Just like no person who believes in God could possibly think that an almighty, all-knowing transcendental God for whom time is meaningless could have used evolution as the means of creating life on Earth, setting first causes into motion (i.e. big bang) content with the certainty that the result will unfold as desired.
Well, no one who's committed to reason can believe that, no. If human life on Earth is the desired result, an almighty, all-knowing transcendental God would not use evolution as the means. Nor would it sculpt them out of clay after seven days of puttering around. We're talking almighty here, why wait?
"Hmm. I'd like some humans. I could wait around for 13,000,000,000 years...nah. Bam! Alakazoom! Humans. Go build me a church already."
So, if one believes in the God-as-first-cause thing, it follows that either 1. God is not almighty, or 2. Human life on Earth is not the the desired result, or at least not the sole desired result.
One still has to deal with the fact that the hypothesis is both untestable (you can conduct no experiment to show the existence of such a God) and lacks explanatory power (it is simpler to say "the Universe has always been here" than to say "the Universe came from God, and God has always been here).
They made jokes about rape. Why should anyone care? As far as I know, only the people deemed 'insane' by society would be affected by such jokes so much that they would view rape as more 'okay' because of them. As far as I know, no one really believes that rape is okay just because someone (or themselves) make a few jokes about it.
I'm sorry to let you in on this, but human beings don't work that way.
It's not the case that there's some bright line where sane people all understand that rape is always 100% wrong and only a handful of people with seriously broken brains would ever think otherwise. There are a lot of people in a grey area, who can be pushed one way or the other. It's why, for example, rape is routinely used as a tool of war: you can take an otherwise sane soldier, expose him to concentrated toxic memes, and create a rapist.
Similarly, you can take some gamer kid who does not believe that violence against women is ok, expose him to media that normalize beating up women, and create a batterer.
Will it be common? No, because that's one influence among many. Should we use force to silence odious media that normalize violent behavior? No. Should intelligent, thoughtful people who give a damn say "this is over the line, and we're going to criticize it"? Yes.
It's like how people don't understand parody and satire.
What exactly are we satirizing here? I mean, if this is a satire of idiotic greasy-faced misogynistic gamer boys, for whom this is the closest they'll ever come to an actual woman, and who would probably get their ass kicked if they ever actually tried to hit a woman, then maybe -- just maybe -- there might be some lulz hidden deep in the notion of beating up women. I mean, does Duke turn to the "camera" after he punches a woman and say, "Does this get you hot, Poindexter?" or what?
(Hey, hope I didn't say the wrong thing there about idiotic gamer boys who can't get laid. But, you know, people need to learn to chill.)
Can you explain the satire? Because from here it seems that, while the strippers in Duke Nukem 3D were maybe kinda funny on a seventh-grade level, violence against non-combatant women as an expected part of gameplay is pretty fscking pathetic.
What exactly are you doing on a netbook that wouldn't be better served by a laptop or a tablet?
Just about anything that's outside my house?
Netbook beats laptop for portability and battery life -- my Asus Eee with extended battery will run over 6 hours. Netbook beats tablet because it's got a damn keyboard and I'm not a passive consumer of entertainment; I'm either blogging or writing or working.
Erotic includes but is not limited to exposed genitals and sexual acts.
So an anatomy book is erotica? A book about sexual health, displaying the rashes caused by STDs, is erotica? A catalog of a museum exhibit of shunga prints is erotica?
Actually, gravity is *not* a theory. Newton's law of universal gravitation is a law.
Newtonian gravitation is a theory. The "law" is a mathematical expression of that theory. The theory is, as it turns out, incorrect. There have been many "laws" that were later found incorrect -- Bode's Law, for example.
Well "Secession" is a reserved power under the Tenth Amendment. Just as any of the EU States can secede from the Union, so too can any of the US States.
No, maybe, and no.
