I don't think Black Friday sales are quite the right analogy. If a store has a big sale on blenders, they've already paid the blender manufacturer $X per unit, and then set their prices based on that, or even below if they think it'll add enough overall sales on other items to make up for the loss. They don't get to tell the blender manufacturer "Hey guys, we're having a big sale, so instead of paying you $X, we're only going to pay you $Y".
Laura Kriho was convicted and fined $1200 for attempting jury nullification.
You left out that she was ultimately aquitted. The judge and prosecutor who initially came after her were clearly very wrong, but in the end, the system corrected their actions, and reaffirmed the jurors right to be free from prosecution for decisions made during deliberations.
I have no ethical issues with downloading if I already bought a physical copy.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'm currently getting a novel I wrote ready to go on sale, so I've really given a lot of thought to this from the position of an author (no, I'm not famous, and almost certainly won't get rich from this, but I've thought it through anyway). Personally, what I'd love to do is somehow link the book sale so that if someone purchases a physical copy, they get some kind of coupon or code that entitles them to a free Kindle/Nook/iBook/whatever copy. Right now I have no way to do that, but it strikes me as fair to all parties involved; the author gets his royalty for the book, and the ebook in this case is essentially free since it's already available for purchase anyway (no additional manufacturing/shipping fees involved). Since I have no way to actually do this [yet], I suppose I'd have to take the official stance of "please don't do that" as far as downloading a cracked copy, but personally if you've already bought a physical copy having a "free" ebook version wouldn't bother me in the least.
Okay, that he can talk is impressive, but either he can't read, or he's already a proper slashdotter and doesn't RTFA. If he did, he'd know that this law makes it so that you can't sell him, or his offspring, although giving him/them away is still perfectly fine, as is taking him/them to a shelter for adoption. Nobody is talking about making having pets illegal, only selling them, with the intent being to discourage puppy-mills. Mr. Yorkie-poo could continue to lie on the couch watching Lassie reruns while eating kibbles 'n bits until his next appointment with his physical therapist. Btw; hope his knee is feeling better.
except when no work means no income and no nice things
That's the part I was getting at. Of course it's nice to have more free time and still get paid, but eventually I think we'll hit a tipping point where an awful lot of people just aren't really suited to the kinds of jobs that can/will be done better and more cheaply by machines.
I really didn't mean to, but in the context of the thread I'm not sure what else you'd be getting at by bringing up a concern about what taxi/truck drivers are supposed to do if they're replaced by robots.
I don't understand how a driverless car will do that, unless being able to do other things while commuting is important.
Google cites improved safety and efficiency in personal transportation as their goal. Sounds good to me. If there's no improvement to be had, then the technology probably wont catch on.
Replacing the commuter train from NJ to NY with a bunch of cars that can drive themself does not seem the most efficient use or resources.
Who's talking about replacing commuter trains? Honestly, Manhattan is pretty much at peek capacity for auto traffic as it is. Granted, these things might improve traffic flow, which would increase capacity a little, but for a city like N.Y. the best idea is probably to beef up the trains/busses, make sure ticket prices are reasonable, and keep raising the bridge and tunnel tolls. I'm not against the idea of making driving in parts of the city by permit only, and improving the subways/bus services. Hell, add some kind of Disney-esque monorail system, it'd go nicely with Times Square now. One of the trickiest parts though would be providing enough parking on the Jersey and Long Island sides for people to drop off their cars to catch a train, it can be pretty tough to find parking around the NJ Transit stations in a lot of places, and I've heard LIRR stations aren't much better.
I would however ask for some type of proof of your last point in referring to human labor generally going down. Studies show that labor does not decrease, but only is transformed to different types of labor, from farm to factory, from factory to office,
I'll concede that I can't prove that here, it's way to complicated condense into a/. post, and there are certainly arguments to be made either way.
Security agents are frisking infants and you think that 'The Protectors' are going to allow a driverless vehicle in?
Why not? We already have suicide bombers that are willing to blow themselves to hell for their cause, and it'd probably be a lot easier to get one of them to suddenly hit the gas and drive through the glass into the terminal than it would be to reprogram one of these cars to do it. Hell, the suicide bomber and a 20 year old Honda would also be a lot cheaper to use than one of these things for quite a long time to come.
