Too many people here are failing to distinguish between, "Is it moral to create games that teach bad values?" and "Should the government make it illegal to teach bad values?" I would answer that it is immoral, but that the government shouldn't be the enforcer of my particular view of morality.
Basically, the immorality of an act is often much less than the immorality of stopping people from doing it. Jaywalking might be immoral, as the jaywalker recklessly disregards the safety of himself and those around him. But no sane person would say it was moral to punish the jaywalker with ten years imprisonment. Similarly, copying an album off the Internet might be immoral, but no sane person would say that the action warrants a $150,000/song fine. Okay, bad example.
There might be a few limited cases where it would be appropriate for the government to enforce "morality" in video games, but they would be patterned after the lines already drawn by the Supreme Court. For example, a game that is basically child porn should be illegal, and a game that seems to incite real-life violence against real people might be subject to review as well. But when the benefits to society don't outweigh the limitation on free speech (and they very seldom do), the government should stand aside and let people make up their own minds.
1) Killing people is bad. 2) Killing people is good. 3) Killing zombies is great. 4) Killing zombies is bad if they've gone through substantial character development. 5) Sacrificing yourself so that the team can make it over the lava flow to fight the Bad Guy is good. 6) Something about not sucking the energy out of the Earth to power your city. 7) Stealing is good, unless the chest is booby-trapped. 8) Feed your pets well, or they will abandon you forever.
That should be enough to get anyone through life, no?
To some extent, this is true. Pinning down facts about a historical figure is tricky, and gets trickier as you go further back.
But on a more fundamental level, it's a bogus comparison. With Henry VIII, we have multiple eyewitness accounts of his life, copious written documents about the time period which corroborate each other. We have decrees he pronounced, legislation he demanded. So while there may be disagreements over motivations for specific actions, or whether letter x was really sent on date y, there is a clear outline of his life which anyone familiar with historical research can verify.
In the case of Jesus, we have none of this. We can get glimmers of how the average person lived his or her life in Jerusalem of 15-35AD. But we have nothing written by Jesus, nothing written by eyewitnesses or assistants, nothing written about him by anyone until decades after the events are said to have taken place.
Paul gives the earliest mentions of Jesus, but provides almost no biographical detail. We know he was familiar with the story of the tomb, but that's all we know for sure. The gospels of Matt, Mark, Luke, and John came much later. Mark seems to have been written first, right after the razing of the temple in Jerusalem. The other three drew on Mark as a primary source, but reworked many details to promote their own agendas.
Then we get into the extra-biblical documentation. Except there isn't any. No tax records, judicial decisions, or anything else specifically referring to Jesus. The Christian movement itself stays under the radar for decades. The first reference to them is in Tacitus' Annals, which demonstrates only that there were Christians living in Rome by about 100AD. His information may be second-hand.
Some of the earliest literature about Jesus comes from the Gnostics, but it's very unlikely that any Christian will accept those writings as having historical content.
Things are so bad, there have been fairly mainstream, plausible attempts to show that Jesus was an entirely mythical character. You just cannot do that with Henry VIII, but the sheer lack of timely corroborating evidence makes it possible with Jesus.
I'm fine with accepting the limits of historical inquiry. I don't think these facts imply anything bad about the Christian faith or the people who follow it. However, many Christians want to believe that every word of the Bible is perfectly true. Those people will have trouble accepting that the silence of history stands in sharp contrast with the importance they place on Jesus today.
Your calculation of ".000025 times smaller" only works if we're assuming a spherical broadcast pattern. In reality, radar systems are unidirectional, so the falloff isn't nearly distance squared.
Still, there's a hefty falloff, and the aircraft only spends a small amount of time in the beam anyways. So I think your overall point stands.
Re:The biggest problem with Wikipedia is Bias
on
FUD-Based Encyclopedias
·
· Score: 1, Informative
You complain about slant and bias on a page which, right at the top, has a warning that says the neutrality is in dispute? Followed by a prominent link to the discussion page, where every nuance of the definition is hashed out in gruesome detail?
Rather than pointing out a weakness of the Wikipedia process, you've pointed out one of its strengths.
Intel is killing off a bottle of Tequila and this is news how? They deserve the chance to drown their sorrows from time to time.
Oh, wait. Something about the continued failing of the Itanium. That's about as worthy news as "SCO still failing" and "No, IBM hasn't bought Novell yet so stop asking." Not that they don't post such stories from time to time, but why the griping?
Part of it is that we're talking about state and local governments here. While the worst of them may be inbred, incompetent, and full of cronyism, it's difficult to work up the same terror-inducing aura that the feds can inspire in the tin-foil crowd.
