> First you state that the government can control property without force, and then proceed to establish that they cannot. How do you deal with this contradiction?
I'm sorry, I will try to be more precise. I assumed you understood that my statement encompassed the use of force as accepted by your worldview, insofar as someone is allowed to use force to counter force initiated elsewhere.
> When the government enforced the ownership of slaves, that was force. When the government prevents someone from raping your mother by throwing them in prison, that is force. Force is the only means enforcing any law.
Force, as you seem to define it, is the only way to enforce anything at all. When a property owner prevents theft of his property, that is force, if you want to extend it that far. Again, I thought it was understood that force in response wasn't considered in the same way that initiated force was.
> Further, existing is not a contractual agreement. The Hobbes concept of social contract is merely a philosohpy whose purpose was to rationalize the existence and authority of the State.
That's a nice way to put it, until you try to suggest anything else workable. Even if you threw out the government every ten years, what do you think would spring up in its place? I'll ask what I ask everyone who talks this way. Who enforces property rights? Each person? Works great until one person overpowers another. What then? Society at large? How does that differ from government? In short, how do you get the idea of agreement among citizens to work when some citizens break the rules (after all, your view that personal property exists has to be agreed on by the whole society if it's to mean anything), if not by collective enforcement of those rules? Who does the enforcing against force-initiators?
> So if I don't agree with the rest of you, my only option is to move thousands of miles from my place of birth? And not just disagree about basic morality, but about, say, whether or not I should pay for your kid to go to school. That doesn't sound very enlightened or civilized of you.
Funny how that works, eh? The problem is that your world view also allows for this to happen, but unlike mine provides no mechanism for removing it. If I was black, living in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, I would find that many business owners wouldn't sell stuff to me. I wasn't allowed into most hospitals. I couldn't reasonably open a business because nobody would shop there. And my only option was to move thousands of miles from my place of birth. People rioted because of this reality, and because of the further reality that your vaunted worldview didn't fix it, and couldn't. It took the force of laws being passed to rectify this particular problem. Why don't you ever mention these market failures in your arguments?
> It seems to me the most enlightened, civilized, truly *tolerant* society would allow each man to go about whatever business he desired, so long as he neither defrauds nor assaults anyone in the process.
This fantasyland would be a great place to live, but unfortunately it doesn't exist, and can't exist. See, this model works great right up until someone decided to play the letter of the idea against the spirit, or decides to violate the rules. The efforts of the rail barons in late 19th century America demonstrate abuse of the market to develop dead end states, and your description of defense of personal property rights has a fundamental flaw. I had someone tell me that they'd simply defend their property against my use of force if they had to. Now, tell me what happens when that person fails. I go to his house to take it. He defends his house, but I'm a better shot, and now he's dead, and I'm in his house. Who enforces his property rights now? Society? Would you care to tell me how that differs in any fundamental way from the concept of a police force?
> Loreena McKennitt (I suspect you may never have heard of her), who started off busking with her harp in Canadian shopping malls, now sells to the world from her website (http://www.quinlanroad.com/) Note that the site is available in 14 languages. She is successful enough that a few years ago a documentary on her showed her office where she employs about 4 or 5 people whose only job is to distribute the CDs that she makes.
That's one. Notice how few of these folks there are, compared to the number of people who can't turn a living off of being musicians? The numbers are strongly skewed against success in the music industry. In a field where there are a thousand others with the same talent as you, you need luck AND skill to be really successful. I counter your Loreena with a fellow I know who busted his butt for years trying to make a living as a musician. He has people that regularly travelled hundreds of miles to hear him play. He's one of the most talented guitarists I've ever seen. Everyone tells him to go big time. He's been offered record contracts. He didn't take the contracts because he didn't want to lose artistic control. Because he's unwilling to sign with a big record company, he gave up on making a living at it, because he needed to keep such a nasty schedule to make his 35K a year that he couldn't see his wife for half the year. He walked away for a bank job that pays more than he was making full time on the road. He wasn't even trying to be the center of the universe, but if skill was a factor more than luck he'd still be a professional musician.
You're still doing this list? Here's a question on your comment:
> They can not, in a free market, truly own or control property -- they only use what all the people loan then. As such, they'd be abusing their monopoly on force by setting rules for speech or expression, as they control no property. The government borrowed property is not theirs to rule, it is the people's and all people are free to speak or express themselves (or bear arms on their property which includes publicly managed properties).
What is so hard for you to grasp about the idea that laws are made by agreement? The government can indeed control property other than by force. Let's say that the people get together and decide that they'll make an entity, and that entity will be responsible for controlling a certain parcel of land. They call this entity "the government" and the land "public". Then, they sit down and decide that it's a good idea that on this "public" land, they won't allow certain behaviors like carrying a firearm. They agree that if someone decides to do it anyway, the "government" will enforce their collective will. Now you show up with your gun, and their "government" removes you. You scream "force!" but where's your responsibility to obey the agreed-on law, change it or leave? You agreed by being part of the society, so your comment about force is obtuse. You don't like taxes? Lobby to rescind the tax laws, or move somewhere without tax laws. If your view is so sensible and popular, it should be easy to get enough folks on your side.
While I was really only making a joke, and while I'm aware that it would be relatively trivial to change someone's fingerprints when they had a face transplant if evading identification was the goal, what remains nonsensical is thinking that someone would undergo a full face transplant with all its requisite lifetime requirements and risks when regular cosmetic surgery would be able to alter their appearance beyond recognition without resorting to such extreme measures. Sure, your facial skin would have the same DNA as always, but realistically how often would that be an issue with DNA-based identification? DNA identification is most often done with blood or a swab in the mouth, so if you were evading pursuit for a crime and you were tested, you'd be sunk anyway.
> You'd have to hope for DNA or some other, more sure way of identifying the person.
Like fingerprints?
Virg
Re:Your show is great fun to watch and all, but...
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 1
Point not conceded. He didn't say "originally", nor did he ever comment on anything other than how designers work now. He made no comment that indicated that "design the truck" (his quote) translates in any meaningful way to "design the first pickup truck", so your point requires overreaching his statement.
