What about we just teach a well-rounded science curriculum?...it would seem to be teaching an element of valid science for a political cause rather than for educational merit alone.
In a democratic nation, one criterion for "well-rounded science curriculum" is that it prepares students to understand the scientific issues relative to public policy.
we held the name for 5 days, so the user would have to come back to us to register it, and then released it after that time.
Further proof - if any more was needed - that Network Solutions is a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Reading jihadist materials from the internet is one of the ways that ordinary people become radicals.
"Jihadist" and "internet" are irrelevant. Reading stuff, from Common Sense to Mein Kampf to Letter from Birmingham Jail, is one of the ways that people become radicals - whether radical haters, or radical workers for justice.
Racist skinheads also use online materials to self-radicalize, and I bet that nobody here would be against coming down hard on them.
If "coming down hard" means using the violence of government censorship in a futile attempt to prevent other violence, I'd be against it.
They apparently were frustrated by the mosque's elders, who forbid the discussion of politics in the mosque.
Let's see here: certain discussions are forbidden. People therefore have them underground, in a context of ignorance. Violence results. Your example argues for frank and open discussion, not for censorship.
Be careful and take note that many techs understand systems better than some factory trained engineers.
A "factory trained engineer" is not an "engineer" in the same sense as a university educated electrical engineer or aerospace engineer - or software engineer, though that's a mushier term. "Real" engineers aren't the guys who come out to fix your heat pump - they're the guys who designed the thing.
"Factory trained engineers" are service technicians with fancy titles, not engineers. Indeed you're often better off with a technician who calls himself a technician and who has experience on several different systems, than with a "factory trained engineer" who knows only what the factory tells him. And sometimes the "horse sense" of an experienced tech will give insights that an "real" engineer's theory might miss.
But engineer or tech, breadth of education is highly desirable. The guy who says "I went to technical school instead of college because I didn't want to waste time on those liberal arts classes" probably isn't the guy I want to hire.
Many employers look at military as at least a Bachelor's degree and are able to start you at a late apprentice level...Many places have HR departments that understand Military is compressed specialty training.
A college degree is much more than specialty training. (At least, a meaningful college degree.)
This is valuable in the technical fields as you didn't spend half your time in liberal arts classes.
In other words, you were trained only in specific technical skills, not in critical thinking. If you just want to be a technician, I suppose that's ok; and since the original poster brings up his "CCNA certification", that may be his aim. But if I were looking for a developer or anyone whose job involves creative solutions to unusual problems, I'd be looking for more than technical knowledge.
I can name 5 different 12 channel 2400 watt/channel wall mount dimmer packs by 5 manufactures that will do wall stations and mix with DMX-512 and the advantages of each and which need an option board to enable it at additional cost.
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off
by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast
after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time
memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
That's why I might hire a guy with a college degree who might have less knowledge of what specific tools we're using but more training in thinking skills, over a tech school graduate who's memorized a "map of the cat".
I salute the physical courage, and the willingness to serve their countrymates, of those who enlist. I worry about their ignorance, and their lack of judgment and of moral courage in turning their conscience over to the United States government, an organization known as a great perpetrator of injustice.
It doesn't have anything to do with hate for most of them, it has to do with orders, and that is why they are professionals.
If anyone is considering joining up, I urge meditation on the words of Thoreau:
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
If the goverment is taking money to put in social programs, then it IS making decisions, and propping up some businesses but not others. It may be more indirect than a pure command economy though.
Of course there's a continuum between a free market and a command economy. The point is, that is irrelevant to the socialism vs. capitalism issue.
Believe it or not, it is possible to own something without being government backed. That's pretty much a basic tenets of free markets and capitalism.
What is ownership in our system, except for the right to call government force to protect your control of something?
Trace any claim of ownership under our system back, and at the root you'll find government action. This should be clear with "intellectual property", which is created by government fiat, and with corporate ownership, as corporate charters are government-issued.
But more than that, any object is made with materials obtained from land. Who turns land - and the resources that can be extracted from it - into property? Governments.
