But, they are, unless one murders, steals, etc. with someone else's body.
Murder, theft, etcetera require actions that occur outside of a persons body, actions that violate the rights of others.
You seem to think that basically nothing you do in your own home affects me if I don't know about it.
The question is not whether you know about it, it's whether it violates or threatens to violate your rights. Sure, there are things I can do that others don't know about that violate their rights - secretly dumping toxic waste in my basement so that it seeps into my neighbor's well, for instance.
But here we're not talking about something that happens just within my own home, but within my own skin. If I - hypothetically - stay home and shoot heroin into my eyeballs Friday night, it neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg., and it's wrong (practically and ethically) to point guns at me to stop me from making such a private choice.
Did you mean to say, "competent adults should have certain absolute rights, including self-defense, controlling their own bodies, freedom of belief, etcetera." ?
It is entirely possible to have a right and not have it recognized by the state. The whole theoretical basis of American government is that these rights exist a priori, and that governments are supposed to recognize and secure them; the rights exist even if governments fail to recognize them.
By definition, whether you like it or not, a ruling by the Supreme Court is constitutional.
No. By defintion, a ruling in concert with the text of the Constitution is constitutional, and a ruling which is not so in concert is unconstitutional. That's why the word "constitution", not "court", is the root of "constitutional".
If the Congress enacted a law declaring Fundamentalist Zoroastorianism the state religion, the POTUS signed it, and the SCOTUS stamped it OK, that law would still be unconstitutional.
I would accept that a person generally has a right to control their own body, until they show that they are incapable (murder, theft, public intoxication?, etc.) of self-control.
Non sequitor. Murder, theft, and disruptive public behavior are not examples of controlling one's own body.
Obviously one can lose rights by engaging in criminal behavior. I took that as an unspoken axiom, but in case there's any ambigutity: competent adults have certain absolute rights, including self-defense, controlling their own bodies, freedom of belief, etcetera. People who demonstrate incompetence by engaing in behaviors that significantly violate the rights of others, or credibly threaten to do so, may be placed under close supervision (including incarceration, probation, and parole) and have those rights restricted to the degree necessary to protect the rights of others. Since they are not "competent adults", this does not alter the proposition that "competent adults have certain absolute rights".
Both of these [drug purity and anti-intoxicated driving laws] seem to contradict the word "absolute" in your initial statement of faith.
Not at all. Threatening my safety by getting behind the wheel when you're not fit to drive is not an example of controlling your own body. Nor is fraudulantly selling impure drugs (or food or anything else).
Is it true, in spite of extensive experience with banning other products and pretty solid economic theory, that legal prohibition doesn't decrease drug use?
Drug use, sitting home getting drunk/high/stoned/tripping/whatever once in a while, it ain't nobody's business if you do. Extensive experience and pretty solid economic theory shows that drug abuse is increased by prohibition; prohibtion drives people towards more concentrated (easily smuggled) drugs, removes assurances of purity (increasing the risks of poisoning or overdose), encourages unhealthy usage patterns, and shackles the free-market forces that would lead to the development of more pleasant and less harmful drugs.
No, they have lower top marginal tax rates. Which is meaningless.
If you want to understand the tax burden, you need to look at the percent of GDP that ends up as taxes. Forbes calls this the "misery index"; I think the fact that Mexico ranks as "less miserable" than Japan tells you the degree of BS in that label, but the data is informative nonetheless. The U.S. is near the bottom of the list, with a low tax burden.
Well, depends which drugs that this "war on drugs" is aimed at, no?
No, it doesn't. A person's right to control their own body is absolute.
If you want to use drugs in a dangerous way, like injecting heroin into your eyeballs, it's just and reasonable for the state to dissuade you with (accurate) anti-drug education, to put a reasonable "sin tax" on heroin, to regulate heroin for purity and strength, and to ban you from driving under its influence.
But the sovereignty of the state ends at your skin. Your body, your choice.
Not only is drug probibition immoral, it's also impractical. It doesn't work. Review the history.
