Don't be silly. Under Windows, MacOS, and Linux (and probably all other major OSes) you can specify any keyboard layout you want. I've contemplated the idea of switching to Dvorak for a few years but just haven't gone through with it. But I did at least set up my Win2k desktop in anticipation of making the switch -- it takes at most three minutes to do.
"I built a custom search so 'gg term' searches google and 'dict word' brings up the dictionary.com page."
OMFG, please share! I've been wanting to do something like that for a loooooong time. I do both of those things quite often, and to be able to bypass the homepage (though at least Google's is nicely minimalist) would be very sweet.
If you could post any info I'd be very grateful, even if it's just pointers to where to look for info. I will go look for myself now, but I anticipate that others would love to have this as well.
Others have already addressed the problem that most copyrighted works (though only software has been mentioned here) are a collaboration of many people. Since you cannot assign copyright to one person, nor pieces to individuals, a legal entity (corporation) is needed. I don't have a problem with this, and the only issue I see discussed is when tying copyright length to the death of the holder. I don't think death should have anything to do with it for the reason below.
Copyrights were created to promote the creation and dissemination of various media (articles, books, music, poetry, software, movies, et al). In order for authors to invest their time and money into creation, they had to be assured some method of being compensated for allowing the public to use their works. However, most media created today is not the sole effort of the authors. It sometimes costs a lot of money to produce it, money the authors do not have. So other parties fund the effort in exchange for some promise (or rather opportunity) of future compensation.
Software companies pay developers to write software.
Publishers pay advances to authors to write books and employ editors.
Record companies pay for the studio time so artists can record.
Newspapers and magazines pay writers and fly them around the world to report.
Movie studios front millions of dollars to produce a movie.
If we bar corporations from holding the copyrights or tie the copyright term to the life of the author, then these external parties will be reluctant to fund the creation of media. The effect would be the same as if the authors didn't receive a copyright.
Really, the only gripe I can coherently voice is the perpetual extension of the length of copyright term that has occurred throughout history by the corporations that hold the most lucrative copyrights, mainly Disney from my limited understanding. This squarely points to the political control corporations wield in the U.S., which stems directly from the fact that it costs millions of dollars to run an effective campaign. The problem is that money can buy far more votes than the actual stance of the politician, thanks to media control.
Our society has already decided that if you break the law, society's thirst for vengeance (a.k.a. justice and rehabilitation in the U.S.) wins out over your right to liberty. Thus there is no conflict and the bank teller gets to live. Besides, the bank teller doesn't interfere with the robber's liberty -- the jail guards do that.
Sodomy "denot[es] a number of sexual practices variously proscribed by law, especially bestiality, oral-genital contact, and anal intercourse." As crazy as it sounds, there are two states, IIRC, where it is still illegal to perform oral sex.
If you saw a woman being raped, mutilated, and murdered, and the only way to save the woman was to kill the rapist, would you do it?
When is the only way to stop a rapist to murder the rapist? When is the only way to stop abortion doctors to murder them? You have contrived an impossible scenario. If the only deterrant you can think of is murder, you need to expand your horizons a bit.
Did you know that the Hippocratic Oath specifically prohibits performing abortion?
It's been some time since I read it, but I don't recall the word abortion mentioned specifically. I do recall the main tenant is "first, do no harm."
Great. Aborting the fetus harms the fetus. But forcing the woman to carry the child against her will harms the woman, physically and psychologically. This is a very common dilema in medicine, where a choice between two harms must be made. To remove a dying appendix requires harming the body through surgery. To abort a fetus requires harming the fetus and the woman.
As with most things in life, there is no absolute correct answer but a choice. Who better to choose, the woman carrying the child or someone completely unrelated to the parties involved?
That is why the Declaration of Independence affirms right off the bat that
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
You'll notice that it doesn't say "life over liberty." All three of those are equally important. When one being's life (the fetus) conflicts with another being's liberty (the woman), the Constitution does not provide us a handy barometer with which to make a clear-cut decision.
You are also making the same error as others above. Pro-choice advocates don't claim that the life of a fetus is worthless. They contend that the very clearly living woman has a right to govern her own body, of which the fetus is a part. This is why it is an individual decision and not a fact. Two equal beings with equal rights. You can't legislate which one wins out.
If it is OK to kill the baby of rape though, why can't we kill the rapist? It only follows your logic. This baby has no intrinsic value to society and the mother and apparently is a encumbrance, eliminate it. This rapist has no intrinsic value to society and causes harm, kill him.
