go flying out of the chamber/collision hall undetected at most labs.
Yes...and no. They can be indirectly detected by requiring conservation of momentum in a plane transverse to the beam. This is not as good as actually seeing them but we can easily reconstruct W boson decays which involve neutrinos and we can even measure the W boson mass although it is an incredibly complex analysis.
And Muons only survive on their own for 2 microseconds
That's easy to fix - boost them to ~260 GeV and they will last long enough to make a 1,600 km journey. It's the 1,600 km of vacuum pipe and focussing magnets that is the real problem.
I'd be careful about complaining about the food it prints to the cook. It probably will not be long before someone figures out how to make it print an edible gun.
Thanks for the link - no surprise there. This is what I find maddening about the climate debate: it is full of people who are willing misrepresent or omit data to support their preconceived bias. As an outsider to the field this makes it impossible to tell which articles contain real science and which contained the cherry-picked data to support the author's viewpoint.
Loopholes are removed by simplifying the law, not complicating it.
Not always. Look at Google's tax avoidance in the UK. To skip paying UK tax all the deals are negotiated by people in the UK but the final act of agreeing to the the sale is done by someone in Ireland. So now your simple law which is "you get taxed where the sale takes place" suddenly has to sprout a whole ton of rules about how it defines where the deal takes place to avoid Google's tactic of doing everything in the UK except the last part.
The problem is not always that governments have written laws with loopholes in them it is that corporations will twist even the simplest things, like where a deal takes place, and use it to avoid paying tax. They would run rings around any simply stated tax code. Part (but not all ) of the reason most country's tax laws are a nightmare is to stamp out the most egregious abuses.
most of the dozens of"exotic" subatomic particles we know of are from second, tertiary and high decay products that are more common ordinary things.
Yes but in these cases we have the 4-momenta measured of most, if not all, the particle in the decay and so can reconstruct the invariant mass of the decaying particle along with other properties like charge and spin. Saying that a massively complex and not fully understood system like the galaxy is producing more positrons than we think it should is a very, very different from saying that we see a mass resonance at a particular value.
For example if instead of showing a mass peak when looking at Higgs to Z boson to muon decays ATLAS has just claimed that there was an 5 sigma excess of high energy muons over what was expected nobody would believe that we had found the Higgs: it might be the Higgs or it might be some background feature that we did not understand. Once you can show that you have 2 muons and 2 anti-muons with one pair give a Z boson mass and the total mass of all 4 producing a peak at 125 GeV/c2 over 5 sigma above the background you then have enough evidence to claim discovery of a new, electrically neutral particle. That is the level of detail which is going to be needed before anyone believes that you have found Dark Matter.
Never trust an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer with important discoveries.
What makes this funnier is that it is true! Nobody will really believe that the AMS positron signal is from Dark Matter until we have discovered the Dark Matter itself. It may useful in giving us an idea of where to search. Indeed the earlier discovery by PAMELA of the signal AMS is studying already lead to new models for DM which can explain the lack of anti-protons.
if you want someone to not do something, say so in the rules, don't make some extra-legal fluffy bullshit up that you also expect people and companies to adhere to.
Any ideas how you can do that without coming up with a legal code so hopelessly complex that nobody can possibly follow it? Your position also implies that you have no real objections to highly immoral, but technically legal, activities that international companies get up to e.g. running slave-wage sweat shops in third world countries, unsafe factories etc. Should we really not expect companies to behave in a moral and ethical fashion even if not compelled to do so by law? They get up to worse legal allowed things than tax evasion!
...claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.
Completely true and the government certainly shoulders some of the blame but they are also stuck in a very hard place. They could certainly change the tax law but the problem is how? They are up against multi-national corporations who will do anything they can to avoid paying tax and have armies of lawyers and a global reach to do just that. It is hard to see how any tax law can actually stop these companies and billionaires without being so strict, severe or complex that it will hurt smaller companies.
