Let's say I have a GB of data to burn each time I do a backup. Can you tell me where I can buy a 1GB hard drive for 10 cents?
Oh, and one that's small enough to keep in a small pocket so I don't have to leave it around in my house, where it risks getting stolen/damaged (backups are pointless if they get lost by the same thing that claims your PC).
And the time to burn a CD is still quicker than the time to open my PC and connect up a second hard disk each time! Now, you probably mean keeping a single second hard drive installed to use for everytime I backup, but that just means you lose all your backups if the drive goes, and you're still putting all your data on a single machine (consider if the machine is stolen or destroyed, or you get a virus).
Let's get over this idea that there are "no victims" in the crime of prostitution. The victims are the prostitutes. Yes, some people do willingly trade sex for money. A great, great many do not.
You might as well say "The victims are women" - after all, whilst some people willingly have sex, many women are raped. Does this mean it makes sense to say that "There are victims in the act of sex"? That it's okay to demonise or even criminalise sex as a whole? Of course not - it's rape that's wrong.
So let's say that there are victims in rape, sex slavery and so on, and stop trying to conflate the issue with consensual acts.
The OP is spot on - the victims you claim are victims of the crime of rape and sex slavery, not victims of buying sex. Consider, even if sex slaves were used for free, it would obviously still be wrong!
Regarding Lib Dems, remember it's not all or nothing - an extra Lib Dem MP is still one less MP of the Government party, who can help vote against authoritarian laws along with the opposition party. (And don't forget to check what the votes are like in your consituency - it's surprising how many people think Lib Dems are a "wasted" vote, when it turns out they live somewhere where Lib Dems are the 1st or 2nd party.)
On the one hand, I fear that Conservatives will end up doing just as bad things sooner or later. But they have said they will scrap the compulsory National ID card and database system - if Labour get in next election, that's here to stay for certain. (More generally, even if the two main parties are "just as bad", there's an argument that switching between them is better than one party staying in power for a long period of time, as then they tend to get away with pushing through all sorts of draconian long term plans.)
You must remember when ever you are on a side you always assume your side is more moderate then the other.
Well, this goes for you too.
However nearly every person who I met who was an atheist who learns that I am a practicing catholic will often ask me, I just can't believe that you are a catholic, you are too smart to be one. Then more often then not will try disprove every section of the bible. Which I take as a Literary truth not a Literal truth.
But now you've switched the argument from disproving God, to disproving Catholicism. Catholicism and the Bible make specific claims, and it is a lot more plausible to try to disprove them. This is nothing to do with your original statement of "A god being a being of infinite intelligence and power. Would be near impossible to prove or disprove."
And to respond to your "I don't see how finding the God Particle will prove or Disproove God." - I don't see any atheists claiming that. Anyone who thinks that the God particle has anything to do with God is completely wrong. I don't know where this misunderstanding came from, and I don't really care if they happen to be an atheist or theist - they're an idiot, either way.
Many atheist will get defensive and angry at the idea that there could be a God, discredit any logical explanation why they could be
I'd do neither - but I've never heard a religious argument that is logical.
even though their argument against one is just as weak
Is the argument against the existence of Thor just as weak as the argument in favour? What about the argument against the existence of a teapot orbiting Mars? Or of invisible unicorns? Or that we're all made of jelly?
Do you believe in all of these things, because the argument against them is "just as weak"?
Anyhow, this is all beside the point - regarding the idea that atheists spend their time disproving God whilst scientists don't, I disagree. In practice, I would say that atheist scientists are no more likely to try to disprove God than theist scientists try to prove God; and I would say the same holds for non-scientists too.
I'm sure there's more versions than that definition, but yes, that would be the second of my categories.
That's in my opinion what belief (in Christianity) means.
Well, that and the whole "Jesus is the son of God, who came from a virgin birth, and rose from the dead" bit.
Miracles don't exist for science, even if observed, they will be rejected.
Not at all. Science is all about observation. The problem is that religions make claims that cannot or have not been observed, or have been disproven. What is your definition of a miracle? In science, laws are descriptive, not prescriptive - if a law is observed to be violated, then the law is incorrect. The problem is that religions make claims that the laws do not hold, despite vast amounts of evidence to the contrary.
I think you are confusing scientists with atheists. Scientists are not interesting in proving the existence of god or not.
Nor are most atheists. (And indeed, my experience is that theists are more likely to try to prove God's existence, than atheists are to prove his non-existence.)
