I proposed this (Morse input on cell phones) on/. a couple years ago, and was mocked for it - for once I wish I were a subscriber, so I could check my comment history that far back. (And find out who to say, "I told you so" to.)
Coal can be (and is being) used to fire ethanol plants.
True, but I'd be very surprised if it weren't more efficient to produce synthetic oil directly from coal, rather than burn the coal to fuel the farming and distilling operations needed to produce ethanol.
So stop painting Bork as a victim of dirty tricks by mean liberals. He was an evil bastard who acted in concert with Nixon to thwart a legal investigation into Watergate.
The fact that Bork may be an evil bastard does not change the fact that he was a victim of dirty tricks (and gross, politically motivated misrepresentation) by liberals. The fight over Bork's nomination had almost nothing to do with his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre", and everything to do with liberal objections, and particularly pro-choice objections, to the anticipated consequences of Bork's appointment.
The problem with the Bork confirmation hearings (apart from the grotesque caricature of Bork's views by Ted Kennedy) was precisely that they did not focus on Bork's ethics, integrity, or legal judgment. Liberals were afraid that Bork would vote to reverse Roe v. Wade, and did everything they could to discredit him, to keep that from happening.
Which raises a good point - why not just require everyone to board airplanes naked? The cabins are climate-controlled anyway, you'd save lots of time in security lines, and the inevitability of public nudity might even do something about American obesity.
Wal-Mart (which this argument seems to have started with) is a publicly held company. Which is to say that if Wal-Mart voluntarily shared its wealth, it would be sharing the resources of its stockholders, who do not necessarily have much more than they need - who may be expecting to sell their shares to help support themselves in retirement, for instance.
There's some merit in the argument that publicly held companies should make all the money they can, and let the individual shareholders be generous with their individual profits, if they choose - rather than try to impose the same level of enforced generosity on everyone, regardless of their circumstances.
What's the point in my keeping more of a resource than I need?... anything more than that is selfish hoarding.
I think your idea of "need" is more arbitrary than you think. I suspect someone who posts on slashdot as regularly as you do might own a computer, for instance. And the hundreds of dollars that computer cost could have gone a long way helping less fortunate people who don't even have electricity, let alone computers - and who might disapprove of your selfish hoarding.
My only problem with the theory of evolution is that it states that evolution is random.
The "theory of evolution" states no such thing. The mutations that provide the genetic diversity on which natural selection can act are random, but the process of natural selection itself, while not purposeful, is not at all random.
It seems to me that one of the first things that organisms would develop after sexual reproduction would be the ability to make choices of mates based on whose traits combined with one's own would offer the best chances for survival.
Depends on the organism's way of life - flowering plants seem to be surviving quite successfully, despite being unable to do much about which of their neighbors they are fertilized by. But many animals (from people to peacocks) do chose their mates, and presumably do so based on instinctive judgements about the reproductive consequences of their choices (since animals that make such judgements well will, ipso facto, be selected for). The idea that sexual selection is a significant force in evolution was first proposed by Darwin himself.
This may be why we are attracted to some individuals and not others.
Yes. That idea has been taken for granted by evolutionary theorists for decades.
American companies' GM foods... are specifically engineered so that you can only use them once. So if you plant a patch of GM corn, you cannot use the seeds of the plants to grow new corn. So now you have to buy the corn from the company every year, thereafter.
Shouldn't you have figured this out after the first year, and bought regular, fertile corn next time?
And in fact I don't think your initial claim is even true - Monsanto and DuPont announced back in 1999 that they would not market any seed using "Terminator" technology, and I don't believe any major biotech company has sold seed engineered for sterility. That's why Monsanto keeps suing farmers who save seed; they're relying on licensing agreements to protect their IP, not on sterile seeds.
Incidentally, nearly all the non-GM corn grown in the US is grown from hybrid seed that does not breed true - so farmers have to buy new seed every year anyway, because the second generation would be much less productive. That's been true since the 1940s. It's not part of a plot to starve you.
Explain to me why 3 men and a cat can't get married but 2 men can?
It's too bad you added,"a cat" to your question; cats are incapable of understanding marriage, let alone giving meaningful consent. As for why three men can't get married - good question. I can't think of any reason the arguments for gay marriage shouldn't apply to loving, committed relationships of three or more people, and I'm disappointed by the inconsistency of those who want to legalize the former and not the latter.
I don't have any objection to gay marriage or to plural marriage - my own opinion is that governments simply shouldn't be in the business of deciding who is and isn't married. If you can find a church that will marry you, or just want to declare yourself married, go for it. Insurance companies can find some other way of dealing with partner benefits.
Marriage is either a social and evolutionary construct between each sex or it's just a club.
