Of course it's about obeying the commands of Jesus Christ. [...] But this is accomplished from within, not from external control
My point is, if you reject Jesus Christ as your savior, then certainly His teachings will not form external control over your behavior except to the extent where it coincides with local laws. But once you accept and believe him, his teachings bind your behavior. The most important point that I'm trying to make is that your choice in the matter stops at choosing Christ as your savior, after which His teachings come wholesale, non-negotiable.
That is, there is no room for internal synthesis of your own personal morality. You are not free to say that Jesus really dropped the ball on teaching X or Y, and you'll do the opposite but remain Christian, basically by definition. Freedom from external control, to me, means that you are allowed by right to absorb and synthesize your own conscience. Christians don't have that right, theoretically anyway, because they've accepted external control of their behavior.
I pity you that your brand of Christianity operates through fear, as you attest. It is far better to aspire to heaven from love God.
I'm not Christian, so my understanding may be off the mark. The carrot and the stick are both common forms of external control, and I'm pointing out to you that even if you don't think much of it, the threat of hell is plainly evident in Christian teachings. If someone says he loves God but has no fear of spending eternity in hell, does that even make sense?
It's far more about the individual learning to control himself.
No, Christianity is about obeying the commands of Jesus Christ. When you violate such commands (i.e., love your neighbors), you risk your salvation. In other words, Christianity is a set of defined morals and clear punishment for disobedience. You may (in fact, you have to) be entirely willing to submit yourself to this belief system, but don't delude yourself that this isn't an external control over your internal moral compass.
Put another way, faith is not about agreeing with Jesus Christ and therefore believing in his divinity. It's about believing in his divinity first, and then obeying him. Jesus Christ is not a philospher you can just choose to agree with or disagree with like Confucius or Plato.
Let me give you a most obvious example. The Bible states clearly that you shall not kill. Yet Christian soldiers fire their weapons when attacked, because at that moment something inside them says it's right (though perhaps not Christian) to kill. If there was such a thing as a truly Christian (i.e., turn the other cheek) nation, it would be colonized in zero time. This is one case where your internal sense overrides the litaral teachings of religion.
Atheism, on the other hand, is the ultimate form of self control. Without fear of hell and the lure of heaven, and therefore no external bound on moral behavior other than law, an atheist who doesn't always act purely on self interest is doing exactly what you were ascribing.
In addition, taxes are also collected from all foreigners living in the US, including permanent residents ("green card" holders). In fact, H-1B visa holders even have to pay social security, although their temporary residence in the US depends entirely on holding a job so they cannot avail of its benefits.
"Sex and the City", "Six Feet Under", "The Wire", "Deadwood", "Rome", and other HBO productions are quite a bit more well-written and produced than most movies out there. Right about now, my on-screen guide shows me that HBO can also be showing "Titus", "Taxi", "True Lies", "Love Don't Cost a Thing", "The Spitfire Grill", "Career Opportunities", and "Talkin' Dirty After Dark". How many of those would you consider well-written?
There isn't a program that can't be written as a state machine; but most programs expressed this way are difficult to understand and maintain.
My experiences contradict your statement. State machines are both easy to implement, and easy to debug, if you do it the right way. I have seen many entirely wrong implementations, including one where you can go from any of about two dozen "states" to any other. I have seen some that just switch states when they feel like it, or switch states based on complex decisions, which makes debugging difficult. Put another way, you can make a "state machine" degenerate into something else, and nullify its benefits, if you refuse to follow the rules.
A well-implemented state machine has an important characteristic: it is clear to see why you are where you are. This means that state transitions are checked (against unexpected events) and traced, so debugging the machine is literally a matter of reading a log that looks like this:
in state 0, received event A so went to state 2
in state 2, received event B so went to state 1
in state 1, received event C so went to state 5
in state 5, ignoring event A
in state 5, received unexpected event C
and so on. In this particular example, the question to answer is why we're not handling event C properly in state 5, or why we went to state 5 in the first place. Either should be pretty obvious when you consult the original design. The fix is likewise obvious. Figuring out state machines, in my experience, has always been easier than figuring out multi-threaded code.
This isn't to say that all programs should be implemented as a state machine. Simple Unix-style pipe programs, for instance, are generally unsuitable. If you don't know how to design a state machine properly, it's also going to be unsuitable.
