...POPLINE searches for "Republican" and "Nazi" still return records!
What a closed-minded, shame this set of circumstances is. The Christian Right won't be happy until we've bred ourselves back into the dark ages. (This particular vision they share with their Islamofacist brethren. Whichever one wins the race, lovers of freedom and liberty are doomed.)
At the risk of my pending crucifixion, Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" was the first and only rather expensive hardbook book I've ever tossed in the trash. And at only about 30 pages in. Gah, what awful stuff. It was like drinking urine: Something you don't do twice unless you're not right in the head.
Framing is, pure and simple, an underhanded political technique. To "frame" science, is an attempt to inject the political into scientific arguments; moreso, it's the reprehensible attempt to state a political _premise_ as the basis for a scientific argument. Political premises usually are _not_ irreducible absolutes; when they're presented as such, it's a lie. By basing scientific argument on a false _political_ absolute, and placing that political false-absolute outside the realm of the debate, they basically seek to argue from a false starting position, and one that benefits their argument and give the appearance of their not arguing dishonestly.
(Note that "spin" differs from "framing" in that "spin" is a misinterpretation of the facts. "Framing" attempts to misinterpret _reality_ so that when their "facts" are presented, everything fits. Spin is the equivalent of a fortune teller reading a tarot deck. Framing would be stacking that deck before it's read. It's still mysticism either way you look at it, but the latter tries to make it look as if their's only one way it could have played out in the first place.)
That's not science. Not by a long shot. Bad enough it happens in politics, even worse if the scientific community would sanction its creeping into scientific debate. They should be tarring it, feathering it, and riding it out of town on a rail. Framing science is the corruption of science. A way to gain agreement without actually doing the scientific work. It's lazy. It's evil.
I see no need to frame scientific debates. Facts are facts. Explain the facts. Answer questions according to the facts. Tell folks where or how to go and get the facts and see for themselves. Explain that what one wishes, hopes, feels or prays to will not change those facts. If one can see the facts, and doesn't accept them, they're a fool, there's no place for them _in_ scientific debate. Best to ignore them and let them live out their days in ignorance.
If you manage to get yourself into stupid financial dealings, you're an idiot. There's (unfortunately) no law against being an idiot. (See recent other replies in this thread for more on that topic.)
It's no different than the current subprime thing. Idiot people wanted to own things they couldn't afford; idiot banks lent them money they should have reasonably known the idiot people couldn't/wouldn't pay back; Idiot shareholders didn't tell the idiot banks to stop lending to idiot people and kept on investing in these banks anyways. Justice (in the sense everyone involved is getting what they deserve for their part in the whole thing) ensued, sans usual hilarity.
I don't see it as being particularly tricky, but then, I expect that people are capable of _not_ being idiots. Anyone who does manage to find themselves as being an actual idiot, well, they pretty much deserve what they get. Anyone can think rationally. It's not that hard. That some choose not to, or do not do so wisely is not my concern.
Selling your organs is illegal in the US. You can _donate_ them to whoever you like -- I have relatives who have donated their bodies to science, for instance -- but you can't sell them. Ebay would be a far more interesting and lucrative place if you could.
Imagine if *you* had the right to sell your corpse
on
The Real Body Snatchers
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yup, you're worth a lot of money dead. To everyone but you. Imagine if _you_ had the right to decide to sell your corpse for a profit, the good you could do: You could leave that money to your family, donate it to charities. You could also do wonders to eliminate the organ donor waiting list -- if, presumably, you could directly sell your organs to folks willing to pay for them.
I'm a computer nerd athiest male. We should totally hook up!
*ahem* Just kidding on the second part. Wouldn't mind chatting though, some time, because I have so few opportunities to meet my female counterparts.