Social constructs are changeable, and have changed in the past - and the evidence (of sexual dimorphism, testicle size, anthropological data, and so on) suggests that humans evolved in an environment of mild polygyny - the males in our ancestry often had multiple "wives".
That isn't too surprising - the biblical kings and patriarchs were polygynous, for instance - and it's also totally irrelevant. What people are trying to change is not marriage as an "evolutionary construct", but marriage as a legal institution. Legally limiting marriages to those between a man and a woman, on evolutionary grounds, doesn't make any more sense than legally limiting marriages to those between a man and a small harem, on (somewhat better supported) evolutionary grounds.
If our state and federal governments are going to be involved in marriage at all, they might as well recognize gay couples, and plural marriages, since it will make those people happy, and it won't hurt you a bit.
By the way, a good friend of mine got married, legally, only because it would get him his wife's health coverage, while saving her on taxes. They divorced a year later, when the marriage was no longer useful. He also had a girlfriend at the time, to whom he was not married. That should help you appreciate the distinction between marriage as a social construct/evolutionary development and marriage as a legal institution.
Short-term price spikes, due to political circumstances, natural disasters, wars, changes in OPEC policy, and so on, are always possible. But when it comes to price increases due to our actually running out of oil, there are two possibilities: either we can make fairly good predictions about how long oil supplies will hold out - in which case speculators will buy up oil ahead of time, and the price will gradually rise at a pace related to interest rates - or we cannot predict how long oil supplies will last, in which case anyone who says we will run out of oil in, say, 20 years is making unfounded guesses.
I don't think that the people who are worried about our suddenly running out oil have access to any better information than speculators, or the oil companies themselves - people who are staking their livelihoods on their knowledge of oil supplies - so if can be confidently known that we will run out of oil in the forseeable future, then oil prices will already reflect that fact.
If you don't think oil prices reflect the best available knowledge about future supplies, then I guess you've found yourself a good investment opportunity.
...the only campaign finance reform that makes sense is to ban all forms of campaign finance except that allocated by an independant Electoral Commission based on a per vote basis.
If I had spent a few dollars to print pamphlets, or put up a website, saying what I thought was wrong with G.W. Bush, would I have been financing the Kerry campaign? What if the website also said what I liked about Kerry? And how about if a few friends and I - or a few hundred like-minded individuals - pooled our money for the printing/hosting costs?
If those things are campaign finance, then banning campaign finance would mean the end of free political speech, and the effective repeal of the First Amendment. And if they are not campaign finance, then all your campaign finance laws will accomplish is to reroute the megacorp/Chinese money through dummy organizations - as has happened with 527 groups since McCain-Feingold passed.
Campaign finance laws won't accomplish much but to keep incumbents in office and put the government in the business of deciding who can say what about politics. I don't think either of those is a generally desirable outcome.
But...Biblical faith is trust. In spite of popular misconception, it does not mean "blind belief".
If by "Biblical faith" you mean "the kind of faith Jesus asked for", then yes, it does mean just that. See John 20:29:
Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
Could Jesus possibly have expressed clearer approval of "blind faith" than by saying, "blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed"?
The context, by the way, is that the apostle Thomas has been told that Jesus has risen from the grave, but (understandably, I think) is not convinced until he sees and touches Jesus himself. Jesus is scolding Thomas for his empiricism, and praising the blind faith of his other followers.
All that is not to say that the Bible presents a consistent message on faith (the Bible is not a particularly self-consistent document, in general) - but the teachings of Jesus, as reported in the Bible, do specifically endorse "blind" faith - faith in the absence of evidence. And that is certainly the kind of faith that is the basis of the belief of millions of Christians (though not all, of course), like it or not.
Where do you think those daytime soaps got all their ideas?...Shakespeare hammered out a lot of the classic plot elements that have been copied ever since.
I won't argue that Shakespeare wasn't a great writer, but he lifted most of his plots from earlier sources as well - Romeo and Juliet from the earlier Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, Hamlet from Amleth, Prince of Denmark, and so on. So don't give him too much credit. On the other hand, the writers he took his ideas from have mostly been forgotten, so presumably he improved on his sources.
What's that about the First Ammendment? Giving someone money isn't speech.
But campaign finance regulations, if they work, work specifically by obstructing political speech. The goal may be to keep corporations from buying influence, but when you do that by having the government make decisions about which organisations can and cannot freely pay to make their ideas widely heard, you do run into First Amendment concerns.