What are the harmful effects of marijuana? What are they, compared to alcohol and tobacco?
Physically, the harmful effects of cannabis result from inhaling smoke. Use of a vaporizer or oral injestion eliminate these and make its use quite safe. (Presuming one doesn't do something stupid like drive a car or operate power tools while high, a problem with any intoxicant.) The effective dose to lethal dose ratio for THC is trendously high; you'd have to smoke hundreds of pounds to die by overdose. (Which isn't to say you can't overdose into an unpleasant "too high" experience; that's distinctly unfun, but doesn't have long-term toxic effects.)
Psychologically, some people like using cannabis a whole lot, and have trouble moderating or stopping. This can also be a problem with TV, MMORPGs, sex, relationships, thrill sports, music, exercise...
Of course, no amount of harmful effects would justify the state interfering with a person's choices about their body. But given the safety of cannabis use, its prohibition is particulary hypocritical.
(Once upon a time, "addiction" was a well-defined syndrome marked by tolerance, withdrawl, continued use in the face of health problems, and repeated failed attempts to quite. When it became obvious that cannabis use and other behaviors that moralists wanted to ban didn't fit this model, the bullshit notion of "psychological addition" was invented.)
Where does the Constitution say that the Treasury Department can raise an army against Pennsylvania farmers?
Article I, Section 8: "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions". Now, what does that have to do with international commerce?
It does not matter if a federal judge disagrees. This has been settled decades ago by the supreme court.
The Supreme Court also settled decades ago that people of African decent were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Fortunately, the opinions of the Court alter neither the text of the Constitution nor the nature of reality; they merely decide what degree of illiteracy and delusion the U.S. Government will operate under.
IANAL, but the right to search and seizure without warrant has been around under certain cases since the inception of the country, and is not unconstitutional.
Any search of an American citizen's person, house, papers, or effects without a proper warrant is unconstitutional. Illiterate courts and historical precedent don't change that.
There are some potential social possibilities in a 3d web site, but does it really help you get to the information any better?
Exactly. I'm so looking forward to the day when I'm supposed to navigate through some 3D maze environment to find the blue boxes that represent my text files, instead of good ol' "find ~ -name '*.txt'".
As a Java contractor who is sick of driving for miles to work at client sites when I could do exactly the same work from home, but the clients like to see what they are paying for, I really really look forward to it.
How in the world do you need a 3D VW to telecommute?
My point is that you are able to organise a large amount of information in your own head, and retrieve it very efficiently in this 3-D environment called your home.
But the examples that you give are completely unrelated to the number of dimensions of your home.
They are based rather on the principle of hierarchical organization: toenail clippers are in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom in my house. Which is just another way of saying
~/bathroom/medicine_cabinet/toenail_clippers.
I don't need "bathroom" or "medicine cabinet" to have any dimension at all to model the "contains" relationship.
Through brutal, stupid, and exploitive foreign policies - the slave trade, imperialism, covert operations, proxy wars - the U.S. and other imperial powers caused or encouraged many of the problems suffered by the rest of the world. It is just that we and those nations other make restitution.
Peace and stability is in our national economic and security interests. Many problems don't respect national borders: disease, weapons proliferation, climate change. It's thus sensible and prudent that we invest in some amount of foreign aid in support of those goals.
Unfortunately, current foreign aid policys are largely opposed to these goals.
Many small businesses can no longer afford to provide coverage, and many employees can't afford their portion of premiums. There's a loss of coverage even amoung households making $50k+/year.
Replace "7:00:00" with how long you want it to run in hh:mm:ss format. I run this to help me sleep at night, then use "at" to turn on the music player as an alarm clock ("xmms -p").
That doesn't mean their right to do so was protected by Amendment II.
the last thing they wanted was a government with enough of an advantage over private citizens that it could suppress another revolution!
Of course that's what they wanted. One of the first significant things the new federal government organized under the Constitution did was go suppress a rebellion.
