Except for the fact that it is cheaper for insurance companies to cover contraceptives than for them to cover all the additional pregnancies that occur when they don't offer contraceptive coverage. In other words, a price increase for other items due to contraceptive coverage is exactly what won't happen.
What the hell is it with this BS where people keep talking about Fluke being 30 years old as though that disqualifies her from speaking about herself as a student? I'm 30 and I'm a grad student -- big deal. Every female law student is a woman. There a few if any teenage girls in law school -- you have to have a bachelors before you can even apply, after all. Also, so what if she's rich? She wasn't testifying only about herself -- she was acting as an advocate for those who are not so well off. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for a law student to do, since that is often a part of what lawyers do.
If people want to counter the substance of Fluke's argument, then they should do so. Simply claiming she's a grown woman and acting like that renders her incapable of also being a student is a red herring and and very stupid one at that. Not to mention it insultingly implies that all female students are just little girls.
The obvious corollary is that researchers aren't smart enough to know their own limitations
Except for the fact that some of the same research showing incompetent people overestimate their abilities also shows that very high performing people *underestimate* their abilities. (See the paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It" by Kruger and Dunning)
Whoa, chill out there, I wasn't attacking you -- I was just wondering about the apparent contradictions between theistic evolution and Christianity (as the GP was talking about Christianity), and I am genuinely curious about how people who believe in theistic evolution reconcile it with the Bible. My hunch, at least from reading a bit about it online after posting my comment, is that in the more liberal view the references to sin causing death are apparently supposed to be referring simply to spiritual death. I assumed since you brought up theistic evolution as a solution to the creationism vs evolution problem, you (or someone else) may have been interested in defending it.
Okay, let's assume God used evolution to create humans (and other life). Can you explain why an all-powerful, all-good, all-loving being chose a method of creation that necessitates suffering and death for all organisms? Also, unless I'm misremembering, suffering and death, in the Christian worldview, are supposed to be due to the fall of man. However, if God used evolution to create man, how did suffering and death not begin until after man existed?
There is good reason why evangelicals are so freaked out by evolution, and I am curious how Catholics and liberal denominations manage to accept it.
Your analogy to the broken window fallacy isn't valid for taxing and spending in general, and I'm not sure it is even applicable to the welfare question (what exactly gets destroyed the way the window does when it comes to welfare?). Yes, business owners are forced to distribute some of their profit to others due to taxes, but it isn't the same sort of futile cycle when the spending isn't being spurred by destruction.
As for the idea that spending tax money on the economy necessarily detracts from it, the interstate highway system was built via taxing and spending. Did it only "appear" to make the economy stronger? Or would the economy have actually grown more if only state and county roads existed? Oh, wait, it turns out state and county roads are built by taxing and spending, too? Clearly, the optimal solution for the economy is for private businesses to simply build roads as they need them -- if someone else wants to use a road, you can just pay a toll to the company that owns it. Sure, a toll in this case is money you pay to an outside entity, but at least you don't *have to* pay it like taxes. Oh, wait, you want to leave your house and get food? I guess you *will* have to pay that toll, unless you want to starve; either that or build your own road to the grocery store. Or just go gather your food in the woods.
Yes, spending is too high in some areas, but your claim that in general taxing and spending only create the "appearance" of growth while actually detracting from the economy? That idea is ridiculous on its face if you bother to pay the slightest bit of attention to reality. Large parts of modern civilization only exist because of taxing and spending. Certainly there are sectors of the economy where government spending may be wasteful, but you clearly can't treat that like a general principle -- you have to deal with it on case by case basis.
Perhaps my post placed too much emphasis on our control. The problem is not so much that we can guide evolution in the E. Coli / ampicillin example, but that we always observe the same outcome for that experiment. My question is, if God guides evolution, why does he only do it when we aren't setting up experiments to see what happens under a given set of circumstances? That sort of selectivity seems rather deceptive. It is the same as the problem with miracles mysteriously ceasing as soon as humans learned how to do science -- God supposedly can do miracles, but anytime we are watching in a rigorous way, he lets things proceed in an orderly fashion, as though he isn't there.
The appeal of theistic evolution is that it supposedly doesn't require God to be deceptive in the face of scientific evidence the way normal creationism does. My point is that theistic evolution doesn't actually seem to get around the deception problem.
Now, it is certainly possible that an omnipotent being *could* manipulate the universe only when we aren't looking. That might be deceptive, but if an omnipotent being wanted to be deceptive that wouldn't, by itself, bother me. What I find troubling is when the same being supposedly demands we believe in it and intends to treat us differently based on whether or not we do. I figure that is the viewpoint of god that is typically held by theistic evolutionists, because if evolution is capable of producing complex life on its own, why else feel the extra supernatural layer is required?
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force.
I've never found that position to be compatible with the evidence, either. Here is why: If God is the driving force behind evolution, then why can humans control evolution in the laboratory? Anyone who has had a college genetics course has probably done the experiment where you force E. Coli to develop ampicillin resistance, for example. If an E. Coli culture is placed under a UV light for a limited amount of time, samples from the UV-exposed culture will be found to have the ability to grow on ampicillin-amended media, while samples from a control culture will not (or, at least, there will be fewer colonies arising from the control -- the function of the UV light is to speed mutations; they will occur at lower rate naturally).
