" is it not pretty clear we have diverged greatly into different species?"
Most certainly not. Two members of two differen species cannot breed a fertile offspring. If that were true of, say, whites and Hispanics, I wouldn't be here as my mother wouldn't be able to have children.
"When observed dogs that are quite varried in size, proportions, and coloring we call them different breeds -why not so with people?"
Breeds != species. All dogs can interbreed with each other, which is why verifying a dog's purebred status can be so important to collectors and such.
"Not saying one is better than the other but a African Pygmy and a Pacific Samoian are pretty unmistakably different."
If they can have a fertile child, they're of the same species. Appearances can be deceiving.
My understanding may be flawed and dated (I Am Not a Biologist), but speciation isn't a particularly slow process. There's no "connect the dots" record of one species slowly devleoping into another, instead we have things remaining relatively constant for a long period of time, then something sudden happens (geologically speaking) that brings about a drastic change (geologically speaking) in the environment, triggering many new developments to thrive and die off rapidly (etc.) until a small number of clear winners comes out of the fray.
If we were in the middle of such an event, sure, we wouldn't notice in the course of a single lifespan, but over the course of recorded history we'd probalby have noticed something by now.
I suspect the female geeks are attracted to the male geeks as much as the male geeks to the female. When you get right down to it, everybody wants dumb and pretty, which is why the species will be reduced to vapid personalities inhabiting bodies made by DuPont.
This is the definition of the word "anecdote." While I don't doubt your experience, yours is only one out of possibly millions, and before we are able to say that porn is bad to the species as a whole (as opposed to a predisposition of a few, as with alcoholism) we have to take into account the expierence of a properly chosen sample of the population, which this book apparently does not do.
And while your experiences may be true, your interpretation of them may be flawed. I myself have been a 23 year-old guy with an internet connection, and I know that one's hormones do not magically turn off at 20 and you're still a young man with the primal urge to procreate the species. You're assuming your obsession with porn is a cause rather than a symptom.
"BTW, in response to your first post, Garcia,"
I'm not him.
"However, if I just married someone, I definitely wouldn't be at work (or elsewhere) posting about how strong my relationship is."
No plan survives contact with the enemy. Honeymoons end.
I didn't say "implication," I said "evidence." And while one particular vision of divinity can be disproven, most surviving views are inherently untestable.
And besides, everything breaks down when you consider that Zeus and Olympus were themselves often viewed as metaphors in their own time. The human search for meaning will always be left open to human interpretation, and you can't justifiably use science to promote one interpretation over another, even if that interpretation is "there is no god."
Cause/Effect?
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just, in general, the review smacks of assuming cause and effect. For example:
"Consider this -- prior to the Internet, law enforcement believed that child porn had been basically wiped out. It was a crime from a previous age, like body snatching. But then came the Web. Between 1996 and 2004, child-porn cases handled by the FBI increased 23 fold."
It seems the reviewer is assuming that greater access to child pornography has triggered a surge, but even he used the word "believed." Simply because prosecutors didn't find any evidence of child porn activity does't mean it didn't exist. All I see here is that easy access to Usenet made it easier to find evidence.
And in general the reviewer mentions certain anecdotes for their shock value while never making the case that easy access caused this behavior (if anything, I can see this behavior causing a desire to look at the porn in question, not the other way around). It seems it would be possible to find a verified normal, healthy person, throw porn at them and see if there's empirical evidence of a change in the person, but the only answer given is another anecdote that some schools think it would be "too dangerous," regardless of whether the porn in question is late-night Skinemax or Rape Fantasies, Inc. Is it more dangerous than, say, pharmecutical testing?
And even if it can be shown that porn, any porn, is psychologicall damaging, I still don't see anything suggesting that a normal, healthy person would actually seek out this damaging material on their own, or at least wouldn't have a natural aversion to it if unwittingly exposed to it.
Since you were bumped up as informative, I'm assuming either you or your moderators have empirical evidence of this you would like to share with the rest of the class.
AMD64 runs 32-bit programs natively without the need for software emulation. Whereas WOW on an IA64 machine has to emulate a 32-bit architecture for 32-bit code, on an AMD64 WOW simply passes the code onto the CPU as is. WOW wouldn't even be an issue if 64-bit Windows could assume in all instances that a 64-bit architecture would be able to run 32-bit code natively, as the AMD64 does (and most AMD64 Windows users dual-boot between 64-bit and 32-bit OS).
