Are you sure? Do you know the phrase "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"? Besides, as long as he's not in jail, our elected public servants will know that they are above the law.
This whole "separation of church and state" thing seems to be giving Illinois sour-tummy. With religion finally gone (errrrrr...) they feel a power vacuum: someone has to come up with "facts" and doctrine that is not subject to question. Otherwise the American People will have to grow brains, and then Democracy will surely fail!
I'm just saying that I'm not sure the person in question can be taken at face value.
Should anyone?
Someone who makes it a point to mention their sexual orientation (or race, or religion, or whatever) in their gamer profile is quite possibly someone who is *trying* to be provocative and cause trouble.
It strikes me that if you briefly mention your sexual orientation with the intent to cause trouble, then it is very important that trouble be caused. A society that can't handle brief offhand mentions of sexual preference has serious issues, and needs to be bitchslapped. What's the best environment for said bitchslapping? Probably one with lots of young people who might actually have their minds opened (check). One that is designed for social interactions (check). One that involves a little bit of imagination and roleplaying, so people come in ready to imagine and dream (check). One in which people can't actually be threatened by physical harm (check, although some people do get pretty attached to their avatars). I think that these games could be a great opportunity for pulling socially isolated groups out of their isolation, and exposing them to the world and the world to them.
And people like that are often banned for reasons unrelated to simply "being a X."
And blacks are often thrown in jail for reasons unrelated to being black. That's a good argument to lock up all the niggers, apparently?
I bet I could get banned too if I wrote "I'm a proud heterosexual" in my profile and then went running around in every game I played screaming into the mic "I'm a proud heteroseuxual! Heterosexuals rule! Shove it up your asses if you don't like it!"
I missed that. I thought she'd just made a small note on her profile?
It's really hard to skew an election by more than a few percent, given that we have all kinds of polls, and Nate Silver, and so on. And it's a stretch to take seriously any election that is won by a few percent.
I'm terribly disappointed in the last few years. Does anyone actually believe that Obama's election marks a new era of thoughtfulness and wisdom? PAH! He won convincingly enough, but not because the American people suddenly sprouted brains. He won because of charisma and a very good ground team, and possibly because the Arabs manipulated oil prices;)
Don't get me wrong: I am starting to really like him. I believe that he will fail--the country was too economically fucked up when he took over. But that's not the point.
The point is this: a democracy is only safe when the citizens are educated and wise. Do we have that? We have a few educated and wise people, a few educated and greedy people, and a shitload of sheep about half of whom were, this time, convinced by stellar effort and happy coincidences that Republicans couldn't save them. Until we have a majority who can process information and make wise decisions, a few votes one way or another do not say a damn thing about what The People want.
ps. Yes, I love the idea of trying the responsible execs for treason. I just don't think it'll help very much with the real problem.
It would appear that the problem, then, is not medicine, but law. Doctors are at least pretty close to scientists, but lawyers are closer to evangelists--and who can blame them, since due to the jury selection process "a jury of your peers" often means "a bunch of uneducated morons off the street". The real problem is that our legal system has no obligation to be rigorous. What can we do about that one?
I liked your reply. You raise a point that I hadn't considered: the hub problem. However, I'm not convinced that that's not just a problem of not enough public transportation infrastructure--I've seen plenty of places where there are hundreds of "hubs" (subway stops), and most anywhere is less than 10 minutes by foot (half a mile) from one of them. Since so many people are getting some exercise, the women (and probably the men) are all hot! It works pretty well!
Is the USA really that much more prosperous than, say, the Netherlands? How about when you take into account our raw resources vs. theirs? Who is healthier? Who is happier?
There are a couple of things going on here, though, and it would be good to spell them out. The first is that on the individual level cars cause certain social and health problems. The second is that there are simply too many people in the world, and until we solve that, even bicycles will, as you say, cause traffic jams. There is no solution, and there will never be a solution, that will eliminate traffic as we approach the limit of infinite population.
