Non-free software is able to take people's freedom away when compared with free software. For instance, you can't (necessarily) edit and redistribute non-free software. This is clearly true and if you don't think so, please do explain why. Just as clearly, non-free is not able to take people's freedom away when compared with no software at all. On the other hand, if there is a need it will be filled by free software or non-free software, so by permitting non-free software, free software and therefore users' freedom is harmed. This is why the Free Software Foundation never talks about non-free alternatives: If a user has a need and it's only filled by a non-free program they're unaware of, they might write or pay someone to write a free program that fulfils that need. I can think of reasons why this is not really the right way to go, but I'm not reporting my opinion, just facts.
And in all these ways, free software is directly comprable to free time, and my point was about the semantics of "free" in "free software".
This is also much the same logic as American libertarians who quote one of their founding fathers who said "someone who would exchange a little freedom to obtain a security deserve neither freedom nor security" or words to that effect. I find it one of the most abhorrent quotes ever uttered in support of a generally good aim, and I definitely disagree with it.
Please provide an example of how work time leaves people less "free" than the would be if the time didn't exist. You couldn't do different things in that time... but you still can't do that if it doesn't exist.
It's about as relevant to your reply as yours was to mine.
What!? I was thinking more along the lines of millilitres measure volume i.e. three-dimensional space. Having a camera in my phone makes my phone just that much larger. Really going straight from mL -> blood is just weird and confusing. If you were here in person and realised I was making a joke I would question your sanity.
There's a massive difference between "bullshit" and "being wrong" that I wish Slashdotters would learn. You probably believe the the PP to be wrong, so say that instead of insulting them. Even if you think they're deliberately spreading information they don't believe to be true, the normal rules of society say you don't just insult someone simply because they're wrong.
It doesn't mean that, and it never did. (And don't even begin to pull that bullshit that there's no word in the English language that means "libre". There is. It's "liberated".)
Not remotely true. Free software is exactly the same as a "free society". In a free society, you're not free to do whatever you want: for instance, you can't take someone's freedom away from them. (You two can engage in a contract to agree to do something, but the other party is still free to terminate or breech the contract. They may have to pay some consequences, but it doesn't diminish their freedom.) Or "free time"; you aren't obliged to do something in particular doing that time, but you aren't allowed to do anything. For instance, during free time at school you aren't allowed to leave the grounds; at work you aren't allowed to spend ten minutes undoing your last week's work.
And "liberated" means something different from "libre". Something has only been liberated if it previously lacked freedom, and now has it; I am free, but I've never been liberated.
Heh, well, for me none is better than the highest quality. Or anything in between. I have no particular need for a camera and no particular desire to pay for one (be it in $, g or mL) I won't use.
I'm not saying it isn't a dumb idea. It is, and I'm never going to do it, for that reason and for others. But when there's so many good reasons not to do something, you don't need to bring up stupid or wrong ones like the PP did.
You have my respect for typing such a long reply into such a narrow box, but aside from that I think it's confused:
These chips aren't for "city slickers" living in America, they're for people in Mexico.
Having a chip doesn't stop you packing a gun.
Having a chip doesn't make yourself like property; it's like carrying a mobile phone. Or a gun ("oh, he can't help himself; he needs to have his own personal protection service like cattle").
Refusing to help someone clearly in need is the most inhumane thing in world, regardless of whether you have different views on personal security.
The reason western countries are safe is precisely because of the government. The bad guys know if they attack the general public there's too much risk they will be caught by the police i.e. a government arm — even if the crooks have guns and us civilians don't. I don't know what your reference to Russia and China was meant to prove; they barely have governments, will all the corruption they've got up top.
I'm not sure how much we disagree about, well, anything really. Or to the extent that we disagree it's because we're looking at things from such different angles, like if we disagree about the color of a sign because you can only see the front and I can only see the back. Still...
A person with a severe mental disability, with no proven capacity for abstract thought, severe memory loss and a lack of education on the fall of Rome or other historical events... is she human?
A human is a human because their parents were human. Well, not even that's a proper definition because if some infertile creature suddenly popped into existence and clearly had no parents and clearly could not breed with other people, I'd have no problem with classifying them as human. But our abilities don't make us human; that's more of a membership of some sort of abstract species that does it or similarity to a prototype or something along those lines.
What makes us special is that we can do all that cool stuff, mostly. Language makes us special and is a reflection of other things which make us special, but it's not what makes us people. Language is one of the things that so far only humans can do, and we clearly have a natural instinct to use them.
Since you are a software engineer (i am not), you must be aware of the problems that the lack of formal definition entails for a class of entities to be useful.
What, for computer programs yeah. Last I checked people continue to exist whether or not there's a program. People don't work like computer programs, and we can get by without formal definitions. Drawing false analogies is a good way to stifle creativity and spread confusion.
