They'll proscute you because it's a chit on their belt. Even searching for well known porn stars ( Traci Lords ) can get you such pictures. Unless you knew her biography, you could easily click on a seemingly legal picture of her on an a.b.p.e usenet group that could be used to put you behind bars and on lists. I wonder how many millions have an illegal Traci Lords picture on their hard drives who think their hard drives are 100% free from illegalities.
On another note, how many people have clicked on goatse.cx accidentally? You don't know what a picture is until you've already downloaded it and it's already on your hard drive. Finding something like that on unallocated space seems like it could easily have come from a browser cache or something.... It's not like they found an IllegalPorn directory.
SO TRUE! Plea bargaining should be outlawed. The huge sentences are there for when prosecuters have an iron clad case, and don't need the defendant to plea bargain, but they are also there for a threat to intimidate people who might be acquitted into plea bargaining with. This assures that innocent people will be punished, if not with the full penalty then with at least a partial penalty.
There is always pressure in the course of carrying out 'justice' to look at a person's percieved probability of guilt and assign them a sentence equal to the probability of guilt ( or conviction ) * penalty for crime if convicted. Since unsolved crimes have been committed, there is always the probability that a random person is the culprit. If there is a murder in your city, does that mean everyone should be sentenced to 15 minutes in prison? Of course not. Only the truely guilty should have to pay.
The system is not perfect - it is not omniscient or even just. It is entirely possible that up to 10% of the prison population is innocent. Pleading guilty or no-contest doesn't make you guilty, only legally guilty which is an entirely different thing. I pleaded no-contest to driving without insurance on a traffic ticket, and paid the fine. I thought I was uninsured because of a misunderstanding with the insurance company. I later found out I actually HAD insurance at the time I got the ticket. Nothing I can do about it now. For the last few years, ( and for a few more I believe ) I am unable to register a car without a special form proving I am insured. This form I must have to register my car is similar to regitering as a sex offender ( even if much less serious or inconvenient, though some insurance companies ( like geico ) will not sell me insurance because of it. I got a better price from progressive anyway so ha! ) .
Also, plea bargaining lets the police close cases by assigning guilt arbitrarily. If someone is caught for stealing booze out of one summer cabin, then they can get a lighter sentence by pleading guilty to a string of 20 recent summer cabin burglaries, 18 of which they did not commit than they would get if they were convicted in a court of just the one. 18 burglers are no longer persued by the law since the cases have been closed due to a plea bargain. If they are later found with stolen whisky bottles from those camps, then that evidence will never be tied to the crime which was 'officially committed by' the guy who copped a plea.
Maybe plea bargaining should be illegal. Also, pleading guilty or no-contest should also be illegal. That way even the retarded who are not officially labeled that way or the scared or whatever would at least have someone try to prove their innocence. That would limit bullying by prosecutors too. It would remove the incentive to intimidate ( defendent MUST defend )
Then when people see non-hardcore criminals ( maybe some 18-20 yr olds that broke into someone's a summer camp and stole a couple bottles of whisky ) being sentenced to outrageously long prison terms that fill the jails the jail terms will be lowered. And kids that just happened to be found drinking the same brand ( possibly obtained by paying a bum to straw-purchase ) who did not actually steal it won't have to plead guilty to theft in order to avoid charges of burglery. ( and if 50 camps have had booze stolen recently, and they only stole from one camp, they won't have to plead guilty to all 50 burgleries to get a sentence lighter than if they'd gone to trial and been found guilty for the one just so the cops can close a bunch of cold cases. ) Maybe then the perpetrators of the other 49 burgleries will still have a chance of being caught.
Maybe that island has suffered Gum-Tree-Overgrowth followed by Koala Population boom followed by denudation followed by mass Koala Starvation followed by Gum-tree-overgrowth cycles since time immemorial. Perhaps without the mass die-off of Gum-Trees, other trees/plants will go extinct causing a whole other chain reaction that will screw up the island some other way.
As much as even I vicerally hate spyware/viruses and spam, you can not solve the problem by banning it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Spammers will always be able to set up shop in a failed state with no police, write a virus/worm that sets up spam zombies and fire away.
