Without commenting on the overall torture problem, I feel impelled to point out that there are multiple logical fallacies in the parent post. The parent stated:
[1] God allowed Jesus to be tortured. [2] God = Jesus. [3] Therefore, Jesus allowed Jesus to be tortured.
[4] Golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. [5] Jesus says: Do unto others as I (God) would do unto (others) Jesus. [6] Therefore, Torture others, coz Jesus says it's okay.
One formulation of the so-called golden rule [4] is found in Matthew 7:12 "So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets." The parent's formulation of the rule, while popular, is not the scriptural statement the parent should be using when attributing an argument to Jesus or to a person who believes in Jesus.
In [5], the parent substitutes you = "I (God)" and you = "(others) Jesus". However, the parent's premise [2] precludes any notion of Jesus being an "other" to God. Further, the parent also deletes with no basis the words "have them", causing [5] to have a meaning much different from [4]. The parent's statement [5] is thus unsupported.
The parent's [6] is likewise a hopeless muddle that cannot be reached from [5]. The parent attempts to replace what "God would do" in [5] with "torture" in [6]. However, the parent has not shown that God would torture. In [1] and [3], the parent stated only that God and Jesus allowed Himself to be tortured. In fact, the so-called Golden Rule does not speak to what you should do to yourself. It addresses only what you should do to others. What God/Jesus may have done to himself or allowed to be done to himself provides no justification for the torture of any other person.
Frankly, I am disappointed by the parent. With a little logic and a little scripture, it is quite easy to wrap any religious absolutist in his own arguments. There is no excuse for doing such a poor job of it as the parent has done. The parent could have done better simply by stating that under the so-called Golden Rule, anyone who commits torture must accept that he, himself, should also be tortured. Better yet, he could have begun with Matthew 7:16-18:
You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.
Torture is without question an evil fruit. Any further conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader...
a story about a government supercomputer running Linux that 'pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege.'"
Why is this news? The govt runs battle simulations on computers. Linux runs computers. What part of this didn't we know and why do we care?
Obviously, the final application of this kind of technology is to allow the car to take primary control of the vehicle and let the passengers relax in peace.
If the vehicle is going to drive itself (which I'm all for), then why have it be a car at all?::pulls out trainpass and heads for station::
Assuming we're now talking about Amendment I,...I submit to you that "Congress shall make no law" means what it says and says what it means.
Many have submitted that position to the-court-that-is-right-because-it-is-last and that court has not accepted it. At least, no majority of that court has accepted it.
They allow all kinds of caveats for things like hiring assassings to comit murder, inciting a riot in a packed theatre, revealing top secret documents, and slandering people.
"No law" sounds like a nice and clean formulation of the principle, but actually having no laws would be bad. How would it be if some one took out a full-page ad calling you an adulterer and an embezzler and there was abosolutely nothing you could do to get them to stop?
...the tank to hold the water would have to be massive compared to those used to hold a compressed gas fuel source.
Why? The water was about as dense to begin with as the gas will be after you compress it. The determinative question is What mass of fuel/propellant do you need and what volume of container will you need to hold it? A sufficiently dense propellant might not need to be additionally compressed.
Well, I suppose it is "flamebait" after a fashion. But only in the sense of wanting to point out that FCC may have had the right idea here.
Obviously 2-7 are purely speculative and 8-9 are silly. What we should ask is why the original submitter didn't write, "FCC finally cracks down on E-Rate abuses despite foot-dragging by Congress."
Instead, the submitter took the approach that FCC was the bad guy in this with lines like "no advance notice" and "ostensible cause". Is such an angle justified? Or is this FCC action just good governing?
The Federal Government has been usurping more and more power over the past 100 years...The Court's 1942 decision in Wickard vs. Filburn gave Congress the power to regulate anything...
You'll be pleased to know that this exact point is going before the court again this year. The Supreme Court will consider whether Congress can ban medical marijuana in California even if it never leaves the state.
The WWII wheat-quotas-are-OK case (Wickard v Filburn, 1942) is looking pretty weak after the can't-prohibit-guns-near-schools case (US v Lopez, 1995). I can hardly imagine that the Court will force a broad role-back of Congressional authority, but we'll know in a few months or so.
Example #1: There is a line at the bottom of your tax form that asks if you will give a dollar of the taxes you just paid to be spent on campaign funding. The funding is only available to parties who qualify by size (namely the Republicrats and no one else).