To put it in yet another sense: Is it possible to build a machine that could tell humans and non-humans apart? how? if so, then any entity that passes that test should be considered a member of the class entitled to all rights and duties of humans.
Yes. When a mummy and a daddy love each other lots and lots etc. Wait six or so years. Beware that if its training occurs in the wrong society you may receive some false negatives or, depending on your perspective, false positives. (In theory much less waiting is necessary, but in practice if you want to get a coherent answer on demand you'll probably need to wait most of that time.)
Well, that depends on your definition of "machine", but if you want a machine that picks humans according to our conventional norms, you'll need something pretty much as intelligent as a human.
You surely understand that this is form of reasoning is aberrant to any self respecting rationalist... hence, problematic.
What? No. That's completely out of left field. If we define rights and duties as being attached to humans and our machine has been set up with a wrong definition of "human", then what's wrong with fixing the definition once the error's been found?
In any case, defining rights is a tricky issue. It can't be done on the basis of democracy (hence the American tradition of enshrining some rights in the constitution), and not all human rights are applied to all humans (mentally incompentant people, for instance, lack human rights that require mental compentance).
(Maybe I'm not a rationalist and I don't know what their logic is.)
What exactly is a language? and all answers to that one tend to end up where we started: language is any medium useful to communicate human stuff.
That's a poor definition (and not for the circularity involved). I'm too tired right now to give it an adequate response, but suffice it to say a graph isn't an expression of language, but it does communicate "human stuff". Also, broadening "language" in that way is as silly as altering "planet" to "any body with a relatively strong gravitational force" or "chemical" to "any liquid capable of causing burns".
I haven't heard of any apes turning up to lectures on special relativity. Or even the sign-language equivalent of the local rag. Or doing the typical four year old "why?... why?... why?" trying to get to the bottom of things. Or even going through typical terrible twos when children have learnt they can say no and do it just because it's fun — a new toy. So either all of those things weren't enabled by language, or apes haven't learnt sign language, or both.
My understanding of ape so-called sign language is that it has very little in common with an actual sign language. Things like grammar are missing and the whole thing is pretty much hit-and-miss. So I would say apes can't learn language. From my understand the scientists who say they can are usually not linguists, and from a scientific perspective are unqualified to talk about language.
You're being disingenuous. There is clearly something which separates humans from plants and animals, and city-building, movie-directing, and literature-writing are reflections of that. Your parent didn't say "we're humans because we have built cities". I haven't built a city, but I do build software which helps. No animal does anything comparable. Sure, we're not the only social life form. We're not the only tool-using life form. We're not the only communicating life form (although I claim we're the only language-using life form).
But we are the only life form that's got to the moon under our own steam, that can remember things long after the event happened (how many magpies can remember the fall of Rome? I can, and I wasn't even there). We are different. Maybe it's a matter of degree — although from what I can see we alone augment our intelligence — but there's such a massive difference between us and the next most intelligent creature that it's fair to say we're special. And you know what? Maybe we've done that on our own. The fact that we're special doesn't mean God or gods created us so. It just means that we're fundamentally more important than any animal.
as physical beings, we would be absolutely determined in our behaviour and actions.
You make an assumption that we're wholly physical beings. Have you got any proof of that or are you just accepting it as the received wisdom of the day?
And then, there's the concept of "soul" that, so far, has only helped to muddy the waters of reasoning in this topic. I'd really like to see a way that the concept of "soul" could be included in the discussion of free will in a physical world, I just don't know of any scientifically minded philosopher who had done it.
AFAIK the soul is precisely that non-physical part of us, if you assume one exists. Therefore, it makes no sense to include the concept of soul in a physical world, no more than to consider how transubstantiation fits in (i.e. the Catholic view that during Mass the bread and wine change into the substance of flesh and blood, even though any way we have of measuring them will make them look like they're still the bread and wine they started as).
Probably a bit of food got burnt in a bushfire or something and they realised what had happened and that it made it tasty/preserved it/whatever benefit it has.
The bigger question is how people came up with the idea of beer. Mead was probably the first alcoholic drink, and it was probably nothing more than some honey some caveman collected was left out in the rain and then naturally fermented. The resulting drink probably didn't taste that great, but did have some acceptable side effects. Wine isn't much harder, once you've got the idea and the grapes (actually with the extra nutrients of fruit juice it's easier than mead). But beer? I suppose someone tried to make flour with partially germinated barley, tried to clean it because it wasn't working, and realised it was sweet and therefore fermentable.
Your breaking the golden rule in America at least if you want people to use public transport it has to be faster than driving or driving has to be priced out of that segment.