Therefore the compiler would first perform 'i=i' and then increment 'i' by 1.
You are entirely wrong, because you do not understand the concept of sequence points. In a nutshell, in C an object can only be modified once between two sequence points, and "i = i++;" is undefined because it is modifed twice. Do not respond to this post without learning what a sequence point is. Googling for "C sequence points" will get you several sources right on the first page.
You should read more specs.
I have read the C Standard. You, beyond any doubt, have not.
If Taiwan is so independent why doesn;t it have a seat on the UN ?
The government that is running Taiwan today is called the Republic of China. This is the government established by the Nationalist Party, which overthrew the imperial Qing Dynasty about a century ago. This is also the government that fought alongside the Allies in WWII against Japan, and is a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
After WWII, the government lost mainland China to the communists in civil war, and retreated to Taiwan. The communists then formed the People's Republic of China, and took over the Security Council seat and UN membership a couple of decades later.
Today, Taiwan maintains an independent executive, legislative, and judicial system, with police and military power. It also maintains diplomatic relationships with about two dozen small countries. It is not in the UN primarily because of the unfortunate zero-sum diplomatic contest that has been ongoing for decades now. Put simply, the PRC would not allow Taiwan into the UN, and most governments do not recognize Taiwan because the PRC would sever relations if they did.
I've head quite a few boxes on them that say Taiwan, ROC on them so I guess not even everyone there shares the same opinion.
Taiwan is ruled by the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China. The problem at hand is that by saying "Taiwan, China", people (like you, no offense) will mistake it for the People's Republic of China. Over the years, a good number of native (meaning, arrived in Taiwan before 1949) Taiwanese have grown to resent the repressive Nationalist rule, and there is now some negative reaction to the name "China". The Nationalists have since lost power in elections, and the new ruling party has tried what it can to ditch the "China" altogether and achieve an independent "Taiwan", but this remains the most divisive political issue on the island.
HTML text formatting tags don't add very much to code comments, but there are many times I wished there was a good way to include even a simple drawing. A function may implement a state machine, and the easiest way to describe a state machine is frequently a state transition diagram. In some other cases, a table that I don't have to format by hand would also have been wonderful.
POSIX, like most specs, is designed to allow software to be both closed-source, and compatible. When your code is available, the sole traditional reason for specs is gone.
You are wrong. You cannot reverse-engineer a spec from an implementation, because you cannot separate the implementation choices from spec requirements. For example, if I show you an implementation of an algorithm, and you realize that it can run within 300 ms, do you know if there's an actual need for it to finish within 300 ms? Or, how would you know if an alternative implementation (that uses less RAM, for instance) that needs 500 ms to run is actually acceptable?
Similarly, there are almost always things in a spec that a particular implementation does not need (but another implementation would). To piece back together the actual spec would require reading multiple implementations and figuring out the union of all they implement. Worse, the implementations may actually contradict each other. The C language leaves certain constructs formally undefined (for example, "i = i++;" is undefined behavior), so how would you figure out what that's supposed to do by reading compiler source code?
Thirdly, while source code may be readable by people who want to provide an implementation, it is not readable by people who merely want to use it. When was the last time you learned to program in a language by reading the source code of its compiler? What if the compiler was self-hosting (that is, written in the language it compiles)?
Code examples are always better than specs because they are unambiguous.
So the complete source code to Mozilla is a better source of information on HTML than the W3C HTML specification?
Killing someone is a one time deal. Ten years later, people might not even remember the name or crime.
Have you ever heard of the sex offender registry, and various regulations that require paroled or released convicts to go door-to-door introducing themselves? I'm not equating this to murder, but some crimes can stick with you for a long, long time.
Hell, just being arrested and searched by the FBI can ruin your reputation in the neighborhood, even if no charges are ever filed against you. How would you like, for instance, "suspected of downloading child pornography" attached to your name?
If the answer to higher demand for their product is higher prices, then surely the answer to lower demand in the form of rampant piracy is lower prices? How come the market should decide how high the price of a song should be, but not how low? How come they instead choose to rely on bad laws like the DMCA (which also punishes fair use) and blank media taxes (which also punishes the innocent), as well as hundreds of cases of litigation (including the inevitable bad PR), to avoid dropping prices?
