From an economic perspective, money saved is money wasted -- if it's not changing hands, it's not helping the economy.
Wrong. From an economic perspective, money saved is money available for investment.
Consumption is a necessary economic activity. It would not be out of line to say that consumption is the entire reason for economic activity in general. Production for production's sake is pointless, as the whole point of investing in the present is to allow more consumption at lower cost in the future. However, the base state of the economy is bare subsistence, all labor and resources devoted to merely staying alive, at a population level far lower than what we have now. Advancing beyond that state requires an investment in capital—tools which enable more efficient production.
Capital is the factor which amplifies the productivity of labor and raw materials, and allows goods to be produced and consumed at lower cost. A lack of saving, and therefore investment, results in degrading capital, less efficient production, and rising costs. Even a zero saving rate implies falling standards of living, as existing capital wears out and is not repaired or replaced.
The net savings rate at the moment is negative. Encouraging consumption is exactly the wrong response. People need to be putting resources aside so that they can invest them later. Spending on consumption beyond their means is just borrowing against their own future well-being.
So, which rich fat cat is helping our economy, the one you say is "wasting" money, or the one who is sitting on his nest egg, not letting it trickle down?
The second. That "nest egg" isn't cash, it's an investment which corresponds to capital goods, meaning more efficient production. As a result of that "nest egg", a given amount of labor and raw materials produces more goods for direct consumption, which increases the variety and decreases the cost (relative to wages) of the goods available for that laborer to buy.
This can be considered an application of the old saying "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." The first individual in your example is of the former variety, giving people fish (money) in exchange for immediate services. The second individual is making capital investments (teaching them to fish—education is an investment in human capital), which amplifies their ability to provide the goods they need and want.
when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate
Actually, that's what happens when the government mandates that insurers ignore pre-existing conditions. In an interference-free insurance market, you can't just put off buying insurance until you get sick. The rational premiums in that case (where the risk is 100%) would be at least as high as the payments on an equivalent loan. At that point you don't need insurance, you need a loan—or charity. In either case, there is no reason to involve insurance providers.
The free market allocates money better
Many people take this axiomatically and apply it ubiquitously instead of looking at models and data and drawing a conclusion.
As well they should: the models discount important factors, such as undisclosed preferences and non-material economic goods, simply because they do not fit into a utilitarian economic calculus. The interpretation of the raw data, in turn, is tainted by the flaws and omissions in the model. Worse, the models attempt to draw objective conclusions on topics which are inherently subjective, such as the relative values of goods between different individuals. Prices are only objective reflections of relative value in the absence of coercion, between the individuals involved in the trade—and always for some point in the past.
All else being equal, individual economic actors are in possession of better information than central planners. Information is always incomplete, of course, but individuals know their own preferences, while the planners can only guess at what they would choose. Individuals also have a stronger incentive to collect the information which is relevant to the decisions which impact them the most. Central planners do not have anywhere near the level of detail to govern an entire economy with the same degree of efficiency as an emergent system of individuals making choices within their own tiny domains, seeking and communicating information according to their own unique interests.
Central planning may result in more efficient production or distribution of some specific goods, for some subjective evaluation of "efficiency". After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. However, there is no reason to expect this to be true for any particular case. Such cases can only be identified in retrospect. The market is just the opposite; its emergent properties lead it a natural convergence on the most efficient allocation of resources, without compromising the liberty of any individual participant.
All true, aside from the "irrelevant" part: power capacity is very nearly the only relevant factor in an electric-vehicle charging system, aside from the obvious safety considerations. Electric vehicles do indeed require somewhat less energy to travel a given distance. However, all those factors combined only make an ideal (100% efficient) electric vehicle about 3-5 times more energy-efficient (gasoline being somewhere between 20% and 30%), whereas the 8MW delivered by a gas pump is 200 times the GP's estimated 40 kW charging rate. Whether the target is 8MW or 1MW, we're still a long way from matching the recharge rate possible with chemical energy.
... larger drives have to store multiple segments, but that the segments have to be arranged in a way such that a drive failure on one of the large drives doesn't take the RAID down. If the drives can't be bisected -- that is, divided into two piles of the same total size -- this is impossible, and the fact that your range is from.1TB to 3TB implies this might be the case.
There is a simple formula to determine the available space in these circumstances: If the largest drive is larger than all the other combined, the available space (after mirroring) is the sum of the smaller drives. In this case the largest drive mirrors all the others. Otherwise, the available space is half of the total of all the drives, and no space is wasted. A filesystem like BTRFS (or, presumably, ZFS) can work out the details automatically if you set it up in RAID-1 mode.
But having one side of the mirror spread across 9 drives makes failure laughably likely, to the point where you're paying performance penalties for nothing.