Virg
The problem you're putting forward is that the car can't keep itself moving at the speed necessary to maintain sufficient upforce to pin itself to the roof. The thing to keep in mind is that downforce to provide lateral stability isn't really the issue here. In this special case, the car needs only to move fast enough to generate downforce slightly higher than its own weight to remain attached. It doesn't need steering ability to drive upside down in a straight line, only enough speed to keep itself off the ground, and enough extra force to keep the tires from breaking loose. Since it's assumed that the car will be moving quite fast when it inverts, it's unlikely that hard acceleration will be needed to keep going, so the tires won't break loose very easily. Given that the driver won't need to punch the accelerator, just maintain speed, you wouldn't need very much force at all to overcome the drag of the aeroforms.
All that said, though, from what I've seen of F1 engine design the car would never make it anyway since it's unlikely to be able to run upside down without major design changes. Assuming no gravity feeding and a fuel tank that works in any orientation, I think you'd be able to do it.
Virg
Re:Your show is great fun to watch and all, but...
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 1
> I'm fairly certain that the pickup truck came along well before they were able to test and engineer aerodynamics to that level, if at all. The flat beds in pickup trucks haven't exactly changed since the original designs.
Two mistakes. First, most pickup trucks have box beds, not flat beds, and second, the design of the cab determines the airflow pattern over the whole vehicle, not the bed. Cab designs are radically different from years ago.
> If someone threatens you verbally, just draw your gun in defense. See if they'll continue.
This is getting quite tiresome. Your argument requires that the only thing of value that you have is your personal safety. OK, then try this: the threat becomes "give me $100.00 or I'll blow your house up while you're away." Now, to credibly defend yourself against the threat, you can't just "show your piece", you have to stay at home to defend it. If you leave, your bravado (and your firearm) is irrelevant. Or try, "Give me $100.00 or I'll kill your kid when he's not near you." Again, your ability to defend yourself doesn't help, and unless you want to spend your life in proximity to your kid you can't defend him at all times, so again the threat carries weight. Since the threat requires you to change your behavior to deal with it, it's rational to consider it a use of force.
> There is a difference between public venue and private property. In my house, I should be able to say whatever I want; in public, I should have to mind my manners. If I am publically lying about a person in public, then that should be actionable.
That's a good metric, until you find the grey areas in "public". Is a restaurant public or private? Sure, it's owned by a private entity, but it's open to the public. If I walk into a restaurant and start talking trash about someone, and the other patrons are listening, am I talking privately or publicly? It's the "private protperty for public use" that gets you into hot water, and these are the venues for which anti-discrimination laws were originally scripted.
> You should be able to hire whomever you please without fear of a discrimination suit, and you should be able to fire people the same way. You should be able to refuse to serve Austrians in your restaurant, require everyone to where a green shirt, etc.
The basis of anti-discrimination laws has always been exclusionary. For example, it's not actually a violation of anti-discrimination laws to require that everyone in your restaurant wear green, because that's not exclusionary. It is, however, not legal to open a restaurant to the public and then disallow certain people on the basis of stuff that's not disruptive to your business, like being Austrian. The reason is that while it seems on the surface to be a matter of private property, history has shown that such discrimination can persevere in the face of financial loss, because some people will value the prejudice above monetary gain and if they carry enough financial or civil weight, can enforce that desire on their communities. Moreover, in cases where discrimination shows a profit (building access to your business for the handicapped costs a lot, for example) you can develop a class of people that never get redress against discrimination, and this was deemed a long time ago to be detrimental to society at large. Keep in mind that none of this applies to private property (for example, you can hire and fire a nanny for any or no reason with little legal difficulty and you don't need ramps in your house), when your business is a public entity you must play by the rules of society.
> A person using public property can't be allowed to abuse it to put forth mistruths; they have their own property for that.
In the fifties, white superiority wasn't considered a mistruth. There are still people who don't consider it a mistruth now. Again, some people place a very high value on their prejudice. If someone who does that ends up in a very high position or on a position of monopoly, it's reasonable to assume that society at large will suffer unless that person's prejudice cannot be used in public (and quasi-public) settings. If the only grocery in a town with thirty black people decides not to serve them, they have no real recourse to competition since nobody can profitably run a grocery for that small a clientele.
> In the US, having our freedoms restored from the poor wording of the Civil Rights Act would do a great deal to rid ourselves of discrimination. Instead of it being illegal to do all those things I mentioned, make it illegal for the government to do them. That is as it should be. That would rid us of horrible things like affirmative action, the so called "equal opportunity" laws, race based college financial aid, etc.
It would do no such thing. These things exist specifically because of discriminatory practice that made minorities into second-class citizens. Competition didn't eliminate or even significantly ameliorate these problems in the forties and fifties, so I have no idea why you think that it'll magically work now. As I said before, your view of discrimination requires that people value monetary gain more than their prejudice, and that's a very naive view of the world. The United Negro College Fund exists because when it was created, it
> I own stores, they're my property. If I don't want a communist shirt on my property, it's my right.
Nice thought, but since your store is purportedly for public access, you have to comply with a variety of laws that don't apply to private property like a house. For example, there's no law that requires you to have fire exits marked in your house. By the same token, you're not allowed to violate anti-discrimination laws in your store, where they don't apply to your house.
> If I'm a landlord and I don't like a tenant, I shouldn't be forced to accept them. It is my property.
Again, because you're presumably offering the rental property to the general public, you give up the right to discriminate in violation of the law. If you want the protection of contract law and right of separation (you're not criminally liable for crimes committed by your tenant on the rental property, for example), then you need to abide by the whole landlord-tenant paradigm, which includes not being allowed to say "no communists".
> Yes, some racist white guy may say no to a black family. What stops another landlord from saying no problem? Competition opens doors shut by others.
I'd say that (shown by history) other people in the community could apply the pressure that stop the other landlord. It's appallingly naive to say that competition will fix a problem like this. The reason laws like this exist is specifically because competition didn't fix problems like this.
> Similarly, it is against the law to deny somebody of their right to free speech, and therefore, they cannot make you abide by the terms of a contract that removes those rights.
The problem is that this sentence is not correct, so it doesn't follow from the last sentence. It is indeed legal to sign away your right to free speech, as regards certain subjects. NDAs and other contracts cover this, and there's lots of legal precedent that you can give up this right contractually as long as it's not deemed coercive, and the contract of attendance at a private university would certainly not qualify as coercive.
Take note that this sort of thing applies only to private entities, so if you attend a public university this would be entirely different, but as regards the institutions discussed above, it's not illegal.
You post demonstrates the problem with crossing logic and faith, and goes to the heart of why ID is seen more as an attack on science than a rational alternate. Simply put:
> The real problem people have with God, and why humanists love evolution and atheism, is that if God exists, He made us.