Public transport has to be better than driving for people to do it anywhere, yes. You identified a badly designed and run system and showed why people aren't going to use it. Loops are good for an inner city area where people want to get around the place, but for commuters they are an awful design. And even twenty minutes between services is too long for people to wait (average trip time for this service of yours: one hour and ten minutes); two hours is abysmal (average trip time for this service of yours: two hours).
Of course, there's other standards for "better" than just "faster". Here in Australia we've discovered "cheaper".
It sounds like you have a gripe with cars and sprawl. All electric units can push the pollution to the manufacturing and power generation where nukes and good design can help out.
Unfortunately for us in Australia most of our electricity is produced by coal and other dirty sources, and in particular in Victoria where I live it's mostly brown coal. All electric cars would actually increase the carbon emissions. Our rail-based public transport currently has more greenhouse gas emissions than London in spite of being less useful (although we have more — 617 km of trams and trains vs their 400 km of trains).
But more than just greenhouse gases, the current design of Melbourne offers little choice; if you want affordable housing (based on up-front costs) you have to live in the suburbs and drive everywhere (even if it's just to the station). In fact, you say:
For those that do not care to live in dense urban settings for various reasons we will never be efficient to serve with current methods of public transportation.
Whereas I think if people actually had a real choice, many people would choose to live in higher density areas who can't at the moment. And I live in what's probably the most "European" city in Australia in this regard; if I wanted to move to a different city that offers more of what I want, I would have to live 24 hours (plus a week of jetlag) and $2000 away from home. (Trust me: it's exactly what I'm doing. I'm moving to Germany in a fortnight, albeit for other reasons.)
Yeah, station carparks are usually full well and truly before the end of peak hour here in Melbourne too. They get used — but I doubt these people would drive to the park and ride and then take a train/bus into town if driving were a practical alternative. People will only take public transport if you make it better than driving, or if you make driving better than taking public transport. Park and rides make public transport worse when people could drive, and when people can't drive they'll find a way to get to the station anyway.
Sprawl mightn't increasing housing costs but it does increase other costs of living especially transport costs and costs related to providing services over a greater area. When you live in high density areas, you can walk to many more places than in sprawling suburbs, and you have to travel a lot longer to get to work (on average; the best case scenario would be about the same, but comparing like with like you'll never be faster in the suburbs).
The more people buy up housing that's not close to the city the more expensive trips into to work get. It takes me about an hour and a half to get to the city from home in the morning. I don't work in the city so it's not the biggest issue for me, but that's where all the decent jobs are in this town (I'm moving overseas soon) and dad does — and yeah, that's another thing, it also makes housing so expensive that people working full-time in their mid-twenties don't bother moving out because there's nowhere better to go. So just building bigger and bigger cities without building higher cities is not going to work.
One of many things that Europe's got right. I was — no, I am — amazed that it takes less time to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh than it does to go from one part of Melbourne to another.
Massive car parks at major commuter hubs are very often a bad idea. They seem good, but they actually serve to reduce public transport use.
If people have to get into their cars to drive, they'll drive the whole way unless that's impossible (e.g. because a million people need to go to the city in the morning). This means that public transport will have much less than its potential return on investment; anyone who's not travelling in the peak direction might as well drive. If you're from Melbourne you might know about the recurrent Doncaster line proposals; although I am an advocate of public transport investment, I hope that never gets build. Instead, a subway should be built to replace the 48 tram (and be extended all the way to Doncaster); in this way, the train stations will always be within walking distance of shops and houses and schools and other places people might want to go and the system will be used all day by people who don't have to use the train, but by the same token don't have to use their car.
Also, if there's a massive car park around the train station, it makes the station feel less safe and less useful. If you've got a ten or twenty minute wait before the train, you might want to go to shops to have something to do. If you've got to cross the car park, you'll be less likely to do this, you'll get bored, and you'll be more reluctant to catch the train next time. The optimum train station design has ground-level access directly to the street and the surrounding shops.
Also-also, car parks are massively expensive. It's basically dead land, no-one makes any money from them and you hope no-one's living in them. And there's not just the space inside the carpark, but the surrounding roads as well. Instead of having space for one hundred cars, you could put relatively dense housing and commercial development (relatively --- compared to the surrounding area, not compared to the whole city). In fact, a lot of stations which current have masses of car parking would be excellent candidates for the distributed CBDs (e.g. Dandenong in Melbourne).
Add in a decent bus or tram system (depending on the area) collecting people. This satisfies the problem of inefficient public transport; it's only inefficient because currently buses are treated as if they're welfare, whereas they should be treated as if they're a service. Instead of having four bus routes in each suburb running once every hour on different back roads so that no-one knows when they have to be where to take a bus, just run one route on the major roads. Make sure they're neat and tidy, and have schools run 10-4 instead of 9-3 to keep students off the buses when business folk are on them (and to improve concentration in the first period). Essentially treat buses like trams that run on liquefied dead creatures instead of petrified ones.
