The problem with most religion is not that it creates answers for questions to which we do not, and can not (at the time) know the answer to, it's that after it has given an answer for such a question, it insists that its answer must be the one and only true answer to the question. Even worse all too often after we have become able to determine the real answer, the made up answer is preferred over the truth.
The problem with Religion isn't faith, it's dogmatism.
Actually, we have proof that life can exist on one ball of mud and water. So we know it can happen, SETI's checking for the obvious evidence of it happening more than once. SETI's only useless if there actually isn't any other intelligent life in the Universe, and the odds of that are staggeringly low.
On the flip side, we know that any sentient life we discover could be uncompromisingly hostile, so it would be in our best interest to find other life before it finds us.
As far as I'm aware the U.S. still has many barriers to trade, for example there's been an ongoing free trade dispute with Canada for almost a decade now over Softwood Lumber imports. Furthermore, the U.S. has no free trade agreement with China, as far as I know, which should mean that most Chinese imports are, in fact, taxed when they enter the country.
American Industry has been draining away because the American dollar has had a very strong purchasing power for a very long time. This makes it cheaper to import than it is build. It's simple economics that when a large cost-discrepancy appears, coporations will attempt to take advantage of it. The outsourcing of the American industries is a simple consequence of foreigners willing to work for less. If the American government outlawed building factories in foreign countries, corporations would move their headquarters out of country. Many already have. The game of Corporations and Governments is complicated, treacherous, and always changing.
In the end, it is as much the fault of the American people for buying foreign goods as it is the fault of the American government for not taxing those goods even more than they already are. Let's not forget that raising taxes on products may reduce their popularity, but it also fuels smuggling and black markets. Lastly, politicians are elected, which means they are responsible for their decisions to the people who elected them. Selling higher taxes on anything is usually a tough job, and if it doesn't work the guy who tried to raise the taxes is out on his ass, and his replacement has a clear reason to not try any of that higher taxes stuff.
In the end, the government is elected by the people and it is the people who bear responsibility for the quality of the government.
He's the co-chair of the Committee on Human Rights which may cast his early support of the War in Iraq in a slightly different light and make his reaction to Yahoo's behaviour entirely consistent. One of the big justifications for toppling Sadam Hussein was his record of Human Rights Abuses. He may have bought the White House's lies about their intelligence on Iraq and how they expected the War to proceed. Considering the majority of Americans did the same, I find it difficult to dismiss what appears to be an otherwise principled approach to human rights based on one failure, but your opinion may differ.
Interestingly enough from his voting history he also appears to be anti-free trade and anti-flag burning.
Now I am not implying that the US--the country I chose to live in--is even close to China/North Korea/etc in oppression, but what happened to REPUBLICAN values?
Nixon. He alienated the intelligencia from the Republican Party, they switched to supporting the Democrats. And the Democrat's official sponsorship of the Civil Rights act alienated many fundamentally bigotted voters in the south, who switched to supporting the Republican party (which is somewhat amusing since the Republican party support for the Civil Rights act was actually stronger than Democrats support). So with the consicence gone and strong support from a group with a history of bigotry, is it any wonder that Republicans don't support the rights of anyone except their own? The politicians are usually going to be a reflection of the people who elected them.
Even with gerrymandering, there's only so far you can go without popular support. The Republicans have found that by catering to the lowest common denominator of gay-fearing or foreigner-hateing voters that they can motivate people to vote because there's nothing like fear and hatred to motivate people.
So what you are saying is that Congress should have passed a law to prevent China from exporting anything to the United States? That it should have passed laws to prevent American corporations from building factories in unapproved areas? That is should have passed laws to prevent people from buying the cheap Chinese products that they've been buying? That the people who have been buying Chinese goods instead of American goods do not, in fact, bear any responsibility for their actions because Congress didn't pass laws preventing them from doing so?
From here it really does look like you want the U.S. to become as free as China.
Ironically, if both parties put forward their best candidates instead of their most "electable" candidates the United States would be a much better country.
I don't think anyone will offer a serious argument against that. Cut scenes can be amazing, but if you have to watch them over and over again, they become much less amazing.
