you rarely here about anybody supporting lower sentances for crimes
Just as you rarely see politicians endorsing limits on government power, or reducing the scope and expense of government in general. No surprise there. The larger the business, the more potential profit for those who control the business. There is a simple reason why the US federal government today dwarfs the US federal government of only 100 years ago (in power, scope, and expense): because it benefits those in power.
It doesn't surprise me that government is willing to put a dollar amount on human life. The US government is doing exactly that in Iraq. After thousands of steady, continuous civilian deaths, "collateral damage" is proven inevitable. It is all but guaranteed. Therefore, by "staying the course" and continuing to wage war, the US government makes a calcutated decision to sacrifice innocent human lives for political agenda. (Isolated killings may or may not be consiered accidental, but the war as a whole is certainly not.) Logically, if those human lives were considered priceless (with no possible "worth" that could be assigned to them), then the US government would have halted the war long ago.
The problem with capital punishment are that (1) it's irreversible
Exactly, and what this means in practice is that innocent people *will* be executed. (There has been more than one case of a prisoner on death row later proved innocent -- that says it all.) Now, I'm not going to argue that murderers don't deserve to die. They do, and they also deserve to burn in hell for eternity. But that isn't the issue here. The issue is that government is not perfect and never will be, and therefore government should NOT posess the power to invoke the ultimate, irreversible penalty (death). Government makes mistakes, and that is a proven fact. To think that somehow the death penalty is exempt from mistakes (or abuse) is just naive. To execute an innocent man is to commit the exact crime government strives to avenge with the death penalty.
OS the problem? Not in my experience. My home computer doubles as a jukebox (60 gigs worth of FLAC files, over 200 discs total) running XMMS on Linux. No problems whatsoever, let alone crashing. Attributing problems to "the OS" is just plain silly, considering the many other factors that are much more likely to be the source of problems.
That's the main drawback with lossless -- you need a lot of space to store it all. If it's not going to be a formal archive, then MP3 will be fine, but going with 256 is overkill. If you're going lossy, you might as well go with a lower bitrate and reap all the benefits of lossy compression. Even the highest possible quality of lossy compression is still lossy, after all. Going with 256 is like saving a JPEG at quality level "10" -- you may have slightly better quality, but the main benefit of lossy compression (space saving) is negated.
BTW, lossless compression has nothing to do with being an audiophile. It's not really about quality. It's about having an exact duplicate of your master copy -- this is why lossless is suitable for archiving and lossy is not. A lossless copy is as good as having the original CD and always will be; a lossy copy is not and never will be.
I'll be ripping all my cds to high quality MP3 befor i go to college, not because its the absolute best, but because its a standard.
Archive them with the FLAC lossless format, and you can later re-encode them to any lossy format you want. Archive them with a lossy format (MP3), and be stuck forever in that format.
I've archived my entire CD collection in FLAC format (almost 200 discs, about 60GB), and I normally play them right off the hard disk. But, I also have scripts to automaticlly convert to MP3 or OGG whenever the need arises (for portable CD player, etc).
It does not matter that rights are "guaranteed", because the guarantee will be ignored if government makes it so. What matters is the reality of government power vs. individual soverignty.
My textbooks still stay that Americans value freedom and free speech more than Canadians
You may be interested in this book. Not everything your textbooks say can be trusted, especially if those textbooks are meant for or approved by government schools ("public education" is the politically-correct term).
Technically, any government could be considered an oligarchy, by the fact that any government requires an inequality of power between those who impose the law and those who don't. That inequality must be weighted towards an elite few, or government wouldn't be able to fund its own existence (which it must do by forcibly extracting revenue from the people who actually create wealth -- the majority -- who operate on the principle of voluntary association). Under any type of government, the law must be imposed by someone, and that someone must hold power (the "right" to initiate force as a means to an end) over everyone else. If that someone was equal in power to everyone else, i.e. had no "right" to initiate force, then government wouldn't exist. Thus, power is naturally concentrated in the hands of an elite few, and this is the general definition of oligarchy. To state this another way, if everyone held the "right" to initiate force, then all crime would be legal.
If I could die to save lives of my countrymen, and to save what I believe in I would.
