The Allegory of the Cave by Socrates is the original allegory. Apparently, it's now commonly called the Brain in a Vat thought experiment in philosophy. It used to be the Evil Daemon thought experiment but daemon's have fallen out of favor since Descartes wrote about it.
Part of the reasons the IOC chose China was to shine a spotlight on their censorious, opaque and human-rights-violating ways.
Actually, it's much more likely that the IOC chose China because of the rather large bribes which were presented to their selection committee.
That IS how they operate after all. Free dinners, big parties, free alcohol, and free jewelry for their wives or cars for the husbands so they can honestly say "No, I didn't get anything".
I know what you're thinking, and yes, the jewelry should be worth more than the cars if you want to be the winner...
Yeah, when you're making a movie of the best selling graphic novel of all time, and you decide that the author (Alan Moore) and story are not important to the production, well it most likely is going to suck for fans.
It's not the Watchmen, it's a original prequel to the watchmen writer with no input from the original author.
Most likely it will be a "blockbuster" movie and be mostly explosions and fight scenes with few or no reference to the big themes from the original work.
He's referring to Gerrymandering. You know the process where the state redesigns the electoral blocks to increase their parties federal representation and surpress all others.
They do this by creating a few areas where the vote goes 90% for their opponent, and a majority of areas where the vote goes 60% for themselves. They do it by redrawing the divisions to force popular candidates of the opposing party to run against one another, while guaranteeing their own mediocre candidates are running against unknowns.
It's one of the biggest factors in the corruption of American politics.
Well now, there's a few reasons that could be truthy. For one, Bush isn't as popular as he used to be, so conservatives could be removing the stickers from their cars or otherwise hiding them because they're ashamed of Bush.
But most likely, you're suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias, in which you only notice the things that reinforce your preset beliefs.
Actually it's worse than that, it doesn't make them look terribly stupid, just desperate and pathetic.
It's clear even McCain's campaign people believe he's going to lose so they're trying any ridiculous idea they can think up. That's why this move completely lacks any subtlety at all.
1) What the hell is DiViD and why would I want Divid? 2) Divid players are much more expensive than VHS. 3) You can't record on Divids like you can on VHS. 4) My local Blockbuster has a lot more VHS movies than these new divids!
I think there just as applicable to Blu-ray as they were to DVDs.
Sometimes you really, really have to wonder. This article should be labeled "Economic Theory Still Valid". Increase the cost to entry and you decrease demand. As long a HD TVs are more expensive, Blu-Ray players are more expensive and Blu-Ray discs are more expensive, demand will be lower.
Of course, Blu-Ray isn't a revolutionary innovation (like DVDs were), it's an evolutionary improvement on the DVD. Eventually, prices will come down, and the media companies will stop price gouging for Blu-Ray discs. As prices drop, demand will rise slowly and inexorably. Give it a decade and almost everyone will have a BluRay player*.
* barring some revolutionary new technology in the mean time.
It's pretty simple, I suppose, you'll never have that perfect agreement between employer and employee, because if the employee doesn't agree to the conditions, they'd be fired. Thus any such agreement must be considered to be under duress.
Frankly, you have no right to pollute the air other people breath. And I see no reason why other people should have to adjust their lives to accommodate you.
Smoking is something you chose to do, so you should be the only one who has to deal with the consequences of that choice. With out these laws, everyone else is also forced to deal with the consequences of your choice. I see no good reason that other people should be forced to quit their jobs, leave their dinners half-eaten, and generally avoid any place you decide to go just to accommodate a habit you chose to indulge in.
So I suppose, you could say the law is legalized babysitting. But mostly it prevents non-smokers from defending themselves from smokers. I mean the reasonable alternative is to legalize the use of force to prevent smokers from endangering the health and safety of non-smokers. Frankly, I don't think that's an option you'd like.
No one required the wait staff to apply to work there.
While that's true in theory, it's also bullshit. Waiters and waitresses usually don't make very good money, so if they quit their jobs and look for one somewhere else, they have little or no savings to fall back on. That might mean that they can't afford their rent next month, and end up homeless. That's hardly an improvement from a health point of view.
