A flying personal transportation device has already been invented.
A flying personal transportation device is one that can take off and land in front of my house, not one that I have to drive my ground vehicle to the airport in order to use. Airplanes are not flying cars until having one in my driveway is an option. (If it takes $5000 in lessons as part of the cost of that option, fine.)
These are actual scientists, who also happen to be evangelical Christians.
People who believe in the Biblical story of creation are not scientists, regardless of what degrees or jobs they hold. To be a scientist requires accepting the basic tenants of the philosophy of science; otherwise one may go through the motions, but one is not doing science.
Now that these folks are disavowing the Biblical story of creation, they might -- might, in time -- develop into scientists.
I insist that athiests acknowledge that the view they hold is an unprovable opinion, and not scientific fact.
At the extremes, every statement is an unprovable opinion. (Well, outside of formal mathematics and logic, and that's only because they get to define "proof" in a restricted sense.)
"The sky of the planet on which we live is blue." No, that's an unprovable opinion, we might be living in a giant computer simulation, or I might be a brain in a vat, or a dreaming butterfly, on a planet with a red sky.
Do you also insist that people acknowledge that their view that "objective" reality exists in some manner that is related to their perceptions, is an unprovable opinion?
Love the irony of shooting someone for speaking freely because they're in some way against free speech.
If I, as a private citizen, say "People who say X should be arrested!", that's free speech, because I have no way to effect such an arrest.
If someone in public office and with armed agents of the state at their command says, "People who say X should be arrested!", that is a threat to use force to silence people saying X. It is just and proper to discuss the use of force to end such a threat.
If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality. Just cause there's $50,000 functionality built into the car to make manufacturing cheaper, doesn't mean it should be given to you for free.
If they can build a car for $20,000 - X, where X is some reasonable bit of profit, but are able to sell that car at $50,000, you have a market failure. Competition should be keeping the end price around that $20,000 level
How do you determine what something is worth, and why is that a better method than free market pricing ?
What does this have to do with free markets? Eliminate all those government-issued patents Intel holds, and then revoke its government-issued corporate charter, and then we can talk about free markets.
The same as if you buy a game engine for a set number of developers, or a software license for large products(e.g. windows), or a db license(e.g. mssql).
You speak as if those were acceptable practices.
When you have a product that's capable of 500 units-of-performance, but has been deliberately crippled so that it's only capable of 100 units-of-performance, you have a market failure.
Most of the cost will be in the design and testing efforts, which are probably higher for the $400 version than for the $200 version
If it's the same chip, and the difference betwee the $400 and $200 is how perfect the manufacturing process was that day, then the design effort is identical. If the $400 version is more thoroughly tested, fine; but that's not at all related to what's going on here, where the chip is within the higher spec but is deliberately crippled.
When manufacturers deliberately downgrade the quality of their product, you have a market failure.
I'm sorry, but that's not correct. The Nazis thought they were doing good. The Confederates thought they were doing good. The Unabomber thought he was doing good. Except for the occasional psychopath, no one who does what the rest of us call "evil" thinks to his or her self, "I'm going to go do evil."
Many horrors are perpetrated by people who, by their lights, are doing good -- they're defending their people against not-really-human barbarians, for example, or they're using harsh measures on somebody for that person's own benefit. It's the highest good to burn someone at the stake, it will save their immortal soul from eternal damnation. It's the highest good to slaughter that other tribe, they don't really have souls and we need to protect the True People. Et cetera, et cetera, for thousands of bloody years.
We all know what the word means, the specific definition that you are trying to use is a problem with the LANGUAGE(s), not the concept.
If you can't define it, you don't have a concept, you have an emotional state. It's fine to figure in emotion, but "the good is that to which I have a positive emotional reaction" is still not a universally accepted definition of good.
Everything touching on politics or law is "only a viewpoint".
and moreover oes not describe a "right" at all.