No, that's your logic, not mine. To allow the baby to live, the woman must carry it for nine months. This greatly affects the woman. To allow a rapist to live requires nothing. How can you claim every life is sacred and yet advocate killing someone as punishment? Certainly you'd want to try helping the rapist learn from his mistake, right? Remember, turn the other cheek.
The reason I believe abortion needs to remain legal -- though I certainly would rather a woman freely choose to bring the baby to term -- is not because an unwanted baby is worthless but rather that a woman should not be forced to remain pregnant against her will, regardless of how she became pregnant.
But abortion does affect someone else, but many people don't consider the fetus (baby) a person. At what point do they become a person? After they come out? 2 yrs? 6 yrs?
Of course it affects the fetus. And being pregnant affects the woman. Many people don't consider the woman's rights, thus my points about chauvinism. To your question, the fetus becomes a person after the 23rd trimester.;) Seriously, who knows? Certainly not anyone on this planet, so how can you make moral judgments about it?
there are about 4,000 abortions in the US every day.
Do you have a link or source for this figure? 4,000 per day is 1,460,000 per year. There are roughly 70,000,000 women ages 15-50. That works out to 1 out of every 49 women getting an abortion each year. That just seems too high.
Certainly. Control your body. Your baby, however, is not part of your body.
To phrase it as a woman would, "If the fetus must remain inside my body for nine months in order to develop -- all the while food I eat provides nourishment to it and anything it feels I feel as well -- it bloody well is a part of my body." Up to the point the umbilical cord is cut, the mother and child are effectively one organism.
They should be held permanently accountable, and forced to provide financially for that child.
Again, you are completely ignoring what a woman must go through to carry a child to term. You can't just come up with some dollar value to cover the physical and psychological effects. $10,000? $100,000? And who's going to pick up that check anyway? Certainly not the rapist or teenage kid. So now you are asking me to pay the state to force a woman to carry a baby against her will so you will feel less guilt. No thanks.
Funny, I only see examples of this chauvinism [men with many partners are cool] in people who embrace abortion anyway.
You, my friend, need to get out more.
I fail to see how prostitution and pot smoking play into this.
If there was a large market of attractive women willing to pay men for sex, I bet you large amounts of money prostitution would be legal or only lightly enforced. If men had to carry the baby instead of women, again I bet that the anti-abortion movement would be much smaller.
As for illicit substances, that they are illegal is partly due to the moral objections that I am harming myself and must therefore be stopped against my will, even if the solution (loss of property and jail time) is far worse than the effects of the drug itself. And worse, other people are made to pay to implement the punishment simply so the moralists get to feel better that I have been saved from myself.
This same principle is where the disregard for a woman's right to govern her body stems from. Even if you accept that destroying a fetus at any age is murder, you are still subjugating the rights of the woman to the rights of the unborn child. Given that "all men are created equal," how can you unilaterally claim that the child's rights outweigh the woman's?
And quite frankly, if I knew that my parents did not want to bring me into the world, I'd rather check out than create a scarred family. Better to have parents that truly want to create life do so, rather than everyone who just happens to get pregnant. We have more than enough neglected children already -- no need to legislate more. It's not that a neglected child could not live a happy existance or even contribute to the community, but why start with such a negative strike when it just isn't necessary? Of course, that starts getting into personal beliefs rather than logical arguments.
I look at the people who are actually in the gutters doing something about hunger... don't condone abortion.
That's nice, but that's backwards. How many anti-abortionists do you see feeding the hungry versus those calling for the murder of abortion doctors, or perhaps ordering cluster-bombing of foreign countries with expected civilian casualties? I find no basis for your causal relationship between self-expressed high moral standing and moral action.
However, instead of feeding the hungry, then, perhaps the anti-abortionist could spend more effort in educating people on the effective use of birth control. Unless, of course, your religion forbids it. Sad. So much pain is caused when man thinks he can know God's mind.
Regarding a woman's right to an abortion in the event of incest or rape,
Yes, those exceptions should be scrapped! What did the baby do in those cases to deserve death?
What did the woman do to deserve forced pregnancy? The whole point of pro-choice is not "baby murder should be legal" but rather "a woman should control her body." Carrying and delivering a baby is a huge -- and dangerous -- ordeal. No one should do it without great consideration, and certainly no one should be forced into it against their will.