Wait staff don't "gladly" take the risk of being in a smoky bar, at least not the ones I've talked to. They reluctantly took them because they had bills to pay and were having trouble finding work elsewhere.
So, no, the law weighed the benefits and the disadvantages of outlawing smoking in enclosed spaces and found the convenience of the few outweighed by the health of the many.
I know you can fall back on your old absolutisms about freedom. But frankly, this is the real world. In practice absolutisms don't work as well as you'd think they would.
You're still free to smoke your precious cigarettes, just not where you're going to endanger the health of other people.
I'll answer your strawman argument with a simple answer:
The employees are not free to leave, without suffering undue economic hardship (Ie. being fired with cause). They're also the people most likely to suffer the worst adverse affects because they're stuck there usually for 8 hours (or longer) at a time.
Given their health or your convenience, we have to choose their health. Laws are only passed because people like you are assholes who choose your own convenience over the health of others.
Here, in Ontario, the justification for banning smoking from enclosed public spaces has nothing to do with patrons, and everything to do with safe workplace regulations.
Long term exposure to workplace second hand smoke does have adverse health effects. Waiters and waitresses are people too, and the cumulative effect of an endless parade of smokers in restaurants can have serious impacts on their health.
So, no, you can't smoke in restaurants. If you absolutely have to smoke, stand up and walk outside. I don't see why we have to sacrifice the health and well being of everyone around you because you're addicted and in denial.
I said nothing about whether you should or should not follow the teachings of the Bible, just that claims of divine authorship are self-referential.
In simple words: It would be better to put your faith in the message of the Bible, rather than it's divine origin.
The proper argument isn't that the Bible is the word of God and therefore true, but that it wouldn't matter whether it was the word of God, because what it teaches is good.
Well, let's look at things rationally for a moment here.
1) You know the commandments were handed down by God because the Bible tells you they were. 2) You know the Bible is the word of God because your priest tells you so. 3) You know your priest is telling you truth because he's been endorsed by your Church. 4) You know your Church is true because... because... it teaches what's in the Bible?
The problem is that the Bible was written by men. The old testament is essentially a compilation of Jewish mythology and religious laws. The new testament was written decades after the events in question by people who weren't there, often by people who never knew the principals.
It is most definitely the work of men. It may or may not be the work of men inspired by God. It may or may not be the work of men trying to describe what they think God would want us to do. But it definitely was the work of men.
Well, since they can't beat Google, they just figured they could destroy the Universe. You see Microsoft blows and AOL sucks, therefore if they carry out a merger, then the result would both suck and blow. Which, in theory, is physically impossible and should BSoD all of reality, or so they hope.
It's not just consoles, it's the guys who make chips, graphics cards, and assemble PCs. I got a new computer a while ago, and I thought it had a decent graphics card in it. Turned out I was wrong. The graphics card sucked ass and I couldn't even play a lot of older games at their normal settings. I didn't know what the hell was wrong with it, until I replaced the graphics card with a slightly better card from a different company. Although the specs don't appear to be that much different, the actual result was the difference between chugging on minimum settings and sailing on maximum settings.
If you don't care to learn quite a bit about graphics cards, you won't know what you need to play the games you want and you will not be happy with results of the money you wasted on the wrong stuff.
Consoles win because you are supposed to have to worry about which version of the console will play the games the way you want to play them. Of course, MS and Sony are because screwing that up for themselves.
I've found that pirates also tend to be cheaters. They have a virtually unlimited supply of games, so they can't afford to spend any significant time on any one game. This means they use cheats to start a game with all the powerups and invulnerability on. Then they complain that the game sucks because it's not challenging at all and move on the next game they're also going to hate because it's too easy, because they're cheating.
Frankly, I think they do it to get a false sense of superiority. After all, if every game is too easy, it must be because they're really, really good at playing games. Right? Right?
