Actually no. The logic is that the government can regulate commerce. For example, if you had a coal mine where black lung is a danger to the workers, the government might step in and require you to provide masks, etc. so as to not endanger them. While they might respect your right to mine coal, it might not be in your best interests to do so safely, but the government has got a legitimate interest in safety. For example government response in the case of epidemics.
I said nothing about the where the government believes it derives its authority from. I know about the very broad interpretation of the commerce clause. I disagree with it, but that has nothing at all to do with the arguement I made.
Thus, it's regulable. Calling it slavery is a ridiculous stretch. If that were an even vaguely credible argument, any sort of law could be deemed slavery, for it interferes with someone's desire to do things. Laws punishing criminal trespass do not make slaves of trespassers because they're told where they cannot go.
My arguement is very simple: Slavery is involuntarily serving another. The ADA forces business people involuntarily to serve the disabled or be punished. Therefore the ADA creates a kind of slavery.
Isn't there a difference between preventing someone from doing something like tresspass, and forcing them against their will to serve another?
The difference seems obvious to me. What about these two things makes you think they are similar?
"I wouldn't hire a waiter with Tourette's, and I wouldn't hire a waiter who was just clumsy. I wouldn't hire a teacher who was mentally retarded, and I wouldn't hire a teacher who was just plain dumb. I wouldn't hire a firefighter who was too weak to lift a hose, and I wouldn't hire a firefighter with no arms. "
Of course the fallacy of the argument is that the ADA doesn't require you to do any of these things either. But don't let the facts stand in the way of a great emotional argument.
If that isn't the pot calling the kettle black.
Support for the ADA doesn't come from anywhere except emotional arguements. It has nothing to do with principles or reasoning.
A typical commercial for the ADA went something like this:
Scene with person in a wheel-chair sees stairs and no ramp.
A tears rolls down the face of wheel-chair person.
After which the audience says "something must be done!"
It must be done by someone else of course, like business owners.
Okay. So where's the arguement for it? Its all just emotion.
So you thought that it was perfectly fine that many businesses in the American South discriminated against blacks until our government started legislating against it, hm? That blacks couldn't go into movie theaters, or resturants, or hospitals that were white-only?
Just because something is morally wrong doesn't mean there should be a law against it.
Tell me: Do you think people should be free to say racist things or should that be against the law? You don't seem to think freedom of association should be protected. Maybe you think freedom of speech should be next.
In other words, if it's okay for a business to choose to ignore a minority like the blind, why is it wrong for them to ignore other minorities, like blacks? The logic is the same in both cases, both for and against the government taking a stand on the issue.
This also touches on the idea of legislating morality. Just because something like descrimination is immoral, should there be a law against it? Should people be free to be immoral?
Yeah!! Any why should companies have to hire blacks and women if they don't want to?
I know you're being sarcastic but why indeed? I agree that descrimination is stupid, wrong, and idiotic, but do the threat of lawsuits really change people's minds or does it make them even more hostile? Does taking away the right of free association really promote harmony? If we value freedom, should we be free to associate as we please? Should we be free NOT to associate if we want to?
This is very similar to the debates about free speech. Should we allow people to say things we don't like? Can we defend their right to speak while disagreeing with them? Of course.
That's why the law was put in place, as a measure of human decency that allows these people to function normally in society."
No. The law was put into place so that the public could feel good about themselves while making someone else pay for it.
Voting should not be mandatory. How can a democracy be a *real* democracy if people are required to vote?
Democracy and Freedom are not the same thing. Democracy is one group ruling everyone. Democracies can make rules that abridge free speech, take property without compensating the owner, declare a national religion, make it criminal to put unapproved substances into your body, and MAKE you vote.
Freedom means freedom from other people -- even if they are in the majority. The Bill of Rights is anti-democratic in a sense, for example. There are certain things that shouldn't be put to a simple majority vote.
Another way to look at it is in terms of collectivism versus individualism -- society versus the individual. More than just being different things, democracy and freedom are sometimes opposites. Thats hard to see when you're on the majority side making the rules for everyone. Its easy to see when you're in the minority being made to submit.