The same chauvinism is apparent in our attitudes toward sex. Men who have many sexual partners are seen as cool. Women who do the same are reviled. If I take a woman out to dinner, drinks, and a movie, and we later have sex, that's okay. If instead I simply pay her money for the sex, we can be arrested and jailed. In some U.S. states it is still illegal for two consenting adults to engage in oral sex (sodomy).
In the latter two cases we have one group of people limiting the actions of another group of people when those actions do not affect anyone else. The same is true with the war on drugs. If you smoke pot, as long as you don't drive or operate heavy machinery you are not a threat to anyone. What right does anyone else have to confiscate your property and throw you in jail?
And here it is more bluntly. With starvation rampent world-wide (even in the U.S.), vastly surpassing abortions, why isn't more effort put into feeding people? If the anti-abortion rally cry is "We cannot lose even one precious life," they could save far more lives with less effort by addressing hunger. And it wouldn't trample women's rights at the same time.
It's not the perpetual existance of the universe that I find difficult to accept, it's that a big ball of energy exploded into the void and after trillions of years sentient life was born by happenstance.
But the whole trouble with theory 1 is that WHO CREATED THE CREATOR!
I don't find that much of a problem. The idea that there is a creator of the universe is not made less likely because we cannot understand its existence. Perhaps time truly is just another dimension like x, y, and z, and it was created along with the universe. Thus the creator would have no beginning or end; it would simply exist.
Given that the creator probably isn't hanging out by Pluto, it's no different to say it exists "outside" of time than it is to say it exists "outside" of the universe.
however, gravity is counted as negative energy, and so the whole [assuming a big crunch[ evens out -you end up right back where you started.
Gravity is negative energy? I've never heard that before, but no matter. So if the very complex universe I described can be summed up as energy and negative energy that cancel out to zero, then it's really not complex at all and could have come about randomly? That discounts that the forms that energy takes are themselves complex. Perhaps I didn't understand your point.
once you get the "many worlds" solution, it makes sense that as least ONE universe should have life...
Perhaps if life were as trivial as, say, the collective works of Shakespeare, and you had a million monkeys, this might be a viable argument. But sentient life is so very complex, and it's built up from other life forms. Let your mind sit with this concept for five minutes: your physical body is not a single being but rather millions of cells and organisms living symbiotically. How fscking amazing is that?
And think about how RNA works to replicate DNA. It's a molecular machine, nanotechnology. To look upon that as a random by-product of atoms bumping together puts too much faith in monkeys.
My friend's answer is that the order of life rises naturally out of a chaotic system. So what's the force that makes that happen? It may not have a white beard, but it fits the bill.
The whole idea of God... goes against common sense.
That's so easy to say, and I've said it many times in my life. But if you look at it, it's not as clear as you state. Let's examine two possibilities and see how they measure up against common sense.
Theory 1: There exists some "thing" that created the universe and the life within it.
Theory 2: At some point in time a universe appeared from nowhere, full of matter and energy. Over billions of years, clumps of debris formed into clouds, stars, planets, etc. On at least one planet, random atoms came together in complex formations to create molecular machines. From these, cellular organisms sprang forth with limited reactive abilities. These in turn grouped together to create very complex life forms, culminating in the self-aware human beings we know and love today.
The more I let my mind ponder each theory in turn, the more the second one sounds like a great science fiction story. There are so many random occurances resulting in complex patterns.
The first theory, however, starts to seem dodgy when one attempts to personify the "thing" by calling it the "creator." Images of an old man with a long white beard and robe sitting in the clouds is obviously quite silly, but it's what people tend to think of and thus dismiss the theory out-of-hand.
Worse things happen still when power and politics come into play. Seeing the violence some people commit in the name of religion and a creator made it easy for me to dismiss the possibility, for I assumed anyone willing to do so must be completely wrong. It wasn't until I looked for myself at the arguments that I was able to separate spirituality from religion.
And damnit, I sure can't wait to find out the answer!;)
Just how exactly media corportions lost site of the usefulness of this doctrine is beyond me.... People will pay to support media they like and to ensure good quality fun. They will NOT pay for over-priced crap forced down their throats.
People will and regularly do pay for over-priced crap, but before Napster and P2P, there was no mainstream viable alternative. Now consumers have a choice between over-priced and free, and it's the copyright corporations that are forcing that choice. They continue to attempt to legislate around it, but it will continue to fail.
