There's a difference between software with bugs or software that gets more advanced over time and software that is designed to stop working or to disable features two years after its release date (like some versions of Quicken now) or software that will never work without some sort of expiring license that requires a constant flow of money.
It's the latter category that we have problems with not the former category which you're sputtering about.
I'd buy it. Then again, I'm notorious for spending an arm and a leg for products that I want to never have to worry about buying again. Heck, my first car lasted for 13 years until I drove it into the back of someone else's car a couple of years ago. I was shooting for 20+ years or until fossil fuel alternatives became viable. My first TV purchase is going to be an LCD model. It should last for 3 times as long as a plasma before only needing a replacement bulb, and it's 1080p meaning that it won't look dated in 10 years. (Yes, these were factors in picking what to buy for me.)
If I could a solid blender and dishwasher from that company, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I've never seen a fridge break before, so I don't know when I'd be in the market for one.
It's a nice conjecture, but I don't really see MS getting all that hyped about Cell when it's more likely that they see it as a competitor. After all, you don't have to be using WinCE to take advantage of the distributed architecture.
Furthermore, Cell isn't a general purpose CPU. In fact, it may be slower for general purpose computing than today's CPUs. According to the Ars Technica article posted earlier today, they trimmed a lot of the out-of-order execution logic out of the main PowerPC component to make room for the SPEs and to let it be clocked faster. It also seems to only have a single FPU on it -- a logical move since the SPEs are vector FPUs primarily. Code not optimized for Cell (which is going to be a limited subset of multimedia applications) will run slower. The.NET VM isn't going to auto-parallelize code after all.
Overall, I don't see MS trying to abandon x86 for Cell any time soon since x86 multimedia processing power is more than enough for most consumer applications. While Cell may take off for games, it's not going to make Office or Explorer run any faster.
There's a difference between the physical limits of hardware and designed-in product failure. People simply don't like it when a company deliberately breaks their product to soak more money out of them when they could've given people a better product that they wanted in the first place. $49 software with an expiry date is software that could've lasted you for life for $49. People resent being treated that way.
Millions of people don't read the EULA before accepting it.
Millions of people don't obey the speed limit. Millions of people download MP3s on-line. Millions of people use marijuana. Millions of people sign the legal disclaimers at hospitals without reading them and -- guess what -- millions of people don't bother to read the paperwork on their car loans in full before signing.
Failure to pay attention to the law never exempts one from it. Contract law is no different. Just because the majority of people don't bother to read most of the terms and conditions of a EULA doesn't make it unenforcealbe any more than any other contract. There are other good reasons that EULAs might be unenforceable, but your argument that they're invalid because people don't bother to educate themselves about what they're about to agree to before agreeing is totally and completely ungrounded in fact.
Your other comments in response to PDAllen demonstrate a complete ignorance of contract law. I suggest you do some reading.
You should read "The Millionaire Next Door" and "The Millionaire Mind." Both are basically books written about the results of interviewing people with over a million dollars in assets about their jobs, their lives, and their backgrounds. Few millionairs credit a superior intellect as having been important to success. Most were not great students in high school and college. The primary exception to this is the small percentage of millionaires who are doctors or lawyers.
High IQ will get you far in the lower to middle class rungs, but work ethic, social skills, and a viable business idea is what is needed generally to get into the upper crust if you weren't born there (and most millionaires are first generation).
You realize that traffic congestion is also caused by selfish, competitive people who won't let others over, causing them to have to slow down or take even more stupid and panicked actions when their exit comes up. In other words, you're part of the problem.
The best way to get rid of traffic jams would be for people to chill out and to actually listen to all those defensive driving classes that tell you to keep a minimum of 3 seconds of distance at your current speed between you and the car in front of you. Let people over. You keeping them from getting in front of you might make you get home a few seconds later, but blocking them could cause many others to have much more trouble.
It took me awhile to get over myself and stop doing that too. (My pet peeve was idiots who don't use their turn signal before trying to get over.)