That's not the point. If there were 400 or 4,000,000 buggy whip makers, the profession would still be obsolete and banning cars wouldn't have been a reasonable action just to protect those jobs. Yes, it's possible that self driving vehicles could reduce the call for taxis and delivery people, but that doesn't mean that we should avoid developing the technology, especially if it does it better than those people do it now. Robots have displaced millions of factory workers, computers in general have displaced millions more. Do you think we should be seriously thinking that we shouldn't have developed computers or robots though because of that?
The fact is that as technology progresses, the need for human labor generally trends down, and we haven't come up with a really good way to deal with what to do with that excess labor force. I'm pretty sure the answer isn't to stop developing new technologies.
Yes and no. The advantage of a dedicated hardware receiver for these messages is that if the cellular system is overwhelmed or data connections are broken, they can still push the message. I'm thinking it'd be a regular receiver (like GPS or FM), that listens for an alert squawk on the emergency frequency, and if it hears one it wakes up completely and starts displaying the messages. Depending on where they broadcast from, this could also get messages to people who are way outside of normal cellular coverage areas. My big question is; how much power would this draw? I tend to shut off most of the radios on my phone when I'm not using them to extend my battery life (no GPS, 4G, FM, and depending where I am 3G, just the regular phone). I'd rather not see battery life get noticeably worse to support a receiver that, in theory, should almost never be needed.
Windows computers require a little more comprehension of how computers work to use,
Unless you're talking about the ability to troubleshoot broken drivers or remove viruses/spyware, I'm really not sure what you mean. OSX is Unix.
but they are more widely supported and far more powerful on the software end.
Such as?
They also are more 'liberal' in that everything you run on them doesn't have to be 'verified and approved' by Fuhrer Jobs and his crew. I can sit down and write any program I want, for free...
Not true. I write and run my own code, and can download anything I want to run on my Mac, there is no verification or approval process. You also can install and use the full version of XCode for free, last I checked the full version of Visual Studio was pretty expensive.
Apple requires me to register for their developer program, pay them for the right to do the developing, and then submit my applications for approval.
Not true at all. You've taken what you've heard about the iPhone/iPod/iPad and completely misapplied it to the Mac product line.
Just like it serves the tribe to have some be warriors, even though the warrior's life is often brutally cut short.
As long as the warrior lives long enough to procreate, he's served his purpose as far as evolution is concerned. Evolution is a machine, it doesn't think, plan or feel. If a trait arose that guaranteed that you'd get to procreate successfully more than the next guy by age 16, but then die a horrible painful death, we'd see lifespans drop to 16.
Many rational ID proponents are simply trying to make the point that God Intelligently Designed the universe, and that science and evolution are the way they are because God made the universe that way.
Even as an atheist that seriously doubts the existence of God, I see no reason what that claim is incompatible with science.
They're perfectly welcome to make this point in their place of worship, or their own religion classes, or any number of other venues. The simple fact is that there is no scientific basis for a god, there's no need for a god to exist for scientific theories to be explained, and therefore it's not a subject that needs to be injected into a science class. If you're an atheist, I'm puzzled why you'd be okay with introducing a fictional concept into a science class, rather than just keeping to material that's relevant to the subject.
Are you seriously suggesting that all illness is avoidable through lifestyle choices? You don't have to eat fast food every day or smoke heavily to get an unexpected illness, and I can't believe that I should even have to say that.
Smoking increases your chances of getting lung cancer, but if you really think there's no way you can get it just by not smoking you're badly misinformed. Same for heart disease and diabetes. And how about the myriad of diseases that have absolutely nothing at all to do with lifestyle choices? Breast and prostate cancer spring to mind. Or how about a nice bout with e-coli, or do you send everything you eat out to a lab for analysis before you take a bite?
Most times, becoming ill is not some kind of punishment for making poor choices, or any choices at all. You can do all the right things and still end up in an oncologists office, and until it happens you'll never see it coming.
You're right, life isn't fair. That doesn't mean that we have to purposely allow needless suffering while turning our heads and looking the other way. It's ironic that I have to tell this to someone who calls himself "Archangel Michael".
I have no evidence that my brain is not floating in some vat somewhere with electrodes sticking out of it, but I take it on faith that it's not.