But cars are not the solution to public transport, cars are never a solution to greenhouse gases. If you try to accommodate cars you will end up having more cars.
I believe that the we're the ones who're living on the inside of the earth. The outside of the earth doesn't really exist though; instead what regular science considers to be the centrepoint of the earth is actually the very edge of the universe. Although if I bother reading your link a similar proposal is discussed there (attributed to Martin Gardner), but my link's to the site of a guy titled the Wizard of New Zealand, so it's probably more reliable than Wikipedia.
While that seems obvious, it's really not possible.
Oh yeah I've already had this discussion with someone; suffice it to say that I think the rules should allow for that; but seeing as they don't, they should be changed effective the next election. It is important to get people's actual opinions, not some impression of them.
And as for the rest, you are of course right; I was simplying because it wasn't my main point — that the worst thing you can do in such a situation is to tell the losers to shut up, and that (largely to ensure a peaceful transition of power) the rules as they are written must be followed, not what someone believes the purpose of the rules to be.
this sort of functionality is best handled by an extension. There's probably one out there already.
Eurgh god no. Extensions are an awful 1980s idea that somehow have managed to stick around. My computer is able to react based on the type of the content and I can override that if needs be. But don't force yet another extension onto us!
Interesting that you so emphatically consider me to be wrong.
You are entitled to your views. I consider your conclusion—that seeing as the final result was the same as the popular vote, then the final result was right—to be merely wrong or even just misguided.
I consider you so emphatically wrong because you say "Let's just drop it", "Get over it". No! That is divisive. You cite a Wikipedia article (heh) on a psychological topic. Perhaps you know a thing or two about dispute resolution as well. Just saying that because you won according to some standard (here: the election went to the team that had a majority of the popular vote; whether or not your team won is irrelevant), the rest of us should shut up — that's a great way to make a bad situation worse.
If you seriously think the popular vote is all that should count, then you should be arguing for a change to law, not to ignore it. You think the point of the system is to give the election to whoever has the most votes. Well, you call it "the will of the public" but that's not really concrete enough because the "public" is ill defined, and because it's perfectly legitimate to want to weight people's votes differently. But who else agrees with you? It would seem like it's not enough people to have the rules changed, because the electoral system is clearly not designed to give the prize to whoever wins the popular vote.
After the 2000 and 2004 elections it's appalling that the 2008 election will be played by the same rules. The rules clearly don't fit the standards of today. But you can't disregard complaints just because the result that came out is the one you feel is right.
You're arguing from the basis of the rule of law, which is fine.... I'm arguing on a more abstract level - from the basis of the purpose of those laws.
Please give me more credit than that. Saying "which is fine" is dismissive and by referencing Kohlberg you seem to be trying to imply I'm less mature than you. There's dozens of ways to argue that there's multiple kinds of morality — why did you choose a source and examples to make it look like you're further along a development trend than I am?
And more importantly than that, are you aware that Kohlberg isn't discussing sources of morality, but the nature of the argument? It's entirely possible for me to uphold the law while having a post-conventional stage of development, and it's entirely possible for you to disregard the law and still be at stage four or lower. In fact, Kohlberg 4 is more like: it's wrong to speed because it's against the law. Another argument from law that's not Kohlberg 4 is: it's wrong to speed because someone who's studied traffic accidents and risks considers 50 a safe speed for this road, and disregarding that advice puts other road users at an unnecessarily greater risk.
Whereas the Chinese have done it before so obviously they'll have to be good now. That, or just buy as out so that we can't criticise them for fear of having our economy crash and burn. Teaching them capitalism was a really bad idea on whoever's part it was.
These voting machines come in contact with potentially thousands of people in a day. Any one of them, and very probably quite a few of them, could be contagious. You wouldn't want your voting machine to catch a virus of some voter would you? and surely you wouldn't want your voting machine to spread it round to other voters. Without anti-virus software on the computer the economy would crash and terrorists would win.
My karma's high enough that I'd rather the reply anyway:) I'm not keen on so much power going to one person. If I were to reform the United States, I'd begin by dissolving it. Not down to the level of states, but three or four independent federations. I don't have anything necessarily against the idea of selection by popular vote (well, as long as I'm the only candidate), but selecting a person as powerful as the President of the United States is by popular vote gives them even more power in the form of a Mandate (a dirty word in my view), and this is a very bad thing indeed. No person other than me, no matter the means of selection, should be able to hold so much power. (And even if I held so much power I'd be very careful to divest myself of it before I died; I wouldn't want to cause a problem with succession. Waiting until after I've died just ends you up with wars.)