There are a Lot of Athiests out there claiming that they are so much smarter then everyone else, however they know just as little about the universe then everyone else. And jumps to the same irrational ideas that makes them feel better.
There are? And what irrational ideas? Let's have sourced statements rather than the same old anti-atheist stereotyping - I see far more of that, than I do of this alleged behaviour.
And your evidence for these numbers plucked out of thin air?
I see no reason to believe that atheists in these discussions are more likely to have not "researched" the matter than theists in these discussions. Indeed, I see many recycled arguments put forward by theists who think they're original clever arguments they've just come up with (e.g., Pascal's Wager).
And what do you mean by research anyway? Do I need to perform research into unicorns before I can say that unicorns don't exist?
One with omnipresence would be easy to prove.... If you only need a "mechanical" God, the bet is won already.
That's backwards logic - just because God has omnipresence as a property, doesn't mean that anything that's omnipresent counts as god.
Unless you redefine God to mean "anything that's omnipresence". Yes, you are right that this is a common theist tactic, but all it is is wordplay, and nothing to do with the meaning of the word that's almost always used by the theist who makes the argument, not to mention billions of people on the planet. It's "proof by redefinition". I might as well say "God looks like an old man with a beard" - it would clearly be ludicrous to say that therefore an old man with a beard was God!
(This is a variation of the obviously flawed argument "God is Love, Love exists, therefore God exists"...)
Definitions of God fall into one of three categories: * Made up definitions that have little in common with the actual god that people believe in. * Vague unfalsifiable claims ("God created the Universe, and he made everything happen the way we see it"). * Claims which are falsifiable, and usually have been falsified (many of the claims of various religions).
The software would work just as well for those who identified as the opposite gender to what they were born with, as they'd obviously give whatever names they go by, not the names they were given at birth. Though yes, some people may not like a software program deciding to choose a gender for them.
And note that non-transgendered people also get offended by an incorrect gender assumption, often far more so.
I don't think it tries to guess your gender, I think it tries to guess the gender of the user you're talking to.... I think the idea is that people are going to make these assumptions anyway, so maybe a computer can help them be more accurate. This is why the invention is useful.
I think that makes it worse though. People aren't going to read an avatar as being "An educated guess at someone's gender", they're going to read it as something that the user themselves has set (either directly, or via a male/female option), since that's how avatars have traditionally been set.
Although I wonder why it matters. If someone is that bothered about someone's sex, they could take a moment to maybe ask them. Or use the old fashioned method of letting people set it on their profile when they sign up.
Another example would be shortened names - it's common for girls to shorten their names to names that are still often associated with boys' names (e.g., "Alex" might be short for "Alexandra" - I wonder how this software would categorise that).
Since when can ideas being stolen? You would rather than every idea be patented or copyrighted by the original company, and no one else be allowed to use them unless the original company allows it?
You are the one taking the RIAA-style stance, by claiming that copying is equivalent to stealing. However, at least the RIAA are concerned with actual copyright infringemnent - it's ridiculous to suggest that mere ideas can be copyrighted.
As for using lawyers, I'm far more concerned at companies that use them to sue people for "stealing" their ideas (as you think they ought to do), compared with companies simply using them to defend themselves against such mad litigation.
Anyhow, there are plenty of ideas that Apple use but didn't come up with, and they didn't pay for the "rights" to use them in every instance.
But the GUI came from Xerox. And by Windows 95, the elements in the GUI had been developed by many other platforms too (I'd say the OS had more elements borrowed from AmigaOS if anything - e.g., a combined GUI and command line, pre-emptive multitasking).
I don't see a huge problem here. Apple didn't invent the Dock; lots of platforms had one before OS X came along. Apple may have added some new things to the idea - just as Microsoft are now doing themselves.
When Apple copies an idea and adds something, it's "innovation" or "doing something that no one did before", or even "Apple invented it".
When Microsoft copies and idea and adds something, it's "stealing Apple's ideas".
I guess it's an amusing downside of the "Apple invented it first" nonsense. Just as we get Iphone fans going "OMG I can access the Interwebs, aren't Apple great!" as if no one had ever done that before, it also means that any problems with phones are assumed to be Apple-only issues.
I can't wait for someone to tout this as an Apple-only advantage - "The Iphone lets me know I'm going to receive a call even before it rings! Aren't Apple great!"