Which is why I put "right" in scare quotes. Property is not a right, it is a means of ensuring and promoting rights. If you have no control at all over your environment via property or some similar mechanism, you cannot exercise your rights of privacy, self-determination, etc.; on the other hand, when abused property gives others the ability to control my environment and interfere with my rights.
Everyone in the world knows what the word "good" means
Ok, then what does it mean? In the context of "good" and "evil", that is; good is the sense of "of superior quality" is clear.
It's kind of like an argument about how to make the best lemonade - the fact that we argue about the proper ingredients means we both agree about what lemonade is supposed to be.
That does not follow. There is a lot of crap out there being sold as "lemonade" that would not qualify as such at all under my definition. Is "lemonade" a beverage made with lemons, juice, and sugar? Or can other sweeteners be used and the product still be "lemonade"? What about some beverage made from powder? Using artificial lemon flavoring? There are many possible definitions of "lemonade".
Similarly, there are many possible definitions of "good". There are people out there who believe that "good" is exactly and only what their deity says is "good". There are utilitarians who believe that "good" is defined by the greatest benefit to the greatest number. There are Kantians who define "Good" by the categorical imperative. There are sensualists who say if it feels good, it is good. All have quite different definitions.
He's mad and feeling powerless because you stole something under threat of state violence.
"Stole something"? Who issued that land deed that turned a section of the planet's surface into "property"?
Property is created by the state. No one in the U.S. has some natural right to land, it's all stolen property. (Except maybe some reservation territory, and much of that was stolen from one tribe by the feds and given to another tribe.) Your "right" to "own" some specific piece of land is dependent on the public good.
Now, certainly eminent domain is sometimes used to fatten the pockets of the powerful rather than for the public good, and sometimes people are not justly compensated. Those are legitimate complaints. But complaining about the existence of eminent domain betrays an ignorance of the nature of property. It has always been the case that private property can be taken for public use, provided that appropriate compensation is made. It's in the Constitution, for cryin' out loud.
As I look around I see tea partiers trying to lower the oppressive tax burden...
What oppressive tax burden? Taxes are at historical lows and are lower than comparable developed nations.
The rest of your claims are similarly disconnected from reality. Economic experts agree that the problem with the economic stimulus was that it was too tiny, thanks to right-wing opposition. The majority of U.S. debt is owned by U.S. citizens, not by China; and China holds only a little bit more than Japan. No "shovel-ready" projects involved the SEIU, since SEIU is a service industry union, not a construction industry one. Etc., etc.
If you choose to remain ignorant of basic political facts, please choose also to remain silent in the political discourse. Thanks.
Like educated, urban populations in general, journalists tend to be socially liberal -- socially conservative positions are almost always the product of poor education, or of parochial views resulting from a narrow experience of the world. But on economic issues, the media leans right.
That Linode VM is only about $30/month, and it comes in handy for lots of other things. If it's a hobby, it's well within the realm of affordability. Can't recommend them enough for something like this (their competitors are probably good too, but I only have personal experience with Linode).
Linode's $19.95 plan is sufficient for personal mail and web hosting. I've used a few others VPS providers and had reliability problems, but Linode has been solid. Recommended.
but overall, the ACLU is anti-church, anti-family, anti-white, and anti-establishment
Nonsense. The ACLU defends *all* churches, not just the mainstream ones -- they step up to defend groups like the Westboro Baptist Church, as well as Muslims,Jews, atheists, Pagans, etc. The ACLU defends the rights of *all* families, not just Mom+Dad+2.5 kids. Labeling them "anti-white" is gibberish -- the ACLU defends the free speech rights of the KKK.
And in a nation where the "establishment" has no respect for the rights of the people, being anti-establishment is a virtue.
Not to say they're always right, but the ACLU is on the side of the angels more often than any other political group.
There were many more factors besides slavery that led to the Civil War and the confederacy.