The right to free speech would mean nothing if it meant a right to speak freely only in your own closet: it is also essential that you be free to use effective means to make yourself heard. Imagine, for instance, that wood pulp was strictly controlled by the government, with only selected classes of people or organisations permitted to use it. Everyone else would be free to "speak", and use printing presses - they'd just have a hard time getting the paper to put out any books, newspapers, pamphlets - would that not raise First Amendment questions? Or substitute ink, or copper wire, or fiberglass... or spectrum, which is controlled, in ways that constantly raise Constitutional questions here on slashdot.
No, money isn't speech, and neither is paper, or copper, but campaign finance laws operate specifically by controlling political speech (which should be the most strongly protected form of speech), by controlling how money can be used to get political speech into the public eye. I was disappointed that the Supreme Court didn't overturn more of McCain-Feingold.
Anyway, doesn't it worry you to have laws designed in effect to keep us from having "too much" speech?
As for "corporate citizenship" - No, corporations aren't citizens - but they are owned and controlled by groups of citizens, who ultimately decide how the corporation will act (usually by delegating to a smaller group of people the power to make those decisions). I don't think that corporations should buy campaign ads - I agree that the interested individuals should contribute through some other, non-business channel - but I also don't know that they can constitutionally be forbidden to do so.
Churches, like corporations, are not people - should it be legal to prohibit churches from making statements on political issues? Or from paying to publicize those statements? And if you think that should be legal, how do you go about deciding which organizations should be able to freely make, distribute, and pay for political speech? A list of government-approved political organisations?
Sorry about the rant; I think I share your basic goals, but I don't see that corporations are particularly being given rights that do not follow naturally from their being a form of collective action by individuals who do have those rights (can a corporate property be searched without a warrant? should it be?) - and I don't like seeing the First Amendment eroded, even for a good cause. (It's always for a good cause, isn't it?)
All historical, scientific, or other accepted "facts" are only those that the greatest ammount of people agree with.
I really hope the parent is a troll.
Assuming it isn't, though, I'm not sure how to interpret it - if the parent poster is merely pointing out that the ideas the most people believe in, right or wrong, will be the ideas that are widely regarded as "facts", "truth", or "science", then his argument is correct - but also tautological and beside the point. Yes, the things most people consider facts will be "those that the greatest amount of people agree with" - but what distinguishes science as a source of knowledge is the approach it takes to finding and verifying knowledge, the kind of reasons it gives for believing that the knowledge it provides is correct.
It's not that the Theory of Evolution is somehow innately superior to the Hypothesis of Intelligent Design -- they're not even opposites.
There are evolutionary theories of intelligent design - what one might call gradual creationism - but "the theory of evolution" is usually taken as shorthand for "the theory of evolution by natural selection" - whereas gradualistic intelligent design would be a theory of "supernatural selection". So there is a conflict.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is superior in that it attempts to explain the complexity and diversity of living things in terms of known phenomena - we know that random genetic mutations occurr; we know that an organisms genetic makeup affects the number of offspring it is likely to produce - rather than resorting to the ad-hockery of intelligent design (why are there living things? There must be a being that creates living things! - you might as well answer the question "why do cars go?" by saying, "there must be a being that pushes cars around").
Treating I.D. like it's a fully fleshed-out "anti-evolution" thinking is purely political, and not scientific at all.
And the intelligent design movement itself is quite political, and not at all scientific. The phrase "intelligent design" gained its current popularity because it serves as a court-friendly euphemism for creationism. You are right that intelligent design is not fully fleshed-out - it's deliberately vague because a more detailed version would be more blatantly a religious belief, and harder to get into American textbooks.
I asked a rabbi about that once. I was working for a catering company in Cleveland that does a lot of Jewish events (weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on), and the catering company worked with a rabbi who oversaw things to make sure we followed the food laws. So I thought he'd be well qualified to tell me whether a pig-based animal, genetically modified to comply with the Levitical food laws, could be kosher.
I didn't get an answer, though. I couldn't get him to take the question seriously - he seemed to think that no one would go to the trouble of genetically engineering pigs, just to let Jews eat real bacon - which seems oddly naive, given the lengths people have gone to to get around the commandment against working on the Sabbath.
There are lots of questions like this, where advances in science have possibilities that aren't clearly covered under millenia-old religious laws - like how a Muslim on the moon (or worse, a rotating space station) would figure out which way to face to pray.
I've got a few good ideas... Limit beef in the United States to be sold to the consumer within the state where it was raised...
I don't think you'd have to be a libertarian extremist for this to drive you nuts- the more than a million Rhode Islanders, for instance, who live in a state with only 8,000 head of cattle, might also have some complaints. I'm not sure that making beef a luxury item for the eastern seaboard while simultaneously destroying the economy of Wyoming has much appeal for anyone except Marxist daydreamers like yourself.
And that's not even considering the black market you'd create in smuggled beef - unless you want checkpoints and searches at all state border crossings. (Which, incidentally, is one of the problems with creating the kind of control economy you apparently envision - though an article on octopi and robot design probably isn't the place for that discussion.)