Ah - no. They didn't change their name to hide from past shame. They've changed their name of their voting machines department so they can continue to screw these up without influencing our perception of ATMs and other machines companies will only buy if they actually work properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Non-free software is able to take people's freedom away when compared with free software. For instance, you can't (necessarily) edit and redistribute non-free software. This is clearly true and if you don't think so, please do explain why. Just as clearly, non-free is not able to take people's freedom away when compared with no software at all. On the other hand, if there is a need it will be filled by free software or non-free software, so by permitting non-free software, free software and therefore users' freedom is harmed. This is why the Free Software Foundation never talks about non-free alternatives: If a user has a need and it's only filled by a non-free program they're unaware of, they might write or pay someone to write a free program that fulfils that need. I can think of reasons why this is not really the right way to go, but I'm not reporting my opinion, just facts.
And in all these ways, free software is directly comprable to free time, and my point was about the semantics of "free" in "free software".
This is also much the same logic as American libertarians who quote one of their founding fathers who said "someone who would exchange a little freedom to obtain a security deserve neither freedom nor security" or words to that effect. I find it one of the most abhorrent quotes ever uttered in support of a generally good aim, and I definitely disagree with it.
Please provide an example of how work time leaves people less "free" than the would be if the time didn't exist. You couldn't do different things in that time ... but you still can't do that if it doesn't exist.
It's about as relevant to your reply as yours was to mine.
What!? I was thinking more along the lines of millilitres measure volume i.e. three-dimensional space. Having a camera in my phone makes my phone just that much larger. Really going straight from mL -> blood is just weird and confusing. If you were here in person and realised I was making a joke I would question your sanity.
I call delusional bullshit, and here's why.
There's a massive difference between "bullshit" and "being wrong" that I wish Slashdotters would learn. You probably believe the the PP to be wrong, so say that instead of insulting them. Even if you think they're deliberately spreading information they don't believe to be true, the normal rules of society say you don't just insult someone simply because they're wrong.
It doesn't mean that, and it never did. (And don't even begin to pull that bullshit that there's no word in the English language that means "libre". There is. It's "liberated".)
Not remotely true. Free software is exactly the same as a "free society". In a free society, you're not free to do whatever you want: for instance, you can't take someone's freedom away from them. (You two can engage in a contract to agree to do something, but the other party is still free to terminate or breech the contract. They may have to pay some consequences, but it doesn't diminish their freedom.) Or "free time"; you aren't obliged to do something in particular doing that time, but you aren't allowed to do anything. For instance, during free time at school you aren't allowed to leave the grounds; at work you aren't allowed to spend ten minutes undoing your last week's work.
And "liberated" means something different from "libre". Something has only been liberated if it previously lacked freedom, and now has it; I am free, but I've never been liberated.
Heh, well, for me none is better than the highest quality. Or anything in between. I have no particular need for a camera and no particular desire to pay for one (be it in $, g or mL) I won't use.
I'm not saying it isn't a dumb idea. It is, and I'm never going to do it, for that reason and for others. But when there's so many good reasons not to do something, you don't need to bring up stupid or wrong ones like the PP did.
You have my respect for typing such a long reply into such a narrow box, but aside from that I think it's confused:
I'm not sure how much we disagree about, well, anything really. Or to the extent that we disagree it's because we're looking at things from such different angles, like if we disagree about the color of a sign because you can only see the front and I can only see the back. Still...
A person with a severe mental disability, with no proven capacity for abstract thought, severe memory loss and a lack of education on the fall of Rome or other historical events... is she human?
A human is a human because their parents were human. Well, not even that's a proper definition because if some infertile creature suddenly popped into existence and clearly had no parents and clearly could not breed with other people, I'd have no problem with classifying them as human. But our abilities don't make us human; that's more of a membership of some sort of abstract species that does it or similarity to a prototype or something along those lines.
What makes us special is that we can do all that cool stuff, mostly. Language makes us special and is a reflection of other things which make us special, but it's not what makes us people. Language is one of the things that so far only humans can do, and we clearly have a natural instinct to use them.
Since you are a software engineer (i am not), you must be aware of the problems that the lack of formal definition entails for a class of entities to be useful.
What, for computer programs yeah. Last I checked people continue to exist whether or not there's a program. People don't work like computer programs, and we can get by without formal definitions. Drawing false analogies is a good way to stifle creativity and spread confusion.
To put it in yet another sense: Is it possible to build a machine that could tell humans and non-humans apart? how? if so, then any entity that passes that test should be considered a member of the class entitled to all rights and duties of humans.