I'll bet that a full third of that 35% is Japanese stuff -- fansubbed anime, pirated anime, manga, soundtracks, video games, artbooks, and hentai equivalents of all of the above. The fansub distribution scene was one of the first huge adopters of BitTorrent thanks to its ability to quickly get out files from a central low-bandwidth source.
My comment regarding mental capacity of gay folk who decide to put down roots in the rural red states still stands.
Look. I'm straight, but I am a progressive living in Georgia right now. You can't just uproot yourself because the majority of people that you don't deal with in your home area are a bunch of prejudiced bastards, even if they're prejudiced against you. "Home is where the heart is." People have friends and family that they can't just give up on. Your roots are your family and your friends, and you don't always get to choose them with forethought.
I think it'd a sad and lonely life if one could just give up on everyone they've ever known and leave because of politics.
What's the man going to do now that he knows he's got nothing else to run for?
That's not what I fear. With the Senate & House victories and the impending replacement of up to 3 Supreme Court justices, what's the man going to do now that there's nothing to stop him? Things are going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better.
Every single one of you needs to see the movie Network. Even though it was made in 1976, the movie grows in relevance every day. The plot is about a news anchor who is fired for sinking rating and who is exploited for ratings by his network after he suffers from a mental breakdown. It is about the way that news organizations pander to the lowest forms of thrill-seeking. Howard Beale, the anchor turned madman prophet, is given a show on which he rails against the sickness of his times -- ALL of which is still relevant today. The best soliloquy of the entire movie is all about this:
"You people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damned force in the whole godless world. And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the 20th floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome, god-damned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what s--t will be peddled for truth on this network.
So, you listen to me! Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth, go to your God, go to your gurus, go to yourselves because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth. But man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We like like hell! We'll tell you that Kojack always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch - at the end of the hour, he's gonna win. We'll tell you any s--t you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds - we're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube.
This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!
What makes the Daily Show so good is that they're honest about what kind of show they are. It's the "real" news sites that are too disingenuous to admit that they've made "Network" a reality.
The more religious people are, the crazier they are. (yadda yadaa)...imaginary friend... (yadda yadda)...with religion, it's much easier to overcome this basic common sense... (yadda yadda)...poisonous snakes... (yadda yadda)...this group exhibits much better critical thinking skills.
You quite seem to have the bitter bias and closed mind of a dedicated atheist. There is no more point in arguing anything further with you than with any other religious zealot.
It's not that surprising when you consider how each side views their opposition.
Pro-choice advocates view their average opponent as a religious loony or a sexist bigot at worst. Pro-life advocates view their opponents as child-murderers. There's a severe difference in how objectionable each side sees their opponents' behavior and accordingly a much different standard of what to do about it.
Plus, there's a problem of targetable people. Who could a pro-choice zealot murder to put a dent in a philosophical movement dedicated to preventing an act? There's no one you could kill to put a stop to pro-life activities easily. On the other hand, pro-life zealots can kill the doctors that are directly responsible for performing the very act which they consider to be murder. Targets are much easier to find.
This difference in perceived wrong and of targets is not a small factor in this issue. I'm a firm believer in the Uniform Distribution of Assholes Principle. Regardless of religion, creed, and lifestyle, each movement probably has the same percentage of crazies in it. There's just not that much that pro-choice crazies could direct their destructive energies at nor really that much to get worked up over in comparison to pro-life crazies.
1) You would blind drivers in older cars. 2) Reflected light (such as from the object illuminated by your headlights) scatters and would be filtered by your windshield.
I saw a poll in a USENET group about a year ago. Most posters (residents of the USA) were still on Pentium I and Pentium II PC's.
You may have a non-representative sample group here. How a this affects a poll is a classic problem. There was a presidential election where they predicted the wrong candidate to win based on phone polling. The problem was that there was a whole conservative base of voters who didn't have phones yet. Modern pollsters are concerned that the rise of cell phones will cut off access to an entire demographic due to laws that prevent pollsters from calling them.
People who use their computer to play modern video games or to grab pirate video & audio tend to have whizzier machines. People who spend their time in chat rooms, on newsgroups, in MUDs tend to have budget machines. It could be that their buying habits follow their hobbies or that their hobbies follow the quality of their machines, but the correlation is still there. This skews the results.