So it seems to me that we need a two-pronged approach. First: take steps to ensure that the population does not continue to increase forever, even though it'll make plenty of economists have a cow. Second, in the short term (and this is time-critical at least for greenhouse gases and energy independence (national security)): reduce the environmental (pollution, traffic, health care, etc) impact of each person as much as practical, as quickly as possible. You and I seem to differ on what we think is practical, but we have lived in different places and seen differently effective systems, so that's just a detail.
Here, as I see it, are the problems with cars:
(1) They convert fossil fuels into toxins, carcinogens, greenhouse gases, and resource wars. This can, as you say, be avoided, if we increase our clean energy production in the USA by a factor of about, what, 100? That's not unrealistic, actually, but it could take a while.
(2) Most people have no time for daily exercise, but they make time to commute. I and many others have found that the only practical way to exercise is while commuting (too much time spent on slashdot, apparently...). Therefore, human-powered commuting, while far from the only answer, is one very potent solution to the health care crisis. A society that makes that possible will be far healthier. Since societies tend to pay for the poor health of their citizens (even the rather backwards USA is finally moving in that direction, kicking and screaming the whole way), it is very profitable for a society to try to give its members opportunities to be healthy.
(3) Cars take up lots of space. Storing cars is very expensive, because they're big and heavy. Terminal costs are a large part of transportation infrastructure costs. I don't understand how requiring people to pave yet more land for no good reason boosts the economy. It is not a real source of value to anyone--the only value is secondary, as people can get where they're going in order to produce actual value. You can read more about this one (and some of the others, actually) in "The High Cost Of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup.
(4) Cars are dangerous. Hurtling at 200km/h within meters of people you don't know in multi-thousand-kilogram blocks of steel seems like a recipe for a horror movie, and indeed it is. Forget the indirect costs--the direct cost in lives due to this peculiar pastime is 40000 deaths/year in the USA. I don't know the injury rate, but it is probably at least 20 times that. What is the cost of that?
(5) Many people cannot drive. Some are too old or too young, some are drunk or high, some have poor or no eyesight, some don't have the money, some may suffer from random blackouts, some are too stupid or careless, some grew up in New York... Call me socialist, but I like a society that provides a way for these people to maintain their independence.
There are plenty of very active and fit people who drive cars.
Yup, I drive one when I need to. There are places that public transportation can't take you (and that's a good thing, I think). There are things I can't carry on my bike. But when I can bike, it's a little better for everyone, and vastly better for me.
Why should the vast majority of people subsidize the public transit system, sidewalks, etc. that you and a very, very small minority of people are using?
Have you ever dealt with LA rush hour, when you can easily average under 5mph for miles? What do you think would alleviate that? Have you breathed the LA air? It makes for pretty sunsets, for sure! That's an extreme example, but for many other reasons it is somewhere between nice and crucial that we move away from cars, and that can't be done until we have an alternative system in place. It's just not practical to say "From tomorrow on, nobody can drive. The alternatives will appear in just a few years." We need to create an alternative and gradually increase incentives to use them, even as we continue to improve them. For example, what would life be like if the Bay Area and LA, or Boston and New York, had effective public transportation and a cheap walk-in 1-hour TGV between them?
Cheap? Obviously, asymptotically we would like all transportation to cost the rider what it actually costs--no passing hidden costs on to storefronts or health care or environmental cleanup operations or future generations or Iraqis. I don't know what gasoline costs, but it sure as hell isn't $2/gallon. I'm guessing that ten times that is optimistic, but that's just a guess, and of course costs will on average go up until there's none left. I do know roughly what parking costs--about $20000/space to install. At least maintenance isn't so bad.
Oops. The short answer is this: we have created a society in which people need cars. That has sweeping implications, and hurts us more than most who haven't seen the alternatives or done the maths can understand. Should public transportation be subsidised? Probably more so than private transportation is while we try to encourage people to build a better way of life, but ultimately, perhaps not. Of course, to every person in the world it is worth something to dissuade someone else from driving, so perhaps it is reasonable to pay people not to drive. I don't know.