This doesn't follow. The Christian version of the story says so, but to assume that means it's universal, or that it must follow by logic, is a fault.
> And if He made us, then we have a duty to respond to Him.
Even if the first part is right, again, this doesn't follow. And again, you extend the Christian version of the story to be "The Story" and just expect everyone to take it as a given.
This is why people chafe when you claim to understand what drives atheists and humanists. It shows in your writing that you have difficulty grasping anything outside your faith (take that as insult if you must) and so it colors your perspective badly enough to be wrong. I'm an atheist, and I'm not an atheist because I feel guilty about not responding to God or because I subscribe to "eat, drink and be merry..." at all. I recognize that I have a responsibility to the society I live in that extends beyond my own life. To make it most personal, my descendants will need to live in the world I help create so I must do what I can to make their world a better place. I believe in no god, because I reflected on it and that's what I came to. Like any other following of faith, it guides my perception, but one thing it doesn't do, that your faith seems to, is forbid me from seeing other points of view. Notice I don't say that people who believe in God do it just because of reason A or situation B, because I realize that faith is a very complex, very personal thing. You should consider that before you preface comments with, "The real problem people have with God, and why humanists love evolution and atheism...", because so far you haven't shown that you understand that that's a bad idea.
OK, then here's the simple shoot-down of your argument
The original poster wrote, "And, the First Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with this because it is not a federal law." Your response was, "How can you say that an amendment to the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES is not a federal law?"
Well, he didn't say that. He said that the statement made by the Rev. Kieran McHugh, the school's principal, isn't a federal law, and therefore it's not a First Amendment case.
> This isn't an "ad hominem attack". It's a reprise of reality.
No, it's actually a weak ad hominem attack.
> The simple fact is that/. is pretty much overrun with liberals so anything remotely related to conservatives or Republicans is going to get short shrift. Did you read that article? Much worse things than that happen in local police departments every single week, which have nothing at all to do with the Patriot Act whatsoever.
Why is that relevant? The FBI utilizing aspects of the USA PATRIOT act in ways that are illegal is relevant. What other police departments do isn't relevant to this article. Mentioning them in this discussion is what is generally called "changing the subject".
> Does that excuse what the FBI did? No, but there's a certain perspective here on/. which requires that anything done by a Republican is automatically evil while anything done by a Democrat is automatically a pure as the driven snow.
I only half agree with you. Democrats don't get a free ride here either.
> What about that incident in NOLA last week where a 64 year old man was given a brutal beat down by the city's cops? New Orleans is run almost exclusively by Democrats.
You don't use the word "relevant" much, do you? Not only are neither of these sentences relevant to the article, they're not relevant to each other.
> Now which would you prefer? Someone wasting their time reading old emails and then having to destroy them, or you getting hammered so bad that your blood is literally running on the sidewalk?
I'm going to go with the choice that your false dichotomy doesn't present, which is "neither of them". Just because you can point out an incident of abuse of power that's worse than the ones addressed in the article doesn't make the stuff addressed in the article any more acceptable.
> In any of those incidents listed in the article, did anyone lose their life? Did anyone end up in a hospital? Did anyone end up with a broomstick rammed up their spincter? Did anyone end up in prison for 10 years because a cop planted a bag of cocaine in his car?
In "any of those incidents listed in the article", did someone overstep their authority or abuse their position? Well gee, it seems they all qualify for that, which is what the article is about. See, there's that darn "relevant" thing coming up again.
> These are all things done by local police forces prior to, afterwards, and independent of the Patriot Act.
Does that fact that corruption happened before the USA PATRIOT act mean that abuse of that act shouldn't be called to task? Does that fact mean that the USA PATRIOT act cannot be flawed? Didn't think so.
> Let's face facts here./. is an amusing site at times, but anyone who comes here for anything serious is an idiot.
Knowing this, you came here why? Perhaps you might want to look up "facts" when you're looking up "relevant".
> If a person is unable to make the right decision when presented with the question, "Should I rob this bank or not?", then how can you even consider that they'd make a good decision when asked, "Which candidate should run the country?"
There are an awful lot of holes in this concept, both because of abusability and because of the fundamental disconnect you're following. Firstly, assuming that someone who robs a bank can't make a good political decision, even twenty years after the crime and ten years after release from jail, does a huge disservice to the idea that someone can reform themselves. After all, when a person gets out of prison, is it not said that he's paid his debt to society? Secondly, what if the decision wasn't so severe as to enter into armed robbery? What if the offense is smoking pot, which some believe shouldn't be a crime? Prohibiting those who think that a given law is unjust from voting on the basis of violating that law is a self-reinforcing method of supressing dissent. Also, it's too easy to abuse the concept of eliminating voters using post-conviction disenfranchisement. For example, simply arrest everyone in a protest that you don't like, and charge them all with minor crimes. At this point you can remove them from the voter pool, effectively crushing opposition. This particular abuse has already happened in real life, so I find it difficult to belive it wouldn't happen again.
> Just assume that all prisoners would vote for the party on the left, if they weren't such psychotic social degenerates incapable of functioning in a civilized society.
This would require me to assume that all prisoners are psychotic social degenerates, and I will not do such a thing. This is just stupid and prejudicial, and it sounds disturbingly similar to arguments presented about why black people shouldn't have been allowed to vote.
> If someone sneaks into another company and photocopies trade secrets, they are said to have stolen the secrets.
This is reasonably theft. Since they stole the secret, it's no longer a secret (since it's now known to more than just you). Therefore, you no longer have a secret.
> If someone copies enough of my personal information that they can and do pose as me, that's identity theft.
Once a person does this, they are utilizing your credit rating to get stuff. If they don't pay back the debts they incur then your credit rating will suffer, which means you no longer have a good credit score to use for yourself. Sure, they stole something non-physical (your reputation), but since it's no longer available to you to use, it's reasonable to call it theft.
> In other words, the word theft is commonly used to refer to taking something ephemeral, not just something physical.
In both of the examples you provided, you've lost something real (a secret or a credit score). In the case of infringement, the copyright holder still has the copyrighted work to distribute.
> You can argue as a language purist that what everyone else does is wrong, but if the word's new meaning is common among most users of the language, then the word has shifted meaning and you'll have to keep up with the times.
The argument here is that the RIAA is making a concerted effort to associate theft with copyright infringement to benefit themselves, and that we're not going to let them get away with doing that.