And even if it was, it'd be irrelevant. Science is about exploring and explaining the reality that we actually live in. If that reality were engineered, and done so in a way that we could never discover it, it wouldn't matter because we could never experience it anyway unless we found and exploited some flaw that allowed us to "look behind the curtain". Unless and until such a flaw is discovered, there's no point in worrying about the whole thing being a construct because by design it's the only reality we can ever know until the sysadmin decides otherwise.
What's in any theory of "origin of species": based on evolution or Creation, is "demonstrable, repeatable and self-correcting"?
I think you're really referring to the origin of life when you say "origin of species", so the answer is that we don't really have a proper theory. There are a number of hypotheses. Once they become testable and supported by more evidence one of those hypotheses may become a theory.
When people compare evolution to creationism, they're immediately muddying the discussion because the two really don't attempt to describe the same thing. Creation is, at it's base, a religious attempt to answer "where did life come from". Evolution attempts to answer "How did current life-forms develop from earlier life-forms". The only time they intersect is when the religious version attempts to claim that life has always existed in the form we see now, and did not slowly evolve from earlier versions.
Couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was for or why I'd want one though.
Not that I'm criticizing your choice, but I could say the exact same thing about a netbook. Same form-factor things that I don't like about my laptop when it comes to casual use, generally less battery life, more potential upkeep and more parts to break (keyboard, HD, display hinge, etc). That a netbook works for you is great, but that's really only useful for deciding what you want, not in understanding what other people want.
The people who disagree are immune to persuasion with facts and information.
Your opinion does not constitute fact.
Consensus has nothing to do with objective truth.
Your opinion does not constitute objective truth.
In an amicus curae brief, in the case of New York v. Ferber, the ACLU took the position that it should be legal for the owner of an adult bookstore to sell videos of teenaged boys masturbating. Citation provided.
Do you not understand NY v Ferber, or are you being deliberately disingenuous? The brief filed by the ACLU argued that unless the court applied the "Miller Test", material that was not obscene (such as educational materials) could be considered obscene. They made no judgement specifically on the material that was at the center of the case, other than to say that child pornography that "failed" the Miller test deserved no constitutional protection and should be banned. They were talking about the legal arguments used in the case, not what the outcome should be. The brief was one of many, including various mainstream publishers and publishers/booksellers associations. The material in question would certainly fail the Miller test. Is falsely accusing people of supporting child-pornography now a conservative value?
Abortion is a homicide issue, it has nothing to do with reproductive rights. You have the right to prevent pregnancy, you do not have the right to kill your child.
Again, your opinion. While I understand that it would be easier for you if you were dictator and you could make laws based on your opinions, that's simply not the case.
You are incorrect. 2008, the last year of Bush's Presidency, the number of abortions were down to their lowest level since the 1970s.
What's your point? They were legal, and available that year, so this doesn't really mean anything in the context of supporting a ban. Supporters of abortion rights, believe it or not, do not actually like abortions. Safe, legal, and rare is the common meme. Nobody wants that number to actually go up, it's always preferable for them to go down.
I think it's preferable to work within the law, but I have no real problem with those who do not. Scott Roeder, Paul Hill and Michael Griffin have prevented thousands of abortions.
So you support lawlessness and murder. Nice. Don't come back with "abortion is murder", that's a point that is opinion, not fact. The three people that you named and are okay with are, unarguably, murderers. Now it's clear for me, you're not just a zealot, you're among the worst the debate has to offer. I don't even have the words to describe how worthless you are, and damaging to your own "side" of the debate. You've now moved from childish and shrill to despicable and worthy of nothing but disgust.
Gestures are going to kill the tablet. Why hold this expensive and delicate thing that's too big to fit into my pocket when I should just be able to gesture and say what I want to my TV or PC?
Maybe I missed something, but what does one have to do with the other? This is like saying that I don't need a lawnmower because my microwave oven is programmable. The gesture thing for the TV does sound cool, but I'm not bringing a 46" TV out and about with me. Conversely, I'll still be using my iPad to read/. while the kids watch Sesame Street on the TV, or to look up recipes while I'm cooking in the kitchen where there's nothing to gesture at.... .
You've got that backwards. We're saying "It should be illegal to kill babies", your side is saying "But these are OUR rights!",
Yeah, it's impossible to not know what your "side" is saying. Have you considered that part of the reason you can't convince people who don't agree with you is the shrill tone you take?
