I don't remember it being convinced before there was a public propaganda campaign. What I read on the CIA website in early 2003 (IIRC) was that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program (true at one time, but dismantled before 2003) and potential for chemical weapons. It didn't look like waiting another several months was going to hurt much, although, taking the report at face value, invading by the end of the year looked like a good idea. It wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false.
Neither a sperm nor an egg are a person. A fertilized egg is not a person, and nobody really believes it is, or they'd want cause-of-death investigations of late periods. Historically, fetuses have not been considered persons, as the law against abortion and the law against murder have been separate. There is no clear point at which a cell becomes a human. Some points that have been used are conception, birth, and "quickening", which (IIRC) corresponds roughly with the beginning of human brain activity.
As far as I've been able to tell, this is also true of politicians who run as "pro-life": they're not interested in reducing the number of abortions so much as they're interested in using it as a wedge issue. If they managed to get abortion banned again, or come up with some sort of resolution, they'd lose supporters.
Obviously, this isn't all anti-abortion politicians, but at least a large part of them, probably the majority.
I don't remember what BlueStrat has written on the issue, and I'm not going to check up, because it's pointless. BlueStrat was talking about one thing, and you started talking about something different you don't like about BlueStrat. That doesn't help anyone. If you read something BlueStrat has written and you take objection to something in it, please post. If you take objection to BlueStrat, hunt down his or her posts and respond to what's in the post. Objecting to things BlueStrat has said in other posts just derails the conversation.
There is no greater good, there are only gradations of evil interference that can come out of government.
Pure ideology there.
There are two main ways to figure value to employer, and you don't seem to realize the implications. One is that an employee is worth what it would cost to get a satisfactory replacement for him or her. The other is that an employee is worth the value he or she brings to the employer. (The second is way oversimplified as I said it, since the cost of an employee is always greater than the employee's pay, and that needs to be accounted for.) There is usually a gap there.
Presumably, you hire people who contribute more than they cost, and you pay them more or less what it would cost to get a satisfactory replacement. If the minimum wage increases, then the replacement cost increases. For some people, you'd now be paying them more than they're worth, and you'd eliminate their jobs and do something different. Other people would still contribute more than you're paying them. You'll still be hiring people with no experience or skills and paying them minimum wage, but there will be fewer of them, because their jobs will have to be worth enough to justify the pay.
The minimum-wage employee is not necessarily without skills or experience, at least in the US. There frequently are lots of people with low-level skills that you can pick up for minimum wage, since if you don't like how they work out you can fire them and hire another qualified candidate for minimum wage.
Let's take an example. You run a store, and you need a minimum-wage guy to come in and do various things as ordered. It turns out that you need two people to keep the store open, you and someone else with minimal qualifications. That guy is letting you keep the store open, and that's where your revenue comes from. He or she is indispensable, and is contributing a great deal to the business. You'll pay any reasonable minimum wage.
Out of curiosity, asking a non-political non-religious non-weather related question, why did you start posting on something verboten under your third heading?
No, if I hired someone to push my novel on Amazon, and Amazon distributed it, they'd be acting under license. If you told Amazon to distribute it, without a license from me or someone authorized to issue them, Amazon would not have a valid license. It's not that difficult.
No, I don't know better. You present me with examples of people unable to say certain things to certain audiences and call that censorship. I entirely agree that those are censorship, because the government stopped people from saying things. Perhaps I should be more clear: censorship is preventing people from saying certain things to certain audiences. In some cases, the audience is a whole country, or many countries. In some cases, the audience is just a few people (in WWII, letters home were censored, in that the soldiers couldn't write anything in them that was likely to help the enemy if found out). So, if you'd find people who were kicked off Facebook or Twitter on the basis of political beliefs, I'll believe they're censoring. Slanting the news is not censorship, unless you do it by silencing some people. Providing biased news isn't censorship.