The world would be be a far better place if human beings reproduced seldom.
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, I agree with you. It's quite fun/enlightening/depressing to study primate behaviour and then go to even a polite, educated dinner party (let alone a frat party). Wow! We have come so far in so many ways that don't much matter.
Meanwhile, the best solution I can think of is to (1) try to educate myself (and ideally everyone) in the last few thousand years' worth of development in the techniques of rational thought, and in history that always asks "what were they thinking, really?" and (2) when that fails, publicly mock the "logic" of those who try to promote fuzzy thoughts--not trying to educate the idiots anymore, but trying to get the potential victims to take sides based on observation and reason.
Wrong word. I have reached some conclusions because I have a brain. They are not moralistic, but based on observation of what works. When there's overwhelming evidence directly tying your actions to great harm to society, I'm going to call you on it. Hiding behind words like "self-righteous" because you want to avoid looking at the ethical implications of your behaviour is pretty weak.
Thanks for your kind wishes, but I still have enough faith in this government to believe that I could have a few people fired for wasting taxpayers' money trying to collect on a ticket given to someone for a crime he didn't commit. Still, a bloody waste of time.
Every time major new roads are constructed, the economy grows dramatically.
I said society, not the economy. Economists will tell you that they're the same, but then, engineers will tell you that society is measured by the complexity of its machines, aritsts will tell you that society is measured by its creative output, environmentalists will tell you it's measured by whether it will last more than 50 years... it's a standard outcome of myopic training.
Who pays for roads? We do. What effect do they have? They increase the number of cars (it's a little more complex than that, but you can probably work out the details yourself).
When we have more cars, what does that do to us? It means we need more parking: more urban sprawl, more expensive paving projects, etc. It means we have less incentive to create public transportation. It means we need more hospitals, since there will be more accidents, more toxins and carcinogens in the air, more people driving instead of walk/bus/bike, and thus more stress, more high blood pressure, more obesity and the dozens of serious diseases that go along with that... Cars (currently) depend on a very limited supply of "free energy" in the form of oil--what is the cost to society of transforming it when that runs out? What is the cost of securing oil resources that we don't have? What is the cost of extracting resources that we do have? Oil spills and ecosystem destruction are usually ignored, because if they weren't, popular positions like yours would not look quite so sensible. and then there's the little problem of global warming, which probably rather trumps the others.
The true costs of a car include neutralising all of those things. Economists are usually quite happy to spatially or temporally displace these hidden costs, and who can blame them? That's their training.
The overwhelming majority of people are going to need a parking space, yet it's not included with the price of... whatever (eg. rent).
I take your point about convenience and roundoff error. However, this last point is moronic: you propose to make everyone pay for something that only lazy people "need". When I go shopping, I pay higher prices because the store owners have to pay for free parking that I don't use. I am literally subsidising parking spots by buying at these stores (providing "free" parking is part of most city building codes). Why should I do that? I've already told you how much cars hurt people (probably needlessly; you probably already knew it). Now why should I pay for it?
The overwhelming majority of people choose to use cars because they're too stupid and greedy and lazy to find better alternatives. Why should I pay for that? Why should society bear the costs incurred by its stupidest members?
And only because society subsidises this ridiculous lifestyle is it so popular. Look at places with good public transportation systems. When people don't need cars, what happens to health? To quality of life? To sprawl, pollution, asthma, heart disease, cancer,...?
Of course we're superior. You'd be a fool not to recognise your superiority. However, it's a secret that you should keep close to your chest. People--normal people who have never learned to respect achievement--will only like you if they think they're better than you.
People who want to park their cars for free are pathetic whiners. Cars cost our society an enormous amount. Why shouldn't the individual using the car pay for some of the car's costs?
That said, I did get in illegitimate parking ticket once (parked under a sign with restriction hours posted on it, outside the restriction hours). They dismissed it, eventually.