Well, this is where we get into the nitty gritty of how things really work. In effect, at birth the social contract was offered to you and your parents accepted the contract on your behalf establishing you as a citizen of the country in which you live.
If you choose not to abide by the social contract, then you should, in good conscience, renounce your citizenship. Your citizenship is your assent to the social contract. Of course, there are consequences to renouncing your citizenship, but there are always consequences.
Of course, I'm just writing to point out that by maintaining your citizenship you are maintaining your agreement to your contract with society.
Unethical laws shouldn't be obeyed, just because they're laws. But you have to remember if you choose not to obey the laws, you may end up paying with freedom or your life. Sometimes the prize is worth the price.
It's slightly more complicated than that. There's a group of Democrats called the Blue Dog Coalition who keep selling out the rest of the Democratic party on security issues. There's 47 of them currently in office.
Presumably they represent the will of the people who elected them, which on this issue is fear of the terrorists.
But otherwise, yes this congress is crippled by a slim majority, an adversarial president and a faction in the party that consistently sides with the administration on security issues.
I don't think you understand the problem. Darwinian Evolution isn't beyond question, it's just been questioned so many times recently that people no longer tolerate the questioning any more.
The argument has been done, been done recently, and no matter what "questions" you're going to throw at evolution they've already been answered in favour of evolution. I say not because there is no question that you could ask that hasn't been answered, but because there is no question you will ask that hasn't been answered.
Darwinian evolution isn't meant to be a panacea, so yes, there are questions that it can't answer. "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if woodchuck could chuck wood?" is a question it does absolutely nothing to resolve. Nor do we expect it to. It's not the universal theory of everything and everyone.
Intelligent design isn't a "search for the answers", it's a search for the questions. ID already has the answer: "God did it". Now they just need to tailor the questions so their answer is always right.
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The Allegory of the Cave by Socrates is the original allegory. Apparently, it's now commonly called the Brain in a Vat thought experiment in philosophy. It used to be the Evil Daemon thought experiment but daemon's have fallen out of favor since Descartes wrote about it.
Apparently, what I'd heard was wrong, that makes me feel a bit better about the movie.
Part of the reasons the IOC chose China was to shine a spotlight on their censorious, opaque and human-rights-violating ways.
Actually, it's much more likely that the IOC chose China because of the rather large bribes which were presented to their selection committee.
That IS how they operate after all. Free dinners, big parties, free alcohol, and free jewelry for their wives or cars for the husbands so they can honestly say "No, I didn't get anything".
I know what you're thinking, and yes, the jewelry should be worth more than the cars if you want to be the winner...
But maybe I'm just being cynical.
Yeah, when you're making a movie of the best selling graphic novel of all time, and you decide that the author (Alan Moore) and story are not important to the production, well it most likely is going to suck for fans.
It's not the Watchmen, it's a original prequel to the watchmen writer with no input from the original author.
Most likely it will be a "blockbuster" movie and be mostly explosions and fight scenes with few or no reference to the big themes from the original work.
He's referring to Gerrymandering. You know the process where the state redesigns the electoral blocks to increase their parties federal representation and surpress all others.
They do this by creating a few areas where the vote goes 90% for their opponent, and a majority of areas where the vote goes 60% for themselves. They do it by redrawing the divisions to force popular candidates of the opposing party to run against one another, while guaranteeing their own mediocre candidates are running against unknowns.
It's one of the biggest factors in the corruption of American politics.
Well now, there's a few reasons that could be truthy. For one, Bush isn't as popular as he used to be, so conservatives could be removing the stickers from their cars or otherwise hiding them because they're ashamed of Bush.
But most likely, you're suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias, in which you only notice the things that reinforce your preset beliefs.
Actually it's worse than that, it doesn't make them look terribly stupid, just desperate and pathetic.
It's clear even McCain's campaign people believe he's going to lose so they're trying any ridiculous idea they can think up. That's why this move completely lacks any subtlety at all.
Yes, if his idea of "helping" them is to bribe them to say nice things about him.
All of your gripes applied to DVDs 12 years ago.