Yes. When a mummy and a daddy love each other lots and lots etc. Wait six or so years. Beware that if its training occurs in the wrong society you may receive some false negatives or, depending on your perspective, false positives. (In theory much less waiting is necessary, but in practice if you want to get a coherent answer on demand you'll probably need to wait most of that time.)
Well, that depends on your definition of "machine", but if you want a machine that picks humans according to our conventional norms, you'll need something pretty much as intelligent as a human.
You surely understand that this is form of reasoning is aberrant to any self respecting rationalist... hence, problematic.
What? No. That's completely out of left field. If we define rights and duties as being attached to humans and our machine has been set up with a wrong definition of "human", then what's wrong with fixing the definition once the error's been found?
In any case, defining rights is a tricky issue. It can't be done on the basis of democracy (hence the American tradition of enshrining some rights in the constitution), and not all human rights are applied to all humans (mentally incompentant people, for instance, lack human rights that require mental compentance).
(Maybe I'm not a rationalist and I don't know what their logic is.)
What exactly is a language? and all answers to that one tend to end up where we started: language is any medium useful to communicate human stuff.
That's a poor definition (and not for the circularity involved). I'm too tired right now to give it an adequate response, but suffice it to say a graph isn't an expression of language, but it does communicate "human stuff". Also, broadening "language" in that way is as silly as altering "planet" to "any body with a relatively strong gravitational force" or "chemical" to "any liquid capable of causing burns".
I haven't heard of any apes turning up to lectures on special relativity. Or even the sign-language equivalent of the local rag. Or doing the typical four year old "why? ... why? ... why?" trying to get to the bottom of things. Or even going through typical terrible twos when children have learnt they can say no and do it just because it's fun — a new toy. So either all of those things weren't enabled by language, or apes haven't learnt sign language, or both.
My understanding of ape so-called sign language is that it has very little in common with an actual sign language. Things like grammar are missing and the whole thing is pretty much hit-and-miss. So I would say apes can't learn language. From my understand the scientists who say they can are usually not linguists, and from a scientific perspective are unqualified to talk about language.
You're being disingenuous. There is clearly something which separates humans from plants and animals, and city-building, movie-directing, and literature-writing are reflections of that. Your parent didn't say "we're humans because we have built cities". I haven't built a city, but I do build software which helps. No animal does anything comparable. Sure, we're not the only social life form. We're not the only tool-using life form. We're not the only communicating life form (although I claim we're the only language-using life form).
But we are the only life form that's got to the moon under our own steam, that can remember things long after the event happened (how many magpies can remember the fall of Rome? I can, and I wasn't even there). We are different. Maybe it's a matter of degree — although from what I can see we alone augment our intelligence — but there's such a massive difference between us and the next most intelligent creature that it's fair to say we're special. And you know what? Maybe we've done that on our own. The fact that we're special doesn't mean God or gods created us so. It just means that we're fundamentally more important than any animal.
as physical beings, we would be absolutely determined in our behaviour and actions.
You make an assumption that we're wholly physical beings. Have you got any proof of that or are you just accepting it as the received wisdom of the day?
And then, there's the concept of "soul" that, so far, has only helped to muddy the waters of reasoning in this topic. I'd really like to see a way that the concept of "soul" could be included in the discussion of free will in a physical world, I just don't know of any scientifically minded philosopher who had done it.
AFAIK the soul is precisely that non-physical part of us, if you assume one exists. Therefore, it makes no sense to include the concept of soul in a physical world, no more than to consider how transubstantiation fits in (i.e. the Catholic view that during Mass the bread and wine change into the substance of flesh and blood, even though any way we have of measuring them will make them look like they're still the bread and wine they started as).
Probably a bit of food got burnt in a bushfire or something and they realised what had happened and that it made it tasty/preserved it/whatever benefit it has.
The bigger question is how people came up with the idea of beer. Mead was probably the first alcoholic drink, and it was probably nothing more than some honey some caveman collected was left out in the rain and then naturally fermented. The resulting drink probably didn't taste that great, but did have some acceptable side effects. Wine isn't much harder, once you've got the idea and the grapes (actually with the extra nutrients of fruit juice it's easier than mead). But beer? I suppose someone tried to make flour with partially germinated barley, tried to clean it because it wasn't working, and realised it was sweet and therefore fermentable.
Your breaking the golden rule in America at least if you want people to use public transport it has to be faster than driving or driving has to be priced out of that segment.
Public transport has to be better than driving for people to do it anywhere, yes. You identified a badly designed and run system and showed why people aren't going to use it. Loops are good for an inner city area where people want to get around the place, but for commuters they are an awful design. And even twenty minutes between services is too long for people to wait (average trip time for this service of yours: one hour and ten minutes); two hours is abysmal (average trip time for this service of yours: two hours).