It just seems to me that belief in the free market are quickly abandoned when it doesn't go their way.
Re:the exclusion of radio is pretty stupid
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The Future of the iPod
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· Score: 3, Insightful
i chose the iRiver IFP-180T simply because it has a radio tuner, and would never buy an iPod, because i can't believe apple wouldn't devote the 50 cents it would cost to put a radio tuner in there
seriously, apple: do cost-benefit analysis of a radio tuner... how much does the circuitry cost?
If a radio tuner takes up negligible space, no engineering or manufacturing effort, and costs $0.50 to include in every iPod, then it would cost Apple $2.5M every quarter if it sold 5 million iPods in the span. Assuming Apple makes $50 per iPod sold, it would have to sell an additional (i.e., to people like you) 50,000 iPods each quarter just to break even on the effort. Now, note that space, engineering, and manufacturing all cost real money, and a very small radio tuner (you wouldn't expect the form factor to change just for this, right?) just might cost more than $0.50 each.
If there aren't significantly more than 200,000 of you every year, then your radio tuner would probably not be a standard part of the iPod. Hope this helps.
To complete your thought, corporate America thinks that way because they have to compete in the stock market for capital. Since investors don't care how much foresight a company has, corporations are forced to only look at next quarter's numbers.
(Yes, there are exceptions.)
The government is just another manifestation of the people's will. We can use tax money to fund scientific research and education, but many people seem to prefer tax cuts instead.
So on the one hand we ask corporations to show us bigger and bigger profits every quarter, and on the other hand we ask government to take less taxes from us. Where exactly is the money going to come from?
How about the fact that my P2 400 MHZ computer works great under Linux and could barely chug along with Win2k (i.e. don't worry about buying a new computer every time a new version of Windows comes out)?
Your comment also needs to be tempered. I still own a 350MHz K6, and it runs Windows 2000 about as well as it runs KDE - that is, not all that well. I remember my 8MB 66MHz 80486 laptop running Win98 and Word competently enough, but barely able to run X by itself, nevermind OpenOffice.
Point is, to a certain extent, a computer is stuck with its contemporary software. Linux is certainly more usable with more recent software, but the difference is not night and day. What does your 400 MHz P2 actually run when you say "Linux"? I very much doubt that OpenOffice "works great" on that box.
Another point is that many software have plateaued in terms of CPU demands. Nobody desperately needs Word or Excel or IE to run much faster, and what may be true of your 200MHz P2 is not necessarily applicable to a 1GHz Celeron. Other than rendering video, which I do once in a while, I basically don't need much more raw performance out of my 733MHz G4 running Tiger.
The equipment to do all this is frighteningly expensive, but available. It's reliable, but not foolproof.
The Tomahawk missile can fly several hundred miles at very low altitude, avoiding terrain all the while, and hit a target within a few feet of error margin. Current production units cost under $600,000 per missile (and you don't need the rest of the missile), which might be less than the life insurance of one passenger.
Another alternative comes from Predator UAV technology, which I believe allows a ground station within line-of-sight to land the unmanned craft by remote control. The system cost is $40M, but the system is designed to be mobile, so you don't even have to equip every airport with it.
I do agree with you that any machine that can take over the controls from the pilots must be approached with extreme care. I just think that the system is not so much "frighteningly expensive", but too expensive for the "few" lives it will save. We don't like to admit that, of course.
If adult stem cells hits a dead end I would encourage looking for another alternative.
Just to take this thought to conclusion, and if there aren't any alternatives?
In my mind embryonic life holds the same value that full-born life does. I'm not crazy about the embryos that are left over after fertility processes, either, but I think it's a harder moral line to draw.
So the worst reasons for infertile parents to reproduce is still more important, in your mind, than the most promising research to treat the most beloved terminally-ill person?
You also contradict yourself. If embryonic life has the same value as full-born life, then there cannot be any confusion to the morality of killing embryonic life leftover from fertility attempts, or even those deliberately prevented from implanting in a uterus. They must all be murder.
what I was saying really doesn't make any moral judgements, but rather just states the potential "slippery slope" that federally funding embryonic research creates.
You point out that there will be a market demand for embryos, which begets embryos as products, arriving at what you refer to as "the problem". For that to be a "problem", there has to be something wrong with producing embryos to sell to research, as opposed to producing embryos for reproduction. That is a moral judgement.