But I suspect that the overwhelming majority of parking tickets are perfectly legitimate and completely deserved.
What is scary about this story is that they are talking about mere allegations of copyright violations to suspend service. Surely this will be abused...
So... abuse it! Nothing points out the problems with a system faster than breaking it. Is there a punishment for people whose allegations turn out to be incorrect?
I took some photographs and put them in an archive named "StarWars.zip". This person downloaded and seeded a file by that name on BitTorrent.
Wait--I thought the blank-media tax made copying legal in Canada?
'Scuse me? An individual's sexual preference doesn't hurt others. An individual's faith does. Even if you choose to ignore all the atrocities that have been committed because of faith, at the very least it provides a fertile environment for superstition.
Good point about sequestration, at least if the trees are not burned. Of course, there are other reasons to save them. On the practical side, it's very difficult to cut them down without causing erosion, topsoil loss, destruction of complex and far-reaching ecosystems associated with habitat loss, etc... But perhaps more importantly, there are also interesting quality-of-life issues involved with destroying things of great beauty. At what point is it just not worth cramming a few billion more people onto an ugly planet?
Wow...like really, DUH! Anytime you repetatively perform an action, especially when it can be strenuous and cause things like sweat, you will get sores/callouses/etc.
I dunno. Regular exercise certainly qualifies, and isn't really such a bad thing--your body destroys itself pretty quickly if you don't get any. Of course, sporadic exercise causes sores, blisters, etc. It's entertaining that some forms of exercise are healthy whereas others (button mashing, typing, etc) are less so.
I'd guess that wool glove liners would help with this particular disease. Just as jogging without shoes is dangerous...?
That isn't acceptable if someone's profile says they're Black, or Indian or White or Christian or Muslim, and it isn't acceptable if someone says they're gay.
Being gay shouldn't be grounds for hounding--it's not hurting anyone (except all of us straight males who can't get a date because the accursed gay males convinced women that men should know how to dress well). But what exactly is wrong with hounding Christians or Muslims? It's about time that we as a society moved beyond basing major life decisions on fairytales and wishful thinking. Why shouldn't people who use faith to justify ANYTHING be hounded and harassed and mocked? For one thing, Microsoft's and society's homophobia is almost certainly a direct result of Christian faith.
That said, I'd prefer if people identified their faith-vs-brightness status upfront. It'd save a bunch of time.
Because it is natural for people to identify with other people who share interests or status. What's wrong with a gay gamer being interested in playing with other gay gamers? What about Christian gamers wanting to play with other Christian gamers?
You said it! Of course, by the same token, what's wrong with straight white gamers being interested in playing with other straight white gamers? That's exactly the same thing. No, it's not a "choice" issue--sexual orientation and religion usually don't seem to be consciously chosen either.
Perhaps we as a society would actually gain if we forbade any expression of individuality that would allow cliques to form based on anything other than long-term personal interaction. But that seems like a kludge.
Maybe you wouldn't. If you don't like it, you can ignore it, just as you can ignore the people who write about their favourite breed of dog. If you're not going to say whatever is important to you on your profile, how is it an interesting profile?
It sounds like you are advocating banning anyone who discusses any topic that is not of particular interest to you.
Is that in order to be considered evidence in court? Or can you be sued for recording a conversation for your own ends? Because HR or the manager's manager or etc. is not a court.
True. However, I wonder things all the time. If I googled all of them, I would never be able to get anything done at all. Or even eat.
Which isn't a bad thing, per se. But wondering aloud to friends is not only wondering about the thing, but also wondering about friends' reactions to the thing. It's a social interaction! That's why I've seen PhD students surrounded by computers debating some factual point about eggplant for 5 minutes. It's more fun than just looking it up!
That said, the benefit of the analogue of such "social interaction" on Slashdot is questionable.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure? Do you know the phrase "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"? Besides, as long as he's not in jail, our elected public servants will know that they are above the law.