Thank you. I'm glad someone else understands that fascism is an actual political philosophy, not an all-purpose derogatory term for people you disagree with. "Fascist" seems to be used today the same way "Communist" was forty years ago - or "She's a witch!", 300 years ago.
...the first electronic music experiment was done by Lev Sergeivitch Termen and his famus Theremin.
Also not true - the link you point to lists electronic instruments going back to 1876, forty years before the theremin. The Telharmonium (1897) was a pretty sophisticated instrument, but it weighed 200 tons, and vacuum-tube amplifiers hadn't been invented yet, so it wasn't very practical.
Some of the problems with Asimov's laws of robotics were quite apparent even back in the '40s. The first law is especially difficult : "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot that attempted to strictly follow the first law would, for instance, keep taking away your cigarettes. See Jack Williamson's The Humanoids -- a 1949 novel in which humanoid robots following Asimovian guidelines ("To serve and obey, and guard men from harm") keep an entire planet of humans drugged into complacency, because it's the only way to keep people from endangering themselves.
come on!!! Ford Prefect == BLACK GANGSTA RAPPER (Mos Def) ?!?!??!?!?!
Mos Def, while black, and a rapper, is by no means a "GANGSTA RAPPER". You seem to be using "gangsta" and "ghetto" as insulting synonyms for "black".
And Mos Def was a professional actor before he started rapping, anyway - so I don't see how his musical career is relevant.
I agree that they probably shouldn't have cast a guy from Brooklyn to play Ford Prefect, and the fact that they chose a black actor does look like tokenism - but I don't remember Ford's race being at all significant to the book, or even mentioned (whereas Arthur is clearly a stereotypical white Englishman). And again, Mos Def's being a rapper no more makes him a poor actor than Clint Eastwood's writing his own scores makes him a bad director.
Anyway, the real problem with Ford Prefect is that the joke of his name is mostly lost on Americans. I sometimes which they had renamed him "Ford Escort" for U.S. consumption.
One thing I would take issue with here though is that "American-Style" democracy is not necessarily synonymous with liberty (the two can exist independent of each other).
The post you are responding to didn't say anything about democracy, American-style or otherwise. Certainly one can have great personal freedom under, say, a benevolent dictatorship - although I'd suggest that democracy is a better bet for preserving freedom in the long run. But you seem to be suggesting that American-style freedom is not necessarily the kind of freedom that is appropriate to other people, and with that I disagree.
...liberty cannot be imposed, for if it is, it is not liberty.
No. If A tells B, "you can't go outside without a veil", and I tell A, "you can't stop her", and make it stick, I have imposed liberty - that is, the only freedom I have taken away is the freedom to take away others' freedoms. A society in which a man cannot tell his neighbor how to dress, or how to worship, is more free than one in which he can - even though he has lost the "freedom" to tell his neighbor how to dress.
Iran is moving slowly in a direction of popular democracy with a strong religious aspect... there is no separation between church and state.
You are treating the Iranian people as though they were a collective, Muslim hive-mind. You talk about the right of self-determination without asking whether that means the right of a Muslim majority to impose its will on Christians, Jews, Baha'is, and atheists - and on Muslims who are not Twelver Shi'ites.
You are right that American intervention would likely be counterproductive, but I'd be glad to have the U.S., or the U.N., or benevolent aliens impose freedom on Iran and the world, if I thought it were possible.
If you'd like to play rock-paper-scissors against a computer, there's always the WWW Roshambot. It's not at all related to the CogVis project, but interesting in its own right:
The WWW Roshambot utilizes an Artificial Intelligence algorithm in order to determine the optimal move for each round. It does NOT cheat (i.e. it does not use your move on the current round to determine it's move for the current round), nor is it random (except on the first move).
Presumably if it played against Bart Simpson it would learn to always pick paper.
Is conneXion considered an error? I like it much better than connection.
It's correct, but British. Just like colour/color, or theatre/theater. Or foetus/fetus, though that doesn't seem to come up so often.
connexion Pronunciation: k&-'nek-sh&n chiefly British variant of CONNECTION
Did it never occur to you to check an actual online dictionary? I use google to see if my usage of a word or phrase is acceptable (or at least common), but a dictionary is probably a better bet for spelling.
real (3, adverb): VERY (he was real cool -- H. M. McLuhan) usage Most handbooks consider the adverb real to be informal and more suitable to speech than writing. Our evidence shows these observations to be true in the main, but real is becoming more common in writing of an informal, conversational style. It is used as an intensifier only and is not interchangeable with really except in that use.