I don't think that embryos should be used for research in any case. There have been very encouraging steps taken using adult stem cells
Sorry, do you oppose embryonic stem cell research because it's immoral, or because it's unnecessary? What if adult stem cell research hits a dead end?
Religious people have difficulty with this concept, but consider the notion that human life is not a binary property that you either have or not have. That is, a human sperm or egg cell has a bit of humanity, an embryo has more, an embryo implanted in a uterus has still more, a born baby has even more, while a brain-dead accident victim perhaps has less.
Once you can accept this, then the arbitrary, discrete, and approximate classes of humans according to laws make more sense. Before the second trimester abortion is usually legal. By a certain point, you can be legally murdered. Before 18 you can't vote. Before 21 you can't drink. If you're no longer able to decide for yourself, your next of kin gets to pull your plug. And of course, for a large part of human history we condoned slavery, where humans were bought and sold as property. Killing a human in war can also have very different results for you, depending on the circumstances.
I don't have problems with birth control, since embryos don't always implant naturally.
So let's say your car brakes have not been working very well, and somebody drains the brake fluids and you die in the resulting accident. Shall that not be murder, because the brakes could've failed on its own? I would think that the person who made it 99% likely that you won't survive would be accused of murder.
A society that starts viewing certain human lives as less worthy of protection than others is not a society that's on a healthy ethical footing.
We have not only "started", we've been doing this throughout our history on this planet. Doesn't mean it's right or moral, but I hope you're not surprised. What it does mean is that perhaps the morally consistent socity you seek might have some practical difficulties, such as not being able to kill invading humans from a "less moral" society.
The objection is that if the use of these embryos for stem cell research is allowed then the demand for them will rise sharply.
In other words, it's moral and legal to create and destroy embryos if you at least partially want to have a baby. It's immoral and should be illegal to do exactly the same thing without wanting to have a baby.
I hope you realize that making the same action legal or illegal depending on ultimately unverifiable human motives is futile. It's like saying parents can beat their children if they really meant well, but not if they just had a bad day at work.
How much do you need to want to have that baby for some of your embryos to be legally diverted to research?
But see, I do use fire and police services. Indirectly. I pay to make sure someone is there to put out my house when I light it up
You're missing the point. Consider if many of your neighbors are not as smart enough to realize that you pay for the fire department not because you plan to light your house up, but because accidents happen. Consider if they don't think their houses will catch fire and refuse to pay for a fire department.
What will you do? You are unlikely to be able to afford it by yourself, but you think that "it should be illegal to charge someone for a service they do not use."
The reason I do not support recycling is [...]
As I said, reducing consumption and reusing tend to be more effective methods that people who oppose recycling don't often talk about. Seems to me that if you are opposed only to the inefficiencies of recycling, you'd at least avoid consuming non-renewables, or at least reuse them where you can.
it should be illegal to charge someone for a service they do not use.
Obviously, society collapses when each citizen is allowed to be entirely selfish. I think you would be happy to never need fire or police services in your lifetime, but you would probably not prefer to pay the full cost of such services if you are so unlucky to need them. That doesn't mean taxes should fund recycling programs or open WiFi connections or any other particular service, but it does mean that there's probably an arguable point where government should force you to pay for something you don't use.
Its too bad too many people hear recyling and think its always a good thing.
It's also too bad that many people, irked by the inefficiencies or expenses or recycling, forget that it's even better to reuse or avoid consumption when you can.
it should be much easier to convince people to put up $100 to try an alternate, superior OS
Linux doesn't beat Windows in every respect (and neither does MacOS X), but it's quite a bit cheaper than either. Why has it been so hard to convince people to even try Linux, and why doesn't MacOS X suffer the same problems?
Most people would probably more readily dive for Linux than want to go out and buy all new hardware
Nonsense. If this was the case, everybody would be running Linux now. The fact is that people are far more willing to continue using their old computer (which is why Windows 98 is still not quite dead), or buy a new computer. Linux is a distant third choice (and so is a Mac), in terms of popularity.
for people with small budgets -- getting an off-the-shelf x86 system and slapping Apple's "starter" OS on it would be good for basic needs.
