded scapegoating.
Because the constitution bounds the powers of the FEDERAL government.
And the state governments as well via Article Six. Government at all levels is bound by the Constitution.
In fact the laws against murder are all state laws
Demonstrably not true. Perhaps you should actually read about federal law or at least spend 20 seconds on Wikipedia before posting something so easily refuted. There are federal laws concerning murder for cases where state law would not apply such as for overseas military, on federal property, situations crossing state lines, involving federal officials, ambassadors, foreign officials, and numerous other circumstances.
A state could decide not to have any law against murder as far as the constitution is concerned.
Kind of a stupid argument since they all do have laws against murder.
So the First Amendment says CONGRESS shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. It doesn't stop a state from limiting free speech.
Actually it specifically does stop states from limiting free speech via Article Six, specifically "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." Basically the First Amendment overrides any state law that contradicts it. If the Constitution was not applicable to states then it would be a useless document.
I truly don't get this. If an organization requires a law to tell it that it shouldn't do this - YOU DON'T WANT TO WORK THERE.
That is of course correct but not the point. The problem is because sometimes people need jobs that they do not want. My father is a very smart guy but he doesn't have a college degree and he worked for many years in a job with limited applicability outside of a handful of companies. He didn't really want to work there, he had to out of economic necessity. The pay was better than probably anything else he could get and he had a union to protect him from idiots who might demand unreasonable things from him. (one of the good cases for unions actually) It would have been very easy for some moron to demand some ridiculous intrusion into his personal life without some form of external protection like a union or a law.
Bills like this are not to protect (presumably) you or me but rather to protect people with limited options. If your options are to hand over your facebook password so that you can feed your family, you're probably going to give over the password. It's completely wrong to even ask but sometimes we have to make laws to prohibit such behavior explicitly because a few idiots can't figure out why it is wrong. A law gives protections and recourse to those who might be vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
However, go find me a COMPUTER that has a battery life of half a work week , running off the kind of batteries I'd find at Wal-Mart or 7-11. It has to be a complete, self-reliant computer - I should be able to not just install any program I want, but *write* any program I can write, all without needing any other computer.
Ok, I've got a HP calculator in my desk drawer that roughly fit that description and are VASTLY more powerful than the model 100.
The problem isn't making a computer that does what you are talking about. The problem is making one you'd actually want to use for more than extremely limited uses. We don't make general purpose computers like the model 100 anymore because we don't have to and because people don't want them, not because we couldn't. We could easily create a device today that outpeforms the model 100 for a narrow range of tasks.
Just refueling satellites with reaction mass would be worth billions.
Not if it is still cheaper to do it from Earth. If it costs a penny more than doing it from Earth, then it is worth nothing. And it is not remotely clear that it can be done cheaper than refueling from Earth even with the obscene cost of launches from the surface.
Yes, "WE are ALREADY in space", and we're going to keep going there
Barely. Orbiting the earth a few hundred miles up is kind of like sticking your toe in the ocean and claiming you have conquered the sea.
so why does trying to do it in a more efficient way make someone a 'space nutter'?
It doesn't. But most of the discussions I've seen have a rather poor grasp on the economics of the situation. There is an axiomatic assumption that mining materials in space will somehow reduce costs. Making that happen will require some rather major technological advances which no one is even seriously working on at this point as well as some economic return to the parties on Earth who are financing the whole thing.
What they WILL find, however, is a bunch of metal and such that doesn't have to be lifted out of a deep gravity well to be useful in orbit.
No, instead you have to lift all the (non-existent) processing equipment instead. Are you under the impression that a steel mill is somehow not very heavy? Of course none of this technology is being developed because even if you did get it into orbit, you need a product to return to earth to make the financing possible.
Also, the water content of those meteors is worth a fortune in and of itself. Ice chunks + solar powered electrolysis = rocket fuel worth a minimum of $10,000 per pound by virtue of not needing to be launched with the ship.
The economics are nowhere near that simple. Let's say you have a big store of rocket fuel up there and ignore (for a moment) the cost of obtaining it. Then what? You still need payload which mostly has to come from Earth and the key processing equipment which also has to come from Earth. You haven't escaped the cost of the launch, you've simply added to the complexity and thus the cost.
Then there is the problem of actually developing the technology to mine and process these resources. We don't have industrial scale factories that are space worthy. Even if we did, they still have to be launched into space. We don't even have anyone working on them because there is no reasonable prospect of a return on investment. To get financing you have to have a product you can sell back here on earth and there is very little prospect of an economic return in the reasonably near future. Most of the economic benefits to the private sector are indirect ones (spinoff technologies, etc) for the foreseeable future.
What they want is, the materials right where they are, in space, where they will provide materials to work with in space.
Ok, let's say you are correct for the sake of argument and they want to work with materials in space. Let's even say they succeed and bring a large amount of iron ore into orbit. Then what? We have essentially no technology available to work with anything close to industrial scale ore processing in space, nor any reasonable prospect of developing it anytime soon. There simply is no reasonable economic case to be made here, even taking into account the high cost of escaping Earth's gravity well.
The problem isn't as simple as finding the ore and mining it (which isn't simple), you also have to have a space based industrial capacity actually do the work. This technology is not only not available, no one is even developing it. Why? Because there is no reasonable prospect of a market in which to sell it. You have to have a product to bring back to earth and sell. That product might be information, or ore, or something else, but if everything stays in space no one will ever finance it. There HAS to be a return on investment ON EARTH for any of this to happen. I just don't see any of this happening without some pretty major technological leaps forward.