Take duct tape, not gaffer's tape. Gaffe tape frankly sticks too well for most jury-rigging jobs, and it's much more expensive than duct tape, which will do the job just as well in almost all cases you'll encounter. Throw in ten rolls of electrical tape in cases where waterproof seals are a requirement, and you'll be golden for half the cost.
> The database is not the important factor there. You are basically saying, "if the government was less efficient, then he wouldn't have been able to kill as many Jews". I agree. And I agree that the "database" made the government more efficient.
However efficiency in itself is not a bad thing and not a thing to be avoided. Your argument, like I said, rests on the premise that governments should be inefficient all the time for the exceptional situation when the worst case scenario comes into play.
Not at all. The crux of my argument as regards the Dutch records and Hitler's abuse of them has to do with the intrinsic weakness of the concept of information centralization. The problem was that there were records in the Dutch government that listed each person's religion, and I can see no realistic reason why that information needed to be there. Total demographics about religion can be gathered without tying a perticular person to a particular religion, and what possible benefit could having your religion listed in a census database serve you? This is a real problem, in that such repositories end up collecting information that doesn't provide any real benefit to the person recorded, but is there to be abused. Coupled with the fact that very few of these data collectors see any problem with assembling such information with or without the consent of those profiled, and with the fact that these same collectors do their best never to discard information from their system, you end up with a system that captures a whole lot of stuff that represents nothing but a liability to the person in question. This is in fact what happened in the Netherlands, where they collected and stored information about their population's religion to no plausible benefit, and that information was later abused to their detriment.
Again, I don't care if the government is efficient. What concerns me is that these databases don't provide benefit to nearly as many people as they impose detriment, and so care must be exercised in what information ends up where, and why. Therefore, streamlining their connectivity to allow more efficient data exchange isn't necessarily a good thing.
The simple answer is that Paul thought it was best to be celibate like him, but if you couldn't manage that, you should marry and be faithful so you don't fornicate. The rest of the passage is just elaboration on the idea of using marriage to channel the sex urge, but in the end he reiterates that it's better not to have sex at all.
Your mention of the magic reset button reminded me of something that we figured out throughout all of the Star Trek shows. It was something like this:
Original Series: "Don't worry cap'n, the writers'll get us outta this one too!"
The Next Generation: "Don't worry, captain, I'll just reconfigure something!"
Deep Space Nine: "Don't worry, commander, the particle du jour is just what we need!"
Voyager: "Not to worry, captain, pluck and Borg technology will get us out of this one!"
Enterprise: "Oh, crap! Run!"
Now as to the original Battlestar Galactica, I don't think it was bad, given its era. It was very cheesy due to budget, and it had a lot of the same flaws as every show written in the '70s, but overall it was a very good idea, done as well as possible given its limits. Like all shows that ran too many seasons, the story fell apart at the end, but all in all, it stands that it belongs on a best 50 list, or at least a top 100. Besides, who could resist raster-scan monitors full of little triangles?
The new BSG deserves its slot because it's what BSG would have been if TV back in the '70s would have allowed it. I always thought that the biggest problem with the original show was that it was way too lighthearted, that Starbuck was not nearly mentally damaged enough to have the reputation he had, and that everything looked a little too neat, clean and friendly for a "ragtag, fugitive fleet" that was always running low on food and fuel. Darker colors and darker plots have won me over, even if there are plot holes, because realistically how many sci-fi films or shows are perfect as regards continuity?
> For everybody's talk of "nightmarish situations", I have yet to hear a single actual nightmarish situation that is actually a result of a database like this.
This lacks validity because until now, such a database hasn't really existed, so saying that there are no real-world cases is much like the folks in 1940 saying nuclear weapons aren't dangerous because there wasn't a single actual situation where they were dangerous. The ramifications of how such a tool benefits its users and those whose information is stored must be weighed against the possibility of abuse of that central repository, and how much worse that abuse can make other situations. Others here have referred to the Nazi abuse of Dutch citizenship records to target Jews, and in that particular real world case more Jews died because their religion was stored in a "database" than would have if it wasn't. I ask you to consider what possible benefit that piece of information provided, given that it became quite a liability in the wrong hands.
> It works for your situations too.
This is a morass of straw men, and I suspect you know it. Just to take the first one, voting has a significant, proven and obvious benefit to a huge percentage of the population, so you'd need to demonstrate one Hell of a bad side-effect to overrule that. In the case of this benefit, you must consider whether protecting the few that this step will protect warrants such a wholesale risk to the population in general. Unifying a large number of databases to prevent a few cases from falling through the cracks sounds like a great idea, but I present that they haven't proven on a large scale that it'll work as well as any other step they may consider, and that it adds a great deal of externality to the mix.
> I'm sorry, but your argument seems to boil down to "the government should be bureaucratic because if it operated efficiently, if it turned evil, it would be evil in an efficient manner".
I disagree. This argument boils down to "will forcing everyone in the country to give up some portion of their privacy be worth the benefit that the unifying of databases will give?" When you take away the "think of the children" mentality, you're left with a lot of centralized information and only the Dutch government's word that it'll never be abused. If you think it's about the children, then perhaps you'd like to reconcile how "gradle to grave" fits with protecting only children, except in cases where someone dies before age 18. How does allowing this to work throughout a person's life protect them after they leave mom and dad? Consider this: thirty years ago, it was simply inconceivable for someone to use a Social Security number to steal another person's credit identity. Now, it's so commonplace that experts advise not using it for an ID number. Add to that that Social Security was put forward with the promise that it wouldn't become an ID, but would only to be used for Social Security. Now, it's against the law not to put your SSN on your income tax forms, and DMVs and state colleges use them for driver license and student ID numbers, respectively. Now, reconcile this with your thought that it's just a matter of efficiency. Can you promise the people subject to this database that the unifying of information won't expose them to risks that we don't even know about yet? Can anyone? If you can't, then you have little ground to say that those espousing the risks are just extremists.
The easiest example for what the space program got us is right in front of your face, and you even mentioned it, but far too many people don't think about how deep an impact it really had. Rockets and moon landers and orbiters (oh my!) needed computing power, and vacuum tube-based computers were too heavy and too sensitive to do the job, so lots of work was put into building solid state computing devices. This brought on the computer age, and even the grandest Luddite would have a hard time imagining something with a bigger influence on the world today than microcomputers.
Slashdot Mirror
> First you state that the government can control property without force, and then proceed to establish that they cannot. How do you deal with this contradiction?
