Actually, I quit tv for about 8 months and I noticed the exact same thing. The first couple of weeks of having TV again (I got a roomate who demanded having a TV, he generally watched VH1 'Hey remember the X0's' for about 5 hours every day) I couldn't stand commercials to the point of ordering HBO just to have something that wasn't total crap to watch.
But yea, commercials seem way over the top after you've spent some time away from them.
There is no reason not to overtax to produce reserves. Simply add 50 billion to the annual budget and put it into gold and other investments, like buying up already accrued debt or simply in some sort of limbo, like simply removing that cash from the money supply with the option of re-printing it later.
The government will then have that cash on hand in the event of an emergency, and can thus spend that money without changing taxes or borrowing.
If the emergency is large enough that it requires more money than has been saved, the fed still has the power to borrow money. The caveat I would make is that the power to borrow money should be discouraged by the pain of paying it back, and so a minimum portion of the debt should have to be paid back every year, in addition to any accrued interest. A ballpark amount for this might be "No more than 10% of the non-debt portion of the annual federal budget, plus any accrued interest". That way the debt will only increase taxes by about 10% (not tax rates, taxes. So if you were paying 20% income tax, with a large debt you may have to pay a maximum of (very ballpark figure) 22% + any interest).
I propose this system of taxation-after-spending because the current system has no feedback whatsoever to voters or congressman. If you spend $1000 dollars on your credit card you have to pay a bill every month, and that is unpleasant. So you weigh every credit card purchase against the unpleasant payments. You ask yourself "is this new DVD burner really worth the amount I'm going to have to pay for it?". Stores know how this psychology works, and so they offer you "No interest until 2008" and "No payments until 2007" etc. They do this because delaying the payment lets us convince ourselves that spending the money now is worthwhile. By the time we regret the purchase the couch is well worn.
That is how our federal finances work now. They can spend without limit and basically never have to repay the debt. The payments never start, and so the unpleasantness is delayed. However, the unpleasant payback is not avoided. Eventually someone has to pay back the debt, and the longer we go without changing the way we accrue it the greater the unpleasantness will be in the end.
In this way we will have to pay enough of the budget year by year that there will be pressure not to spend on congress. This pressure is counteracted by the urge to spend. Where the desire to spend among a majority of congress is greater than the expected unpleasantness of the taxes necessary to support that spending, the spending will take place. Otherwise, it won't, and the money will not be wasted.
This is the first thing you are told in philosophy of ethics. They are interchangeable terms.
Now, you might personally think these words have a different sense, but what things feel like to you isn't evidence. If something is ethical it is moral, and if it is immoral it is unethical.
There are differing systems of morals and differing systems of ethics. By calling one system a 'moral' system and another an 'ethical' system you can produce seeming contridictions. But the contradictions are between the competing systems, each of which is a system of morals and a system of ethics, since every system of morals is a system of ethics.
Example of a parallel argument to yours: There is a difference between things that taste good and things which are tasty. Nachos are tasty to people in America, but in Japan people think nachos don't taste good. Therefore there is a difference between tasty and tastes good, since nachos can be tasty and not taste good at the same time.
The above is ridiculous, and so is your assertion once you realize what you are really claiming.
Have you ever bothered to actually *look* at a government budget? That itemized receipt would be marvelously unwieldy and thick.
And we should work around this somehow? Why not simplify government spending so that they aren't paying for weird fish studies. Besides, we don't need a line item for every dollar spent, breaking it into departments or catagories ($x.xx -- Science Research, $yyyyyyy*10^8 -- Tax credits to oil companies).
Actually, I'm 99% sure that stipends from a university aren't taxable at all. So you paid taxes on money that doesn't count as earnings under the law, you should try to get that money back this year by reporting an overpayment for those previous years.
Taxes determined by government spending of the current year = No safety margin whatsoever. Hurricane Katrina comes along, and you have to say "sorry, we're out of money. Help yourselves."