No, our "enemies" are who Congress declares war on, which hasn't happened since 1941. Even Ethel and Julius Rosenberg weren't tried for treason. You cannot arbitrarily declare someone as an "enemy" of the United States and there are very good reasons for this.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Attitudes like yours is why this little passage was put into the Constitution of the United States. Now, it's still possible to be found guilty of treason against a state, but you didn't seem to specify.
" With the current state of CGI and a world awash with 'fake' scifi images running all the way back to 2001: A space Odyssey, "
Interesting choice of movie examples. They actually changed the visual effects to more resemble the Voyager footage that was just coming in at the time. In fact, the Voyager probes are why the Discovery when to Jupiter instead of Saturn (like they did in the book).
I really can't feel sorry for them. I could possibly root for Google's Chinese engine if they didn't cowtow to Beijing's censorhsip regime, but so long as they're both self-censoring, I find myself more in favor of their homegrown competitors because they at least have an excuse.
"I'd want the right to marry a woman, but I wouldn't be stupid enough to pretend that it was the "same" right as my neighbour Bob's right to marry his friend Steve. I assume the law in that imaginary land would say something to the effect of "you can marry whoever you want as long as they are the same gender as you.
Bob would therefore have the right to marry Steve. I also would have the right to marry Steve if he preferred me over Bob. That's what you can an EQUAL right."
Bob is white and Steve is a Freedman. Both want to vote. The law says that you can't vote unless your grandfather was able to vote. Bob's grandfather was a free white man, Steve's was a slave (who obviously couldn't vote). However, because the law is applied "equally" in your view, Jim Crow is just fine and dandy.
The federal courts have already said that a law, no matter how "equally" it is applied, cannot be used to produce an inequal result. The Fourteenth Amendment doesn't say "equal application," it says "equal protection," and so long as the law is used to protect a heterosexual's liberty to freely associate with someone in marriage while denying the homosexual's liberty, it violates the Fourteenth Amendment.
(Look, ma! My sig is on topic!)
"A different right would be the EXTRA right to marry someone of the opposite gender. "
A different right would be the EXTRA right of the descendant of slaves to vote.
"Clinton impeahced? It was Rehnquist who was presiding judge in the Senate."
He had no involvement in the House vote to impeach, and while presiding over the Senate he has no say in the Senate's vote on conviction. He may have been the "judge" as you say, but he certainly wasn't the jury.
And the only reason he's involved is to avoid a conflict of interest. You don't see anybody in the judicial branch presiding over the impeachment trial of a federal judge, so it makes little sense to have had Al Gore presiding over Clinton's impeachment trial.
"They can do far more than "cancel" actions. Look at Massachuset. They legislature took no action on gays. Yet the courts ruled that gas had special rights."
First off, apples and oranges; that was a state court, which has jurisdiction in anything and everything the Constitution doesn't grant to the courts set up by Congress. Secondly, all the court said was that the state legislature could not grant rights to heterosexual couples while simultaneously witholdin them from homosexuals. There were no special rights, the courts said "Everybody can get married, or nobody can get married." Pesky Fourteenth Amendment.
"Not only that, but the court told businesses, no matter what religion of the leadership, they must pay money to gays to support the "spouse"."
It also means that Catholics have to support the Protestant spouses of employees or, even worse, divorcees. I can also think of a few Christian sects that say it's a mortal sin to marry someone of the wrong skin color. If you allow religious discrimination of any sort, you allow all of it, or else you end up "respecting an establishment of religion."
"That is even if the business is private, and the owners are christian and want to give christian values to the world"
That's for them to do in their places of worship, not in the hiring of employees.
"John Adams"... had jack and shit to do with the Constitution of 1789.
"Hamilton was gunned down by the Vice President of the USA."
And yet he lives on in the courts' continued reference to his writings as "The Federalist," where in he talked about the government formed by the Constitution of 1789 as designed.
"Jefferson"... had jack and shit to do with the Constitution of 1789.