Sure, we'd need to put a smelter assembly in orbit to refine the metals & scavange the carbon/etc from any asteroid,
Oh, is that all? Do you know of some space worthy steel mill the rest of us don't know about? Some way to turn the iron into steel, to shape it, heat it, form it, etc? Some way to power all this? Iron by itself is of limited value in space. Bringing it into orbit is completely useless unless you have factories and tools also in orbit. We do not have that technology or even a near term prospect of developing it. And even if we did, you have to have some economically viable product to bring back to earth to finance the project. While I'm optimistic that the engineering could be worked out sooner or later, I very much doubt the economics will permit it within the lifetime of anyone reading this.
And all this of course completely ignores the danger that if a 500 ton asteroid that can be moved and aimed is essentially a weapon of mass destruction and that bringing it into orbit is actually a terrifyingly bad idea.
...one of the key players in the still suprisingly active community for the TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer.
Reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons where Burns says "have I missed the 4:30 autogyro to Siam?"
Not only is this a significant increase in packet overhead, but it is highly likely that some portion will identify a person.
Without additional corroborating information all you can do with IPV4 or IPV6 is identify the originating computer. It is impossible to be 100% certain of who the person actually sitting at that computer is unless they transmit other uniquely identifying information or can be identified by third party sources such as security cameras. IPv6 is not meaningfully more useful for personal identification than IPv4.
I'd say the US has a pretty massive deficiency compared to the Europe
Then you would be wrong to say that. The EU has debt of just under 10 Trillion Euros which is around $13.1 Trillon dollars at current exchange rates. US public debt currently stands at just under $15 Trillion. The difference is actually fairly minimal.
we have socialized healthcare, they have inhumanity
Couldn't you come up with a better troll than that?
So you think paying someone worth $75k $60k isn't exploitation?
No, because if they are actually worth $75K they should be able to go get it. If no one is willing to hire them for $75K, then QED they are not worth $75K. It's economics 101 that things are worth what someone is willing to pay for them. Not a penny more or a penny less.
It seems in Europe people believe the government has a place in encouraging a society that is dignified and equitable for the public at large.
People in the US feel the same way. You only have to look at the number of laws promoting social causes to see that. (medicare, social security, various tax incentives, equal rights laws, etc) The differences are really more philosophical than practical. The biggest difference in general seems to be that people in the US trust their governments less. Put succinctly I once heard someone explain it that a government that is powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take everything you have.
In America your worth and place in society is based on your value to someone else.
How is "public at large" any different from "someone else"? You are making a distinction without a difference. (actually you are simply saying "my team is better than your team" without utilizing any actual facts to back up your assertion.)
Do you really think there can be a fair discussion between an employee and their employer?
Depends on what you mean by "fair". Fair does not necessarily equal easy or comfortable. The employee is legally allowed to leave any time they like (absent a contractual obligation). Likewise, with a few important restrictions, employers have the same right. That is certainly fair. It might also be very hard but that's the way life is sometimes.
Do you really think the employer won't exploit the employee, particularly in times of high unemployment?
You think employees don't do the same whenever they can? If you do then you have never employed anyone. Employees take advantage of companies all the time. They goof off, play on the internet, conduct personal business when they are supposed to be working, sometimes steal, etc. I've gone into manufacturing plants where people sat there reading the newspaper for several hours instead of doing the work they were hired to do.
That's not to say there aren't scummy employers out there. There are plenty who will screw people every chance they get. But let's not pretend it is a one way screwing.
If your system is so great, how come it leads to so much social inequality?
No one ever claimed there was a perfect system and every system has social inequality. The only question is the degree of it.
So in this case where the government behaves like a child - who's the responsible adult in charge?
In the US and other democracies the voters are in charge. (sooner or later anyway)
How come people in the US can get fired for reasons other than incompetence or stealing?
Because employment is "at will". The employee can leave at any time and for any reason (including no reason at all). The employer can (with some specific restrictions) terminate employment for a worker at any time and for any reason. Employment is a social contract and it's only fair that it be on reasonably similar terms for both parties.
There are many very sensible reasons why a company might let an employee go besides incompetence or stealing. There might not be enough business to justify the expense of their continued employment. The company might be moving in a direction that no longer requires their expertise. The employee might be a social problem (bad attitude, etc) or disruptive. The job might be seasonal (taxes or landscaping). The company might find a better qualified individual for that role.
Employment isn't a right. Companies hire you because the have an economic need. If that need disappears or becomes no longer economically viable, insisting that the company continue to employe excess employees is insane. My own company has customer demand that fluctuates significantly. We have a number of full time employees but also have a number of temporary employees through an agency. If we had to keep all of them on payroll all the time we'd be out of business within a year and all those employees would be worse off. Yes it can be very hard on people sometimes but that doesn't by itself make it a bad idea. If companies go bankrupt supporting unnecessary employees, everyone is worse off in the long run.
It's in fact very difficult to fire a person here if he is a good worker.
It's also difficult to fire workers in much of Europe if they are NOT good workers. We have the same problem with a lot of unions here in the US. I don't necessarily object to unions per-se but they do tend to protect a lot of dead weight. Having the ability to adjust the workforce to match product demand is a good thing for the economy.