Agreed. I would probably forget about using any drive under 1TB. The more drives you throw into this sort of mixed-size RAID-1 array, the more likely you are to have multiple drive failures and a risk of data loss, particularly since we're talking about older hard drives.
Why am I responsible for the other 532 representatives that I can't influence one way or the other with my single vote?
Because you live in a Democracy.
Exactly. Your actual influence over the government is not significantly greater in a Democracy than in a Dictatorship, but if you happen to live in in a Democracy people will happily blame you for the actions of "your" government anyway, while those in a Dictatorship are merely victims.
A person can only rationally be held responsible for their own choices and actions, not those of others. That applies just as much in a Democracy as anywhere else. However, if you support Democracy then you are legitimizing whatever the majority decides, which makes you responsible for the outcome regardless of your personal vote (or lack thereof). If you don't support what the majority chooses to do, the only moral position is to reject the legitimizing influence of Democracy itself.
Put another way, the No True Scotsman fallacy is something that occurs when you fail to define your terms beforehand. When you're arguing over whether something or someone is a member of a group, it's important to establish in advance exactly what it means to be a member of that group.
In your first example, the participants clearly have different ideas about what it means to be a Scotsman (characteristics like "enjoys haggis" vs., e.g., ancestry). Both definitions are reasonable, and can be constructed without circular reasoning. In the second case, granting equal weight to both definitions would render the term "vegetarian" meaningless, since one is essentially circular: "someone who self-identifies as vegetarian".
A term like "liberal" is closer to the former case; there are lots of reasonable definitions, spanning literal, historical, and modern interpretations, which themselves vary from place to place, and applied to social or fiscal policies. It's difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to be "liberal" in every sense of the term; on the other hand, most people are liberal in some areas.
Despite having "software" in the name, "software patents" include all patents on algorithms and protocols—anything which can be implemented in software—of which WiFi and H.264 are obvious examples. So long as the patent would cover a software implementation, it's a software patent; the fact that any software can also be implemented in fixed hardware is irrelevant.
If the patent only covers a particular was of implementing the algorithm or protocol in hardware, and thus would not apply to any software implementation, then it's still an unjust act of aggression, and a net loss to society, but it's not a software patent.
The Jews would know that the Messiah needed to be a "son of David." (descendant) The genealogy in Matthew, therefore, traces Jesus' "legal" right to sit on the throne. That is, it traces the male line from David. The Gentiles would recognize, though, that if the story of a virgin conception is true, Joseph was NOT the father of Jesus.
Going with that interpretation for the moment—you still have the problem that the genealogy showing Jesus to be a "son of David" depends on Joseph being his real father. You can't have it both ways. Assuming the virgin birth to be true, the only (human) genealogy that matters is the maternal one, and with no immediate male ancestor he cannot be in anyone's male line, much less David's.
I don't know how you do your crime calculus on this issue...
I believe I already said that there is no objective answer, no "crime calculus". You can only compare preferences ordinally, within one individual. Preferences cannot be objectively compared between separate individuals. There is no way to objectively determine whether crime X affecting group A is better or worse than crime Y affecting group B, regardless of X and Y or the sizes of groups A and B. If there were then you could objectively justify aggression against one group on the basis that it reduces aggression overall, but in fact there is no such justification.
What is the murder equivalent of the loss of 3e8 rights?
There is no "equivalent". The violation of one right of one person is already too much. You can't justify one violation by weighing it against another, or even many others.
When you violate someone's constitutional rights, that's a crime worse than murder.
Please explain how murdering someone does not take away all their natural and constitutional rights. Oppression is neither so complete nor so permanent a state as death. Rights are only relevant to the living.
Some may choose death over abandoning their principles, for the sake of their own integrity and/or as an example to others, but that is hardly the same thing as claiming that murder is morally superior to oppression. It merely means that you can't safely assume that someone would rather be oppressed than accept the risk (or even certainty) of death—or vise-versa. That is an individual decision, and no one has the right to make that choice for another.
Whether it is better for a few to die or for many to suffer lesser violations of their rights... one might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Like most matters involving interpersonal preferences, there is no objective answer. So far as I am concerned, however, the only principled answer is that you shouldn't do either—even if other people make difference choices. If there is a way to prevent the deaths without violating anyone's rights, great. If not, we must learn to live with the risk.
You are ignoring the effect of natural selection. It is true that mutation, by itself, tends to result in individual organisms less-adapted to survive and reproduce in their environment then their predecessors. However, while the organisms with harmful mutations die out, the ones with beneficial mutations out-compete their peers. As a result, the beneficial gene is passed on to an increasing share of the population with each generation until it becomes dominant.
The question is when it stops becoming "theirs" and starts becoming "mine", if I rent an apartment can the landlord let the police search it without warrant? If I lease a car can the leasing company give permission to search my trunk without warrant? Can the phone company give out my calls to the police without warrant? Can my ISP give out my Internet traffic to the police without warrant?