With all the brainpower that exists in the world, you'd think a middle-of-the-road solution that maintains fair-use while allowing quality media to be developed could be created. However, as maximizing profit is the ultimate (only?) goal of corporations, they're hooked on getting $18 for crap.
which US action killed 30 000 000 people as Stalin did ?
I can't think of a single war even that has produced 30 million deaths, but I don't memorize many war statistics. One is that the U.S. supported (funded, trained, and provided military equipment) Indonesia in it's recent 25 year war against East Timor. One third of East Timor's 750,000 population has been eradicated to date, and the majority of it occurred in the past 2-3 years.
Under socialism nobody gets to decide anything for it the decisions are reserved to chosen few who are (unlike a corporation) under no external pressure to do anything sensible.
You can have ownership and control by the state. Russia had essentially a ruling class that decided how resources were to be used statewide. In the U.S., those with the capital (corporations) get to decide how resources are used. Current socialist movements put the control of resources into the hands of those that work them. This has shown up in the U.S. as employee ownership and single proprieterships.
They can rape steal your crops and rape your wife and there is NOTHING you can do about it.
This has nothing to do with the form of government. Situations as you describe, while sensational, have occurred in all societies where law enforcement is weak.
So far , capitalism created the best standard of living for EVERYONE involved.
Please, tell me you do not honestly believe this. Have you traveled to any developing nations? Have you read about U.S. foreign policy? As I mentioned above, there are 250,000 East Timorese that would disagree with you had they not been slaughtered for voting for a local democratic government over rule by the Indonesian military.
millions of people who risk their lives to get into this, what you call "abuse of power", are the best proof what is a superior economical system.
I never claimed that capitalism wasn't good for the capitalist elite; in fact I claimed the opposite. Sure, it's turned out well for a lot of Americans, but at the expense of people living in the developing nations. Some of them clearly benefit, but mostly it's those that set up the systems to export profit to the transnational corporations. That many people come to the U.S. supports both views, not one over the other.
Finally some advice: by insulting someone, you're much less likely to get a lively discussion and debate. It will likely devolve into more name-calling and anger. Frankly, I'm 100% behind reducing both of those.
Me: For example, under Socialism, the farm workers themselves determine how farmland is used.
You: Under Soviet Communism, farm workers did not determine how land was to be used.
Fine, but I said socialism, not communism. My only point is that declaring communism itself -- or any form of government -- evil by nature is rediculous. Totalitarian rule is by far the most efficient in terms of deciding laws, and Mother Theresa might even be able to pull it off. But I wouldn't want my state to use it. It's too open for easy abuse.
2,500 innocent lives is the acceptable limit for plausable deniability. Once you pass that, you've launched yourself into "genocide" territory, and only the CIA can help you now -- if they want to.;)
More people were murdered by their own communistic governments than by any wars or famines in the last century.
That would be true only if you disregarded all the various violent external U.S. actions in South America, Africa, and Asia as well as those of the totalitarian regimes the U.S. has set up throughout Latin and South America. Sure, the U.S. tends to avoid killing its own citizens, but our leaders seem to have no qualms about supporting mass murder in other countries.
The over 5,000 children that die in Iraq every month since 1991 from sanctions overshadows any current Communist actions, and it's just the first example.
The point is not that Communism is the best form of government/monetary policy. The point is that when you give lots of power to humans, they tend to exercise it unwisely at the expense of others, regardless of the type of government. The problem as I see it is that because Capitalism's goal is to maximise the control of resources to a few, it allows a much larger abuse of power than other economic models.
For example, under Socialism, the farm workers themselves determine how farmland is used. If twenty farmers "go nuts" and decide to use tons of chemicals on their farm, they only affect one farm. However, under Capitalism, if one transnational corporation "goes nuts" and uses the same pesticides, they will affect the food for several countries instead of 500 people.
The fact of the matter is that there has never been a non-corrupt communist regime
And there has never been a non-currupt democratic regime, nor a republic or totalitarian regime, so what's your point? You think you are arguing that communism must be corrupt, yet all you're saying is that every government set up by humans has been corrupt. And the sky is blue. So what?
I agree. I view the "Organization" header as stating the legal entity to which I have pledged some sort of allegiance, in most cases meaning I work for them in exchange for money. This carries the assumption that, since I am posting in the identity of someone that "belongs" to said organization, I have some legal right to speak for them unless I apply a disclaimer.