The other major point being, why should a person be expected to cripple their professional advancement by being forbidden to use knowledge that they have amassed?
The problem is that the person voluntarily gives up the future use of that knowledge to advance professionally now. If they don't agree to the companies terms, they don't get the knowledge in the first place. Sometimes professional advancement takes sacrifices -- long hours, long trips on the road, stress, and sometimes things like signing non-disclosure agreements.
This is a very American thing. I hate to say that the influence of it, like patents and copyrights and all the other stuff you guys are perpetrating down there, is starting to poison us elsewhere. Thanks a lot. Yeah, you're the home of the free, alright - my ass.
Much of the world would like America's prosperity and much of the world envies it. Well, these are the sorts of things you have to do if you want that prosperity.
And like I said before, allowing people to make agreements between themselves is an expression of freedom.
Finally, copyright and patents try to ensure that people responsible for creating the things you enjoy are compensated for it. If you don't compensate them, then you're just using them. Using the product of someone else's labor (creative or otherwise) without compensating them for it is a form of involuntary servitude and thats not freedom -- its the opposite. Now I agree that the system needs reform, but I the priciple is correct: Getting paid for you're work means you're free. Other's using your work without compensating you for it borders on slavery. You're just being used.
Batteries just can't compete on weight with other sources of energy. Looking at the above table, we see that the best batteries (Zinc Air with sacrificial anode) provide just 1/70th the energy kg for kg that gasoline provides. Electric vehicles seem to be a dead-end to me. A lot of energy is spent just moving the batteries themselves from place to place. The physics are strongly against battery-powered vehicles.
A much better approach would be to determine how we can produce gasoline from CO2 and H2O or coal, using some other source of energy to get the job done. It's already possible to produce natural gas this way.
Uhhh, what? Hydrogen is not an energy source! It is merely a storage medium for energy.
Counter-example:
4H -> He + neutrinos + energy
And as an anonymous coward already pointed out: If you claim hydrogen is merely a storage medium for energy, then you must also claim natural gas, coal, and oil are merely storage mediums.
I suspect that you were trying to say that energy must be used to create the hydrogen gas before the energy can be gotten from it, which is true, but to call it a "storage medium" is still incorrect. A more accurate thing you can say about it is that it is an element.
There's so much focus on the tools of voting, that people don't pay much attention to the fact that there are fundamental limits to voting systems themselves.
For example, in 1950 Kenneth Arrow proved that no voting system is fair.
This is know as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and places fundamental mathmatical limits on what the democratic process is capable of.
Of course, we have the worst of the worst sort of voting system here with its single-member voting districts and "one man - one vote" philosophy.
Taking even a very high-resolution (for a desktop) monitor, say 1600x1200, is less than 2 Megapixels. So anything higher than that will have to be downsampled to display on a monitor anyway (either that or you'll have to scroll around). The main advantage in going higher than that is for high-quality printing. Printing a standard 3x5" photograph at 300 dpi requires a bit less than a 5 Megapixel camera, though something less will probably do okay too.
Keep in mind that pixels on a digital camera are for one primary color only; i.e. 1 megapixel = number of red + green + blue elements = 1,000,000. Often times the ratio of green to red to blue is 2:1:1 which means that for certain images, the number of effective pixels might be 1/4 of what you'd expect. Assuming this, a digital camera would have to be a 7.68 megapixel device to fully tax your 1600x1200 monitor for all possible images.
A better comparison between monitors and digital cameras would count phosphers in the monitor against the elements in the camera's CCD.
This is a state-owned monopoly telephone system that is very profitable. In essence, the state is providing "free" internet access by over-charging everyone else for telephone service.
This is really a strategy by the State of Egypt to keep itself firmly in control of the Internet in the country. The deals with local ISP's to split the money are just to ensure the ISP's loyalty. They are being bought by the state.
We can deduce from the rediculously inflated price of CDs, the assumption that we are all thieves, and the total lack of diversity in the music that they premote that they don't serve the consumer.