No, you spend then you tax. So if the government has to bail out katrina people, then you get a higher tax bill at the end of the year. It's not like the government lives hand to mouth, they spend what they want and then cook the books and eventually they sell bonds.
Now, as for Katrina, I don't understand why the federal government has to go down there and babysit those people. Yes, rescue them. Yes, give them emergency shelter. But let them build their own houses, and if they didn't have insurance explain to them that in the future it might be wise to carry insurance, especially if you live under sea level near the ocean. If they couldn't GET insurance then it is a question of assuming the risk of living there.
It seems heartless, but if the government bails out people every time there is a predictable disaster there remains no incentive to AVOID getting into situations like that. I for one wouldn't want to build a house a foot above the Mississippi, because it floods every 20 years and wipes those houses away. But every 20 years hundreds or thousands of people in the 20 year floodplain lose their houses and look at the government to build them again.
Sorry folks, if you are so stupid that you build your house where you know it will get destroyed then I shouldn't shoulder the burden of building it again.
Yes, I understand that most of the people were too poor to do alot about the flooding, and they couldn't afford to move, etc etc. I grant that this is true. So if we are to build them new houses, lets not be completely retarded and build them new houses in the same underwater bowl where they will be trapped again in the next flood. Just cut them a check and let them live wherever, but if they go back to NO let them know they shouldn't expect another check next year.
Who cares? The reason people who don't make any money aren't audited are that they don't make much money and they have simple 1040EZ taxes. There isn't much there to be suspicious of, and there is even less to double check.
I think the IRS should autocompute your taxes based on the information that companies send them about pay, interest, etc, and send you a summary in January. If there is nothing to do, just sit on it and your check/bill will come in April, or sign and return it (go to a website, etc) and get your refund check immediately. Otherwise you have until the normal reporting time to submit a form with deductions and/or a separate form for additional income not reported yet.
Now, this could be even simpler if the government would simply do away with all deductions and simplify the tax code. If the government wants to encourage people to go to college then they can give money to those people in ways other than a tax credit, or just give money directly to schools.
A simpler tax system would be:
No tax on the first 20,000 you make.
X% for the next 20K, 1.2*X% for the next 20K, 1.5*X% for the next 20K. 2*X% for the rest of your income.
The value of X is determined by that years spending. If the government spends 1 Trillion simoleons in 2004, the taxes for that year need to sum to 1 Trillion simoleons. This will put a lot of pressure on congress to only spend the amount needed, and it will make congressmen very wary of each others pork, because the bill for that huge bridge in Alaska will be paid by people outside of Alaska, and they will directly see the cost.
Finally, the IRS should provide a line item summary or receipt for each person who files their taxes. It should show the total amount of the taxes paid by that person for every line item in the federal budget (within reason). In other words, somewhere in the receipt for Joe Jackson in Mississippi, who paid $2500 in federal taxes this year, will be a line reading
"John Wastemore Memorial Bridge to Nowhere -- $4.25" and another reading
"Study on the effects of hormone injections with regard to the breeding practices of freshwater farm raised catfish -- $0.13" and even
"Preparation of receipts for every person filing taxes in previous fiscal year -- $1.03"
My guess is that the IRS segregates the really big fish into a separate system for closer scrutiny. If they are off a tiny bit on a "regular" tax return they might end up plus or minus $50. If they make a tiny mistake on Billy-o's taxes it could be millions of dollars. Plus they probably have an actual team of people going over it, so they may need to let more than one person access a record at a given time, which is likely not the case with their standard system.
Windows are ok because it's nice to get sunlight in the morning. Wine is better after dinner with friends, and at night Windows can reduce your privacy.
Ok, so wine isn't perfect for you, so you run windows on your computer. I'm glad I spent 8 seconds of my life reading about it. You play WoW? Very interesting. You use another program with that? That rules! What color is your car? Do you wear reading glasses? Who was your favorite English teacher? Do you prefer running or basketball shoes, and why? Could you stretch your answer out to 5 or 6 paragraphs?
Alternate response: You really don't have anything better to do with your time than to collect imaginary trinkets in fantasy land? When you're 80 you'll think back on today and weep dusty old man tears over your wasted life.
