the Roe decision is the antithesis of liberty because the nine unelected judges made new law over an issue the majority thought was the right way to behave.
You seem to have confused liberty with majority rule.
Liberty is the absence of constraint. Roe v. Wade reduced government power, removed constraint from a woman's personal choices. It is therefore pro-liberty; it matters not if the majority wanted to constraint those choices. The majority doesn't get to vote on taking away people's rights, and it's the job of the courts to enforce that principal.
When the SCOTUS ruled in Texas v. Johnson that citizens had the right to express themselves by destroying a flag, they probably went against the majority view of Texans - but in favor of liberty. (The only disappointing aspect is that this was a 5-4 decision instead of a unanimous one.)
Both Texas v. Johnson and Roe v. Wade show the court quite correctly defending unenumerated rights of citizens against state governments - fine (though by no means perfect) examples of the system working properly.
why is it okay to bend the constitution to achieve a social goal?
Who said that is was?
Under the Constitution, it's the job of the feds to protect the rights of citizens against state government encroachment. If the State of Maryland wanted to censor my blog, I'd have turn to the feds for relief.
Even though blogs and the web aren't mentioned in the text of the Constitution, I trust we agree that they're covered under the concept of free expression? Similarly, though abortion isn't mentioned in the text of the Constitution, the right to make private medical choices is covered under the concept of privacy. Amendments IX and X make it clear that we should interprets people's rights expansively, and government power - whether at the state or the federal level - restrictively.
The idea that we should restrict the power of the federal government to enforce the rights of the people against state governments, is neither good sense nor good law.
His position on Roe v. Wade is only a symptom, not the whole of his disease. It shows that his position is not one of preferring less government and more freedom, but of simply moving government powers around; and it shows the influence of irrational religious belief on his thoughts and opinions.
It shows that he's anti-science, when he makes statements such as "As an obstetrician, I know that partial birth abortion is never a necessary medical procedure." The whole purpose of intact dilation and extraction (the real name of the procedure) is to avoid damage to the woman's uterus. It is generally safer for the patient that dilation and evacuation. IDX is only "never a necessary medical procedure" if the health of the patient isn't a concern.
So, thanks, Dr. Paul, for bringing your medical "expertise" to patients you've never examined, but fuck you very much.
The enemy of good is perfect. You will never find a candidate -- mainstream or fringe -- that perfectly represents every one of your hot button issues, whatever they may be.
Certainly true - I did some work for the Kerry campaign for the general election last time around, despite his bad record on the RKBA and his less than inspiring positions on many other issues. (I still voted Green (Cobb), since I live in a safely blue state.) However bad Kerry was, he had the very important plus of not being batshit crazy like Bush.
That's the issue here - there are hot button issues, and then there are batshit crazy issues. Being pro-torture is a batshit crazy issue. Being unable to accept the reality of biological evolution is a batshit crazy issue. Being in favor of outlawing abortion, of forcing women to carry pregnancies to term at gunpoint (however indirect the threat), is a batshit crazy issue.
Yes, that means that all the Republican candidates, and a large portion of the U.S. in general, are batshit crazy. I'll stand by that.
I'm willing to give ordinary citizens who are perhaps not well educated some slack on holding batshit crazy views - otherwise very nice people can believe in creationism, that most Muslims are terrorists, in the physical reality of extraterrestrial aliens who abduct humans and/or of angels who bring them visions, that Iraq was behind 9/11, or that an zygote is a person because some sort of ghost comes into human egg cells along with the sperm. I can deal with neighbors or coworkers, even students or clients, who have views like this, as I smile and nod and say "That's very interesting, though I'm afraid I can't agree."
But a candidate for office? Batshit crazy views are an immediate disqualification.
Between his views on abortion, the separation of church and state, and evolution, Paul earns three strikes on the batshit-o-meter. Thanks for playing and we have some lovely parting gifts.