While I assume they are overriding the "Organization" header as a marketing tactic, I believe they are ignoring the internet cultural norms for how that field is used. I hope they come to understand what they have done, perhaps inadvertantly, and change their policy. However, given the current climate, I suspect this will continue unnoticed (save the/. crowd) for years to come with no ramifications.
Wouldn't it be nice if that were true. However, WIPO and the IMF have provisions for transnational corporations to sue sovereign nations. For example, South Africa was recently sued by a company that makes AIDS drugs. South Africa had purchased generic replacements of those drugs, and they were sued over IP rights of the US corporation.
If this were true, how do you account for psychiatry and psychotherapy? Sometimes drugs are used to alter the brain chemistry to affect the moods of a patient. And sometimes simple therapy sessions achieve the same results. Just because the brain affects the mind does not mean that the brain is all there is to the mind.
Your own analogy speaks to this. The software in a computer is not the silicon curcuits. The software uses the hardware to do its work. Similarly, the mind uses the brain to process information and perceive.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be silly. Under Windows, MacOS, and Linux (and probably all other major OSes) you can specify any keyboard layout you want. I've contemplated the idea of switching to Dvorak for a few years but just haven't gone through with it. But I did at least set up my Win2k desktop in anticipation of making the switch -- it takes at most three minutes to do.
How is this different from the U.S. government? :)
Very, very cool. I just created the Google and dictionary.com entries. Tres sweet! :) Thanks again.
OMFG, please share! I've been wanting to do something like that for a loooooong time. I do both of those things quite often, and to be able to bypass the homepage (though at least Google's is nicely minimalist) would be very sweet.
If you could post any info I'd be very grateful, even if it's just pointers to where to look for info. I will go look for myself now, but I anticipate that others would love to have this as well.
Copyrights were created to promote the creation and dissemination of various media (articles, books, music, poetry, software, movies, et al). In order for authors to invest their time and money into creation, they had to be assured some method of being compensated for allowing the public to use their works. However, most media created today is not the sole effort of the authors. It sometimes costs a lot of money to produce it, money the authors do not have. So other parties fund the effort in exchange for some promise (or rather opportunity) of future compensation.
If we bar corporations from holding the copyrights or tie the copyright term to the life of the author, then these external parties will be reluctant to fund the creation of media. The effect would be the same as if the authors didn't receive a copyright.
Really, the only gripe I can coherently voice is the perpetual extension of the length of copyright term that has occurred throughout history by the corporations that hold the most lucrative copyrights, mainly Disney from my limited understanding. This squarely points to the political control corporations wield in the U.S., which stems directly from the fact that it costs millions of dollars to run an effective campaign. The problem is that money can buy far more votes than the actual stance of the politician, thanks to media control.
Our society has already decided that if you break the law, society's thirst for vengeance (a.k.a. justice and rehabilitation in the U.S.) wins out over your right to liberty. Thus there is no conflict and the bank teller gets to live. Besides, the bank teller doesn't interfere with the robber's liberty -- the jail guards do that.
Sodomy "denot[es] a number of sexual practices variously proscribed by law, especially bestiality, oral-genital contact, and anal intercourse." As crazy as it sounds, there are two states, IIRC, where it is still illegal to perform oral sex.
When is the only way to stop a rapist to murder the rapist? When is the only way to stop abortion doctors to murder them? You have contrived an impossible scenario. If the only deterrant you can think of is murder, you need to expand your horizons a bit.
Did you know that the Hippocratic Oath specifically prohibits performing abortion?
It's been some time since I read it, but I don't recall the word abortion mentioned specifically. I do recall the main tenant is "first, do no harm."
Great. Aborting the fetus harms the fetus. But forcing the woman to carry the child against her will harms the woman, physically and psychologically. This is a very common dilema in medicine, where a choice between two harms must be made. To remove a dying appendix requires harming the body through surgery. To abort a fetus requires harming the fetus and the woman.
As with most things in life, there is no absolute correct answer but a choice. Who better to choose, the woman carrying the child or someone completely unrelated to the parties involved?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
You'll notice that it doesn't say "life over liberty." All three of those are equally important. When one being's life (the fetus) conflicts with another being's liberty (the woman), the Constitution does not provide us a handy barometer with which to make a clear-cut decision.
You are also making the same error as others above. Pro-choice advocates don't claim that the life of a fetus is worthless. They contend that the very clearly living woman has a right to govern her own body, of which the fetus is a part. This is why it is an individual decision and not a fact. Two equal beings with equal rights. You can't legislate which one wins out.