I look forward to the article "How the Iphone allows people to talk to people who aren't even in the same room as you"...
If you aren't developing an app that has iPhone specific features (camera, GPS or phone)
But hang on - the main reason he gave for developing for the Iphone was that it guaranteed certain features. He even gave GPS and camera as an example! (As an aside, I fail to see how having a "camera" is a "very interesting feature" these days - welcome to the 21st Century.)
So which is it? If you need certain features, then you restrict yourself to the Iphone, and the Ipod is irrelevant. If you don't care about requiring specific features to the extent that running on an Ipod is okay, then one might as well develop using open standards to run on every single phone on the market (except for a minority which don't yet support such standards).
But it doesn't exist on *every* other phone. One of the huge advantages of targeting the iPhone is that you are guaranteed to have a specific feature set that you can rely on.
If that's important, couldn't you, I don't know, specify any other phone as a requirement too? You know, "This software is only tested for the following phone or phones"?
I have no idea why the choice is presented "All phones except the Iphone" versus "Only the Iphone". Perhaps because the Iphone uses incompatible standards, I don't know, and if that was the choice, it seems surprising to me choose the latter, when it's a vastly smaller market. But the point is that such a choice is a false dichotomy anyway - if you want to target specific phones, you can do that with other phones too!
The advantage is that the iPhone is rapidly becoming the most mainstream consumer level smartphone
Reference please? And what definition of "smartphone" are you using, considering that most phones these days offer features that Iphone fans plug as "new", yet it's still playing catch-up on standard features offered by even ordinary phones?
I know loads of places to get an app for my phone - the crucial point is that I don't need one especially for my phone, I download an app, and it Just Works. I wouldn't know where to get something special for the Iphone.
Developing for the Iphone seems reasonable, although it's annoying that one has to compile an extra special version just for Iphones. It seems an odd choice of me to only develop for Iphones, when you look at the mobile market share as a whole.
By this reasoning, one might as well suggest that desktop application developers target the Amiga, because it has a single centralised software archive whilst other platforms such as Windows don't have a standard download place.
It's perfectly fine to use secondary sources - e.g., if a historian has spent his life researching something, it's fine to reference him I think, rather than having to reevaluate all of the primary sources yourself.
Wikipedia itself often cites secondary sources, and not just primary sources.
Encyclopedias are sometimes described as tertiary sources, to reflect the fact that they reference primary and secondary sources.
If people misuse a source, that's up to them. I think that sometimes linking to an encyclopedia is appropriate, although this is more if you want to give someone further reading, rather than backing up a specific fact - e.g., if you have a well written Wikipedia page which links to 100 sources, it's a choice between linking to the Wikipedia page, or linking to 100 sources and writing your own summary of them.
It's quite possibly too late for Android. Apple already has a mature product in place, and has several million users.
The mobile phone market was a mature market, with billions of users, including phones that had the Iphone's functionality, years before Apple came along to play catch-up.
I agree that if it's true that they solely prosecuted them for the "theft", not the assault, it's ridiculous, but I'd be way of trusting the article, as it doesn't give sources, nor state exactly what crime they were charged with.
Do you have a source that the crime was "stealing the victim's Runescape items"?
Note that many crimes actually treat a theft and assault/threat together - it's why rather than just one generic "theft" crime, we have things like mugging, armed robbery, shoplifting, burglary.
If someone's being threatened for something, I'm not sure that the fact that it's easily replaceable changes the nature of the crime.
I did read the links. It's just yet another whiner who argues that Wikipedia is wrong because it doesn't say exactly what he wants it to say. His complaints about the sockpuppet rule make no sense.
If sockpuppets were allowed, then other people would be whining that Wikipedia was bad for allowing that!
I love the irony that people accuse Wikipedia of being flawed, yet they trust hearsay from anonymous posters on forums, who rather than putting forward arguments, instead resort to "Mod Parent Troll", because you don't like what people have to say.
To avoid the problems you listed? Of course, if someone values having a short URL over having a reference that won't change from what they cited, then that's up to them - but that's their choice, not the fault of Wikipedia.
The same issue exists with every other source, online and offline - e.g., books get updated, so if you don't list the ISBN because it looks "nasty", you can't complain that people don't know what version you mean.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say I have a GB of data to burn each time I do a backup. Can you tell me where I can buy a 1GB hard drive for 10 cents?