I agree nobody should be expected to pay more tax voluntarily than the law allows but, at the same time, calling an individual or a house a company simply to avoid income tax or stamp duty is going completely against the spirit of the law. Yes government can pass laws to block each new loop hole but you'll end up with tax laws that fill a library and the cost of filing your taxes will soar. This, ultimately, is the problem with laws: there is always some way to circumvent them if you try hard enough. Fixing the law is not the issue here we need to fix the attitude of the companies and billionaires who have benefitted greatly from society and now need to contribute to it at at least the same rate as the rest of us.
Are you under the mistaken impression that high-enrollment courses on campus always card students before they take an exam?
It is not a mistaken impression. I regularly teach such courses and I (and the TAs) card each and every student in both the midterm and final exams. If other institutes don't more fool them.
Please include any time when they stated a falsifiable claim.
They claim that global warming is man-made. This is a falsifiable claim: with enough understanding of the climate you can either find an alternative mechanism which is the cause of the heating or you can understand the man-made mechanism in enough detail that there is no room for doubt. This is not at all easy but there is no requirement that things be easily falsifiable.
So, if it gets hotter, it's global warming, if it gets colder, it's global warming. In the end, there's no way to prove it wrong. By your own definition, that's not science.
The climate is a complex beast and disturbing it can easily cause local cooling even if the overall global trend is to warm up. For example if the melting Greenland ice cap dumps enough fresh water into the Atlantic to disrupt the Gulf Stream then northern Europe will get a LOT colder. If there are reasonable, verifiable mechanisms for local then it is not unreasonable to have local cooling caused by global heating.
If you want to attack this survey then there are far better way to do it: which journals did they use and are they reputable? were the search criteria biased in any way and were control samples using a random selection of articles without the initial selection bias checked for a consistent result? Even if the survey was completely unbiased in every way can you really draw any sensible conclusions from numbers of papers?
As a scientist what I truly find really objectionable though is that this is science! You should make up your mind based on evidence not on what other people's opinions are: this is not some popularity contest! Personally I think the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and it is highly likely that humans are some or all of the reason behind it but don't believe me: I could easily be wrong! Listen to what the evidence is and make up your own mind.
Why isn't this program free? And don't give me this BS that by charging money you'll get the "serious" students.
The issue with "free" is not about how serious the students are it is about how serious the accreditation of those students is. Frankly I would not give any worth to a degree based only on online tests and assignments taken remotely. There is no way to guarantee that the person taking the tests is the person that they say they are. To do this you need some physical verification i.e. the exam has to be held where someone can physically verify who is taking the exam and that they are following the exam rules. You also need someone to setup a new exam each time and grade the responses: this is not "free" someone has to be paid to do this as well as develop and maintain the software to run the course, regularly update the course materials to e.g. make examples more relevant etc. etc.
In essence the old adage "you get what you pay for" applies. Online degrees may be a lot cheaper and, with physical verification of students for exams and important tests, they may gain value but those that remain free will likely have very little value attached to their accreditation. That does not mean that you cannot still learn a lot from such free courses but it will mean that you will have no paper to prove that you know the material. So, in essence, they would be the high tech equivalent of reading a book.
They were selling the soybeans for 'feed, milling, and other uses'. Not for seed to be planted.
Well clearly Monsanto need to add DRM to their seeds because we can't have people buying seeds and then using them in an unlicensed fashion. I suppose the method that would work best in this case is to install a root kit.
I'd go further. The human brain is a physical device. A very complex one, yes - but still just that.
Excellent point but this raises a more fundamental question: are physical devices deterministic? Using newtonian mechanics the answer would be a clear yes but since every physical device is actually governed by quantum mechanics the picture is far from clear. Newtonian mechanics is just the result of averaging over countless quantum possibilities. In fact this transition between a quantum and a macroscopic system is an area of active research with the aim to try and understand how a quantum system becomes a classical system and whether there is anything more going on that just the averaging over quantum states.
I agree with what most of what you're saying, but something can't be "highly deterministic." It either is or it isn't.