So, since you can now see into the future, tell me what the next series of Powerball numbers will be.
Yes, because predicting a specific string of numbers is exactly like watching a trend and predicting where it is likely to end up.
Every wife-beater and child rapist in the world agree with you.
But again, there's almost universal consensus that wife-beating and child-raping is wrong. Come back when you have the same level of consensus on abortion.
The ACLU happens to think that both should be legal.
Who's lying now? I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and have NEVER heard that the ACLU thinks child porn should be legal. This is one of those "citation needed" moments.
More over, very few people think there should be "no abortions". I am not among them. I believe that abortion should be legal to save the life or physical health of the mother.
And guess what, I agree with you , but I don't agree that making abortion under other circumstances illegal is even sort of close to the right way to do that. It's not my place or yours to tell someone that you don't even know that they have to remain pregnant against their wishes. Especially if that child is likely to have a serious defect, or in cases of rape or incest.
I'm not a tea party member. I'm just a plain old Republican. I happen to like the tea party, but I'm not one of them.
Pretty much all the arguments about the tea party apply to conservative republicans. The tea party, contrary to what they keep trying to claim, are just a noisy conservative group.
I like Coca Cola, you may like Pepsi, that's a difference of opinion. Neither person in that context would be lying. You, on the other hand, are misrepresenting the facts regarding this issue.
You've done nothing to show that I'm misrepresenting a thing. Abortion and the morning-after pill are reproductive rights issues, and issues that the tea party tends to come down against. The fact that this doesn't make you feel good doesn't make it different. You, on the other hand, are trying to separate issues you don't like in an attempt at changing the argument. Who's misrepresenting now, hint, that would be you.
That does make you a liar.
I'm not a liar, that's a lie you lying liar.
I'm not trying to sway your opinion. You seem to think that the exchange is about you and me. It's not. The exchange is about the observers.
Like I said, you want to have a public tantrum and feel good about it. People like you ensure that abortion will be around forever. You alienate the people that you claim to want to sway, offer no practical solutions, and do absolutely nothing aside from display your enormous sense of self-proclaimed moral superiority. You're an ineffective, marginalized nuisance, and you'll never accomplish a thing as far as stopping, or even slowing the number of abortions.
Your position is based on obfuscation and bullshit.
Like it or not, abortion and the morning after pill *are* part of reproductive rights issues. You don't get to redefine the argument just because it fits your personal belief system better.
No one wants to ban hormonal birth control or your "plenty of other things".
And I didn't claim they do, although since you keep bringing it up, prominent members of the tea party (including Sarah Palin) have said publicly that they don't approve of *any* form of birth control, including by married couples. They haven't said ban, but I'm not comfortable that they wouldn't go down that road if they thought for a second they could.
People, like me, want a ban to abortion on demand.
And people like me think it's not your business to butt into other people's lives.
Calling abortion on demand "reproductive rights" is very much akin to calling child pornography "free speech".
Oh yeah, it's almost exactly the same, except for the part about there being nearly universal consensus that child-porn should be illegal, and the fact that the "no abortion" crowd is a minority. But why let a little detail like that get in the way of a perfectly stupid analogy.
And yes, I would get just as angry if you were to make such an asinine statement.
Shit, I better put out my cigar, it might catch your strawman on fire.
That's not what makes you a liar. What makes you a liar is that you're pretending that there is any other controversy in regards to "reproductive rights".
See, there's another charming feature of the tea party members, the propensity to scream "LIAR" any time they don't agree with or believe something someone else says. You don't agree with me, fine, nifty, very nice for you. That does not make me a liar. Calling me one though, over and over, proves only that you're not interested in debate, and you have no actual interest in trying to sway my opinion, you just want a chance to have a public tantrum and still somehow feel good about it. This kind of childishness is a big part of what's wrong with American politics today, thanks for being part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Black Friday sales are quite the right analogy. If a store has a big sale on blenders, they've already paid the blender manufacturer $X per unit, and then set their prices based on that, or even below if they think it'll add enough overall sales on other items to make up for the loss. They don't get to tell the blender manufacturer "Hey guys, we're having a big sale, so instead of paying you $X, we're only going to pay you $Y".