If you're going to complain about the document, try focusing on the people who actually signed the thing. I'll let you include John Jay as an exception, but otherwise you did nothing but list two straw men.
"They are the only one that is not checked."
While the impeachment of presidents is rare, the impeachment of federal judges is not. For example, Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida got elected to the House after he was kicked off the federal bench by the Senate. Seems like a "check" to me.
"How can Congress or the President strike down a court order?"
Well, they can ignore it (Lincoln has a history of ignoring several big federal court rulings), they can remove the judges, or they can do what is most often done: stack the deck.
"The problem is that the hurricane broke the dikes. That's it, that's the whole problem. The hurricane itself is a non-problem. Yes, it causes storm surges on the 'wrong' side because of the lake, and in fact that's what broke the dikes."
And what you don't understand is that they weren't dykes, they're levees. Dykes have constant pressure on them, while 90% of the time levees don't have water up against them. They're designed to hold back water temporarily during times of flooding. Without the storm surge, there would have been no water to rush into the city if somebody had blown them up. Wikipedia has a picture of a levee just outside of New Orleans under normal circumstances, but as can be seen from the news footage the water was high enough to wash over them, and at least one of the breaks I've seen appear to be breaks in the floodwall running along the top of the levee proper.
If you blew up the levee last month, there would have been no water on the other side to rush into the city. The water that eroded away the levee and eventually poured into New Orlans came from the storm surge.
And since you seem to define "the hurricane" to be the high winds themselves and not what they do to water, then "the hurricane" didn't break the levee.
That may be, but the fact remains that, for each and every of those 35 counts, an individual's rights had been violated. If each count doesn't carry a similar sentence, then some victims are considered to be more important than others, and if future similar illegal acts carry a progressively lighter sentence, there is less and less reason to stop doing it.
The individual counts may not warrant the maximum, and the judge can always order the sentences to be served concurrently, but the fact remains that linear sentencing, with a similar punishment for each and every count, while not always palletable, is about as fair as we can think of.
" And the precious irony is that the French Quarter - you know, the heart of NO's lascivious nightlife, Bourbon St. et al - is one of the least damaged parts of NO north of the Mississippi. "
I'd wager it has more to do with experience than anything. The French Quarter is probably the oldest urban area north/east of the Mississippi and has been putting up with floods and such for long before they had the levee system. Atop of that, the buildings are older, lighter, and sinking at a slower rate.
"At least (70%?) of the Louisiana National Guard was still there, even if their most applicable units weren't"
There's something I've been wondering about when this debate comes up: of the NG units that have not yet been called up, where are their armories? Could all the units form up even if they wanted to?
"And why hasn't the media picked up on the story of how utterly incompenent the folks in charge of New Orleans are?"
Dude, it's Louisiana. Widespread croneyism and nepotism, deep-seated coruption... for Louisiana, especially New Orleans, this is not news.
A few years back, umpteen term governor (for life) Edwin G. Edwards finally got sentenced on federal corruption charges, sending him up the river to Texas. The most his supporters can say is "Yeah, he was crooked, but he didn't do that particular bit of crookedness." The only reason he's not still governor is newly-enacted term limits in the state's consitution.
Ever heard of him? Of course not. "Dog bites man" doesn't make the newspapers.
Saying the folks in the federal government aren't as bad as Louisiana isn't exactly a good defense, and certainly isn't flattering. If anything, it damages the federal government for being compared to Louisiana.
" There's no trucks to move it around and the roads are blocked anyway, and the people can't get to where the supplies are."
Again, this is Louisiana. Boudreaux can get on out there in his pirot (which happens fairly often, considering all the flooding the area gets). This would be a great application for the "brown water" Navy we don't seem to have.
Because it's a political appointment. The president appoints, and the Senate confirms, based on a persons loyalty to The Beloved Party. For an organization as large and well-funded as FEMA, it's not about how good you are, it's who you know.
Slashdot Mirror
"Plastic girls aren't worth my time."
Then I suppose all that porn on your hard drive is there becuase of the obvious intelligence of the subjects?
" is it not pretty clear we have diverged greatly into different species?"
Most certainly not. Two members of two differen species cannot breed a fertile offspring. If that were true of, say, whites and Hispanics, I wouldn't be here as my mother wouldn't be able to have children.