I'm sorry, I will try to be more precise. I assumed you understood that my statement encompassed the use of force as accepted by your worldview, insofar as someone is allowed to use force to counter force initiated elsewhere.
> When the government enforced the ownership of slaves, that was force. When the government prevents someone from raping your mother by throwing them in prison, that is force. Force is the only means enforcing any law.
Force, as you seem to define it, is the only way to enforce anything at all. When a property owner prevents theft of his property, that is force, if you want to extend it that far. Again, I thought it was understood that force in response wasn't considered in the same way that initiated force was.
> Further, existing is not a contractual agreement. The Hobbes concept of social contract is merely a philosohpy whose purpose was to rationalize the existence and authority of the State.
That's a nice way to put it, until you try to suggest anything else workable. Even if you threw out the government every ten years, what do you think would spring up in its place? I'll ask what I ask everyone who talks this way. Who enforces property rights? Each person? Works great until one person overpowers another. What then? Society at large? How does that differ from government? In short, how do you get the idea of agreement among citizens to work when some citizens break the rules (after all, your view that personal property exists has to be agreed on by the whole society if it's to mean anything), if not by collective enforcement of those rules? Who does the enforcing against force-initiators?
Virg
> So if I don't agree with the rest of you, my only option is to move thousands of miles from my place of birth? And not just disagree about basic morality, but about, say, whether or not I should pay for your kid to go to school. That doesn't sound very enlightened or civilized of you.
Funny how that works, eh? The problem is that your world view also allows for this to happen, but unlike mine provides no mechanism for removing it. If I was black, living in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, I would find that many business owners wouldn't sell stuff to me. I wasn't allowed into most hospitals. I couldn't reasonably open a business because nobody would shop there. And my only option was to move thousands of miles from my place of birth. People rioted because of this reality, and because of the further reality that your vaunted worldview didn't fix it, and couldn't. It took the force of laws being passed to rectify this particular problem. Why don't you ever mention these market failures in your arguments?
> It seems to me the most enlightened, civilized, truly *tolerant* society would allow each man to go about whatever business he desired, so long as he neither defrauds nor assaults anyone in the process.
This fantasyland would be a great place to live, but unfortunately it doesn't exist, and can't exist. See, this model works great right up until someone decided to play the letter of the idea against the spirit, or decides to violate the rules. The efforts of the rail barons in late 19th century America demonstrate abuse of the market to develop dead end states, and your description of defense of personal property rights has a fundamental flaw. I had someone tell me that they'd simply defend their property against my use of force if they had to. Now, tell me what happens when that person fails. I go to his house to take it. He defends his house, but I'm a better shot, and now he's dead, and I'm in his house. Who enforces his property rights now? Society? Would you care to tell me how that differs in any fundamental way from the concept of a police force?
VIrg
> Loreena McKennitt (I suspect you may never have heard of her), who started off busking with her harp in Canadian shopping malls, now sells to the world from her website (http://www.quinlanroad.com/) Note that the site is available in 14 languages. She is successful enough that a few years ago a documentary on her showed her office where she employs about 4 or 5 people whose only job is to distribute the CDs that she makes.
That's one. Notice how few of these folks there are, compared to the number of people who can't turn a living off of being musicians? The numbers are strongly skewed against success in the music industry. In a field where there are a thousand others with the same talent as you, you need luck AND skill to be really successful. I counter your Loreena with a fellow I know who busted his butt for years trying to make a living as a musician. He has people that regularly travelled hundreds of miles to hear him play. He's one of the most talented guitarists I've ever seen. Everyone tells him to go big time. He's been offered record contracts. He didn't take the contracts because he didn't want to lose artistic control. Because he's unwilling to sign with a big record company, he gave up on making a living at it, because he needed to keep such a nasty schedule to make his 35K a year that he couldn't see his wife for half the year. He walked away for a bank job that pays more than he was making full time on the road. He wasn't even trying to be the center of the universe, but if skill was a factor more than luck he'd still be a professional musician.
Virg
You're still doing this list? Here's a question on your comment:
> They can not, in a free market, truly own or control property -- they only use what all the people loan then. As such, they'd be abusing their monopoly on force by setting rules for speech or expression, as they control no property. The government borrowed property is not theirs to rule, it is the people's and all people are free to speak or express themselves (or bear arms on their property which includes publicly managed properties).
What is so hard for you to grasp about the idea that laws are made by agreement? The government can indeed control property other than by force. Let's say that the people get together and decide that they'll make an entity, and that entity will be responsible for controlling a certain parcel of land. They call this entity "the government" and the land "public". Then, they sit down and decide that it's a good idea that on this "public" land, they won't allow certain behaviors like carrying a firearm. They agree that if someone decides to do it anyway, the "government" will enforce their collective will. Now you show up with your gun, and their "government" removes you. You scream "force!" but where's your responsibility to obey the agreed-on law, change it or leave? You agreed by being part of the society, so your comment about force is obtuse. You don't like taxes? Lobby to rescind the tax laws, or move somewhere without tax laws. If your view is so sensible and popular, it should be easy to get enough folks on your side.
Virg
While I was really only making a joke, and while I'm aware that it would be relatively trivial to change someone's fingerprints when they had a face transplant if evading identification was the goal, what remains nonsensical is thinking that someone would undergo a full face transplant with all its requisite lifetime requirements and risks when regular cosmetic surgery would be able to alter their appearance beyond recognition without resorting to such extreme measures. Sure, your facial skin would have the same DNA as always, but realistically how often would that be an issue with DNA-based identification? DNA identification is most often done with blood or a swab in the mouth, so if you were evading pursuit for a crime and you were tested, you'd be sunk anyway.
Virg
> You'd have to hope for DNA or some other, more sure way of identifying the person.
Like fingerprints?
Virg
Point not conceded. He didn't say "originally", nor did he ever comment on anything other than how designers work now. He made no comment that indicated that "design the truck" (his quote) translates in any meaningful way to "design the first pickup truck", so your point requires overreaching his statement.
Virg
Frankly, this works just as well with sand. Anything small and particulate will do it.