No, that's your logic, not mine. To allow the baby to live, the woman must carry it for nine months. This greatly affects the woman. To allow a rapist to live requires nothing. How can you claim every life is sacred and yet advocate killing someone as punishment? Certainly you'd want to try helping the rapist learn from his mistake, right? Remember, turn the other cheek.
The reason I believe abortion needs to remain legal -- though I certainly would rather a woman freely choose to bring the baby to term -- is not because an unwanted baby is worthless but rather that a woman should not be forced to remain pregnant against her will, regardless of how she became pregnant.
But abortion does affect someone else, but many people don't consider the fetus (baby) a person. At what point do they become a person? After they come out? 2 yrs? 6 yrs?
Of course it affects the fetus. And being pregnant affects the woman. Many people don't consider the woman's rights, thus my points about chauvinism. To your question, the fetus becomes a person after the 23rd trimester. ;) Seriously, who knows? Certainly not anyone on this planet, so how can you make moral judgments about it?
there are about 4,000 abortions in the US every day.
Do you have a link or source for this figure? 4,000 per day is 1,460,000 per year. There are roughly 70,000,000 women ages 15-50. That works out to 1 out of every 49 women getting an abortion each year. That just seems too high.
To phrase it as a woman would, "If the fetus must remain inside my body for nine months in order to develop -- all the while food I eat provides nourishment to it and anything it feels I feel as well -- it bloody well is a part of my body." Up to the point the umbilical cord is cut, the mother and child are effectively one organism.
They should be held permanently accountable, and forced to provide financially for that child.
Again, you are completely ignoring what a woman must go through to carry a child to term. You can't just come up with some dollar value to cover the physical and psychological effects. $10,000? $100,000? And who's going to pick up that check anyway? Certainly not the rapist or teenage kid. So now you are asking me to pay the state to force a woman to carry a baby against her will so you will feel less guilt. No thanks.
Funny, I only see examples of this chauvinism [men with many partners are cool] in people who embrace abortion anyway.
You, my friend, need to get out more.
I fail to see how prostitution and pot smoking play into this.
If there was a large market of attractive women willing to pay men for sex, I bet you large amounts of money prostitution would be legal or only lightly enforced. If men had to carry the baby instead of women, again I bet that the anti-abortion movement would be much smaller.
As for illicit substances, that they are illegal is partly due to the moral objections that I am harming myself and must therefore be stopped against my will, even if the solution (loss of property and jail time) is far worse than the effects of the drug itself. And worse, other people are made to pay to implement the punishment simply so the moralists get to feel better that I have been saved from myself.
This same principle is where the disregard for a woman's right to govern her body stems from. Even if you accept that destroying a fetus at any age is murder, you are still subjugating the rights of the woman to the rights of the unborn child. Given that "all men are created equal," how can you unilaterally claim that the child's rights outweigh the woman's?
And quite frankly, if I knew that my parents did not want to bring me into the world, I'd rather check out than create a scarred family. Better to have parents that truly want to create life do so, rather than everyone who just happens to get pregnant. We have more than enough neglected children already -- no need to legislate more. It's not that a neglected child could not live a happy existance or even contribute to the community, but why start with such a negative strike when it just isn't necessary? Of course, that starts getting into personal beliefs rather than logical arguments.
I look at the people who are actually in the gutters doing something about hunger ... don't condone abortion.
That's nice, but that's backwards. How many anti-abortionists do you see feeding the hungry versus those calling for the murder of abortion doctors, or perhaps ordering cluster-bombing of foreign countries with expected civilian casualties? I find no basis for your causal relationship between self-expressed high moral standing and moral action.
However, instead of feeding the hungry, then, perhaps the anti-abortionist could spend more effort in educating people on the effective use of birth control. Unless, of course, your religion forbids it. Sad. So much pain is caused when man thinks he can know God's mind.
Yes, those exceptions should be scrapped! What did the baby do in those cases to deserve death?
What did the woman do to deserve forced pregnancy? The whole point of pro-choice is not "baby murder should be legal" but rather "a woman should control her body." Carrying and delivering a baby is a huge -- and dangerous -- ordeal. No one should do it without great consideration, and certainly no one should be forced into it against their will.