I'd say you're fighting a losing battle on this one. I'm not too bothered by it, either; the English language has other words that function both as adjectives and as adverbs, despite the existence of a distinct adverb form - near dead and nearly dead are both standard, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
I proposed this (Morse input on cell phones) on /. a couple years ago, and was mocked for it - for once I wish I were a subscriber, so I could check my comment history that far back. (And find out who to say, "I told you so" to.)
Coal can be (and is being) used to fire ethanol plants.
True, but I'd be very surprised if it weren't more efficient to produce synthetic oil directly from coal, rather than burn the coal to fuel the farming and distilling operations needed to produce ethanol.
So stop painting Bork as a victim of dirty tricks by mean liberals. He was an evil bastard who acted in concert with Nixon to thwart a legal investigation into Watergate.
The fact that Bork may be an evil bastard does not change the fact that he was a victim of dirty tricks (and gross, politically motivated misrepresentation) by liberals. The fight over Bork's nomination had almost nothing to do with his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre", and everything to do with liberal objections, and particularly pro-choice objections, to the anticipated consequences of Bork's appointment.
The problem with the Bork confirmation hearings (apart from the grotesque caricature of Bork's views by Ted Kennedy) was precisely that they did not focus on Bork's ethics, integrity, or legal judgment. Liberals were afraid that Bork would vote to reverse Roe v. Wade, and did everything they could to discredit him, to keep that from happening.
Which raises a good point - why not just require everyone to board airplanes naked? The cabins are climate-controlled anyway, you'd save lots of time in security lines, and the inevitability of public nudity might even do something about American obesity.
Wal-Mart (which this argument seems to have started with) is a publicly held company. Which is to say that if Wal-Mart voluntarily shared its wealth, it would be sharing the resources of its stockholders, who do not necessarily have much more than they need - who may be expecting to sell their shares to help support themselves in retirement, for instance.
... anything more than that is selfish hoarding.
There's some merit in the argument that publicly held companies should make all the money they can, and let the individual shareholders be generous with their individual profits, if they choose - rather than try to impose the same level of enforced generosity on everyone, regardless of their circumstances.
What's the point in my keeping more of a resource than I need?
I think your idea of "need" is more arbitrary than you think. I suspect someone who posts on slashdot as regularly as you do might own a computer, for instance. And the hundreds of dollars that computer cost could have gone a long way helping less fortunate people who don't even have electricity, let alone computers - and who might disapprove of your selfish hoarding.
My only problem with the theory of evolution is that it states that evolution is random.
The "theory of evolution" states no such thing. The mutations that provide the genetic diversity on which natural selection can act are random, but the process of natural selection itself, while not purposeful, is not at all random.
It seems to me that one of the first things that organisms would develop after sexual reproduction would be the ability to make choices of mates based on whose traits combined with one's own would offer the best chances for survival.
Depends on the organism's way of life - flowering plants seem to be surviving quite successfully, despite being unable to do much about which of their neighbors they are fertilized by. But many animals (from people to peacocks) do chose their mates, and presumably do so based on instinctive judgements about the reproductive consequences of their choices (since animals that make such judgements well will, ipso facto, be selected for). The idea that sexual selection is a significant force in evolution was first proposed by Darwin himself.
This may be why we are attracted to some individuals and not others.
Yes. That idea has been taken for granted by evolutionary theorists for decades.
American companies' GM foods... are specifically engineered so that you can only use them once. So if you plant a patch of GM corn, you cannot use the seeds of the plants to grow new corn. So now you have to buy the corn from the company every year, thereafter.
Shouldn't you have figured this out after the first year, and bought regular, fertile corn next time?
And in fact I don't think your initial claim is even true - Monsanto and DuPont announced back in 1999 that they would not market any seed using "Terminator" technology, and I don't believe any major biotech company has sold seed engineered for sterility. That's why Monsanto keeps suing farmers who save seed; they're relying on licensing agreements to protect their IP, not on sterile seeds.
Incidentally, nearly all the non-GM corn grown in the US is grown from hybrid seed that does not breed true - so farmers have to buy new seed every year anyway, because the second generation would be much less productive. That's been true since the 1940s. It's not part of a plot to starve you.
Explain to me why 3 men and a cat can't get married but 2 men can?
It's too bad you added,"a cat" to your question; cats are incapable of understanding marriage, let alone giving meaningful consent. As for why three men can't get married - good question. I can't think of any reason the arguments for gay marriage shouldn't apply to loving, committed relationships of three or more people, and I'm disappointed by the inconsistency of those who want to legalize the former and not the latter.
I don't have any objection to gay marriage or to plural marriage - my own opinion is that governments simply shouldn't be in the business of deciding who is and isn't married. If you can find a church that will marry you, or just want to declare yourself married, go for it. Insurance companies can find some other way of dealing with partner benefits.