Virg
The problem you're putting forward is that the car can't keep itself moving at the speed necessary to maintain sufficient upforce to pin itself to the roof. The thing to keep in mind is that downforce to provide lateral stability isn't really the issue here. In this special case, the car needs only to move fast enough to generate downforce slightly higher than its own weight to remain attached. It doesn't need steering ability to drive upside down in a straight line, only enough speed to keep itself off the ground, and enough extra force to keep the tires from breaking loose. Since it's assumed that the car will be moving quite fast when it inverts, it's unlikely that hard acceleration will be needed to keep going, so the tires won't break loose very easily. Given that the driver won't need to punch the accelerator, just maintain speed, you wouldn't need very much force at all to overcome the drag of the aeroforms.
All that said, though, from what I've seen of F1 engine design the car would never make it anyway since it's unlikely to be able to run upside down without major design changes. Assuming no gravity feeding and a fuel tank that works in any orientation, I think you'd be able to do it.
Virg
> I'm fairly certain that the pickup truck came along well before they were able to test and engineer aerodynamics to that level, if at all. The flat beds in pickup trucks haven't exactly changed since the original designs.
Two mistakes. First, most pickup trucks have box beds, not flat beds, and second, the design of the cab determines the airflow pattern over the whole vehicle, not the bed. Cab designs are radically different from years ago.
Virg
> If someone threatens you verbally, just draw your gun in defense. See if they'll continue.
This is getting quite tiresome. Your argument requires that the only thing of value that you have is your personal safety. OK, then try this: the threat becomes "give me $100.00 or I'll blow your house up while you're away." Now, to credibly defend yourself against the threat, you can't just "show your piece", you have to stay at home to defend it. If you leave, your bravado (and your firearm) is irrelevant. Or try, "Give me $100.00 or I'll kill your kid when he's not near you." Again, your ability to defend yourself doesn't help, and unless you want to spend your life in proximity to your kid you can't defend him at all times, so again the threat carries weight. Since the threat requires you to change your behavior to deal with it, it's rational to consider it a use of force.
Virg
> There is a difference between public venue and private property. In my house, I should be able to say whatever I want; in public, I should have to mind my manners. If I am publically lying about a person in public, then that should be actionable.
That's a good metric, until you find the grey areas in "public". Is a restaurant public or private? Sure, it's owned by a private entity, but it's open to the public. If I walk into a restaurant and start talking trash about someone, and the other patrons are listening, am I talking privately or publicly? It's the "private protperty for public use" that gets you into hot water, and these are the venues for which anti-discrimination laws were originally scripted.
> You should be able to hire whomever you please without fear of a discrimination suit, and you should be able to fire people the same way. You should be able to refuse to serve Austrians in your restaurant, require everyone to where a green shirt, etc.
The basis of anti-discrimination laws has always been exclusionary. For example, it's not actually a violation of anti-discrimination laws to require that everyone in your restaurant wear green, because that's not exclusionary. It is, however, not legal to open a restaurant to the public and then disallow certain people on the basis of stuff that's not disruptive to your business, like being Austrian. The reason is that while it seems on the surface to be a matter of private property, history has shown that such discrimination can persevere in the face of financial loss, because some people will value the prejudice above monetary gain and if they carry enough financial or civil weight, can enforce that desire on their communities. Moreover, in cases where discrimination shows a profit (building access to your business for the handicapped costs a lot, for example) you can develop a class of people that never get redress against discrimination, and this was deemed a long time ago to be detrimental to society at large. Keep in mind that none of this applies to private property (for example, you can hire and fire a nanny for any or no reason with little legal difficulty and you don't need ramps in your house), when your business is a public entity you must play by the rules of society.
> A person using public property can't be allowed to abuse it to put forth mistruths; they have their own property for that.
In the fifties, white superiority wasn't considered a mistruth. There are still people who don't consider it a mistruth now. Again, some people place a very high value on their prejudice. If someone who does that ends up in a very high position or on a position of monopoly, it's reasonable to assume that society at large will suffer unless that person's prejudice cannot be used in public (and quasi-public) settings. If the only grocery in a town with thirty black people decides not to serve them, they have no real recourse to competition since nobody can profitably run a grocery for that small a clientele.
> In the US, having our freedoms restored from the poor wording of the Civil Rights Act would do a great deal to rid ourselves of discrimination. Instead of it being illegal to do all those things I mentioned, make it illegal for the government to do them. That is as it should be. That would rid us of horrible things like affirmative action, the so called "equal opportunity" laws, race based college financial aid, etc.
It would do no such thing. These things exist specifically because of discriminatory practice that made minorities into second-class citizens. Competition didn't eliminate or even significantly ameliorate these problems in the forties and fifties, so I have no idea why you think that it'll magically work now. As I said before, your view of discrimination requires that people value monetary gain more than their prejudice, and that's a very naive view of the world. The United Negro College Fund exists because when it was created, it
> I own stores, they're my property. If I don't want a communist shirt on my property, it's my right.
Nice thought, but since your store is purportedly for public access, you have to comply with a variety of laws that don't apply to private property like a house. For example, there's no law that requires you to have fire exits marked in your house. By the same token, you're not allowed to violate anti-discrimination laws in your store, where they don't apply to your house.
> If I'm a landlord and I don't like a tenant, I shouldn't be forced to accept them. It is my property.
Again, because you're presumably offering the rental property to the general public, you give up the right to discriminate in violation of the law. If you want the protection of contract law and right of separation (you're not criminally liable for crimes committed by your tenant on the rental property, for example), then you need to abide by the whole landlord-tenant paradigm, which includes not being allowed to say "no communists".
> Yes, some racist white guy may say no to a black family. What stops another landlord from saying no problem? Competition opens doors shut by others.
I'd say that (shown by history) other people in the community could apply the pressure that stop the other landlord. It's appallingly naive to say that competition will fix a problem like this. The reason laws like this exist is specifically because competition didn't fix problems like this.
Virg
> Similarly, it is against the law to deny somebody of their right to free speech, and therefore, they cannot make you abide by the terms of a contract that removes those rights.
The problem is that this sentence is not correct, so it doesn't follow from the last sentence. It is indeed legal to sign away your right to free speech, as regards certain subjects. NDAs and other contracts cover this, and there's lots of legal precedent that you can give up this right contractually as long as it's not deemed coercive, and the contract of attendance at a private university would certainly not qualify as coercive.
Take note that this sort of thing applies only to private entities, so if you attend a public university this would be entirely different, but as regards the institutions discussed above, it's not illegal.
Virg
You post demonstrates the problem with crossing logic and faith, and goes to the heart of why ID is seen more as an attack on science than a rational alternate. Simply put:
> The real problem people have with God, and why humanists love evolution and atheism, is that if God exists, He made us.