How can you say they are ridiculously priced when the article points out that, when adjusted for inflation, the price of CD's has remained about constant over 30 years? There has been effectively NO CHANGE in cost.
The state of the economy does have some effect, but it looks like he's already taken this into account. There have been several recessions over the past 30 years he looked at and the 9.8 percent decline still seams unusual. In addition, this recession is nothing (yet) compared to say 1981. I remember those times vividly -- they were much more desperate than what we have now. By 1982, the unemployment rate had grown to over 9.5%.
We live in a golden-age today by comparison. Of course, things could get worse.
So, this respected researcher has changed his mind three times in 4 months . Perhaps he should think and formulate a well conceived, intelligent opinion before opening his mouth next time - is this guy the salon version of the first post trolls ?
Honest researchers change their minds when new data suggests that they should. They don't hold on to pet theories if the data contradicts those theories, you idiot. Thats what makes him a degreed economist and you a moron.
Just because you don't like what the evidence might suggest doesn't mean he's wrong.
"If it were the case that there was a 9.8 percent drop on albums, when you look at the historical record of the ups and downs of the CD industry, [that's] a bigger decline than we've seen in 30 years. It starts to look unusual. "
Except, that a) we're in a recession, b) teenage disposable income is now spilt between DVDs, Games and CDs c) bland mass appeal music always sees a drop in sales - see the RIAA's "Home taping is killing music" campaign in the late disco, pre punk era.
He just said it looks unusual in the past 30 years -- 30 years which include recessions, splits in teenage income, and changes in mass appeal. He's already taking into account these things. Christ, you're stupid.
Maybe its not them, but your development environment. Are they familiar with all the tools they're going to use? What about peculiar aspects of the OS? Can they create a make file?
Its easy to find people with knowledge of C/C++, but knowledge of the use of your development tools and system is almost as important as knowledge of the language you're using. Programmers can get frustrated at the prospect of having to learn about all the little quirks of a particular system and this can make them much less productive.
The sun has set on our economic system that is based on debt. It's all downhill from here. There will be no recovery until the system is redesigned.
I hate to agree, but you may be in some sense right.
Besides debt, much of the money that funded the last boom was also savings and capital. It took people years and years to build -up these bankrolls. Now much of it has disappeared. It will take years and years again to build it back up. I know a guy who lost about 2/3 of the wealth he inherited from his father (about $900,000). It took his father a lifetime to accumulate it. It was "invested" away in about a year.
This poor guy was really taken advantage of and got conned/screwed by an asshole VP of marketing. The investor was a good guy. Still, the money is gone. Where is the tech industry going to get its next $900,000 or $2,000,000 or $100,000,000? Was the growth of the economy during the 90's real or just the spending off of capital?
So we have a double-whammy; squandered capital + big debt.
And this isn't just private debt. Our governments also borrow and this will bite us in this ass too.
O'Reilly seems to be promoting the agenda of Microsoft's Software Choice campaign. He's a business man; perhaps there's a reason we don't know about.
Yes! A business man! He must be evil!
He's been deceiving us all along. We should have know he wasn't one of us, one of the chosen.
Heretic! Burn him! Burn him!
Only when the world is rid of businessmen/corporations/greed will I be able to get the food/music/girls/sex I deserve. And maybe the pimples will disappear, too -- yes, I'm sure of it!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually no. The logic is that the government can regulate commerce. For example, if you had a coal mine where black lung is a danger to the workers, the government might step in and require you to provide masks, etc. so as to not endanger them. While they might respect your right to mine coal, it might not be in your best interests to do so safely, but the government has got a legitimate interest in safety. For example government response in the case of epidemics.
I said nothing about the where the government believes it derives its authority from. I know about the very broad interpretation of the commerce clause. I disagree with it, but that has nothing at all to do with the arguement I made.
Thus, it's regulable. Calling it slavery is a ridiculous stretch. If that were an even vaguely credible argument, any sort of law could be deemed slavery, for it interferes with someone's desire to do things. Laws punishing criminal trespass do not make slaves of trespassers because they're told where they cannot go.