Your statements demonstrate a determinedly ignorant commitment to apologetics for the Confederacy. Your suggestion that anything other than slavery was the casus belli take only a few minutes with Google to utterly refute, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for attempting to excuse these evil-doers.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world... a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization." -- Mississippi's declaration of secession
"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable". -- Texas Secession Convention
South Carolina's declaration noted "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and protested that Northern states had interfered with the return of fugitive slaves.
"We went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery. Men fight from sentiment. After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought." -- Confederate Col. John S. Mosby
Jefferson Davis himself, in his address at the ratification of the Confederate constitution -- a speech that is nothing but a fairy tale about the wonders of slavery, the evils of abolitionists, and his ignorance about the U.S. Constitution -- said:
In addition to the long-continued and deep-seated resentment felt by the Southern States at the persistent abuse of the powers they had delegated to the Congress, for the purpose of enriching the manufacturing and shipping classes of the North at the expense of the South, there has existed for nearly half a century another subject of discord, involving interests of such transcendent magnitude as at all times to create the apprehension in the minds of many devoted lovers of the Union that its permanence was impossible. When the several States delegated certain powers to the United States Congress, a large portion of the laboring population consisted of African slaves imported into the colonies by the mother country. In twelve out of the thirteen States negro slavery existed, and the right of property in slaves was protected by law. This property was recognized in the Constitution, and provision was made against its loss by the escape of the slave. The increase in the number of slaves by further importation from Africa was also secured by a clause forbidding Congress to prohibit the slave trade anterior to a certain date, and in no clause can there be found any delegation of power to the Congress authorizing it in any manner to legislate to the prejudice, detriment, or discouragement owners of that species of property, or excluding it from the protection of the Government.
...
As soon, how ever, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures a
I meant that relative to a poet's other options for communicating, like essays and dissertations and other prose, a poem is a puzzle because it doesn't go to the same lengths to set forth ideas clearly and avoid ambiguity
Ah, but ambiguity what makes both quantum computing and poetry work. An essay, ideally, means only one sharp well-defined thing, where a poem (or a literary work of prose) can simultaneously hold many meanings.
"The tao that can be told / is not the eternal Tao," says the ol' master in an famous Chinese poem, and "The facts are useful and real . . . . they are not my dwelling . . . . I enter by them to an area of the dwelling" says crazy Uncle Walt. These statements are ambiguous not because Lao Tzu or Whitman were careless, or because they were creating puzzles, or because they were not capable essayists (can't speak for Lao Tzu, but Whitman could write clear prose), but because ambiguity was part and parcel of their subject matter.
Making a deal about race is what got the US into the mess in the first place and to fix it we are going to focus on race?
No. Racism got the U.S. into the mess in the first place, and to fix it we need to acknowledge the role that racism played in our history, that the effects of racist policies linger on for generations after the policies were removed, and that racism is still with us today as a socioeconomic force.
Instead, we still have people glorifying the Confederacy, an anti-American organization dedicated to race-based slavery. We have the acceptance of racism that allows Americans to question the birthplace of the first African-American president and not be expelled from the political dialog. (I'm not saying opposing Obama implies racism; I'm saying birtherism and death-panelerism have racist roots, and anyone on the right not standing up to these wackos is aiding and abetting racism. There's still plenty of room to disagree or oppose Obama on substantive issues.) We have the racism of the War on Drugs. We have the unwillingness too consider how the legacy of segregation affects African-Americans today.
The conservative "let's just ignore color from now on" neglects our responsibility to address the problems created by all the years when we didn't ignore color. Maybe it's a genuinely accidental neglect, but it has the convenient effect of keeping power where it is.
Because hiding the meaning is precisely the point. It's not supposed to be a dissertation with a well supported thesis; it's a clever little puzzle that people enjoy composing and analyzing.
No, it is not. A poem is most certainly not a riddle, and any so-called poet who attempts to pervert poetry in such a manner ought to be keel-hauled.
A poem is an expression with emotional content, an attempt to illustrate or convey a state of consciousness. As Emerson tells us, "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune."