Also, it's kinda fun :)
This whole "separation of church and state" thing seems to be giving Illinois sour-tummy. With religion finally gone (errrrrr...) they feel a power vacuum: someone has to come up with "facts" and doctrine that is not subject to question. Otherwise the American People will have to grow brains, and then Democracy will surely fail!
Lemme check my notes...
Is that the murder rate within the US? Or the murder rate by US citizens? I was just wondering about what Bush did to that number...
I'm just saying that I'm not sure the person in question can be taken at face value.
Should anyone?
Someone who makes it a point to mention their sexual orientation (or race, or religion, or whatever) in their gamer profile is quite possibly someone who is *trying* to be provocative and cause trouble.
It strikes me that if you briefly mention your sexual orientation with the intent to cause trouble, then it is very important that trouble be caused. A society that can't handle brief offhand mentions of sexual preference has serious issues, and needs to be bitchslapped. What's the best environment for said bitchslapping? Probably one with lots of young people who might actually have their minds opened (check). One that is designed for social interactions (check). One that involves a little bit of imagination and roleplaying, so people come in ready to imagine and dream (check). One in which people can't actually be threatened by physical harm (check, although some people do get pretty attached to their avatars). I think that these games could be a great opportunity for pulling socially isolated groups out of their isolation, and exposing them to the world and the world to them.
And people like that are often banned for reasons unrelated to simply "being a X."
And blacks are often thrown in jail for reasons unrelated to being black. That's a good argument to lock up all the niggers, apparently?
I bet I could get banned too if I wrote "I'm a proud heterosexual" in my profile and then went running around in every game I played screaming into the mic "I'm a proud heteroseuxual! Heterosexuals rule! Shove it up your asses if you don't like it!"
I missed that. I thought she'd just made a small note on her profile?
I don't really see what all the fuss is about.
It's really hard to skew an election by more than a few percent, given that we have all kinds of polls, and Nate Silver, and so on. And it's a stretch to take seriously any election that is won by a few percent.
I'm terribly disappointed in the last few years. Does anyone actually believe that Obama's election marks a new era of thoughtfulness and wisdom? PAH! He won convincingly enough, but not because the American people suddenly sprouted brains. He won because of charisma and a very good ground team, and possibly because the Arabs manipulated oil prices ;)
Don't get me wrong: I am starting to really like him. I believe that he will fail--the country was too economically fucked up when he took over. But that's not the point.
The point is this: a democracy is only safe when the citizens are educated and wise. Do we have that? We have a few educated and wise people, a few educated and greedy people, and a shitload of sheep about half of whom were, this time, convinced by stellar effort and happy coincidences that Republicans couldn't save them. Until we have a majority who can process information and make wise decisions, a few votes one way or another do not say a damn thing about what The People want.
ps. Yes, I love the idea of trying the responsible execs for treason. I just don't think it'll help very much with the real problem.
It would appear that the problem, then, is not medicine, but law. Doctors are at least pretty close to scientists, but lawyers are closer to evangelists--and who can blame them, since due to the jury selection process "a jury of your peers" often means "a bunch of uneducated morons off the street". The real problem is that our legal system has no obligation to be rigorous. What can we do about that one?
I liked your reply. You raise a point that I hadn't considered: the hub problem. However, I'm not convinced that that's not just a problem of not enough public transportation infrastructure--I've seen plenty of places where there are hundreds of "hubs" (subway stops), and most anywhere is less than 10 minutes by foot (half a mile) from one of them. Since so many people are getting some exercise, the women (and probably the men) are all hot! It works pretty well!
Is the USA really that much more prosperous than, say, the Netherlands? How about when you take into account our raw resources vs. theirs? Who is healthier? Who is happier?
There are a couple of things going on here, though, and it would be good to spell them out. The first is that on the individual level cars cause certain social and health problems. The second is that there are simply too many people in the world, and until we solve that, even bicycles will, as you say, cause traffic jams. There is no solution, and there will never be a solution, that will eliminate traffic as we approach the limit of infinite population.