This doesn't follow. The Christian version of the story says so, but to assume that means it's universal, or that it must follow by logic, is a fault.
> And if He made us, then we have a duty to respond to Him.
Even if the first part is right, again, this doesn't follow. And again, you extend the Christian version of the story to be "The Story" and just expect everyone to take it as a given.
This is why people chafe when you claim to understand what drives atheists and humanists. It shows in your writing that you have difficulty grasping anything outside your faith (take that as insult if you must) and so it colors your perspective badly enough to be wrong. I'm an atheist, and I'm not an atheist because I feel guilty about not responding to God or because I subscribe to "eat, drink and be merry..." at all. I recognize that I have a responsibility to the society I live in that extends beyond my own life. To make it most personal, my descendants will need to live in the world I help create so I must do what I can to make their world a better place. I believe in no god, because I reflected on it and that's what I came to. Like any other following of faith, it guides my perception, but one thing it doesn't do, that your faith seems to, is forbid me from seeing other points of view. Notice I don't say that people who believe in God do it just because of reason A or situation B, because I realize that faith is a very complex, very personal thing. You should consider that before you preface comments with, "The real problem people have with God, and why humanists love evolution and atheism...", because so far you haven't shown that you understand that that's a bad idea.
Virg
OK, then here's the simple shoot-down of your argument
The original poster wrote, "And, the First Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with this because it is not a federal law." Your response was, "How can you say that an amendment to the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES is not a federal law?"
Well, he didn't say that. He said that the statement made by the Rev. Kieran McHugh, the school's principal, isn't a federal law, and therefore it's not a First Amendment case.
Carry on.
Virg
> This isn't an "ad hominem attack". It's a reprise of reality.
/. is pretty much overrun with liberals so anything remotely related to conservatives or Republicans is going to get short shrift. Did you read that article? Much worse things than that happen in local police departments every single week, which have nothing at all to do with the Patriot Act whatsoever.
/. which requires that anything done by a Republican is automatically evil while anything done by a Democrat is automatically a pure as the driven snow.
/. is an amusing site at times, but anyone who comes here for anything serious is an idiot.
No, it's actually a weak ad hominem attack.
> The simple fact is that
Why is that relevant? The FBI utilizing aspects of the USA PATRIOT act in ways that are illegal is relevant. What other police departments do isn't relevant to this article. Mentioning them in this discussion is what is generally called "changing the subject".
> Does that excuse what the FBI did? No, but there's a certain perspective here on
I only half agree with you. Democrats don't get a free ride here either.
> What about that incident in NOLA last week where a 64 year old man was given a brutal beat down by the city's cops? New Orleans is run almost exclusively by Democrats.
You don't use the word "relevant" much, do you? Not only are neither of these sentences relevant to the article, they're not relevant to each other.
> Now which would you prefer? Someone wasting their time reading old emails and then having to destroy them, or you getting hammered so bad that your blood is literally running on the sidewalk?
I'm going to go with the choice that your false dichotomy doesn't present, which is "neither of them". Just because you can point out an incident of abuse of power that's worse than the ones addressed in the article doesn't make the stuff addressed in the article any more acceptable.
> In any of those incidents listed in the article, did anyone lose their life? Did anyone end up in a hospital? Did anyone end up with a broomstick rammed up their spincter? Did anyone end up in prison for 10 years because a cop planted a bag of cocaine in his car?
In "any of those incidents listed in the article", did someone overstep their authority or abuse their position? Well gee, it seems they all qualify for that, which is what the article is about. See, there's that darn "relevant" thing coming up again.
> These are all things done by local police forces prior to, afterwards, and independent of the Patriot Act.
Does that fact that corruption happened before the USA PATRIOT act mean that abuse of that act shouldn't be called to task? Does that fact mean that the USA PATRIOT act cannot be flawed? Didn't think so.
> Let's face facts here.
Knowing this, you came here why? Perhaps you might want to look up "facts" when you're looking up "relevant".
Virg
> If a person is unable to make the right decision when presented with the question, "Should I rob this bank or not?", then how can you even consider that they'd make a good decision when asked, "Which candidate should run the country?"
There are an awful lot of holes in this concept, both because of abusability and because of the fundamental disconnect you're following. Firstly, assuming that someone who robs a bank can't make a good political decision, even twenty years after the crime and ten years after release from jail, does a huge disservice to the idea that someone can reform themselves. After all, when a person gets out of prison, is it not said that he's paid his debt to society? Secondly, what if the decision wasn't so severe as to enter into armed robbery? What if the offense is smoking pot, which some believe shouldn't be a crime? Prohibiting those who think that a given law is unjust from voting on the basis of violating that law is a self-reinforcing method of supressing dissent. Also, it's too easy to abuse the concept of eliminating voters using post-conviction disenfranchisement. For example, simply arrest everyone in a protest that you don't like, and charge them all with minor crimes. At this point you can remove them from the voter pool, effectively crushing opposition. This particular abuse has already happened in real life, so I find it difficult to belive it wouldn't happen again.
> Just assume that all prisoners would vote for the party on the left, if they weren't such psychotic social degenerates incapable of functioning in a civilized society.
This would require me to assume that all prisoners are psychotic social degenerates, and I will not do such a thing. This is just stupid and prejudicial, and it sounds disturbingly similar to arguments presented about why black people shouldn't have been allowed to vote.
Virg
> If someone sneaks into another company and photocopies trade secrets, they are said to have stolen the secrets.
This is reasonably theft. Since they stole the secret, it's no longer a secret (since it's now known to more than just you). Therefore, you no longer have a secret.
> If someone copies enough of my personal information that they can and do pose as me, that's identity theft.
Once a person does this, they are utilizing your credit rating to get stuff. If they don't pay back the debts they incur then your credit rating will suffer, which means you no longer have a good credit score to use for yourself. Sure, they stole something non-physical (your reputation), but since it's no longer available to you to use, it's reasonable to call it theft.
> In other words, the word theft is commonly used to refer to taking something ephemeral, not just something physical.
In both of the examples you provided, you've lost something real (a secret or a credit score). In the case of infringement, the copyright holder still has the copyrighted work to distribute.
> You can argue as a language purist that what everyone else does is wrong, but if the word's new meaning is common among most users of the language, then the word has shifted meaning and you'll have to keep up with the times.
The argument here is that the RIAA is making a concerted effort to associate theft with copyright infringement to benefit themselves, and that we're not going to let them get away with doing that.