1) What the hell is DiViD and why would I want Divid?
2) Divid players are much more expensive than VHS.
3) You can't record on Divids like you can on VHS.
4) My local Blockbuster has a lot more VHS movies than these new divids!
I think there just as applicable to Blu-ray as they were to DVDs.
Sometimes you really, really have to wonder. This article should be labeled "Economic Theory Still Valid". Increase the cost to entry and you decrease demand. As long a HD TVs are more expensive, Blu-Ray players are more expensive and Blu-Ray discs are more expensive, demand will be lower.
Of course, Blu-Ray isn't a revolutionary innovation (like DVDs were), it's an evolutionary improvement on the DVD. Eventually, prices will come down, and the media companies will stop price gouging for Blu-Ray discs. As prices drop, demand will rise slowly and inexorably. Give it a decade and almost everyone will have a BluRay player*.
* barring some revolutionary new technology in the mean time.
It's pretty simple, I suppose, you'll never have that perfect agreement between employer and employee, because if the employee doesn't agree to the conditions, they'd be fired. Thus any such agreement must be considered to be under duress.
Spoken like a true self-centered asshole.
Frankly, you have no right to pollute the air other people breath. And I see no reason why other people should have to adjust their lives to accommodate you.
Smoking is something you chose to do, so you should be the only one who has to deal with the consequences of that choice. With out these laws, everyone else is also forced to deal with the consequences of your choice. I see no good reason that other people should be forced to quit their jobs, leave their dinners half-eaten, and generally avoid any place you decide to go just to accommodate a habit you chose to indulge in.
So I suppose, you could say the law is legalized babysitting. But mostly it prevents non-smokers from defending themselves from smokers. I mean the reasonable alternative is to legalize the use of force to prevent smokers from endangering the health and safety of non-smokers. Frankly, I don't think that's an option you'd like.
No one required the wait staff to apply to work there.
While that's true in theory, it's also bullshit. Waiters and waitresses usually don't make very good money, so if they quit their jobs and look for one somewhere else, they have little or no savings to fall back on. That might mean that they can't afford their rent next month, and end up homeless. That's hardly an improvement from a health point of view.
Wait staff don't "gladly" take the risk of being in a smoky bar, at least not the ones I've talked to. They reluctantly took them because they had bills to pay and were having trouble finding work elsewhere.
So, no, the law weighed the benefits and the disadvantages of outlawing smoking in enclosed spaces and found the convenience of the few outweighed by the health of the many.
I know you can fall back on your old absolutisms about freedom. But frankly, this is the real world. In practice absolutisms don't work as well as you'd think they would.
You're still free to smoke your precious cigarettes, just not where you're going to endanger the health of other people.
I'll answer your strawman argument with a simple answer:
The employees are not free to leave, without suffering undue economic hardship (Ie. being fired with cause). They're also the people most likely to suffer the worst adverse affects because they're stuck there usually for 8 hours (or longer) at a time.
Given their health or your convenience, we have to choose their health. Laws are only passed because people like you are assholes who choose your own convenience over the health of others.
Penn & Teller are good magicians, and sometime that show is spot on, but they're blind to the bias introduced by their own political leaning.
It causes them to regularly miss the obvious because they don't want to see it.
Here, in Ontario, the justification for banning smoking from enclosed public spaces has nothing to do with patrons, and everything to do with safe workplace regulations.
Long term exposure to workplace second hand smoke does have adverse health effects. Waiters and waitresses are people too, and the cumulative effect of an endless parade of smokers in restaurants can have serious impacts on their health.
So, no, you can't smoke in restaurants. If you absolutely have to smoke, stand up and walk outside. I don't see why we have to sacrifice the health and well being of everyone around you because you're addicted and in denial.
I think the difference is in the movie, he's saying that to a child in a primary school.
An interesting thought, but specious.
I said nothing about whether you should or should not follow the teachings of the Bible, just that claims of divine authorship are self-referential.
In simple words: It would be better to put your faith in the message of the Bible, rather than it's divine origin.