"When observed dogs that are quite varried in size, proportions, and coloring we call them different breeds -why not so with people?"
Breeds != species. All dogs can interbreed with each other, which is why verifying a dog's purebred status can be so important to collectors and such.
"Not saying one is better than the other but a African Pygmy and a Pacific Samoian are pretty unmistakably different."
If they can have a fertile child, they're of the same species. Appearances can be deceiving.
"Will any noticeable branching happen?"
My understanding may be flawed and dated (I Am Not a Biologist), but speciation isn't a particularly slow process. There's no "connect the dots" record of one species slowly devleoping into another, instead we have things remaining relatively constant for a long period of time, then something sudden happens (geologically speaking) that brings about a drastic change (geologically speaking) in the environment, triggering many new developments to thrive and die off rapidly (etc.) until a small number of clear winners comes out of the fray.
If we were in the middle of such an event, sure, we wouldn't notice in the course of a single lifespan, but over the course of recorded history we'd probalby have noticed something by now.
I suspect the female geeks are attracted to the male geeks as much as the male geeks to the female. When you get right down to it, everybody wants dumb and pretty, which is why the species will be reduced to vapid personalities inhabiting bodies made by DuPont.
"I know by experience"
This is the definition of the word "anecdote." While I don't doubt your experience, yours is only one out of possibly millions, and before we are able to say that porn is bad to the species as a whole (as opposed to a predisposition of a few, as with alcoholism) we have to take into account the expierence of a properly chosen sample of the population, which this book apparently does not do.
And while your experiences may be true, your interpretation of them may be flawed. I myself have been a 23 year-old guy with an internet connection, and I know that one's hormones do not magically turn off at 20 and you're still a young man with the primal urge to procreate the species. You're assuming your obsession with porn is a cause rather than a symptom.
"BTW, in response to your first post, Garcia,"
I'm not him.
"However, if I just married someone, I definitely wouldn't be at work (or elsewhere) posting about how strong my relationship is."
No plan survives contact with the enemy. Honeymoons end.
I didn't say "implication," I said "evidence." And while one particular vision of divinity can be disproven, most surviving views are inherently untestable.
And besides, everything breaks down when you consider that Zeus and Olympus were themselves often viewed as metaphors in their own time. The human search for meaning will always be left open to human interpretation, and you can't justifiably use science to promote one interpretation over another, even if that interpretation is "there is no god."
Just, in general, the review smacks of assuming cause and effect. For example:
"Consider this -- prior to the Internet, law enforcement believed that child porn had been basically wiped out. It was a crime from a previous age, like body snatching. But then came the Web. Between 1996 and 2004, child-porn cases handled by the FBI increased 23 fold."
It seems the reviewer is assuming that greater access to child pornography has triggered a surge, but even he used the word "believed." Simply because prosecutors didn't find any evidence of child porn activity does't mean it didn't exist. All I see here is that easy access to Usenet made it easier to find evidence.
And in general the reviewer mentions certain anecdotes for their shock value while never making the case that easy access caused this behavior (if anything, I can see this behavior causing a desire to look at the porn in question, not the other way around). It seems it would be possible to find a verified normal, healthy person, throw porn at them and see if there's empirical evidence of a change in the person, but the only answer given is another anecdote that some schools think it would be "too dangerous," regardless of whether the porn in question is late-night Skinemax or Rape Fantasies, Inc. Is it more dangerous than, say, pharmecutical testing?
And even if it can be shown that porn, any porn, is psychologicall damaging, I still don't see anything suggesting that a normal, healthy person would actually seek out this damaging material on their own, or at least wouldn't have a natural aversion to it if unwittingly exposed to it.
Since you were bumped up as informative, I'm assuming either you or your moderators have empirical evidence of this you would like to share with the rest of the class.
"Look further, accept and embrace your human condition."
I thought that was the whole point of religion to begin with.
AMD64 runs 32-bit programs natively without the need for software emulation. Whereas WOW on an IA64 machine has to emulate a 32-bit architecture for 32-bit code, on an AMD64 WOW simply passes the code onto the CPU as is. WOW wouldn't even be an issue if 64-bit Windows could assume in all instances that a 64-bit architecture would be able to run 32-bit code natively, as the AMD64 does (and most AMD64 Windows users dual-boot between 64-bit and 32-bit OS).