BUSH himself didn't try to silence this guy by "telling lies"
Of course! I shouldn't have assumed that requiring a NASA employee to get pre-approval from the WHITEHOUSE before giving an interview, and requiring a PR person from the WHITEHOUSE to be present would have something to do with the PRESIDENT.
the 'government' did, so your direct attack on bush is offtopic trash.
Thanks for setting the record straight. It wasn't a policy created by a person, it was a policy straight out of that magic place called 'The Government'. 'The Government' is somehow independant from the people who make it up, I should have seen that...
the rest of your posts in this thread are bullshit because they are.
At this point it is completely clear that I am just feeding a troll.
Maybe. Did you ever consider that merely calling names without any attempt to make a point might get modded down as flaimbait? Because that is what happened to your post.
I don't expect that you have the ability to look at the world without completely distorting it to fit your apriori theories. Regardless, the topic of the article is Bush preventing people with opposing opinions from expressing themselves, which he is clearly doing. Further, he has a tendency to lie at every possible occasion. If you don't like that, fine, nobody can make you believe it. But if you want people to care about what YOU say a good way to start would be to cite facts, or at least not immediatly resort to name calling and blaming the system.
god damnit how did that get modded up so much? and all his other bullshit posts?
The answer is that people agree with what I said, or they disagree but find what I posted meaningful. What makes my posts bullshit? I mean besides your disagreement.
Sure. You'll mainly notice it when his mouth is open.
Possible lie: "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons." -- Sept 12, 2002
Certain lie: "We found weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." --May 29, 2003
Why? lie: "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot." -- Dec 04, 2001 (There was no video of the first plane hitting WTC on television until days later. Bush was informed of the second strike while already in the classroom.)
Care to give an example of the president telling a truth? (It has to be something that isn't immediatly verifiable, we aren't to emperor has no clothes territory.. yet)
Even the nazis had to start somewhere. It was thanks to "people like you" TM that they were able to send out the brownshirts after a while.
Now, let's all pretend that there is nothing wrong. After all, who cares about civil rights or science or facts so long as fags can't get married!? You have to have your priorities straight. Get it, "priorities straight"!?
In other news, Haliburton has just recieved a no bid contract to build 500 gigantic ovens. In a press release they said that the ovens were part of a secret government program to bake gigantic loaves of bread, and any rumors of anything else going on is just disinformation put out by "the terrorists".
The public is a fairly skittish beast, and as soon as they hear some "expert from NASA" telling them one thing, even if it is a theory, they'll run with it for miles.
We should ALL thank the whitehouse for protecting us from dangerous ideas. We could be easily confused if we didn't have people like George Bush telling us what to think. (and also preventing other people from telling us stuff)
Actually I tried to post directly to the article but I recieved a "lameness filter" message each time. So I tried to respond to a post and then it worked. But I notice that you weren't able to come up with an example of the president telling the truth, but instead you just insulted me. Does my challenge make you uncomfortable? Do you wriggle in your seat when people bring things like this up?
Maybe instead of praying toward Washington 5 times each day like a good republican you can join the debate.
If everybody jumped off a bridge you would too, I take it.
If Clinton is literally the antichrist and the example of every possible vice this does not make Bush any better. Bush IS a liar. Bush DOESN'T tell the truth. It is not a defense to point at other liars in an attempt to change the subject away from something that makes you uncomfortable.
Bush is daily dropping bombs on people to help the financial interests of certain people (oh, right, it was so that we could fight the terrorists over there. Now that we have invaded Iraq the terrrorists wouldn't try to attack America.).
Can you cite a single time the president has told the truth about any issue? (about something not immediatly verifiable. Yes, when he lit the capitol christmas tree, and then said "It's lit!" he was telling the truth.)
The answer is no, you can't, but feel free to try if you really like the guy. Every statement this president has made which involved delayed verification has been false. Thank you TV for making us all idiots.
A super advanced intelligence may not see much difference between a snowflake blowing in the wind and a human going about there day.
