This film doesn't call for violence. Bin Laden and al-Awlaki do. There is a big, big difference between "Mohammed is a goat-fucking paedophile" and "We should go murder some infidels".
Does this anti-Islam video call for the murder of anyone? I bet not, since Google's looked at it and said "doesn't threaten anyone, doesn't even insult Muslims, just their religion, it's not against our terms of service".
There is a big difference between calls to violent jihad and a video condemning a religion.
Are those "subliminal messages" actually real threats of violence that warrant preemptive violent action, or simply insults that are especially insulting to people who adhere to a particular mythology?
Who cares if Muslims find it more insulting? Remember those cartoons of Bush, showing him as a chimpanzee? Those were legal.
Now, if someone drew cartoons of Obama as a chimpanzee, that's a race-wank dog-whistle, because of the history of depicting black people as simians. That's especially insulting to a black fellow. But it is ALSO LEGAL, because both "offending someone a little bit" and "offending someone a lot" are part of free expression.
I meant "public property" in the sense that you took: open to the general public. But, yes -- the city would need to vet the taxis that go to the non-general-public portion of the airport. That is something I have no problem with, so long as it is truly being done with the best interests of the passengers rather than the protection of an artificial monopoly in mind.
Barring non-city-authorized taxis from public roads (public in the sense of "open to the public", not "owned by the government") is an entirely different thing.
The taxi stand is not public property, and the airport is perfectly free to decide that "only taxicabs approved by the New York Association of Whatever can pick up fares here".
Shouldn't DMCA safe harbor provisions kick in? A business run from your living room is still a business, and renting out CPU time on a sandboxed VM ought to count as being an "online service provider".
Out-of-town business travelers should be able to choose to trust whoever they like, whether it's someone vetted by the City of New York or someone vetted by the National Taxi Vetting Association or whatever.
And I have to put up with guys at bus stops asking me for fiddy cent for crack all the time; why are gypsy cabs any different?
I didn't say that taxicabs should be able to do whatever they want. Fraud and theft are still fraud and theft.
But part of what this country at least nominally supports is the idea that businesses should compete on who can provide better services for less money, and that with very few limits anyone who wants to provide a service that people want can sell it. Instead we have an artificial oligopoly on cab services with artificially-high barriers to entry.
That first story has a nice big retraction at the bottom saying "this grass isn't genetically modified, but is a conventional strain".
The second story talks about the Bt protein killing the things that it's supposed to kill: the larvae of Lepidoptera species. (It's harmless to humans.) A little thought about what fraction of monarch host plants are within 60 yards of corn fields will reveal that this is not a big deal at all.
This is why free markets are good. You can eat organic corn and pay extra for either all the pesticides used to kill Heliothis worms, or pay extra for organic corn because it produces less per acre. I'll continue eating conventional corn.
As for thalidomide and DDT, we learned something from those, and this is why we do more thorough testing these days.
Yep, and people realize this, so they choose the ones that have been certified. All I'm claiming is that gypsy cabs should not be banned from operating. If some company does their own independent vetting of their drivers, and builds up public trust, then why shouldn't people be allowed to choose them?
Of course, and this is an important point: the free market isn't inconsistent with licensure/vetting. Let a third party (or even the government) license taxis and offer medallions, and post notices in the airports saying "Here are the agencies that vet taxicabs here, here are our impressions of whether or not they do a god job, and here are what their marks look like. If you ride with them you might pay a little more but you know what you'll be getting. If you ride with someone else, they're still not legally allowed to rip you off, but they might try."
Saying that you're certified by the AAA Taxicab Inspection Board when you're not is fraud under any system.
This is very different from "nobody who doesn't pay for a medallion is allowed to operate a taxicab".
Fraud is very specifically illegal in all philosophical formulations of the free market. The reason that people mix drywall dust into cocaine is because the customers of the cocaine distribution industry, operating underground as they do, are not going to go to the police with a fraud claim.
In a free market for taxicabs, the police would and should investigate fraud claims. "Officer, I asked this guy for a ride home, and he took me the long way to run up the fare. I have this GPS log right here if you'd like to see it." -> fraud conviction -> jail.
The anti-GMO crowd has already shown their hand: they got the data from a Bt-corn lab rat study and reanalyzed it, and made an elementary statistical error (whether out of malice or incompetence, I don't know) that led to them seeing all sorts of spurious statistical significance where none existed. If they can't get undergrad stats right in their studies they scare me.
(Specifically, what they did was to ignore correlations between variables -- like "weight of rat at five weeks" and "weight of [same] rat at six weeks" in calculating significance. If you have ten rats and they all are 0.8 sigma heavier than your control, that's potentially significant; if you measure the weight of the same rat ten times and all those measurements come in 0.8 sigma heavier than the control, then you don't get to "count" this ten times in calculating significance because it's the same rat. There are precise and well-understood numerical ways for testing for significance when dealing with correlated variables; we teach them to undergrads.