Secession is not a "power", it's a breach of law. States yielded sovereignty when they joined the union. They gave up many of the authorities required for a independent nation, and there's no "backsies" clause in the Constitution.
Should some state attempt to act as an independent nation without Congress's permission, its government would be violating Article I Section 10 of the Constitution. It would be unlawfully attempting to exert authority over U.S. citizens, and the federal government must come to their defense.
I've never looked into the structure of the EU. But under the Constitution, the United States is most definitely not a federation of sovereign states -- and this was never the intent. As James Madison wrote, "It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States....Hence was embraced the alternative of a Government which instead of operating, on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them."
Or as Charles Pinckney wrote, "I apprehend the true intention of the States in uniting, is to have a firm national Government, capable of effectually executing its acts, and dispensing its benefits and protection. In it alone can be vested those powers and prerogatives which more particularly distinguish a sovereign State. The members which compose the superintending Government are to be considered merely as parts of a great whole, and only suffered to retain the powers necessary to the administration of their State Systems."
While I can agree that the federal government has overstepped its bounds in some areas -- the idea that drug possession can be a federal crime, for example, has no basis in Constitutional authority -- most "Tenthers" fail both reading comprehension and history. We once had the sort of weak federal government they envision, under the Articles of Confederation. It was an abject failure, and thus there was a push for a strong central government. That's what the Constitution gave us.
So, take a bunch of copyrighted (or, copylefted) code, stripping out the comments, and then claim there's no copyrightable information???
Header files implement an interface. That interface is a fact, not subject to copyright.
The fact "strcpy takes as arguments two character pointers, and returns a character pointer", is not copyrightable. This does not change if I express it in C as "char *strcpy(char *d, const char *s);"
A minimal C or C++ header file is just a collection of such facts.
What a twisted bit of reporting. The Daily Caller is upset because this policy would recognize harassment of gay students as a bad thing, and this apparently threatens the superstitious beliefs of its target demographic. (Many of them -- and try not to laugh -- believe that an omnipotent, all-loving invisible person in the sky will sentence a person's ghost to eternal torment if that person is gay.)
This isn't about the free expression of ideas, it's about harassment. Harassment is, and should be, against both the law and school policy. If a boss is sexually harassing an employee, say constantly calling them at home to ask for a date, "it happened out of the office" is not a defense -- every intelligent person understands that the consequences of that harassment reach into the workplace. Same with school bullying; as the letter quoted in the article correctly states, it "creates a hostile environment... [which can] limit a student's ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school."
TV Shows in HD should cost 99 cents to own, 50 cents to stream...
No. The artificial distinction between "streaming" and "downloading" is another driver of piracy. Let me download the damn file and not have to deal with bandwidth issues and sucky Flash players. I'm probably only going to watch it once anyway.
I should be able to tell my computer, "Here's $5/month. Each night around 4am -- when I'm asleep and thus using no bandwidth -- download the latest Daily Show and have it waiting for me over breakfast." I could just about do this now for free with torrents and RSS.
Originally, perhaps. If you look at a recent bottle (at least the one I have here) it says it was brewed and bottled in Canada. Now days, Guinness = Canadian beer.
Same with many Japanese beers. The big print on a Sapporo or Asahi says "IMPORTED"; the small print says "from Canada". (Kirin doesn't even bother to pretend -- it's brewed by Anheuser-Busch.)
In practice, I seriously doubt that anyone would not disclose the location of a child - it is not in the interests of the person to keep that information to themselves. What do they stand to gain?
Here we see the root of your problem: you believe that human nature is other than it is. Human beings do not always act out of rational self-interest.
A right, by definition, does not require action on the part of another.
That's a popular right-wing shibboleth, but it's incorrect. You have the right to a trial by jury, the right to legal consul, and the right to compel witnesses to appear on your behalf, all of which fundamentally imply action on the part of others.
Facebook often subjects you to a rather lengthy quiz to prove that you are the accountholder, asking you to identify friends in photos (based on other users' tags.)