So it seems to me that we need a two-pronged approach. First: take steps to ensure that the population does not continue to increase forever, even though it'll make plenty of economists have a cow. Second, in the short term (and this is time-critical at least for greenhouse gases and energy independence (national security)): reduce the environmental (pollution, traffic, health care, etc) impact of each person as much as practical, as quickly as possible. You and I seem to differ on what we think is practical, but we have lived in different places and seen differently effective systems, so that's just a detail.
Here, as I see it, are the problems with cars:
(1) They convert fossil fuels into toxins, carcinogens, greenhouse gases, and resource wars. This can, as you say, be avoided, if we increase our clean energy production in the USA by a factor of about, what, 100? That's not unrealistic, actually, but it could take a while.
(2) Most people have no time for daily exercise, but they make time to commute. I and many others have found that the only practical way to exercise is while commuting (too much time spent on slashdot, apparently...). Therefore, human-powered commuting, while far from the only answer, is one very potent solution to the health care crisis. A society that makes that possible will be far healthier. Since societies tend to pay for the poor health of their citizens (even the rather backwards USA is finally moving in that direction, kicking and screaming the whole way), it is very profitable for a society to try to give its members opportunities to be healthy.
(3) Cars take up lots of space. Storing cars is very expensive, because they're big and heavy. Terminal costs are a large part of transportation infrastructure costs. I don't understand how requiring people to pave yet more land for no good reason boosts the economy. It is not a real source of value to anyone--the only value is secondary, as people can get where they're going in order to produce actual value. You can read more about this one (and some of the others, actually) in "The High Cost Of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup.
(4) Cars are dangerous. Hurtling at 200km/h within meters of people you don't know in multi-thousand-kilogram blocks of steel seems like a recipe for a horror movie, and indeed it is. Forget the indirect costs--the direct cost in lives due to this peculiar pastime is 40000 deaths/year in the USA. I don't know the injury rate, but it is probably at least 20 times that. What is the cost of that?
(5) Many people cannot drive. Some are too old or too young, some are drunk or high, some have poor or no eyesight, some don't have the money, some may suffer from random blackouts, some are too stupid or careless, some grew up in New York... Call me socialist, but I like a society that provides a way for these people to maintain their independence.
There are plenty of very active and fit people who drive cars.
Yup, I drive one when I need to. There are places that public transportation can't take you (and that's a good thing, I think). There are things I can't carry on my bike. But when I can bike, it's a little better for everyone, and vastly better for me.
Why should the vast majority of people subsidize the public transit system, sidewalks, etc. that you and a very, very small minority of people are using?
Have you ever dealt with LA rush hour, when you can easily average under 5mph for miles? What do you think would alleviate that? Have you breathed the LA air? It makes for pretty sunsets, for sure! That's an extreme example, but for many other reasons it is somewhere between nice and crucial that we move away from cars, and that can't be done until we have an alternative system in place. It's just not practical to say "From tomorrow on, nobody can drive. The alternatives will appear in just a few years." We need to create an alternative and gradually increase incentives to use them, even as we continue to improve them. For example, what would life be like if the Bay Area and LA, or Boston and New York, had effective public transportation and a cheap walk-in 1-hour TGV between them?
Cheap? Obviously, asymptotically we would like all transportation to cost the rider what it actually costs--no passing hidden costs on to storefronts or health care or environmental cleanup operations or future generations or Iraqis. I don't know what gasoline costs, but it sure as hell isn't $2/gallon. I'm guessing that ten times that is optimistic, but that's just a guess, and of course costs will on average go up until there's none left. I do know roughly what parking costs--about $20000/space to install. At least maintenance isn't so bad.
Oops. The short answer is this: we have created a society in which people need cars. That has sweeping implications, and hurts us more than most who haven't seen the alternatives or done the maths can understand. Should public transportation be subsidised? Probably more so than private transportation is while we try to encourage people to build a better way of life, but ultimately, perhaps not. Of course, to every person in the world it is worth something to dissuade someone else from driving, so perhaps it is reasonable to pay people not to drive. I don't know.