Interesting. Up until I did some research to refute your post, I had never heard of a single-chip LCoS set. I thought DLP was the only technology to use a color wheel. Every LCoS projector or RPTV set that I've ever seen is a three-chip solution, including Toshiba's 61" RPTV monster from last year, and JVC's D-ILA series of front projectors .
I thought the point was that my 192.168.1.0/24 behind my linksys access point is "an internet". The 66.35.250.0/24 slashdot is on is "an internet" (unlike mine, a publicly routeable one). An internet is any network that uses, surprise surprise, the "internet protocol".
What you are talking about is an intranet, not an internet. The Internet is the connection of multiple networks to each other. It is a network of networks, thus it sits between other networks and earns the inter- prefix. Intra- means within one's own logical grouping. A corporate network, Slashdot's server farms, and your person home network are intranets because they are a network of machines within one logical organization.
This is why there can be only one Internet unless you make a completely separate other network between networks that doesn't talk to the first one at all. That's very unlikely to happen until we start building colonies on other worlds, and we'll probably have slow, laggy connections between them even then. I see no reason to decapitalize the Internet since there can be only one. (No Highlander jokes, please.)
Alright, no one mentioned souls or spirits but you. Do you accept that it is possible to advance the belief that life (or at least human life) is important in some manner without having a religious angle?
If so, then explain why passing through a vagina (or a surgical opening) changes a newborn from property to a person. Explain, then, why only partially passing through it (as in some late-term abortion methods) does not.
If you use the "dependent on the mother" argument, please explain why it's not okay to kill the child after birth. Would an advance in technology that allowed for the child to develop to term in an artificial womb be grounds for banning abortion since a child would no longer be dependent on the mother? If not, when does a tank-grown child gain personhood and why?
If you use the developmental stages argument, explain why a 5 month-old prematurely birthed baby has human rights that a 6 month-old fetus still in a womb does not.
In my opinion, the best atheistic argument against abortion is that all dividing lines for determining personhood are either arbitrary and/or hypocritical. Birth is arbitrary. Developmental stages can be hypocritical in the face of the rights of premature babies and can be arbitrary and hard to determine. The only absolute for determining humanity is fertilization, when the number of genes in the egg cell equals that of a full-fleged diploid human organism.
Restated: Show me one (non-Buddhist) atheist who is ethically against stem cell research.
I assume by "atheist" you restrict the category to people who weren't raised in a religious setting, right? I can't do that, but I do know former Christian atheists and agnostics who object. You could argue that their beliefs are influenced by religion, but they've managed to cling to a belief in the "sanctity" of life even after no longer truly believing in God. It is rare, though. Most become very utilitarian about the issue.
It depends on who pulled the coup and why. 80% of military personnel vote Republican. Military bases in America are all stationed in heavily pro-Republican rural areas, and there has been a gradual shift since WW2 to the present politically unbalanced situation today.
This is part of the reason why overseas ballots were so disputed in the 2000 Presidential election. By some people's counts about 680 illegitimate ballots were included in the Florida election's totals, and 544 of them were votes for Bush, who won by only 537 votes. (Of course 544 minus the 136 remaining votes is still less than 537, so the point is a little bit diminished.)
Technically, after Caldera bought the Santa Cruz Operation, it renamed itself SCO without any acronym to back the three letters. SCO doesn't mean anything now, so TSG is appropriate.
Also, after enough common usage, many acronyms can themselves become parts of other acronyms. LASER is an acronym, yet "LAser Detection And Ranging" is abbreviated LADAR, not LASERDAR.
This may be an Internet first: a mainstream television show spawned from a genuine internet phenomenon.
Nope. The popularity of the short film "The Spirit of Christmas" once it spread across the Internet was what led to Comedy Central asking the creators to make South Park. Without the Internet, they'd be languishing in obscurity.
That's.7%, and if they did the crime, they can do the time.
Two questions: A) Is the punishment justified based on the nature of the crime? Take the example of the kid doing 26 years for selling marijuana to other students. That's more punishment than many murderers and rapists will get. B) Why did they commit the crime, and can we do something about that cause? In other words, can we attack crime at the roots rather than ripping it out after it's sprouted up?