No actually he doesn't and neither do you. Your point is not relevant to the discussion at hand. We are not talking about Dave the Barber or Sam's Shortwave Radio station. We're talking about webcomics with audiences larger than 10,000 daily readers. There may be some genuine non-notables being deleted however, we are talking about notables that are being deleted in sneaky and underhanded ways because someone decided that the category they belong too doesn't deserve to exist. The treatment from wikipedia is that all web comics are not notable unless proven notable beyond a reasonable doubt, plus the author is denied from speaking on his own behalf, plus there is no notification that the article is scheduled for deletion. It's a guaranteed way to make wikipedia look like it's run my asshole tyrants.
Someone other than the author took the time to write up a detailed description of the web comic and because that person didn't write a section proving why it's notable (probably because they didn't know they needed to have such a section), it gets deleted as non-notable generally without recourse. Everyone knows that some articles can be deleted because they have nothing interested to say, however, no one is bothering to prove that there is nothing interesting to say about a webcomic that has been running for years with a solid audience.
Hell we should increase it to 100%. Then when wikipedia has no articles left, it will be ultimate in encyclopedias contain no trivial information what-so-ever.
Blowdart is a blowhard who doesn't know what he's talking about. We're talking about comics that have won awards that were and are being purged from Wikipedia. When someone pointed out that some of them were award-winning the awards referenced were deleted so the person requesting the deletions could say "sorry, that's not a notable award" and delete the article any way.
My opinion of wikipedia has declined significantly due to the posts of the Wikipedia editors here. It's all about pretending the problem doesn't exist rather than take a long hard look at while they're acting like jackasses in the first place.
Let's not be foolish the "community" that decides is often a group of less than 10 and the vote for deletion (when it is won) if often by a margin of one vote, and in some cases the admin running the vote disregards do not delete votes for reasons which are spurious such as "you didn't provide a good enough reason to vote against deleting" or "I think it's obvious that this vote should be to delete so I'm going to ignore the result".
First, *YOUR* definition of anarchy is flawed, failed states are generally the most anarchistic state you are going to see. The fact that you choose to exclude them, just indicates to me that you don't particularly want to be right, you want to not be wrong.
Anarchy is the very definition of a power vaccuum and most often the people who arrise to take control are not the people you'd want in control. There is no magical "anarchist training" you can give people to make them not want security and stability. There is no way to innoculate them against taking orders and figuring that if it's "us" vs "them", that "us" is preferable. There will always be someone who sees the advantage that can be gained by violence and coersion in the absence of something more powerful to stop them. There would have to be fundamental changes to what makes us human, for the situation to change.
What ever happened to well educated (on multiple topics) politicians? Apparently, in practice, knowing what you're talking about is less important in swaying voters than staying "on message". It's one of the downsides of the two party system of the U.S.
Actually, in many case knowing what you're talking about it a down right disadvantage. There are deep seated roots of anti-intellectualism in the United States.
You keep using those words, but I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
Maybe I don't understand how the U.S. government system works. But here's how I understand it: Generally speaking, in addition to the specific meaning in the constitution, the principle of Seperation of Church and State means the government shouldn't be doing things that give precendence or preference to one religion over another. It has absolutely nothing to do with religions influencing the government, except that a religion can not lobby the government and maintain it's tax exempt status. Why? Because that's like the government paying to have itself religiously influenced which is, obviously, against both the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Furthermore, the tax exempt status of a Church is supposed to support the Church's charitable works, not be a cover for political donations.
So it's as acceptible for religious organizations to lobby the government as it is for business groups and political groups. They just can't claim tax free status while doing so.
Actually, I'm pretty sure he would. In principle no, but he's been in the political machine. He knows that any such test would immediately be used to suppress "undesirable" voters. In the hands of Republicans you'd suddenly find that hundreds of thousands of black and poor voters were unable to pass the test. While recently it's been the Republicans that have been abusing their positions of power, I wouldn't trust the Democrats with it either.
The problem, particularly in the U.S., is that you can't trust the test makers, the test administrators, or the evaluators. Hell, even if you could trust all of those, you still couldn't trust the system. I firmly believe the current crop of Republicans* would assign fewer test administrators and employ "spoilers" to ensure that it takes much longer to vote in areas where they expect to do poorly. So by reducing the maximum throughput of voters they can ensure that some people do not get a chance to vote, as not everyone is willing to or can afford to wait 8 hours to vote.