Of course, there's other standards for "better" than just "faster". Here in Australia we've discovered "cheaper".
It sounds like you have a gripe with cars and sprawl. All electric units can push the pollution to the manufacturing and power generation where nukes and good design can help out.
Unfortunately for us in Australia most of our electricity is produced by coal and other dirty sources, and in particular in Victoria where I live it's mostly brown coal. All electric cars would actually increase the carbon emissions. Our rail-based public transport currently has more greenhouse gas emissions than London in spite of being less useful (although we have more — 617 km of trams and trains vs their 400 km of trains).
But more than just greenhouse gases, the current design of Melbourne offers little choice; if you want affordable housing (based on up-front costs) you have to live in the suburbs and drive everywhere (even if it's just to the station). In fact, you say:
For those that do not care to live in dense urban settings for various reasons we will never be efficient to serve with current methods of public transportation.
Whereas I think if people actually had a real choice, many people would choose to live in higher density areas who can't at the moment. And I live in what's probably the most "European" city in Australia in this regard; if I wanted to move to a different city that offers more of what I want, I would have to live 24 hours (plus a week of jetlag) and $2000 away from home. (Trust me: it's exactly what I'm doing. I'm moving to Germany in a fortnight, albeit for other reasons.)
Yeah, station carparks are usually full well and truly before the end of peak hour here in Melbourne too. They get used — but I doubt these people would drive to the park and ride and then take a train/bus into town if driving were a practical alternative. People will only take public transport if you make it better than driving, or if you make driving better than taking public transport. Park and rides make public transport worse when people could drive, and when people can't drive they'll find a way to get to the station anyway.
Sprawl mightn't increasing housing costs but it does increase other costs of living especially transport costs and costs related to providing services over a greater area. When you live in high density areas, you can walk to many more places than in sprawling suburbs, and you have to travel a lot longer to get to work (on average; the best case scenario would be about the same, but comparing like with like you'll never be faster in the suburbs).
The more people buy up housing that's not close to the city the more expensive trips into to work get. It takes me about an hour and a half to get to the city from home in the morning. I don't work in the city so it's not the biggest issue for me, but that's where all the decent jobs are in this town (I'm moving overseas soon) and dad does — and yeah, that's another thing, it also makes housing so expensive that people working full-time in their mid-twenties don't bother moving out because there's nowhere better to go. So just building bigger and bigger cities without building higher cities is not going to work.
One of many things that Europe's got right. I was — no, I am — amazed that it takes less time to go from Glasgow to Edinburgh than it does to go from one part of Melbourne to another.
Massive car parks at major commuter hubs are very often a bad idea. They seem good, but they actually serve to reduce public transport use.
If people have to get into their cars to drive, they'll drive the whole way unless that's impossible (e.g. because a million people need to go to the city in the morning). This means that public transport will have much less than its potential return on investment; anyone who's not travelling in the peak direction might as well drive. If you're from Melbourne you might know about the recurrent Doncaster line proposals; although I am an advocate of public transport investment, I hope that never gets build. Instead, a subway should be built to replace the 48 tram (and be extended all the way to Doncaster); in this way, the train stations will always be within walking distance of shops and houses and schools and other places people might want to go and the system will be used all day by people who don't have to use the train, but by the same token don't have to use their car.
Also, if there's a massive car park around the train station, it makes the station feel less safe and less useful. If you've got a ten or twenty minute wait before the train, you might want to go to shops to have something to do. If you've got to cross the car park, you'll be less likely to do this, you'll get bored, and you'll be more reluctant to catch the train next time. The optimum train station design has ground-level access directly to the street and the surrounding shops.
Also-also, car parks are massively expensive. It's basically dead land, no-one makes any money from them and you hope no-one's living in them. And there's not just the space inside the carpark, but the surrounding roads as well. Instead of having space for one hundred cars, you could put relatively dense housing and commercial development (relatively --- compared to the surrounding area, not compared to the whole city). In fact, a lot of stations which current have masses of car parking would be excellent candidates for the distributed CBDs (e.g. Dandenong in Melbourne).
Add in a decent bus or tram system (depending on the area) collecting people. This satisfies the problem of inefficient public transport; it's only inefficient because currently buses are treated as if they're welfare, whereas they should be treated as if they're a service. Instead of having four bus routes in each suburb running once every hour on different back roads so that no-one knows when they have to be where to take a bus, just run one route on the major roads. Make sure they're neat and tidy, and have schools run 10-4 instead of 9-3 to keep students off the buses when business folk are on them (and to improve concentration in the first period). Essentially treat buses like trams that run on liquefied dead creatures instead of petrified ones.