The fact is that we have the largest percentage of our population who are or have done time of any nation in the world. Our rates have been climbing steadly for the several decades from.2% of our population in prison in 1978 to.7% today. He make up 5% of the population of the planet, but we have 25% of the world's prison population. Furthermore, a whopping 4.8% of the black population is in prison right now. That's nearly 1 in 20 and suggests a broken racial and economic policy. It doesn't help that that means 1 in 20 black people won't be able to find a decent job anymore once they're out.
Most of these offenders are there due to drug policy, especially "possession" violations. The federal prison population swelled from 57,000 in 1990 to 130,000 in 2000. 75,000 were drug offenders, and in 1999 over half of all drug offenders were first time offenders receiving on average 4 years in prison. Now, I'm not for legalizing drugs, but I am for taking it down from prison time and from having to report it on job applications for the rest your ruined life to a traffic-sized fine and mandatory rehab. Considering the root causes of drug abuse and its minimal effect on society compared to other crimes, we should be looking into constructive rather than destructive solutions for fixing people's lives. It would save both lives and taxpayer dollars to not have to house all these people in prison.
I assume they're talking about high-security lockdown, reserved for heinous crimes or prisoners who can't get along with the other prisoners and start fights or kill them. I say kill them off, but we keep them around and away from other people.
No, actually, they're probably talking about the fact that prisons don't do enough to prevent them from killing and raping other prisoners in the first place. Some prison guards actually encourage that sort of thing. Abu Ghraib and the presence of an America prison guard in the scandal were no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to prison abuse in America. Our prison situation is a huge shame for our nation. At least it should be, but there's a sizeable half of the voting population *cough* Republicans *cough* that likes it this way and poisons any public debate about fixing it.
Besides, DNA evidence delivers a perpetrator's identity with 100% confidence, all the cast iron proof you could want.
Actually, DNA evidence has a 1.2% error rate according to a study release in early 2002. Even if it had 100% accuracy, the presence of a person's DNA isn't always ironclad proof that they were involved in the crime, depending on the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between software with bugs or software that gets more advanced over time and software that is designed to stop working or to disable features two years after its release date (like some versions of Quicken now) or software that will never work without some sort of expiring license that requires a constant flow of money.
It's the latter category that we have problems with not the former category which you're sputtering about.
I'd buy it. Then again, I'm notorious for spending an arm and a leg for products that I want to never have to worry about buying again. Heck, my first car lasted for 13 years until I drove it into the back of someone else's car a couple of years ago. I was shooting for 20+ years or until fossil fuel alternatives became viable. My first TV purchase is going to be an LCD model. It should last for 3 times as long as a plasma before only needing a replacement bulb, and it's 1080p meaning that it won't look dated in 10 years. (Yes, these were factors in picking what to buy for me.)
If I could a solid blender and dishwasher from that company, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I've never seen a fridge break before, so I don't know when I'd be in the market for one.
It's a nice conjecture, but I don't really see MS getting all that hyped about Cell when it's more likely that they see it as a competitor. After all, you don't have to be using WinCE to take advantage of the distributed architecture.
.NET VM isn't going to auto-parallelize code after all.
Furthermore, Cell isn't a general purpose CPU. In fact, it may be slower for general purpose computing than today's CPUs. According to the Ars Technica article posted earlier today, they trimmed a lot of the out-of-order execution logic out of the main PowerPC component to make room for the SPEs and to let it be clocked faster. It also seems to only have a single FPU on it -- a logical move since the SPEs are vector FPUs primarily. Code not optimized for Cell (which is going to be a limited subset of multimedia applications) will run slower. The
Overall, I don't see MS trying to abandon x86 for Cell any time soon since x86 multimedia processing power is more than enough for most consumer applications. While Cell may take off for games, it's not going to make Office or Explorer run any faster.
There's a difference between the physical limits of hardware and designed-in product failure. People simply don't like it when a company deliberately breaks their product to soak more money out of them when they could've given people a better product that they wanted in the first place. $49 software with an expiry date is software that could've lasted you for life for $49. People resent being treated that way.