Marriage is either a social and evolutionary construct between each sex or it's just a club.
Social constructs are changeable, and have changed in the past - and the evidence (of sexual dimorphism, testicle size, anthropological data, and so on) suggests that humans evolved in an environment of mild polygyny - the males in our ancestry often had multiple "wives".
That isn't too surprising - the biblical kings and patriarchs were polygynous, for instance - and it's also totally irrelevant. What people are trying to change is not marriage as an "evolutionary construct", but marriage as a legal institution. Legally limiting marriages to those between a man and a woman, on evolutionary grounds, doesn't make any more sense than legally limiting marriages to those between a man and a small harem, on (somewhat better supported) evolutionary grounds.
If our state and federal governments are going to be involved in marriage at all, they might as well recognize gay couples, and plural marriages, since it will make those people happy, and it won't hurt you a bit.
By the way, a good friend of mine got married, legally, only because it would get him his wife's health coverage, while saving her on taxes. They divorced a year later, when the marriage was no longer useful. He also had a girlfriend at the time, to whom he was not married. That should help you appreciate the distinction between marriage as a social construct/evolutionary development and marriage as a legal institution.
Short-term price spikes, due to political circumstances, natural disasters, wars, changes in OPEC policy, and so on, are always possible. But when it comes to price increases due to our actually running out of oil, there are two possibilities: either we can make fairly good predictions about how long oil supplies will hold out - in which case speculators will buy up oil ahead of time, and the price will gradually rise at a pace related to interest rates - or we cannot predict how long oil supplies will last, in which case anyone who says we will run out of oil in, say, 20 years is making unfounded guesses.
I don't think that the people who are worried about our suddenly running out oil have access to any better information than speculators, or the oil companies themselves - people who are staking their livelihoods on their knowledge of oil supplies - so if can be confidently known that we will run out of oil in the forseeable future, then oil prices will already reflect that fact.
If you don't think oil prices reflect the best available knowledge about future supplies, then I guess you've found yourself a good investment opportunity.
...the only campaign finance reform that makes sense is to ban all forms of campaign finance except that allocated by an independant Electoral Commission based on a per vote basis.
If I had spent a few dollars to print pamphlets, or put up a website, saying what I thought was wrong with G.W. Bush, would I have been financing the Kerry campaign? What if the website also said what I liked about Kerry? And how about if a few friends and I - or a few hundred like-minded individuals - pooled our money for the printing/hosting costs?
If those things are campaign finance, then banning campaign finance would mean the end of free political speech, and the effective repeal of the First Amendment. And if they are not campaign finance, then all your campaign finance laws will accomplish is to reroute the megacorp/Chinese money through dummy organizations - as has happened with 527 groups since McCain-Feingold passed.
Campaign finance laws won't accomplish much but to keep incumbents in office and put the government in the business of deciding who can say what about politics. I don't think either of those is a generally desirable outcome.
If by "Biblical faith" you mean "the kind of faith Jesus asked for", then yes, it does mean just that. See John 20:29:
Could Jesus possibly have expressed clearer approval of "blind faith" than by saying, "blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed"?
The context, by the way, is that the apostle Thomas has been told that Jesus has risen from the grave, but (understandably, I think) is not convinced until he sees and touches Jesus himself. Jesus is scolding Thomas for his empiricism, and praising the blind faith of his other followers.
All that is not to say that the Bible presents a consistent message on faith (the Bible is not a particularly self-consistent document, in general) - but the teachings of Jesus, as reported in the Bible, do specifically endorse "blind" faith - faith in the absence of evidence. And that is certainly the kind of faith that is the basis of the belief of millions of Christians (though not all, of course), like it or not.
Heavy Metal Umlat [infoworld.com] is a very interesting look at the history of a Wiki page. Worth checking out.
That's Heavy Metal Umlaut.
Misspelling the same (key) word twice in a twenty-word post makes my eyes hurt. It may also make the baby Jesus cry, FWIW.
Where do you think those daytime soaps got all their ideas? ...Shakespeare hammered out a lot of the classic plot elements that have been copied ever since.
I won't argue that Shakespeare wasn't a great writer, but he lifted most of his plots from earlier sources as well - Romeo and Juliet from the earlier Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet , Hamlet from Amleth, Prince of Denmark , and so on. So don't give him too much credit. On the other hand, the writers he took his ideas from have mostly been forgotten, so presumably he improved on his sources.
What's that about the First Ammendment? Giving someone money isn't speech.
But campaign finance regulations, if they work, work specifically by obstructing political speech. The goal may be to keep corporations from buying influence, but when you do that by having the government make decisions about which organisations can and cannot freely pay to make their ideas widely heard, you do run into First Amendment concerns.