Further, from a privacy standpoint, big business doesn't have a significantly better track record than big government. We all have the sneaking suspicion that they'd sell your personal information to whoever, if only their cost/benefit analysis justified it. So from a privacy standpoint, it's hard for me to get worked up. I can work to unelect the people responsible, go to the meetings where the decisions are made, publicize misdeeds in the local paper, etc. But if Huge Private Provider X is doing something untoward with the data I send over its equipment, or provide crappy service, there isn't a whole lot I can do except hope that there is another provider in my area.
You claim to want "a selection of providers," but that's not an option for many people who aren't willing to move to a different neighborhood. Many people can choose only one provider, and some can't even choose that. That sort of situation is rife with monopoly abuse potential.
Further, I'm guessing you'd be opposed to Utah's UTOPIA Project. Quick summary: Several municipalities have teamed up to finance a big fiber optic layout. Once completed, they intend to rent bandwidth out to service providers, who will compete for the money of businesses and residents.
So instead of having to choose between Crappy Provider X and dial-up, every resident hooked into the system could choose any provider on the system for whatever services they wanted. The UTOPIA folks make a reasonable case that competition will increase because of government involvement. I mean, it's not like Comcast is going to rent its cable out to a competing provider whose sole intention is to steal its customer away.
Under this system, a lot of redundant build-out will be avoided, customers will be guaranteed healthy competition, and a lot of comfortable monopolies will be shattered.
Still, I guess because government is involved, private industry could have done better (in some alternate dimension where they could think beyond the next quarter).
Actually, these things are "luxuries" for individuals, but I honestly don't see how to keep nearly seven billion people alive on this planet without the sanitation, productivity, and coordination provided by sewer, electricity, and phone services.
In short, take away these "luxuries" and billions die.
Given that, I would put Internet access as something increasingly headed towards the "necessity" side of the balance sheet.
They do have a point, in that governments are allowed to run systems at a loss, indefinitely. No private enterprise can compete with the right of governments to levy taxes.
I think the best way to go is akin to Utah's Utopia Project. The state takes out some municipal bonds, lays out vast swaths of fiber optic cable, connecting a lot of the cities in Utah. Then it pays the bonds back as private service providers rent the lines and compete for customers. The best thing about it is, rather than having to hope that good provider X will get to your area so you can stop using sucky provider Y, they both have to compete for your dollars because changing services is as simple as making a couple of phone calls.
It would be similar to government laying the roads, providing private taxi companies with a forum for competition, rather than having each company build out its own roads over an area. With the latter approach, there is a natural inclination towards unhealthy regional monopolies.
I think there's a problem with your analysis, mostly stemming from the fact that the benefits of ubiquitous and cheap broadband are bestowed even upon those who generally don't use computers. Ideally, Internet access would benefit everyone through better communication between citizens, government, and businesses, better education, more efficient government services, the attractiveness of a wired city to new businesses, etc. If everyone in town can reach you on the 'Net, it becomes more attractive for public and private entities to start offering more Internet-enabled services.
The question of "subsidies" is a tricky one, because a government might be pouring millions a year into a service like Internet access, but the overall savings vastly outweigh the costs. While the money spent is easy to quantify, the savings are not.
I think it's much akin to the situation of public roads: the benefits of having a road system are tremendous, but it's not easy for a "road provider" to recoup enough of that value and make privatized roads work.
Franklin actually did become more religious towards the end of his life. By the time the Constitutional Convention came around, he was willing to ask that the delegates begin each session with prayer.
The way I heard it growing up, shortly after his speech, the deadlock between the big and small states broke, and the process started moving forward again. That's true as far as it goes, but they expected us to draw the conclusion that it was God's wisdom that finally inspired the Constitution.
Those who tell the story never mention that Franklin's suggestion was voted down. Usually it's because they themselves don't realize it.
To answer your question: In my religion, Jesus is a white chick.
You sound very much like someone who is willing to say anything it takes to argue your point. I find it very unlikely that anyone could make such incomprehensibly bad arguments out of ignorance, rather than a malicious desire to interfere with reasonable debate. But there's a small chance, so for the moment I'll suspend my disbelief.
First point: The treaty does not need to bind everyone in order to be effective. If it were Monaco that were holding out rather than the United States, it would be irrelevant, because its fraction of the world CO2 output is irrelevant. As it stands, the only two major holdouts are Australia and the U.S., and if they signed, there wouldn't be any non-Kyoto countries that polluting industries could reasonably relocate to.
This means that, had the U.S. and Aussieland signed, the Kyoto Protocol would apply to the emitters of 99% of greenhouse gases worldwide. The only way this could NOT have an effect on global climate is if polluters moved all their manufacturing to non-Kyoto countries, or they moved all their manufacturing out of Annex 1 countries to non-Annex 1 countries.