Yes. The property owner, or anyone in possession of the desired information, has the right to grant access to their property or disclose any information they may have to anyone they wish, including the police. However, depending on your contract with them, doing so may place them in breach of contract, entitling you to compensation.
Can the police scan my home with an IR camera without warrant?
An IR camera doesn't "scan" anything; it's a passive collector. You are radiating IR light into public spaces, where anyone (including the police) can observe it. If you don't want anyone observing your IR emissions, you need to ensure they don't leave your property.
Can they attach a GPS transmitter to my car without warrant?
No, because that would involve modifying your property without your permission. As this is a violation of your property rights, special permission is required in the form of a warrant. To get that warrant the police must show probable cause, i.e. reason to expect that they will actually find what they claim to be looking for.
If they do indeed find evidence that you committed a crime, the violation of your property rights necessary to prove it can be considered part of your sentence. Otherwise, warrant or no warrant, they still owe you compensation for any harm you have suffered from the search itself and/or the seizure and/or unauthorized use of your property. (Not that you'll ever get them to acknowledge that debt.)
Amps are how tall they are, volts how many are arriving in a frame of time or frequency.
Not that it affects the product (charge/energy), but amps measure transfer of charge over time, and volts measure electrical potential energy, so volts should be the height of the waves (gravitational potential energy) and amps the rate of arrival (in terms of volume of water per unit time, not waves per unit time).
It's a perfectly valid way to measure since we pay based on wattage per hour.
I don't know about where you're from, but around here we pay for energy in watt-hours (1 W*h = 3600 J), not watts per hour.
Liberty implies a free (as in libre) market... This country was founded on principles which inevitably lead to a free market.
No, it doesn't, thankfully. If it did, I would have to oppose liberty because liberty would be bad, which I would not want to do, because liberty is in fact not bad.
Actually, it does. Fortunately for you, that does not imply that liberty is bad; rather, it implies that the free market is good. Shocking, I know, that a market system defined by purely voluntary interaction and the rejection of aggression might not be such a bad thing after all.
if it were, don't you think it would have... you know... started out with a free market?
You mean like how we started out without slavery, and with equal rights for minorities? There is a difference between principles and practice. Fortunately, we've made progress in putting our principles into practice in some areas, but we're still rather hypocritical in others, including, but not limited to, the widespread curtailment of liberty within the market.
Did I ever claim that we had a perfectly free market? No, I did not. I said that our principles, taken consistently to their logical conclusion, imply a free market. The absence of a free market implies only that we have not been perfectly true to our principles, which is obvious to anyone who has examined our history. We have often denied both liberty and justice, despite promises to the contrary. Slavery, a civil war, segregation, internment camps, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc.—our past is littered with such failures. That doesn't change the principles, or diminish their value, or change the fact that a society with both liberty and justice necessarily includes a free market.
"ZERO market regulations!? Who would want that?!" An incredibly tiny minority of industrialists would want that, tmosley.
Plus anyone interested in "liberty and justice for all". Last I checked, most Americans take a pledge to uphold those principles. Liberty implies a free (as in libre) market, the freedom to exercise your property rights without third-party interference, without which you have no meaningful liberty. Justice includes the protection of property rights, punishment for the use of force or threats or fraud—regardless of the source.
This country was founded on principles which inevitably lead to a free market. You can't argue against a free market without abandoning those principles.
There is already a standard for that. The root domain is ".", so the fully-qualified "pepsi" TLD would be "pepsi.". Technically the name of this site is "slashdot.org.", not just "slashdot.org".
Isn't interesting how doing science requires believing in induction, that the future will be like the past.
Living requires the assumption that the future will be like the (apparent) past. If the future is unrelated to the past, then memory and experience and choice and action are all meaningless. For there to be such a thing as choice, one must be able to predict the effects of one's actions. The point of choosing an action is to have a certain effect on the future. If the future does not follow from the past, experience is useless, and memories may well be arbitrary—after all, they're being remembered in the future compared to the time those memories were supposedly made.
You can't choose to believe that the future does not follow from the past without contradiction. Perhaps it doesn't—but there is no point in entertaining that possibility. It can never form the basis for any action or belief.
But if you don't assume that the reason why the future is like the past is due to God sustaining and creating those rules, you have laws of physics resting on nothing. There's no reason they won't change.
And if you do assume that, then you have the laws of physics resting on an unfounded belief, and there is still no reason why they won't change. Since the result is the same, one might as well choose the principle with fewer unnecessary assumptions.
Or the fact that atheists trust their own rationality. I mean you have your thoughts being due to brains that weren't designed for any particular reason. Why trust your own rationality?
You are attempting to make a rational argument against rationality. This is a contradiction. If your argument against rationality were well-founded, it would invalidate itself.
One trusts one's own rationality—within limits—because one has no choice.