The same chauvinism is apparent in our attitudes toward sex. Men who have many sexual partners are seen as cool. Women who do the same are reviled. If I take a woman out to dinner, drinks, and a movie, and we later have sex, that's okay. If instead I simply pay her money for the sex, we can be arrested and jailed. In some U.S. states it is still illegal for two consenting adults to engage in oral sex (sodomy).
In the latter two cases we have one group of people limiting the actions of another group of people when those actions do not affect anyone else. The same is true with the war on drugs. If you smoke pot, as long as you don't drive or operate heavy machinery you are not a threat to anyone. What right does anyone else have to confiscate your property and throw you in jail?
And here it is more bluntly. With starvation rampent world-wide (even in the U.S.), vastly surpassing abortions, why isn't more effort put into feeding people? If the anti-abortion rally cry is "We cannot lose even one precious life," they could save far more lives with less effort by addressing hunger. And it wouldn't trample women's rights at the same time.
It's not the perpetual existance of the universe that I find difficult to accept, it's that a big ball of energy exploded into the void and after trillions of years sentient life was born by happenstance.
I don't find that much of a problem. The idea that there is a creator of the universe is not made less likely because we cannot understand its existence. Perhaps time truly is just another dimension like x, y, and z, and it was created along with the universe. Thus the creator would have no beginning or end; it would simply exist.
Given that the creator probably isn't hanging out by Pluto, it's no different to say it exists "outside" of time than it is to say it exists "outside" of the universe.
however, gravity is counted as negative energy, and so the whole [assuming a big crunch[ evens out -you end up right back where you started.
Gravity is negative energy? I've never heard that before, but no matter. So if the very complex universe I described can be summed up as energy and negative energy that cancel out to zero, then it's really not complex at all and could have come about randomly? That discounts that the forms that energy takes are themselves complex. Perhaps I didn't understand your point.
once you get the "many worlds" solution, it makes sense that as least ONE universe should have life...
Perhaps if life were as trivial as, say, the collective works of Shakespeare, and you had a million monkeys, this might be a viable argument. But sentient life is so very complex, and it's built up from other life forms. Let your mind sit with this concept for five minutes: your physical body is not a single being but rather millions of cells and organisms living symbiotically. How fscking amazing is that?
And think about how RNA works to replicate DNA. It's a molecular machine, nanotechnology. To look upon that as a random by-product of atoms bumping together puts too much faith in monkeys.
My friend's answer is that the order of life rises naturally out of a chaotic system. So what's the force that makes that happen? It may not have a white beard, but it fits the bill.
That's so easy to say, and I've said it many times in my life. But if you look at it, it's not as clear as you state. Let's examine two possibilities and see how they measure up against common sense.
Theory 1: There exists some "thing" that created the universe and the life within it.
Theory 2: At some point in time a universe appeared from nowhere, full of matter and energy. Over billions of years, clumps of debris formed into clouds, stars, planets, etc. On at least one planet, random atoms came together in complex formations to create molecular machines. From these, cellular organisms sprang forth with limited reactive abilities. These in turn grouped together to create very complex life forms, culminating in the self-aware human beings we know and love today.
The more I let my mind ponder each theory in turn, the more the second one sounds like a great science fiction story. There are so many random occurances resulting in complex patterns.
The first theory, however, starts to seem dodgy when one attempts to personify the "thing" by calling it the "creator." Images of an old man with a long white beard and robe sitting in the clouds is obviously quite silly, but it's what people tend to think of and thus dismiss the theory out-of-hand.
Worse things happen still when power and politics come into play. Seeing the violence some people commit in the name of religion and a creator made it easy for me to dismiss the possibility, for I assumed anyone willing to do so must be completely wrong. It wasn't until I looked for myself at the arguments that I was able to separate spirituality from religion.
And damnit, I sure can't wait to find out the answer! ;)
Just how exactly media corportions lost site of the usefulness of this doctrine is beyond me. ... People will pay to support media they like and to ensure good quality fun. They will NOT pay for over-priced crap forced down their throats.
People will and regularly do pay for over-priced crap, but before Napster and P2P, there was no mainstream viable alternative. Now consumers have a choice between over-priced and free, and it's the copyright corporations that are forcing that choice. They continue to attempt to legislate around it, but it will continue to fail.
With all the brainpower that exists in the world, you'd think a middle-of-the-road solution that maintains fair-use while allowing quality media to be developed could be created. However, as maximizing profit is the ultimate (only?) goal of corporations, they're hooked on getting $18 for crap.