The first option is obviously impossible. There just aren't that many non-signers out there, and the costs of moving production would be bigger than simply reducing emissions. Finally, if any country got enough business into the country to make a significant impact in total pollutants, they'd come under pressure to sign as well.
The second option has been argued with some plausibility. But moving to China will only hasten the day when it becomes an Annex 1 country as well. Same goes for every other country where polluters might try to seek refuge. Business moves in, quality of life goes up, and suddenly the terms of the protocol kick in.
Your argument thus far has been:
1 - Kyoto is meant to respond to "global climate change". 2 - BUT, not every nation has ratified the treaty. 3 - THEREFORE it cannot be a global solution. 4 - THEREFORE it cannot be effective in reducing "global climate change". 5 - THEREFORE we shouldn't bother.
I leave finding the weaknesses in this logic as an exercise for the reader.
Second point: A treaty demanding zero emissions isn't possible until zero-emission technologies are feasible. There is no zero-emissions option available to us besides dismantling society, going back to a basic agrarian society, and let famine, war, and plague reduce our numbers by 95% or so. This is what I mean by "not desirable"; I'm not saying, "Wouldn't it be horrible if we could reduce emissions to zero without serious sacrifice?" I'm looking at the costs of turning off the economy entirely, and deeming them too high.
Couple that with your "we have literally decades, so we don't need to bother" crack, and I begin to suspect you're demanding such a treaty in order to be an ass, not out of concern for the environment or a desire to expose a real problem with my views.
Third point: No, there is no single, safe level of CO2 production that we can call "safe". You're asking us to believe the impossible: That there is some level of CO2 production beneath which "global warming" will not "occur", but if someone eats a bad batch of beans, his emissions will push us over the tipping point, and global warming will happen.
Rather, it's an incremental process: Plug in X units of CO2, and get Y increase in global temperature. So at best, any recommendation of appropriate levels of CO2 emissions are prescriptive, not absolute. That is to say, we might be able to say, "Reducing emissions by X billions of tons a year will eliminate effects Y1 and Y2, and substantially mitigate Z1, Z2, and Z3", but there's no absolute way to say whether the former situation is "unsafe" while the latter is "safe".
It's the same as when you take a medication. Not taking the medication will lead to sickness or death, and an overdose may lead to sickness or death. But in between is the "presc
How does it make any sense to compare a treaty which doesn't go far enough (Kyoto) with your hypothetical treaty? You're stretching like a rubber band to try and make a nonsensical point.
First, a treaty binding on everyone is impossible. You know this. Second, a treaty requiring zero emissions is impossible. You know this, as well. Thirdly, reducing emissions to zero isn't necessary, and probably isn't desirable.
Finally, your claim that reducing emissions will just "add a few years to the death march" is ridiculous hyperbole. It's much the same attitude people use to avoid exercise and healthy eating. The difference is, if you want to screw up your own body, you have a right. But it's not your planet to screw up. Everyone suffers the consequences.
A few years would give us the time we need to develop cleaner technologies, get the whole space exploration thing off the ground, maybe give us time to make a smooth transition to clean energy. All of that sounds worth doing to me.
Are you twice as happy with an SUV as you would be with a car that consumed half as much gas? Are you one quarter as happy if somebody switches all the bulbs in your house with CFLs? No. Limiting energy usage doesn't necessarily require lowering your standard of living. If I build a machine that can do the same job as the old one, but use a quarter the energy to do so, I've *raised* the standard of living by making the overall economy more efficient.
Oh, and it's "ridiculous", not "rediculous". If we'd just taken the money we'd spent on failed attempts to educate you,
Gotcha. All progress comes from the private sector. Like when AT&T came up with the idea of making phone networks more efficient by using "packet switching" instead of connection switching. As soon as they saw the inherent superiority of packet-switched networks, they leapt into action and... fired the guy who came up with it.
Why? They knew the new network would be their own worst competition. Nah, the Internet had to come out of government-sponsored research. Space exploration had to come from the government. A lot of medical research is done through government institutions like the NIH and CDC. But in your right-wing, gub'ment-can-do-no-right world, if they would just give that money back to taxpayers, it would all magically make its way back to research institutions, rather than being used to produce DVDs.
Do you really think an unfettered private sector would have been better at protecting the environment than the government? Would we have cleaner air and water if they'd stepped aside and let corporations drop their waste wherever they liked?
If government action is so invariably terrible, and the private sector so competent, how do you explain Enron? WorldCom? The Los Angeles Clippers? The government has a role in our country, far beyond bungled attempts to liberate other countries and their natural resources.