Ben Affleck?
Just the thought of yet another inane "radio personality" (I refuse to use the term DJ... they're not) screaching at me makes me shutter.
Wait... you think "disc jockey" is more of a honor to them than saying that they are/have "personalities?"
Millions of people don't read the EULA before accepting it.
Millions of people don't obey the speed limit. Millions of people download MP3s on-line. Millions of people use marijuana. Millions of people sign the legal disclaimers at hospitals without reading them and -- guess what -- millions of people don't bother to read the paperwork on their car loans in full before signing.
Failure to pay attention to the law never exempts one from it. Contract law is no different. Just because the majority of people don't bother to read most of the terms and conditions of a EULA doesn't make it unenforcealbe any more than any other contract. There are other good reasons that EULAs might be unenforceable, but your argument that they're invalid because people don't bother to educate themselves about what they're about to agree to before agreeing is totally and completely ungrounded in fact.
Your other comments in response to PDAllen demonstrate a complete ignorance of contract law. I suggest you do some reading.
You should read "The Millionaire Next Door" and "The Millionaire Mind." Both are basically books written about the results of interviewing people with over a million dollars in assets about their jobs, their lives, and their backgrounds. Few millionairs credit a superior intellect as having been important to success. Most were not great students in high school and college. The primary exception to this is the small percentage of millionaires who are doctors or lawyers.
High IQ will get you far in the lower to middle class rungs, but work ethic, social skills, and a viable business idea is what is needed generally to get into the upper crust if you weren't born there (and most millionaires are first generation).
You realize that traffic congestion is also caused by selfish, competitive people who won't let others over, causing them to have to slow down or take even more stupid and panicked actions when their exit comes up. In other words, you're part of the problem.
The best way to get rid of traffic jams would be for people to chill out and to actually listen to all those defensive driving classes that tell you to keep a minimum of 3 seconds of distance at your current speed between you and the car in front of you. Let people over. You keeping them from getting in front of you might make you get home a few seconds later, but blocking them could cause many others to have much more trouble.
It took me awhile to get over myself and stop doing that too. (My pet peeve was idiots who don't use their turn signal before trying to get over.)
I'll bet that a full third of that 35% is Japanese stuff -- fansubbed anime, pirated anime, manga, soundtracks, video games, artbooks, and hentai equivalents of all of the above. The fansub distribution scene was one of the first huge adopters of BitTorrent thanks to its ability to quickly get out files from a central low-bandwidth source.
My comment regarding mental capacity of gay folk who decide to put down roots in the rural red states still stands.
Look. I'm straight, but I am a progressive living in Georgia right now. You can't just uproot yourself because the majority of people that you don't deal with in your home area are a bunch of prejudiced bastards, even if they're prejudiced against you. "Home is where the heart is." People have friends and family that they can't just give up on. Your roots are your family and your friends, and you don't always get to choose them with forethought.
I think it'd a sad and lonely life if one could just give up on everyone they've ever known and leave because of politics.
What's the man going to do now that he knows he's got nothing else to run for?
That's not what I fear. With the Senate & House victories and the impending replacement of up to 3 Supreme Court justices, what's the man going to do now that there's nothing to stop him? Things are going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better.
Every single one of you needs to see the movie Network. Even though it was made in 1976, the movie grows in relevance every day. The plot is about a news anchor who is fired for sinking rating and who is exploited for ratings by his network after he suffers from a mental breakdown. It is about the way that news organizations pander to the lowest forms of thrill-seeking. Howard Beale, the anchor turned madman prophet, is given a show on which he rails against the sickness of his times -- ALL of which is still relevant today. The best soliloquy of the entire movie is all about this:
What makes the Daily Show so good is that they're honest about what kind of show they are. It's the "real" news sites that are too disingenuous to admit that they've made "Network" a reality.
The more religious people are, the crazier they are. (yadda yadaa) ...imaginary friend... (yadda yadda) ...with religion, it's much easier to overcome this basic common sense... (yadda yadda) ...poisonous snakes... (yadda yadda) ...this group exhibits much better critical thinking skills.