My arguement is very simple: Slavery is involuntarily serving another. The ADA forces business people involuntarily to serve the disabled or be punished. Therefore the ADA creates a kind of slavery.
Isn't there a difference between preventing someone from doing something like tresspass, and forcing them against their will to serve another?
The difference seems obvious to me. What about these two things makes you think they are similar?
"I wouldn't hire a waiter with Tourette's, and I wouldn't hire a waiter who was just clumsy.
I wouldn't hire a teacher who was mentally retarded, and I wouldn't hire a teacher who was just plain dumb.
I wouldn't hire a firefighter who was too weak to lift a hose, and I wouldn't hire a firefighter with no arms. "
Of course the fallacy of the argument is that the ADA doesn't require you to do any of these things either. But don't let the facts stand in the way of a great emotional argument.
If that isn't the pot calling the kettle black.
Support for the ADA doesn't come from anywhere except emotional arguements. It has nothing to do with principles or reasoning.
A typical commercial for the ADA went something like this:
Scene with person in a wheel-chair sees stairs and no ramp.
A tears rolls down the face of wheel-chair person.
After which the audience says "something must be done!"
It must be done by someone else of course, like business owners.
Okay. So where's the arguement for it? Its all just emotion.
So you thought that it was perfectly fine that many businesses in the American South discriminated against blacks until our government started legislating against it, hm? That blacks couldn't go into movie theaters, or resturants, or hospitals that were white-only?
Just because something is morally wrong doesn't mean there should be a law against it.
Tell me: Do you think people should be free to say racist things or should that be against the law? You don't seem to think freedom of association should be protected. Maybe you think freedom of speech should be next.
This has lots of civil rights overtones.
In other words, if it's okay for a business to choose to ignore a minority like the blind, why is it wrong for them to ignore other minorities, like blacks? The logic is the same in both cases, both for and against the government taking a stand on the issue.
This also touches on the idea of legislating morality. Just because something like descrimination is immoral, should there be a law against it? Should people be free to be immoral?
Yeah!! Any why should companies have to hire blacks and women if they don't want to?
I know you're being sarcastic but why indeed? I agree that descrimination is stupid, wrong, and idiotic, but do the threat of lawsuits really change people's minds or does it make them even more hostile? Does taking away the right of free association really promote harmony? If we value freedom, should we be free to associate as we please? Should we be free NOT to associate if we want to?
This is very similar to the debates about free speech. Should we allow people to say things we don't like? Can we defend their right to speak while disagreeing with them? Of course.
That's why the law was put in place, as a measure of human decency that allows these people to function normally in society."
No. The law was put into place so that the public could feel good about themselves while making someone else pay for it.
Thats not fair and its not decent.
If someone doesn't want to serve the blind why should they be MADE TO SERVE THEM? Isn't forcing one person to serve another a form of slavery?
I suppose the logic is that business people can afford to be slaves.
If the majority (sympathetic public) wants to make a minority (business people) serve a third group (the blind) then in a democracy the public wins.
Another example of how democracy and freedom are not the same thing.
Voting should not be mandatory. How can a democracy be a *real* democracy if people are required to vote?
Democracy and Freedom are not the same thing. Democracy is one group ruling everyone. Democracies can make rules that abridge free speech, take property without compensating the owner, declare a national religion, make it criminal to put unapproved substances into your body, and MAKE you vote.
Freedom means freedom from other people -- even if they are in the majority. The Bill of Rights is anti-democratic in a sense, for example. There are certain things that shouldn't be put to a simple majority vote.
Another way to look at it is in terms of collectivism versus individualism -- society versus the individual. More than just being different things, democracy and freedom are sometimes opposites. Thats hard to see when you're on the majority side making the rules for everyone. Its easy to see when you're in the minority being made to submit.
Chaos does not mean unpredictable.
It means non-deterministic or limited predictability and possibly unpredictability.
You have it exactly backwards: Chaotic systems are deterministic but unpredictable.
Global warming is the name for the rapid change of global climate (Rapid for a global climate change).