How could reducing our CO2 emissions cost many times more than the entire world economic output? Once we hit zero, we have to start taking skyscrapers back down and disassembling automobiles?
The "facts and figures" you're throwing around don't make any more sense than your apparent claim that scientists don't know that the Sun warms the Earth.
They--and I groan at even having to mention this--do. The problem is, as long as we've been measuring solar output, the variability we've seen amounts to about 1% of total output. Whatever we know about "periodic instabilities in the nuclear processes up there" (that sentence really sounded like you were babbling on about stuff you didn't understand) we can assume at least over the short term that solar output is a constant, not a variable.
I'm also wondering about your proposed mechanism for cooling the Earth by increasing CO2 emissions. We know perfectly well that it increases temperature by trapping infrared radiation. Venus alone shows that. What counterbalancing mechanism is supposed to outweigh that increase?
Finally, nobody is asking people to junk their cars immediately. We're talking about dedication to reductions in future emissions. If it's possible to make lifestyle choices that will reduce them *now*, then more power to us. But every time it's time to make a new decision about the future, the Right starts whining about how every environmental consideration is going to destroy our economy and leave us all jobless.
Stop treating it like an all-or-nothing thing. We can start making adjustments that will keep our environment and our population healthy in the future. Turn out lights. Take the bus sometimes. Turn the thermostat down and wear a sweater.
I despair when I see people ignoring any environmentally friendly actions because some of them are hard. Well, some of them are easy. Do those.
Name one remotely respectable scientist who blamed the tsunami on "global warming".
You can't do it. Earthquakes have nothing to do with climate. Yet you throw the accusation out because you want the other side to look like a bunch of fear-mongering hippies.
What "the average American can plainly see" is a load of crap. They're not looking at the data. Standing outside and taking a whiff isn't the way to come to conclusions about global warming.
The fact is, the environment is getting worse, and has been for a long time. But people don't want to make the sacrifices necessary to stop it. They can't bear the idea of using mass transit, or living in the same city in which they work, shop, and entertain themselves. Turning things off before going to sleep? Too much work. Having one or two children instead of five or six? How dare you tell me how to live my life! Kyoto Protocol? What do you think we are, some sort of wussy Eurotrash types?
"You're stupid and selfish" may not be persuasive, but when you continue to do stupid, selfish things, it's hard for those around you to keep from saying it. The statement offends, but some people are worth offending.
Even if the guy didn't understand that "assembly is not cross-platform," that's hardly call to judge him unfit for the profession. I'm betting there was some point in your life where you didn't know what assembly was either, or why you couldn't compile a program on an Intel and run it on a Sun. Shocking thought: Maybe he's taking the class so he'll understand what assembly is.
In being so dismissive of his capabilities and potential to improve those capabilities, you've not simply sounded like a troll; you've been a troll.
I also think the question is open-ended enough that you simply cannot make the judgments you have. It could be interpreted as simply asking what other x86 emulators are out there besides VirtualPC.
If computer science is really the haven for jerks who would rather insult peoples' intelligence to compensate for their own insecurities (an impression you convey rather strongly) then I agree: This kid should find something else to do with his life.
Point: Amazon.com was just one of many, many, many different organizations collecting funds.
Counterpoint: Whoa! Eighty million? Shouldn't that be enough to fully fund a show for several seasons? You'd think all they'd have to pay is the difference between the ad revenue a successful show would generate, and the ad revenue Enterprise is actually generating. Even less, since the existence of the hard-core fanbase would indicate that DVD sales would be quite high.
Also, it does seem like there are better uses for this money than saving a struggling television show. I mean, it's their money and all, but nevertheless.
I remember they were doing a similar thing for Firefly. They've rebuilt all the sets for the movie, so they're hoping to get enough interest in a "straight to DVD" distribution model so they can start producing new episodes instead of tearing the sets back down again.
Fine. If that's not the deal they're offering, you don't have to give them a plug nickel.
Geez, people! How far out of your way do you have to go to find something to gripe about? Five bucks says the parent wouldn't pony up even if he did receive "all rights of ownership", plus a guarantee that Jolene Blalock would get nekkid every third episode.
I understand that, but I think the point still remains. If the goal of Social Security is to guarantee everyone a minimum retirement, and some people invest unwisely so that their overall return is less than that minimum, are we going to make up the shortfall?
If you're correct, the answer is no. Also, the fact that a retiree would still be guaranteed 90% would make them more willing to invest riskily with the remaining 10%.
Slashdot Mirror
Too many people here are failing to distinguish between, "Is it moral to create games that teach bad values?" and "Should the government make it illegal to teach bad values?" I would answer that it is immoral, but that the government shouldn't be the enforcer of my particular view of morality.