As far as spyware goes, if it's in the Eula, then it's not the government's business to stop it. If Eula legalese ofusticates the existance of bundled spyware, then consumers will have to learn which 'brand names' put out software that comes spyware-free if they are too lazy to read each Eula.
As far as viruses/worms go, legislating against them only lets the careless claim victimhood ( such as people who were so careless as to buying software with tons of holes to let them in. Here we see a monopoly that doesn't want to shell out to secure it's products and a public that doesn't want to get a Macintosh because they can't play their favorite games on one. Games continue to be produced exclusively for Windows contiuing the cycle of consumer entrapment. Maybe the government should fine microsoft for every security hole that allows a wild virus to spread as an antitrust measure... ).
The worse these problems get the more the public will demand a change - some will vote with their dollars, others will whine to government. What's needed is a fed-up public that has learned it's lesson about computerized marketing sleaze, not laws.
If it is illegal to write worms/distribute spyware/send spam then only criminals will write worms/distribute spyware/send spam.
If you like to download music files off p2p, but don't want the spyware that comes with Kazaa, then use something else to get your pirated songs. If it doesn't work as well as Kazaa, then consider that all the Gator Revenue might actually be being put back into the Kazaa product. If you think Kazaa is gouging the public, start your own P2P network funded by banner ads and compete. If you'd rather pay a fee to be ad-free, consider buying songs legally for 99 cents each. Geez!
Anyone who runs a business had better not be thinking about good and evil. If there's no laws against dumping raw waste into the river, you'd better not be spending money to treat it first if you want to stay in business.
I think being run by stockholders won't make google any more evil, it will just make google less of a long term thinker. A current stock holder doesn't care if a course of action kills the company in the long run as long as it drives up the stock price in the short term so they can sell high. There will be more gimmicky things added for short term gain once ownership stakes in google become more liquid.
This is probably a good time to create/invest in high quality pre-ipo google competitors who's long term thinking will eventually eat google's lunch once they start squandering their prowess on gimmicky stock pumping schemes.
The police don't need a warrant from a judge to simply follow you around all day and take notes on where you go as you're out and about on your daily business. Should they?
I think most people would agree that if police aren't allowed to investigate then they can't do their jobs. I don't think anyone would have a problem with this, as the police aren't going to spend their time watching EVERYBODY since it is much more efficient to watch the 'probably guilty'. Each police officer has their own criteria that arouses their suspicion, but hopefully one group isn't over-targeted for harassment.
But it's just harmless watching. If you don't do anything 'bad' then you have nothing to fear right? There would be no *harm* in watching everybody if that were feasable.
Wrong. Technology has suddenly allowed everyone's license plates to be monitored with cameras. Anyone that sprays their license plate with camera blocker ( or has lots of dried mud on their license plate ) can be automaticallt flagged as suspicious and police can be alerted to tail them. There is no way to 'opt out'.
And now there is a database with information about everyone's lives (namely their whereabouts in this case), in government's posession. This database can and will be mined. Patterns that seemingly have nothing to do with crime will be used to tag people as suspicious in the same way that insurance companies use facts that are not neccessarily causatively related to bad driving to calculate auto insurance rates. For instance: people under 25 pay more than people over 25, married people pay less than unmarried people, men pay more than women. If race weren't such a toxic issue, then whites would pay more than blacks or vice versa when some actuary linked race to accident rate. None of these things are just, and there are so many thousands of ways to gerrymander the statistics to separate the 'good' from the 'bad' that most everyone is designated as either good or bad using some set of criteria.
Shop around for car insurance. You will find many different rates. A company that offers you a cheap rate might offer someone else an expensive rate, but another company might take them on for cheap, but refuse to insure you entirely. It all depends on how their actuaries have gerrymandered the statistics to guarantee a profit.
Government will use criteria from the data they have collected on the whole populace to tag individuals as suspicious. They will choose these people to stripsearch at airports and train terminals, and anywhere else they can require ID. Your plate will be run through computers and tag you as suspicious and cause you to be pulled over every 5 minutes for 'swerving' so they can look in your backseat for drugs.
And the people who are tagged as suspicious will be in the minority. They will be an arbitrary minority for sure, but in a democracy, they will be weak and vulnerable to having their rights curtailed by the 'nonsuspicious' majority.