I encountered this once. Very stupid idea. Many of my Facebook "friends" are people who have seen me perform poetry or music, or been to a class I taught, or otherwise know me when I really don't know them. My Facebook page is part of my campaign of relentless self-promotion, and less than 10% of my Facebook "friends" are people I know well.
Plus, there's the habit of tagging people who aren't in photos in order to bring the photo to someone's attention. A lot of times people are tagged in a photo that is actually the image of a flier for an upcoming show that the tagger is promoting.
FB's attempt to use the ability to recognize tagged photos as proof of identity demonstrates that FB has little idea how people are actually using the site.
I do feel that part of the problem with nuclear power has been the culture of secrecy fed by, to be frank, the scientific and engineering ignorance, emotionalism and sometimes near-hysteria of the antis.
Wait wait wait. Government and industry have had to hide the truth because of ignorance?
There is certainly ignorance and emotionalism among some people opposed to nuclear fission. There is also ignorance and emotionalism among some people among people in favor of nuclear fission -- a belief that wind and solar are for hippies, that "splitting the atom" shows man controlling nature, breezy pronouncements about nuclear waste and weapons proliferation, and a reluctance or refusal to acknowledge the accidents that have occurred.
But anti-nuke activists will consider this the worse tragedy
Nonsense. No one is going to consider this worse. Rational humans, however, will consider it more under human control. We cannot prevent earthquakes and tsunamis; we can eliminate the threat of nuclear meltdowns entirely by not building uranium or plutonium fission reactors.
There is, of course, a cost to that choice. We would either have to reduce energy usage (either by efficiency or austerity), build more dirty, CO2-spewing fossil fuel plants, deploy more wind and solar and other renewables (which have their own costs), develop the other nuclear technologies (fusion and "energy amplifier" designs, still at the prototype stage at best), or some combination of these. There are also benefits besides eliminating meltdowns: nuclear waste, weapons proliferation, the ecological damage of uranium mining, "peak uranium", and terrorism concerns are all ameliorated by not having fission reactors.
Another choice, as you say, is to build new fission reactors that are safer. Given that the pronouncements of how much "safer" these new designs are come from governments and industries with a history of spin and untruths, and are often spread by people who seem to have an emotional attachment to the idea of "Man Mastering the Primal Forces of the Universe!", it's appropriate to view them skeptically.
And the crew on the Death Star were just innocent bystanders.
May I introduce you to the concept of fiction, and its overly simplistic portrayal of "good" and "evil"?
But let's stick with that for just a minute. Remember what Luke, our hero, wanted to do when we first meet him? He's talking to his aunt and uncle about applying to "the Academy" -- presumably, an Imperial military academy.
Let's imagine some guy just like Luke, a farm kid looking for something better, but whose daddy isn't a Sith and who doesn't have a pair of droids fall into his lap and call him to adventure. Farm kid goes to the academy, gets trained to follow orders, maybe has an occasional doubt or twinge of conscience but does as he's told. Why? Because it's human nature to follow authority. Until he graduates and gets posted to the Death Star...
Armies are full of "innocent bystanders", people who individually are generally ok but are part of a structure designed to nullify their conscience and judgment. The guys who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more fundamentally evil than most of the folks you meet every day.
No, the company is a legal entity, quite possible the immortal sociopathic form of legal person known as a corporation.
One of my girlfriends works for Bank of America. She, and her co-workers I've met, are great. Yet the corporation is an evil corporate bastard.
How can a structure of great people turn out evil? The same way a structure of unconscious nerve cells can turn out to have a consciousness. The evil that a company does is (usually) an emergent property. It's not enough to trust the people -- you have to trust the structure, and for any large for-profit company that's a very foolish thing to do.
Your gift to the American Red Cross will support our disaster relief efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific. On those rare occasions when donations exceed American Red Cross expenses for a specific disaster, contributions are used to prepare for and serve victims of other disasters.