VNC or RDP does not replace the network transparency of X. it would just be a terrible kludge to get around lost core functionality.
That "core functionality" is something which no modern toolkit actually uses. Remote rendering through X11 these days consists almost entirely of clients rendering into bitmaps and sending them, uncompressed, over the network to the server. VNC or RDP offers the same thing, but with less cruft and better compression. The XRender extension (which is not part of the core protocol) offers some server-side rendering, but its capabilities are limited.
I agree that true remote rendering might be able to beat VNC/RDP-style image transfer, but for a general solution that would require a proper remote interface to Gallium3D or OpenGL, which could be adapted to work as well (or better—less overhead) with Wayland as with X11.
There's judicial activism (passing judgement based on personal ideology rather than law), and there's just doing the job and being a judge.
If you disagreed with the definition I gave you should have said so up front. There is no profit in arguing over semantics. That said, all interpretations of the law are founded in some ideology or another. Your definition amounts to "passing judgment based on an interpretation of the law which differs from my own", which brings us full-circle: that is the meaningless definition I was arguing against in the first place.
I defined "judicial activism" as overturning prior precedents. Using that definition, either there is such a thing as "justified judicial activism", or precedent is absolute—and we've already agreed that there are times when precedent should be overruled. We are thus in agreement so far as the substance of the argument is concerned; only the terms are in dispute. I have no interest in arguing semantics, but I do think that a term for rulings which alter established precedent is far more useful than another way of saying "I disagree".
I can't think of a single successful site that has advertising as the content.
I don't know about that. eBay, Amazon.com, craigslist... there are quite a few successful sites which consist almost entirely of advertising. The problem is the mixed sites. Advertising is fine in a commercial context, when it's relevant, but it shouldn't intrude where non-commercial context is expected. In particular, no reputable news site should be publishing obviously-biased press releases as if they were stories. It's poor journalism, even for a mere "aggregator".
This makes the assumption that a group of justices can never make a mistake or be forced to judge incorrectly because a complaintant poorly articulates his case.
You should read past the first paragraph before replying:
Sometimes activism is a good thing; the older precedent may well be flawed. However, it is not something to be undertaken lightly.
If the former precedent was flawed, then it should be overturned. I'm not disputing that. There is such a thing as justified judicial activism. However, the "justified" part is crucial. If you're going to advance a brand-new interpretation of the law which is incompatible with prior rulings, you'd better be able to explain why the previous interpretation was wrong—and why your own interpretation is less likely to be overturned by a future court.
Law is higher than court precedents. Laws are passed by the People through their duly-elected representatives/delegates/senators. If a judge (or group of judges in appeal or supreme courts) thinks the law says ABC, then he should rule ABC, even if former precedents said XYZ. We are a republic where the Law is the ruler above all else.
I'm not disputing any of that at this point, though the relationship between the civil law and the will of the People is problematical at best. However, people depend on the stability of the law, including its interpretation. The inertia of precedent aids that stability. Reinterpreting the law and overturning precedent amounts to declaring that the prior rulings were flawed, a claim which requires substantial public justification.
Of course there is: An activist judge is a judge that makes a ruling which creates a precedent I don't like.
Funny, but no. An activist judge is one that makes a ruling which creates a precedent which conflicts with prior rulings regarding the same laws at the same or higher level within the judiciary. In other words, one who rewrites well-established precedents.
Sometimes activism is a good thing; the older precedent may well be flawed. However, it is not something to be undertaken lightly. It creates uncertainty and undermines the accumulated legitimacy of the court, as the conflict implies that at least one of the rulings—and any others based on it—was in error.
First remember that the 4th Amendment does not actually require a warrant before the government can search your property. It just requires that searches be "reasonable."
That is the common interpretation, but (IMHO) it's based on a misreading of the text.
A "warrant" is nothing more or less than permission to do something which would normally be illegal. In this case, to perform a search, which involves violating the owner's property rights. Without a warrant, one has, by definition, no permission to do anything which a normal private citizen couldn't do. Given that, the 4th amendment is clearly saying that "reasonable" warrants (and thus involuntary searches) are defined as ones which establish probable cause in advance, supported by oath or affirmation, as well as the place to be searched and what is being searched for (the item(s) to be seized). Those conditions have to be met for every warrant, so it's not enough that someone considers a broad class of search "reasonable" without any specific probable cause to expect the search to uncover illegal activity.
Now, at the border itself—not the huge "border zone" currently staked out, but the actual point of entry—one could claim that they are free to turn away non-citizens who do not consent to a search, and I would grant that this is compatible with the Constitution. If consent is granted then no warrant is necessary. However, citizens have an established right to re-enter their home country, so they cannot be turned away even if they do not consent (and lack of consent to a search does not, of itself, qualify as probable cause).