A poem does not "hide" behind metaphor, it uses metaphor a means of communication. Now, in order to understand a metaphor, you need some background knowledge about the metaphier; but that's not the poet hiding anything from you. When I say "Oh, that's like Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," and you don't know who Darmok and Jalad are, we have a communications fail, but not because I'm hiding anything. Maybe I shouldn't expect you to know who Darmok and Jalad, or maybe your education has been deficient, but there's no attempt to create a puzzle.
Then along came airbnb.com, with its accolades in the media and great reviews, and it seemed like the perfect solution! Certainly it's a brilliant idea, offering a controlled and seemingly low-risk environment in which travelers and hosts can connect and exchange - the Facebook of couch-surfing, so to speak - that appears to eliminate all the insecurity and randomness of using Craigslist.
...
Yet now I ask myself this: for what, exactly, did I pay a service fee to airbnb.com? What did I get in exchange for my 20-something dollars? What was the advantage of using this service over Craigslist, which is free? Ironically airbnb.comâ(TM)s site states âoethe promise of our site is that it is entirely transparentâ when in reality, it is not. And therein lies the fundamental, though not immediately apparent, difference: on Craigslist, I am warned loudly and repeatedly that use of the site is at my own risk. I am encouraged to take certain precautions, and I have the ability to do so by gaining quick access to the email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying information of the person(s) I am communicating with, all of which can be researched and at least somewhat verified by means of basic internet searches. Alternatively, airbnb.com tightly controls the communication between host and traveler, disallowing the exchange of personal contact information until the point in which a reservation is already confirmed and paid for. By hindering my ability to research the person who will rent my home, there is an implication that airbnb.com has already done the research for me, and has eliminated the investigative work that Craigslist requires.
Go ahead do a factory reset without having the phone synced with your gmail account, hope you have all your contacts written down and a few hours to input them all back in again....
Go to Contacts. Hit Menu. Touch Import/Export. Export to SD card. It will create a.vcf file on your SD card.
Syncing with GMail is not the only way to get data on and off your phone.
Slashdot Mirror
The runner's high is from endorphins, not adrenaline.
People who believe in the Biblical story of creation are not scientists, regardless of what degrees or jobs they hold. To be a scientist requires accepting the basic tenants of the philosophy of science; otherwise one may go through the motions, but one is not doing science.
Now that these folks are disavowing the Biblical story of creation, they might -- might, in time -- develop into scientists.
At the extremes, every statement is an unprovable opinion. (Well, outside of formal mathematics and logic, and that's only because they get to define "proof" in a restricted sense.)
"The sky of the planet on which we live is blue." No, that's an unprovable opinion, we might be living in a giant computer simulation, or I might be a brain in a vat, or a dreaming butterfly, on a planet with a red sky.
Do you also insist that people acknowledge that their view that "objective" reality exists in some manner that is related to their perceptions, is an unprovable opinion?
The problem is exactly that our behavior is, long-term, anti-survival.
ATF are federal paramilitary thugs, the assholes behind the Waco massacre.
The issue at hand should have been handled by the local liquor board.
If I, as a private citizen, say "People who say X should be arrested!", that's free speech, because I have no way to effect such an arrest.
If someone in public office and with armed agents of the state at their command says, "People who say X should be arrested!", that is a threat to use force to silence people saying X. It is just and proper to discuss the use of force to end such a threat.
If they can build a car for $20,000 - X, where X is some reasonable bit of profit, but are able to sell that car at $50,000, you have a market failure. Competition should be keeping the end price around that $20,000 level
What does this have to do with free markets? Eliminate all those government-issued patents Intel holds, and then revoke its government-issued corporate charter, and then we can talk about free markets.
You speak as if those were acceptable practices.
When you have a product that's capable of 500 units-of-performance, but has been deliberately crippled so that it's only capable of 100 units-of-performance, you have a market failure.