* I say Republicans specifically, because they did this in the last set of elections and were, by and large, not called on it in any significant way so you can expect this abuse to be doubled or tripled for the next round of elections.
It's kind of obvious that he's a Christian Fundie and more particularly a homophobe. He objects to the bill because it extends anti-discriminator teaching to include sexual orientation. He believes that not teaching children to hate gays is a crime against Christianity.
And I believe the absence of any rulers, included elected rulers, inevitably turns into despotism. Read some history books, people. No rules has always meant strength of arms rules. Anarchy breeds oppression.
Not exactly. Because of the windows and office monopolies Microsoft doesn't have to make a profit on anything else and generally speaking they don't. What they do is create a vaste wasteland of computer related businesses that undercut their competition and bleed them to death to scare people away from software businesses.
Microsoft takes a loss on 360s because they want to drive Sony and Nintendo out of the console business. That's their long term plan: Establish a monopoly then raise prices. As long as it doesn't work it's ok for customers, but if it does work then everyone gets screwed.
And for the inevitable people who're going to say, "All the US demand for engineers is being filled by H1-B types" I say good! More engineers in this country means more engineering work has to come to this country, because that's where the engineers are, and that's where the work will be done best. There's only one problem, many of the people who have H1-Bs are smart enough to know that. They're also smart enough to know that they can sell the trade secrets of American companies to companies in their native countries to make a wad of cash on the side and incidentally help their orginal homeland prosper.
So, your theory works as long as the immigrant workers fully intend to stay in the country. If they expect to return home, it may be doing more to erode the U.S. technological advantages than to enhance them. Essentially the U.S. may be serving as the world's training grounds right now for the next generation of economic power houses.
I've got to go against what you've said. "Next Gen" is next generation, it's not really actually supposed to be revolutionary and different. It's supposed to be an incremental improvement. Therefore the Wii can't be "Next Gen", it's not an improvement on the old. It's not the future of the game console. It is the beginning of something different, not the continuation of the old.
It's kind of like claiming that a laptop is the next generation of desktop computers. They can do a lot of the same stuff but they aren't designed for the same target markets.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with most religion is not that it creates answers for questions to which we do not, and can not (at the time) know the answer to, it's that after it has given an answer for such a question, it insists that its answer must be the one and only true answer to the question. Even worse all too often after we have become able to determine the real answer, the made up answer is preferred over the truth.
The problem with Religion isn't faith, it's dogmatism.
Actually, we have proof that life can exist on one ball of mud and water. So we know it can happen, SETI's checking for the obvious evidence of it happening more than once. SETI's only useless if there actually isn't any other intelligent life in the Universe, and the odds of that are staggeringly low.
On the flip side, we know that any sentient life we discover could be uncompromisingly hostile, so it would be in our best interest to find other life before it finds us.
As far as I'm aware the U.S. still has many barriers to trade, for example there's been an ongoing free trade dispute with Canada for almost a decade now over Softwood Lumber imports. Furthermore, the U.S. has no free trade agreement with China, as far as I know, which should mean that most Chinese imports are, in fact, taxed when they enter the country.
American Industry has been draining away because the American dollar has had a very strong purchasing power for a very long time. This makes it cheaper to import than it is build. It's simple economics that when a large cost-discrepancy appears, coporations will attempt to take advantage of it. The outsourcing of the American industries is a simple consequence of foreigners willing to work for less. If the American government outlawed building factories in foreign countries, corporations would move their headquarters out of country. Many already have. The game of Corporations and Governments is complicated, treacherous, and always changing.
In the end, it is as much the fault of the American people for buying foreign goods as it is the fault of the American government for not taxing those goods even more than they already are. Let's not forget that raising taxes on products may reduce their popularity, but it also fuels smuggling and black markets. Lastly, politicians are elected, which means they are responsible for their decisions to the people who elected them. Selling higher taxes on anything is usually a tough job, and if it doesn't work the guy who tried to raise the taxes is out on his ass, and his replacement has a clear reason to not try any of that higher taxes stuff.
In the end, the government is elected by the people and it is the people who bear responsibility for the quality of the government.