Yes...and no. Technically you are correct: if a process is deterministic 99.99% of the time and non-deterministic 0.01% of the time then overall it is non-deterministic from a technical stand point. However I would argue that this is a "highly deterministic" system because 99.99% of the time the output is entirely predictable given the same inputs. Personally I would guess that this is actually what the human brain is like: most of the time given the same inputs and the same state it produces the same response. However, once in a while, it tries something different just to see how whether that works out better (but this is not much more than a guess so any neurologist please feel free to correct me!).
You've never done any software testing, have you? No, it is NOT easy to determine by measurement that computing results even for a single moderately complex program are deterministic...
Actually it is "easy" because we understand the physical processes of a computer extremely well. Sure there can be race conditions if other processes can interfere or intermittent hardware issues but these are "easy" to check for. It might be that "easy" requires a day or more of testing and setup (and yes I have done that - in fact I designed and debugged an embedded linux system using an Alpha CPU before Intel embedded systems became available commercially) but I mean "easy" in the sense that it is possible to do in a finite and reasonable amount of time. You cannot do this for the human brain in any amount of time and even if you could ethics would prevent you from doing so.
...and an extremely poor record of enforcing its laws. Why not try a European country like the UK which has extremely strict gun laws and a record of strict enforcement. Wikipedia provides a nice table of the rate of gun deaths per 100,000 people and we find that the US has 10.20 and the UK 0.25 i.e. over 40 times fewer people are killed in the UK by guns even accounting for the difference in population. Worse, if you just look at gun murders (i.e. exclude suicides and accidents) the US rate is 80 times that in the UK.
We all agree that government restrictions are to be avoided whenever possible but in the case of gun control there is a clear trade off: either you have strict controls (with strict enforcement) or you have an exceedingly high rate of deaths due to guns. If the US is happy with one of the highest rate of gun deaths in the world then that's its choice: it knows one reliable way to reduce it if it so chooses.
That being said controlling 3D printers because of this is just daft. You can almost certainly make a gun with a CNC machine (in fact a quick Google search turned up this video). They have not controlled these so why should a 3D printer be any different? They can machine plastic just as easily if the sole concern is detectability.
Maybe the "positrons" are actually holes in an electron sea
That was Dirac's interpretation of them at the time Asimov started writing the stories since Feynman had not come along to improve on it. However even with the Dirac interpretation of positrons it was still known that they annihilate with electrons to produce dangerous gamma rays.
Asimov started writing the first robot stories in 1939 and by that time there was already considerable evidence to the fact that radiation was hazardous. Indeed Curie died in 1934 from the effects of radiation and only 2 years after he started, in 1941, the US government put strict limits on the amount of radium allowed in products which, given the speed that governments work contrary to the desires of industry, means it was well known years before that.
Actually I thought Asimov was a chemist. Any physicist should have realized that with that many positrons, instead of electrons, flying around their brains the first law would have required every robot to immediately shutdown due to the radiation hazard they posed.
The "brains" are 100% deterministic, which means that there is a great gap between the smartest robot and the dumbest dog.
How do you know that our brains are not highly deterministic too? At the moment computers and robots have very limited inputs so we can easily tell that they are deterministic because it is easy to give them identical inputs and identical programming and observe the identical response. With humans and animals this is exceedingly hard to show because, even if you somehow manage to create the identical inputs, we have a memory and our response will be governed by that. In addition each of our brains is slightly differently arranged due to genetic and environmental factors which will also cause different responses.
Quantum fluctuations are probably what save us from being 100% deterministic but, nevertheless, we may find out that we are perhaps more deterministic that we think we are and that it is only the complexity of our brains and the inputs they process that makes it appear otherwise. So I am not quite convinced that the gap you
mention has much to do with determinism rather than the relative complexity of a dog's brain vs. the smartest robot's.
Also, since you failed to address it before, I'll ask again: what part of "free speech" and "have a debate" and "open society" requires (or even permits) that one side should be able to throw their money...
No, I did answer that you just chose to ignore it. My point was that there is no _requirement_ but if you think it is ok for people to loose their jobs over their _political beliefs_ (not your ridiculous suggestion about criminal acts - in that case you just call the police and the problem is solved) you no longer have a free and open society. There is no significant difference between what you are doing and firing someone because they voted for the wrong political party...or perhaps you don't see any problem with that either? Indeed the only real argument you have made against this is that so many people will continue to buy his books that it will not really affect his livelihood. I'd tend to agree in which case you are effectively arguing that what you are doing is ok just as long as it is ineffective which seems a somewhat strange argument to make.