Slashdot Mirror
From an economic perspective, money saved is money wasted -- if it's not changing hands, it's not helping the economy.
Wrong. From an economic perspective, money saved is money available for investment.
Consumption is a necessary economic activity. It would not be out of line to say that consumption is the entire reason for economic activity in general. Production for production's sake is pointless, as the whole point of investing in the present is to allow more consumption at lower cost in the future. However, the base state of the economy is bare subsistence, all labor and resources devoted to merely staying alive, at a population level far lower than what we have now. Advancing beyond that state requires an investment in capital—tools which enable more efficient production.
Capital is the factor which amplifies the productivity of labor and raw materials, and allows goods to be produced and consumed at lower cost. A lack of saving, and therefore investment, results in degrading capital, less efficient production, and rising costs. Even a zero saving rate implies falling standards of living, as existing capital wears out and is not repaired or replaced.
The net savings rate at the moment is negative. Encouraging consumption is exactly the wrong response. People need to be putting resources aside so that they can invest them later. Spending on consumption beyond their means is just borrowing against their own future well-being.
So, which rich fat cat is helping our economy, the one you say is "wasting" money, or the one who is sitting on his nest egg, not letting it trickle down?
The second. That "nest egg" isn't cash, it's an investment which corresponds to capital goods, meaning more efficient production. As a result of that "nest egg", a given amount of labor and raw materials produces more goods for direct consumption, which increases the variety and decreases the cost (relative to wages) of the goods available for that laborer to buy.
This can be considered an application of the old saying "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." The first individual in your example is of the former variety, giving people fish (money) in exchange for immediate services. The second individual is making capital investments (teaching them to fish—education is an investment in human capital), which amplifies their ability to provide the goods they need and want.
when people don't buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate
Actually, that's what happens when the government mandates that insurers ignore pre-existing conditions. In an interference-free insurance market, you can't just put off buying insurance until you get sick. The rational premiums in that case (where the risk is 100%) would be at least as high as the payments on an equivalent loan. At that point you don't need insurance, you need a loan—or charity. In either case, there is no reason to involve insurance providers.
The free market allocates money better
Many people take this axiomatically and apply it ubiquitously instead of looking at models and data and drawing a conclusion.
As well they should: the models discount important factors, such as undisclosed preferences and non-material economic goods, simply because they do not fit into a utilitarian economic calculus. The interpretation of the raw data, in turn, is tainted by the flaws and omissions in the model. Worse, the models attempt to draw objective conclusions on topics which are inherently subjective, such as the relative values of goods between different individuals. Prices are only objective reflections of relative value in the absence of coercion, between the individuals involved in the trade—and always for some point in the past.
All else being equal, individual economic actors are in possession of better information than central planners. Information is always incomplete, of course, but individuals know their own preferences, while the planners can only guess at what they would choose. Individuals also have a stronger incentive to collect the information which is relevant to the decisions which impact them the most. Central planners do not have anywhere near the level of detail to govern an entire economy with the same degree of efficiency as an emergent system of individuals making choices within their own tiny domains, seeking and communicating information according to their own unique interests.
Central planning may result in more efficient production or distribution of some specific goods, for some subjective evaluation of "efficiency". After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. However, there is no reason to expect this to be true for any particular case. Such cases can only be identified in retrospect. The market is just the opposite; its emergent properties lead it a natural convergence on the most efficient allocation of resources, without compromising the liberty of any individual participant.
All true, aside from the "irrelevant" part: power capacity is very nearly the only relevant factor in an electric-vehicle charging system, aside from the obvious safety considerations. Electric vehicles do indeed require somewhat less energy to travel a given distance. However, all those factors combined only make an ideal (100% efficient) electric vehicle about 3-5 times more energy-efficient (gasoline being somewhere between 20% and 30%), whereas the 8MW delivered by a gas pump is 200 times the GP's estimated 40 kW charging rate. Whether the target is 8MW or 1MW, we're still a long way from matching the recharge rate possible with chemical energy.
... larger drives have to store multiple segments, but that the segments have to be arranged in a way such that a drive failure on one of the large drives doesn't take the RAID down. If the drives can't be bisected -- that is, divided into two piles of the same total size -- this is impossible, and the fact that your range is from .1TB to 3TB implies this might be the case.
There is a simple formula to determine the available space in these circumstances: If the largest drive is larger than all the other combined, the available space (after mirroring) is the sum of the smaller drives. In this case the largest drive mirrors all the others. Otherwise, the available space is half of the total of all the drives, and no space is wasted. A filesystem like BTRFS (or, presumably, ZFS) can work out the details automatically if you set it up in RAID-1 mode.
But having one side of the mirror spread across 9 drives makes failure laughably likely, to the point where you're paying performance penalties for nothing.