Global warming means just what it says: The globe getting warmer.
So now we have two ways to prove that CO2 is affecting the climate of the Earth:
The Earth's climate is getting warmer.
The Earth's climate is getting cooler.
Whichever we see, we know it was the fault of CO2, right?
The other major point being, why should a person be expected to cripple their professional advancement by being forbidden to use knowledge that they have amassed?
The problem is that the person voluntarily gives up the future use of that knowledge to advance professionally now. If they don't agree to the companies terms, they don't get the knowledge in the first place. Sometimes professional advancement takes sacrifices -- long hours, long trips on the road, stress, and sometimes things like signing non-disclosure agreements.
This is a very American thing. I hate to say that the influence of it, like patents and copyrights and all the other stuff you guys are perpetrating down there, is starting to poison us elsewhere. Thanks a lot. Yeah, you're the home of the free, alright - my ass.
Much of the world would like America's prosperity and much of the world envies it. Well, these are the sorts of things you have to do if you want that prosperity.
And like I said before, allowing people to make agreements between themselves is an expression of freedom.
Finally, copyright and patents try to ensure that people responsible for creating the things you enjoy are compensated for it. If you don't compensate them, then you're just using them. Using the product of someone else's labor (creative or otherwise) without compensating them for it is a form of involuntary servitude and thats not freedom -- its the opposite. Now I agree that the system needs reform, but I the priciple is correct: Getting paid for you're work means you're free. Other's using your work without compensating you for it borders on slavery. You're just being used.
A much better approach would be to determine how we can produce gasoline from CO2 and H2O or coal, using some other source of energy to get the job done. It's already possible to produce natural gas this way.
Uhhh, what? Hydrogen is not an energy source! It is merely a storage medium for energy.
Counter-example:
4H -> He + neutrinos + energy
And as an anonymous coward already pointed out: If you claim hydrogen is merely a storage medium for energy, then you must also claim natural gas, coal, and oil are merely storage mediums.
I suspect that you were trying to say that energy must be used to create the hydrogen gas before the energy can be gotten from it, which is true, but to call it a "storage medium" is still incorrect. A more accurate thing you can say about it is that it is an element.
A great discussion of Arrow's Theorem is in
Archimedes' Revenge: the Joys and Perils of Mathematics
by Paul Hoffman in the chapter
"Is democracy mathematically unsound?"
It also has has a good discussion of the Beale ciphers and Turing machines amoung other things.
There's so much focus on the tools of voting, that people don't pay much attention to the fact that there are fundamental limits to voting systems themselves.
For example, in 1950 Kenneth Arrow proved that no voting system is fair.
This is know as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and places fundamental mathmatical limits on what the democratic process is capable of.
Of course, we have the worst of the worst sort of voting system here with its single-member voting districts and "one man - one vote" philosophy.
An improvement would be proportional representation.
This can't overcome Arrow's theorem, but its better than what we have now.
Taking even a very high-resolution (for a desktop) monitor, say 1600x1200, is less than 2 Megapixels. So anything higher than that will have to be downsampled to display on a monitor anyway (either that or you'll have to scroll around). The main advantage in going higher than that is for high-quality printing. Printing a standard 3x5" photograph at 300 dpi requires a bit less than a 5 Megapixel camera, though something less will probably do okay too.
Keep in mind that pixels on a digital camera are for one primary color only; i.e. 1 megapixel = number of red + green + blue elements = 1,000,000. Often times the ratio of green to red to blue is 2:1:1 which means that for certain images, the number of effective pixels might be 1/4 of what you'd expect. Assuming this, a digital camera would have to be a 7.68 megapixel device to fully tax your 1600x1200 monitor for all possible images.
A better comparison between monitors and digital cameras would count phosphers in the monitor against the elements in the camera's CCD.
This is a state-owned monopoly telephone system that is very profitable. In essence, the state is providing "free" internet access by over-charging everyone else for telephone service.
This is really a strategy by the State of Egypt to keep itself firmly in control of the Internet in the country. The deals with local ISP's to split the money are just to ensure the ISP's loyalty. They are being bought by the state.