The point is, simply placing mutating bacteria in a given environment can lead to it adapting to that environment. If a UV photon strikes the bacteria's DNA in the right spot to activate the ampicillin-resistance gene (and the mutation goes un-repaired), it becomes ampicillin resistant; otherwise, it doesn't. The mutations are random when a single bacterium is considered, but the bulk result is always the same. What role is there for God in that? Was God controlling our choice to attempt to grow the bacteria on ampicillin amended media? Does God always step in and force the ampicllin-resistance mutation to occur just to trick us into thinking it was natural (or is Satan doing that part)?
That example is a microcosm of how all evolution occurs -- for God to be involved he would have to be either directly controlling the environment or directly controlling the mutations. All evidence that I know of appears to show he isn't guiding the mutations (unless he is trying to trick us), so that leaves the environment. In that case, the "deity drives evolution" argument would either have to be limited to events where humans are not involved or God would have to usurp our free will.
God controlling the environment to achieve a certain evolutionary end while still being consistent with current evidence seems to be problematic, too (even when humans aren't involved). God could have set the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that life would arise in environments that would push it toward the development of humans, but that would either require a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics or God personally manipulating random quantum processes in a deceptive manner, just like with the ampicillin-resistance mutations mentioned above. That again seems improbable, for the same reason as with the mutations -- quantum processes are random in isolation, but give consistent results when considered in bulk.
I've wondered about this ever since I had my college genetics lab -- if anyone can knock down this argument I'd be interested in hearing it.
To be fair, although Ron Paul certainly is a bit too extreme on some of his positions (wildly swinging a machete at cabinet departments, for example), he is also supported because some people realize that when Orwell wrote the phrase "WAR IS PEACE", he didn't intend it to become a guiding principle in western democracies. Have you seen the way every other Republican candidate talks about Iran!? Also, the drug war, PATRIOT act, and corporatism kind of suck a lot, too, and every other Republican candidate, along with Obama, seems to think that stuff is just dandy.
Point me to someone I can vote for who is centrist or center-left on economics and both a civil libertarian and against our current bully-everyone foreign policy (Kucinich, maybe? Well, if he was running) and I would happily support them. Right now we're still stuck with choosing the least of various evils, though, and at this point that looks a lot like Paul to me.
Keep in mind that most of Paul's wilder ideas (gold standard, defunding cabinet departments left and right) would require congressional approval. Veto all he wants, I doubt he'll ever get enough support to do those things. In the meantime the President has a lot more power over civil liberties issues and a *ton* of power over foreign policy (power which is seemingly increasing with each administration at this point).
That actually parallells drug abusers, including alcoholics I know. What I don't understand is, if you weren't thinking rationally, how did the law keep you from using it? Simply the luck of it not being available? Since you were a teenager it wouldn't have been any more available since it would still be illegal for minors, and actually could be less available; teenagers tell me it's easier for them to get pot than it is to get beer.
In my case the law kept me from using it in two ways: First, I grew up in a town of ~2500 people in rural Kansas. Heroin is very rare there -- I actually can't recall any news about anyone ever getting busted for possessing/selling/trafficking heroin while I was living there. Meth and weed were the only street drugs that seemed common. Meth is pretty psychologically addictive, too, but I never saw the appeal of stimulants as an escape from depression.
Second, my depression was rooted in social anxiety, so I was pretty socially isolated. Even for the drugs that are present, rural areas never seem to have the sort of open, dealer-standing-on-a-corner, sort of drug selling that occurs in large cities, so a person needs a certain level of social adeptness to find illegal drugs in those places (which at my worst times I lacked).
You raise a good point, though -- living in a place where few drugs were available was a matter of luck. Things may well have worked out differently if I lived in a large city, and if I was approaching this from the viewpoint of an inner-city dweller, I'd likely completely agree with you. If drugs like heroin are easily available anyway then they should be legal both to eliminate the black market related violence and to protect the health of users. I think I've read at some point the idea that legalizing hard drugs would be a tradeoff: It would improve conditions in inner cities, but cause new problems in the suburbs and small towns. That strikes me as likely. Optimally I think it would be best if drugs like heroin were regulated in a way that made them more difficult to get than alcohol but still allowed for a legitimate supply. The nature of the supply-demand dynamic for such drugs may make that unrealistic, though, and if that is the case I would be forced to agree with you and favor treating them pretty much just like alcohol. I'd just like to see some sort of middle-ground approach tried before we take that step.
The "increased useage" is an unwarranted assumption and is likely incorrect; alcohol use rose during prohibition, but not after alcohol was legalized. Is the law all that's keeping you from shooting heroin? Not me, the effects of heroin itself does, and the law doesn't stop me or anyone else from smoking pot. I know a lot of people who don't smoke it because they just don't like the effects, but I have yet to hear anyone say "you know, if they legalized it I'd try it."
If you have a citation for that statistic of alcohol use rising during prohibition, would you mind adding it to wikipedia? Everything in the article there about that topic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_during_and_after_prohibition ) states that alcohol use fell during prohibition, although by how much appears uncertain.