Let's trace back my claim of property on the coffee mug on my desk. I traded money (for sake of argument, we'll take it as given that the money was mine) to the folks from whom I bought it. If they weren't it's legitimate owners, then my ownership isn't legitimate. So how did they become its owners?
The mug sellers traded money to the company who made the mug. How did the company who made it become its owners? They traded money to their workers, and to another company who provided the clay for the ceramics.
How did the clay supplier come to have the clay? They dug it out of the ground on the land they owned. And how did they come to own the land?
Government action.
Wait! you say. They bought that land from somebody else, the government merely recorded the transaction. But how did that previous "owner" come to own the land?
Trace the chain back and you end up with a land grant from a king, or land wrested from one government by another in war, or outright theft of land by colonial powers.
If my mug was made in China (pretty likely these days), then ultimately my claim of ownership on it rests in the right of conquest of the Chinese Communist Party. If by chance it was made in the USA, then it may rest on the divine right of the King of England to issue land grants in the New World, or on the Manifest Destiny of the United States government to drive the natives from the land and give it to white people.
This isn't to say that property isn't a useful notion. Without private property, private decisions become impossible. If I don't own the mug, I don't get to choose what tea to brew in it. If I don't own my guitar, then I don't get to choose what songs to play on it.
But property is a tool to ensure other rights, not a primary right in itself; and we should not attempt to apply the same reasoning that might work for coffee mugs and guitars, to capital.
It's not abstract when they are taking html and css code verbatim, using text content verbatim, and using any graphics that were on the original site and just modifying some of the text on the graphics around. THAT is how they "steal" a site design.
If you're "stealing" text or graphics, that's not "stealing" a design, it's "stealing" content. (Copying is not theft, but that's a different argument.)
I think it would be pretty hard to show infringement on the use of HTML/CSS markup. It's perfectly fair to look at the markup to see how a site gets that fluid width three-column layout or whatever and use the same trick; and there's not a lot of possible variation on how to express that same trick in markup.
If you actually checked the pirated-site link you would have seen that for yourself.
I checked the link. I saw no complaints of substance; perhaps there's a specific one of two you'd like to point out?
Well that's the same outrage that designers feel when you steal a site design.
Excuse me? How in the world do you "steal" something as abstract as a site design?
It sounds sounds like Apple's ludicrous "look and feel" lawsuits.
"OMG! You thief! You used a three-column layout, a sans-serif font for headers, a menu across the top, and a gradient for a background! You stole my design!"
A good looking website isn't moving, blinking crap. Its good layout, color schemes and art. Hire a graphic designer.
Problem is, when you hire a graphic designer, what you get tends more towards moving, blinking crap, or pretty-looking but unusable pages where you can't figure out what's a link and what's not and that break in a browser different than what the designer uses, than it does towards good layout, color schemes and art.
A web site is not a magazine ad or a glossy brochure, but those are the roots of the field of "graphic design".
Hire a graphic designer to make your logos and graphics, sure, and maybe rough-out a look; but unless they've had extensive training in user interfaces, HTML, and CSS, don't hand your whole site over to a graphic designer.
1. Free market
2. Socialist
3. Free market towards U.S. citizens and socialist towards corporations
4. Socialist towards U.S. citizens and free market towards corporations
"Free market" and "socialist" are not opposites. The "free market - command economy" and "capitalist - socialist" axes are orthogonal. Command economy capitalism can be seen in the economies of the U.S. and U.K. during WWI and WWII, when the government called the shots but private ownership was maintained. Free market socialism can be found in the theory of mutualism; some of these ideas were put into practice during the Spanish Civil War.
The "capitalist - socialist" question is, Who profits from the use of economic resources? A class of government-backed "owners", or the people who do the work?
The "free market - command economy" question is, Who decides what gets made, bought, and sold? The people making individual choices, or the state making coordinated ones?
I submit that the fundamental problem with the United States is excessively concentrated power.