If it's the same chip, and the difference betwee the $400 and $200 is how perfect the manufacturing process was that day, then the design effort is identical. If the $400 version is more thoroughly tested, fine; but that's not at all related to what's going on here, where the chip is within the higher spec but is deliberately crippled.
When manufacturers deliberately downgrade the quality of their product, you have a market failure.
I'm sorry, but that's not correct. The Nazis thought they were doing good. The Confederates thought they were doing good. The Unabomber thought he was doing good. Except for the occasional psychopath, no one who does what the rest of us call "evil" thinks to his or her self, "I'm going to go do evil."
Many horrors are perpetrated by people who, by their lights, are doing good -- they're defending their people against not-really-human barbarians, for example, or they're using harsh measures on somebody for that person's own benefit. It's the highest good to burn someone at the stake, it will save their immortal soul from eternal damnation. It's the highest good to slaughter that other tribe, they don't really have souls and we need to protect the True People. Et cetera, et cetera, for thousands of bloody years.
If you can't define it, you don't have a concept, you have an emotional state. It's fine to figure in emotion, but "the good is that to which I have a positive emotional reaction" is still not a universally accepted definition of good.
Everything touching on politics or law is "only a viewpoint".
Which is why I put "right" in scare quotes. Property is not a right, it is a means of ensuring and promoting rights. If you have no control at all over your environment via property or some similar mechanism, you cannot exercise your rights of privacy, self-determination, etc.; on the other hand, when abused property gives others the ability to control my environment and interfere with my rights.
Ok, then what does it mean? In the context of "good" and "evil", that is; good is the sense of "of superior quality" is clear.
That does not follow. There is a lot of crap out there being sold as "lemonade" that would not qualify as such at all under my definition. Is "lemonade" a beverage made with lemons, juice, and sugar? Or can other sweeteners be used and the product still be "lemonade"? What about some beverage made from powder? Using artificial lemon flavoring? There are many possible definitions of "lemonade".
Similarly, there are many possible definitions of "good". There are people out there who believe that "good" is exactly and only what their deity says is "good". There are utilitarians who believe that "good" is defined by the greatest benefit to the greatest number. There are Kantians who define "Good" by the categorical imperative. There are sensualists who say if it feels good, it is good. All have quite different definitions.
"Stole something"? Who issued that land deed that turned a section of the planet's surface into "property"?
Property is created by the state. No one in the U.S. has some natural right to land, it's all stolen property. (Except maybe some reservation territory, and much of that was stolen from one tribe by the feds and given to another tribe.) Your "right" to "own" some specific piece of land is dependent on the public good.
Now, certainly eminent domain is sometimes used to fatten the pockets of the powerful rather than for the public good, and sometimes people are not justly compensated. Those are legitimate complaints. But complaining about the existence of eminent domain betrays an ignorance of the nature of property. It has always been the case that private property can be taken for public use, provided that appropriate compensation is made. It's in the Constitution, for cryin' out loud.
What oppressive tax burden? Taxes are at historical lows and are lower than comparable developed nations.
The rest of your claims are similarly disconnected from reality. Economic experts agree that the problem with the economic stimulus was that it was too tiny, thanks to right-wing opposition. The majority of U.S. debt is owned by U.S. citizens, not by China; and China holds only a little bit more than Japan. No "shovel-ready" projects involved the SEIU, since SEIU is a service industry union, not a construction industry one. Etc., etc.
If you choose to remain ignorant of basic political facts, please choose also to remain silent in the political discourse. Thanks.
Because, contrary to popular mythology, the media lean to the right. (It's only gotten worse since 1998.)
Like educated, urban populations in general, journalists tend to be socially liberal -- socially conservative positions are almost always the product of poor education, or of parochial views resulting from a narrow experience of the world. But on economic issues, the media leans right.
Linode's $19.95 plan is sufficient for personal mail and web hosting. I've used a few others VPS providers and had reliability problems, but Linode has been solid. Recommended.