The world would be be a far better place if human beings reproduced seldom.
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, I agree with you. It's quite fun/enlightening/depressing to study primate behaviour and then go to even a polite, educated dinner party (let alone a frat party). Wow! We have come so far in so many ways that don't much matter.
Meanwhile, the best solution I can think of is to (1) try to educate myself (and ideally everyone) in the last few thousand years' worth of development in the techniques of rational thought, and in history that always asks "what were they thinking, really?" and (2) when that fails, publicly mock the "logic" of those who try to promote fuzzy thoughts--not trying to educate the idiots anymore, but trying to get the potential victims to take sides based on observation and reason.
Wrong word. I have reached some conclusions because I have a brain. They are not moralistic, but based on observation of what works. When there's overwhelming evidence directly tying your actions to great harm to society, I'm going to call you on it. Hiding behind words like "self-righteous" because you want to avoid looking at the ethical implications of your behaviour is pretty weak.
Thanks for your kind wishes, but I still have enough faith in this government to believe that I could have a few people fired for wasting taxpayers' money trying to collect on a ticket given to someone for a crime he didn't commit. Still, a bloody waste of time.
See my reply to "evilviper" below if you actually care.
Every time major new roads are constructed, the economy grows dramatically.
I said society, not the economy. Economists will tell you that they're the same, but then, engineers will tell you that society is measured by the complexity of its machines, aritsts will tell you that society is measured by its creative output, environmentalists will tell you it's measured by whether it will last more than 50 years... it's a standard outcome of myopic training.
Who pays for roads? We do. What effect do they have? They increase the number of cars (it's a little more complex than that, but you can probably work out the details yourself).
When we have more cars, what does that do to us? It means we need more parking: more urban sprawl, more expensive paving projects, etc. It means we have less incentive to create public transportation. It means we need more hospitals, since there will be more accidents, more toxins and carcinogens in the air, more people driving instead of walk/bus/bike, and thus more stress, more high blood pressure, more obesity and the dozens of serious diseases that go along with that... Cars (currently) depend on a very limited supply of "free energy" in the form of oil--what is the cost to society of transforming it when that runs out? What is the cost of securing oil resources that we don't have? What is the cost of extracting resources that we do have? Oil spills and ecosystem destruction are usually ignored, because if they weren't, popular positions like yours would not look quite so sensible. and then there's the little problem of global warming, which probably rather trumps the others.
The true costs of a car include neutralising all of those things. Economists are usually quite happy to spatially or temporally displace these hidden costs, and who can blame them? That's their training.
The overwhelming majority of people are going to need a parking space, yet it's not included with the price of... whatever (eg. rent).
I take your point about convenience and roundoff error. However, this last point is moronic: you propose to make everyone pay for something that only lazy people "need". When I go shopping, I pay higher prices because the store owners have to pay for free parking that I don't use. I am literally subsidising parking spots by buying at these stores (providing "free" parking is part of most city building codes). Why should I do that? I've already told you how much cars hurt people (probably needlessly; you probably already knew it). Now why should I pay for it?
The overwhelming majority of people choose to use cars because they're too stupid and greedy and lazy to find better alternatives. Why should I pay for that? Why should society bear the costs incurred by its stupidest members?
And only because society subsidises this ridiculous lifestyle is it so popular. Look at places with good public transportation systems. When people don't need cars, what happens to health? To quality of life? To sprawl, pollution, asthma, heart disease, cancer, ...?
Of course we're superior. You'd be a fool not to recognise your superiority. However, it's a secret that you should keep close to your chest. People--normal people who have never learned to respect achievement--will only like you if they think they're better than you.
...the fools...
What delicious irony! Free parking is perhaps the primary cause of asthma and obesity.
People who want to park their cars for free are pathetic whiners. Cars cost our society an enormous amount. Why shouldn't the individual using the car pay for some of the car's costs?