Well, of course there is more of a difference.
To get a snowflake you can suspend water in a gas atmosphere and lower the temperature. Total time = less than a minute. Total complexity of process = 1 tank, some gas, some water vapor, and lower temperature.
To get an intelligent life form you have to have an area where conditions allow life to start, an area large enough for complex life to evolve before the area can no longer support life, that same area must at some point be able to support more and more complicated forms of life. Then you have to have billions of years in which trillions of life forms evolve, and the are has to be able to support those life forms for those billions of years without total disruption. This means, for example, no massive meteor strikes or solar flares, or gamma ray bursts or supernovae near by. Finally, intelligence must provide some sort of survival benefit to at least some of these organisms. Finally you get a dog or something.
To say that these two things are on a par with each other is comical. You must realize that you are appealing to ignorance when you say, 'Maybe a superintelligent being will think...'. And indeed, maybe such a being would think that. But *maybe* such a being would be too preoccupied chewing on toothpicks in an attempt to change the orbit of the moon. Any random speculations on a subject with which we are totally ignorant are equally plausible. So the idea that somebody might think something and that somebody is super intelligent doesn't imply anything at all.
Basically your argument comes down to, "Imagine a super intelligent being, and further imagine that that being agrees with me. Therefore your argument isn't convincing."
As for the rest of what you say, yes, natural and inherent are not good words to use here. Obviously anything which comes about is 'natural' in the sense that nothing from outside the universe brought it about. I used 'natural' as opposed to 'special' or 'extraordinary'. Natural doesn't always mean 'Not Supernatural', although I understand your confusion.
natural: 3.Conforming to the usual or ordinary course of nature
So you can see that life is, as far as we know, unusual and extraordinary in the universe, and so isn't natural in that sense.
I don't see how it could not be inherent in matter though. Everything is build from the elements. Or are you saying there is such a thing as a soul?
Don't be an idiot. Look around the universe! Even on Earth intelligent beings make up virtually 0% of the total matter. Living things make up barely more than that, as a fraction. So we can pretty safely assume that a very very small portion of the universe is 'alive' and an even smaller portion is 'intelligent'. If matter tended toward intelligence you would see the opposite.
Add this to the fact that the only intelligent matter we know of, a handful of animals, is the result of a very long process which could have been interupted and thus stopped at many turns. There are very specific conditions which allowed animals to evolve, and even given those conditions we don't have any evidence to say that such an evolution of intelligent beings is even a likely result of such special conditions.
So intelligence is very rare, as far as we know. Rocks don't develop intelligence, even large living systems don't seem to develop intelligence. So no, matter develops intelligence in only very special conditions, and not in general, so it is not 'generally' or 'naturally' intelligent. Now, we can get into an argument over the word 'naturally', but I think it is clear what I mean.
The natural state of matter is not consciousness. If it were virtually everything would be intelligent. As it is only a few animals seem to possess intelligence on one planet.
We know that consciousness in Man is the result of billions of years of competition among trillions upon trillions of organisms which are our ancestors.
The idea that a single entity, designed, but not designed to be conscious will eventually become intelligent is the result of too much bad science fiction. Trillions of organisms evolving for billions of years to produce even slightly intelligent animals vs. a single network with much less than a billion nodes and no evolutionary forces at work whatsoever.
AI will be developed when we unravel the secrets to intelligence or when we produce enormously fast computer simulated evolution, but it will not come about as a side effect of people surfing porn.
The energy needed to lift heavy things (like water) is greater than the energy in the temperature difference.
If you believe this then your entire post is suspect.
This process won't have to 'lift' any water. Since they are moving the water up in a tube which is surrounded by water, they are really just circulating water around, which requires very little energy. By your logic it would be impossible to coast on a bike, since you have to continually lift the part of the tire touching the ground all the way up to the height of the tire.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I quit tv for about 8 months and I noticed the exact same thing. The first couple of weeks of having TV again (I got a roomate who demanded having a TV, he generally watched VH1 'Hey remember the X0's' for about 5 hours every day) I couldn't stand commercials to the point of ordering HBO just to have something that wasn't total crap to watch.