Agreed. But that concentration isn't just the federal government; it's the control of the majority of the nation's wealth into the hands of a few.
This concentration isn't something that just happens, it occurs because of government action and policy - it's governments that issue corporate charters, land deeds, and the like.
If there are indeed infrastructure problems within a state, why is the state impotent incapable of fixing them, instead relying on federal handouts?
States vary enormously in their wealth. New Jersey's median household income is $64,169; Mississippi's is $35,261.
If all states are part of one nation, if companies in New Jersey want to ship their goods to Mississippi, it's not unreasonable to share that wealth around so that everybody has decent infrastructure.
Thus, the real place to begin the reform is to avoid giving the nearly 1 trillion dollars to the Fed. This simple logic can then be applied to the vampiric parade of entitlements currently sucking your wallet, and your future, dry.
The big problem with entitlements is medical care. What drives the rising costs? The for-profit medical "care" model.
How many Atheist killers can you name?
How many Atheists terrorists?
As a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian, I'm certainly sympathetic to atheism. However, there have certainly been atheist killers - Stalin, perhaps the champion blood-shedder of the 20th Century, is quoted as saying "You know, they are fooling us, there is no God... all this talk about God is sheer nonsense." If that doesn't qualify him as an atheist, then the term is meaningless.
Mao and Pol Pot are also generally taken to be atheists, though I don't have quotations to back that up.
Googling suggests that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is an atheist, though that may just be rumor.
So what? "Atheist" is by its nature a negative descriptor, it just describes what you aren't - a theist. It doesn't describe what you are.
Supernatural belief is orthogonal to ethical behavior. Believers who are tempted but refrain from evil because of their beliefs are balanced out by believers who kill in the name of their god[s]; non-believers include both good people and twisted evil fucks.
"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.
Or this (link is to a good "Straight Dope" on the whole question):
"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life"
He was certainly able to apply religious belief - in the manipulation of others. How much of what he said about religion he actually believed, and how much was manipulation, is hard to say.
Some of his statements flat-out contradict each other, but is that surprising? This was not a sane human being. Whatever he believed, his actions were clearly not consistent with the teachings of Jeshua ben Joseph, nor with teaching of secular humanists such as the Huxleyian tradition.
Just as the actions of Al Qaeda and the like are clearly not consistent with the teachings of Muhammad, and Zen masters raising money for fighter planes is clearly not consistent with the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, and the idiot who told me "Jesus would bomb Saddam Hussein!" in response to my "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" sign clearly makes Baby Jesus cry.
Murder, however regrettable, is not the same as terrorism, nor is it necessarily motivated by the religion.
Murder for political ends is a form of terrorism.
And terrorism isn't motivated by the religion. Terrorism in the Middle East is motivated by the political and economic condition there. Organized religion is a tool often used by those in power to get ignorant people worked up enough to kill or die.
Without justifying Nixon's secret bombings, I don't think that they qualify as terrorism - their goal was not terror but to disable enemy forces.
I'm sure Bin Laden would explain to you that his goal was to disable the "enemy".
There is no significant difference between mass bombing and "terrorism". Both are indiscriminate violence used to forward political ends.
But the reason we are lightly taxed has a lot to do with all of our whining which has also the positive effect of being one of the most prosperous nations on average.
When the Federal Income Tax was first introduced in 1864, it was only 3%. We are now boiled up 35% (having touched 88% in 1942) and you don't seem to scream.
In 1864, the United States was an agrarian natiton with little industrialization. Urban industrialized nations require more governance than a land sparsely populated with farmers who work mostly by manual labor.
By the standards of the contemporary industrialized world, the U.S. is lightly taxed, and citizens of other nations laugh at our tax whining.
If you want to avoid war with Iran then you should be in favor of diplomatic action to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons which could be a pretext for such a war.
That aside, either all sovereign nations have a right to possess nuclear arms, or none do; this "we can have them but you can't" thing will not work in the long term. If the U.S. doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons, it has to start fulfilling its obligations towards disarmament under the NPF.
Once you make a copy, you create a separate person.