The other strange inconsistency with your argument is that, while it is commendable that you support freedom of sexual orientation, why can't you also support freedom of political belief? Can't OSC just be wrong without the hyperbole of trying to cast him as 'evil'? Freedom of political belief is not some legally protected right, nor would I really want to see it become one since there are enough legal restrictions, but if many people take the same attitude which you do it will probably need to become one in the future in order to allow any sort of political debate...although to be honest from the outside I don't see a lot of political debate in the US. Most issues seem to have two polar opposite camps who each believe the other is "evil" and will use any and all legal means to stop them. You cannot have meaningful debate in such circumstances.
Do you seriously think I should subscribe to the fucking Westboro Chapel loony tunes newsletter of the KKK quarterly review?
No, that would be actively supporting those idiots. What I'm saying is that if you employ someone to do a job and you are happy with the job that they do you should not refuse to hire them again if you find out that you disagree with their beliefs.
if a street preacher or televangilist shouts at me about sin and hellfire and damnation for anybody who doesn't donate to his particular church, and I choose not to donate...
I would hope that you can see that there is a difference between a person asking for donations to support a cause and say, selling PCs. If I donate to a political party X then I am specifically supporting that party. If I happen to buy a PC from someone who supports political party X I there is zero implication that I support that party. Do you really think that everyone who watches a film with Tom Cruise in it supports scientology?
Exactly which ideal upon which the US was founded indicates that we should financially support people...
Again you utterly miss the point which is that you should make your purchasing decisions based on quality of service/product not whether the creator has acceptable political beliefs...at least if you want to have any sort of effective free speech. Why not just accept that if his ideas are wrong then people will not listen to him and he will be ignored: why should you even feel the need to silence him by denying him a livelihood? It's far better to let him have his say and then engage in a debate as to why he is wrong. This way others can learn both sides and decide for themselves and that is how a free and open society is supposed to operate!
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go flying out of the chamber/collision hall undetected at most labs.
Yes...and no. They can be indirectly detected by requiring conservation of momentum in a plane transverse to the beam. This is not as good as actually seeing them but we can easily reconstruct W boson decays which involve neutrinos and we can even measure the W boson mass although it is an incredibly complex analysis.
And Muons only survive on their own for 2 microseconds
That's easy to fix - boost them to ~260 GeV and they will last long enough to make a 1,600 km journey. It's the 1,600 km of vacuum pipe and focussing magnets that is the real problem.
Makes you wonder what's wrong with the Great Lakes route which is presumably much shorter.
I'd be careful about complaining about the food it prints to the cook. It probably will not be long before someone figures out how to make it print an edible gun.
Thanks for the link - no surprise there. This is what I find maddening about the climate debate: it is full of people who are willing misrepresent or omit data to support their preconceived bias. As an outsider to the field this makes it impossible to tell which articles contain real science and which contained the cherry-picked data to support the author's viewpoint.
Loopholes are removed by simplifying the law, not complicating it.
Not always. Look at Google's tax avoidance in the UK. To skip paying UK tax all the deals are negotiated by people in the UK but the final act of agreeing to the the sale is done by someone in Ireland. So now your simple law which is "you get taxed where the sale takes place" suddenly has to sprout a whole ton of rules about how it defines where the deal takes place to avoid Google's tactic of doing everything in the UK except the last part.
The problem is not always that governments have written laws with loopholes in them it is that corporations will twist even the simplest things, like where a deal takes place, and use it to avoid paying tax. They would run rings around any simply stated tax code. Part (but not all ) of the reason most country's tax laws are a nightmare is to stamp out the most egregious abuses.
most of the dozens of"exotic" subatomic particles we know of are from second, tertiary and high decay products that are more common ordinary things.