Also, let me put an end to you never hearing someone say they would try heroin if it was legal. I wouldn't now, but I suffered from some pretty serious depression when I was in my late teens and early twenties and I may well have done so then. At that time I couldn't see any way for life to ever improve, so rational thought about the consequences wouldn't have kept me from it. The future was going to be awful (or short) anyway, so why not try to get whatever short term comfort is available? Although that is only my own anecdotal experience, I don't think that is an uncommon thought pattern for depressed people. At any rate, I'm certainly glad I didn't try it, because life did get better, and the chances of that happening probably would have been much lower had I had access to heroin.
I knew a woman who was an alcoholic crackhead. Her problems with alcohol were far worse.
Just as an aside, I learned something interesting in the last couple of weeks: combining alcohol and cocaine is complicated for reasons beyond the simple combination of the two drugs' effects. When a person takes both of those at the same time, his or her liver takes some of each and creates an entirely new third drug, Cocaethylene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaethylene).
Having many different hurricane models that don't always agree with each other is actually quite useful -- the degree of agreement across models can often be used as a measure of uncertainty in the forecast. If all of the models show a storm plowing into New Orleans as a Cat 5 in three days, it is probably time to start evacuating. If one of the models says that, but the rest of them show it fizzling out into a tropical depression, chances are it won't warrant evacuations, and calling for them will most likely have a very large and unnecessary negative impact on the local economy.
If you think we should cut funding for hurricane forecast R&D, take a look at the right side of the millions section in XKCD's great money chart: http://xkcd.com/980/huge/
For those who don't want to hunt for that, we've spent $440 million on improving hurricane forecasts since 1989, or about $20 million per year on average. The estimated economic savings from limiting evacuations due to Hurricane Irene this year (one storm, during one year) is $700 million. Seems pretty cost-effective to me.
Thunderstorms can be quite tricky to forecast since their development can be very sensitive to small details in things like the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere. Often times during the summer in the Midwest, the difference between sunny skies (or at least just a bunch of puffy clouds) and severe thunderstorms can be only a degree or two in the temperature, either at the surface or in the low- to mid-levels of the atmosphere. Thus, if our observations of temperature have a small error, or if a small amount of error exists in a model forecast, it may be quite difficult to predict whether storms will occur or not. Similar sensitivities exist when it comes to moisture in the low-levels of the atmosphere.
Tornadoes are even trickier, since in their case we are still trying to figure out exactly what all to look for in a storm and the storm's environment that determines if it will produce a tornado or not. We know a lot more about that than we used to, but we are still a way from being able to say with much certainty whether any specific storm will produce a tornado, especially with more than a short lead-time (at least in the case of storms occurring in environments favorable for tornadoes -- there are plenty storms which we can pretty certainly say will *not* produce a tornado). Even if we figure out all the details of what causes tornadoes to occur and thus what to look for, predicting them will likely still, in many cases, be subject to the sort of sensitivity to small scale details mentioned above.
The mechanisms that drive large-scale precipitation, like often occurs during Midwest winters, are less sensitive to small details, which allows it to be predicted with more certainty much further in advance.
The main reason forecasts are poorer near the Pacific coast is that we have few observations available over the ocean compared to what we have over land. Since there is predominately westerly flow in the mid-latitudes, storm systems are poorly sampled when they arrive at the west coast, but we can observe them thoroughly before they reach the Midwest. A lot of research is currently being done to develop ways to use current and future satellite observations in forecast models, partly for the purpose of making up for the shortage of obs over the oceans.
Sorry it took me so long to get around to writing this -- I decided it had been a bit too long since I've really studied the "legalize hard drugs" question. After some looking, the best research I know of on the topic is Some of David Nutt's work in the UK ( http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/abstract and also Nutt et al's 2007 paper cited in that one). It agrees with our opinions that alcohol is some pretty bad stuff, but unfortunately it can't differentiate between effects caused by the drugs themselves versus effects caused by their legality/illegality -- a ranking based purely on pharmacological considerations may well come out differently. I suppose no study will be able to truly compare (accounting for both pharmacological and social effects) alcohol to things like crack and heroin until some place just legalizes everything.
Given what we currently know, I just think outright legalization (i.e., regulating them like alcohol) of hard drugs would be much more of a gamble than legalizing soft drugs. Certainly there are a ton of problems caused by their prohibition, but the problems that may occur from things like heroin and crack due to increased usage after legalization are a big unknown. For example, although alcohol is very physically addictive, it isn't nearly as psychologically reinforcing as heroin and crack, and that could cause some serious problems that don't occur with alcohol. I think the harms of soft drugs are clearly limited enough, though, that the effects of legalization aren't so uncertain in their case.
I agree, though, that are current system is broken and is doing a lot of harm, often to people who have nothing to do with drugs, as made clear by the current situation in Mexico. I think we should clearly treat hard drug use and addiction more as a health problem than a crime problem. Since most of the prohibition-related harms come from the black market, the big question there is whether or not there is any way to legitimize the supply of such drugs without completely legalizing them. I believe some European countries have experimented with that but I haven't had time yet to explore the effectiveness of those experiments. I'm not sure if it is possible for that to work from a supply and demand standpoint, but if it is possible, I'd be all for it. The consequences of full legalization of hard drugs are still just too blurry for me to strongly support it at this time, though. If we try some other approaches first and the black market violence remains, it may eventually appear to be the best option, but I think we should try a more moderate approach first.