You are trying to imply that you have a choice between dying for a noble cause and dying by senseless aggression. My scenario doesn't give you that choice. My scenario puts you in Iraq, with a wife and children, and a foreign superpower dropping bombs on your house for *their* cause, not yours.
You wouldn't be dying for a cause. You would be dying because of simple aggression. Please answer the question under that criteria.
You have to get past the idea that you belong to the US "team", and the Iraqis belong to the Iraqi "team". Realize that you are a human being, just like the human beings in Iraq, each of which are equally deserving of life. There is no difference whatsoever between an innocent Iraqi and an innocent American.
Good insight. I agree with most of what you're saying. Innocent deaths are not necessarily the root cause of terrorism, but most certainly serve to stir the hornet's nest. The root cause is simply aggression of any type -- in general, the US government's long history of dealing with other coutries (especially Arab nations) through the initiation of force.
And BTW, thanks for responding with a calm and respectful tone, which is more than I can say for most people who respond to my anti-war posts.
I did say, killing one person to save two others is ok which you had no answer for
I most certainly do have an answer to that, which you can't possibly dispute: if you kill an innocent person, for any possible reason, you are a murderer who has committed the most horrible act of aggression possible. The heroic notion of saving another (or two, as you put it) is therefore null and void. Logically, you cannot be BOTH a murderer (a deplorable sub-human who initiates force as a means to an end) and a hero (a commendable savior who only invokes force in defense of force) at the same time.
And I don't believe you've answered the most revealing question: what if the person who is killed to supposedly save another (or 100 others) is you, your wife, or a member of your family? You're stuck between a rock and a hard place now, because if you say it's immoral and unjust for a "hero" to kill you or your family for the supposed benefit of others, then you're a hypocrite, and your logic is proven arbitrary. On the other hand, if you say it's moral and just, then you have undermined your own inalienable right to individual soverignty. If you honestly choose to do that, then you may retain your stance without becoming a hypocrite, but now you must admit that you consider yourself nothing but a tool of the state, expendable for whatever reason the state deems necessary.
The idea behind libertarianism is the zero-aggression principle.
If the zero-aggression principle is noble, then how can the deliberate killing of innocent people (an act of aggression if there ever was one) ALSO be noble as you claimed before?
Actually, I have seen otherwise intelligent people readily adopt that stance (that terrorists hate the US because of our freedom, or wealth, or religious beliefs, or basically any non-aggressive act they can drum up). When offered the possibility that terrorists hate the US because the US government regularly kills innocent civilians in the wake of its never-ending war campaigns, these same people launch into a verbal assult and full-out denial of any logic which tries to "reason with the terrorists". (As if admitting that the US government is wrong would somehow give justification for the terrorists' dispicable attacks on innocent people.)
Group think. That's what we're dealing with here (on both sides, the gung-ho warmongers AND the terrorists). It's simply easier for people to conform to the group, than it is to deny the group and think for themselves. If pushed, some of these people will actually claim that it is just and moral to MURDER an innocent human being if it supposedly saves another. This is the power of group think.
I really have nothing to say, except that I can't possibly understand the thought process of somebody who would deliberately murder an innocent, no matter what the supposed gain. To me, that is the work of the devil.
BTW, I'm certainly no "liberal" (which nowadays means "socialist"), but thanks for the insult.
Ah, the typical comparisons to past wars, and the typical blather about how freedom isn't free. Let me guess: you're going to argue that all wars are justified, no matter what the reason, or how many innocents are killed?
Here's a curveball for you: Do you consider the US government evil for murdering upwards of 75,000 at Hiroshima, the vast majority of whom were non-aggressors and just wanted to live their lives in peace?
If you answered "no" to the above (which I'm assuming you did), would you answer differently if the tables were turned and YOUR city was the one that was destroyed?
The goal of the war on Iraq is not to kill innocent people. The goal is simply to generate "justification" for bigger government: more revenue, more power over the people, more "responsibilities", and naturally, more profit for the powerful elite. Are you aware that the US federal government today dwarfs the US federal government of only 100 years ago? How exactly did they achieve this incredible growth? War, plain and simple. As the saying goes, war is the health of the state.
you must understand there will be innocent people killed on both sides
I hold that it is immoral to kill an innocent for any possible reason, even if it *could* be proved that killing one innocent would save another.