But yea, commercials seem way over the top after you've spent some time away from them.
There is no reason not to overtax to produce reserves. Simply add 50 billion to the annual budget and put it into gold and other investments, like buying up already accrued debt or simply in some sort of limbo, like simply removing that cash from the money supply with the option of re-printing it later.
The government will then have that cash on hand in the event of an emergency, and can thus spend that money without changing taxes or borrowing.
If the emergency is large enough that it requires more money than has been saved, the fed still has the power to borrow money. The caveat I would make is that the power to borrow money should be discouraged by the pain of paying it back, and so a minimum portion of the debt should have to be paid back every year, in addition to any accrued interest. A ballpark amount for this might be "No more than 10% of the non-debt portion of the annual federal budget, plus any accrued interest". That way the debt will only increase taxes by about 10% (not tax rates, taxes. So if you were paying 20% income tax, with a large debt you may have to pay a maximum of (very ballpark figure) 22% + any interest).
I propose this system of taxation-after-spending because the current system has no feedback whatsoever to voters or congressman. If you spend $1000 dollars on your credit card you have to pay a bill every month, and that is unpleasant. So you weigh every credit card purchase against the unpleasant payments. You ask yourself "is this new DVD burner really worth the amount I'm going to have to pay for it?". Stores know how this psychology works, and so they offer you "No interest until 2008" and "No payments until 2007" etc. They do this because delaying the payment lets us convince ourselves that spending the money now is worthwhile. By the time we regret the purchase the couch is well worn.
That is how our federal finances work now. They can spend without limit and basically never have to repay the debt. The payments never start, and so the unpleasantness is delayed. However, the unpleasant payback is not avoided. Eventually someone has to pay back the debt, and the longer we go without changing the way we accrue it the greater the unpleasantness will be in the end.
In this way we will have to pay enough of the budget year by year that there will be pressure not to spend on congress. This pressure is counteracted by the urge to spend. Where the desire to spend among a majority of congress is greater than the expected unpleasantness of the taxes necessary to support that spending, the spending will take place. Otherwise, it won't, and the money will not be wasted.
That makes me laugh. You are playing less video games, but that's ok because it lets you get back into TV.
F U N N Y
TV watching is highly addictive. If you don't believe me try quitting for a year.
"I can quit any time I want, I just don't want to"
Moral == Ethical
THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE
This is the first thing you are told in philosophy of ethics. They are interchangeable terms.
Now, you might personally think these words have a different sense, but what things feel like to you isn't evidence. If something is ethical it is moral, and if it is immoral it is unethical.
There are differing systems of morals and differing systems of ethics. By calling one system a 'moral' system and another an 'ethical' system you can produce seeming contridictions. But the contradictions are between the competing systems, each of which is a system of morals and a system of ethics, since every system of morals is a system of ethics.
Example of a parallel argument to yours: There is a difference between things that taste good and things which are tasty. Nachos are tasty to people in America, but in Japan people think nachos don't taste good. Therefore there is a difference between tasty and tastes good, since nachos can be tasty and not taste good at the same time.
The above is ridiculous, and so is your assertion once you realize what you are really claiming.
Have you ever bothered to actually *look* at a government budget? That itemized receipt would be marvelously unwieldy and thick.
And we should work around this somehow? Why not simplify government spending so that they aren't paying for weird fish studies. Besides, we don't need a line item for every dollar spent, breaking it into departments or catagories ($x.xx -- Science Research, $yyyyyyy*10^8 -- Tax credits to oil companies).
Actually, I'm 99% sure that stipends from a university aren't taxable at all. So you paid taxes on money that doesn't count as earnings under the law, you should try to get that money back this year by reporting an overpayment for those previous years.
Taxes determined by government spending of the current year = No safety margin whatsoever. Hurricane Katrina comes along, and you have to say "sorry, we're out of money. Help yourselves."