Virg
Take duct tape, not gaffer's tape. Gaffe tape frankly sticks too well for most jury-rigging jobs, and it's much more expensive than duct tape, which will do the job just as well in almost all cases you'll encounter. Throw in ten rolls of electrical tape in cases where waterproof seals are a requirement, and you'll be golden for half the cost.
Virg
> The database is not the important factor there. You are basically saying, "if the government was less efficient, then he wouldn't have been able to kill as many Jews". I agree. And I agree that the "database" made the government more efficient.
However efficiency in itself is not a bad thing and not a thing to be avoided. Your argument, like I said, rests on the premise that governments should be inefficient all the time for the exceptional situation when the worst case scenario comes into play.
Not at all. The crux of my argument as regards the Dutch records and Hitler's abuse of them has to do with the intrinsic weakness of the concept of information centralization. The problem was that there were records in the Dutch government that listed each person's religion, and I can see no realistic reason why that information needed to be there. Total demographics about religion can be gathered without tying a perticular person to a particular religion, and what possible benefit could having your religion listed in a census database serve you? This is a real problem, in that such repositories end up collecting information that doesn't provide any real benefit to the person recorded, but is there to be abused. Coupled with the fact that very few of these data collectors see any problem with assembling such information with or without the consent of those profiled, and with the fact that these same collectors do their best never to discard information from their system, you end up with a system that captures a whole lot of stuff that represents nothing but a liability to the person in question. This is in fact what happened in the Netherlands, where they collected and stored information about their population's religion to no plausible benefit, and that information was later abused to their detriment.
Again, I don't care if the government is efficient. What concerns me is that these databases don't provide benefit to nearly as many people as they impose detriment, and so care must be exercised in what information ends up where, and why. Therefore, streamlining their connectivity to allow more efficient data exchange isn't necessarily a good thing.
Virg
The simple answer is that Paul thought it was best to be celibate like him, but if you couldn't manage that, you should marry and be faithful so you don't fornicate. The rest of the passage is just elaboration on the idea of using marriage to channel the sex urge, but in the end he reiterates that it's better not to have sex at all.
Virg
Your mention of the magic reset button reminded me of something that we figured out throughout all of the Star Trek shows. It was something like this:
Original Series: "Don't worry cap'n, the writers'll get us outta this one too!"
The Next Generation: "Don't worry, captain, I'll just reconfigure something!"
Deep Space Nine: "Don't worry, commander, the particle du jour is just what we need!"
Voyager: "Not to worry, captain, pluck and Borg technology will get us out of this one!"
Enterprise: "Oh, crap! Run!"
Now as to the original Battlestar Galactica, I don't think it was bad, given its era. It was very cheesy due to budget, and it had a lot of the same flaws as every show written in the '70s, but overall it was a very good idea, done as well as possible given its limits. Like all shows that ran too many seasons, the story fell apart at the end, but all in all, it stands that it belongs on a best 50 list, or at least a top 100. Besides, who could resist raster-scan monitors full of little triangles?
The new BSG deserves its slot because it's what BSG would have been if TV back in the '70s would have allowed it. I always thought that the biggest problem with the original show was that it was way too lighthearted, that Starbuck was not nearly mentally damaged enough to have the reputation he had, and that everything looked a little too neat, clean and friendly for a "ragtag, fugitive fleet" that was always running low on food and fuel. Darker colors and darker plots have won me over, even if there are plot holes, because realistically how many sci-fi films or shows are perfect as regards continuity?
Virg
> For everybody's talk of "nightmarish situations", I have yet to hear a single actual nightmarish situation that is actually a result of a database like this.
This lacks validity because until now, such a database hasn't really existed, so saying that there are no real-world cases is much like the folks in 1940 saying nuclear weapons aren't dangerous because there wasn't a single actual situation where they were dangerous. The ramifications of how such a tool benefits its users and those whose information is stored must be weighed against the possibility of abuse of that central repository, and how much worse that abuse can make other situations. Others here have referred to the Nazi abuse of Dutch citizenship records to target Jews, and in that particular real world case more Jews died because their religion was stored in a "database" than would have if it wasn't. I ask you to consider what possible benefit that piece of information provided, given that it became quite a liability in the wrong hands.
> It works for your situations too.
This is a morass of straw men, and I suspect you know it. Just to take the first one, voting has a significant, proven and obvious benefit to a huge percentage of the population, so you'd need to demonstrate one Hell of a bad side-effect to overrule that. In the case of this benefit, you must consider whether protecting the few that this step will protect warrants such a wholesale risk to the population in general. Unifying a large number of databases to prevent a few cases from falling through the cracks sounds like a great idea, but I present that they haven't proven on a large scale that it'll work as well as any other step they may consider, and that it adds a great deal of externality to the mix.
> I'm sorry, but your argument seems to boil down to "the government should be bureaucratic because if it operated efficiently, if it turned evil, it would be evil in an efficient manner".
I disagree. This argument boils down to "will forcing everyone in the country to give up some portion of their privacy be worth the benefit that the unifying of databases will give?" When you take away the "think of the children" mentality, you're left with a lot of centralized information and only the Dutch government's word that it'll never be abused. If you think it's about the children, then perhaps you'd like to reconcile how "gradle to grave" fits with protecting only children, except in cases where someone dies before age 18. How does allowing this to work throughout a person's life protect them after they leave mom and dad? Consider this: thirty years ago, it was simply inconceivable for someone to use a Social Security number to steal another person's credit identity. Now, it's so commonplace that experts advise not using it for an ID number. Add to that that Social Security was put forward with the promise that it wouldn't become an ID, but would only to be used for Social Security. Now, it's against the law not to put your SSN on your income tax forms, and DMVs and state colleges use them for driver license and student ID numbers, respectively. Now, reconcile this with your thought that it's just a matter of efficiency. Can you promise the people subject to this database that the unifying of information won't expose them to risks that we don't even know about yet? Can anyone? If you can't, then you have little ground to say that those espousing the risks are just extremists.
Virg
The easiest example for what the space program got us is right in front of your face, and you even mentioned it, but far too many people don't think about how deep an impact it really had. Rockets and moon landers and orbiters (oh my!) needed computing power, and vacuum tube-based computers were too heavy and too sensitive to do the job, so lots of work was put into building solid state computing devices. This brought on the computer age, and even the grandest Luddite would have a hard time imagining something with a bigger influence on the world today than microcomputers.
Virg