Wrong. The Viking mission detected microbial life....The following day it was retracted.
As TFA explains:
The Viking 1976 missions to Mars performed several experiments designed to assess the potential for life on the planet. The results were puzzling. Samples of soil from the top 10 cm of the Martian surface released dioxygen when exposed to humidity (1). At least one compound in a set of radiolabeled organic compounds (formate, D,L-lactate, glycolate, glycine, and D,L-alanine) released radiolabeled carbon dioxide when placed in aqueous solution on the Martian surface, evidently via oxidative processes (2). Both results were initially thought to indicate the presence of life. However, a GC-MS experiment looking for volatile products from a sample of soil heated for 30 s (sometimes repeatedly) at 200, 350, and 500C did not detect any organic molecules (3). This result was (and remains) strong evidence against life on Mars, at least at the surface.
TFA then considers the chemistry at the Martian surface and argues that the GC-MS experiement was misdesigned. I am not a chemist and can't speak to the strength of their argument.
continuing to promote a license (the GNU Free Documentation License or GFDL)...which was incompatible with the GPL was a bad thing.
The GPL and the GFDL are applied to different sorts of creations. Complaining of incompatibility seems rather like complaining that my chainsaw is incompatible with my text editor.
Stallman isn't looking out for people when he dictates how they are supposed to refer to Linux or what they're allowed to do with code they write.
WFT? Stallman asking people to use names properly (Linux is the kernel) isn't dictating anything. And the GPL isn't about what you're allowed to do with code you write, it's about what you're allowed to to with code other people - who GPL'ed their code - wrote.
Once a single line of GPL3 code is used in a project the entire project must go to GPL3 or it can't use that code.
It's extremely unlikely that any court would rule the use of a single line from program A in program B makes B a derivative work of A.
In fact I'll bet you a nickle that for any reasonable defintion of "single line of code" (i.e., no fair just removing all the newlines!), using just a single line falls under fair use.
When they said; A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. They knew what them meant.
They did indeed. However, word meanings and connotations change with time. Today many people think the "militia" is synonmyous with the National Guard (when in fact, the Guard has been part of the Army since 1933), and "well-regulated" means "operating under a large set of rules"; but at the time, it was clear to the authors that "militia" meant "every able-bodied man young enough to fight", and "well-regulated" meant "prepared and trained in military skills".
The meaning of "arms" has also changed: at the time, it was understood to mean the sort of weapon carried by an infantryman. Heavier weapons would be refered to as "cannon"; so Amendment II doesn't mean you have a right to a howitzer on your front lawn. But people arguing against the Second Amendment today often attempt a reductio ad absurdum which includes WMDs under "arms".
(Some people evidently also seem to think that "shall not be infringed" somehow means "can be limited by the government", but that's a linguisitic drift that's harder to account for.)
Anyway, point being that what is absolutely clear and precise to one audience, can still be interpreted differently by another (especially if the two group have different motivations).
though the visible tattoo could be an effective deterrent as well.
Tattooing the face actually was a punishment in ancient China. That was getting off light, compared to the other common penalties of lopping off the nose, feet, genitals, or head. The Legalists of the Han dynasty were the original "tough on crime" crusaders.
Slashdot Mirror
Murder, theft, etcetera require actions that occur outside of a persons body, actions that violate the rights of others.
The question is not whether you know about it, it's whether it violates or threatens to violate your rights. Sure, there are things I can do that others don't know about that violate their rights - secretly dumping toxic waste in my basement so that it seeps into my neighbor's well, for instance.
But here we're not talking about something that happens just within my own home, but within my own skin. If I - hypothetically - stay home and shoot heroin into my eyeballs Friday night, it neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg., and it's wrong (practically and ethically) to point guns at me to stop me from making such a private choice.
It is entirely possible to have a right and not have it recognized by the state. The whole theoretical basis of American government is that these rights exist a priori, and that governments are supposed to recognize and secure them; the rights exist even if governments fail to recognize them.