As far as I what I expect, personally, well I want a mix of quite a few things: 1. Intelligence. 2. Reasoning Ability (they're two entirely different things.) 3. An independent streak; I'd prefer someone who *wants* to be with me, but doesn't *neeeeeeed* to be with me. 4. Someone I find attractive (which I can never put accurately into words, but I know what I like the moment I see it.). 5. Someone who can put up with my being Objectivist, and understands why my being selfish is not a bad thing, why my being proud of myself isn't arrogant, and why I don't think there's any such thing as "unconditional love", among other things. You don't necessarily need to be like-minded, but I do expect you to understand where I'm coming from and why. 6. Likewise, someone appreciates my usually dark, sarcastic, bizarre, tongue-in-cheek and/or caustic sense of humour and the fact that I spell humor with an "o" because I like it that way. 7. Isn't too incredibly nitpicky about my spelling or grammar. 8. It wouldn't kill you to enjoy cooking and the occasional household chore, because I sure as hell don't want to do them all the time. 9. Must not prattle on exclusively about "fashion, celebrities, and astrology". Please, please, pleeeeeease no.
Some would call me picky or judgemental. I'm both. I often joke that I subscribe to the "Waiter, check please!" school of dating, or that 8-minute "speed dating" is usually 7 minutes I'll never get back. I don't suffer fools easily. Even when the fool is occasionally me.
"Well, they do give money to me. Lots of it." "I'm in favor of state-sponsoring because I'm not wealthy."
"State-sponsored" is government-seized. If you're in favor of the state seizing the wealth of those who have more than you, then what you're saying is that those with more wealth than you exist for the purpose of serving your interests, not their own. So, then, accepting that premise as universal, I take it you would have no problem with the fact someone with less wealth than you, holding the same premise, has every right to hold that you, being more wealthy than he, exist to serve _his_ interests, not _your_ own? If you hold your premise consistently, then man's nature is that he is to be a slave. You consign yourself to slavery.
"Beware: Easily subvertable position. If you punch me in the face and I punch you back that might be considered justified; if you punch me in the face and I murder your whole family, it's decidedly not."
You're contradicting yourself. First you say that it's an easily subvertible position, and in the same breath, you say that it's "decidely not." Your first premise is wrong. Your second is correct. Justice -- the virtue by which we hold men to the consequences of their actions -- would certainly deem the second act to be an unjust response to being punched in the face: First, because you are holding other people responsible for the acts of one; second, because the consequences do not fit the act. There is nothing "easily subvertable" in such a position.
Second, your premise that the government produces or provides anything that is a value to me, over and above providing an able military and law enforcement, is false. There is not _one_ thing that my government makes it easier to do for myself. The regulate everything from health care, to land use, to how I may renovate my house, etc... Not one of those things brings me a bit of value. You said it yourself: "Sometime ago our glorious leaders decided that they'd improve the quality of our education by raising mandatory tuitions in all universities" -- how does their taking that money from students provide them with any value? Answer: It doesn't. It's probably say to assume that in exchange for that sum, you got an additional bunch of guidelines and regulations. Again, you say this yourself, as the loan you get is "tied to lots of red tape." Wake up! You're praising a system that you _know_ doesn't work worth a damn. Why?
Third, that said, you're smart, why can't you get a job and pay for school on your own? Your fellow man doesn't owe you an education, or even a loan for one. Your fellow Germans have their own lives to worry about. Why should they support your education? Just because you "need" one? I'm sure there's an awful lot of things your fellow citizens "need", too. Would their need alone justify their seizing the means to fulfill that need from you?
Fourth, there is nothing wrong with compassion. If you want to help someone and can afford to do it, nobody should be able to stop you. But one should not act to benefit someone at their own expense, for instance, if you're giving so much to a homeles shelter that you can't afford to eat, you're foolish or worse. Likewise, you should not be forced to be compassionate, which is what collecting taxes and giving it to homeless shelters, public schools and the like is. As for the argument that some will make that government can be an agent of compassion and should be in charge or the redistribution of funds on this basis, there is _no_ government in the world that can distribute compassionately collected funds better than most private charities and foundations. They have the focus on their mission and an incentive towards efficiency that the government just doesn't have.