I'll ignore the rest of your personal attacks and random conformist propaganda. BTW, where are those weapons of mass destruction?
That's all fine and dandy, but I said "a crusade", not "THE Crusades".
the only way to win a war against terroism is to give what you get
Are you saying that in order to stop the killing of innocent people we need to kill innocent people? That's exactly what's been happening for years, and it sure hasn't fixed anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as you rarely see politicians endorsing limits on government power, or reducing the scope and expense of government in general. No surprise there. The larger the business, the more potential profit for those who control the business. There is a simple reason why the US federal government today dwarfs the US federal government of only 100 years ago (in power, scope, and expense): because it benefits those in power.
It doesn't surprise me that government is willing to put a dollar amount on human life. The US government is doing exactly that in Iraq. After thousands of steady, continuous civilian deaths, "collateral damage" is proven inevitable. It is all but guaranteed. Therefore, by "staying the course" and continuing to wage war, the US government makes a calcutated decision to sacrifice innocent human lives for political agenda. (Isolated killings may or may not be consiered accidental, but the war as a whole is certainly not.) Logically, if those human lives were considered priceless (with no possible "worth" that could be assigned to them), then the US government would have halted the war long ago.
Exactly, and what this means in practice is that innocent people *will* be executed. (There has been more than one case of a prisoner on death row later proved innocent -- that says it all.) Now, I'm not going to argue that murderers don't deserve to die. They do, and they also deserve to burn in hell for eternity. But that isn't the issue here. The issue is that government is not perfect and never will be, and therefore government should NOT posess the power to invoke the ultimate, irreversible penalty (death). Government makes mistakes, and that is a proven fact. To think that somehow the death penalty is exempt from mistakes (or abuse) is just naive. To execute an innocent man is to commit the exact crime government strives to avenge with the death penalty.
OS the problem? Not in my experience. My home computer doubles as a jukebox (60 gigs worth of FLAC files, over 200 discs total) running XMMS on Linux. No problems whatsoever, let alone crashing. Attributing problems to "the OS" is just plain silly, considering the many other factors that are much more likely to be the source of problems.
That's the main drawback with lossless -- you need a lot of space to store it all. If it's not going to be a formal archive, then MP3 will be fine, but going with 256 is overkill. If you're going lossy, you might as well go with a lower bitrate and reap all the benefits of lossy compression. Even the highest possible quality of lossy compression is still lossy, after all. Going with 256 is like saving a JPEG at quality level "10" -- you may have slightly better quality, but the main benefit of lossy compression (space saving) is negated.
BTW, lossless compression has nothing to do with being an audiophile. It's not really about quality. It's about having an exact duplicate of your master copy -- this is why lossless is suitable for archiving and lossy is not. A lossless copy is as good as having the original CD and always will be; a lossy copy is not and never will be.
Why would you go to the trouble of "testing" lossless when you could just play the original disc?
Archive them with the FLAC lossless format, and you can later re-encode them to any lossy format you want. Archive them with a lossy format (MP3), and be stuck forever in that format.
I've archived my entire CD collection in FLAC format (almost 200 discs, about 60GB), and I normally play them right off the hard disk. But, I also have scripts to automaticlly convert to MP3 or OGG whenever the need arises (for portable CD player, etc).
It does not matter that rights are "guaranteed", because the guarantee will be ignored if government makes it so. What matters is the reality of government power vs. individual soverignty.
You may be interested in this book. Not everything your textbooks say can be trusted, especially if those textbooks are meant for or approved by government schools ("public education" is the politically-correct term).
Technically, any government could be considered an oligarchy, by the fact that any government requires an inequality of power between those who impose the law and those who don't. That inequality must be weighted towards an elite few, or government wouldn't be able to fund its own existence (which it must do by forcibly extracting revenue from the people who actually create wealth -- the majority -- who operate on the principle of voluntary association). Under any type of government, the law must be imposed by someone, and that someone must hold power (the "right" to initiate force as a means to an end) over everyone else. If that someone was equal in power to everyone else, i.e. had no "right" to initiate force, then government wouldn't exist. Thus, power is naturally concentrated in the hands of an elite few, and this is the general definition of oligarchy. To state this another way, if everyone held the "right" to initiate force, then all crime would be legal.