Give me an actual joke and I'll enjoy it like anyone else. There isn't one in this thread. I've made some elsewhere (got a +5, Funny or whatever it is once), but recently I've been getting really annoyed by stupid people who make a claim and wave me in the general direction of Google instead of supporting it.
I've worked in science. Unlike you, I'm looking at this calmly and rationally. You said that the fact that they didn't eliminate two of their sample showed agenda and bias. For this to happen, you need to show why they should have. Obviously, two people in a group are insufficient to tell almost anything about the group. However, if they establish numeric values for classes, like ranks, the two self-reported upper-class people are significant in calculating correlation. There are other statistical tests where having two people in one group is marginally better than having none.
No, you're ignoring the plain meaning of the words.
Some people want flood insurance. Private insurance companies won't sell it at affordable prices. I agree that government subsidies are a scam here, but the government makes flood insurance affordable.
The advantages of GPS were obvious, but it was too expensive for private companies to do, hence unaffordable. It's affordable now.
The post office made sending messages affordable. The government took advantage of that.
You seem to be saying that US residents must pay godawful prices for drugs to keep drug companies developing new drugs. I agree that this is how much new drug research is currently funded, but I really think we can find a better solution.
I've been looking at pebbles. So far, I've mostly been running into things like the uranium deal with Russia, which is not really evidence of corruption. There is one incident from the 1970s or 1980s I'm not through investigating.
Clinton is not squeaky clean. There's bad things about her. My current judgment is that these don't matter all that much for the Presidency, and I expect her to be a good (not great) President.
Put copyrighted decorative designs on every ballot, so that any photo that shows enough of the ballot to be useful has enough of the decoration to infringe on copyright. (The Federal government itself can't get a copyright on anything it produces directly. This is not necessarily true of the states. Moreover, both the Feds and the states can buy copyrights.)
Then, if anyone creates an illicit copy of part of a ballot, sue them for intentional copyright violation. The statutory damages for that are ruinous.
I don't know whether it matters to me. What's the co-worker or person I know going to do to me if I vote against his or her interests? I will confess to having concerns about being fired or beaten up.
Apparently, there was a claim of this. The voter was unwilling to swear that he hadn't accidentally selected the wrong line, and did correct his vote before casting it. The machine was investigated.
Claims of this will happen in ANY system without a human-readable paper ballot, which is why they're so fundamentally important.
Around here, there are strict chain-of-custody rules on ballot boxes, and observers from both major parties (and likely others) will be on hand whenever the tamper-evident seals are broken. Having observers from all concerned parties means that, if someone tries cheating, there's at least one person in the room who will protest.
If you have a legitimate photo, you can use it as free speech. There's already restrictions on that, by the way; most of the time, you won't be allowed to publicly display a picture of a naked person with the "naughty bits" visible. You certainly won't be allowed to publicly display a photo of a minor being sexually abused. This doesn't mean it's legal to display everything. If you take a photo of something copyrighted, you may well not have the right to display it.
Given thee restrictions, forbidding photos of filled-out ballots looks very reasonable.
Thiel donated money to a political campaign. That had nothing to do with voting. Free speech means that you can say what you want, not that others can't react to it as they please.
Voter fraud like that does exist, but not on any significant scale. You'll note that (taking your words at face value for argument's sake) you have increased the total for your preferred candidate by two votes while leaving forensic evidence behind, and if they catch you you will face felony charges. Assuming there's any sort of enforcement of voting laws, the risk to reward ratio sucks big-time. That's why there's not much of this sort of vote fraud: not because everybody in politics is honest and upstanding, but because it isn't worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember it being convinced before there was a public propaganda campaign. What I read on the CIA website in early 2003 (IIRC) was that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program (true at one time, but dismantled before 2003) and potential for chemical weapons. It didn't look like waiting another several months was going to hurt much, although, taking the report at face value, invading by the end of the year looked like a good idea. It wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false.