Yes but in these cases we have the 4-momenta measured of most, if not all, the particle in the decay and so can reconstruct the invariant mass of the decaying particle along with other properties like charge and spin. Saying that a massively complex and not fully understood system like the galaxy is producing more positrons than we think it should is a very, very different from saying that we see a mass resonance at a particular value.
For example if instead of showing a mass peak when looking at Higgs to Z boson to muon decays ATLAS has just claimed that there was an 5 sigma excess of high energy muons over what was expected nobody would believe that we had found the Higgs: it might be the Higgs or it might be some background feature that we did not understand. Once you can show that you have 2 muons and 2 anti-muons with one pair give a Z boson mass and the total mass of all 4 producing a peak at 125 GeV/c2 over 5 sigma above the background you then have enough evidence to claim discovery of a new, electrically neutral particle. That is the level of detail which is going to be needed before anyone believes that you have found Dark Matter.
Never trust an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer with important discoveries.
What makes this funnier is that it is true! Nobody will really believe that the AMS positron signal is from Dark Matter until we have discovered the Dark Matter itself. It may useful in giving us an idea of where to search. Indeed the earlier discovery by PAMELA of the signal AMS is studying already lead to new models for DM which can explain the lack of anti-protons.
if you want someone to not do something, say so in the rules, don't make some extra-legal fluffy bullshit up that you also expect people and companies to adhere to.
Any ideas how you can do that without coming up with a legal code so hopelessly complex that nobody can possibly follow it? Your position also implies that you have no real objections to highly immoral, but technically legal, activities that international companies get up to e.g. running slave-wage sweat shops in third world countries, unsafe factories etc. Should we really not expect companies to behave in a moral and ethical fashion even if not compelled to do so by law? They get up to worse legal allowed things than tax evasion!
...claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.
Completely true and the government certainly shoulders some of the blame but they are also stuck in a very hard place. They could certainly change the tax law but the problem is how? They are up against multi-national corporations who will do anything they can to avoid paying tax and have armies of lawyers and a global reach to do just that. It is hard to see how any tax law can actually stop these companies and billionaires without being so strict, severe or complex that it will hurt smaller companies.
I agree nobody should be expected to pay more tax voluntarily than the law allows but, at the same time, calling an individual or a house a company simply to avoid income tax or stamp duty is going completely against the spirit of the law. Yes government can pass laws to block each new loop hole but you'll end up with tax laws that fill a library and the cost of filing your taxes will soar. This, ultimately, is the problem with laws: there is always some way to circumvent them if you try hard enough. Fixing the law is not the issue here we need to fix the attitude of the companies and billionaires who have benefitted greatly from society and now need to contribute to it at at least the same rate as the rest of us.
Are you under the mistaken impression that high-enrollment courses on campus always card students before they take an exam?
It is not a mistaken impression. I regularly teach such courses and I (and the TAs) card each and every student in both the midterm and final exams. If other institutes don't more fool them.
Please include any time when they stated a falsifiable claim.
They claim that global warming is man-made. This is a falsifiable claim: with enough understanding of the climate you can either find an alternative mechanism which is the cause of the heating or you can understand the man-made mechanism in enough detail that there is no room for doubt. This is not at all easy but there is no requirement that things be easily falsifiable.
So, if it gets hotter, it's global warming, if it gets colder, it's global warming. In the end, there's no way to prove it wrong. By your own definition, that's not science.
The climate is a complex beast and disturbing it can easily cause local cooling even if the overall global trend is to warm up. For example if the melting Greenland ice cap dumps enough fresh water into the Atlantic to disrupt the Gulf Stream then northern Europe will get a LOT colder. If there are reasonable, verifiable mechanisms for local then it is not unreasonable to have local cooling caused by global heating.
If you want to attack this survey then there are far better way to do it: which journals did they use and are they reputable? were the search criteria biased in any way and were control samples using a random selection of articles without the initial selection bias checked for a consistent result? Even if the survey was completely unbiased in every way can you really draw any sensible conclusions from numbers of papers?