No, you spend then you tax. So if the government has to bail out katrina people, then you get a higher tax bill at the end of the year. It's not like the government lives hand to mouth, they spend what they want and then cook the books and eventually they sell bonds.
Now, as for Katrina, I don't understand why the federal government has to go down there and babysit those people. Yes, rescue them. Yes, give them emergency shelter. But let them build their own houses, and if they didn't have insurance explain to them that in the future it might be wise to carry insurance, especially if you live under sea level near the ocean. If they couldn't GET insurance then it is a question of assuming the risk of living there.
It seems heartless, but if the government bails out people every time there is a predictable disaster there remains no incentive to AVOID getting into situations like that. I for one wouldn't want to build a house a foot above the Mississippi, because it floods every 20 years and wipes those houses away. But every 20 years hundreds or thousands of people in the 20 year floodplain lose their houses and look at the government to build them again.
Sorry folks, if you are so stupid that you build your house where you know it will get destroyed then I shouldn't shoulder the burden of building it again.
Yes, I understand that most of the people were too poor to do alot about the flooding, and they couldn't afford to move, etc etc. I grant that this is true. So if we are to build them new houses, lets not be completely retarded and build them new houses in the same underwater bowl where they will be trapped again in the next flood. Just cut them a check and let them live wherever, but if they go back to NO let them know they shouldn't expect another check next year.
Who cares? The reason people who don't make any money aren't audited are that they don't make much money and they have simple 1040EZ taxes. There isn't much there to be suspicious of, and there is even less to double check.
I think the IRS should autocompute your taxes based on the information that companies send them about pay, interest, etc, and send you a summary in January. If there is nothing to do, just sit on it and your check/bill will come in April, or sign and return it (go to a website, etc) and get your refund check immediately. Otherwise you have until the normal reporting time to submit a form with deductions and/or a separate form for additional income not reported yet.
Now, this could be even simpler if the government would simply do away with all deductions and simplify the tax code. If the government wants to encourage people to go to college then they can give money to those people in ways other than a tax credit, or just give money directly to schools.
A simpler tax system would be:
No tax on the first 20,000 you make.
X% for the next 20K,
1.2*X% for the next 20K,
1.5*X% for the next 20K.
2*X% for the rest of your income.
The value of X is determined by that years spending. If the government spends 1 Trillion simoleons in 2004, the taxes for that year need to sum to 1 Trillion simoleons. This will put a lot of pressure on congress to only spend the amount needed, and it will make congressmen very wary of each others pork, because the bill for that huge bridge in Alaska will be paid by people outside of Alaska, and they will directly see the cost.
Finally, the IRS should provide a line item summary or receipt for each person who files their taxes. It should show the total amount of the taxes paid by that person for every line item in the federal budget (within reason). In other words, somewhere in the receipt for Joe Jackson in Mississippi, who paid $2500 in federal taxes this year, will be a line reading
"John Wastemore Memorial Bridge to Nowhere -- $4.25" and another reading
"Study on the effects of hormone injections with regard to the breeding practices of freshwater farm raised catfish -- $0.13" and even
"Preparation of receipts for every person filing taxes in previous fiscal year -- $1.03"
My guess is that the IRS segregates the really big fish into a separate system for closer scrutiny. If they are off a tiny bit on a "regular" tax return they might end up plus or minus $50. If they make a tiny mistake on Billy-o's taxes it could be millions of dollars. Plus they probably have an actual team of people going over it, so they may need to let more than one person access a record at a given time, which is likely not the case with their standard system.
This is true... sniff...
Windows are ok because it's nice to get sunlight in the morning. Wine is better after dinner with friends, and at night Windows can reduce your privacy.
Ok, so wine isn't perfect for you, so you run windows on your computer. I'm glad I spent 8 seconds of my life reading about it. You play WoW? Very interesting. You use another program with that? That rules! What color is your car? Do you wear reading glasses? Who was your favorite English teacher? Do you prefer running or basketball shoes, and why? Could you stretch your answer out to 5 or 6 paragraphs?