Neither a sperm nor an egg are a person. A fertilized egg is not a person, and nobody really believes it is, or they'd want cause-of-death investigations of late periods. Historically, fetuses have not been considered persons, as the law against abortion and the law against murder have been separate. There is no clear point at which a cell becomes a human. Some points that have been used are conception, birth, and "quickening", which (IIRC) corresponds roughly with the beginning of human brain activity.
As far as I've been able to tell, this is also true of politicians who run as "pro-life": they're not interested in reducing the number of abortions so much as they're interested in using it as a wedge issue. If they managed to get abortion banned again, or come up with some sort of resolution, they'd lose supporters.
Obviously, this isn't all anti-abortion politicians, but at least a large part of them, probably the majority.
I don't remember what BlueStrat has written on the issue, and I'm not going to check up, because it's pointless. BlueStrat was talking about one thing, and you started talking about something different you don't like about BlueStrat. That doesn't help anyone. If you read something BlueStrat has written and you take objection to something in it, please post. If you take objection to BlueStrat, hunt down his or her posts and respond to what's in the post. Objecting to things BlueStrat has said in other posts just derails the conversation.
Pure ideology there.
There are two main ways to figure value to employer, and you don't seem to realize the implications. One is that an employee is worth what it would cost to get a satisfactory replacement for him or her. The other is that an employee is worth the value he or she brings to the employer. (The second is way oversimplified as I said it, since the cost of an employee is always greater than the employee's pay, and that needs to be accounted for.) There is usually a gap there.
Presumably, you hire people who contribute more than they cost, and you pay them more or less what it would cost to get a satisfactory replacement. If the minimum wage increases, then the replacement cost increases. For some people, you'd now be paying them more than they're worth, and you'd eliminate their jobs and do something different. Other people would still contribute more than you're paying them. You'll still be hiring people with no experience or skills and paying them minimum wage, but there will be fewer of them, because their jobs will have to be worth enough to justify the pay.
The minimum-wage employee is not necessarily without skills or experience, at least in the US. There frequently are lots of people with low-level skills that you can pick up for minimum wage, since if you don't like how they work out you can fire them and hire another qualified candidate for minimum wage.
Let's take an example. You run a store, and you need a minimum-wage guy to come in and do various things as ordered. It turns out that you need two people to keep the store open, you and someone else with minimal qualifications. That guy is letting you keep the store open, and that's where your revenue comes from. He or she is indispensable, and is contributing a great deal to the business. You'll pay any reasonable minimum wage.
Quantum mechanics? Relativity? Newtonian gravitation? There's been a lot of basic research with no apparent near future applications.
Out of curiosity, asking a non-political non-religious non-weather related question, why did you start posting on something verboten under your third heading?
No, if I hired someone to push my novel on Amazon, and Amazon distributed it, they'd be acting under license. If you told Amazon to distribute it, without a license from me or someone authorized to issue them, Amazon would not have a valid license. It's not that difficult.
Thanks. That's interesting. Having programmed both the Z80 and 6809 when I was a lot younger, I'd rather have the 6809.
No, I don't know better. You present me with examples of people unable to say certain things to certain audiences and call that censorship. I entirely agree that those are censorship, because the government stopped people from saying things. Perhaps I should be more clear: censorship is preventing people from saying certain things to certain audiences. In some cases, the audience is a whole country, or many countries. In some cases, the audience is just a few people (in WWII, letters home were censored, in that the soldiers couldn't write anything in them that was likely to help the enemy if found out). So, if you'd find people who were kicked off Facebook or Twitter on the basis of political beliefs, I'll believe they're censoring. Slanting the news is not censorship, unless you do it by silencing some people. Providing biased news isn't censorship.
Give me an actual joke and I'll enjoy it like anyone else. There isn't one in this thread. I've made some elsewhere (got a +5, Funny or whatever it is once), but recently I've been getting really annoyed by stupid people who make a claim and wave me in the general direction of Google instead of supporting it.