As a scientist what I truly find really objectionable though is that this is science! You should make up your mind based on evidence not on what other people's opinions are: this is not some popularity contest! Personally I think the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and it is highly likely that humans are some or all of the reason behind it but don't believe me: I could easily be wrong! Listen to what the evidence is and make up your own mind.
Why isn't this program free? And don't give me this BS that by charging money you'll get the "serious" students.
The issue with "free" is not about how serious the students are it is about how serious the accreditation of those students is. Frankly I would not give any worth to a degree based only on online tests and assignments taken remotely. There is no way to guarantee that the person taking the tests is the person that they say they are. To do this you need some physical verification i.e. the exam has to be held where someone can physically verify who is taking the exam and that they are following the exam rules. You also need someone to setup a new exam each time and grade the responses: this is not "free" someone has to be paid to do this as well as develop and maintain the software to run the course, regularly update the course materials to e.g. make examples more relevant etc. etc.
In essence the old adage "you get what you pay for" applies. Online degrees may be a lot cheaper and, with physical verification of students for exams and important tests, they may gain value but those that remain free will likely have very little value attached to their accreditation. That does not mean that you cannot still learn a lot from such free courses but it will mean that you will have no paper to prove that you know the material. So, in essence, they would be the high tech equivalent of reading a book.
They were selling the soybeans for 'feed, milling, and other uses'. Not for seed to be planted.
Well clearly Monsanto need to add DRM to their seeds because we can't have people buying seeds and then using them in an unlicensed fashion. I suppose the method that would work best in this case is to install a root kit.
I'd go further. The human brain is a physical device. A very complex one, yes - but still just that.
Excellent point but this raises a more fundamental question: are physical devices deterministic? Using newtonian mechanics the answer would be a clear yes but since every physical device is actually governed by quantum mechanics the picture is far from clear. Newtonian mechanics is just the result of averaging over countless quantum possibilities. In fact this transition between a quantum and a macroscopic system is an area of active research with the aim to try and understand how a quantum system becomes a classical system and whether there is anything more going on that just the averaging over quantum states.
I agree with what most of what you're saying, but something can't be "highly deterministic." It either is or it isn't.
Yes...and no. Technically you are correct: if a process is deterministic 99.99% of the time and non-deterministic 0.01% of the time then overall it is non-deterministic from a technical stand point. However I would argue that this is a "highly deterministic" system because 99.99% of the time the output is entirely predictable given the same inputs. Personally I would guess that this is actually what the human brain is like: most of the time given the same inputs and the same state it produces the same response. However, once in a while, it tries something different just to see how whether that works out better (but this is not much more than a guess so any neurologist please feel free to correct me!).
You've never done any software testing, have you? No, it is NOT easy to determine by measurement that computing results even for a single moderately complex program are deterministic...
Actually it is "easy" because we understand the physical processes of a computer extremely well. Sure there can be race conditions if other processes can interfere or intermittent hardware issues but these are "easy" to check for. It might be that "easy" requires a day or more of testing and setup (and yes I have done that - in fact I designed and debugged an embedded linux system using an Alpha CPU before Intel embedded systems became available commercially) but I mean "easy" in the sense that it is possible to do in a finite and reasonable amount of time. You cannot do this for the human brain in any amount of time and even if you could ethics would prevent you from doing so.
Take Mexico, a country with a 100% ban on guns...
We all agree that government restrictions are to be avoided whenever possible but in the case of gun control there is a clear trade off: either you have strict controls (with strict enforcement) or you have an exceedingly high rate of deaths due to guns. If the US is happy with one of the highest rate of gun deaths in the world then that's its choice: it knows one reliable way to reduce it if it so chooses.
That being said controlling 3D printers because of this is just daft. You can almost certainly make a gun with a CNC machine (in fact a quick Google search turned up this video). They have not controlled these so why should a 3D printer be any different? They can machine plastic just as easily if the sole concern is detectability.
Maybe the "positrons" are actually holes in an electron sea
That was Dirac's interpretation of them at the time Asimov started writing the stories since Feynman had not come along to improve on it. However even with the Dirac interpretation of positrons it was still known that they annihilate with electrons to produce dangerous gamma rays.