Nylon is made of oil, which is running out. Steel is made of iron, which will never run out.
Nylon is thermoplastic. You can make nylon stuff out of old nylon stuff.
The melting point of nylon is about 220-265 C, depending on the type, while steel melts around 1425 - 1540 C. Seems like it's much easier to recycle nylon than steel.
You could put a big-enough planet-killing asteroid into it, strip off the sulphur-dioxide-laden atmosphere, and start over, but the entire surface would be molten at that point, and since the rest of the planet is already "squeezed bone dry", you'd just end up back where you started when things cooled down enough.
Comets, then? Big ol' chunks of ice from space.
There's some interesting speculation about terraforming Venus in the wik: Terraforming of Venus.
not an internet kill switch like some countries are trying to have -ahem- not looking at anyone america
The U.S. is not "trying" to have an internet kill switch. It has one, under a law that goes back to the 1930s and grants the President broad authority over wired and wireless communication. The bill in question would have limited, not expanded, this power.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, no one who's committed to reason can believe that, no. If human life on Earth is the desired result, an almighty, all-knowing transcendental God would not use evolution as the means. Nor would it sculpt them out of clay after seven days of puttering around. We're talking almighty here, why wait?
"Hmm. I'd like some humans. I could wait around for 13,000,000,000 years...nah. Bam! Alakazoom! Humans. Go build me a church already."
So, if one believes in the God-as-first-cause thing, it follows that either 1. God is not almighty, or 2. Human life on Earth is not the the desired result, or at least not the sole desired result.
One still has to deal with the fact that the hypothesis is both untestable (you can conduct no experiment to show the existence of such a God) and lacks explanatory power (it is simpler to say "the Universe has always been here" than to say "the Universe came from God, and God has always been here).
It took hundreds of millions of years and a lab the size of a planet to do it the first time. It may take more than a few decades to reproduce that.
I'm sorry to let you in on this, but human beings don't work that way.
It's not the case that there's some bright line where sane people all understand that rape is always 100% wrong and only a handful of people with seriously broken brains would ever think otherwise. There are a lot of people in a grey area, who can be pushed one way or the other. It's why, for example, rape is routinely used as a tool of war: you can take an otherwise sane soldier, expose him to concentrated toxic memes, and create a rapist.
Similarly, you can take some gamer kid who does not believe that violence against women is ok, expose him to media that normalize beating up women, and create a batterer.
Will it be common? No, because that's one influence among many. Should we use force to silence odious media that normalize violent behavior? No. Should intelligent, thoughtful people who give a damn say "this is over the line, and we're going to criticize it"? Yes.
What exactly are we satirizing here? I mean, if this is a satire of idiotic greasy-faced misogynistic gamer boys, for whom this is the closest they'll ever come to an actual woman, and who would probably get their ass kicked if they ever actually tried to hit a woman, then maybe -- just maybe -- there might be some lulz hidden deep in the notion of beating up women. I mean, does Duke turn to the "camera" after he punches a woman and say, "Does this get you hot, Poindexter?" or what?
(Hey, hope I didn't say the wrong thing there about idiotic gamer boys who can't get laid. But, you know, people need to learn to chill.)
Can you explain the satire? Because from here it seems that, while the strippers in Duke Nukem 3D were maybe kinda funny on a seventh-grade level, violence against non-combatant women as an expected part of gameplay is pretty fscking pathetic.
Just about anything that's outside my house?
Netbook beats laptop for portability and battery life -- my Asus Eee with extended battery will run over 6 hours. Netbook beats tablet because it's got a damn keyboard and I'm not a passive consumer of entertainment; I'm either blogging or writing or working.
Unless you never leave large cities, Virgin's paucity of smartphones is much less important than the absence of roaming on their plans.
So an anatomy book is erotica? A book about sexual health, displaying the rashes caused by STDs, is erotica? A catalog of a museum exhibit of shunga prints is erotica?
