I'm not going to support people who, as part of their personal li[f]e, take action and make up lies that harm others.
Has Tom Cruise done that himself, though? Or is he just as deluded as the other poor fools who've been suckered into Scientology - moreso, in his case perhaps, since it would be even more in Scientology's interests to continue buffing his ego, given the considerable interest his name can generate. They gave him a freakin' medal, for Xenu's sake. I wouldn't be surprised if Cruise had been told and genuinely believed that all of the negative press about Scientology was part of an establishment (or alien) conspiracy.
"Plain and simple, you don't have to work in the Ethics department to understand he comitted crimes."
Fuck no he didn't.
Perhaps GP should have said you don't have to work in the Law department, because, yes, he did commit crimes*. That's why he was arrested and charged and would, most likely, have been found guilty.
I'm pretty sure you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, so I suggest you read Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and learn for yourself.
Why? Does that book point to the statute that makes what he did not a crime?
*if he was still alive I'd probably have to add "alledgedly," since he was never convicted.
I think "mocking" the insect she was about to squash characterizes it more correctly.
I think you're inferring what it pleases you to infer. It looks like a plain statement of fact to me, and the document goes on to explain the reasoning behind the statement in detail. How could it have been worded to not sound mocking, to you?
the US seems to have terrorized a youth into killing himself.
I've highlighted the operative word. While it's reasonable to assume that they probably didn't help (to put it extremely mildly), even those closest to him will spend years agonizing over what exactly was going through his mind and what, if anything, they could have done to prevent this. Why does everyone else seem to think they've got to the bottom of it in five minutes?
Creating three reservoir out of one well will mean one thing - each reservoir will have less than one third the potential power of that one well.
Damn, if only you'd been around to tell the scientists this before they wasted their time.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it's actually a lot more complicated and non-linear than that, that these guys know what they're doing, and the article just doesn't go into quite enough detail.
Yes. Yes, it is. But so is "morality is absolute," and they can't both be true.
which can't exist in a moral universe that contains no absolute statements about morality
I think you've just made an absolute statement about morality which declares all such statements to be self-contradictory.
You appear - as cheekyjohnson has pointed out - to have conflated statements about morality with statements of morality. By your logic, nothing can be said to be relative. Replace "morality" with "sexiness" and "moral universe" with "sexy universe," for example ("sexy universe" is a ridiculous term, of course, but then what is a "moral universe" anyway?)
It requires intellectual effort, and that's your real problem with it.
Even if you were right about any of this, why did you have to finish up by being a dick about it? Do you sneer at everyone you consider to be beneath you on the intellectual ladder?
The new collection is four billion light years long. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. This means the collection is 1600 times the distance to Andromeda in length. What's wrong with that? (apart from the fact that either distance is pretty close to unimaginable for us day-to-day Earth-bound humans)
Using one as a reference point for the other in four-dimensional space makes little sense to me.
If you believe the universe was created in 4004 BC at 9am, you are a nut. There are no qualifiers to go with that. Not "you might be a nut" or "some people would disagree with you." No. You're a full-blown nutcase.
What if you're brought up on a desert island and that's all you've ever been told? And you have no facilities or education to determine otherwise?
Not that I don't see your point. I'm just a hopeless pedant and feel it necessary to point out that there are qualifiers to go with that, and there are plenty of shades of grey from my example up to a well-educated but close-minded Christian fundamentalist.
However that doesn't mean that the poor planet is still waiting to get hit by all those comets just because we haven't observed it yet.
I may have this wrong, but my understanding is:
"Still" and "yet" are very flexible terms here. In our reference frame, we can define a fairly fixed "now" in which we can be fairly sure that the event happened before "now" - but for another observer in the same position as us but moving at a (vastly) different speed, they may not be so sure. Only when we see it can we be certain that there are no reference frames at our position for which the event is yet to happen.
I forget the details, but I read something like the following: if there is an alien in Andromeda at (for simplicity's sake) a fixed distance from me, he could calculate his current "now" to correspond with my 2013. If he takes a single step further away from us (or is closer?), his now will "bend" to coincide with somewhere around the 1800s. If he steps the other way, it bends into the future. When he stops moving, it's back to 2013. Of course it's not like he can use that to flick through our history, since he still has to wait for the light to get there.
TL:DR; time is to any of the spatial dimensions as x is to 1/x, and many weird things happen.
Louise Radnofsky reports that a study by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine has found U.S. life expectancy ranks near the bottom of 17 affluent countries.
Shocking! But wait, if you extend the list to the 34 most affluent countries, the US would be in the top 50%. Make it a list of 100 countries and you could argue that the US was "near the top." Who picked the list?
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns.
Do any of the linked articles quantify the reduction in average life expectancy due to guns?
If you ruin another geek culture icon, there'll be hell to pay.
No there won't. There'll be a few angry nerds that no-one in charge will care about because they're already picking through next season's must watch TV. Monkey Tennis, Cooking in Prison, and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to support people who, as part of their personal li[f]e, take action and make up lies that harm others.
Has Tom Cruise done that himself, though? Or is he just as deluded as the other poor fools who've been suckered into Scientology - moreso, in his case perhaps, since it would be even more in Scientology's interests to continue buffing his ego, given the considerable interest his name can generate. They gave him a freakin' medal, for Xenu's sake. I wouldn't be surprised if Cruise had been told and genuinely believed that all of the negative press about Scientology was part of an establishment (or alien) conspiracy.
For assuming you get to decide I give you ten demerits.
N. C. Wickramasinghe = Magic chin wankers
You'd be surprised where you can stick a Raspberry Pi, you really would.