Well, if that is the case, then the judge was just plain wrong, because the Fat consoles all had the feature, and the Slim wasn't released until September 1, 2009. The The 3.21 firmware was released April 1, 2010. The PS3 has a one year warranty from the date of purchase, so unless there was a 5 month period where zero new PS3s were sold, it can't possibly be true that all OtherOS-capable consoles were beyond their warranty period when the feature was removed.
Oops, didn't mean to post this anonymously before.
If the PS3 with pre-3.21 firmware continues to run every game that it ran at the time you bought it, it passes the legal test
Wait a minute. Maybe I'm misunderstanding that sentence, but it appears you are saying Sony legally can arbitrarily disable the ability for the PS3 to play new games at any time. That they can sell you a PS3 on Monday, then on Tuesday say "if you want to play games released today or later, you need to buy another PS3". I think people generally buy game consoles with the expectation that they will be able to play every game released for that console, whether it is released before or after they bought the console. If new PS3 games are incompatible with old PS3s, you may as well just buy a computer, because the main advantage of a console is gone. If what you claim is the legal test actually is the legal test, it would be stupid for anyone to buy a console when it is launched, since typically not very many games are available yet at that time.
the plaintiffs contended that Sony forced them into "...the “Hobson’s choice” of either permitting the Other OS feature to be disabled or forgoing their access to the PSN and any other benefits available through installing Firmware Update 3.21." (emphasis mine)
The plaintiffs probably should have been more specific about the "other benefits" -- it was a little stupid of them only to mention PSN explicitly -- but the judge's ruling seems to have ignored an important part of that sentence.
The Photoshop analogy is flawed -- computer programs clearly state what versions of an operating system they are intended to work with. AFAIK, PS3 games simply say they work with PS3s. That simplicity is half the point of a game console. Also, you can dual-boot different versions of OSX, so you don't actually lose anything but some convenience in the situation you are describing.
There is more to the PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3) computer entertainment system than you may have assumed. In addition to playing games, watching movies, listening to music, and viewing photos, you can use the PS3 system to run the Linux operating system.
By installing the Linux operating system, you can use the PS3 system not only as an entry-level personal computer with hundreds of familiar applications for home and office use, but also as a complete development environment for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.).
Looks a lot like marketing to me, and the disclaimer at the top wasn't present before OtherOS was removed.
The fact that a lot of users didn't know about it is irrelevant. By that logic any niche feature of any product stands to be disabled at any time. People generally don't pay much attention to features of products they aren't interested in. Advertising mostly works when the people who see the ads are in the market for the features being advertised. I'd bet that a pretty large proportion of PS3 owners don't even know what linux is in the first place, and thus would ignore or forget any marketing for OtherOS.
I agree, if alcohol was mixed in with the currently illegal drugs it would almost surely be considered a hard drug, and the physical dependence that it causes is among the worst of any drug. The acute effects of alcohol intoxication can also be among the worst of any drug. I make those points to people on a fairly regular basis myself. I didn't mean to imply that I think it is benign -- just that the regulatory scheme we have in place for it seems like a good model to use, at least as a starting point, when figuring out how to regulate soft drugs. It is entirely possible that things like marijuana don't even need to be controlled as tightly as alcohol, but it is hard enough to convince people that pot should be legal in the first place -- people are even less supportive of legalization if you propose to treat it like it is more benign than alcohol, evidence be damned.
My arguments for legalizing marijuana used to hinge mostly on its lack of danger along with civil liberties issues and tax money issues, but more and more I would also like to see it legalized because I think people will substitute it for alcohol and in doing so make society safer for everyone. The recent study that came out showing reduced traffic deaths in medical marijuana states strongly supports that idea.
Note that when methamphetamine is produced by legitimate companies (it happens -- the brand name is Desoxyn), the labs never explode. Also, if one did, it probably wouldn't be in the middle of a residential area. Exploding meth labs that kill bystanders are a consequence of meth being produced by incompetent amateur chemists with shoddy equipment, which is a consequence of it being illegal.
Not that I'm arguing that meth be legalized, though. Soft drugs should be treated like alcohol, plain and simple -- I've never seen a good argument otherwise. Hard drugs are a more difficult problem, and I'm not sure what to do about them. The current system is obviously a failure, though.
I agree with you -- like I said, people staying home is *part* of the reason, not the whole reason. The studies I've seen on driving while stoned say it is riskier than driving sober, but not nearly as risky as driving with a 0.08% BAC, never mind higher. If I remember right, the risk is similar to talking on a cell phone or having around a 0.04% BAC, although I'm sure more research needs to be done on the topic. I'm not big on the idea of making it legal for people to drive stoned, but even if we did I seriously doubt it would cause the amount of trouble drunken driving causes.