No. By defintion, a ruling in concert with the text of the Constitution is constitutional, and a ruling which is not so in concert is unconstitutional. That's why the word "constitution", not "court", is the root of "constitutional".
If the Congress enacted a law declaring Fundamentalist Zoroastorianism the state religion, the POTUS signed it, and the SCOTUS stamped it OK, that law would still be unconstitutional.
Non sequitor. Murder, theft, and disruptive public behavior are not examples of controlling one's own body.
Obviously one can lose rights by engaging in criminal behavior. I took that as an unspoken axiom, but in case there's any ambigutity: competent adults have certain absolute rights, including self-defense, controlling their own bodies, freedom of belief, etcetera. People who demonstrate incompetence by engaing in behaviors that significantly violate the rights of others, or credibly threaten to do so, may be placed under close supervision (including incarceration, probation, and parole) and have those rights restricted to the degree necessary to protect the rights of others. Since they are not "competent adults", this does not alter the proposition that "competent adults have certain absolute rights".
Not at all. Threatening my safety by getting behind the wheel when you're not fit to drive is not an example of controlling your own body. Nor is fraudulantly selling impure drugs (or food or anything else).
Drug use, sitting home getting drunk/high/stoned/tripping/whatever once in a while, it ain't nobody's business if you do. Extensive experience and pretty solid economic theory shows that drug abuse is increased by prohibition; prohibtion drives people towards more concentrated (easily smuggled) drugs, removes assurances of purity (increasing the risks of poisoning or overdose), encourages unhealthy usage patterns, and shackles the free-market forces that would lead to the development of more pleasant and less harmful drugs.
No, they have lower top marginal tax rates. Which is meaningless.
If you want to understand the tax burden, you need to look at the percent of GDP that ends up as taxes. Forbes calls this the "misery index"; I think the fact that Mexico ranks as "less miserable" than Japan tells you the degree of BS in that label, but the data is informative nonetheless. The U.S. is near the bottom of the list, with a low tax burden.
No, it doesn't. A person's right to control their own body is absolute.
If you want to use drugs in a dangerous way, like injecting heroin into your eyeballs, it's just and reasonable for the state to dissuade you with (accurate) anti-drug education, to put a reasonable "sin tax" on heroin, to regulate heroin for purity and strength, and to ban you from driving under its influence.
But the sovereignty of the state ends at your skin. Your body, your choice.
Not only is drug probibition immoral, it's also impractical. It doesn't work. Review the history.
Physically, the harmful effects of cannabis result from inhaling smoke. Use of a vaporizer or oral injestion eliminate these and make its use quite safe. (Presuming one doesn't do something stupid like drive a car or operate power tools while high, a problem with any intoxicant.) The effective dose to lethal dose ratio for THC is trendously high; you'd have to smoke hundreds of pounds to die by overdose. (Which isn't to say you can't overdose into an unpleasant "too high" experience; that's distinctly unfun, but doesn't have long-term toxic effects.)
Psychologically, some people like using cannabis a whole lot, and have trouble moderating or stopping. This can also be a problem with TV, MMORPGs, sex, relationships, thrill sports, music, exercise...
Of course, no amount of harmful effects would justify the state interfering with a person's choices about their body. But given the safety of cannabis use, its prohibition is particulary hypocritical.
(Once upon a time, "addiction" was a well-defined syndrome marked by tolerance, withdrawl, continued use in the face of health problems, and repeated failed attempts to quite. When it became obvious that cannabis use and other behaviors that moralists wanted to ban didn't fit this model, the bullshit notion of "psychological addition" was invented.)
Article I, Section 8: "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions". Now, what does that have to do with international commerce?
The Supreme Court also settled decades ago that people of African decent were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Fortunately, the opinions of the Court alter neither the text of the Constitution nor the nature of reality; they merely decide what degree of illiteracy and delusion the U.S. Government will operate under.
There is no "international commerce" exception to the Bill of Rights mentioned in the Constitution.