You left out that she was ultimately aquitted. The judge and prosecutor who initially came after her were clearly very wrong, but in the end, the system corrected their actions, and reaffirmed the jurors right to be free from prosecution for decisions made during deliberations.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'm currently getting a novel I wrote ready to go on sale, so I've really given a lot of thought to this from the position of an author (no, I'm not famous, and almost certainly won't get rich from this, but I've thought it through anyway). Personally, what I'd love to do is somehow link the book sale so that if someone purchases a physical copy, they get some kind of coupon or code that entitles them to a free Kindle/Nook/iBook/whatever copy. Right now I have no way to do that, but it strikes me as fair to all parties involved; the author gets his royalty for the book, and the ebook in this case is essentially free since it's already available for purchase anyway (no additional manufacturing/shipping fees involved). Since I have no way to actually do this [yet], I suppose I'd have to take the official stance of "please don't do that" as far as downloading a cracked copy, but personally if you've already bought a physical copy having a "free" ebook version wouldn't bother me in the least.
Okay, that he can talk is impressive, but either he can't read, or he's already a proper slashdotter and doesn't RTFA. If he did, he'd know that this law makes it so that you can't sell him, or his offspring, although giving him/them away is still perfectly fine, as is taking him/them to a shelter for adoption. Nobody is talking about making having pets illegal, only selling them, with the intent being to discourage puppy-mills. Mr. Yorkie-poo could continue to lie on the couch watching Lassie reruns while eating kibbles 'n bits until his next appointment with his physical therapist. Btw; hope his knee is feeling better.
Never heard that one, I must be new here.....
That's the part I was getting at. Of course it's nice to have more free time and still get paid, but eventually I think we'll hit a tipping point where an awful lot of people just aren't really suited to the kinds of jobs that can/will be done better and more cheaply by machines.
I really didn't mean to, but in the context of the thread I'm not sure what else you'd be getting at by bringing up a concern about what taxi/truck drivers are supposed to do if they're replaced by robots.
Google cites improved safety and efficiency in personal transportation as their goal. Sounds good to me. If there's no improvement to be had, then the technology probably wont catch on.
Who's talking about replacing commuter trains? Honestly, Manhattan is pretty much at peek capacity for auto traffic as it is. Granted, these things might improve traffic flow, which would increase capacity a little, but for a city like N.Y. the best idea is probably to beef up the trains/busses, make sure ticket prices are reasonable, and keep raising the bridge and tunnel tolls. I'm not against the idea of making driving in parts of the city by permit only, and improving the subways/bus services. Hell, add some kind of Disney-esque monorail system, it'd go nicely with Times Square now. One of the trickiest parts though would be providing enough parking on the Jersey and Long Island sides for people to drop off their cars to catch a train, it can be pretty tough to find parking around the NJ Transit stations in a lot of places, and I've heard LIRR stations aren't much better.
I'll concede that I can't prove that here, it's way to complicated condense into a /. post, and there are certainly arguments to be made either way.
Why not? We already have suicide bombers that are willing to blow themselves to hell for their cause, and it'd probably be a lot easier to get one of them to suddenly hit the gas and drive through the glass into the terminal than it would be to reprogram one of these cars to do it. Hell, the suicide bomber and a 20 year old Honda would also be a lot cheaper to use than one of these things for quite a long time to come.
That's not the point. If there were 400 or 4,000,000 buggy whip makers, the profession would still be obsolete and banning cars wouldn't have been a reasonable action just to protect those jobs. Yes, it's possible that self driving vehicles could reduce the call for taxis and delivery people, but that doesn't mean that we should avoid developing the technology, especially if it does it better than those people do it now. Robots have displaced millions of factory workers, computers in general have displaced millions more. Do you think we should be seriously thinking that we shouldn't have developed computers or robots though because of that?
The fact is that as technology progresses, the need for human labor generally trends down, and we haven't come up with a really good way to deal with what to do with that excess labor force. I'm pretty sure the answer isn't to stop developing new technologies.
If there was an award for incredibly random and strange trolls, you'd have it locked up there skippy.....
Yes and no. The advantage of a dedicated hardware receiver for these messages is that if the cellular system is overwhelmed or data connections are broken, they can still push the message. I'm thinking it'd be a regular receiver (like GPS or FM), that listens for an alert squawk on the emergency frequency, and if it hears one it wakes up completely and starts displaying the messages. Depending on where they broadcast from, this could also get messages to people who are way outside of normal cellular coverage areas. My big question is; how much power would this draw? I tend to shut off most of the radios on my phone when I'm not using them to extend my battery life (no GPS, 4G, FM, and depending where I am 3G, just the regular phone). I'd rather not see battery life get noticeably worse to support a receiver that, in theory, should almost never be needed.