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Except for the fact that it is cheaper for insurance companies to cover contraceptives than for them to cover all the additional pregnancies that occur when they don't offer contraceptive coverage. In other words, a price increase for other items due to contraceptive coverage is exactly what won't happen.
What the hell is it with this BS where people keep talking about Fluke being 30 years old as though that disqualifies her from speaking about herself as a student? I'm 30 and I'm a grad student -- big deal. Every female law student is a woman. There a few if any teenage girls in law school -- you have to have a bachelors before you can even apply, after all. Also, so what if she's rich? She wasn't testifying only about herself -- she was acting as an advocate for those who are not so well off. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for a law student to do, since that is often a part of what lawyers do.
If people want to counter the substance of Fluke's argument, then they should do so. Simply claiming she's a grown woman and acting like that renders her incapable of also being a student is a red herring and and very stupid one at that. Not to mention it insultingly implies that all female students are just little girls.
The obvious corollary is that researchers aren't smart enough to know their own limitations
Except for the fact that some of the same research showing incompetent people overestimate their abilities also shows that very high performing people *underestimate* their abilities. (See the paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It" by Kruger and Dunning)
Whoa, chill out there, I wasn't attacking you -- I was just wondering about the apparent contradictions between theistic evolution and Christianity (as the GP was talking about Christianity), and I am genuinely curious about how people who believe in theistic evolution reconcile it with the Bible. My hunch, at least from reading a bit about it online after posting my comment, is that in the more liberal view the references to sin causing death are apparently supposed to be referring simply to spiritual death. I assumed since you brought up theistic evolution as a solution to the creationism vs evolution problem, you (or someone else) may have been interested in defending it.
Okay, let's assume God used evolution to create humans (and other life). Can you explain why an all-powerful, all-good, all-loving being chose a method of creation that necessitates suffering and death for all organisms? Also, unless I'm misremembering, suffering and death, in the Christian worldview, are supposed to be due to the fall of man. However, if God used evolution to create man, how did suffering and death not begin until after man existed?
There is good reason why evangelicals are so freaked out by evolution, and I am curious how Catholics and liberal denominations manage to accept it.
Your analogy to the broken window fallacy isn't valid for taxing and spending in general, and I'm not sure it is even applicable to the welfare question (what exactly gets destroyed the way the window does when it comes to welfare?). Yes, business owners are forced to distribute some of their profit to others due to taxes, but it isn't the same sort of futile cycle when the spending isn't being spurred by destruction.
As for the idea that spending tax money on the economy necessarily detracts from it, the interstate highway system was built via taxing and spending. Did it only "appear" to make the economy stronger? Or would the economy have actually grown more if only state and county roads existed? Oh, wait, it turns out state and county roads are built by taxing and spending, too? Clearly, the optimal solution for the economy is for private businesses to simply build roads as they need them -- if someone else wants to use a road, you can just pay a toll to the company that owns it. Sure, a toll in this case is money you pay to an outside entity, but at least you don't *have to* pay it like taxes. Oh, wait, you want to leave your house and get food? I guess you *will* have to pay that toll, unless you want to starve; either that or build your own road to the grocery store. Or just go gather your food in the woods.
Yes, spending is too high in some areas, but your claim that in general taxing and spending only create the "appearance" of growth while actually detracting from the economy? That idea is ridiculous on its face if you bother to pay the slightest bit of attention to reality. Large parts of modern civilization only exist because of taxing and spending. Certainly there are sectors of the economy where government spending may be wasteful, but you clearly can't treat that like a general principle -- you have to deal with it on case by case basis.
Since you don't seem to be aware, National Guard != Police
Perhaps my post placed too much emphasis on our control. The problem is not so much that we can guide evolution in the E. Coli / ampicillin example, but that we always observe the same outcome for that experiment. My question is, if God guides evolution, why does he only do it when we aren't setting up experiments to see what happens under a given set of circumstances? That sort of selectivity seems rather deceptive. It is the same as the problem with miracles mysteriously ceasing as soon as humans learned how to do science -- God supposedly can do miracles, but anytime we are watching in a rigorous way, he lets things proceed in an orderly fashion, as though he isn't there.
The appeal of theistic evolution is that it supposedly doesn't require God to be deceptive in the face of scientific evidence the way normal creationism does. My point is that theistic evolution doesn't actually seem to get around the deception problem.
Now, it is certainly possible that an omnipotent being *could* manipulate the universe only when we aren't looking. That might be deceptive, but if an omnipotent being wanted to be deceptive that wouldn't, by itself, bother me. What I find troubling is when the same being supposedly demands we believe in it and intends to treat us differently based on whether or not we do. I figure that is the viewpoint of god that is typically held by theistic evolutionists, because if evolution is capable of producing complex life on its own, why else feel the extra supernatural layer is required?
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force.
I've never found that position to be compatible with the evidence, either. Here is why: If God is the driving force behind evolution, then why can humans control evolution in the laboratory? Anyone who has had a college genetics course has probably done the experiment where you force E. Coli to develop ampicillin resistance, for example. If an E. Coli culture is placed under a UV light for a limited amount of time, samples from the UV-exposed culture will be found to have the ability to grow on ampicillin-amended media, while samples from a control culture will not (or, at least, there will be fewer colonies arising from the control -- the function of the UV light is to speed mutations; they will occur at lower rate naturally).