The arbitrary criteria used to tag people as suspicious will then become a political weapon. There will be pressure to select criteria from the many equally crime-spottingly-effective ways of gerrymandering the statistics to find criteria that also select for 'democrats' or 'republicans' or what have you.
I wouldn't be suprised if someone could be consious while missing the right half of the brain or consious while missing the left half of their brain, but I would be very suprised if someone were consious while missing their entire brain.
All you have said is that each half of the brain is capable of consiousness independently. When both halves of the brain are present in a skull, then they act together via interconnections to produce a single consiousness.
You could say that complete brains consist of the right half, the left half, and the interconnections between them, without the interconnections ( an intact corpus callosum ) you indeed have 2 independently functioning halves that could possibly each be independently consious.
Imagine being the 'other half' of yourself if you had your corpus callousum cut, eternally watching the other half of your brain control things until one day, you gain control of the left hand, pick up a knife and stab yourself while the shocked right hand tries to block your fatal blow.
If one could directly observe God, then it would be foolish to doubt God's existance. But if God were there, and could be felt by one of the 5 senses, or even via an additional sense, then why doesn't everyone feel God? I certainly do not feel God. And if I'm handicapped, if I'm third eye blind, then God can kiss my shiny metal ass.
Sources of information that I *have* had a chance to personally evaluate and form a stance of trust with based on observation have vouched for the professionals I do trust with my welfare ( like airplane engineers and medical doctors )
For instance, my regular news sources have proven to be fairly accurate sources of disaster information. When I saw the WTC collapse on TV, I thought - wow! I have a picture of me standing in the lobby from early that same summer! When I went to that spot a few months later, I saw that indeed the buildings were missing.
If airplanes were crashing because the bournoulli effect was just a scam perpetrated by a Boeing conspiracy, then I would not be able to observe it any time I want by shaping my hand like an airplane wing and sticking it out the passenger side window when driving down the road ( or by blowing under a piece of bent paper on a desk ). If air travel were a statistically unacceptable risk, I trust that the news sources who have an interest in reporting such shenanigans would be able to find out and let me know.
If germ theory were a scam perpetrated by a conspiracy of disinfectant companies, then I would read about people who have carried out Pasteur's broth expiriment and consistently gotten different results. Because there is no Germ Theory is a Scam movement, I tend to believe in the existence of germs.
I have personally watched amoxicillin kill the control e-coli during a biology lab ( in a class ) where we conferred antibiotic resistance to the e-coli. They didn't grow after being killed, whereas the resistant strain did. I tend to believe that the ear-aches I had as a kid were really cured by the pink-stuff-that-tasted-like-bubble-gum that my doctor prescribed. The stories I've heard about the mechanism of the cure, about antibiotics killing germs seem to check out. I don't hear about people who didn't take their screaming 4 year old to the doctor claiming that the earache went away just as quickly without the medicine. ( at least not en masse, as would probably eventually be the case if they were supported by the facts, you always have some wackos that will claim anything. )
Also, I have learned to trust the follow-the-money rule. I tend not to believe people who have an interest in me believing a proposition without a vouch by someone who has no such interest - for instance, I wouldn't take Boeing's word for it that it's planes were safe, but that the news stations who have an interest in finding fault, have not reported an outstandingly bad safety record for Boeing planes counts as a vouch FOR the safety of Boeing planes.
You can claim to taste similar to, or better than pepsi. If a person searches for Pepsi, then Coke should be able to offer themselves as an alternative, as long as they don't say they ARE Pepsi. When someone searches for AXA, they are probably interested in insurance. A competitor buying the AXA keyword is merely using the knowledge that AXA pertains to insurance to find people interested in insurance. They are not infringing on trademark. That would only occur if someone claimed to BE AXA.
And I can't install the patch from microsoft. It fails every time even after a fresh install! I need to depend on AntiVir to keep deleting it ( the blaster worm ). I hate fixing the damn windows partition. Does anyone know if blaster somehow interferes with the patching process? I know I'm infected with something because I always get a svchost32.exe has failed and is quitting message...
Ahh, but it makes the most sence to trust your own senses. Nobody here has personally seen God. If they had, they would not be surfing the internet, they would be taking their thorazine. All anyone has seen are old books and men in funny hats.