Christmas is to Christians and Earth Day is to Environmentalists.
Over-commercialised, bereft of its original meaning, and just a big pain in the arse for the rest of us?
No, the book makes the point that this sort of behavior is, historically, par for the courseat MIT.
Still doesn't make it legal.
So where do they get the air to inflate it?
Duh. An astronaut blows it up. Those guys all have good lungs.
"Plain and simple, you don't have to work in the Ethics department to understand he comitted crimes." Fuck no he didn't.
Perhaps GP should have said you don't have to work in the Law department, because, yes, he did commit crimes*. That's why he was arrested and charged and would, most likely, have been found guilty.
I'm pretty sure you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, so I suggest you read Stephen Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and learn for yourself.
Why? Does that book point to the statute that makes what he did not a crime?
*if he was still alive I'd probably have to add "alledgedly," since he was never convicted.
And it won't be a personal assistant (or a PA's PA) that opens and reads his physical mail because...?
I think "mocking" the insect she was about to squash characterizes it more correctly.
I think you're inferring what it pleases you to infer. It looks like a plain statement of fact to me, and the document goes on to explain the reasoning behind the statement in detail. How could it have been worded to not sound mocking, to you?
but not nearly as important as he tries to make it out to be,' quipped United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz
Quipped? Chided? These words do not mean what you seem to think they mean.
the US seems to have terrorized a youth into killing himself.
I've highlighted the operative word. While it's reasonable to assume that they probably didn't help (to put it extremely mildly), even those closest to him will spend years agonizing over what exactly was going through his mind and what, if anything, they could have done to prevent this. Why does everyone else seem to think they've got to the bottom of it in five minutes?
Creating three reservoir out of one well will mean one thing - each reservoir will have less than one third the potential power of that one well.
Damn, if only you'd been around to tell the scientists this before they wasted their time.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it's actually a lot more complicated and non-linear than that, that these guys know what they're doing, and the article just doesn't go into quite enough detail.
"Morality is relative" is an absolute statement
Yes. Yes, it is. But so is "morality is absolute," and they can't both be true.
which can't exist in a moral universe that contains no absolute statements about morality
I think you've just made an absolute statement about morality which declares all such statements to be self-contradictory.
You appear - as cheekyjohnson has pointed out - to have conflated statements about morality with statements of morality. By your logic, nothing can be said to be relative. Replace "morality" with "sexiness" and "moral universe" with "sexy universe," for example ("sexy universe" is a ridiculous term, of course, but then what is a "moral universe" anyway?)
It requires intellectual effort, and that's your real problem with it.
Even if you were right about any of this, why did you have to finish up by being a dick about it? Do you sneer at everyone you consider to be beneath you on the intellectual ladder?
Using one as a reference point for the other in four-dimensional space makes little sense to me.
It's being used as a reference distance.
He committed a crime, and knew full well he was doing it. Comparing him to what happened to Turing...
...sounds pretty reasonable to me at first glance, since Turing also committed what he knew to be a crime.
It was immoral and wrong for him to commit suicide.
Oh, have they made morality absolute now? That's gonna solve a whole bunch of problems!
Uneducated as I must be, I at first assumed they were talking about infra-red radiation, and so I was duly enlightened.
Cephalopods know they're not fish.
If you believe the universe was created in 4004 BC at 9am, you are a nut. There are no qualifiers to go with that. Not "you might be a nut" or "some people would disagree with you." No. You're a full-blown nutcase.
What if you're brought up on a desert island and that's all you've ever been told? And you have no facilities or education to determine otherwise?
Not that I don't see your point. I'm just a hopeless pedant and feel it necessary to point out that there are qualifiers to go with that, and there are plenty of shades of grey from my example up to a well-educated but close-minded Christian fundamentalist.
However that doesn't mean that the poor planet is still waiting to get hit by all those comets just because we haven't observed it yet.
I may have this wrong, but my understanding is:
"Still" and "yet" are very flexible terms here. In our reference frame, we can define a fairly fixed "now" in which we can be fairly sure that the event happened before "now" - but for another observer in the same position as us but moving at a (vastly) different speed, they may not be so sure. Only when we see it can we be certain that there are no reference frames at our position for which the event is yet to happen.
I forget the details, but I read something like the following: if there is an alien in Andromeda at (for simplicity's sake) a fixed distance from me, he could calculate his current "now" to correspond with my 2013. If he takes a single step further away from us (or is closer?), his now will "bend" to coincide with somewhere around the 1800s. If he steps the other way, it bends into the future. When he stops moving, it's back to 2013. Of course it's not like he can use that to flick through our history, since he still has to wait for the light to get there.
TL:DR; time is to any of the spatial dimensions as x is to 1/x, and many weird things happen.
Tiny molecular machine apes cellular production line
Louise Radnofsky reports that a study by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine has found U.S. life expectancy ranks near the bottom of 17 affluent countries.
Shocking! But wait, if you extend the list to the 34 most affluent countries, the US would be in the top 50%. Make it a list of 100 countries and you could argue that the US was "near the top." Who picked the list?
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns.
Do any of the linked articles quantify the reduction in average life expectancy due to guns?
If you ruin another geek culture icon, there'll be hell to pay.
No there won't. There'll be a few angry nerds that no-one in charge will care about because they're already picking through next season's must watch TV. Monkey Tennis, Cooking in Prison, and so forth.
If you ruin another geek culture icon, there'll be hell to pay.
They're quite capable of ruining Star Wars* without a writer's strike.
*again