Any search of an American citizen's person, house, papers, or effects without a proper warrant is unconstitutional. Illiterate courts and historical precedent don't change that.
Exactly. I'm so looking forward to the day when I'm supposed to navigate through some 3D maze environment to find the blue boxes that represent my text files, instead of good ol' "find ~ -name '*.txt'".
How in the world do you need a 3D VW to telecommute?
But the examples that you give are completely unrelated to the number of dimensions of your home.
They are based rather on the principle of hierarchical organization: toenail clippers are in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom in my house. Which is just another way of saying ~/bathroom/medicine_cabinet/toenail_clippers.
I don't need "bathroom" or "medicine cabinet" to have any dimension at all to model the "contains" relationship.
Through brutal, stupid, and exploitive foreign policies - the slave trade, imperialism, covert operations, proxy wars - the U.S. and other imperial powers caused or encouraged many of the problems suffered by the rest of the world. It is just that we and those nations other make restitution.
Peace and stability is in our national economic and security interests. Many problems don't respect national borders: disease, weapons proliferation, climate change. It's thus sensible and prudent that we invest in some amount of foreign aid in support of those goals.
Unfortunately, current foreign aid policys are largely opposed to these goals.
Uh, no. In point of fact, many get no healthcare at all - 27 million Americans with jobs don't have health insurance. Only about 59 percent of businesses provide health insurance to employees.
Many small businesses can no longer afford to provide coverage, and many employees can't afford their portion of premiums. There's a loss of coverage even amoung households making $50k+/year.
If you have sox (a standard sound app often found on GNU/Linux systems), make a pink noise generator with:
sox -t sl - -t ossdsp /dev/dsp synth 7:00:00 pinknoise < /dev/zero
Replace "7:00:00" with how long you want it to run in hh:mm:ss format. I run this to help me sleep at night, then use "at" to turn on the music player as an alarm clock ("xmms -p").
That doesn't mean their right to do so was protected by Amendment II.
Of course that's what they wanted. One of the first significant things the new federal government organized under the Constitution did was go suppress a rebellion.
As TFA explains:
TFA then considers the chemistry at the Martian surface and argues that the GC-MS experiement was misdesigned. I am not a chemist and can't speak to the strength of their argument.
The GPL and the GFDL are applied to different sorts of creations. Complaining of incompatibility seems rather like complaining that my chainsaw is incompatible with my text editor.
WFT? Stallman asking people to use names properly (Linux is the kernel) isn't dictating anything. And the GPL isn't about what you're allowed to do with code you write, it's about what you're allowed to to with code other people - who GPL'ed their code - wrote.
It's extremely unlikely that any court would rule the use of a single line from program A in program B makes B a derivative work of A.
In fact I'll bet you a nickle that for any reasonable defintion of "single line of code" (i.e., no fair just removing all the newlines!), using just a single line falls under fair use.
They did indeed. However, word meanings and connotations change with time. Today many people think the "militia" is synonmyous with the National Guard (when in fact, the Guard has been part of the Army since 1933), and "well-regulated" means "operating under a large set of rules"; but at the time, it was clear to the authors that "militia" meant "every able-bodied man young enough to fight", and "well-regulated" meant "prepared and trained in military skills".
The meaning of "arms" has also changed: at the time, it was understood to mean the sort of weapon carried by an infantryman. Heavier weapons would be refered to as "cannon"; so Amendment II doesn't mean you have a right to a howitzer on your front lawn. But people arguing against the Second Amendment today often attempt a reductio ad absurdum which includes WMDs under "arms".
(Some people evidently also seem to think that "shall not be infringed" somehow means "can be limited by the government", but that's a linguisitic drift that's harder to account for.)
Anyway, point being that what is absolutely clear and precise to one audience, can still be interpreted differently by another (especially if the two group have different motivations).
Tattooing the face actually was a punishment in ancient China. That was getting off light, compared to the other common penalties of lopping off the nose, feet, genitals, or head. The Legalists of the Han dynasty were the original "tough on crime" crusaders.