You quite seem to have the bitter bias and closed mind of a dedicated atheist.
There is no more point in arguing anything further with you than with any other religious zealot.
It's not that surprising when you consider how each side views their opposition.
Pro-choice advocates view their average opponent as a religious loony or a sexist bigot at worst. Pro-life advocates view their opponents as child-murderers. There's a severe difference in how objectionable each side sees their opponents' behavior and accordingly a much different standard of what to do about it.
Plus, there's a problem of targetable people. Who could a pro-choice zealot murder to put a dent in a philosophical movement dedicated to preventing an act? There's no one you could kill to put a stop to pro-life activities easily. On the other hand, pro-life zealots can kill the doctors that are directly responsible for performing the very act which they consider to be murder. Targets are much easier to find.
This difference in perceived wrong and of targets is not a small factor in this issue. I'm a firm believer in the Uniform Distribution of Assholes Principle. Regardless of religion, creed, and lifestyle, each movement probably has the same percentage of crazies in it. There's just not that much that pro-choice crazies could direct their destructive energies at nor really that much to get worked up over in comparison to pro-life crazies.
2 Problems:
1) You would blind drivers in older cars.
2) Reflected light (such as from the object illuminated by your headlights) scatters and would be filtered by your windshield.
I saw a poll in a USENET group about a year ago. Most posters (residents of the USA) were still on Pentium I and Pentium II PC's.
You may have a non-representative sample group here. How a this affects a poll is a classic problem. There was a presidential election where they predicted the wrong candidate to win based on phone polling. The problem was that there was a whole conservative base of voters who didn't have phones yet. Modern pollsters are concerned that the rise of cell phones will cut off access to an entire demographic due to laws that prevent pollsters from calling them.
People who use their computer to play modern video games or to grab pirate video & audio tend to have whizzier machines. People who spend their time in chat rooms, on newsgroups, in MUDs tend to have budget machines. It could be that their buying habits follow their hobbies or that their hobbies follow the quality of their machines, but the correlation is still there. This skews the results.
Interesting. Up until I did some research to refute your post, I had never heard of a single-chip LCoS set. I thought DLP was the only technology to use a color wheel. Every LCoS projector or RPTV set that I've ever seen is a three-chip solution, including Toshiba's 61" RPTV monster from last year, and JVC's D-ILA series of front projectors .
I thought the point was that my 192.168.1.0/24 behind my linksys access point is "an internet". The 66.35.250.0/24 slashdot is on is "an internet" (unlike mine, a publicly routeable one). An internet is any network that uses, surprise surprise, the "internet protocol".
What you are talking about is an intranet, not an internet. The Internet is the connection of multiple networks to each other. It is a network of networks, thus it sits between other networks and earns the inter- prefix. Intra- means within one's own logical grouping. A corporate network, Slashdot's server farms, and your person home network are intranets because they are a network of machines within one logical organization.
This is why there can be only one Internet unless you make a completely separate other network between networks that doesn't talk to the first one at all. That's very unlikely to happen until we start building colonies on other worlds, and we'll probably have slow, laggy connections between them even then. I see no reason to decapitalize the Internet since there can be only one. (No Highlander jokes, please.)
Alright, no one mentioned souls or spirits but you. Do you accept that it is possible to advance the belief that life (or at least human life) is important in some manner without having a religious angle?
If so, then explain why passing through a vagina (or a surgical opening) changes a newborn from property to a person. Explain, then, why only partially passing through it (as in some late-term abortion methods) does not.
If you use the "dependent on the mother" argument, please explain why it's not okay to kill the child after birth. Would an advance in technology that allowed for the child to develop to term in an artificial womb be grounds for banning abortion since a child would no longer be dependent on the mother? If not, when does a tank-grown child gain personhood and why?
If you use the developmental stages argument, explain why a 5 month-old prematurely birthed baby has human rights that a 6 month-old fetus still in a womb does not.
In my opinion, the best atheistic argument against abortion is that all dividing lines for determining personhood are either arbitrary and/or hypocritical. Birth is arbitrary. Developmental stages can be hypocritical in the face of the rights of premature babies and can be arbitrary and hard to determine. The only absolute for determining humanity is fertilization, when the number of genes in the egg cell equals that of a full-fleged diploid human organism.