Basically, the immorality of an act is often much less than the immorality of stopping people from doing it. Jaywalking might be immoral, as the jaywalker recklessly disregards the safety of himself and those around him. But no sane person would say it was moral to punish the jaywalker with ten years imprisonment. Similarly, copying an album off the Internet might be immoral, but no sane person would say that the action warrants a $150,000/song fine. Okay, bad example.
There might be a few limited cases where it would be appropriate for the government to enforce "morality" in video games, but they would be patterned after the lines already drawn by the Supreme Court. For example, a game that is basically child porn should be illegal, and a game that seems to incite real-life violence against real people might be subject to review as well. But when the benefits to society don't outweigh the limitation on free speech (and they very seldom do), the government should stand aside and let people make up their own minds.
Morals I've learned from video games:
1) Killing people is bad.
2) Killing people is good.
3) Killing zombies is great.
4) Killing zombies is bad if they've gone through substantial character development.
5) Sacrificing yourself so that the team can make it over the lava flow to fight the Bad Guy is good.
6) Something about not sucking the energy out of the Earth to power your city.
7) Stealing is good, unless the chest is booby-trapped.
8) Feed your pets well, or they will abandon you forever.
That should be enough to get anyone through life, no?
Dumbest. Non-sequitor. Ever.
To some extent, this is true. Pinning down facts about a historical figure is tricky, and gets trickier as you go further back.
But on a more fundamental level, it's a bogus comparison. With Henry VIII, we have multiple eyewitness accounts of his life, copious written documents about the time period which corroborate each other. We have decrees he pronounced, legislation he demanded. So while there may be disagreements over motivations for specific actions, or whether letter x was really sent on date y, there is a clear outline of his life which anyone familiar with historical research can verify.
In the case of Jesus, we have none of this. We can get glimmers of how the average person lived his or her life in Jerusalem of 15-35AD. But we have nothing written by Jesus, nothing written by eyewitnesses or assistants, nothing written about him by anyone until decades after the events are said to have taken place.
Paul gives the earliest mentions of Jesus, but provides almost no biographical detail. We know he was familiar with the story of the tomb, but that's all we know for sure. The gospels of Matt, Mark, Luke, and John came much later. Mark seems to have been written first, right after the razing of the temple in Jerusalem. The other three drew on Mark as a primary source, but reworked many details to promote their own agendas.
Then we get into the extra-biblical documentation. Except there isn't any. No tax records, judicial decisions, or anything else specifically referring to Jesus. The Christian movement itself stays under the radar for decades. The first reference to them is in Tacitus' Annals, which demonstrates only that there were Christians living in Rome by about 100AD. His information may be second-hand.
Some of the earliest literature about Jesus comes from the Gnostics, but it's very unlikely that any Christian will accept those writings as having historical content.
Things are so bad, there have been fairly mainstream, plausible attempts to show that Jesus was an entirely mythical character. You just cannot do that with Henry VIII, but the sheer lack of timely corroborating evidence makes it possible with Jesus.
I'm fine with accepting the limits of historical inquiry. I don't think these facts imply anything bad about the Christian faith or the people who follow it. However, many Christians want to believe that every word of the Bible is perfectly true. Those people will have trouble accepting that the silence of history stands in sharp contrast with the importance they place on Jesus today.
Your calculation of ".000025 times smaller" only works if we're assuming a spherical broadcast pattern. In reality, radar systems are unidirectional, so the falloff isn't nearly distance squared.
Still, there's a hefty falloff, and the aircraft only spends a small amount of time in the beam anyways. So I think your overall point stands.
You complain about slant and bias on a page which, right at the top, has a warning that says the neutrality is in dispute? Followed by a prominent link to the discussion page, where every nuance of the definition is hashed out in gruesome detail?
Rather than pointing out a weakness of the Wikipedia process, you've pointed out one of its strengths.
I reject your example. Have another one?
Intel is killing off a bottle of Tequila and this is news how? They deserve the chance to drown their sorrows from time to time.
Oh, wait. Something about the continued failing of the Itanium. That's about as worthy news as "SCO still failing" and "No, IBM hasn't bought Novell yet so stop asking." Not that they don't post such stories from time to time, but why the griping?
I think what he's trying to say is, "Hey, look at my UID! Give me karma!"
Part of it is that we're talking about state and local governments here. While the worst of them may be inbred, incompetent, and full of cronyism, it's difficult to work up the same terror-inducing aura that the feds can inspire in the tin-foil crowd.