Newtonian gravitation is a theory. The "law" is a mathematical expression of that theory. The theory is, as it turns out, incorrect. There have been many "laws" that were later found incorrect -- Bode's Law, for example.
No, maybe, and no.
Secession is not a "power", it's a breach of law. States yielded sovereignty when they joined the union. They gave up many of the authorities required for a independent nation, and there's no "backsies" clause in the Constitution.
Should some state attempt to act as an independent nation without Congress's permission, its government would be violating Article I Section 10 of the Constitution. It would be unlawfully attempting to exert authority over U.S. citizens, and the federal government must come to their defense.
I've never looked into the structure of the EU. But under the Constitution, the United States is most definitely not a federation of sovereign states -- and this was never the intent. As James Madison wrote, "It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States....Hence was embraced the alternative of a Government which instead of operating, on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them."
Or as Charles Pinckney wrote, "I apprehend the true intention of the States in uniting, is to have a firm national Government, capable of effectually executing its acts, and dispensing its benefits and protection. In it alone can be vested those powers and prerogatives which more particularly distinguish a sovereign State. The members which compose the superintending Government are to be considered merely as parts of a great whole, and only suffered to retain the powers necessary to the administration of their State Systems."
While I can agree that the federal government has overstepped its bounds in some areas -- the idea that drug possession can be a federal crime, for example, has no basis in Constitutional authority -- most "Tenthers" fail both reading comprehension and history. We once had the sort of weak federal government they envision, under the Articles of Confederation. It was an abject failure, and thus there was a push for a strong central government. That's what the Constitution gave us.
Header files implement an interface. That interface is a fact, not subject to copyright.
The fact "strcpy takes as arguments two character pointers, and returns a character pointer", is not copyrightable. This does not change if I express it in C as "char *strcpy(char *d, const char *s);"
A minimal C or C++ header file is just a collection of such facts.
What a twisted bit of reporting. The Daily Caller is upset because this policy would recognize harassment of gay students as a bad thing, and this apparently threatens the superstitious beliefs of its target demographic. (Many of them -- and try not to laugh -- believe that an omnipotent, all-loving invisible person in the sky will sentence a person's ghost to eternal torment if that person is gay.)
This isn't about the free expression of ideas, it's about harassment. Harassment is, and should be, against both the law and school policy. If a boss is sexually harassing an employee, say constantly calling them at home to ask for a date, "it happened out of the office" is not a defense -- every intelligent person understands that the consequences of that harassment reach into the workplace. Same with school bullying; as the letter quoted in the article correctly states, it "creates a hostile environment ... [which can] limit a student's ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school."
No. The artificial distinction between "streaming" and "downloading" is another driver of piracy. Let me download the damn file and not have to deal with bandwidth issues and sucky Flash players. I'm probably only going to watch it once anyway.
I should be able to tell my computer, "Here's $5/month. Each night around 4am -- when I'm asleep and thus using no bandwidth -- download the latest Daily Show and have it waiting for me over breakfast." I could just about do this now for free with torrents and RSS.
Same with many Japanese beers. The big print on a Sapporo or Asahi says "IMPORTED"; the small print says "from Canada". (Kirin doesn't even bother to pretend -- it's brewed by Anheuser-Busch.)
Here we see the root of your problem: you believe that human nature is other than it is. Human beings do not always act out of rational self-interest.
That's a popular right-wing shibboleth, but it's incorrect. You have the right to a trial by jury, the right to legal consul, and the right to compel witnesses to appear on your behalf, all of which fundamentally imply action on the part of others.
I encountered this once. Very stupid idea. Many of my Facebook "friends" are people who have seen me perform poetry or music, or been to a class I taught, or otherwise know me when I really don't know them. My Facebook page is part of my campaign of relentless self-promotion, and less than 10% of my Facebook "friends" are people I know well.