He's the co-chair of the Committee on Human Rights which may cast his early support of the War in Iraq in a slightly different light and make his reaction to Yahoo's behaviour entirely consistent. One of the big justifications for toppling Sadam Hussein was his record of Human Rights Abuses. He may have bought the White House's lies about their intelligence on Iraq and how they expected the War to proceed. Considering the majority of Americans did the same, I find it difficult to dismiss what appears to be an otherwise principled approach to human rights based on one failure, but your opinion may differ.
Interestingly enough from his voting history he also appears to be anti-free trade and anti-flag burning.
Now I am not implying that the US--the country I chose to live in--is even close to China/North Korea/etc in oppression, but what happened to REPUBLICAN values?
Nixon. He alienated the intelligencia from the Republican Party, they switched to supporting the Democrats. And the Democrat's official sponsorship of the Civil Rights act alienated many fundamentally bigotted voters in the south, who switched to supporting the Republican party (which is somewhat amusing since the Republican party support for the Civil Rights act was actually stronger than Democrats support). So with the consicence gone and strong support from a group with a history of bigotry, is it any wonder that Republicans don't support the rights of anyone except their own? The politicians are usually going to be a reflection of the people who elected them.
Even with gerrymandering, there's only so far you can go without popular support. The Republicans have found that by catering to the lowest common denominator of gay-fearing or foreigner-hateing voters that they can motivate people to vote because there's nothing like fear and hatred to motivate people.
So what you are saying is that Congress should have passed a law to prevent China from exporting anything to the United States? That it should have passed laws to prevent American corporations from building factories in unapproved areas? That is should have passed laws to prevent people from buying the cheap Chinese products that they've been buying? That the people who have been buying Chinese goods instead of American goods do not, in fact, bear any responsibility for their actions because Congress didn't pass laws preventing them from doing so?
From here it really does look like you want the U.S. to become as free as China.
No, speaking seriously, they quashed it because of the spoiler effect. They didn't want his presence as a joke candidate to screw up their results.
In a word: Yes.
Anyone who doesn't believe that is delusional.
Ironically, if both parties put forward their best candidates instead of their most "electable" candidates the United States would be a much better country.
Actually it's a slap in the face to both the criminal justice system and black men. It's not always one or the other, you know.
I don't think anyone will offer a serious argument against that. Cut scenes can be amazing, but if you have to watch them over and over again, they become much less amazing.
A million is a big number. The existence of bigger numbers does not negate it's bigness.
Stop being a tool.
To put it even more succinctly:
It is unreasonable to expect people who have no interest in a topic to volunteer their time to write about it.
No actually he doesn't and neither do you. Your point is not relevant to the discussion at hand. We are not talking about Dave the Barber or Sam's Shortwave Radio station. We're talking about webcomics with audiences larger than 10,000 daily readers. There may be some genuine non-notables being deleted however, we are talking about notables that are being deleted in sneaky and underhanded ways because someone decided that the category they belong too doesn't deserve to exist. The treatment from wikipedia is that all web comics are not notable unless proven notable beyond a reasonable doubt, plus the author is denied from speaking on his own behalf, plus there is no notification that the article is scheduled for deletion. It's a guaranteed way to make wikipedia look like it's run my asshole tyrants.
Someone other than the author took the time to write up a detailed description of the web comic and because that person didn't write a section proving why it's notable (probably because they didn't know they needed to have such a section), it gets deleted as non-notable generally without recourse. Everyone knows that some articles can be deleted because they have nothing interested to say, however, no one is bothering to prove that there is nothing interesting to say about a webcomic that has been running for years with a solid audience.
Hell we should increase it to 100%. Then when wikipedia has no articles left, it will be ultimate in encyclopedias contain no trivial information what-so-ever.
Blowdart is a blowhard who doesn't know what he's talking about. We're talking about comics that have won awards that were and are being purged from Wikipedia. When someone pointed out that some of them were award-winning the awards referenced were deleted so the person requesting the deletions could say "sorry, that's not a notable award" and delete the article any way.
My opinion of wikipedia has declined significantly due to the posts of the Wikipedia editors here. It's all about pretending the problem doesn't exist rather than take a long hard look at while they're acting like jackasses in the first place.
Let's not be foolish the "community" that decides is often a group of less than 10 and the vote for deletion (when it is won) if often by a margin of one vote, and in some cases the admin running the vote disregards do not delete votes for reasons which are spurious such as "you didn't provide a good enough reason to vote against deleting" or "I think it's obvious that this vote should be to delete so I'm going to ignore the result".