Oh, and one that's small enough to keep in a small pocket so I don't have to leave it around in my house, where it risks getting stolen/damaged (backups are pointless if they get lost by the same thing that claims your PC).
And the time to burn a CD is still quicker than the time to open my PC and connect up a second hard disk each time! Now, you probably mean keeping a single second hard drive installed to use for everytime I backup, but that just means you lose all your backups if the drive goes, and you're still putting all your data on a single machine (consider if the machine is stolen or destroyed, or you get a virus).
Let's get over this idea that there are "no victims" in the crime of prostitution. The victims are the prostitutes. Yes, some people do willingly trade sex for money. A great, great many do not.
You might as well say "The victims are women" - after all, whilst some people willingly have sex, many women are raped. Does this mean it makes sense to say that "There are victims in the act of sex"? That it's okay to demonise or even criminalise sex as a whole? Of course not - it's rape that's wrong.
So let's say that there are victims in rape, sex slavery and so on, and stop trying to conflate the issue with consensual acts.
The OP is spot on - the victims you claim are victims of the crime of rape and sex slavery, not victims of buying sex. Consider, even if sex slaves were used for free, it would obviously still be wrong!
Regarding Lib Dems, remember it's not all or nothing - an extra Lib Dem MP is still one less MP of the Government party, who can help vote against authoritarian laws along with the opposition party. (And don't forget to check what the votes are like in your consituency - it's surprising how many people think Lib Dems are a "wasted" vote, when it turns out they live somewhere where Lib Dems are the 1st or 2nd party.)
On the one hand, I fear that Conservatives will end up doing just as bad things sooner or later. But they have said they will scrap the compulsory National ID card and database system - if Labour get in next election, that's here to stay for certain. (More generally, even if the two main parties are "just as bad", there's an argument that switching between them is better than one party staying in power for a long period of time, as then they tend to get away with pushing through all sorts of draconian long term plans.)
You must remember when ever you are on a side you always assume your side is more moderate then the other.
Well, this goes for you too.
However nearly every person who I met who was an atheist who learns that I am a practicing catholic will often ask me, I just can't believe that you are a catholic, you are too smart to be one. Then more often then not will try disprove every section of the bible. Which I take as a Literary truth not a Literal truth.
But now you've switched the argument from disproving God, to disproving Catholicism. Catholicism and the Bible make specific claims, and it is a lot more plausible to try to disprove them. This is nothing to do with your original statement of "A god being a being of infinite intelligence and power. Would be near impossible to prove or disprove."
And to respond to your "I don't see how finding the God Particle will prove or Disproove God." - I don't see any atheists claiming that. Anyone who thinks that the God particle has anything to do with God is completely wrong. I don't know where this misunderstanding came from, and I don't really care if they happen to be an atheist or theist - they're an idiot, either way.
Many atheist will get defensive and angry at the idea that there could be a God, discredit any logical explanation why they could be
I'd do neither - but I've never heard a religious argument that is logical.
even though their argument against one is just as weak
Is the argument against the existence of Thor just as weak as the argument in favour? What about the argument against the existence of a teapot orbiting Mars? Or of invisible unicorns? Or that we're all made of jelly?
Do you believe in all of these things, because the argument against them is "just as weak"?
Anyhow, this is all beside the point - regarding the idea that atheists spend their time disproving God whilst scientists don't, I disagree. In practice, I would say that atheist scientists are no more likely to try to disprove God than theist scientists try to prove God; and I would say the same holds for non-scientists too.
I'm sure there's more versions than that definition, but yes, that would be the second of my categories.
That's in my opinion what belief (in Christianity) means.
Well, that and the whole "Jesus is the son of God, who came from a virgin birth, and rose from the dead" bit.
Miracles don't exist for science, even if observed, they will be rejected.
Not at all. Science is all about observation. The problem is that religions make claims that cannot or have not been observed, or have been disproven. What is your definition of a miracle? In science, laws are descriptive, not prescriptive - if a law is observed to be violated, then the law is incorrect. The problem is that religions make claims that the laws do not hold, despite vast amounts of evidence to the contrary.
I think you are confusing scientists with atheists. Scientists are not interesting in proving the existence of god or not.
Nor are most atheists. (And indeed, my experience is that theists are more likely to try to prove God's existence, than atheists are to prove his non-existence.)
There are a Lot of Athiests out there claiming that they are so much smarter then everyone else, however they know just as little about the universe then everyone else. And jumps to the same irrational ideas that makes them feel better.