Wouldn't people with these really small budgets rather run a free beer OS? Besides, even $300 Dell boxes come with Windows.
selling 20 million $200 operating systems every 2 years is better than selling 1 million $1000 computers
You're missing that little step 3 where Apple finds a way to increase its OS market share by 20x, especially considering this will literally have to happen over Microsoft's dead body.
M$ learned this lesson a long time ago, only chumps sell hardware.
Dell and Apple both seem to be making money from hardware. While Microsoft's position is undoubtedly lucrative, not everybody can or should be making money under the same business model.
what exactly is the point of social conservatives objecting to this?
Think of it as analogous to legal prostitution. Nearly everybody knows that prostitution cannot be entirely eradicated (especially when they exist in the form of marrying for money). Some people respond to that by allowing prostitution, and regulating it to various degrees. Others would rather prostitution exist in the shadows for fear of legitimizing it.
Their objective, if I may venture a guess, is to eradicate pornography, not merely to control it. That's why a.xxx TLD does nothing for them and might even make it look like they approve of it implicitly. Look, we're talking about people who consider abstinence the only way to control third world overpopulation, teenage sex, and sexually-transmitted diseases.
Sorry, which golden age are you referring to? Isaac Asimov certainly predicted widespread use of highly intelligent robots performing general tasks within middle class homes. In that world, the robots weren't "cheap", but they were certainly affordable and used widely. They were also far less specialized than personal computers today.
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My point is, if you reject Jesus Christ as your savior, then certainly His teachings will not form external control over your behavior except to the extent where it coincides with local laws. But once you accept and believe him, his teachings bind your behavior. The most important point that I'm trying to make is that your choice in the matter stops at choosing Christ as your savior, after which His teachings come wholesale, non-negotiable.
That is, there is no room for internal synthesis of your own personal morality. You are not free to say that Jesus really dropped the ball on teaching X or Y, and you'll do the opposite but remain Christian, basically by definition. Freedom from external control, to me, means that you are allowed by right to absorb and synthesize your own conscience. Christians don't have that right, theoretically anyway, because they've accepted external control of their behavior.
I pity you that your brand of Christianity operates through fear, as you attest. It is far better to aspire to heaven from love God.
I'm not Christian, so my understanding may be off the mark. The carrot and the stick are both common forms of external control, and I'm pointing out to you that even if you don't think much of it, the threat of hell is plainly evident in Christian teachings. If someone says he loves God but has no fear of spending eternity in hell, does that even make sense?
No, Christianity is about obeying the commands of Jesus Christ. When you violate such commands (i.e., love your neighbors), you risk your salvation. In other words, Christianity is a set of defined morals and clear punishment for disobedience. You may (in fact, you have to) be entirely willing to submit yourself to this belief system, but don't delude yourself that this isn't an external control over your internal moral compass.
Put another way, faith is not about agreeing with Jesus Christ and therefore believing in his divinity. It's about believing in his divinity first, and then obeying him. Jesus Christ is not a philospher you can just choose to agree with or disagree with like Confucius or Plato.
Let me give you a most obvious example. The Bible states clearly that you shall not kill. Yet Christian soldiers fire their weapons when attacked, because at that moment something inside them says it's right (though perhaps not Christian) to kill. If there was such a thing as a truly Christian (i.e., turn the other cheek) nation, it would be colonized in zero time. This is one case where your internal sense overrides the litaral teachings of religion.
Atheism, on the other hand, is the ultimate form of self control. Without fear of hell and the lure of heaven, and therefore no external bound on moral behavior other than law, an atheist who doesn't always act purely on self interest is doing exactly what you were ascribing.
None of above is allowed to vote.
"Sex and the City", "Six Feet Under", "The Wire", "Deadwood", "Rome", and other HBO productions are quite a bit more well-written and produced than most movies out there. Right about now, my on-screen guide shows me that HBO can also be showing "Titus", "Taxi", "True Lies", "Love Don't Cost a Thing", "The Spitfire Grill", "Career Opportunities", and "Talkin' Dirty After Dark". How many of those would you consider well-written?
My experiences contradict your statement. State machines are both easy to implement, and easy to debug, if you do it the right way. I have seen many entirely wrong implementations, including one where you can go from any of about two dozen "states" to any other. I have seen some that just switch states when they feel like it, or switch states based on complex decisions, which makes debugging difficult. Put another way, you can make a "state machine" degenerate into something else, and nullify its benefits, if you refuse to follow the rules.