Science: Most Beautiful Experiment in Physics
Answer: Airbags for Planetary Defence
We can deduce from the rediculously inflated price of CDs, the assumption that we are all thieves, and the total lack of diversity in the music that they premote that they don't serve the consumer.
How can you say they are ridiculously priced when the article points out that, when adjusted for inflation, the price of CD's has remained about constant over 30 years? There has been effectively NO CHANGE in cost.
The state of the economy does have some effect, but it looks like he's already taken this into account. There have been several recessions over the past 30 years he looked at and the 9.8 percent decline still seams unusual. In addition, this recession is nothing (yet) compared to say 1981. I remember those times vividly -- they were much more desperate than what we have now. By 1982, the unemployment rate had grown to over 9.5%.
We live in a golden-age today by comparison. Of course, things could get worse.
So, this respected researcher has changed his mind three times in 4 months . Perhaps he should think and formulate a well conceived, intelligent opinion before opening his mouth next time - is this guy the salon version of the first post trolls ?
Honest researchers change their minds when new data suggests that they should. They don't hold on to pet theories if the data contradicts those theories, you idiot. Thats what makes him a degreed economist and you a moron.
Just because you don't like what the evidence might suggest doesn't mean he's wrong.
"If it were the case that there was a 9.8 percent drop on albums, when you look at the historical record of the ups and downs of the CD industry, [that's] a bigger decline than we've seen in 30 years. It starts to look unusual. "
Except, that a) we're in a recession, b) teenage disposable income is now spilt between DVDs, Games and CDs c) bland mass appeal music always sees a drop in sales - see the RIAA's "Home taping is killing music" campaign in the late disco, pre punk era.
He just said it looks unusual in the past 30 years -- 30 years which include recessions, splits in teenage income, and changes in mass appeal. He's already taking into account these things. Christ, you're stupid.
Maybe its not them, but your development environment. Are they familiar with all the tools they're going to use? What about peculiar aspects of the OS? Can they create a make file?
Its easy to find people with knowledge of C/C++, but knowledge of the use of your development tools and system is almost as important as knowledge of the language you're using. Programmers can get frustrated at the prospect of having to learn about all the little quirks of a particular system and this can make them much less productive.
The sun has set on our economic system that is based on debt. It's all downhill from here. There will be no recovery until the system is redesigned.
I hate to agree, but you may be in some sense right.
Besides debt, much of the money that funded the last boom was also savings and capital. It took people years and years to build -up these bankrolls. Now much of it has disappeared. It will take years and years again to build it back up. I know a guy who lost about 2/3 of the wealth he inherited from his father (about $900,000). It took his father a lifetime to accumulate it. It was "invested" away in about a year.
This poor guy was really taken advantage of and got conned/screwed by an asshole VP of marketing. The investor was a good guy. Still, the money is gone. Where is the tech industry going to get its next $900,000 or $2,000,000 or $100,000,000? Was the growth of the economy during the 90's real or just the spending off of capital?
So we have a double-whammy; squandered capital + big debt.
And this isn't just private debt. Our governments also borrow and this will bite us in this ass too.
Well, the 90's were fun. Long live the 90's.
O'Reilly seems to be promoting the agenda of Microsoft's Software Choice campaign. He's a business man; perhaps there's a reason we don't know about.
Yes! A business man! He must be evil!
He's been deceiving us all along. We should have know he wasn't one of us, one of the chosen.
Heretic! Burn him! Burn him!
Only when the world is rid of businessmen/corporations/greed will I be able to get the food/music/girls/sex I deserve. And maybe the pimples will disappear, too -- yes, I'm sure of it!
http://www.binghamtonreview.com/archives/wtd.html
Sure, it's common knowledge that everybody working in a university is extreme left. Henry Kissinger, Condolezza Rice, etc - fscking communists!
Uh huh. Go ahead and list a few token Republicans. But look at the numbers here.
The vast majority are Democrats.
Anyone who says universities are balanced politically is an idiot.