Further, from a privacy standpoint, big business doesn't have a significantly better track record than big government. We all have the sneaking suspicion that they'd sell your personal information to whoever, if only their cost/benefit analysis justified it. So from a privacy standpoint, it's hard for me to get worked up. I can work to unelect the people responsible, go to the meetings where the decisions are made, publicize misdeeds in the local paper, etc. But if Huge Private Provider X is doing something untoward with the data I send over its equipment, or provide crappy service, there isn't a whole lot I can do except hope that there is another provider in my area.
You claim to want "a selection of providers," but that's not an option for many people who aren't willing to move to a different neighborhood. Many people can choose only one provider, and some can't even choose that. That sort of situation is rife with monopoly abuse potential.
Further, I'm guessing you'd be opposed to Utah's UTOPIA Project. Quick summary: Several municipalities have teamed up to finance a big fiber optic layout. Once completed, they intend to rent bandwidth out to service providers, who will compete for the money of businesses and residents.
So instead of having to choose between Crappy Provider X and dial-up, every resident hooked into the system could choose any provider on the system for whatever services they wanted. The UTOPIA folks make a reasonable case that competition will increase because of government involvement. I mean, it's not like Comcast is going to rent its cable out to a competing provider whose sole intention is to steal its customer away.
Under this system, a lot of redundant build-out will be avoided, customers will be guaranteed healthy competition, and a lot of comfortable monopolies will be shattered.
Still, I guess because government is involved, private industry could have done better (in some alternate dimension where they could think beyond the next quarter).
Actually, these things are "luxuries" for individuals, but I honestly don't see how to keep nearly seven billion people alive on this planet without the sanitation, productivity, and coordination provided by sewer, electricity, and phone services.
In short, take away these "luxuries" and billions die.
Given that, I would put Internet access as something increasingly headed towards the "necessity" side of the balance sheet.
They do have a point, in that governments are allowed to run systems at a loss, indefinitely. No private enterprise can compete with the right of governments to levy taxes.
I think the best way to go is akin to Utah's Utopia Project. The state takes out some municipal bonds, lays out vast swaths of fiber optic cable, connecting a lot of the cities in Utah. Then it pays the bonds back as private service providers rent the lines and compete for customers. The best thing about it is, rather than having to hope that good provider X will get to your area so you can stop using sucky provider Y, they both have to compete for your dollars because changing services is as simple as making a couple of phone calls.
It would be similar to government laying the roads, providing private taxi companies with a forum for competition, rather than having each company build out its own roads over an area. With the latter approach, there is a natural inclination towards unhealthy regional monopolies.
I think there's a problem with your analysis, mostly stemming from the fact that the benefits of ubiquitous and cheap broadband are bestowed even upon those who generally don't use computers. Ideally, Internet access would benefit everyone through better communication between citizens, government, and businesses, better education, more efficient government services, the attractiveness of a wired city to new businesses, etc. If everyone in town can reach you on the 'Net, it becomes more attractive for public and private entities to start offering more Internet-enabled services.
The question of "subsidies" is a tricky one, because a government might be pouring millions a year into a service like Internet access, but the overall savings vastly outweigh the costs. While the money spent is easy to quantify, the savings are not.
I think it's much akin to the situation of public roads: the benefits of having a road system are tremendous, but it's not easy for a "road provider" to recoup enough of that value and make privatized roads work.
Franklin actually did become more religious towards the end of his life. By the time the Constitutional Convention came around, he was willing to ask that the delegates begin each session with prayer.
The way I heard it growing up, shortly after his speech, the deadlock between the big and small states broke, and the process started moving forward again. That's true as far as it goes, but they expected us to draw the conclusion that it was God's wisdom that finally inspired the Constitution.
Those who tell the story never mention that Franklin's suggestion was voted down. Usually it's because they themselves don't realize it.
To answer your question: In my religion, Jesus is a white chick.
You sound very much like someone who is willing to say anything it takes to argue your point. I find it very unlikely that anyone could make such incomprehensibly bad arguments out of ignorance, rather than a malicious desire to interfere with reasonable debate. But there's a small chance, so for the moment I'll suspend my disbelief.
First point: The treaty does not need to bind everyone in order to be effective. If it were Monaco that were holding out rather than the United States, it would be irrelevant, because its fraction of the world CO2 output is irrelevant. As it stands, the only two major holdouts are Australia and the U.S., and if they signed, there wouldn't be any non-Kyoto countries that polluting industries could reasonably relocate to.
This means that, had the U.S. and Aussieland signed, the Kyoto Protocol would apply to the emitters of 99% of greenhouse gases worldwide. The only way this could NOT have an effect on global climate is if polluters moved all their manufacturing to non-Kyoto countries, or they moved all their manufacturing out of Annex 1 countries to non-Annex 1 countries.