People have seen science at work. You can look at living wiggling germs using a microscope. You can boil the water and look through the scope and see they aren't wiggling anymore. You can tally the statistics yourself between the incidence of food poisoning in those who do not boil their canning jars vs those who do.
If you think you're Jesus and can fly, then you can jump out the window yourself and test gravity. ( or you could jump off a small box first if you weren't that sure. )
But unless you have personally met God, it would seem unwise to have faith in that hypothetical entity. Why implicitly trust someone you have never met, and who you have never seen? It would be like sending money to a Nigerian who contacted you via Email.
Most people would pay almost anything to keep their legs - even thousands and thousands of dollars. But what they actually pay, is usually limited by what they actually *have available* to spend. Somebody always ends up driving the motorized Radio Flyer.
It is probably possible to spend upwards of 10 grand more on a car with extra safety features, and when they actually come into play and save someone, then that person is invariably glad they spent the money.
But suppose feature X costs an extra $1000 and actually comes into play and saves someone from injury Y in 1 out of 100000 cars. Then society as a whole spent 100 million dollars preventing that one injury or death. A human life is worth substantially less than 100 million dollars. Or put a different way: it is possible to save many more than 1 life by spending 100 million dollars more intelligently than on fitting 100000 cars with safety feature X.
I don't have a problem with those who have disposable income wasting money trying to protect themselves from injury in an accident that probably won't ever happen, but whenever a new safety feature comes out it is usually mandated for all new cars within a few years.
Politicians that enact these mandated safety features should always, ( as cold as it seems ), decide on a number represent the dollar value of a human life and then weigh the cost of fitting all cars with feature X against it's expected value in prevented deaths/serious injuries ( $ value of 1 human life * prevented deaths ) - cost of fitting all cars with feature X should be positive.
If ( # people saved by airbags driving year X model year cars * dollar value of 1 human life ) - ( cost of 1 regulation airbag * cars purchased in year X ) is less than zero, then the regulation has resulted in money being spent unwisely. It has resulted in MORE DEATHS since part of societies life saving budget has been squandered stupidly on air bags.
But seat belts would probably be another story because they are so much cheaper and probably have more overall safety value than airbags and are probably involved in saving more lives.
According to NHTST about 5000 people have been saved by airbags total in the US. If there are 1 cars for every 3 people and 70% have airbags at $1000 each then that's $11,600,000.00 per life saved.
I am sure there are ways to save more than one life ( even in the US ) for eleven million dollars.
Wouldn't it be funny if eventually, the bubble-fusors DID reach break even, but could only produce a very low power density. For instance a huge plant being required to generate enough surplus energy to blowdry someone's hair.
Wouldn't it be funny if the sheer acreage of acetone tank required to produce a watt o power makes it less economical than covering that same area with solar panels?
If the power is pulsed at a higher rate than the 'power meters' are meant to measure, then the meters might give inaccurate power measurements. Maybe this guy fooled himself and other people into thinking he'd invented a source of free energy. If he had, then he could hook one of his motors up to one of his 'generators' and it would spin forever. Since he didn't demonstrate that, he probably tried it and was puzzled as to why it didn't work, but is not about to spoil his lucrative conveience store cooling fan business.
The people that buy channels for programming packages are not stupid. They do not pay esoteric channels more than they are worth in terms of viewer appeal. The companies know very well how many people like to watch what. Channels will not suddenly find their funding decreased because their subscriber level will be strongly correlated to what their Neilson Ratings are now.
Channels would be dropped en masse from cable listings if they were unwilling to charge the cable company per subscriber. ( Cable companies are like phone companies that make part of their revenue from the bill and part from inserting ads into the middles of conversations ) You would be buying content from the channels directly under a la carte.
Since there's not room in the market for more than one or two big general audience channels, channels would specialize trying to cater to 'types' of people that will ( hopefully ) find more than one their favorite shows offered. As she channels specialize they will decrease the competition for viewers, but also their possible revenue stream. The Quilt Channel might get most of the Quilting-obsessed to subscribe, but the budget would be low. That doesn't mean it would not be profitable. Low revenue is OK if costs are likewise low. If the quilt channel were to generalize, it would have to compete with The Craft Channel. If the Craft Channel wanted to generalize it would have to compete with HGTV etc all the way up to the Networks.