You're quite right that neither party existed until decades after the current voting algorithm was adopted. However, they have since done everything they can think of at the "regulations"-level to ensure that they are the only parties who can compete effectively under that algorithm.
Consider whether the following is true: The first goal of the [republican|democratic] party is to accumulate and maintain political power.
I suggest that we would be better served if we tweaked the voting algorithm to make their dominance harder to maintain. There is, after all, nothing inherently good about having either a republicrat in office. What we want is a person who governs well, not a member of a powerful party.
I'm for aboloshing the EC.... and it requires a Constitutional Amendment.
Which got me to thinking, "what procedure is required to adopt approval voting?" So, I looked at the U.S. Constitution and found:
Article II Executive, Section 1: "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors,...
Article I Legislature, Section 4: "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators."
Which is interesting. It tells us
no US constitutional amendment is needed to adopt any new voting scheme
one state could change schemes on its own
So, I conclude that we need to gather 20,000 geeks and move to North Dakota. Who's with me?
This is simply incorrrect and it misunderstands what a recount is. In a recount, one examines all ballots again and increments each candidate's total when a yes vote is found. This is true both for single-vote and approval.
You've based your conclusion that it is "impossible" to verify approval voting on the fact that single-vote has an easy checksum that approval voting doesn't have.
Although approval lacks this particular checksum, verification by recount is still quite possible. Further, the checksum you're worried about can be fooled by a tampering method that has the sense to remove ballots for opposing candidates at the same rate it adds false ballots. (The equation must use greater than rather than equal because some voters abstain from some issues.) That particular checksum was never reliable, so it's absence in approval voting is not a problem.
Condorcet isn't that hard for the voter to do, but it's VERY hard to explain. I'm sorry to say that we just can't sell it. (Not to mention that the name is French, which doesn't help.);(
The need for a better voting algorithm is obvious, but Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) isn't it. IRV is a particular voting algorithm that produces some unpredicatable (to the voter) results. There are much better methods available, such as approval voting and the Condorcet method.
IRV is little more than a snappy name covering bad math. It makes a lousy poster-child for the movement to adopt an alternative voting method. How bad is the math on IRV? Under certain circumstances, you can benefit your candidate less by ranking him highest than if you had ranked him lower. That is not a result we want adopted. That's actually worse than the current situation where if you cast your single vote for your true favorite, the candidate you dislike most may win.
Are you excited by the fact that several of the 527 organizations have more money than any third party has had in many election cycles? What are the Democratic and Republican parties doing to prepare for the day when a 527 feels its issues aren't being addressed by the candidate of its current party and decides to use its war chest to give an enormous boost to an independent candidate who truly believes in that 527's issues?
That's a pretty limited question. Why not ask them something really scary, like:
If there were completely free trade worldwide and sufficient time, wouldn't an equilibrium be reached where the rich will be equally rich everywhere in the world and the poor will be equally poor everywhere in the world? If not, why not?
Would you consider such an an equilibrium to be unjust in any way? If so, how, and what would you do to avoid that injustice?
Doesn't a free flow of labor and capital throughout the world dictate that the average standard of living of Americans must decrease over time until it approaches the rising average standard of living of the more populous nations? Please include numbers in your answer to justify your conclusion.
There is no overcrowding in the US -- at least not on any scale that's worth talking about in global terms. It's fine to ask about fresh water supplies and other resources, but the U.S. is actually in need of a much larger population if it wants to avoid having its culture swarmed under by the rest of the world in the long term.
As to what US policy should be on other countries' populations, that's pretty nosey of us, isn't it?
Redundant. Redundant. Questions 13 - 17 #7 and 13 - 17 #4 will be given the exact same boilderplate answer and it won't acutally answer either question. Both candidates will profess to be Christians, but will claim to be capable of governing fairly people of other faiths. Skip this question.
Slashdot Mirror
[1] God allowed Jesus to be tortured.
[2] God = Jesus.
[3] Therefore, Jesus allowed Jesus to be tortured.
[4] Golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
[5] Jesus says: Do unto others as I (God) would do unto (others) Jesus.
[6] Therefore, Torture others, coz Jesus says it's okay.
One formulation of the so-called golden rule [4] is found in Matthew 7:12 "So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets." The parent's formulation of the rule, while popular, is not the scriptural statement the parent should be using when attributing an argument to Jesus or to a person who believes in Jesus.