If the worst were to come about and elective abortions were outlawed nation-wide, it would not be anywhere near as big a deal as it was before. Women have much more freedom, and more importantly, ability to control their bodies today than they had before.
Huh? If elective abortions were outlawed nation-wide, that would mean exactly that women's freedom and ability to control their bodies was reduced. What you are saying makes no sense.
And if state governments controlling women's bodies "would not be anywhere near as big a deal as it was before", then the U.S. is finished, over, done; the rational few of us ought to just abandon it to the religious extremists.
Abortion is not listed anywhere in the Constitution, so Constitutionally, it should be left up to the states to decide.
May I refer you to Amendment IX: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Let me also refer you to Amendment X with an emphasis on an oft-neglected phrase: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Just because it's not a power of the feds, doesn't mean it's a power of the states.
The right of a person to control their own body and choose their own medical care is not enumerated in the Constitution, sure. This does not mean that it is not a right retained by the people.
Computers are not listed anywhere in the the Constitution; so should it be left up to the states to decide whether your/. posts should be censored? Of course not; we recognize that the principles of free expression in the Bill of Rights (as extended over state governments by Amendment XIV) still apply, even if the phrase "free expression" does not appear anywhere therein.
Similarly, we recognize that the principles of privacy in the Constitution apply to the personal and intimate choices of medical care, even if the phrase "right of privacy" does not appear anywhere in the document.
it is not within the realm of the power of the federal government to decide whether or not it is legal for someone to perform an abortion.
It is not within the power of the states, either, just like it's not in their power to decide what books I get to read. That's the practical upshot of Roe v. Wade.
Part of the job of the federal government, since the passage of the Fourteen Amendment, is to protect citizens' rights against state governments. (And part of the job of state governments is to protect citizens from the federal government - it's a clever idea.)
You should investigate the voting record of Ron Paul...
You should also investigate his postition on Roe v. Wade - he'd do everything in his power to overturn it, and allow state legislatures to control women's bodies.
We can do better than n*lg(n) because it's a different computing model.
It's not a different computing model. Any finite set of Turing machines can be emulated with a single one.
As a practical matter, sure, parallelism is cool; but from the theoretical perspective, you don't get any new capabilties in terms of what is computable, and how complex it is to compute it.
I can't understand the USians saying that it's OK for the law to block a criminal investigation... just don't get it at all.
It's called "limited government". It would no doubt be useful for criminal investigations if we forced every citizen to wear a tracking device, submit to random drug screenings, install surveillance cameras in their homes, and answer all questions put to them by a cop under penalty of tourture; but some of us understand that a powerful government is as much, perhaps more, of a threat to us that a random small-time crook.
TV and radio signals aren't detectable very far out; IIRC, out past about the orbit of Saturn they're all lost in the noise. The only thing that gets out to interstellar distances are some radar pulses, some satellite telemetry, and a handful of deliberate high-power transmission.
The only way we can protect ourselves and our families is if we have the information at our disposal to do so.
Then why single out sex offenders? Isn't it important to be able to know if our neighbors have committed assault or robbery to "protect ourselves and our families"? It's much more important to me to know if a neighbor ever took a tire-iron to someone's head, then that they once copped a feel on a crowded subway car. (Or had sex as a teen, which can land you on the registry in some states).
There might be legitimate arguments in favor of a registry of parolees and probationers who have committed serious crimes. But the "sex offender" registry isn't such a list. It's simply another symptom of American fear and ignorance about sex. Shame on us.
Nothing new here. Civil forfeiture has been a feature of the War on Drugs for a long time; extending it to the War on Copying is an obvious strategy. The "great" thing about civil forfeiture is that the defendant isn't you, with all of your rights; in a twisted bit of legal sophistry, it's the property itself being sued by the government.
I'm sure it will be just as successful in stopping copying as it was in stopping drug use. (I'm just waiting for the violent black market in bootleg DVDs to develop.)