If "less" refers to quantities which are in any case measured in parts per trillion, do we care?
If various fungal byproducts will hurt me in large concentrations, and fungicide will hurt me in large concentrations, is it a good thing or a bad thing to use a fungicide which leaves a residue of one part per trillion in order to reduce the fungal byproduct concentration by a factor of ten?
er, what? "Pesticides" are not a monolithic thing. Organophosphate insecticides (same pathway as nerve gas, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors) will hurt you quite a lot. Neonicotinoids (derived, as the name says, from nicotine) will hurt you a lot less. Pyrethroids are quite safe and degrade very quickly in sunlight. The Bt protein (the thing in GMO crops) is essentially completely harmless to mammals (and most insects). I have no idea about fungicides and so on.
And a ripe peach produced with insecticides used responsibly likely *is* healthier than an unripe peach.
Taxicabbing isn't a capital-intensive business, like running a cellphone network is. In principle, all you need is a car and a little TAXI sign. It's not a natural monopoly like electric power distribution is.
No, actually, creationists do *not* believe in a rational ordered universe.
I am a physicist. I don't know what all the laws of physics are, but I believe that there *are* some inviolate laws of physics which apply uniformly throughout all that is. So far as we can tell, this is true: spectral lines in distant stars are the same as they are here, to very high precision, indicating that atomic and nuclear physics are the same. Electrodynamics and such work the same way inside stars as it does in all conditions we've found on Earth.
I suppose you could be a creationist and believe in a deistic universe, where a god chose the laws of physics and then wound up his universe and let it go. But modern creationists do not believe this: they are overwhelmingly Christian, and believe in such things as a god that actively intervenes on this little planet by making virgins pregnant, people turn into pillars of salt -- in general, they believe in miracles, even small ones like altering the genetic makeup of a species. This is the very opposite of a rational ordered universe: all these things, all these miracles, are inherently disordered, since they entail violations of the laws of physics by an entity outside of them. "F=ma, except when god says otherwise" is not a sound basis for a rational theory of the universe.
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This film doesn't call for violence. Bin Laden and al-Awlaki do. There is a big, big difference between "Mohammed is a goat-fucking paedophile" and "We should go murder some infidels".
Thank you. You'd get mod points if I had them.
"Draw Mohammed Day" and things like it, I think, are things we need more of.
Does this anti-Islam video call for the murder of anyone? I bet not, since Google's looked at it and said "doesn't threaten anyone, doesn't even insult Muslims, just their religion, it's not against our terms of service".
There is a big difference between calls to violent jihad and a video condemning a religion.
Are those "subliminal messages" actually real threats of violence that warrant preemptive violent action, or simply insults that are especially insulting to people who adhere to a particular mythology?
Who cares if Muslims find it more insulting? Remember those cartoons of Bush, showing him as a chimpanzee? Those were legal.
Now, if someone drew cartoons of Obama as a chimpanzee, that's a race-wank dog-whistle, because of the history of depicting black people as simians. That's especially insulting to a black fellow. But it is ALSO LEGAL, because both "offending someone a little bit" and "offending someone a lot" are part of free expression.
Because depending on how the screenshot looks, png may actually compress better?
I meant "public property" in the sense that you took: open to the general public. But, yes -- the city would need to vet the taxis that go to the non-general-public portion of the airport. That is something I have no problem with, so long as it is truly being done with the best interests of the passengers rather than the protection of an artificial monopoly in mind.
Barring non-city-authorized taxis from public roads (public in the sense of "open to the public", not "owned by the government") is an entirely different thing.
Thing is these are all things that civilians ought to be able to do without arousing suspicion, too.
The taxi stand is not public property, and the airport is perfectly free to decide that "only taxicabs approved by the New York Association of Whatever can pick up fares here".
Shouldn't DMCA safe harbor provisions kick in? A business run from your living room is still a business, and renting out CPU time on a sandboxed VM ought to count as being an "online service provider".
Out-of-town business travelers should be able to choose to trust whoever they like, whether it's someone vetted by the City of New York or someone vetted by the National Taxi Vetting Association or whatever.
And I have to put up with guys at bus stops asking me for fiddy cent for crack all the time; why are gypsy cabs any different?
I'm not trolling at all.
I didn't say that taxicabs should be able to do whatever they want. Fraud and theft are still fraud and theft.
But part of what this country at least nominally supports is the idea that businesses should compete on who can provide better services for less money, and that with very few limits anyone who wants to provide a service that people want can sell it. Instead we have an artificial oligopoly on cab services with artificially-high barriers to entry.
That first story has a nice big retraction at the bottom saying "this grass isn't genetically modified, but is a conventional strain".
The second story talks about the Bt protein killing the things that it's supposed to kill: the larvae of Lepidoptera species. (It's harmless to humans.) A little thought about what fraction of monarch host plants are within 60 yards of corn fields will reveal that this is not a big deal at all.