Lastly, consider this: A quote from Ayn Rand's, "What is Capitalism?": "When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals."
Uh, no, that's not what I'm looking for; and I assure you, I have my wits completely about me.
Government has _one_ essential responsibility, given to it by its citizens: Protecting the rights of those citizens. That is, the protection of individuals from the initation of force against them. Against internal threats, it employs a legal system: Officers of the law, and officers of the courts. Against external threats, it employs a military.
If we as individuals entrust the government with protecting our rights, we can't expect them to do it for nothing. As such, we recognize we have to pay for the service, and so we should pay voluntarily. While I'd prefer it wasn't called a tax, I happily pay the portion of my taxes that go for this purpose. (Or, well, honestly, I must say a little begrudingly and not totally happily -- if they were completely living up to their responsibility to protect me from force against me, they wouldn't be collecting taxes at the point of a gun, they'd be _shooting_the_tax_collectors_like_pigeons_!)
(Because only the _initiation_ of force is morally wrong. The use of retaliatory force is always justified.)
As for the rest of my tax money -- all the pork, entitlements, administrative gravy et all -- it is taken for purposes that the government has no permission to provide. It is money taken -- by force -- against my will. Nobody has any claim to that money, save for me. Not the government, not those with their hand out because they "need" it. A "need" is _not_ the same as a moral "claim" to anything that belongs to someone else. If you don't believe me, I need a yacht, a race car, and your most attractive legal-age daughter. Now, gimme.
I should note at this point my definition of a right: A right is a universal condition that exists for all and obligates noone else to provide it. (So you can have a right to seek employment, but you have no to right to a job. You have the right to seek an education, but you have no claim to one at someone else's expense. You have the right to earn a living, but you have no right to force me to give you mine.)
What I want is quite the opposite of a dictatorship, monarchy or no. As for ghetto hellholes, have you seen most inner-city public schools lately?
Defense accounts for 21% of the federal budget. Social Security, Medicare, "Safety Net" Programs account for 49% of the federal budget. 9% is interest on debt and 21% is "everything else." (According to cbpp.org) DoJ is likely in that "everything else" category, and accounts for.7% of the federal budget. (According to DOJ press release of today.)
21.7% is _not_ the majority of the federal budget by any stretch. Even if you don't sort out the entitlements from the "everything else" category, Social Security and Medicare are a hefty enough chunk of the budget.
Good for Microsoft! If I could do the same to avoid paying the portion of my taxes that go for welfare-state bullshit (which is pretty much EVERYTHING except for the Military and Law Enforcement budgets), I would. In a heartbeat.
If Washington state makes a move to try to get this income, MS should pick up and move it's entire operation to Nevada. What would Washington State do then?
Geez... compared to the Big Dig -- which also traps a lot of greenhouse gases (under Boston) and came in about $18 billion over budget, 800 million over budget is a steal!
117 pages, and it's dead wrong on page one, with the statement, "it is universally acknowledged that peace is a preferable condition than warfare". Such a claim cannot be verified in the affirmative. It is an assumption and a logical fallacy on the part of the author.
Peace on its own is nearly valueless -- sure, it's a great thing when there aren't bombs dropping, but sometimes, bombs dropping is preferrable to peace, if the alternative is living as a slave and oh, by the way, there just doesn't happen to be bombs dropping. Sure, I like peace, but a peacetime Nazi Germany is not something I'd have desired. Peace as a result of Liberty, I'll happily take. I would prefer to live 10,000 years of war in defense of Liberty rather than live 10 years of peace under tyranny. But in that case, it's still not peace that's the value, Liberty is the value.
So, you see, the author's got it all bloody wrong from the start.