Unless you're talking about the ability to troubleshoot broken drivers or remove viruses/spyware, I'm really not sure what you mean. OSX is Unix.
Such as?
Not true. I write and run my own code, and can download anything I want to run on my Mac, there is no verification or approval process. You also can install and use the full version of XCode for free, last I checked the full version of Visual Studio was pretty expensive.
Not true at all. You've taken what you've heard about the iPhone/iPod/iPad and completely misapplied it to the Mac product line.
Was this before, or after you started calling yourself "CrazyJim"?
As long as the warrior lives long enough to procreate, he's served his purpose as far as evolution is concerned. Evolution is a machine, it doesn't think, plan or feel. If a trait arose that guaranteed that you'd get to procreate successfully more than the next guy by age 16, but then die a horrible painful death, we'd see lifespans drop to 16.
They're perfectly welcome to make this point in their place of worship, or their own religion classes, or any number of other venues. The simple fact is that there is no scientific basis for a god, there's no need for a god to exist for scientific theories to be explained, and therefore it's not a subject that needs to be injected into a science class. If you're an atheist, I'm puzzled why you'd be okay with introducing a fictional concept into a science class, rather than just keeping to material that's relevant to the subject.
Are you seriously suggesting that all illness is avoidable through lifestyle choices? You don't have to eat fast food every day or smoke heavily to get an unexpected illness, and I can't believe that I should even have to say that.
Smoking increases your chances of getting lung cancer, but if you really think there's no way you can get it just by not smoking you're badly misinformed. Same for heart disease and diabetes. And how about the myriad of diseases that have absolutely nothing at all to do with lifestyle choices? Breast and prostate cancer spring to mind. Or how about a nice bout with e-coli, or do you send everything you eat out to a lab for analysis before you take a bite?
Most times, becoming ill is not some kind of punishment for making poor choices, or any choices at all. You can do all the right things and still end up in an oncologists office, and until it happens you'll never see it coming.
You're right, life isn't fair. That doesn't mean that we have to purposely allow needless suffering while turning our heads and looking the other way. It's ironic that I have to tell this to someone who calls himself "Archangel Michael".
And even if it was, it'd be irrelevant. Science is about exploring and explaining the reality that we actually live in. If that reality were engineered, and done so in a way that we could never discover it, it wouldn't matter because we could never experience it anyway unless we found and exploited some flaw that allowed us to "look behind the curtain". Unless and until such a flaw is discovered, there's no point in worrying about the whole thing being a construct because by design it's the only reality we can ever know until the sysadmin decides otherwise.
This may be one of the most cryptically weird comments I've ever seen on /.
I think you're really referring to the origin of life when you say "origin of species", so the answer is that we don't really have a proper theory. There are a number of hypotheses. Once they become testable and supported by more evidence one of those hypotheses may become a theory.
When people compare evolution to creationism, they're immediately muddying the discussion because the two really don't attempt to describe the same thing. Creation is, at it's base, a religious attempt to answer "where did life come from". Evolution attempts to answer "How did current life-forms develop from earlier life-forms". The only time they intersect is when the religious version attempts to claim that life has always existed in the form we see now, and did not slowly evolve from earlier versions.
Not that I'm criticizing your choice, but I could say the exact same thing about a netbook. Same form-factor things that I don't like about my laptop when it comes to casual use, generally less battery life, more potential upkeep and more parts to break (keyboard, HD, display hinge, etc). That a netbook works for you is great, but that's really only useful for deciding what you want, not in understanding what other people want.
We're done here, I will not continue a discussion where the other party feels that threats, even indirect ones, are a valid debate tactic.
Your opinion does not constitute fact.
Your opinion does not constitute objective truth.
Do you not understand NY v Ferber, or are you being deliberately disingenuous? The brief filed by the ACLU argued that unless the court applied the "Miller Test", material that was not obscene (such as educational materials) could be considered obscene. They made no judgement specifically on the material that was at the center of the case, other than to say that child pornography that "failed" the Miller test deserved no constitutional protection and should be banned. They were talking about the legal arguments used in the case, not what the outcome should be. The brief was one of many, including various mainstream publishers and publishers/booksellers associations. The material in question would certainly fail the Miller test. Is falsely accusing people of supporting child-pornography now a conservative value?