But that "separate person" is the same person - in terms of personal identity - as the person who existed the moment before the copy.
The "original" person is also the same person (personal identity-wise) as the person who existed the moment before the copy.
But the "copy" and the "original" are not the same people as each other. The "pre-copy person" survives so long as either the "original" or the "copy" survives.
It's like the Olympic torch: when you pass the flame from one torch to another, we say it's the "same" flame as was kindled on Olympus. (I'm assuming we accept the definition of "same fire" embedded in this ritual, that if I set thing X on fire from thing Y, then X has the "same fire" as Y.) But if I blow out one torch, clearly the other is still aflame - they're not the same as each other. The Olympic fire survives as long as either torch burns.
If I took one of those Olympic torches home and used it to light the pilot light on my stove (if my stove had a pilot light) and you took the other to the stadium and lit the big Flame there, my pilot light and the stadium Flame would not be the same fire - but both could claim to kindled on Olympus. And if some vandal put out the stadium Flame, you could re-light it off my pilot light and the ritual flame would be intact.
The confusion here come due to time. When we ask if you and the copy are the same person, are we asking if you-before-the-copying and the copy are the same person, or if you-after-the-copying and the copy are the same person? Assuming that the copy is 100% accurate in terms of what matters for personal identity, you-before-the-copying and the copy are the same person, you-before-the-copying and you-after-the-copying are the same person. But you-after-the-copying and the copy are not the same person.
The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead...Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead?
If the criterion for personal identity is psychological continuity - and that's really the only one that makes sense, as personal identity is a psychological phenomenon - then I live as long as either the copy or the "original" live.
After Tom0 goes into the copier, we have Tom1 and Tom2, who are identical (in the significant criterion) for an infinitesimal time, and who both claim to be Tom0. That one of them may have many of the "same" atoms in his body as Tom0 is irrelevant. (We are of course assuming that a 100% perfect copy is possible.)
Tom0 survives so long as either Tom1 or Tom2 survives. Tom1 is the same person as Tom0. Tom2 is the same person as Tom0. Tom1 and Tom2 are not the same as each other - personal identity is not transitive - so if Tom2 dies, Tom1 is (clearly) not dead, and Tom0 survives.
(Yes, a bunch of philosophers disagree with me on that last point. That's because they fail to consider the role of time.)
both states (admitted large) seem to have the critical mass to reap any practical economy of scale benefits.
Economies of scale aren't something that just switch on at a critical mass. Even very large corporations realize savings in a merger.
If Maryland (my state) and Virginia both have programs to, say, make disability payments, there's duplication of effort, two bureaucracies with people doing the same jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
The government thinking it can tell you what you may or may not do with your own body is much more of a problem than mere eavesdropping.
The sovereignty of the state ends at my skin. If that's not understood, all else is moot.
In a democratic nation, one criterion for "well-rounded science curriculum" is that it prepares students to understand the scientific issues relative to public policy.
Further proof - if any more was needed - that Network Solutions is a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
"Jihadist" and "internet" are irrelevant. Reading stuff, from Common Sense to Mein Kampf to Letter from Birmingham Jail, is one of the ways that people become radicals - whether radical haters, or radical workers for justice.
If "coming down hard" means using the violence of government censorship in a futile attempt to prevent other violence, I'd be against it.
Let's see here: certain discussions are forbidden. People therefore have them underground, in a context of ignorance. Violence results. Your example argues for frank and open discussion, not for censorship.
A "factory trained engineer" is not an "engineer" in the same sense as a university educated electrical engineer or aerospace engineer - or software engineer, though that's a mushier term. "Real" engineers aren't the guys who come out to fix your heat pump - they're the guys who designed the thing.
"Factory trained engineers" are service technicians with fancy titles, not engineers. Indeed you're often better off with a technician who calls himself a technician and who has experience on several different systems, than with a "factory trained engineer" who knows only what the factory tells him. And sometimes the "horse sense" of an experienced tech will give insights that an "real" engineer's theory might miss.