The first option is obviously impossible. There just aren't that many non-signers out there, and the costs of moving production would be bigger than simply reducing emissions. Finally, if any country got enough business into the country to make a significant impact in total pollutants, they'd come under pressure to sign as well.
The second option has been argued with some plausibility. But moving to China will only hasten the day when it becomes an Annex 1 country as well. Same goes for every other country where polluters might try to seek refuge. Business moves in, quality of life goes up, and suddenly the terms of the protocol kick in.
Your argument thus far has been:
1 - Kyoto is meant to respond to "global climate change".
2 - BUT, not every nation has ratified the treaty.
3 - THEREFORE it cannot be a global solution.
4 - THEREFORE it cannot be effective in reducing "global climate change".
5 - THEREFORE we shouldn't bother.
I leave finding the weaknesses in this logic as an exercise for the reader.
Second point: A treaty demanding zero emissions isn't possible until zero-emission technologies are feasible. There is no zero-emissions option available to us besides dismantling society, going back to a basic agrarian society, and let famine, war, and plague reduce our numbers by 95% or so. This is what I mean by "not desirable"; I'm not saying, "Wouldn't it be horrible if we could reduce emissions to zero without serious sacrifice?" I'm looking at the costs of turning off the economy entirely, and deeming them too high.
Couple that with your "we have literally decades, so we don't need to bother" crack, and I begin to suspect you're demanding such a treaty in order to be an ass, not out of concern for the environment or a desire to expose a real problem with my views.
Third point: No, there is no single, safe level of CO2 production that we can call "safe". You're asking us to believe the impossible: That there is some level of CO2 production beneath which "global warming" will not "occur", but if someone eats a bad batch of beans, his emissions will push us over the tipping point, and global warming will happen.
Rather, it's an incremental process: Plug in X units of CO2, and get Y increase in global temperature. So at best, any recommendation of appropriate levels of CO2 emissions are prescriptive, not absolute. That is to say, we might be able to say, "Reducing emissions by X billions of tons a year will eliminate effects Y1 and Y2, and substantially mitigate Z1, Z2, and Z3", but there's no absolute way to say whether the former situation is "unsafe" while the latter is "safe".
It's the same as when you take a medication. Not taking the medication will lead to sickness or death, and an overdose may lead to sickness or death. But in between is the "presc
How does it make any sense to compare a treaty which doesn't go far enough (Kyoto) with your hypothetical treaty? You're stretching like a rubber band to try and make a nonsensical point.
First, a treaty binding on everyone is impossible. You know this. Second, a treaty requiring zero emissions is impossible. You know this, as well. Thirdly, reducing emissions to zero isn't necessary, and probably isn't desirable.
Finally, your claim that reducing emissions will just "add a few years to the death march" is ridiculous hyperbole. It's much the same attitude people use to avoid exercise and healthy eating. The difference is, if you want to screw up your own body, you have a right. But it's not your planet to screw up. Everyone suffers the consequences.
A few years would give us the time we need to develop cleaner technologies, get the whole space exploration thing off the ground, maybe give us time to make a smooth transition to clean energy. All of that sounds worth doing to me.
Are you twice as happy with an SUV as you would be with a car that consumed half as much gas? Are you one quarter as happy if somebody switches all the bulbs in your house with CFLs? No. Limiting energy usage doesn't necessarily require lowering your standard of living. If I build a machine that can do the same job as the old one, but use a quarter the energy to do so, I've *raised* the standard of living by making the overall economy more efficient.
Oh, and it's "ridiculous", not "rediculous". If we'd just taken the money we'd spent on failed attempts to educate you,
Gotcha. All progress comes from the private sector. Like when AT&T came up with the idea of making phone networks more efficient by using "packet switching" instead of connection switching. As soon as they saw the inherent superiority of packet-switched networks, they leapt into action and... fired the guy who came up with it.
Why? They knew the new network would be their own worst competition. Nah, the Internet had to come out of government-sponsored research. Space exploration had to come from the government. A lot of medical research is done through government institutions like the NIH and CDC. But in your right-wing, gub'ment-can-do-no-right world, if they would just give that money back to taxpayers, it would all magically make its way back to research institutions, rather than being used to produce DVDs.
Do you really think an unfettered private sector would have been better at protecting the environment than the government? Would we have cleaner air and water if they'd stepped aside and let corporations drop their waste wherever they liked?
If government action is so invariably terrible, and the private sector so competent, how do you explain Enron? WorldCom? The Los Angeles Clippers? The government has a role in our country, far beyond bungled attempts to liberate other countries and their natural resources.