Because of the competition for larger revenue streams, the subject-matter specialization of channels will continue to be somewhat hazy, reflecting this tension, but because serving smaller audiences with more inexpensive programming that happens to be more valuable to them than higher budget mass appeal fare is still profitable, channels will continue to specialize.
You will probably have to pay the same to get the same amount of good stuff, but hopefully the filler will be better.
It might be interesting if a la carte could be taken to the extreme. Every viewer gets every channel but it's pay per view. There would be more adverts for shows though that way. Would you pay to watch a show with commercials? You pay a cable bill for that privilege, and pay an ISP to view web pages with ads. ( at least the ISP doesn't put them there like cable companies do with shows ) If channels had to charge viewers directly for content, would more of it be free and ad supported, or would all content be ad-free but charged for?
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On another note, how many people have clicked on goatse.cx accidentally? You don't know what a picture is until you've already downloaded it and it's already on your hard drive. Finding something like that on unallocated space seems like it could easily have come from a browser cache or something.... It's not like they found an IllegalPorn directory.
SO TRUE! Plea bargaining should be outlawed. The huge sentences are there for when prosecuters have an iron clad case, and don't need the defendant to plea bargain, but they are also there for a threat to intimidate people who might be acquitted into plea bargaining with. This assures that innocent people will be punished, if not with the full penalty then with at least a partial penalty.
There is always pressure in the course of carrying out 'justice' to look at a person's percieved probability of guilt and assign them a sentence equal to the probability of guilt ( or conviction ) * penalty for crime if convicted. Since unsolved crimes have been committed, there is always the probability that a random person is the culprit. If there is a murder in your city, does that mean everyone should be sentenced to 15 minutes in prison? Of course not. Only the truely guilty should have to pay.
The system is not perfect - it is not omniscient or even just. It is entirely possible that up to 10% of the prison population is innocent. Pleading guilty or no-contest doesn't make you guilty, only legally guilty which is an entirely different thing. I pleaded no-contest to driving without insurance on a traffic ticket, and paid the fine. I thought I was uninsured because of a misunderstanding with the insurance company. I later found out I actually HAD insurance at the time I got the ticket. Nothing I can do about it now. For the last few years, ( and for a few more I believe ) I am unable to register a car without a special form proving I am insured. This form I must have to register my car is similar to regitering as a sex offender ( even if much less serious or inconvenient, though some insurance companies ( like geico ) will not sell me insurance because of it. I got a better price from progressive anyway so ha! ) .
Also, plea bargaining lets the police close cases by assigning guilt arbitrarily. If someone is caught for stealing booze out of one summer cabin, then they can get a lighter sentence by pleading guilty to a string of 20 recent summer cabin burglaries, 18 of which they did not commit than they would get if they were convicted in a court of just the one. 18 burglers are no longer persued by the law since the cases have been closed due to a plea bargain. If they are later found with stolen whisky bottles from those camps, then that evidence will never be tied to the crime which was 'officially committed by' the guy who copped a plea.
Then when people see non-hardcore criminals ( maybe some 18-20 yr olds that broke into someone's a summer camp and stole a couple bottles of whisky ) being sentenced to outrageously long prison terms that fill the jails the jail terms will be lowered. And kids that just happened to be found drinking the same brand ( possibly obtained by paying a bum to straw-purchase ) who did not actually steal it won't have to plead guilty to theft in order to avoid charges of burglery. ( and if 50 camps have had booze stolen recently, and they only stole from one camp, they won't have to plead guilty to all 50 burgleries to get a sentence lighter than if they'd gone to trial and been found guilty for the one just so the cops can close a bunch of cold cases. ) Maybe then the perpetrators of the other 49 burgleries will still have a chance of being caught.
No they are not. They'll just get you in more trouble.
Maybe that island has suffered Gum-Tree-Overgrowth followed by Koala Population boom followed by denudation followed by mass Koala Starvation followed by Gum-tree-overgrowth cycles since time immemorial. Perhaps without the mass die-off of Gum-Trees, other trees/plants will go extinct causing a whole other chain reaction that will screw up the island some other way.