There are? And what irrational ideas? Let's have sourced statements rather than the same old anti-atheist stereotyping - I see far more of that, than I do of this alleged behaviour.
And your evidence for these numbers plucked out of thin air?
I see no reason to believe that atheists in these discussions are more likely to have not "researched" the matter than theists in these discussions. Indeed, I see many recycled arguments put forward by theists who think they're original clever arguments they've just come up with (e.g., Pascal's Wager).
And what do you mean by research anyway? Do I need to perform research into unicorns before I can say that unicorns don't exist?
One with omnipresence would be easy to prove. ... If you only need a "mechanical" God, the bet is won already.
That's backwards logic - just because God has omnipresence as a property, doesn't mean that anything that's omnipresent counts as god.
Unless you redefine God to mean "anything that's omnipresence". Yes, you are right that this is a common theist tactic, but all it is is wordplay, and nothing to do with the meaning of the word that's almost always used by the theist who makes the argument, not to mention billions of people on the planet. It's "proof by redefinition". I might as well say "God looks like an old man with a beard" - it would clearly be ludicrous to say that therefore an old man with a beard was God!
(This is a variation of the obviously flawed argument "God is Love, Love exists, therefore God exists"...)
Definitions of God fall into one of three categories:
* Made up definitions that have little in common with the actual god that people believe in.
* Vague unfalsifiable claims ("God created the Universe, and he made everything happen the way we see it").
* Claims which are falsifiable, and usually have been falsified (many of the claims of various religions).
The software would work just as well for those who identified as the opposite gender to what they were born with, as they'd obviously give whatever names they go by, not the names they were given at birth. Though yes, some people may not like a software program deciding to choose a gender for them.
And note that non-transgendered people also get offended by an incorrect gender assumption, often far more so.
I don't think it tries to guess your gender, I think it tries to guess the gender of the user you're talking to. ... I think the idea is that people are going to make these assumptions anyway, so maybe a computer can help them be more accurate. This is why the invention is useful.
I think that makes it worse though. People aren't going to read an avatar as being "An educated guess at someone's gender", they're going to read it as something that the user themselves has set (either directly, or via a male/female option), since that's how avatars have traditionally been set.
Although I wonder why it matters. If someone is that bothered about someone's sex, they could take a moment to maybe ask them. Or use the old fashioned method of letting people set it on their profile when they sign up.
Another example would be shortened names - it's common for girls to shorten their names to names that are still often associated with boys' names (e.g., "Alex" might be short for "Alexandra" - I wonder how this software would categorise that).
Since when can ideas being stolen? You would rather than every idea be patented or copyrighted by the original company, and no one else be allowed to use them unless the original company allows it?
You are the one taking the RIAA-style stance, by claiming that copying is equivalent to stealing. However, at least the RIAA are concerned with actual copyright infringemnent - it's ridiculous to suggest that mere ideas can be copyrighted.
As for using lawyers, I'm far more concerned at companies that use them to sue people for "stealing" their ideas (as you think they ought to do), compared with companies simply using them to defend themselves against such mad litigation.
Anyhow, there are plenty of ideas that Apple use but didn't come up with, and they didn't pay for the "rights" to use them in every instance.
You'll be able to upgrade to a machine running the latest version of OS X for $25?
But the GUI came from Xerox. And by Windows 95, the elements in the GUI had been developed by many other platforms too (I'd say the OS had more elements borrowed from AmigaOS if anything - e.g., a combined GUI and command line, pre-emptive multitasking).
I don't see a huge problem here. Apple didn't invent the Dock; lots of platforms had one before OS X came along. Apple may have added some new things to the idea - just as Microsoft are now doing themselves.
When Apple copies an idea and adds something, it's "innovation" or "doing something that no one did before", or even "Apple invented it".
When Microsoft copies and idea and adds something, it's "stealing Apple's ideas".
The things you refer to are philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics, which is probably the most successfully tested scientific theory ever.
If you think it's a hoax, you'd better get off your computer now.
Indeed - what is this, welcome to 1998?
I guess it's an amusing downside of the "Apple invented it first" nonsense. Just as we get Iphone fans going "OMG I can access the Interwebs, aren't Apple great!" as if no one had ever done that before, it also means that any problems with phones are assumed to be Apple-only issues.
I can't wait for someone to tout this as an Apple-only advantage - "The Iphone lets me know I'm going to receive a call even before it rings! Aren't Apple great!"