But engineer or tech, breadth of education is highly desirable. The guy who says "I went to technical school instead of college because I didn't want to waste time on those liberal arts classes" probably isn't the guy I want to hire.
A college degree is much more than specialty training. (At least, a meaningful college degree.)
In other words, you were trained only in specific technical skills, not in critical thinking. If you just want to be a technician, I suppose that's ok; and since the original poster brings up his "CCNA certification", that may be his aim. But if I were looking for a developer or anyone whose job involves creative solutions to unusual problems, I'd be looking for more than technical knowledge.
May I suggest you read Feynman's story about the "map of the cat"?
That's why I might hire a guy with a college degree who might have less knowledge of what specific tools we're using but more training in thinking skills, over a tech school graduate who's memorized a "map of the cat".
Anyone who attempts to do "the honorable thing" in the U.S. military gets court-martialed.
And what sort of group of efficient thinkers is so ignorant that 85% of them think the U.S. invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9-11 attacks?
I salute the physical courage, and the willingness to serve their countrymates, of those who enlist. I worry about their ignorance, and their lack of judgment and of moral courage in turning their conscience over to the United States government, an organization known as a great perpetrator of injustice.
Right, it's all ok as long as you're following orders.
If anyone is considering joining up, I urge meditation on the words of Thoreau:
Of course there's a continuum between a free market and a command economy. The point is, that is irrelevant to the socialism vs. capitalism issue.
What is ownership in our system, except for the right to call government force to protect your control of something?
Trace any claim of ownership under our system back, and at the root you'll find government action. This should be clear with "intellectual property", which is created by government fiat, and with corporate ownership, as corporate charters are government-issued.
But more than that, any object is made with materials obtained from land. Who turns land - and the resources that can be extracted from it - into property? Governments.
Let's trace back my claim of property on the coffee mug on my desk. I traded money (for sake of argument, we'll take it as given that the money was mine) to the folks from whom I bought it. If they weren't it's legitimate owners, then my ownership isn't legitimate. So how did they become its owners?
The mug sellers traded money to the company who made the mug. How did the company who made it become its owners? They traded money to their workers, and to another company who provided the clay for the ceramics.
How did the clay supplier come to have the clay? They dug it out of the ground on the land they owned. And how did they come to own the land?
Government action.
Wait! you say. They bought that land from somebody else, the government merely recorded the transaction. But how did that previous "owner" come to own the land?
Trace the chain back and you end up with a land grant from a king, or land wrested from one government by another in war, or outright theft of land by colonial powers.
If my mug was made in China (pretty likely these days), then ultimately my claim of ownership on it rests in the right of conquest of the Chinese Communist Party. If by chance it was made in the USA, then it may rest on the divine right of the King of England to issue land grants in the New World, or on the Manifest Destiny of the United States government to drive the natives from the land and give it to white people.
This isn't to say that property isn't a useful notion. Without private property, private decisions become impossible. If I don't own the mug, I don't get to choose what tea to brew in it. If I don't own my guitar, then I don't get to choose what songs to play on it.
But property is a tool to ensure other rights, not a primary right in itself; and we should not attempt to apply the same reasoning that might work for coffee mugs and guitars, to capital.
If you're "stealing" text or graphics, that's not "stealing" a design, it's "stealing" content. (Copying is not theft, but that's a different argument.)
I think it would be pretty hard to show infringement on the use of HTML/CSS markup. It's perfectly fair to look at the markup to see how a site gets that fluid width three-column layout or whatever and use the same trick; and there's not a lot of possible variation on how to express that same trick in markup.
I checked the link. I saw no complaints of substance; perhaps there's a specific one of two you'd like to point out?
Excuse me? How in the world do you "steal" something as abstract as a site design?
It sounds sounds like Apple's ludicrous "look and feel" lawsuits.
"OMG! You thief! You used a three-column layout, a sans-serif font for headers, a menu across the top, and a gradient for a background! You stole my design!"