Now, had the author taken the tack that liberty is mans' preferable state in which to live, the authors would have realized that war is sometimes _necessary_ to combat a threat to liberty. I'm pretty certain that such a perspective would have changed many of his conclusions, and made his paper a hell of a lot shorter.
That said, here's what my version of the paper would say about just war, and the use of [robotic] technology in warfare:
As individuals exist for their own sake at the expense of no others, the initiation of force against the individual is a violation of his right to his own life. As such, the only just use of force is the use of retaliatory force. There need be no bounds on the use of retaliatory force in warfare; As the initiator of force has rejected _all_ claims to a right to life free of force (by rejecting others' rights to live free of force, they reject their own), you, in retaliation, are under no obligation to restrict the degree or method of (lethal) force in your retalition to spare their lives. Use whatever means is necessary to obliterate your enemy.
To those who would object to the above on the basis of "innocent civilians" caught in the middle, they are not your concern. _Their_ government is responsible for their safety. By initiating force in the first place, it is _their_government_ who put their citizens lives at risk, and they are the sole party responsible for civilian casualties, on _either_ side.
"In physics, the photon is the elementary particle responsible for electromagnetic phenomena. It is the carrier of electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths, including gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves."
For some reason, my feeble mind never really made that connection.
"Physicists suspect that empty space is permeated by a Higgs field, which is a bit like an electric field. And just as an electric field consists of particles called photons, the Higgs field consists of particles called Higgs bosons. The Higgs field drags on particles to give them mass, akin to molasses tugging on a spoon."
Electric fields consist of photons? If that's not a typo of some kind, would someone care to explain?
Slashdot Mirror
...POPLINE searches for "Republican" and "Nazi" still return records!
What a closed-minded, shame this set of circumstances is. The Christian Right won't be happy until we've bred ourselves back into the dark ages. (This particular vision they share with their Islamofacist brethren. Whichever one wins the race, lovers of freedom and liberty are doomed.)
At the risk of my pending crucifixion, Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" was the first and only rather expensive hardbook book I've ever tossed in the trash. And at only about 30 pages in. Gah, what awful stuff. It was like drinking urine: Something you don't do twice unless you're not right in the head.
Damn near killed 'um!!
*ducks*
"Grasshopper" is condescending.
There's a good response to all of that.
"Wow. I feel really sorry that you're going to die a God-damned ignorant mystic. Pardon the pun."
Framing is, pure and simple, an underhanded political technique. To "frame" science, is an attempt to inject the political into scientific arguments; moreso, it's the reprehensible attempt to state a political _premise_ as the basis for a scientific argument. Political premises usually are _not_ irreducible absolutes; when they're presented as such, it's a lie. By basing scientific argument on a false _political_ absolute, and placing that political false-absolute outside the realm of the debate, they basically seek to argue from a false starting position, and one that benefits their argument and give the appearance of their not arguing dishonestly.
(Note that "spin" differs from "framing" in that "spin" is a misinterpretation of the facts. "Framing" attempts to misinterpret _reality_ so that when their "facts" are presented, everything fits. Spin is the equivalent of a fortune teller reading a tarot deck. Framing would be stacking that deck before it's read. It's still mysticism either way you look at it, but the latter tries to make it look as if their's only one way it could have played out in the first place.)
That's not science. Not by a long shot. Bad enough it happens in politics, even worse if the scientific community would sanction its creeping into scientific debate. They should be tarring it, feathering it, and riding it out of town on a rail. Framing science is the corruption of science. A way to gain agreement without actually doing the scientific work. It's lazy. It's evil.
I see no need to frame scientific debates. Facts are facts. Explain the facts. Answer questions according to the facts. Tell folks where or how to go and get the facts and see for themselves. Explain that what one wishes, hopes, feels or prays to will not change those facts. If one can see the facts, and doesn't accept them, they're a fool, there's no place for them _in_ scientific debate. Best to ignore them and let them live out their days in ignorance.