But cars are not the solution to public transport, cars are never a solution to greenhouse gases. If you try to accommodate cars you will end up having more cars.
I believe that the we're the ones who're living on the inside of the earth. The outside of the earth doesn't really exist though; instead what regular science considers to be the centrepoint of the earth is actually the very edge of the universe. Although if I bother reading your link a similar proposal is discussed there (attributed to Martin Gardner), but my link's to the site of a guy titled the Wizard of New Zealand, so it's probably more reliable than Wikipedia.
While that seems obvious, it's really not possible.
Oh yeah I've already had this discussion with someone; suffice it to say that I think the rules should allow for that; but seeing as they don't, they should be changed effective the next election. It is important to get people's actual opinions, not some impression of them.
And as for the rest, you are of course right; I was simplying because it wasn't my main point — that the worst thing you can do in such a situation is to tell the losers to shut up, and that (largely to ensure a peaceful transition of power) the rules as they are written must be followed, not what someone believes the purpose of the rules to be.
this sort of functionality is best handled by an extension. There's probably one out there already.
Eurgh god no. Extensions are an awful 1980s idea that somehow have managed to stick around. My computer is able to react based on the type of the content and I can override that if needs be. But don't force yet another extension onto us!
Interesting that you so emphatically consider me to be wrong.
You are entitled to your views. I consider your conclusion—that seeing as the final result was the same as the popular vote, then the final result was right—to be merely wrong or even just misguided.
I consider you so emphatically wrong because you say "Let's just drop it", "Get over it". No! That is divisive. You cite a Wikipedia article (heh) on a psychological topic. Perhaps you know a thing or two about dispute resolution as well. Just saying that because you won according to some standard (here: the election went to the team that had a majority of the popular vote; whether or not your team won is irrelevant), the rest of us should shut up — that's a great way to make a bad situation worse.
If you seriously think the popular vote is all that should count, then you should be arguing for a change to law, not to ignore it. You think the point of the system is to give the election to whoever has the most votes. Well, you call it "the will of the public" but that's not really concrete enough because the "public" is ill defined, and because it's perfectly legitimate to want to weight people's votes differently. But who else agrees with you? It would seem like it's not enough people to have the rules changed, because the electoral system is clearly not designed to give the prize to whoever wins the popular vote.
After the 2000 and 2004 elections it's appalling that the 2008 election will be played by the same rules. The rules clearly don't fit the standards of today. But you can't disregard complaints just because the result that came out is the one you feel is right.
You're arguing from the basis of the rule of law, which is fine. ... I'm arguing on a more abstract level - from the basis of the purpose of those laws.
Please give me more credit than that. Saying "which is fine" is dismissive and by referencing Kohlberg you seem to be trying to imply I'm less mature than you. There's dozens of ways to argue that there's multiple kinds of morality — why did you choose a source and examples to make it look like you're further along a development trend than I am?
And more importantly than that, are you aware that Kohlberg isn't discussing sources of morality, but the nature of the argument? It's entirely possible for me to uphold the law while having a post-conventional stage of development, and it's entirely possible for you to disregard the law and still be at stage four or lower. In fact, Kohlberg 4 is more like: it's wrong to speed because it's against the law. Another argument from law that's not Kohlberg 4 is: it's wrong to speed because someone who's studied traffic accidents and risks considers 50 a safe speed for this road, and disregarding that advice puts other road users at an unnecessarily greater risk.
Whereas the Chinese have done it before so obviously they'll have to be good now. That, or just buy as out so that we can't criticise them for fear of having our economy crash and burn. Teaching them capitalism was a really bad idea on whoever's part it was.
These voting machines come in contact with potentially thousands of people in a day. Any one of them, and very probably quite a few of them, could be contagious. You wouldn't want your voting machine to catch a virus of some voter would you? and surely you wouldn't want your voting machine to spread it round to other voters. Without anti-virus software on the computer the economy would crash and terrorists would win.
My karma's high enough that I'd rather the reply anyway :) I'm not keen on so much power going to one person. If I were to reform the United States, I'd begin by dissolving it. Not down to the level of states, but three or four independent federations. I don't have anything necessarily against the idea of selection by popular vote (well, as long as I'm the only candidate), but selecting a person as powerful as the President of the United States is by popular vote gives them even more power in the form of a Mandate (a dirty word in my view), and this is a very bad thing indeed. No person other than me, no matter the means of selection, should be able to hold so much power. (And even if I held so much power I'd be very careful to divest myself of it before I died; I wouldn't want to cause a problem with succession. Waiting until after I've died just ends you up with wars.)
Ah - no. They didn't change their name to hide from past shame. They've changed their name of their voting machines department so they can continue to screw these up without influencing our perception of ATMs and other machines companies will only buy if they actually work properly.