The right to free speech would mean nothing if it meant a right to speak freely only in your own closet: it is also essential that you be free to use effective means to make yourself heard. Imagine, for instance, that wood pulp was strictly controlled by the government, with only selected classes of people or organisations permitted to use it. Everyone else would be free to "speak", and use printing presses - they'd just have a hard time getting the paper to put out any books, newspapers, pamphlets - would that not raise First Amendment questions? Or substitute ink, or copper wire, or fiberglass... or spectrum, which is controlled, in ways that constantly raise Constitutional questions here on slashdot.
No, money isn't speech, and neither is paper, or copper, but campaign finance laws operate specifically by controlling political speech (which should be the most strongly protected form of speech), by controlling how money can be used to get political speech into the public eye. I was disappointed that the Supreme Court didn't overturn more of McCain-Feingold.
Anyway, doesn't it worry you to have laws designed in effect to keep us from having "too much" speech?
As for "corporate citizenship" - No, corporations aren't citizens - but they are owned and controlled by groups of citizens, who ultimately decide how the corporation will act (usually by delegating to a smaller group of people the power to make those decisions). I don't think that corporations should buy campaign ads - I agree that the interested individuals should contribute through some other, non-business channel - but I also don't know that they can constitutionally be forbidden to do so.
Churches, like corporations, are not people - should it be legal to prohibit churches from making statements on political issues? Or from paying to publicize those statements? And if you think that should be legal, how do you go about deciding which organizations should be able to freely make, distribute, and pay for political speech? A list of government-approved political organisations?
Sorry about the rant; I think I share your basic goals, but I don't see that corporations are particularly being given rights that do not follow naturally from their being a form of collective action by individuals who do have those rights (can a corporate property be searched without a warrant? should it be?) - and I don't like seeing the First Amendment eroded, even for a good cause. (It's always for a good cause, isn't it?)
All historical, scientific, or other accepted "facts" are only those that the greatest ammount of people agree with.
I really hope the parent is a troll.
Assuming it isn't, though, I'm not sure how to interpret it - if the parent poster is merely pointing out that the ideas the most people believe in, right or wrong, will be the ideas that are widely regarded as "facts", "truth", or "science", then his argument is correct - but also tautological and beside the point. Yes, the things most people consider facts will be "those that the greatest amount of people agree with" - but what distinguishes science as a source of knowledge is the approach it takes to finding and verifying knowledge, the kind of reasons it gives for believing that the knowledge it provides is correct.
It's not that the Theory of Evolution is somehow innately superior to the Hypothesis of Intelligent Design -- they're not even opposites.
There are evolutionary theories of intelligent design - what one might call gradual creationism - but "the theory of evolution" is usually taken as shorthand for "the theory of evolution by natural selection" - whereas gradualistic intelligent design would be a theory of "supernatural selection". So there is a conflict.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is superior in that it attempts to explain the complexity and diversity of living things in terms of known phenomena - we know that random genetic mutations occurr; we know that an organisms genetic makeup affects the number of offspring it is likely to produce - rather than resorting to the ad-hockery of intelligent design (why are there living things? There must be a being that creates living things! - you might as well answer the question "why do cars go?" by saying, "there must be a being that pushes cars around").
Treating I.D. like it's a fully fleshed-out "anti-evolution" thinking is purely political, and not scientific at all.
And the intelligent design movement itself is quite political, and not at all scientific. The phrase "intelligent design" gained its current popularity because it serves as a court-friendly euphemism for creationism. You are right that intelligent design is not fully fleshed-out - it's deliberately vague because a more detailed version would be more blatantly a religious belief, and harder to get into American textbooks.
I asked a rabbi about that once. I was working for a catering company in Cleveland that does a lot of Jewish events (weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on), and the catering company worked with a rabbi who oversaw things to make sure we followed the food laws. So I thought he'd be well qualified to tell me whether a pig-based animal, genetically modified to comply with the Levitical food laws, could be kosher.
I didn't get an answer, though. I couldn't get him to take the question seriously - he seemed to think that no one would go to the trouble of genetically engineering pigs, just to let Jews eat real bacon - which seems oddly naive, given the lengths people have gone to to get around the commandment against working on the Sabbath.
There are lots of questions like this, where advances in science have possibilities that aren't clearly covered under millenia-old religious laws - like how a Muslim on the moon (or worse, a rotating space station) would figure out which way to face to pray.
I don't think you'd have to be a libertarian extremist for this to drive you nuts- the more than a million Rhode Islanders, for instance, who live in a state with only 8,000 head of cattle, might also have some complaints. I'm not sure that making beef a luxury item for the eastern seaboard while simultaneously destroying the economy of Wyoming has much appeal for anyone except Marxist daydreamers like yourself.