The point is, simply placing mutating bacteria in a given environment can lead to it adapting to that environment. If a UV photon strikes the bacteria's DNA in the right spot to activate the ampicillin-resistance gene (and the mutation goes un-repaired), it becomes ampicillin resistant; otherwise, it doesn't. The mutations are random when a single bacterium is considered, but the bulk result is always the same. What role is there for God in that? Was God controlling our choice to attempt to grow the bacteria on ampicillin amended media? Does God always step in and force the ampicllin-resistance mutation to occur just to trick us into thinking it was natural (or is Satan doing that part)?
That example is a microcosm of how all evolution occurs -- for God to be involved he would have to be either directly controlling the environment or directly controlling the mutations. All evidence that I know of appears to show he isn't guiding the mutations (unless he is trying to trick us), so that leaves the environment. In that case, the "deity drives evolution" argument would either have to be limited to events where humans are not involved or God would have to usurp our free will.
God controlling the environment to achieve a certain evolutionary end while still being consistent with current evidence seems to be problematic, too (even when humans aren't involved). God could have set the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that life would arise in environments that would push it toward the development of humans, but that would either require a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics or God personally manipulating random quantum processes in a deceptive manner, just like with the ampicillin-resistance mutations mentioned above. That again seems improbable, for the same reason as with the mutations -- quantum processes are random in isolation, but give consistent results when considered in bulk.
I've wondered about this ever since I had my college genetics lab -- if anyone can knock down this argument I'd be interested in hearing it.
To be fair, although Ron Paul certainly is a bit too extreme on some of his positions (wildly swinging a machete at cabinet departments, for example), he is also supported because some people realize that when Orwell wrote the phrase "WAR IS PEACE", he didn't intend it to become a guiding principle in western democracies. Have you seen the way every other Republican candidate talks about Iran!? Also, the drug war, PATRIOT act, and corporatism kind of suck a lot, too, and every other Republican candidate, along with Obama, seems to think that stuff is just dandy.
Point me to someone I can vote for who is centrist or center-left on economics and both a civil libertarian and against our current bully-everyone foreign policy (Kucinich, maybe? Well, if he was running) and I would happily support them. Right now we're still stuck with choosing the least of various evils, though, and at this point that looks a lot like Paul to me.
Keep in mind that most of Paul's wilder ideas (gold standard, defunding cabinet departments left and right) would require congressional approval. Veto all he wants, I doubt he'll ever get enough support to do those things. In the meantime the President has a lot more power over civil liberties issues and a *ton* of power over foreign policy (power which is seemingly increasing with each administration at this point).
That actually parallells drug abusers, including alcoholics I know. What I don't understand is, if you weren't thinking rationally, how did the law keep you from using it? Simply the luck of it not being available? Since you were a teenager it wouldn't have been any more available since it would still be illegal for minors, and actually could be less available; teenagers tell me it's easier for them to get pot than it is to get beer.
In my case the law kept me from using it in two ways: First, I grew up in a town of ~2500 people in rural Kansas. Heroin is very rare there -- I actually can't recall any news about anyone ever getting busted for possessing/selling/trafficking heroin while I was living there. Meth and weed were the only street drugs that seemed common. Meth is pretty psychologically addictive, too, but I never saw the appeal of stimulants as an escape from depression. .
Second, my depression was rooted in social anxiety, so I was pretty socially isolated. Even for the drugs that are present, rural areas never seem to have the sort of open, dealer-standing-on-a-corner, sort of drug selling that occurs in large cities, so a person needs a certain level of social adeptness to find illegal drugs in those places (which at my worst times I lacked)
You raise a good point, though -- living in a place where few drugs were available was a matter of luck. Things may well have worked out differently if I lived in a large city, and if I was approaching this from the viewpoint of an inner-city dweller, I'd likely completely agree with you. If drugs like heroin are easily available anyway then they should be legal both to eliminate the black market related violence and to protect the health of users. I think I've read at some point the idea that legalizing hard drugs would be a tradeoff: It would improve conditions in inner cities, but cause new problems in the suburbs and small towns. That strikes me as likely. Optimally I think it would be best if drugs like heroin were regulated in a way that made them more difficult to get than alcohol but still allowed for a legitimate supply. The nature of the supply-demand dynamic for such drugs may make that unrealistic, though, and if that is the case I would be forced to agree with you and favor treating them pretty much just like alcohol. I'd just like to see some sort of middle-ground approach tried before we take that step.
The "increased useage" is an unwarranted assumption and is likely incorrect; alcohol use rose during prohibition, but not after alcohol was legalized. Is the law all that's keeping you from shooting heroin? Not me, the effects of heroin itself does, and the law doesn't stop me or anyone else from smoking pot. I know a lot of people who don't smoke it because they just don't like the effects, but I have yet to hear anyone say "you know, if they legalized it I'd try it."
If you have a citation for that statistic of alcohol use rising during prohibition, would you mind adding it to wikipedia? Everything in the article there about that topic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_during_and_after_prohibition ) states that alcohol use fell during prohibition, although by how much appears uncertain.