Spammers will always be able to set up shop in a failed state with no police, write a virus/worm that sets up spam zombies and fire away.
As far as spyware goes, if it's in the Eula, then it's not the government's business to stop it. If Eula legalese ofusticates the existance of bundled spyware, then consumers will have to learn which 'brand names' put out software that comes spyware-free if they are too lazy to read each Eula.
As far as viruses/worms go, legislating against them only lets the careless claim victimhood ( such as people who were so careless as to buying software with tons of holes to let them in. Here we see a monopoly that doesn't want to shell out to secure it's products and a public that doesn't want to get a Macintosh because they can't play their favorite games on one. Games continue to be produced exclusively for Windows contiuing the cycle of consumer entrapment. Maybe the government should fine microsoft for every security hole that allows a wild virus to spread as an antitrust measure... ).
The worse these problems get the more the public will demand a change - some will vote with their dollars, others will whine to government. What's needed is a fed-up public that has learned it's lesson about computerized marketing sleaze, not laws.
If it is illegal to write worms/distribute spyware/send spam then only criminals will write worms/distribute spyware/send spam.
If you like to download music files off p2p, but don't want the spyware that comes with Kazaa, then use something else to get your pirated songs. If it doesn't work as well as Kazaa, then consider that all the Gator Revenue might actually be being put back into the Kazaa product. If you think Kazaa is gouging the public, start your own P2P network funded by banner ads and compete. If you'd rather pay a fee to be ad-free, consider buying songs legally for 99 cents each. Geez!
I think being run by stockholders won't make google any more evil, it will just make google less of a long term thinker. A current stock holder doesn't care if a course of action kills the company in the long run as long as it drives up the stock price in the short term so they can sell high. There will be more gimmicky things added for short term gain once ownership stakes in google become more liquid.
This is probably a good time to create/invest in high quality pre-ipo google competitors who's long term thinking will eventually eat google's lunch once they start squandering their prowess on gimmicky stock pumping schemes.
Then Bill Gates gets to own Google....
The police don't need a warrant from a
judge to simply follow you around all day and take notes on where you
go as you're out and about on your daily business. Should they?
I think most people would agree that if police aren't allowed to investigate then they can't do their jobs. I don't think anyone would have a problem with this, as the police aren't going to spend their time watching EVERYBODY since it is much more efficient to watch the 'probably guilty'. Each police officer has their own criteria that arouses their suspicion, but hopefully one group isn't over-targeted for harassment.
But it's just harmless watching. If you don't do anything 'bad' then you have nothing to fear right? There would be no *harm* in watching everybody if that were feasable.
Wrong. Technology has suddenly allowed everyone's license plates to be monitored with cameras. Anyone that sprays their license plate with camera blocker ( or has lots of dried mud on their license plate ) can be automaticallt flagged as suspicious and police can be alerted to tail them. There is no way to 'opt out'.
And now there is a database with information about everyone's lives (namely their whereabouts in this case), in government's posession. This database can and will be mined. Patterns that seemingly have nothing to do with crime will be used to tag people as suspicious in the same way that insurance companies use facts that are not neccessarily causatively related to bad driving to calculate auto insurance rates. For instance: people under 25 pay more than people over 25, married people pay less than unmarried people, men pay more than women. If race weren't such a toxic issue, then whites would pay more than blacks or vice versa when some actuary linked race to accident rate. None of these things are just, and there are so many thousands of ways to gerrymander the statistics to separate the 'good' from the 'bad' that most everyone is designated as either good or bad using some set of criteria.
Shop around for car insurance. You will find many different rates. A company that offers you a cheap rate might offer someone else an expensive rate, but another company might take them on for cheap, but refuse to insure you entirely. It all depends on how their actuaries have gerrymandered the statistics to guarantee a profit.
Government will use criteria from the data they have collected on the whole populace to tag individuals as suspicious. They will choose these people to stripsearch at airports and train terminals, and anywhere else they can require ID. Your plate will be run through computers and tag you as suspicious and cause you to be pulled over every 5 minutes for 'swerving' so they can look in your backseat for drugs.
And the people who are tagged as suspicious will be in the minority. They will be an arbitrary minority for sure, but in a democracy, they will be weak and vulnerable to having their rights curtailed by the 'nonsuspicious' majority.