Plus, there's the habit of tagging people who aren't in photos in order to bring the photo to someone's attention. A lot of times people are tagged in a photo that is actually the image of a flier for an upcoming show that the tagger is promoting.
FB's attempt to use the ability to recognize tagged photos as proof of identity demonstrates that FB has little idea how people are actually using the site.
Yes. My expectation is that my words and actions will be visible and audible only to the people present.
Wait wait wait. Government and industry have had to hide the truth because of ignorance?
There is certainly ignorance and emotionalism among some people opposed to nuclear fission. There is also ignorance and emotionalism among some people among people in favor of nuclear fission -- a belief that wind and solar are for hippies, that "splitting the atom" shows man controlling nature, breezy pronouncements about nuclear waste and weapons proliferation, and a reluctance or refusal to acknowledge the accidents that have occurred.
Nonsense. No one is going to consider this worse. Rational humans, however, will consider it more under human control. We cannot prevent earthquakes and tsunamis; we can eliminate the threat of nuclear meltdowns entirely by not building uranium or plutonium fission reactors.
There is, of course, a cost to that choice. We would either have to reduce energy usage (either by efficiency or austerity), build more dirty, CO2-spewing fossil fuel plants, deploy more wind and solar and other renewables (which have their own costs), develop the other nuclear technologies (fusion and "energy amplifier" designs, still at the prototype stage at best), or some combination of these. There are also benefits besides eliminating meltdowns: nuclear waste, weapons proliferation, the ecological damage of uranium mining, "peak uranium", and terrorism concerns are all ameliorated by not having fission reactors.
Another choice, as you say, is to build new fission reactors that are safer. Given that the pronouncements of how much "safer" these new designs are come from governments and industries with a history of spin and untruths, and are often spread by people who seem to have an emotional attachment to the idea of "Man Mastering the Primal Forces of the Universe!", it's appropriate to view them skeptically.
May I introduce you to the concept of fiction, and its overly simplistic portrayal of "good" and "evil"?
But let's stick with that for just a minute. Remember what Luke, our hero, wanted to do when we first meet him? He's talking to his aunt and uncle about applying to "the Academy" -- presumably, an Imperial military academy.
Let's imagine some guy just like Luke, a farm kid looking for something better, but whose daddy isn't a Sith and who doesn't have a pair of droids fall into his lap and call him to adventure. Farm kid goes to the academy, gets trained to follow orders, maybe has an occasional doubt or twinge of conscience but does as he's told. Why? Because it's human nature to follow authority. Until he graduates and gets posted to the Death Star...
Armies are full of "innocent bystanders", people who individually are generally ok but are part of a structure designed to nullify their conscience and judgment. The guys who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more fundamentally evil than most of the folks you meet every day.
No, the company is a legal entity, quite possible the immortal sociopathic form of legal person known as a corporation.
One of my girlfriends works for Bank of America. She, and her co-workers I've met, are great. Yet the corporation is an evil corporate bastard.
How can a structure of great people turn out evil? The same way a structure of unconscious nerve cells can turn out to have a consciousness. The evil that a company does is (usually) an emergent property. It's not enough to trust the people -- you have to trust the structure, and for any large for-profit company that's a very foolish thing to do.
Why are you asking that in response to a suggestion to donate to the International Red Cross? (The ICRC donations page does not yet list Japan.)
Anyway, american.redcross.org says:
Nylon is thermoplastic. You can make nylon stuff out of old nylon stuff.
The melting point of nylon is about 220-265 C, depending on the type, while steel melts around 1425 - 1540 C. Seems like it's much easier to recycle nylon than steel.
Comets, then? Big ol' chunks of ice from space.
There's some interesting speculation about terraforming Venus in the wik: Terraforming of Venus.
The U.S. is not "trying" to have an internet kill switch. It has one, under a law that goes back to the 1930s and grants the President broad authority over wired and wireless communication. The bill in question would have limited, not expanded, this power.