No, our "enemies" are who Congress declares war on, which hasn't happened since 1941. Even Ethel and Julius Rosenberg weren't tried for treason. You cannot arbitrarily declare someone as an "enemy" of the United States and there are very good reasons for this.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Attitudes like yours is why this little passage was put into the Constitution of the United States. Now, it's still possible to be found guilty of treason against a state, but you didn't seem to specify.
" With the current state of CGI and a world awash with 'fake' scifi images running all the way back to 2001: A space Odyssey, "
Interesting choice of movie examples. They actually changed the visual effects to more resemble the Voyager footage that was just coming in at the time. In fact, the Voyager probes are why the Discovery when to Jupiter instead of Saturn (like they did in the book).
" Besides Intel, who couldn't see the writing on the wall?"
Microsoft. AMD64 isn't the architecture that needs the "Windows on Windows" emulation in NT 5.2.
I really can't feel sorry for them. I could possibly root for Google's Chinese engine if they didn't cowtow to Beijing's censorhsip regime, but so long as they're both self-censoring, I find myself more in favor of their homegrown competitors because they at least have an excuse.
"I'd want the right to marry a woman, but I wouldn't be stupid enough to pretend that it was the "same" right as my neighbour Bob's right to marry his friend Steve. I assume the law in that imaginary land would say something to the effect of "you can marry whoever you want as long as they are the same gender as you.
Bob would therefore have the right to marry Steve. I also would have the right to marry Steve if he preferred me over Bob. That's what you can an EQUAL right."
Bob is white and Steve is a Freedman. Both want to vote. The law says that you can't vote unless your grandfather was able to vote. Bob's grandfather was a free white man, Steve's was a slave (who obviously couldn't vote). However, because the law is applied "equally" in your view, Jim Crow is just fine and dandy.
The federal courts have already said that a law, no matter how "equally" it is applied, cannot be used to produce an inequal result. The Fourteenth Amendment doesn't say "equal application," it says "equal protection," and so long as the law is used to protect a heterosexual's liberty to freely associate with someone in marriage while denying the homosexual's liberty, it violates the Fourteenth Amendment.
(Look, ma! My sig is on topic!)
"A different right would be the EXTRA right to marry someone of the opposite gender. "
A different right would be the EXTRA right of the descendant of slaves to vote.
"Clinton impeahced? It was Rehnquist who was presiding judge in the Senate."
... had jack and shit to do with the Constitution of 1789.
... had jack and shit to do with the Constitution of 1789.
He had no involvement in the House vote to impeach, and while presiding over the Senate he has no say in the Senate's vote on conviction. He may have been the "judge" as you say, but he certainly wasn't the jury.
And the only reason he's involved is to avoid a conflict of interest. You don't see anybody in the judicial branch presiding over the impeachment trial of a federal judge, so it makes little sense to have had Al Gore presiding over Clinton's impeachment trial.
"They can do far more than "cancel" actions. Look at Massachuset. They legislature took no action on gays. Yet the courts ruled that gas had special rights."
First off, apples and oranges; that was a state court, which has jurisdiction in anything and everything the Constitution doesn't grant to the courts set up by Congress. Secondly, all the court said was that the state legislature could not grant rights to heterosexual couples while simultaneously witholdin them from homosexuals. There were no special rights, the courts said "Everybody can get married, or nobody can get married." Pesky Fourteenth Amendment.
"Not only that, but the court told businesses, no matter what religion of the leadership, they must pay money to gays to support the "spouse"."
It also means that Catholics have to support the Protestant spouses of employees or, even worse, divorcees. I can also think of a few Christian sects that say it's a mortal sin to marry someone of the wrong skin color. If you allow religious discrimination of any sort, you allow all of it, or else you end up "respecting an establishment of religion."
"That is even if the business is private, and the owners are christian and want to give christian values to the world"
That's for them to do in their places of worship, not in the hiring of employees.
"John Adams"
"Hamilton was gunned down by the Vice President of the USA."
And yet he lives on in the courts' continued reference to his writings as "The Federalist," where in he talked about the government formed by the Constitution of 1789 as designed.