The arbitrary criteria used to tag people as suspicious will then become a political weapon. There will be pressure to select criteria from the many equally crime-spottingly-effective ways of gerrymandering the statistics to find criteria that also select for 'democrats' or 'republicans' or what have you.
I would say my pets are consious. They certainly seem self aware.
All you have said is that each half of the brain is capable of consiousness independently. When both halves of the brain are present in a skull, then they act together via interconnections to produce a single consiousness.
You could say that complete brains consist of the right half, the left half, and the interconnections between them, without the interconnections ( an intact corpus callosum ) you indeed have 2 independently functioning halves that could possibly each be independently consious.
Imagine being the 'other half' of yourself if you had your corpus callousum cut, eternally watching the other half of your brain control things until one day, you gain control of the left hand, pick up a knife and stab yourself while the shocked right hand tries to block your fatal blow.
If one could directly observe God, then it would be foolish to doubt God's existance. But if God were there, and could be felt by one of the 5 senses, or even via an additional sense, then why doesn't everyone feel God? I certainly do not feel God. And if I'm handicapped, if I'm third eye blind, then God can kiss my shiny metal ass.
For instance, my regular news sources have proven to be fairly accurate sources of disaster information. When I saw the WTC collapse on TV, I thought - wow! I have a picture of me standing in the lobby from early that same summer! When I went to that spot a few months later, I saw that indeed the buildings were missing.
If airplanes were crashing because the bournoulli effect was just a scam perpetrated by a Boeing conspiracy, then I would not be able to observe it any time I want by shaping my hand like an airplane wing and sticking it out the passenger side window when driving down the road ( or by blowing under a piece of bent paper on a desk ). If air travel were a statistically unacceptable risk, I trust that the news sources who have an interest in reporting such shenanigans would be able to find out and let me know.
If germ theory were a scam perpetrated by a conspiracy of disinfectant companies, then I would read about people who have carried out Pasteur's broth expiriment and consistently gotten different results. Because there is no Germ Theory is a Scam movement, I tend to believe in the existence of germs.
I have personally watched amoxicillin kill the control e-coli during a biology lab ( in a class ) where we conferred antibiotic resistance to the e-coli. They didn't grow after being killed, whereas the resistant strain did. I tend to believe that the ear-aches I had as a kid were really cured by the pink-stuff-that-tasted-like-bubble-gum that my doctor prescribed. The stories I've heard about the mechanism of the cure, about antibiotics killing germs seem to check out. I don't hear about people who didn't take their screaming 4 year old to the doctor claiming that the earache went away just as quickly without the medicine. ( at least not en masse, as would probably eventually be the case if they were supported by the facts, you always have some wackos that will claim anything. )
Also, I have learned to trust the follow-the-money rule. I tend not to believe people who have an interest in me believing a proposition without a vouch by someone who has no such interest - for instance, I wouldn't take Boeing's word for it that it's planes were safe, but that the news stations who have an interest in finding fault, have not reported an outstandingly bad safety record for Boeing planes counts as a vouch FOR the safety of Boeing planes.
I need to buy one - got win 2000 - bummer.
I never met them, but I would not trust them either until I got to know them, and they'd earned my trust.
You can claim to taste similar to, or better than pepsi. If a person searches for Pepsi, then Coke should be able to offer themselves as an alternative, as long as they don't say they ARE Pepsi. When someone searches for AXA, they are probably interested in insurance. A competitor buying the AXA keyword is merely using the knowledge that AXA pertains to insurance to find people interested in insurance. They are not infringing on trademark. That would only occur if someone claimed to BE AXA.
Hahah! Good point!
And I can't install the patch from microsoft. It fails every time even after a fresh install! I need to depend on AntiVir to keep deleting it ( the blaster worm ). I hate fixing the damn windows partition. Does anyone know if blaster somehow interferes with the patching process? I know I'm infected with something because I always get a svchost32.exe has failed and is quitting message...
People have seen science at work. You can look at living wiggling germs using a microscope. You can boil the water and look through the scope and see they aren't wiggling anymore. You can tally the statistics yourself between the incidence of food poisoning in those who do not boil their canning jars vs those who do.