"History repeats itself: First as tragedy, then as farce." - Marx got that one right at least.
I don't however think that most of these things were possible because I'm smart, rather it's just because I believe that I'm not limited by anything except myself
I think the point is, having that belief is what makes a person functionally "smart".
Whether the universe "cares" or not about conscious observers, any theory of physics - or of any science - describes and predicts conscious observations. Our theories can't really say "what the universe is doing"; they can say, "here's what we see when we make an observation".
Whether consciousness has some other role is undetermined - perhaps undeterminable, since we can't test what a observation without consciousness would be like.
In fact, if an event changes macroscopic state of ANY physical object - it already counts as observation.
What is "macroscopic state" but the sum of a bunch of quantum states?
TSA will happily shred open your cases with a knife if you lock them and they can't get in.
There are "TSA approved" locks, that can be opened by their baggage invaders with a "master" key. (Whether such a thing is useful or not is an interesting question.)
and we can all smell it a mile away after a bit...all hat, no cattle.
If everybody could smell it, these guys would never have ended up in management.
Come on, fess up... saying that "all else is seldom equal" is just a way to dodge the question. All else being equal, who would you trust more to make the pitch?
If all else is equal, then by definition they're both trustworthy to make the pitch. The question is, do I trust management to listen to Scuffy if he shows up in a t-shirt? And if not, do I trust Scruffy to break out the dress shirt he saves for funerals and court appearances for the presentation tomorrow?
(Also if not, are these people I want to work for? Are managers who pay more attention to a guy in a $50 shirt competent? Should I be shopping my resume around, preparing for when this company tanks?)
Knowledge by itself is useless. Its what you DO with the knowledge that counts.
Knowing what to DO is a form of knowledge, is it not? As a samurai proverb puts it, "To know and to act are one and the same".
convoluted uncommented undocumented spaghetti code. Sure, whoever wrote it has the intimate knowledge of it
They have information about it; what they lack is the (much more important) knowledge of how to write good code.
Packaging is important, especially when you're trying to get people to go along with something that they instinctively don't trust, because they don't know enough about the details of the problem domain themselves (and remember - that's not their job, so don't throw rocks at them for that lack of knowledge).
But it is their job to know to whom to listen.
Someone who's a bit less technically apt, but can make a good presentation both by their appearance, their demeanor, and their knowing when to speak and when to shut up will be trusted over some "slob" reciting the "obvious" technical points.
But points of demeanor and knowing when to shut up aren't the issue here. Hell, I don't even disagree that if you have to give a presentation, it's a good idea to wear a clean shirt and shave or trim your beard that morning.
The points on which I disagree are your assertations that "Spend the money on $50 shirts instead. They'll pay for themselves with your next pay increase" and "Seriously, if you're in tech, and you're in the office, you have to learn to play office politics". That's the superficiality that I despise - the essense of "all hat, no cattle", as you put it.
Pimlico, the one place slots are really needed the most. That is if horse racing is important to ya.
It's not. Cutting subsidies to this dying industry would be an excellent step toward fiscal responsibility.
Slots are no solution. The argument is that they bring tourists, but if it works Pennsylvania and Virginia and other states will follow until nobody has to leave their home state to gamble, and it becomes just another lottery - a tax on Marylanders who are either bad at math or have poor impulse control. (Except that unlike the lottery, this primarily enriches private interests of the owners of the handful of locations where slots will go.)
people DO make judgments based on first impressions.
But what I wear to the office (when I'm working at an office) is not a first impression.
There are two people who can make the "pitch"...All else being equal, who do YOU want to make the pitch?
But that's just it. All else is seldom equal; and the person more likely to have the knowledge to make the argument is, in my experience, more likely to be dressed casually.
Turn your scenario around. "All else being equal", who should management send to talk to the techies in the department down the hall, a guy in a suit or a guy in a t-shirt? Technical people know the heuristic: the more expensive the shirt, the less clueful the wearer.