Also, let me put an end to you never hearing someone say they would try heroin if it was legal. I wouldn't now, but I suffered from some pretty serious depression when I was in my late teens and early twenties and I may well have done so then. At that time I couldn't see any way for life to ever improve, so rational thought about the consequences wouldn't have kept me from it. The future was going to be awful (or short) anyway, so why not try to get whatever short term comfort is available? Although that is only my own anecdotal experience, I don't think that is an uncommon thought pattern for depressed people. At any rate, I'm certainly glad I didn't try it, because life did get better, and the chances of that happening probably would have been much lower had I had access to heroin.
I knew a woman who was an alcoholic crackhead. Her problems with alcohol were far worse.
Just as an aside, I learned something interesting in the last couple of weeks: combining alcohol and cocaine is complicated for reasons beyond the simple combination of the two drugs' effects. When a person takes both of those at the same time, his or her liver takes some of each and creates an entirely new third drug, Cocaethylene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaethylene).
Having many different hurricane models that don't always agree with each other is actually quite useful -- the degree of agreement across models can often be used as a measure of uncertainty in the forecast. If all of the models show a storm plowing into New Orleans as a Cat 5 in three days, it is probably time to start evacuating. If one of the models says that, but the rest of them show it fizzling out into a tropical depression, chances are it won't warrant evacuations, and calling for them will most likely have a very large and unnecessary negative impact on the local economy.
If you think we should cut funding for hurricane forecast R&D, take a look at the right side of the millions section in XKCD's great money chart: http://xkcd.com/980/huge/
For those who don't want to hunt for that, we've spent $440 million on improving hurricane forecasts since 1989, or about $20 million per year on average. The estimated economic savings from limiting evacuations due to Hurricane Irene this year (one storm, during one year) is $700 million. Seems pretty cost-effective to me.
Thunderstorms can be quite tricky to forecast since their development can be very sensitive to small details in things like the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere. Often times during the summer in the Midwest, the difference between sunny skies (or at least just a bunch of puffy clouds) and severe thunderstorms can be only a degree or two in the temperature, either at the surface or in the low- to mid-levels of the atmosphere. Thus, if our observations of temperature have a small error, or if a small amount of error exists in a model forecast, it may be quite difficult to predict whether storms will occur or not. Similar sensitivities exist when it comes to moisture in the low-levels of the atmosphere.
Tornadoes are even trickier, since in their case we are still trying to figure out exactly what all to look for in a storm and the storm's environment that determines if it will produce a tornado or not. We know a lot more about that than we used to, but we are still a way from being able to say with much certainty whether any specific storm will produce a tornado, especially with more than a short lead-time (at least in the case of storms occurring in environments favorable for tornadoes -- there are plenty storms which we can pretty certainly say will *not* produce a tornado). Even if we figure out all the details of what causes tornadoes to occur and thus what to look for, predicting them will likely still, in many cases, be subject to the sort of sensitivity to small scale details mentioned above.
The mechanisms that drive large-scale precipitation, like often occurs during Midwest winters, are less sensitive to small details, which allows it to be predicted with more certainty much further in advance.
The main reason forecasts are poorer near the Pacific coast is that we have few observations available over the ocean compared to what we have over land. Since there is predominately westerly flow in the mid-latitudes, storm systems are poorly sampled when they arrive at the west coast, but we can observe them thoroughly before they reach the Midwest. A lot of research is currently being done to develop ways to use current and future satellite observations in forecast models, partly for the purpose of making up for the shortage of obs over the oceans.
Sorry it took me so long to get around to writing this -- I decided it had been a bit too long since I've really studied the "legalize hard drugs" question. After some looking, the best research I know of on the topic is Some of David Nutt's work in the UK ( http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/abstract and also Nutt et al's 2007 paper cited in that one). It agrees with our opinions that alcohol is some pretty bad stuff, but unfortunately it can't differentiate between effects caused by the drugs themselves versus effects caused by their legality/illegality -- a ranking based purely on pharmacological considerations may well come out differently. I suppose no study will be able to truly compare (accounting for both pharmacological and social effects) alcohol to things like crack and heroin until some place just legalizes everything.
Given what we currently know, I just think outright legalization (i.e., regulating them like alcohol) of hard drugs would be much more of a gamble than legalizing soft drugs. Certainly there are a ton of problems caused by their prohibition, but the problems that may occur from things like heroin and crack due to increased usage after legalization are a big unknown. For example, although alcohol is very physically addictive, it isn't nearly as psychologically reinforcing as heroin and crack, and that could cause some serious problems that don't occur with alcohol. I think the harms of soft drugs are clearly limited enough, though, that the effects of legalization aren't so uncertain in their case.
I agree, though, that are current system is broken and is doing a lot of harm, often to people who have nothing to do with drugs, as made clear by the current situation in Mexico. I think we should clearly treat hard drug use and addiction more as a health problem than a crime problem. Since most of the prohibition-related harms come from the black market, the big question there is whether or not there is any way to legitimize the supply of such drugs without completely legalizing them. I believe some European countries have experimented with that but I haven't had time yet to explore the effectiveness of those experiments. I'm not sure if it is possible for that to work from a supply and demand standpoint, but if it is possible, I'd be all for it. The consequences of full legalization of hard drugs are still just too blurry for me to strongly support it at this time, though. If we try some other approaches first and the black market violence remains, it may eventually appear to be the best option, but I think we should try a more moderate approach first.