So yes, it is an admin problem.
First, *YOUR* definition of anarchy is flawed, failed states are generally the most anarchistic state you are going to see. The fact that you choose to exclude them, just indicates to me that you don't particularly want to be right, you want to not be wrong.
In any case, even within the bounds of your arbitrary and silly restrictions, you could start with the Old West:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Old_West
Or the German Robber Barons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron
Or maybe even a little Mob History:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Buchalter
Anarchy is the very definition of a power vaccuum and most often the people who arrise to take control are not the people you'd want in control. There is no magical "anarchist training" you can give people to make them not want security and stability. There is no way to innoculate them against taking orders and figuring that if it's "us" vs "them", that "us" is preferable. There will always be someone who sees the advantage that can be gained by violence and coersion in the absence of something more powerful to stop them. There would have to be fundamental changes to what makes us human, for the situation to change.
Actually, in many case knowing what you're talking about it a down right disadvantage. There are deep seated roots of anti-intellectualism in the United States.
You keep using those words, but I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
Maybe I don't understand how the U.S. government system works. But here's how I understand it: Generally speaking, in addition to the specific meaning in the constitution, the principle of Seperation of Church and State means the government shouldn't be doing things that give precendence or preference to one religion over another. It has absolutely nothing to do with religions influencing the government, except that a religion can not lobby the government and maintain it's tax exempt status. Why? Because that's like the government paying to have itself religiously influenced which is, obviously, against both the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Furthermore, the tax exempt status of a Church is supposed to support the Church's charitable works, not be a cover for political donations.
So it's as acceptible for religious organizations to lobby the government as it is for business groups and political groups. They just can't claim tax free status while doing so.
Actually, I'm pretty sure he would. In principle no, but he's been in the political machine. He knows that any such test would immediately be used to suppress "undesirable" voters. In the hands of Republicans you'd suddenly find that hundreds of thousands of black and poor voters were unable to pass the test. While recently it's been the Republicans that have been abusing their positions of power, I wouldn't trust the Democrats with it either.
The problem, particularly in the U.S., is that you can't trust the test makers, the test administrators, or the evaluators. Hell, even if you could trust all of those, you still couldn't trust the system. I firmly believe the current crop of Republicans* would assign fewer test administrators and employ "spoilers" to ensure that it takes much longer to vote in areas where they expect to do poorly. So by reducing the maximum throughput of voters they can ensure that some people do not get a chance to vote, as not everyone is willing to or can afford to wait 8 hours to vote.
* I say Republicans specifically, because they did this in the last set of elections and were, by and large, not called on it in any significant way so you can expect this abuse to be doubled or tripled for the next round of elections.
It's kind of obvious that he's a Christian Fundie and more particularly a homophobe. He objects to the bill because it extends anti-discriminator teaching to include sexual orientation. He believes that not teaching children to hate gays is a crime against Christianity.
And I believe the absence of any rulers, included elected rulers, inevitably turns into despotism. Read some history books, people. No rules has always meant strength of arms rules. Anarchy breeds oppression.
Not exactly. Because of the windows and office monopolies Microsoft doesn't have to make a profit on anything else and generally speaking they don't. What they do is create a vaste wasteland of computer related businesses that undercut their competition and bleed them to death to scare people away from software businesses.
Microsoft takes a loss on 360s because they want to drive Sony and Nintendo out of the console business. That's their long term plan: Establish a monopoly then raise prices. As long as it doesn't work it's ok for customers, but if it does work then everyone gets screwed.
So, your theory works as long as the immigrant workers fully intend to stay in the country. If they expect to return home, it may be doing more to erode the U.S. technological advantages than to enhance them. Essentially the U.S. may be serving as the world's training grounds right now for the next generation of economic power houses.
I've got to go against what you've said. "Next Gen" is next generation, it's not really actually supposed to be revolutionary and different. It's supposed to be an incremental improvement. Therefore the Wii can't be "Next Gen", it's not an improvement on the old. It's not the future of the game console. It is the beginning of something different, not the continuation of the old.
It's kind of like claiming that a laptop is the next generation of desktop computers. They can do a lot of the same stuff but they aren't designed for the same target markets.