I've worked in science. Unlike you, I'm looking at this calmly and rationally. You said that the fact that they didn't eliminate two of their sample showed agenda and bias. For this to happen, you need to show why they should have. Obviously, two people in a group are insufficient to tell almost anything about the group. However, if they establish numeric values for classes, like ranks, the two self-reported upper-class people are significant in calculating correlation. There are other statistical tests where having two people in one group is marginally better than having none.
No, you're ignoring the plain meaning of the words.
Some people want flood insurance. Private insurance companies won't sell it at affordable prices. I agree that government subsidies are a scam here, but the government makes flood insurance affordable.
The advantages of GPS were obvious, but it was too expensive for private companies to do, hence unaffordable. It's affordable now.
The post office made sending messages affordable. The government took advantage of that.
You seem to be saying that US residents must pay godawful prices for drugs to keep drug companies developing new drugs. I agree that this is how much new drug research is currently funded, but I really think we can find a better solution.
Ah, your telepathy must be strong.
I've been looking at pebbles. So far, I've mostly been running into things like the uranium deal with Russia, which is not really evidence of corruption. There is one incident from the 1970s or 1980s I'm not through investigating.
Clinton is not squeaky clean. There's bad things about her. My current judgment is that these don't matter all that much for the Presidency, and I expect her to be a good (not great) President.
Put copyrighted decorative designs on every ballot, so that any photo that shows enough of the ballot to be useful has enough of the decoration to infringe on copyright. (The Federal government itself can't get a copyright on anything it produces directly. This is not necessarily true of the states. Moreover, both the Feds and the states can buy copyrights.)
Then, if anyone creates an illicit copy of part of a ballot, sue them for intentional copyright violation. The statutory damages for that are ruinous.
I don't know whether it matters to me. What's the co-worker or person I know going to do to me if I vote against his or her interests? I will confess to having concerns about being fired or beaten up.
Apparently, there was a claim of this. The voter was unwilling to swear that he hadn't accidentally selected the wrong line, and did correct his vote before casting it. The machine was investigated.
Claims of this will happen in ANY system without a human-readable paper ballot, which is why they're so fundamentally important.
Around here, there are strict chain-of-custody rules on ballot boxes, and observers from both major parties (and likely others) will be on hand whenever the tamper-evident seals are broken. Having observers from all concerned parties means that, if someone tries cheating, there's at least one person in the room who will protest.
With internet voting, one of two things is true.
You can't verify your vote, and since there's no paper trail there's no way to tell that that 98% vote for Trump was rigged.
You can verify your vote, which means your abusive spouse will make you, and you're in deep trouble if you voted "wrong".
At least in my state, a misdemeanor is less serious, and what you're talking about is a gross misdemeanor. There's a difference.
Most male genitalia are lopsided. I believe the left one tends to hang lower.
If you have a legitimate photo, you can use it as free speech. There's already restrictions on that, by the way; most of the time, you won't be allowed to publicly display a picture of a naked person with the "naughty bits" visible. You certainly won't be allowed to publicly display a photo of a minor being sexually abused. This doesn't mean it's legal to display everything. If you take a photo of something copyrighted, you may well not have the right to display it.
Given thee restrictions, forbidding photos of filled-out ballots looks very reasonable.
Thiel donated money to a political campaign. That had nothing to do with voting. Free speech means that you can say what you want, not that others can't react to it as they please.
Voting should be private and secret.
Voter fraud like that does exist, but not on any significant scale. You'll note that (taking your words at face value for argument's sake) you have increased the total for your preferred candidate by two votes while leaving forensic evidence behind, and if they catch you you will face felony charges. Assuming there's any sort of enforcement of voting laws, the risk to reward ratio sucks big-time. That's why there's not much of this sort of vote fraud: not because everybody in politics is honest and upstanding, but because it isn't worth it.