As a group we underweigh social skills.
Agreed, but irrelevant. Indeed, I see worse social skills from the guys in the expensive clothes - I find a bit of genuine awkardness easier to deal with than the sort of falsely slick manipulative social skills learned by business majors, the "one minute managers".
I assume you have to collect the 6% tax yourself and pay it to the state quarterly, like you would do for sales tax as any other business... thing is you need a federal employee ID number to do that...
The federal number you're thinking of is an employer identification; you don't need one to file sales taxes. You only need one if you have employees, or if you form a corporation or partnership, or in a few other special cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, he is. Paul voted for the federal "partial birth" abortion ban.
To the states? Or to the people? There's a big difference, and it's within the jurisdiction only of the SCOTUS.
Roe v. Wade says to the people - it's a right of individual choice and state governments have no power to dictate it.
You seem to have confused liberty with majority rule.
Liberty is the absence of constraint. Roe v. Wade reduced government power, removed constraint from a woman's personal choices. It is therefore pro-liberty; it matters not if the majority wanted to constraint those choices. The majority doesn't get to vote on taking away people's rights, and it's the job of the courts to enforce that principal.
When the SCOTUS ruled in Texas v. Johnson that citizens had the right to express themselves by destroying a flag, they probably went against the majority view of Texans - but in favor of liberty. (The only disappointing aspect is that this was a 5-4 decision instead of a unanimous one.)
Both Texas v. Johnson and Roe v. Wade show the court quite correctly defending unenumerated rights of citizens against state governments - fine (though by no means perfect) examples of the system working properly.
Who said that is was?
Under the Constitution, it's the job of the feds to protect the rights of citizens against state government encroachment. If the State of Maryland wanted to censor my blog, I'd have turn to the feds for relief.
Even though blogs and the web aren't mentioned in the text of the Constitution, I trust we agree that they're covered under the concept of free expression? Similarly, though abortion isn't mentioned in the text of the Constitution, the right to make private medical choices is covered under the concept of privacy. Amendments IX and X make it clear that we should interprets people's rights expansively, and government power - whether at the state or the federal level - restrictively.
The idea that we should restrict the power of the federal government to enforce the rights of the people against state governments, is neither good sense nor good law.
His position on Roe v. Wade is only a symptom, not the whole of his disease. It shows that his position is not one of preferring less government and more freedom, but of simply moving government powers around; and it shows the influence of irrational religious belief on his thoughts and opinions.
It shows that he's anti-science, when he makes statements such as "As an obstetrician, I know that partial birth abortion is never a necessary medical procedure." The whole purpose of intact dilation and extraction (the real name of the procedure) is to avoid damage to the woman's uterus. It is generally safer for the patient that dilation and evacuation. IDX is only "never a necessary medical procedure" if the health of the patient isn't a concern.
This is not a surprise from someone who, for all the noise he makes about the Constitution, believes that "a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution", and who does not accept the reality of evolution.
So, thanks, Dr. Paul, for bringing your medical "expertise" to patients you've never examined, but fuck you very much.
Certainly true - I did some work for the Kerry campaign for the general election last time around, despite his bad record on the RKBA and his less than inspiring positions on many other issues. (I still voted Green (Cobb), since I live in a safely blue state.) However bad Kerry was, he had the very important plus of not being batshit crazy like Bush.
That's the issue here - there are hot button issues, and then there are batshit crazy issues. Being pro-torture is a batshit crazy issue. Being unable to accept the reality of biological evolution is a batshit crazy issue. Being in favor of outlawing abortion, of forcing women to carry pregnancies to term at gunpoint (however indirect the threat), is a batshit crazy issue.
Yes, that means that all the Republican candidates, and a large portion of the U.S. in general, are batshit crazy. I'll stand by that.