Agreed. I would probably forget about using any drive under 1TB. The more drives you throw into this sort of mixed-size RAID-1 array, the more likely you are to have multiple drive failures and a risk of data loss, particularly since we're talking about older hard drives.
Why am I responsible for the other 532 representatives that I can't influence one way or the other with my single vote?
Because you live in a Democracy.
Exactly. Your actual influence over the government is not significantly greater in a Democracy than in a Dictatorship, but if you happen to live in in a Democracy people will happily blame you for the actions of "your" government anyway, while those in a Dictatorship are merely victims.
A person can only rationally be held responsible for their own choices and actions, not those of others. That applies just as much in a Democracy as anywhere else. However, if you support Democracy then you are legitimizing whatever the majority decides, which makes you responsible for the outcome regardless of your personal vote (or lack thereof). If you don't support what the majority chooses to do, the only moral position is to reject the legitimizing influence of Democracy itself.
Put another way, the No True Scotsman fallacy is something that occurs when you fail to define your terms beforehand. When you're arguing over whether something or someone is a member of a group, it's important to establish in advance exactly what it means to be a member of that group.
In your first example, the participants clearly have different ideas about what it means to be a Scotsman (characteristics like "enjoys haggis" vs., e.g., ancestry). Both definitions are reasonable, and can be constructed without circular reasoning. In the second case, granting equal weight to both definitions would render the term "vegetarian" meaningless, since one is essentially circular: "someone who self-identifies as vegetarian".
A term like "liberal" is closer to the former case; there are lots of reasonable definitions, spanning literal, historical, and modern interpretations, which themselves vary from place to place, and applied to social or fiscal policies. It's difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to be "liberal" in every sense of the term; on the other hand, most people are liberal in some areas.
Despite having "software" in the name, "software patents" include all patents on algorithms and protocols—anything which can be implemented in software—of which WiFi and H.264 are obvious examples. So long as the patent would cover a software implementation, it's a software patent; the fact that any software can also be implemented in fixed hardware is irrelevant.
If the patent only covers a particular was of implementing the algorithm or protocol in hardware, and thus would not apply to any software implementation, then it's still an unjust act of aggression, and a net loss to society, but it's not a software patent.
The Jews would know that the Messiah needed to be a "son of David." (descendant) The genealogy in Matthew, therefore, traces Jesus' "legal" right to sit on the throne. That is, it traces the male line from David. The Gentiles would recognize, though, that if the story of a virgin conception is true, Joseph was NOT the father of Jesus.
Going with that interpretation for the moment—you still have the problem that the genealogy showing Jesus to be a "son of David" depends on Joseph being his real father. You can't have it both ways. Assuming the virgin birth to be true, the only (human) genealogy that matters is the maternal one, and with no immediate male ancestor he cannot be in anyone's male line, much less David's.
I don't know how you do your crime calculus on this issue...
I believe I already said that there is no objective answer, no "crime calculus". You can only compare preferences ordinally, within one individual. Preferences cannot be objectively compared between separate individuals. There is no way to objectively determine whether crime X affecting group A is better or worse than crime Y affecting group B, regardless of X and Y or the sizes of groups A and B. If there were then you could objectively justify aggression against one group on the basis that it reduces aggression overall, but in fact there is no such justification.
What is the murder equivalent of the loss of 3e8 rights?
There is no "equivalent". The violation of one right of one person is already too much. You can't justify one violation by weighing it against another, or even many others.
When you violate someone's constitutional rights, that's a crime worse than murder.
Please explain how murdering someone does not take away all their natural and constitutional rights. Oppression is neither so complete nor so permanent a state as death. Rights are only relevant to the living.
Some may choose death over abandoning their principles, for the sake of their own integrity and/or as an example to others, but that is hardly the same thing as claiming that murder is morally superior to oppression. It merely means that you can't safely assume that someone would rather be oppressed than accept the risk (or even certainty) of death—or vise-versa. That is an individual decision, and no one has the right to make that choice for another.
Whether it is better for a few to die or for many to suffer lesser violations of their rights... one might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Like most matters involving interpersonal preferences, there is no objective answer. So far as I am concerned, however, the only principled answer is that you shouldn't do either—even if other people make difference choices. If there is a way to prevent the deaths without violating anyone's rights, great. If not, we must learn to live with the risk.
You are ignoring the effect of natural selection. It is true that mutation, by itself, tends to result in individual organisms less-adapted to survive and reproduce in their environment then their predecessors. However, while the organisms with harmful mutations die out, the ones with beneficial mutations out-compete their peers. As a result, the beneficial gene is passed on to an increasing share of the population with each generation until it becomes dominant.
There is more to evolution than random mutation.
The question is when it stops becoming "theirs" and starts becoming "mine", if I rent an apartment can the landlord let the police search it without warrant? If I lease a car can the leasing company give permission to search my trunk without warrant? Can the phone company give out my calls to the police without warrant? Can my ISP give out my Internet traffic to the police without warrant?