Nonsense. The ACLU defends *all* churches, not just the mainstream ones -- they step up to defend groups like the Westboro Baptist Church, as well as Muslims,Jews, atheists, Pagans, etc. The ACLU defends the rights of *all* families, not just Mom+Dad+2.5 kids. Labeling them "anti-white" is gibberish -- the ACLU defends the free speech rights of the KKK.
And in a nation where the "establishment" has no respect for the rights of the people, being anti-establishment is a virtue.
Not to say they're always right, but the ACLU is on the side of the angels more often than any other political group.
Your statements demonstrate a determinedly ignorant commitment to apologetics for the Confederacy. Your suggestion that anything other than slavery was the casus belli take only a few minutes with Google to utterly refute, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for attempting to excuse these evil-doers.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world ... a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization." -- Mississippi's declaration of secession
"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable". -- Texas Secession Convention
South Carolina's declaration noted "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and protested that Northern states had interfered with the return of fugitive slaves.
"We went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery. Men fight from sentiment. After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought." -- Confederate Col. John S. Mosby
Jefferson Davis himself, in his address at the ratification of the Confederate constitution -- a speech that is nothing but a fairy tale about the wonders of slavery, the evils of abolitionists, and his ignorance about the U.S. Constitution -- said:
Ah, but ambiguity what makes both quantum computing and poetry work. An essay, ideally, means only one sharp well-defined thing, where a poem (or a literary work of prose) can simultaneously hold many meanings.
"The tao that can be told / is not the eternal Tao," says the ol' master in an famous Chinese poem, and "The facts are useful and real . . . . they are not my dwelling . . . . I enter by them to an area of the dwelling" says crazy Uncle Walt. These statements are ambiguous not because Lao Tzu or Whitman were careless, or because they were creating puzzles, or because they were not capable essayists (can't speak for Lao Tzu, but Whitman could write clear prose), but because ambiguity was part and parcel of their subject matter.
No. Racism got the U.S. into the mess in the first place, and to fix it we need to acknowledge the role that racism played in our history, that the effects of racist policies linger on for generations after the policies were removed, and that racism is still with us today as a socioeconomic force.
Instead, we still have people glorifying the Confederacy, an anti-American organization dedicated to race-based slavery. We have the acceptance of racism that allows Americans to question the birthplace of the first African-American president and not be expelled from the political dialog. (I'm not saying opposing Obama implies racism; I'm saying birtherism and death-panelerism have racist roots, and anyone on the right not standing up to these wackos is aiding and abetting racism. There's still plenty of room to disagree or oppose Obama on substantive issues.) We have the racism of the War on Drugs. We have the unwillingness too consider how the legacy of segregation affects African-Americans today.
The conservative "let's just ignore color from now on" neglects our responsibility to address the problems created by all the years when we didn't ignore color. Maybe it's a genuinely accidental neglect, but it has the convenient effect of keeping power where it is.
No, it is not. A poem is most certainly not a riddle, and any so-called poet who attempts to pervert poetry in such a manner ought to be keel-hauled.
A poem is an expression with emotional content, an attempt to illustrate or convey a state of consciousness. As Emerson tells us, "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune."
A poem does not "hide" behind metaphor, it uses metaphor a means of communication. Now, in order to understand a metaphor, you need some background knowledge about the metaphier; but that's not the poet hiding anything from you. When I say "Oh, that's like Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," and you don't know who Darmok and Jalad are, we have a communications fail, but not because I'm hiding anything. Maybe I shouldn't expect you to know who Darmok and Jalad, or maybe your education has been deficient, but there's no attempt to create a puzzle.
(Some recent thoughts about poetry here.)
No, it's not., as the victim explains:
Go to Contacts. Hit Menu. Touch Import/Export. Export to SD card. It will create a .vcf file on your SD card.
Syncing with GMail is not the only way to get data on and off your phone.