If you think you're Jesus and can fly, then you can jump out the window yourself and test gravity. ( or you could jump off a small box first if you weren't that sure. )
But unless you have personally met God, it would seem unwise to have faith in that hypothetical entity. Why implicitly trust someone you have never met, and who you have never seen? It would be like sending money to a Nigerian who contacted you via Email.
Come on! They should drive the darn thing and see how it goes!
It is probably possible to spend upwards of 10 grand more on a car with extra safety features, and when they actually come into play and save someone, then that person is invariably glad they spent the money.
But suppose feature X costs an extra $1000 and actually comes into play and saves someone from injury Y in 1 out of 100000 cars. Then society as a whole spent 100 million dollars preventing that one injury or death. A human life is worth substantially less than 100 million dollars. Or put a different way: it is possible to save many more than 1 life by spending 100 million dollars more intelligently than on fitting 100000 cars with safety feature X.
I don't have a problem with those who have disposable income wasting money trying to protect themselves from injury in an accident that probably won't ever happen, but whenever a new safety feature comes out it is usually mandated for all new cars within a few years.
Politicians that enact these mandated safety features should always, ( as cold as it seems ), decide on a number represent the dollar value of a human life and then weigh the cost of fitting all cars with feature X against it's expected value in prevented deaths/serious injuries ( $ value of 1 human life * prevented deaths ) - cost of fitting all cars with feature X should be positive.
If ( # people saved by airbags driving year X model year cars * dollar value of 1 human life ) - ( cost of 1 regulation airbag * cars purchased in year X ) is less than zero, then the regulation has resulted in money being spent unwisely. It has resulted in MORE DEATHS since part of societies life saving budget has been squandered stupidly on air bags.
But seat belts would probably be another story because they are so much cheaper and probably have more overall safety value than airbags and are probably involved in saving more lives.
According to NHTST about 5000 people have been saved by airbags total in the US. If there are 1 cars for every 3 people and 70% have airbags at $1000 each then that's $11,600,000.00 per life saved.
I am sure there are ways to save more than one life ( even in the US ) for eleven million dollars.
Wouldn't it be funny if the sheer acreage of acetone tank required to produce a watt o power makes it less economical than covering that same area with solar panels?
If the power is pulsed at a higher rate than the 'power meters' are meant to measure, then the meters might give inaccurate power measurements. Maybe this guy fooled himself and other people into thinking he'd invented a source of free energy. If he had, then he could hook one of his motors up to one of his 'generators' and it would spin forever. Since he didn't demonstrate that, he probably tried it and was puzzled as to why it didn't work, but is not about to spoil his lucrative conveience store cooling fan business.
Channels would be dropped en masse from cable listings if they were unwilling to charge the cable company per subscriber. ( Cable companies are like phone companies that make part of their revenue from the bill and part from inserting ads into the middles of conversations ) You would be buying content from the channels directly under a la carte.
Since there's not room in the market for more than one or two big general audience channels, channels would specialize trying to cater to 'types' of people that will ( hopefully ) find more than one their favorite shows offered. As she channels specialize they will decrease the competition for viewers, but also their possible revenue stream. The Quilt Channel might get most of the Quilting-obsessed to subscribe, but the budget would be low. That doesn't mean it would not be profitable. Low revenue is OK if costs are likewise low. If the quilt channel were to generalize, it would have to compete with The Craft Channel. If the Craft Channel wanted to generalize it would have to compete with HGTV etc all the way up to the Networks.
Because of the competition for larger revenue streams, the subject-matter specialization of channels will continue to be somewhat hazy, reflecting this tension, but because serving smaller audiences with more inexpensive programming that happens to be more valuable to them than higher budget mass appeal fare is still profitable, channels will continue to specialize.
You will probably have to pay the same to get the same amount of good stuff, but hopefully the filler will be better.
It might be interesting if a la carte could be taken to the extreme. Every viewer gets every channel but it's pay per view. There would be more adverts for shows though that way. Would you pay to watch a show with commercials? You pay a cable bill for that privilege, and pay an ISP to view web pages with ads. ( at least the ISP doesn't put them there like cable companies do with shows ) If channels had to charge viewers directly for content, would more of it be free and ad supported, or would all content be ad-free but charged for?
Agreed, that is good.