A well-implemented state machine has an important characteristic: it is clear to see why you are where you are. This means that state transitions are checked (against unexpected events) and traced, so debugging the machine is literally a matter of reading a log that looks like this:
in state 0, received event A so went to state 2
in state 2, received event B so went to state 1
in state 1, received event C so went to state 5
in state 5, ignoring event A
in state 5, received unexpected event C
and so on. In this particular example, the question to answer is why we're not handling event C properly in state 5, or why we went to state 5 in the first place. Either should be pretty obvious when you consult the original design. The fix is likewise obvious. Figuring out state machines, in my experience, has always been easier than figuring out multi-threaded code.
This isn't to say that all programs should be implemented as a state machine. Simple Unix-style pipe programs, for instance, are generally unsuitable. If you don't know how to design a state machine properly, it's also going to be unsuitable.
You are entirely wrong, because you do not understand the concept of sequence points. In a nutshell, in C an object can only be modified once between two sequence points, and "i = i++;" is undefined because it is modifed twice. Do not respond to this post without learning what a sequence point is. Googling for "C sequence points" will get you several sources right on the first page.
You should read more specs.
I have read the C Standard. You, beyond any doubt, have not.
The government that is running Taiwan today is called the Republic of China. This is the government established by the Nationalist Party, which overthrew the imperial Qing Dynasty about a century ago. This is also the government that fought alongside the Allies in WWII against Japan, and is a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
After WWII, the government lost mainland China to the communists in civil war, and retreated to Taiwan. The communists then formed the People's Republic of China, and took over the Security Council seat and UN membership a couple of decades later.
Today, Taiwan maintains an independent executive, legislative, and judicial system, with police and military power. It also maintains diplomatic relationships with about two dozen small countries. It is not in the UN primarily because of the unfortunate zero-sum diplomatic contest that has been ongoing for decades now. Put simply, the PRC would not allow Taiwan into the UN, and most governments do not recognize Taiwan because the PRC would sever relations if they did.
I've head quite a few boxes on them that say Taiwan, ROC on them so I guess not even everyone there shares the same opinion.
Taiwan is ruled by the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China. The problem at hand is that by saying "Taiwan, China", people (like you, no offense) will mistake it for the People's Republic of China. Over the years, a good number of native (meaning, arrived in Taiwan before 1949) Taiwanese have grown to resent the repressive Nationalist rule, and there is now some negative reaction to the name "China". The Nationalists have since lost power in elections, and the new ruling party has tried what it can to ditch the "China" altogether and achieve an independent "Taiwan", but this remains the most divisive political issue on the island.
as for me, what the hell do I know about it !
HTML text formatting tags don't add very much to code comments, but there are many times I wished there was a good way to include even a simple drawing. A function may implement a state machine, and the easiest way to describe a state machine is frequently a state transition diagram. In some other cases, a table that I don't have to format by hand would also have been wonderful.
You are wrong. You cannot reverse-engineer a spec from an implementation, because you cannot separate the implementation choices from spec requirements. For example, if I show you an implementation of an algorithm, and you realize that it can run within 300 ms, do you know if there's an actual need for it to finish within 300 ms? Or, how would you know if an alternative implementation (that uses less RAM, for instance) that needs 500 ms to run is actually acceptable?
Similarly, there are almost always things in a spec that a particular implementation does not need (but another implementation would). To piece back together the actual spec would require reading multiple implementations and figuring out the union of all they implement. Worse, the implementations may actually contradict each other. The C language leaves certain constructs formally undefined (for example, "i = i++;" is undefined behavior), so how would you figure out what that's supposed to do by reading compiler source code?
Thirdly, while source code may be readable by people who want to provide an implementation, it is not readable by people who merely want to use it. When was the last time you learned to program in a language by reading the source code of its compiler? What if the compiler was self-hosting (that is, written in the language it compiles)?
Code examples are always better than specs because they are unambiguous.
So the complete source code to Mozilla is a better source of information on HTML than the W3C HTML specification?