Problem is, when you hire a graphic designer, what you get tends more towards moving, blinking crap, or pretty-looking but unusable pages where you can't figure out what's a link and what's not and that break in a browser different than what the designer uses, than it does towards good layout, color schemes and art.
A web site is not a magazine ad or a glossy brochure, but those are the roots of the field of "graphic design".
Hire a graphic designer to make your logos and graphics, sure, and maybe rough-out a look; but unless they've had extensive training in user interfaces, HTML, and CSS, don't hand your whole site over to a graphic designer.
"Free market" and "socialist" are not opposites. The "free market - command economy" and "capitalist - socialist" axes are orthogonal. Command economy capitalism can be seen in the economies of the U.S. and U.K. during WWI and WWII, when the government called the shots but private ownership was maintained. Free market socialism can be found in the theory of mutualism; some of these ideas were put into practice during the Spanish Civil War.
The "capitalist - socialist" question is, Who profits from the use of economic resources? A class of government-backed "owners", or the people who do the work?
The "free market - command economy" question is, Who decides what gets made, bought, and sold? The people making individual choices, or the state making coordinated ones?
Agreed. But that concentration isn't just the federal government; it's the control of the majority of the nation's wealth into the hands of a few.
This concentration isn't something that just happens, it occurs because of government action and policy - it's governments that issue corporate charters, land deeds, and the like.
States vary enormously in their wealth. New Jersey's median household income is $64,169; Mississippi's is $35,261. If all states are part of one nation, if companies in New Jersey want to ship their goods to Mississippi, it's not unreasonable to share that wealth around so that everybody has decent infrastructure.
The big problem with entitlements is medical care. What drives the rising costs? The for-profit medical "care" model.
As a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian, I'm certainly sympathetic to atheism. However, there have certainly been atheist killers - Stalin, perhaps the champion blood-shedder of the 20th Century, is quoted as saying "You know, they are fooling us, there is no God... all this talk about God is sheer nonsense." If that doesn't qualify him as an atheist, then the term is meaningless.
Mao and Pol Pot are also generally taken to be atheists, though I don't have quotations to back that up.
The Tamil Tigers, leading the league in suicide attacks for two decades, are "adamantly secular".
Googling suggests that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is an atheist, though that may just be rumor.
So what? "Atheist" is by its nature a negative descriptor, it just describes what you aren't - a theist. It doesn't describe what you are.
Supernatural belief is orthogonal to ethical behavior. Believers who are tempted but refrain from evil because of their beliefs are balanced out by believers who kill in the name of their god[s]; non-believers include both good people and twisted evil fucks.
What do you think is "Utopian" about the Open Source and/or Free Software movements?
Hitler was not just Catholic but claimed he was doing the Lord's work:
Or this (link is to a good "Straight Dope" on the whole question):
He was certainly able to apply religious belief - in the manipulation of others. How much of what he said about religion he actually believed, and how much was manipulation, is hard to say.
Some of his statements flat-out contradict each other, but is that surprising? This was not a sane human being. Whatever he believed, his actions were clearly not consistent with the teachings of Jeshua ben Joseph, nor with teaching of secular humanists such as the Huxleyian tradition.
Just as the actions of Al Qaeda and the like are clearly not consistent with the teachings of Muhammad, and Zen masters raising money for fighter planes is clearly not consistent with the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, and the idiot who told me "Jesus would bomb Saddam Hussein!" in response to my "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" sign clearly makes Baby Jesus cry.
Murder for political ends is a form of terrorism.
And terrorism isn't motivated by the religion. Terrorism in the Middle East is motivated by the political and economic condition there. Organized religion is a tool often used by those in power to get ignorant people worked up enough to kill or die.
I'm sure Bin Laden would explain to you that his goal was to disable the "enemy".
There is no significant difference between mass bombing and "terrorism". Both are indiscriminate violence used to forward political ends.
Most prosperous? Let's see. The U.S. is only ranked twelfth in the U.N. Human Development Index, behind a bunch of nations with higher taxes. Seventeenth in the Human Poverty Index, again with a bunch of heavy taxers ahead of us.