I'm willing to give ordinary citizens who are perhaps not well educated some slack on holding batshit crazy views - otherwise very nice people can believe in creationism, that most Muslims are terrorists, in the physical reality of extraterrestrial aliens who abduct humans and/or of angels who bring them visions, that Iraq was behind 9/11, or that an zygote is a person because some sort of ghost comes into human egg cells along with the sperm. I can deal with neighbors or coworkers, even students or clients, who have views like this, as I smile and nod and say "That's very interesting, though I'm afraid I can't agree."
But a candidate for office? Batshit crazy views are an immediate disqualification.
Between his views on abortion, the separation of church and state, and evolution, Paul earns three strikes on the batshit-o-meter. Thanks for playing and we have some lovely parting gifts.
Huh? If elective abortions were outlawed nation-wide, that would mean exactly that women's freedom and ability to control their bodies was reduced. What you are saying makes no sense.
And if state governments controlling women's bodies "would not be anywhere near as big a deal as it was before", then the U.S. is finished, over, done; the rational few of us ought to just abandon it to the religious extremists.
May I refer you to Amendment IX: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Let me also refer you to Amendment X with an emphasis on an oft-neglected phrase: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Just because it's not a power of the feds, doesn't mean it's a power of the states.
The right of a person to control their own body and choose their own medical care is not enumerated in the Constitution, sure. This does not mean that it is not a right retained by the people.
Computers are not listed anywhere in the the Constitution; so should it be left up to the states to decide whether your /. posts should be censored? Of course not; we recognize that the principles of free expression in the Bill of Rights (as extended over state governments by Amendment XIV) still apply, even if the phrase "free expression" does not appear anywhere therein.
Similarly, we recognize that the principles of privacy in the Constitution apply to the personal and intimate choices of medical care, even if the phrase "right of privacy" does not appear anywhere in the document.
So we get to be more oppressed, but by people closer to home? No thanks.
More power to the people, and less to both state and federal governments.
It is not within the power of the states, either, just like it's not in their power to decide what books I get to read. That's the practical upshot of Roe v. Wade.
Part of the job of the federal government, since the passage of the Fourteen Amendment, is to protect citizens' rights against state governments. (And part of the job of state governments is to protect citizens from the federal government - it's a clever idea.)
You should also investigate his postition on Roe v. Wade - he'd do everything in his power to overturn it, and allow state legislatures to control women's bodies.
Ron Paul is no friend of liberty.
No. For any constant m, O(n/m) is the same as O(n).
It's not a different computing model. Any finite set of Turing machines can be emulated with a single one.
As a practical matter, sure, parallelism is cool; but from the theoretical perspective, you don't get any new capabilties in terms of what is computable, and how complex it is to compute it.
Actaully I find that the stress of threats of extortion tends to interfere with my memory.
Nor is it prudent to yield to tyrants. Civil liberties don't mean jack if you don't stand up for them.
It's called "limited government". It would no doubt be useful for criminal investigations if we forced every citizen to wear a tracking device, submit to random drug screenings, install surveillance cameras in their homes, and answer all questions put to them by a cop under penalty of tourture; but some of us understand that a powerful government is as much, perhaps more, of a threat to us that a random small-time crook.
TV and radio signals aren't detectable very far out; IIRC, out past about the orbit of Saturn they're all lost in the noise. The only thing that gets out to interstellar distances are some radar pulses, some satellite telemetry, and a handful of deliberate high-power transmission.
Dude. Never apologize for linking to the awesome win that is xkcd.
Except, they're not. Sex offenders are actually less likely to re-offend than other criminals.
Then why single out sex offenders? Isn't it important to be able to know if our neighbors have committed assault or robbery to "protect ourselves and our families"? It's much more important to me to know if a neighbor ever took a tire-iron to someone's head, then that they once copped a feel on a crowded subway car. (Or had sex as a teen, which can land you on the registry in some states).
There might be legitimate arguments in favor of a registry of parolees and probationers who have committed serious crimes. But the "sex offender" registry isn't such a list. It's simply another symptom of American fear and ignorance about sex. Shame on us.