Alternate response:
You really don't have anything better to do with your time than to collect imaginary trinkets in fantasy land? When you're 80 you'll think back on today and weep dusty old man tears over your wasted life.
Account for the operating system?
ROFL
BUSH himself didn't try to silence this guy by "telling lies"
Of course! I shouldn't have assumed that requiring a NASA employee to get pre-approval from the WHITEHOUSE before giving an interview, and requiring a PR person from the WHITEHOUSE to be present would have something to do with the PRESIDENT.
the 'government' did, so your direct attack on bush is offtopic trash.
Thanks for setting the record straight. It wasn't a policy created by a person, it was a policy straight out of that magic place called 'The Government'. 'The Government' is somehow independant from the people who make it up, I should have seen that...
the rest of your posts in this thread are bullshit because they are.
At this point it is completely clear that I am just feeding a troll.
Maybe. Did you ever consider that merely calling names without any attempt to make a point might get modded down as flaimbait? Because that is what happened to your post.
I don't expect that you have the ability to look at the world without completely distorting it to fit your apriori theories. Regardless, the topic of the article is Bush preventing people with opposing opinions from expressing themselves, which he is clearly doing. Further, he has a tendency to lie at every possible occasion. If you don't like that, fine, nobody can make you believe it. But if you want people to care about what YOU say a good way to start would be to cite facts, or at least not immediatly resort to name calling and blaming the system.
god damnit how did that get modded up so much? and all his other bullshit posts?
The answer is that people agree with what I said, or they disagree but find what I posted meaningful. What makes my posts bullshit? I mean besides your disagreement.
Sure. You'll mainly notice it when his mouth is open.
Possible lie:
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons." -- Sept 12, 2002
Certain lie:
"We found weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." --May 29, 2003
Why? lie:
"I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot." -- Dec 04, 2001 (There was no video of the first plane hitting WTC on television until days later. Bush was informed of the second strike while already in the classroom.)
Care to give an example of the president telling a truth? (It has to be something that isn't immediatly verifiable, we aren't to emperor has no clothes territory.. yet)
Even the nazis had to start somewhere. It was thanks to "people like you" TM that they were able to send out the brownshirts after a while.
Now, let's all pretend that there is nothing wrong. After all, who cares about civil rights or science or facts so long as fags can't get married!? You have to have your priorities straight. Get it, "priorities straight"!?
In other news, Haliburton has just recieved a no bid contract to build 500 gigantic ovens. In a press release they said that the ovens were part of a secret government program to bake gigantic loaves of bread, and any rumors of anything else going on is just disinformation put out by "the terrorists".
The public is a fairly skittish beast, and as soon as they hear some "expert from NASA" telling them one thing, even if it is a theory, they'll run with it for miles.
We should ALL thank the whitehouse for protecting us from dangerous ideas. We could be easily confused if we didn't have people like George Bush telling us what to think. (and also preventing other people from telling us stuff)
Actually I tried to post directly to the article but I recieved a "lameness filter" message each time. So I tried to respond to a post and then it worked. But I notice that you weren't able to come up with an example of the president telling the truth, but instead you just insulted me. Does my challenge make you uncomfortable? Do you wriggle in your seat when people bring things like this up?
Maybe instead of praying toward Washington 5 times each day like a good republican you can join the debate.
If everybody jumped off a bridge you would too, I take it.
If Clinton is literally the antichrist and the example of every possible vice this does not make Bush any better. Bush IS a liar. Bush DOESN'T tell the truth. It is not a defense to point at other liars in an attempt to change the subject away from something that makes you uncomfortable.
Bush is daily dropping bombs on people to help the financial interests of certain people (oh, right, it was so that we could fight the terrorists over there. Now that we have invaded Iraq the terrrorists wouldn't try to attack America.).
Can you cite a single time the president has told the truth about any issue? (about something not immediatly verifiable. Yes, when he lit the capitol christmas tree, and then said "It's lit!" he was telling the truth.)
The answer is no, you can't, but feel free to try if you really like the guy. Every statement this president has made which involved delayed verification has been false. Thank you TV for making us all idiots.