Yes. The property owner, or anyone in possession of the desired information, has the right to grant access to their property or disclose any information they may have to anyone they wish, including the police. However, depending on your contract with them, doing so may place them in breach of contract, entitling you to compensation.
Can the police scan my home with an IR camera without warrant?
An IR camera doesn't "scan" anything; it's a passive collector. You are radiating IR light into public spaces, where anyone (including the police) can observe it. If you don't want anyone observing your IR emissions, you need to ensure they don't leave your property.
Can they attach a GPS transmitter to my car without warrant?
No, because that would involve modifying your property without your permission. As this is a violation of your property rights, special permission is required in the form of a warrant. To get that warrant the police must show probable cause, i.e. reason to expect that they will actually find what they claim to be looking for.
If they do indeed find evidence that you committed a crime, the violation of your property rights necessary to prove it can be considered part of your sentence. Otherwise, warrant or no warrant, they still owe you compensation for any harm you have suffered from the search itself and/or the seizure and/or unauthorized use of your property. (Not that you'll ever get them to acknowledge that debt.)
Amps are how tall they are, volts how many are arriving in a frame of time or frequency.
Not that it affects the product (charge/energy), but amps measure transfer of charge over time, and volts measure electrical potential energy, so volts should be the height of the waves (gravitational potential energy) and amps the rate of arrival (in terms of volume of water per unit time, not waves per unit time).
It's a perfectly valid way to measure since we pay based on wattage per hour.
I don't know about where you're from, but around here we pay for energy in watt-hours (1 W*h = 3600 J), not watts per hour.
Liberty implies a free (as in libre) market... This country was founded on principles which inevitably lead to a free market.
No, it doesn't, thankfully. If it did, I would have to oppose liberty because liberty would be bad, which I would not want to do, because liberty is in fact not bad.
Actually, it does. Fortunately for you, that does not imply that liberty is bad; rather, it implies that the free market is good. Shocking, I know, that a market system defined by purely voluntary interaction and the rejection of aggression might not be such a bad thing after all.
if it were, don't you think it would have... you know... started out with a free market?
You mean like how we started out without slavery, and with equal rights for minorities? There is a difference between principles and practice. Fortunately, we've made progress in putting our principles into practice in some areas, but we're still rather hypocritical in others, including, but not limited to, the widespread curtailment of liberty within the market.
Did I ever claim that we had a perfectly free market? No, I did not. I said that our principles, taken consistently to their logical conclusion, imply a free market. The absence of a free market implies only that we have not been perfectly true to our principles, which is obvious to anyone who has examined our history. We have often denied both liberty and justice, despite promises to the contrary. Slavery, a civil war, segregation, internment camps, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc.—our past is littered with such failures. That doesn't change the principles, or diminish their value, or change the fact that a society with both liberty and justice necessarily includes a free market.
"ZERO market regulations!? Who would want that?!" An incredibly tiny minority of industrialists would want that, tmosley.
Plus anyone interested in "liberty and justice for all". Last I checked, most Americans take a pledge to uphold those principles. Liberty implies a free (as in libre) market, the freedom to exercise your property rights without third-party interference, without which you have no meaningful liberty. Justice includes the protection of property rights, punishment for the use of force or threats or fraud—regardless of the source.
This country was founded on principles which inevitably lead to a free market. You can't argue against a free market without abandoning those principles.
There is already a standard for that. The root domain is ".", so the fully-qualified "pepsi" TLD would be "pepsi.". Technically the name of this site is "slashdot.org.", not just "slashdot.org".
Isn't interesting how doing science requires believing in induction, that the future will be like the past.
Living requires the assumption that the future will be like the (apparent) past. If the future is unrelated to the past, then memory and experience and choice and action are all meaningless. For there to be such a thing as choice, one must be able to predict the effects of one's actions. The point of choosing an action is to have a certain effect on the future. If the future does not follow from the past, experience is useless, and memories may well be arbitrary—after all, they're being remembered in the future compared to the time those memories were supposedly made.
You can't choose to believe that the future does not follow from the past without contradiction. Perhaps it doesn't—but there is no point in entertaining that possibility. It can never form the basis for any action or belief.
But if you don't assume that the reason why the future is like the past is due to God sustaining and creating those rules, you have laws of physics resting on nothing. There's no reason they won't change.
And if you do assume that, then you have the laws of physics resting on an unfounded belief, and there is still no reason why they won't change. Since the result is the same, one might as well choose the principle with fewer unnecessary assumptions.
Or the fact that atheists trust their own rationality. I mean you have your thoughts being due to brains that weren't designed for any particular reason. Why trust your own rationality?
You are attempting to make a rational argument against rationality. This is a contradiction. If your argument against rationality were well-founded, it would invalidate itself.