"Jefferson"
If you're going to complain about the document, try focusing on the people who actually signed the thing. I'll let you include John Jay as an exception, but otherwise you did nothing but list two straw men.
"They are the only one that is not checked."
While the impeachment of presidents is rare, the impeachment of federal judges is not. For example, Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida got elected to the House after he was kicked off the federal bench by the Senate. Seems like a "check" to me.
"How can Congress or the President strike down a court order?"
Well, they can ignore it (Lincoln has a history of ignoring several big federal court rulings), they can remove the judges, or they can do what is most often done: stack the deck.
"Now imagine a 50 foot chicken...and you're the bug."
Ultra Mega Chicken? No, shhh, he is legend.
Is it cause/effect, though? Are we talking about people infected with toxoplasmy, or cat owners?
"The problem is that the hurricane broke the dikes. That's it, that's the whole problem. The hurricane itself is a non-problem. Yes, it causes storm surges on the 'wrong' side because of the lake, and in fact that's what broke the dikes."
And what you don't understand is that they weren't dykes, they're levees. Dykes have constant pressure on them, while 90% of the time levees don't have water up against them. They're designed to hold back water temporarily during times of flooding. Without the storm surge, there would have been no water to rush into the city if somebody had blown them up. Wikipedia has a picture of a levee just outside of New Orleans under normal circumstances, but as can be seen from the news footage the water was high enough to wash over them, and at least one of the breaks I've seen appear to be breaks in the floodwall running along the top of the levee proper.
If you blew up the levee last month, there would have been no water on the other side to rush into the city. The water that eroded away the levee and eventually poured into New Orlans came from the storm surge.
And since you seem to define "the hurricane" to be the high winds themselves and not what they do to water, then "the hurricane" didn't break the levee.
That may be, but the fact remains that, for each and every of those 35 counts, an individual's rights had been violated. If each count doesn't carry a similar sentence, then some victims are considered to be more important than others, and if future similar illegal acts carry a progressively lighter sentence, there is less and less reason to stop doing it.
The individual counts may not warrant the maximum, and the judge can always order the sentences to be served concurrently, but the fact remains that linear sentencing, with a similar punishment for each and every count, while not always palletable, is about as fair as we can think of.
" And the precious irony is that the French Quarter - you know, the heart of NO's lascivious nightlife, Bourbon St. et al - is one of the least damaged parts of NO north of the Mississippi. "
I'd wager it has more to do with experience than anything. The French Quarter is probably the oldest urban area north/east of the Mississippi and has been putting up with floods and such for long before they had the levee system. Atop of that, the buildings are older, lighter, and sinking at a slower rate.
"At least (70%?) of the Louisiana National Guard was still there, even if their most applicable units weren't"
There's something I've been wondering about when this debate comes up: of the NG units that have not yet been called up, where are their armories? Could all the units form up even if they wanted to?
"And why hasn't the media picked up on the story of how utterly incompenent the folks in charge of New Orleans are?"
Dude, it's Louisiana. Widespread croneyism and nepotism, deep-seated coruption... for Louisiana, especially New Orleans, this is not news.
A few years back, umpteen term governor (for life) Edwin G. Edwards finally got sentenced on federal corruption charges, sending him up the river to Texas. The most his supporters can say is "Yeah, he was crooked, but he didn't do that particular bit of crookedness." The only reason he's not still governor is newly-enacted term limits in the state's consitution.
Ever heard of him? Of course not. "Dog bites man" doesn't make the newspapers.
Saying the folks in the federal government aren't as bad as Louisiana isn't exactly a good defense, and certainly isn't flattering. If anything, it damages the federal government for being compared to Louisiana.
" There's no trucks to move it around and the roads are blocked anyway, and the people can't get to where the supplies are."
Again, this is Louisiana. Boudreaux can get on out there in his pirot (which happens fairly often, considering all the flooding the area gets). This would be a great application for the "brown water" Navy we don't seem to have.
Because it's a political appointment. The president appoints, and the Senate confirms, based on a persons loyalty to The Beloved Party. For an organization as large and well-funded as FEMA, it's not about how good you are, it's who you know.
Don't like it? Keep that in mind next November.