Again, your opinion. While I understand that it would be easier for you if you were dictator and you could make laws based on your opinions, that's simply not the case.
What's your point? They were legal, and available that year, so this doesn't really mean anything in the context of supporting a ban. Supporters of abortion rights, believe it or not, do not actually like abortions. Safe, legal, and rare is the common meme. Nobody wants that number to actually go up, it's always preferable for them to go down.
So you support lawlessness and murder. Nice. Don't come back with "abortion is murder", that's a point that is opinion, not fact. The three people that you named and are okay with are, unarguably, murderers. Now it's clear for me, you're not just a zealot, you're among the worst the debate has to offer. I don't even have the words to describe how worthless you are, and damaging to your own "side" of the debate. You've now moved from childish and shrill to despicable and worthy of nothing but disgust.
Maybe I missed something, but what does one have to do with the other? This is like saying that I don't need a lawnmower because my microwave oven is programmable. The gesture thing for the TV does sound cool, but I'm not bringing a 46" TV out and about with me. Conversely, I'll still be using my iPad to read /. while the kids watch Sesame Street on the TV, or to look up recipes while I'm cooking in the kitchen where there's nothing to gesture at.... .
Yeah, it's impossible to not know what your "side" is saying. Have you considered that part of the reason you can't convince people who don't agree with you is the shrill tone you take?
Yes, because predicting a specific string of numbers is exactly like watching a trend and predicting where it is likely to end up.
But again, there's almost universal consensus that wife-beating and child-raping is wrong. Come back when you have the same level of consensus on abortion.
Who's lying now? I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and have NEVER heard that the ACLU thinks child porn should be legal. This is one of those "citation needed" moments.
And guess what, I agree with you , but I don't agree that making abortion under other circumstances illegal is even sort of close to the right way to do that. It's not my place or yours to tell someone that you don't even know that they have to remain pregnant against their wishes. Especially if that child is likely to have a serious defect, or in cases of rape or incest.
Pretty much all the arguments about the tea party apply to conservative republicans. The tea party, contrary to what they keep trying to claim, are just a noisy conservative group.
You've done nothing to show that I'm misrepresenting a thing. Abortion and the morning-after pill are reproductive rights issues, and issues that the tea party tends to come down against. The fact that this doesn't make you feel good doesn't make it different. You, on the other hand, are trying to separate issues you don't like in an attempt at changing the argument. Who's misrepresenting now, hint, that would be you.
I'm not a liar, that's a lie you lying liar.
Like I said, you want to have a public tantrum and feel good about it. People like you ensure that abortion will be around forever. You alienate the people that you claim to want to sway, offer no practical solutions, and do absolutely nothing aside from display your enormous sense of self-proclaimed moral superiority. You're an ineffective, marginalized nuisance, and you'll never accomplish a thing as far as stopping, or even slowing the number of abortions.
Like it or not, abortion and the morning after pill *are* part of reproductive rights issues. You don't get to redefine the argument just because it fits your personal belief system better.
And I didn't claim they do, although since you keep bringing it up, prominent members of the tea party (including Sarah Palin) have said publicly that they don't approve of *any* form of birth control, including by married couples. They haven't said ban, but I'm not comfortable that they wouldn't go down that road if they thought for a second they could.
And people like me think it's not your business to butt into other people's lives.
Oh yeah, it's almost exactly the same, except for the part about there being nearly universal consensus that child-porn should be illegal, and the fact that the "no abortion" crowd is a minority. But why let a little detail like that get in the way of a perfectly stupid analogy.
Shit, I better put out my cigar, it might catch your strawman on fire.
See, there's another charming feature of the tea party members, the propensity to scream "LIAR" any time they don't agree with or believe something someone else says. You don't agree with me, fine, nifty, very nice for you. That does not make me a liar. Calling me one though, over and over, proves only that you're not interested in debate, and you have no actual interest in trying to sway my opinion, you just want a chance to have a public tantrum and still somehow feel good about it. This kind of childishness is a big part of what's wrong with American politics today, thanks for being part of the problem.