Have you ever heard of the sex offender registry, and various regulations that require paroled or released convicts to go door-to-door introducing themselves? I'm not equating this to murder, but some crimes can stick with you for a long, long time.
Hell, just being arrested and searched by the FBI can ruin your reputation in the neighborhood, even if no charges are ever filed against you. How would you like, for instance, "suspected of downloading child pornography" attached to your name?
It just seems to me that belief in the free market are quickly abandoned when it doesn't go their way.
seriously, apple: do cost-benefit analysis of a radio tuner... how much does the circuitry cost?
If a radio tuner takes up negligible space, no engineering or manufacturing effort, and costs $0.50 to include in every iPod, then it would cost Apple $2.5M every quarter if it sold 5 million iPods in the span. Assuming Apple makes $50 per iPod sold, it would have to sell an additional (i.e., to people like you) 50,000 iPods each quarter just to break even on the effort. Now, note that space, engineering, and manufacturing all cost real money, and a very small radio tuner (you wouldn't expect the form factor to change just for this, right?) just might cost more than $0.50 each.
If there aren't significantly more than 200,000 of you every year, then your radio tuner would probably not be a standard part of the iPod. Hope this helps.
The government is just another manifestation of the people's will. We can use tax money to fund scientific research and education, but many people seem to prefer tax cuts instead.
So on the one hand we ask corporations to show us bigger and bigger profits every quarter, and on the other hand we ask government to take less taxes from us. Where exactly is the money going to come from?
Your comment also needs to be tempered. I still own a 350MHz K6, and it runs Windows 2000 about as well as it runs KDE - that is, not all that well. I remember my 8MB 66MHz 80486 laptop running Win98 and Word competently enough, but barely able to run X by itself, nevermind OpenOffice.
Point is, to a certain extent, a computer is stuck with its contemporary software. Linux is certainly more usable with more recent software, but the difference is not night and day. What does your 400 MHz P2 actually run when you say "Linux"? I very much doubt that OpenOffice "works great" on that box.
Another point is that many software have plateaued in terms of CPU demands. Nobody desperately needs Word or Excel or IE to run much faster, and what may be true of your 200MHz P2 is not necessarily applicable to a 1GHz Celeron. Other than rendering video, which I do once in a while, I basically don't need much more raw performance out of my 733MHz G4 running Tiger.
The Tomahawk missile can fly several hundred miles at very low altitude, avoiding terrain all the while, and hit a target within a few feet of error margin. Current production units cost under $600,000 per missile (and you don't need the rest of the missile), which might be less than the life insurance of one passenger.
Another alternative comes from Predator UAV technology, which I believe allows a ground station within line-of-sight to land the unmanned craft by remote control. The system cost is $40M, but the system is designed to be mobile, so you don't even have to equip every airport with it.
I do agree with you that any machine that can take over the controls from the pilots must be approached with extreme care. I just think that the system is not so much "frighteningly expensive", but too expensive for the "few" lives it will save. We don't like to admit that, of course.
Just to take this thought to conclusion, and if there aren't any alternatives?
In my mind embryonic life holds the same value that full-born life does. I'm not crazy about the embryos that are left over after fertility processes, either, but I think it's a harder moral line to draw.
So the worst reasons for infertile parents to reproduce is still more important, in your mind, than the most promising research to treat the most beloved terminally-ill person?
You also contradict yourself. If embryonic life has the same value as full-born life, then there cannot be any confusion to the morality of killing embryonic life leftover from fertility attempts, or even those deliberately prevented from implanting in a uterus. They must all be murder.
You point out that there will be a market demand for embryos, which begets embryos as products, arriving at what you refer to as "the problem". For that to be a "problem", there has to be something wrong with producing embryos to sell to research, as opposed to producing embryos for reproduction. That is a moral judgement.
I don't think that embryos should be used for research in any case. There have been very encouraging steps taken using adult stem cells
Sorry, do you oppose embryonic stem cell research because it's immoral, or because it's unnecessary? What if adult stem cell research hits a dead end?
Once you can accept this, then the arbitrary, discrete, and approximate classes of humans according to laws make more sense. Before the second trimester abortion is usually legal. By a certain point, you can be legally murdered. Before 18 you can't vote. Before 21 you can't drink. If you're no longer able to decide for yourself, your next of kin gets to pull your plug. And of course, for a large part of human history we condoned slavery, where humans were bought and sold as property. Killing a human in war can also have very different results for you, depending on the circumstances.