This is why free markets are good. You can eat organic corn and pay extra for either all the pesticides used to kill Heliothis worms, or pay extra for organic corn because it produces less per acre. I'll continue eating conventional corn.
As for thalidomide and DDT, we learned something from those, and this is why we do more thorough testing these days.
Exactly.
Yep, and people realize this, so they choose the ones that have been certified. All I'm claiming is that gypsy cabs should not be banned from operating. If some company does their own independent vetting of their drivers, and builds up public trust, then why shouldn't people be allowed to choose them?
Of course, and this is an important point: the free market isn't inconsistent with licensure/vetting. Let a third party (or even the government) license taxis and offer medallions, and post notices in the airports saying "Here are the agencies that vet taxicabs here, here are our impressions of whether or not they do a god job, and here are what their marks look like. If you ride with them you might pay a little more but you know what you'll be getting. If you ride with someone else, they're still not legally allowed to rip you off, but they might try."
Saying that you're certified by the AAA Taxicab Inspection Board when you're not is fraud under any system.
This is very different from "nobody who doesn't pay for a medallion is allowed to operate a taxicab".
Fraud is very specifically illegal in all philosophical formulations of the free market. The reason that people mix drywall dust into cocaine is because the customers of the cocaine distribution industry, operating underground as they do, are not going to go to the police with a fraud claim.
In a free market for taxicabs, the police would and should investigate fraud claims. "Officer, I asked this guy for a ride home, and he took me the long way to run up the fare. I have this GPS log right here if you'd like to see it." -> fraud conviction -> jail.
The anti-GMO crowd has already shown their hand: they got the data from a Bt-corn lab rat study and reanalyzed it, and made an elementary statistical error (whether out of malice or incompetence, I don't know) that led to them seeing all sorts of spurious statistical significance where none existed. If they can't get undergrad stats right in their studies they scare me.
(Specifically, what they did was to ignore correlations between variables -- like "weight of rat at five weeks" and "weight of [same] rat at six weeks" in calculating significance. If you have ten rats and they all are 0.8 sigma heavier than your control, that's potentially significant; if you measure the weight of the same rat ten times and all those measurements come in 0.8 sigma heavier than the control, then you don't get to "count" this ten times in calculating significance because it's the same rat. There are precise and well-understood numerical ways for testing for significance when dealing with correlated variables; we teach them to undergrads.
Wait, the organic crowd uses copper as an insecticide, and claims that this is healthier than pyrethroids?
If "less" refers to quantities which are in any case measured in parts per trillion, do we care?
If various fungal byproducts will hurt me in large concentrations, and fungicide will hurt me in large concentrations, is it a good thing or a bad thing to use a fungicide which leaves a residue of one part per trillion in order to reduce the fungal byproduct concentration by a factor of ten?
"poisons not much different than agent orange"
er, what? "Pesticides" are not a monolithic thing. Organophosphate insecticides (same pathway as nerve gas, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors) will hurt you quite a lot. Neonicotinoids (derived, as the name says, from nicotine) will hurt you a lot less. Pyrethroids are quite safe and degrade very quickly in sunlight. The Bt protein (the thing in GMO crops) is essentially completely harmless to mammals (and most insects). I have no idea about fungicides and so on.
And a ripe peach produced with insecticides used responsibly likely *is* healthier than an unripe peach.
Taxicabbing isn't a capital-intensive business, like running a cellphone network is. In principle, all you need is a car and a little TAXI sign. It's not a natural monopoly like electric power distribution is.
How the hell is this consistent at all with, to use a buzzword, American values?
Why shouldn't I be able to cruise around in my car and offer people rides for money without City Hall's permission?
Leaves, OTOH just grow on trees although winter tends to be a bit harder concept to deal with.
I live in Arizona, you insensitive clod. Ow!
No, actually, creationists do *not* believe in a rational ordered universe.
I am a physicist. I don't know what all the laws of physics are, but I believe that there *are* some inviolate laws of physics which apply uniformly throughout all that is. So far as we can tell, this is true: spectral lines in distant stars are the same as they are here, to very high precision, indicating that atomic and nuclear physics are the same. Electrodynamics and such work the same way inside stars as it does in all conditions we've found on Earth.
I suppose you could be a creationist and believe in a deistic universe, where a god chose the laws of physics and then wound up his universe and let it go. But modern creationists do not believe this: they are overwhelmingly Christian, and believe in such things as a god that actively intervenes on this little planet by making virgins pregnant, people turn into pillars of salt -- in general, they believe in miracles, even small ones like altering the genetic makeup of a species. This is the very opposite of a rational ordered universe: all these things, all these miracles, are inherently disordered, since they entail violations of the laws of physics by an entity outside of them. "F=ma, except when god says otherwise" is not a sound basis for a rational theory of the universe.
The idea is to make weapons which might otherwise be illegal with stuff that can be bought legally, like 3D printers.