I look forward to the article "How the Iphone allows people to talk to people who aren't even in the same room as you"...
If you aren't developing an app that has iPhone specific features (camera, GPS or phone)
But hang on - the main reason he gave for developing for the Iphone was that it guaranteed certain features. He even gave GPS and camera as an example! (As an aside, I fail to see how having a "camera" is a "very interesting feature" these days - welcome to the 21st Century.)
So which is it? If you need certain features, then you restrict yourself to the Iphone, and the Ipod is irrelevant. If you don't care about requiring specific features to the extent that running on an Ipod is okay, then one might as well develop using open standards to run on every single phone on the market (except for a minority which don't yet support such standards).
But it doesn't exist on *every* other phone. One of the huge advantages of targeting the iPhone is that you are guaranteed to have a specific feature set that you can rely on.
If that's important, couldn't you, I don't know, specify any other phone as a requirement too? You know, "This software is only tested for the following phone or phones"?
I have no idea why the choice is presented "All phones except the Iphone" versus "Only the Iphone". Perhaps because the Iphone uses incompatible standards, I don't know, and if that was the choice, it seems surprising to me choose the latter, when it's a vastly smaller market. But the point is that such a choice is a false dichotomy anyway - if you want to target specific phones, you can do that with other phones too!
The advantage is that the iPhone is rapidly becoming the most mainstream consumer level smartphone
Reference please? And what definition of "smartphone" are you using, considering that most phones these days offer features that Iphone fans plug as "new", yet it's still playing catch-up on standard features offered by even ordinary phones?
I know loads of places to get an app for my phone - the crucial point is that I don't need one especially for my phone, I download an app, and it Just Works. I wouldn't know where to get something special for the Iphone.
Developing for the Iphone seems reasonable, although it's annoying that one has to compile an extra special version just for Iphones. It seems an odd choice of me to only develop for Iphones, when you look at the mobile market share as a whole.
By this reasoning, one might as well suggest that desktop application developers target the Amiga, because it has a single centralised software archive whilst other platforms such as Windows don't have a standard download place.
It's perfectly fine to use secondary sources - e.g., if a historian has spent his life researching something, it's fine to reference him I think, rather than having to reevaluate all of the primary sources yourself.
Wikipedia itself often cites secondary sources, and not just primary sources.
Encyclopedias are sometimes described as tertiary sources, to reflect the fact that they reference primary and secondary sources.
If people misuse a source, that's up to them. I think that sometimes linking to an encyclopedia is appropriate, although this is more if you want to give someone further reading, rather than backing up a specific fact - e.g., if you have a well written Wikipedia page which links to 100 sources, it's a choice between linking to the Wikipedia page, or linking to 100 sources and writing your own summary of them.
It's quite possibly too late for Android. Apple already has a mature product in place, and has several million users.
The mobile phone market was a mature market, with billions of users, including phones that had the Iphone's functionality, years before Apple came along to play catch-up.
I agree that if it's true that they solely prosecuted them for the "theft", not the assault, it's ridiculous, but I'd be way of trusting the article, as it doesn't give sources, nor state exactly what crime they were charged with.
Do you have a source that the crime was "stealing the victim's Runescape items"?
Note that many crimes actually treat a theft and assault/threat together - it's why rather than just one generic "theft" crime, we have things like mugging, armed robbery, shoplifting, burglary.
If someone's being threatened for something, I'm not sure that the fact that it's easily replaceable changes the nature of the crime.
The Googlephone doesn't really bring anything new to the table
In that case, I guess they are trying to be like the Iphone then...
I did read the links. It's just yet another whiner who argues that Wikipedia is wrong because it doesn't say exactly what he wants it to say. His complaints about the sockpuppet rule make no sense.
If sockpuppets were allowed, then other people would be whining that Wikipedia was bad for allowing that!
I love the irony that people accuse Wikipedia of being flawed, yet they trust hearsay from anonymous posters on forums, who rather than putting forward arguments, instead resort to "Mod Parent Troll", because you don't like what people have to say.
But is there any reason you'd want to?
To avoid the problems you listed? Of course, if someone values having a short URL over having a reference that won't change from what they cited, then that's up to them - but that's their choice, not the fault of Wikipedia.
The same issue exists with every other source, online and offline - e.g., books get updated, so if you don't list the ISBN because it looks "nasty", you can't complain that people don't know what version you mean.