And that's not even considering the black market you'd create in smuggled beef - unless you want checkpoints and searches at all state border crossings. (Which, incidentally, is one of the problems with creating the kind of control economy you apparently envision - though an article on octopi and robot design probably isn't the place for that discussion.)
Thank you. I'm glad someone else understands that fascism is an actual political philosophy, not an all-purpose derogatory term for people you disagree with. "Fascist" seems to be used today the same way "Communist" was forty years ago - or "She's a witch!", 300 years ago.
...the first electronic music experiment was done by Lev Sergeivitch Termen and his famus Theremin.
Also not true - the link you point to lists electronic instruments going back to 1876, forty years before the theremin. The Telharmonium (1897) was a pretty sophisticated instrument, but it weighed 200 tons, and vacuum-tube amplifiers hadn't been invented yet, so it wasn't very practical.
Some of the problems with Asimov's laws of robotics were quite apparent even back in the '40s. The first law is especially difficult : "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot that attempted to strictly follow the first law would, for instance, keep taking away your cigarettes. See Jack Williamson's The Humanoids -- a 1949 novel in which humanoid robots following Asimovian guidelines ("To serve and obey, and guard men from harm") keep an entire planet of humans drugged into complacency, because it's the only way to keep people from endangering themselves.
come on!!! Ford Prefect == BLACK GANGSTA RAPPER (Mos Def) ?!?!??!?!?!
Mos Def, while black, and a rapper, is by no means a "GANGSTA RAPPER". You seem to be using "gangsta" and "ghetto" as insulting synonyms for "black".
And Mos Def was a professional actor before he started rapping, anyway - so I don't see how his musical career is relevant.
I agree that they probably shouldn't have cast a guy from Brooklyn to play Ford Prefect, and the fact that they chose a black actor does look like tokenism - but I don't remember Ford's race being at all significant to the book, or even mentioned (whereas Arthur is clearly a stereotypical white Englishman). And again, Mos Def's being a rapper no more makes him a poor actor than Clint Eastwood's writing his own scores makes him a bad director.
Anyway, the real problem with Ford Prefect is that the joke of his name is mostly lost on Americans. I sometimes which they had renamed him "Ford Escort" for U.S. consumption.
One thing I would take issue with here though is that "American-Style" democracy is not necessarily synonymous with liberty (the two can exist independent of each other).
...liberty cannot be imposed, for if it is, it is not liberty.
The post you are responding to didn't say anything about democracy, American-style or otherwise. Certainly one can have great personal freedom under, say, a benevolent dictatorship - although I'd suggest that democracy is a better bet for preserving freedom in the long run. But you seem to be suggesting that American-style freedom is not necessarily the kind of freedom that is appropriate to other people, and with that I disagree.
No. If A tells B, "you can't go outside without a veil", and I tell A, "you can't stop her", and make it stick, I have imposed liberty - that is, the only freedom I have taken away is the freedom to take away others' freedoms. A society in which a man cannot tell his neighbor how to dress, or how to worship, is more free than one in which he can - even though he has lost the "freedom" to tell his neighbor how to dress.
Iran is moving slowly in a direction of popular democracy with a strong religious aspect... there is no separation between church and state.
Do the Iranian people have the freedom practice any religion they want? To preach any religion they want? The freedom not to be bound by the laws of the government-sanctioned form of Islam? No. "Apostasy, specifically conversion from Islam, can be punishable by death."
You are treating the Iranian people as though they were a collective, Muslim hive-mind. You talk about the right of self-determination without asking whether that means the right of a Muslim majority to impose its will on Christians, Jews, Baha'is, and atheists - and on Muslims who are not Twelver Shi'ites.
You are right that American intervention would likely be counterproductive, but I'd be glad to have the U.S., or the U.N., or benevolent aliens impose freedom on Iran and the world, if I thought it were possible.
Presumably if it played against Bart Simpson it would learn to always pick paper.
Is conneXion considered an error? I like it much better than connection.
It's correct, but British. Just like colour/color, or theatre/theater. Or foetus/fetus, though that doesn't seem to come up so often.
connexion
Pronunciation: k&-'nek-sh&n
chiefly British variant of CONNECTION
Did it never occur to you to check an actual online dictionary? I use google to see if my usage of a word or phrase is acceptable (or at least common), but a dictionary is probably a better bet for spelling.
I'd say you're fighting a losing battle on this one. I'm not too bothered by it, either; the English language has other words that function both as adjectives and as adverbs, despite the existence of a distinct adverb form - near dead and nearly dead are both standard, for instance.