Well, if that is the case, then the judge was just plain wrong, because the Fat consoles all had the feature, and the Slim wasn't released until September 1, 2009. The The 3.21 firmware was released April 1, 2010. The PS3 has a one year warranty from the date of purchase, so unless there was a 5 month period where zero new PS3s were sold, it can't possibly be true that all OtherOS-capable consoles were beyond their warranty period when the feature was removed.
If the PS3 with pre-3.21 firmware continues to run every game that it ran at the time you bought it, it passes the legal test
Wait a minute. Maybe I'm misunderstanding that sentence, but it appears you are saying Sony legally can arbitrarily disable the ability for the PS3 to play new games at any time. That they can sell you a PS3 on Monday, then on Tuesday say "if you want to play games released today or later, you need to buy another PS3". I think people generally buy game consoles with the expectation that they will be able to play every game released for that console, whether it is released before or after they bought the console. If new PS3 games are incompatible with old PS3s, you may as well just buy a computer, because the main advantage of a console is gone. If what you claim is the legal test actually is the legal test, it would be stupid for anyone to buy a console when it is launched, since typically not very many games are available yet at that time.
the plaintiffs contended that Sony forced them into "...the “Hobson’s choice” of either permitting the Other OS feature to be disabled or forgoing their access to the PSN and any other benefits available through installing Firmware Update 3.21." (emphasis mine)
The plaintiffs probably should have been more specific about the "other benefits" -- it was a little stupid of them only to mention PSN explicitly -- but the judge's ruling seems to have ignored an important part of that sentence.
The Photoshop analogy is flawed -- computer programs clearly state what versions of an operating system they are intended to work with. AFAIK, PS3 games simply say they work with PS3s. That simplicity is half the point of a game console. Also, you can dual-boot different versions of OSX, so you don't actually lose anything but some convenience in the situation you are describing.
There is more to the PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3) computer entertainment system than you may have assumed. In addition to playing games, watching movies, listening to music, and viewing photos, you can use the PS3 system to run the Linux operating system.
By installing the Linux operating system, you can use the PS3 system not only as an entry-level personal computer with hundreds of familiar applications for home and office use, but also as a complete development environment for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.).
Looks a lot like marketing to me, and the disclaimer at the top wasn't present before OtherOS was removed.
The fact that a lot of users didn't know about it is irrelevant. By that logic any niche feature of any product stands to be disabled at any time. People generally don't pay much attention to features of products they aren't interested in. Advertising mostly works when the people who see the ads are in the market for the features being advertised. I'd bet that a pretty large proportion of PS3 owners don't even know what linux is in the first place, and thus would ignore or forget any marketing for OtherOS.
I agree, if alcohol was mixed in with the currently illegal drugs it would almost surely be considered a hard drug, and the physical dependence that it causes is among the worst of any drug. The acute effects of alcohol intoxication can also be among the worst of any drug. I make those points to people on a fairly regular basis myself. I didn't mean to imply that I think it is benign -- just that the regulatory scheme we have in place for it seems like a good model to use, at least as a starting point, when figuring out how to regulate soft drugs. It is entirely possible that things like marijuana don't even need to be controlled as tightly as alcohol, but it is hard enough to convince people that pot should be legal in the first place -- people are even less supportive of legalization if you propose to treat it like it is more benign than alcohol, evidence be damned.
My arguments for legalizing marijuana used to hinge mostly on its lack of danger along with civil liberties issues and tax money issues, but more and more I would also like to see it legalized because I think people will substitute it for alcohol and in doing so make society safer for everyone. The recent study that came out showing reduced traffic deaths in medical marijuana states strongly supports that idea.
Note that when methamphetamine is produced by legitimate companies (it happens -- the brand name is Desoxyn), the labs never explode. Also, if one did, it probably wouldn't be in the middle of a residential area. Exploding meth labs that kill bystanders are a consequence of meth being produced by incompetent amateur chemists with shoddy equipment, which is a consequence of it being illegal.
Not that I'm arguing that meth be legalized, though. Soft drugs should be treated like alcohol, plain and simple -- I've never seen a good argument otherwise. Hard drugs are a more difficult problem, and I'm not sure what to do about them. The current system is obviously a failure, though.
I disagree in the instance of androgenic global warming.
Oh, dear. Not only are we releasing lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, now we're pumping it full of testosterone, too?
I agree with you -- like I said, people staying home is *part* of the reason, not the whole reason. The studies I've seen on driving while stoned say it is riskier than driving sober, but not nearly as risky as driving with a 0.08% BAC, never mind higher. If I remember right, the risk is similar to talking on a cell phone or having around a 0.04% BAC, although I'm sure more research needs to be done on the topic. I'm not big on the idea of making it legal for people to drive stoned, but even if we did I seriously doubt it would cause the amount of trouble drunken driving causes.