You are trying to imply that you have a choice between dying for a noble cause and dying by senseless aggression. My scenario doesn't give you that choice. My scenario puts you in Iraq, with a wife and children, and a foreign superpower dropping bombs on your house for *their* cause, not yours.
You wouldn't be dying for a cause. You would be dying because of simple aggression. Please answer the question under that criteria.
You have to get past the idea that you belong to the US "team", and the Iraqis belong to the Iraqi "team". Realize that you are a human being, just like the human beings in Iraq, each of which are equally deserving of life. There is no difference whatsoever between an innocent Iraqi and an innocent American.
Point taken. I will be more careful about this in the future.
Good insight. I agree with most of what you're saying. Innocent deaths are not necessarily the root cause of terrorism, but most certainly serve to stir the hornet's nest. The root cause is simply aggression of any type -- in general, the US government's long history of dealing with other coutries (especially Arab nations) through the initiation of force.
And BTW, thanks for responding with a calm and respectful tone, which is more than I can say for most people who respond to my anti-war posts.
I most certainly do have an answer to that, which you can't possibly dispute: if you kill an innocent person, for any possible reason, you are a murderer who has committed the most horrible act of aggression possible. The heroic notion of saving another (or two, as you put it) is therefore null and void. Logically, you cannot be BOTH a murderer (a deplorable sub-human who initiates force as a means to an end) and a hero (a commendable savior who only invokes force in defense of force) at the same time.
And I don't believe you've answered the most revealing question: what if the person who is killed to supposedly save another (or 100 others) is you, your wife, or a member of your family? You're stuck between a rock and a hard place now, because if you say it's immoral and unjust for a "hero" to kill you or your family for the supposed benefit of others, then you're a hypocrite, and your logic is proven arbitrary. On the other hand, if you say it's moral and just, then you have undermined your own inalienable right to individual soverignty. If you honestly choose to do that, then you may retain your stance without becoming a hypocrite, but now you must admit that you consider yourself nothing but a tool of the state, expendable for whatever reason the state deems necessary.
That doesn't change a thing. If you kill one innocent human being to supposedly save 100 then you are still a bloody murderer.
The idea behind libertarianism is the zero-aggression principle.
If the zero-aggression principle is noble, then how can the deliberate killing of innocent people (an act of aggression if there ever was one) ALSO be noble as you claimed before?
Group think. That's what we're dealing with here (on both sides, the gung-ho warmongers AND the terrorists). It's simply easier for people to conform to the group, than it is to deny the group and think for themselves. If pushed, some of these people will actually claim that it is just and moral to MURDER an innocent human being if it supposedly saves another. This is the power of group think.
It is murder, plain and simple. Prove that it isn't.
If you kill a human being to supposedly save another, you are no hero, you are a bloody murderer.
Thanks for being honest, but I find it hard to believe you can't see the hypocrisy in that statement. So here's the big question:
What if the person who is murdered for the supposed benefit of others is YOU OR YOUR FAMILY?
I really have nothing to say, except that I can't possibly understand the thought process of somebody who would deliberately murder an innocent, no matter what the supposed gain. To me, that is the work of the devil.
BTW, I'm certainly no "liberal" (which nowadays means "socialist"), but thanks for the insult.
Ah, the typical comparisons to past wars, and the typical blather about how freedom isn't free. Let me guess: you're going to argue that all wars are justified, no matter what the reason, or how many innocents are killed?
Here's a curveball for you: Do you consider the US government evil for murdering upwards of 75,000 at Hiroshima, the vast majority of whom were non-aggressors and just wanted to live their lives in peace?
If you answered "no" to the above (which I'm assuming you did), would you answer differently if the tables were turned and YOUR city was the one that was destroyed?
you must understand there will be innocent people killed on both sides
I hold that it is immoral to kill an innocent for any possible reason, even if it *could* be proved that killing one innocent would save another.
I'll ignore the rest of your personal attacks and random conformist propaganda. BTW, where are those weapons of mass destruction?
And that's exactly why "we" are largely resented around the world.
There's one little problem: I never said or meant to imply that. Perhaps I should have used the word "conquest" instead of "crusade"?
the only way to win a war against terroism is to give what you get
Are you saying that in order to stop the killing of innocent people we need to kill innocent people? That's exactly what's been happening for years, and it sure hasn't fixed anything.