I can't think of a single war even that has produced 30 million deaths, but I don't memorize many war statistics. One is that the U.S. supported (funded, trained, and provided military equipment) Indonesia in it's recent 25 year war against East Timor. One third of East Timor's 750,000 population has been eradicated to date, and the majority of it occurred in the past 2-3 years.
Under socialism nobody gets to decide anything for it the decisions are reserved to chosen few who are (unlike a corporation) under no external pressure to do anything sensible.
You can have ownership and control by the state. Russia had essentially a ruling class that decided how resources were to be used statewide. In the U.S., those with the capital (corporations) get to decide how resources are used. Current socialist movements put the control of resources into the hands of those that work them. This has shown up in the U.S. as employee ownership and single proprieterships.
They can rape steal your crops and rape your wife and there is NOTHING you can do about it.
This has nothing to do with the form of government. Situations as you describe, while sensational, have occurred in all societies where law enforcement is weak.
So far , capitalism created the best standard of living for EVERYONE involved.
Please, tell me you do not honestly believe this. Have you traveled to any developing nations? Have you read about U.S. foreign policy? As I mentioned above, there are 250,000 East Timorese that would disagree with you had they not been slaughtered for voting for a local democratic government over rule by the Indonesian military.
millions of people who risk their lives to get into this, what you call "abuse of power", are the best proof what is a superior economical system.
I never claimed that capitalism wasn't good for the capitalist elite; in fact I claimed the opposite. Sure, it's turned out well for a lot of Americans, but at the expense of people living in the developing nations. Some of them clearly benefit, but mostly it's those that set up the systems to export profit to the transnational corporations. That many people come to the U.S. supports both views, not one over the other.
Finally some advice: by insulting someone, you're much less likely to get a lively discussion and debate. It will likely devolve into more name-calling and anger. Frankly, I'm 100% behind reducing both of those.
You: Under Soviet Communism, farm workers did not determine how land was to be used.
Fine, but I said socialism, not communism. My only point is that declaring communism itself -- or any form of government -- evil by nature is rediculous. Totalitarian rule is by far the most efficient in terms of deciding laws, and Mother Theresa might even be able to pull it off. But I wouldn't want my state to use it. It's too open for easy abuse.
2,500 innocent lives is the acceptable limit for plausable deniability. Once you pass that, you've launched yourself into "genocide" territory, and only the CIA can help you now -- if they want to. ;)
That would be true only if you disregarded all the various violent external U.S. actions in South America, Africa, and Asia as well as those of the totalitarian regimes the U.S. has set up throughout Latin and South America. Sure, the U.S. tends to avoid killing its own citizens, but our leaders seem to have no qualms about supporting mass murder in other countries.
The over 5,000 children that die in Iraq every month since 1991 from sanctions overshadows any current Communist actions, and it's just the first example.
The point is not that Communism is the best form of government/monetary policy. The point is that when you give lots of power to humans, they tend to exercise it unwisely at the expense of others, regardless of the type of government. The problem as I see it is that because Capitalism's goal is to maximise the control of resources to a few, it allows a much larger abuse of power than other economic models.
For example, under Socialism, the farm workers themselves determine how farmland is used. If twenty farmers "go nuts" and decide to use tons of chemicals on their farm, they only affect one farm. However, under Capitalism, if one transnational corporation "goes nuts" and uses the same pesticides, they will affect the food for several countries instead of 500 people.
And there has never been a non-currupt democratic regime, nor a republic or totalitarian regime, so what's your point? You think you are arguing that communism must be corrupt, yet all you're saying is that every government set up by humans has been corrupt. And the sky is blue. So what?
While I assume they are overriding the "Organization" header as a marketing tactic, I believe they are ignoring the internet cultural norms for how that field is used. I hope they come to understand what they have done, perhaps inadvertantly, and change their policy. However, given the current climate, I suspect this will continue unnoticed (save the /. crowd) for years to come with no ramifications.
I will thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.
Wouldn't it be nice if that were true. However, WIPO and the IMF have provisions for transnational corporations to sue sovereign nations. For example, South Africa was recently sued by a company that makes AIDS drugs. South Africa had purchased generic replacements of those drugs, and they were sued over IP rights of the US corporation.
Your own analogy speaks to this. The software in a computer is not the silicon curcuits. The software uses the hardware to do its work. Similarly, the mind uses the brain to process information and perceive.