A super advanced intelligence may not see much difference between a snowflake blowing in the wind and a human going about there day.
...'. And indeed, maybe such a being would think that. But *maybe* such a being would be too preoccupied chewing on toothpicks in an attempt to change the orbit of the moon. Any random speculations on a subject with which we are totally ignorant are equally plausible. So the idea that somebody might think something and that somebody is super intelligent doesn't imply anything at all.
Well, of course there is more of a difference.
To get a snowflake you can suspend water in a gas atmosphere and lower the temperature. Total time = less than a minute. Total complexity of process = 1 tank, some gas, some water vapor, and lower temperature.
To get an intelligent life form you have to have an area where conditions allow life to start, an area large enough for complex life to evolve before the area can no longer support life, that same area must at some point be able to support more and more complicated forms of life. Then you have to have billions of years in which trillions of life forms evolve, and the are has to be able to support those life forms for those billions of years without total disruption. This means, for example, no massive meteor strikes or solar flares, or gamma ray bursts or supernovae near by. Finally, intelligence must provide some sort of survival benefit to at least some of these organisms. Finally you get a dog or something.
To say that these two things are on a par with each other is comical. You must realize that you are appealing to ignorance when you say, 'Maybe a superintelligent being will think
Basically your argument comes down to, "Imagine a super intelligent being, and further imagine that that being agrees with me. Therefore your argument isn't convincing."
As for the rest of what you say, yes, natural and inherent are not good words to use here. Obviously anything which comes about is 'natural' in the sense that nothing from outside the universe brought it about. I used 'natural' as opposed to 'special' or 'extraordinary'. Natural doesn't always mean 'Not Supernatural', although I understand your confusion.
natural:
3.Conforming to the usual or ordinary course of nature
So you can see that life is, as far as we know, unusual and extraordinary in the universe, and so isn't natural in that sense.
I don't see how it could not be inherent in matter though. Everything is build from the elements. Or are you saying there is such a thing as a soul?
Don't be an idiot. Look around the universe! Even on Earth intelligent beings make up virtually 0% of the total matter. Living things make up barely more than that, as a fraction. So we can pretty safely assume that a very very small portion of the universe is 'alive' and an even smaller portion is 'intelligent'. If matter tended toward intelligence you would see the opposite.
Add this to the fact that the only intelligent matter we know of, a handful of animals, is the result of a very long process which could have been interupted and thus stopped at many turns. There are very specific conditions which allowed animals to evolve, and even given those conditions we don't have any evidence to say that such an evolution of intelligent beings is even a likely result of such special conditions.
So intelligence is very rare, as far as we know. Rocks don't develop intelligence, even large living systems don't seem to develop intelligence. So no, matter develops intelligence in only very special conditions, and not in general, so it is not 'generally' or 'naturally' intelligent. Now, we can get into an argument over the word 'naturally', but I think it is clear what I mean.
This is just platitudes and idiocy.
The natural state of matter is not consciousness. If it were virtually everything would be intelligent. As it is only a few animals seem to possess intelligence on one planet.
We know that consciousness in Man is the result of billions of years of competition among trillions upon trillions of organisms which are our ancestors.
The idea that a single entity, designed, but not designed to be conscious will eventually become intelligent is the result of too much bad science fiction. Trillions of organisms evolving for billions of years to produce even slightly intelligent animals vs. a single network with much less than a billion nodes and no evolutionary forces at work whatsoever.
AI will be developed when we unravel the secrets to intelligence or when we produce enormously fast computer simulated evolution, but it will not come about as a side effect of people surfing porn.
The energy needed to lift heavy things (like water) is greater than the energy in the temperature difference.
If you believe this then your entire post is suspect.
This process won't have to 'lift' any water. Since they are moving the water up in a tube which is surrounded by water, they are really just circulating water around, which requires very little energy. By your logic it would be impossible to coast on a bike, since you have to continually lift the part of the tire touching the ground all the way up to the height of the tire.