If you manage to get yourself into stupid financial dealings, you're an idiot. There's (unfortunately) no law against being an idiot. (See recent other replies in this thread for more on that topic.)
It's no different than the current subprime thing. Idiot people wanted to own things they couldn't afford; idiot banks lent them money they should have reasonably known the idiot people couldn't/wouldn't pay back; Idiot shareholders didn't tell the idiot banks to stop lending to idiot people and kept on investing in these banks anyways. Justice (in the sense everyone involved is getting what they deserve for their part in the whole thing) ensued, sans usual hilarity.
I don't see it as being particularly tricky, but then, I expect that people are capable of _not_ being idiots. Anyone who does manage to find themselves as being an actual idiot, well, they pretty much deserve what they get. Anyone can think rationally. It's not that hard. That some choose not to, or do not do so wisely is not my concern.
The laws against homicide and solicitation of murder, perhaps?
But if you're going to fry for my liver, I would recommend taking some onions and butter with you to the electric chair?
Selling your organs is illegal in the US. You can _donate_ them to whoever you like -- I have relatives who have donated their bodies to science, for instance -- but you can't sell them. Ebay would be a far more interesting and lucrative place if you could.
Yup, you're worth a lot of money dead. To everyone but you. Imagine if _you_ had the right to decide to sell your corpse for a profit, the good you could do: You could leave that money to your family, donate it to charities. You could also do wonders to eliminate the organ donor waiting list -- if, presumably, you could directly sell your organs to folks willing to pay for them.
(and I ALWAYS mis-type "atheist." It's a birth defect, I think.)
I'm a computer nerd athiest male. We should totally hook up!
*ahem* Just kidding on the second part. Wouldn't mind chatting though, some time, because I have so few opportunities to meet my female counterparts.
As far as I what I expect, personally, well I want a mix of quite a few things: 1. Intelligence. 2. Reasoning Ability (they're two entirely different things.) 3. An independent streak; I'd prefer someone who *wants* to be with me, but doesn't *neeeeeeed* to be with me. 4. Someone I find attractive (which I can never put accurately into words, but I know what I like the moment I see it.). 5. Someone who can put up with my being Objectivist, and understands why my being selfish is not a bad thing, why my being proud of myself isn't arrogant, and why I don't think there's any such thing as "unconditional love", among other things. You don't necessarily need to be like-minded, but I do expect you to understand where I'm coming from and why. 6. Likewise, someone appreciates my usually dark, sarcastic, bizarre, tongue-in-cheek and/or caustic sense of humour and the fact that I spell humor with an "o" because I like it that way. 7. Isn't too incredibly nitpicky about my spelling or grammar. 8. It wouldn't kill you to enjoy cooking and the occasional household chore, because I sure as hell don't want to do them all the time. 9. Must not prattle on exclusively about "fashion, celebrities, and astrology". Please, please, pleeeeeease no.
Some would call me picky or judgemental. I'm both. I often joke that I subscribe to the "Waiter, check please!" school of dating, or that 8-minute "speed dating" is usually 7 minutes I'll never get back. I don't suffer fools easily. Even when the fool is occasionally me.
Guys, if any women are actually reading this, we are collectively sooooo not ever getting laid.
A Great Brochure from Humanfactors.org is here:
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/guistandards.pdf
Page very close attention to page 14. It describes your situation as "Pitfall #4." And it's right.
"Well, they do give money to me. Lots of it."
"I'm in favor of state-sponsoring because I'm not wealthy."
"State-sponsored" is government-seized. If you're in favor of the state seizing the wealth of those who have more than you, then what you're saying is that those with more wealth than you exist for the purpose of serving your interests, not their own. So, then, accepting that premise as universal, I take it you would have no problem with the fact someone with less wealth than you, holding the same premise, has every right to hold that you, being more wealthy than he, exist to serve _his_ interests, not _your_ own? If you hold your premise consistently, then man's nature is that he is to be a slave. You consign yourself to slavery.