Restated: Show me one (non-Buddhist) atheist who is ethically against stem cell research.
I assume by "atheist" you restrict the category to people who weren't raised in a religious setting, right? I can't do that, but I do know former Christian atheists and agnostics who object. You could argue that their beliefs are influenced by religion, but they've managed to cling to a belief in the "sanctity" of life even after no longer truly believing in God. It is rare, though. Most become very utilitarian about the issue.
It depends on who pulled the coup and why.
80% of military personnel vote Republican. Military bases in America are all stationed in heavily pro-Republican rural areas, and there has been a gradual shift since WW2 to the present politically unbalanced situation today.
This is part of the reason why overseas ballots were so disputed in the 2000 Presidential election. By some people's counts about 680 illegitimate ballots were included in the Florida election's totals, and 544 of them were votes for Bush, who won by only 537 votes. (Of course 544 minus the 136 remaining votes is still less than 537, so the point is a little bit diminished.)
Technically, after Caldera bought the Santa Cruz Operation, it renamed itself SCO without any acronym to back the three letters. SCO doesn't mean anything now, so TSG is appropriate.
Also, after enough common usage, many acronyms can themselves become parts of other acronyms. LASER is an acronym, yet "LAser Detection And Ranging" is abbreviated LADAR, not LASERDAR.
This may be an Internet first: a mainstream television show spawned from a genuine internet phenomenon.
Nope. The popularity of the short film "The Spirit of Christmas" once it spread across the Internet was what led to Comedy Central asking the creators to make South Park. Without the Internet, they'd be languishing in obscurity.
That's .7%, and if they did the crime, they can do the time.
.2% of our population in prison in 1978 to .7% today. He make up 5% of the population of the planet, but we have 25% of the world's prison population. Furthermore, a whopping 4.8% of the black population is in prison right now. That's nearly 1 in 20 and suggests a broken racial and economic policy. It doesn't help that that means 1 in 20 black people won't be able to find a decent job anymore once they're out.
Two questions:
A) Is the punishment justified based on the nature of the crime? Take the example of the kid doing 26 years for selling marijuana to other students. That's more punishment than many murderers and rapists will get.
B) Why did they commit the crime, and can we do something about that cause? In other words, can we attack crime at the roots rather than ripping it out after it's sprouted up?
The fact is that we have the largest percentage of our population who are or have done time of any nation in the world. Our rates have been climbing steadly for the several decades from
Most of these offenders are there due to drug policy, especially "possession" violations. The federal prison population swelled from 57,000 in 1990 to 130,000 in 2000. 75,000 were drug offenders, and in 1999 over half of all drug offenders were first time offenders receiving on average 4 years in prison. Now, I'm not for legalizing drugs, but I am for taking it down from prison time and from having to report it on job applications for the rest your ruined life to a traffic-sized fine and mandatory rehab. Considering the root causes of drug abuse and its minimal effect on society compared to other crimes, we should be looking into constructive rather than destructive solutions for fixing people's lives. It would save both lives and taxpayer dollars to not have to house all these people in prison.
I assume they're talking about high-security lockdown, reserved for heinous crimes or prisoners who can't get along with the other prisoners and start fights or kill them. I say kill them off, but we keep them around and away from other people.
No, actually, they're probably talking about the fact that prisons don't do enough to prevent them from killing and raping other prisoners in the first place. Some prison guards actually encourage that sort of thing. Abu Ghraib and the presence of an America prison guard in the scandal were no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to prison abuse in America. Our prison situation is a huge shame for our nation. At least it should be, but there's a sizeable half of the voting population *cough* Republicans *cough* that likes it this way and poisons any public debate about fixing it.
Besides, DNA evidence delivers a perpetrator's identity with 100% confidence, all the cast iron proof you could want.
Actually, DNA evidence has a 1.2% error rate according to a study release in early 2002. Even if it had 100% accuracy, the presence of a person's DNA isn't always ironclad proof that they were involved in the crime, depending on the situation.