Nothing new here. Civil forfeiture has been a feature of the War on Drugs for a long time; extending it to the War on Copying is an obvious strategy. The "great" thing about civil forfeiture is that the defendant isn't you, with all of your rights; in a twisted bit of legal sophistry, it's the property itself being sued by the government.
I'm sure it will be just as successful in stopping copying as it was in stopping drug use. (I'm just waiting for the violent black market in bootleg DVDs to develop.)
"History repeats itself: First as tragedy, then as farce." - Marx got that one right at least.
I think the point is, having that belief is what makes a person functionally "smart".
No, sorry. We have fair use rights - such as the right to copy an except from your post that I just exercised.
Copying a code snippet from a book or posting, that does not have any further restrictions on it, almost certainly falls under fair use.
Whether the universe "cares" or not about conscious observers, any theory of physics - or of any science - describes and predicts conscious observations. Our theories can't really say "what the universe is doing"; they can say, "here's what we see when we make an observation".
Whether consciousness has some other role is undetermined - perhaps undeterminable, since we can't test what a observation without consciousness would be like.
What is "macroscopic state" but the sum of a bunch of quantum states?
There are "TSA approved" locks, that can be opened by their baggage invaders with a "master" key. (Whether such a thing is useful or not is an interesting question.)
If everybody could smell it, these guys would never have ended up in management.
If all else is equal, then by definition they're both trustworthy to make the pitch. The question is, do I trust management to listen to Scuffy if he shows up in a t-shirt? And if not, do I trust Scruffy to break out the dress shirt he saves for funerals and court appearances for the presentation tomorrow?
(Also if not, are these people I want to work for? Are managers who pay more attention to a guy in a $50 shirt competent? Should I be shopping my resume around, preparing for when this company tanks?)
Knowing what to DO is a form of knowledge, is it not? As a samurai proverb puts it, "To know and to act are one and the same".
They have information about it; what they lack is the (much more important) knowledge of how to write good code.
But it is their job to know to whom to listen.
But points of demeanor and knowing when to shut up aren't the issue here. Hell, I don't even disagree that if you have to give a presentation, it's a good idea to wear a clean shirt and shave or trim your beard that morning.
The points on which I disagree are your assertations that "Spend the money on $50 shirts instead. They'll pay for themselves with your next pay increase" and "Seriously, if you're in tech, and you're in the office, you have to learn to play office politics". That's the superficiality that I despise - the essense of "all hat, no cattle", as you put it.
It's not. Cutting subsidies to this dying industry would be an excellent step toward fiscal responsibility.
Slots are no solution. The argument is that they bring tourists, but if it works Pennsylvania and Virginia and other states will follow until nobody has to leave their home state to gamble, and it becomes just another lottery - a tax on Marylanders who are either bad at math or have poor impulse control. (Except that unlike the lottery, this primarily enriches private interests of the owners of the handful of locations where slots will go.)
But what I wear to the office (when I'm working at an office) is not a first impression.
But that's just it. All else is seldom equal; and the person more likely to have the knowledge to make the argument is, in my experience, more likely to be dressed casually.
Turn your scenario around. "All else being equal", who should management send to talk to the techies in the department down the hall, a guy in a suit or a guy in a t-shirt? Technical people know the heuristic: the more expensive the shirt, the less clueful the wearer.
Agreed, but irrelevant. Indeed, I see worse social skills from the guys in the expensive clothes - I find a bit of genuine awkardness easier to deal with than the sort of falsely slick manipulative social skills learned by business majors, the "one minute managers".
The federal number you're thinking of is an employer identification; you don't need one to file sales taxes. You only need one if you have employees, or if you form a corporation or partnership, or in a few other special cases.
Uh, no. You pay sales or use taxes on them.
Read up on "use tax" before you make your business plan. Maryland companies can't avoid the tax by going out-of-state.