"Beware: Easily subvertable position. If you punch me in the face and I punch you back that might be considered justified; if you punch me in the face and I murder your whole family, it's decidedly not."
You're contradicting yourself. First you say that it's an easily subvertible position, and in the same breath, you say that it's "decidely not." Your first premise is wrong. Your second is correct. Justice -- the virtue by which we hold men to the consequences of their actions -- would certainly deem the second act to be an unjust response to being punched in the face: First, because you are holding other people responsible for the acts of one; second, because the consequences do not fit the act. There is nothing "easily subvertable" in such a position.
Second, your premise that the government produces or provides anything that is a value to me, over and above providing an able military and law enforcement, is false. There is not _one_ thing that my government makes it easier to do for myself. The regulate everything from health care, to land use, to how I may renovate my house, etc... Not one of those things brings me a bit of value. You said it yourself: "Sometime ago our glorious leaders decided that they'd improve the quality of our education by raising mandatory tuitions in all universities" -- how does their taking that money from students provide them with any value? Answer: It doesn't. It's probably say to assume that in exchange for that sum, you got an additional bunch of guidelines and regulations. Again, you say this yourself, as the loan you get is "tied to lots of red tape." Wake up! You're praising a system that you _know_ doesn't work worth a damn. Why?
Third, that said, you're smart, why can't you get a job and pay for school on your own? Your fellow man doesn't owe you an education, or even a loan for one. Your fellow Germans have their own lives to worry about. Why should they support your education? Just because you "need" one? I'm sure there's an awful lot of things your fellow citizens "need", too. Would their need alone justify their seizing the means to fulfill that need from you?
Fourth, there is nothing wrong with compassion. If you want to help someone and can afford to do it, nobody should be able to stop you. But one should not act to benefit someone at their own expense, for instance, if you're giving so much to a homeles shelter that you can't afford to eat, you're foolish or worse. Likewise, you should not be forced to be compassionate, which is what collecting taxes and giving it to homeless shelters, public schools and the like is. As for the argument that some will make that government can be an agent of compassion and should be in charge or the redistribution of funds on this basis, there is _no_ government in the world that can distribute compassionately collected funds better than most private charities and foundations. They have the focus on their mission and an incentive towards efficiency that the government just doesn't have.
Lastly, consider this: A quote from Ayn Rand's, "What is Capitalism?": "When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals."
Uh, no, that's not what I'm looking for; and I assure you, I have my wits completely about me.
Government has _one_ essential responsibility, given to it by its citizens: Protecting the rights of those citizens. That is, the protection of individuals from the initation of force against them. Against internal threats, it employs a legal system: Officers of the law, and officers of the courts. Against external threats, it employs a military.
If we as individuals entrust the government with protecting our rights, we can't expect them to do it for nothing. As such, we recognize we have to pay for the service, and so we should pay voluntarily. While I'd prefer it wasn't called a tax, I happily pay the portion of my taxes that go for this purpose. (Or, well, honestly, I must say a little begrudingly and not totally happily -- if they were completely living up to their responsibility to protect me from force against me, they wouldn't be collecting taxes at the point of a gun, they'd be _shooting_the_tax_collectors_like_pigeons_!)
(Because only the _initiation_ of force is morally wrong. The use of retaliatory force is always justified.)
As for the rest of my tax money -- all the pork, entitlements, administrative gravy et all -- it is taken for purposes that the government has no permission to provide. It is money taken -- by force -- against my will. Nobody has any claim to that money, save for me. Not the government, not those with their hand out because they "need" it. A "need" is _not_ the same as a moral "claim" to anything that belongs to someone else. If you don't believe me, I need a yacht, a race car, and your most attractive legal-age daughter. Now, gimme.