How could reducing our CO2 emissions cost many times more than the entire world economic output? Once we hit zero, we have to start taking skyscrapers back down and disassembling automobiles?
The "facts and figures" you're throwing around don't make any more sense than your apparent claim that scientists don't know that the Sun warms the Earth.
They--and I groan at even having to mention this--do. The problem is, as long as we've been measuring solar output, the variability we've seen amounts to about 1% of total output. Whatever we know about "periodic instabilities in the nuclear processes up there" (that sentence really sounded like you were babbling on about stuff you didn't understand) we can assume at least over the short term that solar output is a constant, not a variable.
I'm also wondering about your proposed mechanism for cooling the Earth by increasing CO2 emissions. We know perfectly well that it increases temperature by trapping infrared radiation. Venus alone shows that. What counterbalancing mechanism is supposed to outweigh that increase?
Finally, nobody is asking people to junk their cars immediately. We're talking about dedication to reductions in future emissions. If it's possible to make lifestyle choices that will reduce them *now*, then more power to us. But every time it's time to make a new decision about the future, the Right starts whining about how every environmental consideration is going to destroy our economy and leave us all jobless.
Stop treating it like an all-or-nothing thing. We can start making adjustments that will keep our environment and our population healthy in the future. Turn out lights. Take the bus sometimes. Turn the thermostat down and wear a sweater.
I despair when I see people ignoring any environmentally friendly actions because some of them are hard. Well, some of them are easy. Do those.
Name one remotely respectable scientist who blamed the tsunami on "global warming".
You can't do it. Earthquakes have nothing to do with climate. Yet you throw the accusation out because you want the other side to look like a bunch of fear-mongering hippies.
What "the average American can plainly see" is a load of crap. They're not looking at the data. Standing outside and taking a whiff isn't the way to come to conclusions about global warming.
The fact is, the environment is getting worse, and has been for a long time. But people don't want to make the sacrifices necessary to stop it. They can't bear the idea of using mass transit, or living in the same city in which they work, shop, and entertain themselves. Turning things off before going to sleep? Too much work. Having one or two children instead of five or six? How dare you tell me how to live my life! Kyoto Protocol? What do you think we are, some sort of wussy Eurotrash types?
"You're stupid and selfish" may not be persuasive, but when you continue to do stupid, selfish things, it's hard for those around you to keep from saying it. The statement offends, but some people are worth offending.
Even if the guy didn't understand that "assembly is not cross-platform," that's hardly call to judge him unfit for the profession. I'm betting there was some point in your life where you didn't know what assembly was either, or why you couldn't compile a program on an Intel and run it on a Sun. Shocking thought: Maybe he's taking the class so he'll understand what assembly is.
In being so dismissive of his capabilities and potential to improve those capabilities, you've not simply sounded like a troll; you've been a troll.
I also think the question is open-ended enough that you simply cannot make the judgments you have. It could be interpreted as simply asking what other x86 emulators are out there besides VirtualPC.
If computer science is really the haven for jerks who would rather insult peoples' intelligence to compensate for their own insecurities (an impression you convey rather strongly) then I agree: This kid should find something else to do with his life.
Point: Amazon.com was just one of many, many, many different organizations collecting funds.
Counterpoint: Whoa! Eighty million? Shouldn't that be enough to fully fund a show for several seasons? You'd think all they'd have to pay is the difference between the ad revenue a successful show would generate, and the ad revenue Enterprise is actually generating. Even less, since the existence of the hard-core fanbase would indicate that DVD sales would be quite high.
Also, it does seem like there are better uses for this money than saving a struggling television show. I mean, it's their money and all, but nevertheless.
I remember they were doing a similar thing for Firefly. They've rebuilt all the sets for the movie, so they're hoping to get enough interest in a "straight to DVD" distribution model so they can start producing new episodes instead of tearing the sets back down again.
Too bad I can't find the link for it.
Fine. If that's not the deal they're offering, you don't have to give them a plug nickel.
Geez, people! How far out of your way do you have to go to find something to gripe about? Five bucks says the parent wouldn't pony up even if he did receive "all rights of ownership", plus a guarantee that Jolene Blalock would get nekkid every third episode.
So I'm curious: why do you care?
After taking the iMaple challenge, I've decided: Pine and Pac-Man win.
I understand that, but I think the point still remains. If the goal of Social Security is to guarantee everyone a minimum retirement, and some people invest unwisely so that their overall return is less than that minimum, are we going to make up the shortfall?
If you're correct, the answer is no. Also, the fact that a retiree would still be guaranteed 90% would make them more willing to invest riskily with the remaining 10%.
As an aside, you may be interested in Paul Krugman's latest column on the matter.