Asimov started writing the first robot stories in 1939 and by that time there was already considerable evidence to the fact that radiation was hazardous. Indeed Curie died in 1934 from the effects of radiation and only 2 years after he started, in 1941, the US government put strict limits on the amount of radium allowed in products which, given the speed that governments work contrary to the desires of industry, means it was well known years before that.
Actually I thought Asimov was a chemist. Any physicist should have realized that with that many positrons, instead of electrons, flying around their brains the first law would have required every robot to immediately shutdown due to the radiation hazard they posed.
The "brains" are 100% deterministic, which means that there is a great gap between the smartest robot and the dumbest dog.
How do you know that our brains are not highly deterministic too? At the moment computers and robots have very limited inputs so we can easily tell that they are deterministic because it is easy to give them identical inputs and identical programming and observe the identical response. With humans and animals this is exceedingly hard to show because, even if you somehow manage to create the identical inputs, we have a memory and our response will be governed by that. In addition each of our brains is slightly differently arranged due to genetic and environmental factors which will also cause different responses.
Quantum fluctuations are probably what save us from being 100% deterministic but, nevertheless, we may find out that we are perhaps more deterministic that we think we are and that it is only the complexity of our brains and the inputs they process that makes it appear otherwise. So I am not quite convinced that the gap you mention has much to do with determinism rather than the relative complexity of a dog's brain vs. the smartest robot's.
Also, since you failed to address it before, I'll ask again: what part of "free speech" and "have a debate" and "open society" requires (or even permits) that one side should be able to throw their money...
No, I did answer that you just chose to ignore it. My point was that there is no _requirement_ but if you think it is ok for people to loose their jobs over their _political beliefs_ (not your ridiculous suggestion about criminal acts - in that case you just call the police and the problem is solved) you no longer have a free and open society. There is no significant difference between what you are doing and firing someone because they voted for the wrong political party...or perhaps you don't see any problem with that either? Indeed the only real argument you have made against this is that so many people will continue to buy his books that it will not really affect his livelihood. I'd tend to agree in which case you are effectively arguing that what you are doing is ok just as long as it is ineffective which seems a somewhat strange argument to make.
The other strange inconsistency with your argument is that, while it is commendable that you support freedom of sexual orientation, why can't you also support freedom of political belief? Can't OSC just be wrong without the hyperbole of trying to cast him as 'evil'? Freedom of political belief is not some legally protected right, nor would I really want to see it become one since there are enough legal restrictions, but if many people take the same attitude which you do it will probably need to become one in the future in order to allow any sort of political debate...although to be honest from the outside I don't see a lot of political debate in the US. Most issues seem to have two polar opposite camps who each believe the other is "evil" and will use any and all legal means to stop them. You cannot have meaningful debate in such circumstances.
Do you seriously think I should subscribe to the fucking Westboro Chapel loony tunes newsletter of the KKK quarterly review?
No, that would be actively supporting those idiots. What I'm saying is that if you employ someone to do a job and you are happy with the job that they do you should not refuse to hire them again if you find out that you disagree with their beliefs.
TL;DR:
Ah, I see you have a sense of irony.
if a street preacher or televangilist shouts at me about sin and hellfire and damnation for anybody who doesn't donate to his particular church, and I choose not to donate...
I would hope that you can see that there is a difference between a person asking for donations to support a cause and say, selling PCs. If I donate to a political party X then I am specifically supporting that party. If I happen to buy a PC from someone who supports political party X I there is zero implication that I support that party. Do you really think that everyone who watches a film with Tom Cruise in it supports scientology?
Exactly which ideal upon which the US was founded indicates that we should financially support people...
Again you utterly miss the point which is that you should make your purchasing decisions based on quality of service/product not whether the creator has acceptable political beliefs...at least if you want to have any sort of effective free speech. Why not just accept that if his ideas are wrong then people will not listen to him and he will be ignored: why should you even feel the need to silence him by denying him a livelihood? It's far better to let him have his say and then engage in a debate as to why he is wrong. This way others can learn both sides and decide for themselves and that is how a free and open society is supposed to operate!