I should note at this point my definition of a right: A right is a universal condition that exists for all and obligates noone else to provide it. (So you can have a right to seek employment, but you have no to right to a job. You have the right to seek an education, but you have no claim to one at someone else's expense. You have the right to earn a living, but you have no right to force me to give you mine.)
What I want is quite the opposite of a dictatorship, monarchy or no. As for ghetto hellholes, have you seen most inner-city public schools lately?
I prefer the term "Indoctrination Complexes." But yes, near-total welfare bullshit. When I was young, nobody bought me breakfast or condoms!
Defense accounts for 21% of the federal budget. Social Security, Medicare, "Safety Net" Programs account for 49% of the federal budget. 9% is interest on debt and 21% is "everything else." (According to cbpp.org) DoJ is likely in that "everything else" category, and accounts for .7% of the federal budget. (According to DOJ press release of today.)
21.7% is _not_ the majority of the federal budget by any stretch. Even if you don't sort out the entitlements from the "everything else" category, Social Security and Medicare are a hefty enough chunk of the budget.
Good for Microsoft! If I could do the same to avoid paying the portion of my taxes that go for welfare-state bullshit (which is pretty much EVERYTHING except for the Military and Law Enforcement budgets), I would. In a heartbeat.
If Washington state makes a move to try to get this income, MS should pick up and move it's entire operation to Nevada. What would Washington State do then?
Geez... compared to the Big Dig -- which also traps a lot of greenhouse gases (under Boston) and came in about $18 billion over budget, 800 million over budget is a steal!
117 pages, and it's dead wrong on page one, with the statement, "it is universally acknowledged
that peace is a preferable condition than warfare". Such a claim cannot be verified in the affirmative. It is an assumption and a logical fallacy on the part of the author.
Peace on its own is nearly valueless -- sure, it's a great thing when there aren't bombs dropping, but sometimes, bombs dropping is preferrable to peace, if the alternative is living as a slave and oh, by the way, there just doesn't happen to be bombs dropping. Sure, I like peace, but a peacetime Nazi Germany is not something I'd have desired. Peace as a result of Liberty, I'll happily take. I would prefer to live 10,000 years of war in defense of Liberty rather than live 10 years of peace under tyranny. But in that case, it's still not peace that's the value, Liberty is the value.
So, you see, the author's got it all bloody wrong from the start.
Now, had the author taken the tack that liberty is mans' preferable state in which to live, the authors would have realized that war is sometimes _necessary_ to combat a threat to liberty. I'm pretty certain that such a perspective would have changed many of his conclusions, and made his paper a hell of a lot shorter.
That said, here's what my version of the paper would say about just war, and the use of [robotic] technology in warfare:
As individuals exist for their own sake at the expense of no others, the initiation of force against the individual is a violation of his right to his own life. As such, the only just use of force is the use of retaliatory force. There need be no bounds on the use of retaliatory force in warfare; As the initiator of force has rejected _all_ claims to a right to life free of force (by rejecting others' rights to live free of force, they reject their own), you, in retaliation, are under no obligation to restrict the degree or method of (lethal) force in your retalition to spare their lives. Use whatever means is necessary to obliterate your enemy.
To those who would object to the above on the basis of "innocent civilians" caught in the middle, they are not your concern. _Their_ government is responsible for their safety. By initiating force in the first place, it is _their_government_ who put their citizens lives at risk, and they are the sole party responsible for civilian casualties, on _either_ side.
Ah.. Found my own answer.
"In physics, the photon is the elementary particle responsible for electromagnetic phenomena. It is the carrier of electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths, including gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves."
For some reason, my feeble mind never really made that connection.
From the article, this struck me as odd:
"Physicists suspect that empty space is permeated by a Higgs field, which is a bit like an electric field. And just as an electric field consists of particles called photons, the Higgs field consists of particles called Higgs bosons. The Higgs field drags on particles to give them mass, akin to molasses tugging on a spoon."
Electric fields consist of photons? If that's not a typo of some kind, would someone care to explain?