In [5], the parent substitutes you = "I (God)" and you = "(others) Jesus". However, the parent's premise [2] precludes any notion of Jesus being an "other" to God. Further, the parent also deletes with no basis the words "have them", causing [5] to have a meaning much different from [4]. The parent's statement [5] is thus unsupported.
The parent's [6] is likewise a hopeless muddle that cannot be reached from [5]. The parent attempts to replace what "God would do" in [5] with "torture" in [6]. However, the parent has not shown that God would torture. In [1] and [3], the parent stated only that God and Jesus allowed Himself to be tortured. In fact, the so-called Golden Rule does not speak to what you should do to yourself. It addresses only what you should do to others. What God/Jesus may have done to himself or allowed to be done to himself provides no justification for the torture of any other person.
Frankly, I am disappointed by the parent. With a little logic and a little scripture, it is quite easy to wrap any religious absolutist in his own arguments. There is no excuse for doing such a poor job of it as the parent has done. The parent could have done better simply by stating that under the so-called Golden Rule, anyone who commits torture must accept that he, himself, should also be tortured. Better yet, he could have begun with Matthew 7:16-18:
Torture is without question an evil fruit. Any further conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader...
Yeah, fair enough. Also, it's a fairly prominent application of Linux -- another mark on the tally board for the cheerleading crowd.
a story about a government supercomputer running Linux that 'pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege.'"
Why is this news? The govt runs battle simulations on computers. Linux runs computers. What part of this didn't we know and why do we care?
Eventually, they will learn that something is getting through the filter and harming a couple of people.
Between now and eventually, thousands or millions of people will be made more healthy by this good water supply.
When the contaminent is identified, all that will be forgotten.
Obviously, the final application of this kind of technology is to allow the car to take primary control of the vehicle and let the passengers relax in peace.
::pulls out trainpass and heads for station::
If the vehicle is going to drive itself (which I'm all for), then why have it be a car at all?
Assuming we're now talking about Amendment I, ...I submit to you that "Congress shall make no law" means what it says and says what it means.
Many have submitted that position to the-court-that-is-right-because-it-is-last and that court has not accepted it. At least, no majority of that court has accepted it.
They allow all kinds of caveats for things like hiring assassings to comit murder, inciting a riot in a packed theatre, revealing top secret documents, and slandering people.
"No law" sounds like a nice and clean formulation of the principle, but actually having no laws would be bad. How would it be if some one took out a full-page ad calling you an adulterer and an embezzler and there was abosolutely nothing you could do to get them to stop?
...the tank to hold the water would have to be massive compared to those used to hold a compressed gas fuel source.
Why? The water was about as dense to begin with as the gas will be after you compress it. The determinative question is What mass of fuel/propellant do you need and what volume of container will you need to hold it? A sufficiently dense propellant might not need to be additionally compressed.
ROTFLAFMO
You've gotta be kidding me! SCO is going to open up a whole site mouthing off while they're still in the middle of a court case?
Quick! Some one start an egg timer to see how long it takes before the Judge sees something SCO wrote on there and takes their heads off for it.
I'm hearing echoes in my memory here. I'm not sure whether they're coming from a State of the Union speech or Danny Devito in Other People's Money:
No, we can't... it not be fair to lots of people whose copyrights haven't yet lapsed.
Let us scan only things for which the copyright has lapsed. This has several advantages.
Once hardware is seized like this, it and everything on it will never be returned. Whether you are guilty or not.
What good would it do anyway? Both the data and the hardware will be obsolete by the time they are returned.
Well, I suppose it is "flamebait" after a fashion. But only in the sense of wanting to point out that FCC may have had the right idea here.
Obviously 2-7 are purely speculative and 8-9 are silly. What we should ask is why the original submitter didn't write, "FCC finally cracks down on E-Rate abuses despite foot-dragging by Congress."
Instead, the submitter took the approach that FCC was the bad guy in this with lines like "no advance notice" and "ostensible cause". Is such an angle justified? Or is this FCC action just good governing?
The Federal Government has been usurping more and more power over the past 100 years...The Court's 1942 decision in Wickard vs. Filburn gave Congress the power to regulate anything...
You'll be pleased to know that this exact point is going before the court again this year. The Supreme Court will consider whether Congress can ban medical marijuana in California even if it never leaves the state.