I don't have problems with birth control, since embryos don't always implant naturally.
So let's say your car brakes have not been working very well, and somebody drains the brake fluids and you die in the resulting accident. Shall that not be murder, because the brakes could've failed on its own? I would think that the person who made it 99% likely that you won't survive would be accused of murder.
A society that starts viewing certain human lives as less worthy of protection than others is not a society that's on a healthy ethical footing.
We have not only "started", we've been doing this throughout our history on this planet. Doesn't mean it's right or moral, but I hope you're not surprised. What it does mean is that perhaps the morally consistent socity you seek might have some practical difficulties, such as not being able to kill invading humans from a "less moral" society.
In other words, it's moral and legal to create and destroy embryos if you at least partially want to have a baby. It's immoral and should be illegal to do exactly the same thing without wanting to have a baby.
I hope you realize that making the same action legal or illegal depending on ultimately unverifiable human motives is futile. It's like saying parents can beat their children if they really meant well, but not if they just had a bad day at work.
How much do you need to want to have that baby for some of your embryos to be legally diverted to research?
You're missing the point. Consider if many of your neighbors are not as smart enough to realize that you pay for the fire department not because you plan to light your house up, but because accidents happen. Consider if they don't think their houses will catch fire and refuse to pay for a fire department.
What will you do? You are unlikely to be able to afford it by yourself, but you think that "it should be illegal to charge someone for a service they do not use."
The reason I do not support recycling is [...]
As I said, reducing consumption and reusing tend to be more effective methods that people who oppose recycling don't often talk about. Seems to me that if you are opposed only to the inefficiencies of recycling, you'd at least avoid consuming non-renewables, or at least reuse them where you can.
Obviously, society collapses when each citizen is allowed to be entirely selfish. I think you would be happy to never need fire or police services in your lifetime, but you would probably not prefer to pay the full cost of such services if you are so unlucky to need them. That doesn't mean taxes should fund recycling programs or open WiFi connections or any other particular service, but it does mean that there's probably an arguable point where government should force you to pay for something you don't use.
Its too bad too many people hear recyling and think its always a good thing.
It's also too bad that many people, irked by the inefficiencies or expenses or recycling, forget that it's even better to reuse or avoid consumption when you can.
Linux doesn't beat Windows in every respect (and neither does MacOS X), but it's quite a bit cheaper than either. Why has it been so hard to convince people to even try Linux, and why doesn't MacOS X suffer the same problems?
Most people would probably more readily dive for Linux than want to go out and buy all new hardware
Nonsense. If this was the case, everybody would be running Linux now. The fact is that people are far more willing to continue using their old computer (which is why Windows 98 is still not quite dead), or buy a new computer. Linux is a distant third choice (and so is a Mac), in terms of popularity.
for people with small budgets -- getting an off-the-shelf x86 system and slapping Apple's "starter" OS on it would be good for basic needs.
Wouldn't people with these really small budgets rather run a free beer OS? Besides, even $300 Dell boxes come with Windows.
You're missing that little step 3 where Apple finds a way to increase its OS market share by 20x, especially considering this will literally have to happen over Microsoft's dead body.
M$ learned this lesson a long time ago, only chumps sell hardware.
Dell and Apple both seem to be making money from hardware. While Microsoft's position is undoubtedly lucrative, not everybody can or should be making money under the same business model.
Think of it as analogous to legal prostitution. Nearly everybody knows that prostitution cannot be entirely eradicated (especially when they exist in the form of marrying for money). Some people respond to that by allowing prostitution, and regulating it to various degrees. Others would rather prostitution exist in the shadows for fear of legitimizing it.
Their objective, if I may venture a guess, is to eradicate pornography, not merely to control it. That's why a .xxx TLD does nothing for them and might even make it look like they approve of it implicitly. Look, we're talking about people who consider abstinence the only way to control third world overpopulation, teenage sex, and sexually-transmitted diseases.
Sorry, which golden age are you referring to? Isaac Asimov certainly predicted widespread use of highly intelligent robots performing general tasks within middle class homes. In that world, the robots weren't "cheap", but they were certainly affordable and used widely. They were also far less specialized than personal computers today.