That said, I did get in illegitimate parking ticket once (parked under a sign with restriction hours posted on it, outside the restriction hours). They dismissed it, eventually.
But I suspect that the overwhelming majority of parking tickets are perfectly legitimate and completely deserved.
What is scary about this story is that they are talking about mere allegations of copyright violations to suspend service. Surely this will be abused...
So... abuse it! Nothing points out the problems with a system faster than breaking it. Is there a punishment for people whose allegations turn out to be incorrect?
I took some photographs and put them in an archive named "StarWars.zip". This person downloaded and seeded a file by that name on BitTorrent.
Wait--I thought the blank-media tax made copying legal in Canada?
'Scuse me? An individual's sexual preference doesn't hurt others. An individual's faith does. Even if you choose to ignore all the atrocities that have been committed because of faith, at the very least it provides a fertile environment for superstition.
Good point about sequestration, at least if the trees are not burned. Of course, there are other reasons to save them. On the practical side, it's very difficult to cut them down without causing erosion, topsoil loss, destruction of complex and far-reaching ecosystems associated with habitat loss, etc... But perhaps more importantly, there are also interesting quality-of-life issues involved with destroying things of great beauty. At what point is it just not worth cramming a few billion more people onto an ugly planet?
Wow...like really, DUH! Anytime you repetatively perform an action, especially when it can be strenuous and cause things like sweat, you will get sores/callouses/etc.
I dunno. Regular exercise certainly qualifies, and isn't really such a bad thing--your body destroys itself pretty quickly if you don't get any. Of course, sporadic exercise causes sores, blisters, etc. It's entertaining that some forms of exercise are healthy whereas others (button mashing, typing, etc) are less so.
I'd guess that wool glove liners would help with this particular disease. Just as jogging without shoes is dangerous...?
As territorial and aggressive as humans?
That isn't acceptable if someone's profile says they're Black, or Indian or White or Christian or Muslim, and it isn't acceptable if someone says they're gay.
Being gay shouldn't be grounds for hounding--it's not hurting anyone (except all of us straight males who can't get a date because the accursed gay males convinced women that men should know how to dress well). But what exactly is wrong with hounding Christians or Muslims? It's about time that we as a society moved beyond basing major life decisions on fairytales and wishful thinking. Why shouldn't people who use faith to justify ANYTHING be hounded and harassed and mocked? For one thing, Microsoft's and society's homophobia is almost certainly a direct result of Christian faith.
That said, I'd prefer if people identified their faith-vs-brightness status upfront. It'd save a bunch of time.
Because it is natural for people to identify with other people who share interests or status. What's wrong with a gay gamer being interested in playing with other gay gamers? What about Christian gamers wanting to play with other Christian gamers?
You said it! Of course, by the same token, what's wrong with straight white gamers being interested in playing with other straight white gamers? That's exactly the same thing. No, it's not a "choice" issue--sexual orientation and religion usually don't seem to be consciously chosen either.
Perhaps we as a society would actually gain if we forbade any expression of individuality that would allow cliques to form based on anything other than long-term personal interaction. But that seems like a kludge.
Maybe you wouldn't. If you don't like it, you can ignore it, just as you can ignore the people who write about their favourite breed of dog. If you're not going to say whatever is important to you on your profile, how is it an interesting profile?
It sounds like you are advocating banning anyone who discusses any topic that is not of particular interest to you.
ps. Beautiful day today, isn't it?
Is that in order to be considered evidence in court? Or can you be sued for recording a conversation for your own ends? Because HR or the manager's manager or etc. is not a court.
True. However, I wonder things all the time. If I googled all of them, I would never be able to get anything done at all. Or even eat.
Which isn't a bad thing, per se. But wondering aloud to friends is not only wondering about the thing, but also wondering about friends' reactions to the thing. It's a social interaction! That's why I've seen PhD students surrounded by computers debating some factual point about eggplant for 5 minutes. It's more fun than just looking it up!
That said, the benefit of the analogue of such "social interaction" on Slashdot is questionable.