One trusts one's own rationality—within limits—because one has no choice.
VNC or RDP does not replace the network transparency of X. it would just be a terrible kludge to get around lost core functionality.
That "core functionality" is something which no modern toolkit actually uses. Remote rendering through X11 these days consists almost entirely of clients rendering into bitmaps and sending them, uncompressed, over the network to the server. VNC or RDP offers the same thing, but with less cruft and better compression. The XRender extension (which is not part of the core protocol) offers some server-side rendering, but its capabilities are limited.
I agree that true remote rendering might be able to beat VNC/RDP-style image transfer, but for a general solution that would require a proper remote interface to Gallium3D or OpenGL, which could be adapted to work as well (or better—less overhead) with Wayland as with X11.
There's judicial activism (passing judgement based on personal ideology rather than law), and there's just doing the job and being a judge.
If you disagreed with the definition I gave you should have said so up front. There is no profit in arguing over semantics. That said, all interpretations of the law are founded in some ideology or another. Your definition amounts to "passing judgment based on an interpretation of the law which differs from my own", which brings us full-circle: that is the meaningless definition I was arguing against in the first place.
I defined "judicial activism" as overturning prior precedents. Using that definition, either there is such a thing as "justified judicial activism", or precedent is absolute—and we've already agreed that there are times when precedent should be overruled. We are thus in agreement so far as the substance of the argument is concerned; only the terms are in dispute. I have no interest in arguing semantics, but I do think that a term for rulings which alter established precedent is far more useful than another way of saying "I disagree".
I can't think of a single successful site that has advertising as the content.
I don't know about that. eBay, Amazon.com, craigslist... there are quite a few successful sites which consist almost entirely of advertising. The problem is the mixed sites. Advertising is fine in a commercial context, when it's relevant, but it shouldn't intrude where non-commercial context is expected. In particular, no reputable news site should be publishing obviously-biased press releases as if they were stories. It's poor journalism, even for a mere "aggregator".
This makes the assumption that a group of justices can never make a mistake or be forced to judge incorrectly because a complaintant poorly articulates his case.
You should read past the first paragraph before replying:
Sometimes activism is a good thing; the older precedent may well be flawed. However, it is not something to be undertaken lightly.
If the former precedent was flawed, then it should be overturned. I'm not disputing that. There is such a thing as justified judicial activism. However, the "justified" part is crucial. If you're going to advance a brand-new interpretation of the law which is incompatible with prior rulings, you'd better be able to explain why the previous interpretation was wrong—and why your own interpretation is less likely to be overturned by a future court.
Law is higher than court precedents. Laws are passed by the People through their duly-elected representatives/delegates/senators. If a judge (or group of judges in appeal or supreme courts) thinks the law says ABC, then he should rule ABC, even if former precedents said XYZ. We are a republic where the Law is the ruler above all else.
I'm not disputing any of that at this point, though the relationship between the civil law and the will of the People is problematical at best. However, people depend on the stability of the law, including its interpretation. The inertia of precedent aids that stability. Reinterpreting the law and overturning precedent amounts to declaring that the prior rulings were flawed, a claim which requires substantial public justification.
Of course there is: An activist judge is a judge that makes a ruling which creates a precedent I don't like.
Funny, but no. An activist judge is one that makes a ruling which creates a precedent which conflicts with prior rulings regarding the same laws at the same or higher level within the judiciary. In other words, one who rewrites well-established precedents.
Sometimes activism is a good thing; the older precedent may well be flawed. However, it is not something to be undertaken lightly. It creates uncertainty and undermines the accumulated legitimacy of the court, as the conflict implies that at least one of the rulings—and any others based on it—was in error.
First remember that the 4th Amendment does not actually require a warrant before the government can search your property. It just requires that searches be "reasonable."
That is the common interpretation, but (IMHO) it's based on a misreading of the text.
A "warrant" is nothing more or less than permission to do something which would normally be illegal. In this case, to perform a search, which involves violating the owner's property rights. Without a warrant, one has, by definition, no permission to do anything which a normal private citizen couldn't do. Given that, the 4th amendment is clearly saying that "reasonable" warrants (and thus involuntary searches) are defined as ones which establish probable cause in advance, supported by oath or affirmation, as well as the place to be searched and what is being searched for (the item(s) to be seized). Those conditions have to be met for every warrant, so it's not enough that someone considers a broad class of search "reasonable" without any specific probable cause to expect the search to uncover illegal activity.
Now, at the border itself—not the huge "border zone" currently staked out, but the actual point of entry—one could claim that they are free to turn away non-citizens who do not consent to a search, and I would grant that this is compatible with the Constitution. If consent is granted then no warrant is necessary. However, citizens have an established right to re-enter their home country, so they cannot be turned away even if they do not consent (and lack of consent to a search does not, of itself, qualify as probable cause).