The proper argument isn't that the Bible is the word of God and therefore true, but that it wouldn't matter whether it was the word of God, because what it teaches is good.
Well, let's look at things rationally for a moment here.
1) You know the commandments were handed down by God because the Bible tells you they were.
2) You know the Bible is the word of God because your priest tells you so.
3) You know your priest is telling you truth because he's been endorsed by your Church.
4) You know your Church is true because... because... it teaches what's in the Bible?
The problem is that the Bible was written by men. The old testament is essentially a compilation of Jewish mythology and religious laws. The new testament was written decades after the events in question by people who weren't there, often by people who never knew the principals.
It is most definitely the work of men. It may or may not be the work of men inspired by God. It may or may not be the work of men trying to describe what they think God would want us to do. But it definitely was the work of men.
Well, since they can't beat Google, they just figured they could destroy the Universe. You see Microsoft blows and AOL sucks, therefore if they carry out a merger, then the result would both suck and blow. Which, in theory, is physically impossible and should BSoD all of reality, or so they hope.
It's not just consoles, it's the guys who make chips, graphics cards, and assemble PCs. I got a new computer a while ago, and I thought it had a decent graphics card in it. Turned out I was wrong. The graphics card sucked ass and I couldn't even play a lot of older games at their normal settings. I didn't know what the hell was wrong with it, until I replaced the graphics card with a slightly better card from a different company. Although the specs don't appear to be that much different, the actual result was the difference between chugging on minimum settings and sailing on maximum settings.
If you don't care to learn quite a bit about graphics cards, you won't know what you need to play the games you want and you will not be happy with results of the money you wasted on the wrong stuff.
Consoles win because you are supposed to have to worry about which version of the console will play the games the way you want to play them. Of course, MS and Sony are because screwing that up for themselves.
I've found that pirates also tend to be cheaters. They have a virtually unlimited supply of games, so they can't afford to spend any significant time on any one game. This means they use cheats to start a game with all the powerups and invulnerability on. Then they complain that the game sucks because it's not challenging at all and move on the next game they're also going to hate because it's too easy, because they're cheating.
Frankly, I think they do it to get a false sense of superiority. After all, if every game is too easy, it must be because they're really, really good at playing games. Right? Right?
Well, this is where we get into the nitty gritty of how things really work. In effect, at birth the social contract was offered to you and your parents accepted the contract on your behalf establishing you as a citizen of the country in which you live.
If you choose not to abide by the social contract, then you should, in good conscience, renounce your citizenship. Your citizenship is your assent to the social contract. Of course, there are consequences to renouncing your citizenship, but there are always consequences.
Of course, I'm just writing to point out that by maintaining your citizenship you are maintaining your agreement to your contract with society.
Unethical laws shouldn't be obeyed, just because they're laws. But you have to remember if you choose not to obey the laws, you may end up paying with freedom or your life. Sometimes the prize is worth the price.
It's slightly more complicated than that. There's a group of Democrats called the Blue Dog Coalition who keep selling out the rest of the Democratic party on security issues. There's 47 of them currently in office.
Presumably they represent the will of the people who elected them, which on this issue is fear of the terrorists.
But otherwise, yes this congress is crippled by a slim majority, an adversarial president and a faction in the party that consistently sides with the administration on security issues.
I don't think you understand the problem. Darwinian Evolution isn't beyond question, it's just been questioned so many times recently that people no longer tolerate the questioning any more.
The argument has been done, been done recently, and no matter what "questions" you're going to throw at evolution they've already been answered in favour of evolution. I say not because there is no question that you could ask that hasn't been answered, but because there is no question you will ask that hasn't been answered.
Darwinian evolution isn't meant to be a panacea, so yes, there are questions that it can't answer. "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if woodchuck could chuck wood?" is a question it does absolutely nothing to resolve. Nor do we expect it to. It's not the universal theory of everything and everyone.
Intelligent design isn't a "search for the answers", it's a search for the questions. ID already has the answer: "God did it". Now they just need to tailor the questions so their answer is always right.