The WWII wheat-quotas-are-OK case (Wickard v Filburn, 1942) is looking pretty weak after the can't-prohibit-guns-near-schools case (US v Lopez, 1995). I can hardly imagine that the Court will force a broad role-back of Congressional authority, but we'll know in a few months or so.
Example #1: There is a line at the bottom of your tax form that asks if you will give a dollar of the taxes you just paid to be spent on campaign funding. The funding is only available to parties who qualify by size (namely the Republicrats and no one else).
You're quite right that neither party existed until decades after the current voting algorithm was adopted. However, they have since done everything they can think of at the "regulations"-level to ensure that they are the only parties who can compete effectively under that algorithm.
Consider whether the following is true: The first goal of the [republican|democratic] party is to accumulate and maintain political power.
I suggest that we would be better served if we tweaked the voting algorithm to make their dominance harder to maintain. There is, after all, nothing inherently good about having either a republicrat in office. What we want is a person who governs well, not a member of a powerful party.
Which got me to thinking, "what procedure is required to adopt approval voting?" So, I looked at the U.S. Constitution and found:
Article II Executive, Section 1: "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors,
Article I Legislature, Section 4: "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators."
Which is interesting. It tells us
no US constitutional amendment is needed to adopt any new voting scheme
one state could change schemes on its own
So, I conclude that we need to gather 20,000 geeks and move to North Dakota. Who's with me?
A recount would not be able to detect changes...
This is simply incorrrect and it misunderstands what a recount is. In a recount, one examines all ballots again and increments each candidate's total when a yes vote is found. This is true both for single-vote and approval.
You've based your conclusion that it is "impossible" to verify approval voting on the fact that single-vote has an easy checksum that approval voting doesn't have.
count(ballots) > sum(count(candidate_1)+ . . . count(candidate_n))
Although approval lacks this particular checksum, verification by recount is still quite possible. Further, the checksum you're worried about can be fooled by a tampering method that has the sense to remove ballots for opposing candidates at the same rate it adds false ballots. (The equation must use greater than rather than equal because some voters abstain from some issues.) That particular checksum was never reliable, so it's absence in approval voting is not a problem.
Condorcet isn't that hard for the voter to do, but it's VERY hard to explain. I'm sorry to say that we just can't sell it. (Not to mention that the name is French, which doesn't help.) ;(
The need for a better voting algorithm is obvious, but Instant Run-off Voting (IRV) isn't it. IRV is a particular voting algorithm that produces some unpredicatable (to the voter) results. There are much better methods available, such as approval voting and the Condorcet method.
IRV is little more than a snappy name covering bad math. It makes a lousy poster-child for the movement to adopt an alternative voting method. How bad is the math on IRV? Under certain circumstances, you can benefit your candidate less by ranking him highest than if you had ranked him lower. That is not a result we want adopted. That's actually worse than the current situation where if you cast your single vote for your true favorite, the candidate you dislike most may win.
Are you excited by the fact that several of the 527 organizations have more money than any third party has had in many election cycles? What are the Democratic and Republican parties doing to prepare for the day when a 527 feels its issues aren't being addressed by the candidate of its current party and decides to use its war chest to give an enormous boost to an independent candidate who truly believes in that 527's issues?
If there were completely free trade worldwide and sufficient time, wouldn't an equilibrium be reached where the rich will be equally rich everywhere in the world and the poor will be equally poor everywhere in the world? If not, why not?
Would you consider such an an equilibrium to be unjust in any way? If so, how, and what would you do to avoid that injustice?
Doesn't a free flow of labor and capital throughout the world dictate that the average standard of living of Americans must decrease over time until it approaches the rising average standard of living of the more populous nations? Please include numbers in your answer to justify your conclusion.
There is no overcrowding in the US -- at least not on any scale that's worth talking about in global terms. It's fine to ask about fresh water supplies and other resources, but the U.S. is actually in need of a much larger population if it wants to avoid having its culture swarmed under by the rest of the world in the long term.
As to what US policy should be on other countries' populations, that's pretty nosey of us, isn't it?
Redundant. Redundant. Questions 13 - 17 #7 and 13 - 17 #4 will be given the exact same boilderplate answer and it won't acutally answer either question. Both candidates will profess to be Christians, but will claim to be capable of governing fairly people of other faiths. Skip this question.
Softball. This question merely lobs up an opportunity for each candidate to repeat part of his stump speech. We've heard it all before.