We have the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world. We're 42nd in the world in life expectancy.
Hell, we're only eleventh in car ownership per capita, I thought we'd clean up there. Our home ownership rate is behind at least those of Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Slovenia, and Israel - and given the current mess, we've probably fallen behind several more nations.
Nixon was a Quaker; he ordered secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos that killed more people than most terrorists could dream of. Zen masters in Japan contributed to militarism there, and encouraged kamikaze pilots in WWII. The Bahá'í/Bábí split led to several murders.
There's no idea so pure that someone can't screw it up. As Douglas Adams observed in a different context, people are a problem.
In 1864, the United States was an agrarian natiton with little industrialization. Urban industrialized nations require more governance than a land sparsely populated with farmers who work mostly by manual labor.
By the standards of the contemporary industrialized world, the U.S. is lightly taxed, and citizens of other nations laugh at our tax whining.
Iran suspended it's nuclear weapons program in 2003.
That aside, either all sovereign nations have a right to possess nuclear arms, or none do; this "we can have them but you can't" thing will not work in the long term. If the U.S. doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons, it has to start fulfilling its obligations towards disarmament under the NPF.
But that "separate person" is the same person - in terms of personal identity - as the person who existed the moment before the copy.
The "original" person is also the same person (personal identity-wise) as the person who existed the moment before the copy.
But the "copy" and the "original" are not the same people as each other. The "pre-copy person" survives so long as either the "original" or the "copy" survives.
It's like the Olympic torch: when you pass the flame from one torch to another, we say it's the "same" flame as was kindled on Olympus. (I'm assuming we accept the definition of "same fire" embedded in this ritual, that if I set thing X on fire from thing Y, then X has the "same fire" as Y.) But if I blow out one torch, clearly the other is still aflame - they're not the same as each other. The Olympic fire survives as long as either torch burns.
If I took one of those Olympic torches home and used it to light the pilot light on my stove (if my stove had a pilot light) and you took the other to the stadium and lit the big Flame there, my pilot light and the stadium Flame would not be the same fire - but both could claim to kindled on Olympus. And if some vandal put out the stadium Flame, you could re-light it off my pilot light and the ritual flame would be intact.
The confusion here come due to time. When we ask if you and the copy are the same person, are we asking if you-before-the-copying and the copy are the same person, or if you-after-the-copying and the copy are the same person? Assuming that the copy is 100% accurate in terms of what matters for personal identity, you-before-the-copying and the copy are the same person, you-before-the-copying and you-after-the-copying are the same person. But you-after-the-copying and the copy are not the same person.
If the criterion for personal identity is psychological continuity - and that's really the only one that makes sense, as personal identity is a psychological phenomenon - then I live as long as either the copy or the "original" live.
After Tom0 goes into the copier, we have Tom1 and Tom2, who are identical (in the significant criterion) for an infinitesimal time, and who both claim to be Tom0. That one of them may have many of the "same" atoms in his body as Tom0 is irrelevant. (We are of course assuming that a 100% perfect copy is possible.)
Tom0 survives so long as either Tom1 or Tom2 survives. Tom1 is the same person as Tom0. Tom2 is the same person as Tom0. Tom1 and Tom2 are not the same as each other - personal identity is not transitive - so if Tom2 dies, Tom1 is (clearly) not dead, and Tom0 survives.
(Yes, a bunch of philosophers disagree with me on that last point. That's because they fail to consider the role of time.)
The Shinkansen. The only truly civilized way to travel that is priced within the reach of ordinary citizens.
The only problem is, now I'm spoiled; the Amtrak Regional seems so shabby now.
(If you ever go to Japan, look into getting the rail pass, it pays for itself with one good trip on the Shinkansen.)
Economies of scale aren't something that just switch on at a critical mass. Even very large corporations realize savings in a merger.
If Maryland (my state) and Virginia both have programs to, say, make disability payments, there's duplication of effort, two bureaucracies with people doing the same jobs.