But that's what confuses me. Much like light and sound travel at different speeds, but nobody claims a causality violation when you see something before you hear it (a distant explosion, say) why would my example violate causality?
Now imagine that you were waiting for this distant explosion because you were supposed to set off one of your own as soon as you saw the first one. And you did so faithfully. And then, when you radioed to your distant partner in pointless pyrotechnics, he was irate because he claimed that you had set off your explosive first! Either one of you is wrong/lying, or causality is broken.
One of the key aspects of relativity is that there are no privileged reference frames. Which means that for causality to mean anything, cause must precede effect according to all reference points that can observe them. Yet relativity also says that time can pass differently for different reference points based on speed/mass, and thus can have different views on when events happened. It is this combined with faster-than-light communication which would make it possible to effectively send information into the past.
Your example by itself would not result in a causality violation. But once you involve another reference frame that itself has instantaneous communication through gravity waves, then it becomes possible to create a chain in which the sender of one message receives a response before sending the message. I don't have the technical knowledge of relativity to show you, but here's a website with pretty pictures.
See, there is a fundamental and unproved ASSUMPTION in Physics that gravity waves must travel at the speed of light
Well, if you're referring to gravity waves being limited to at most c, then that's a pretty safe assumption. It basically means you're assuming that causality exists (i.e. effects occur after causes). It would be an extremely bizarre universe if that were not true.
Though I suppose Newton considered it a pretty safe assumption that time was constant for all frames of reference. Must have seemed like a no-brainer, because in what kind of crazy universe did time pass at an objectively different 'rate' for different people?
But at least we can reason about a universe in which that isn't the case. A universe which doesn't obey causality? I'm not sure it would be possible to make sense of such a thing.
The outcome of pvp encounters used to be maybe 50% skill and preparation, 20% luck and 30% gear and class make-up. With all of the changes they've introduced this past year, your typical arena match is determined by 10% skill and preparation, 5% luck, 85% gear and class make-up. Doesn't that sound exhilarating kids?
Don't kid yourself. PvP has always been 80% gear. Arena just makes that painfully obvious because you "win" based on a single death match between equal numbers of equal leveled players.
BGs mask the fact because a single "encounter" (as in two groups of people fighting) isn't what determines victory. If you lose most of your fights, but accomplish the objectives, then you win. But the fights themselves? Well mostly about numbers, but then it was all about the gear. Same with world PvP, where the side who got more high-level reinforcements would win, but given equal numbers it was still all about the gear.
Now personally I like the BGs exactly because it opens up other avenues for victory -- as in, I may get completely smoked by the better-geared player, but if I distracted them long enough that the flag carrier could escape, then that was a successful strategy. But as far as the actualy "PvP" aspect of trying to kill the other guy? Yeah, that's gear. And then maybe some skill and luck.
According to Blizzard that is anybody who has ever touched the game for the course of its history. Which includes those who already cancelled their accounts... and probably even accounts way back from open beta, since technically those to were free promotional subscriptions
You mean according to you. According to Blizzard, which you actually quoted though clearly misread:
"The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards."
So no, it does not include anyone who has ever touched the game. It in fact is a pretty reasonable definition that includes only people who are currently paying for access to the game.
You could always: 1) Move to a place where public transport links are better
In the real world, people aren't always free to move wherever they want at the drop of a hat. There's these things called "jobs" that tend to play a large role in where people choose to live. And no, not everyone can have the kind of job that grants them mobility. Or, the kind of job that grants mobility doesn't grant the money to move.
2) Vote for politicians who will fund public transport
Been trying. Even got an actual light rail proposal passed -- 5 years on, and we've barely got one rail route that serves only a fraction of the city, no plans for more. And meanwhile traffic only gets worse...
It doesn't help that our state government is entirely in the pocket of big business. Our governor is even trying to shut down key bus stops in our city, actually making our already mediocre-at-best public transportation worse!
Yeah that does suck. But it's much more rare than people buying houses nowhere near public transit and then complaining that it doesn't come close to their house.
It would be impossible for everyone to buy a house near public transit.
Hell it would be highly impractical in many places to make the existence of nearby public transport a major purchasing concern. You don't get to dictate what houses are for sale, what their prices are, what the local property taxes are, and so on and so forth. If the place that you can afford isn't near a bus stop, that's all there is to it.
If you're going to actually put forward using public transportation as a solution, and in fact blame people for not buying their houses where they can use it, then there's only one solution: Provide more public transportation. When it is in fact easy to be near public transportation, and to be sure that your work place is also near public transportation, THEN you can blame people for moving someplace where they can't make use of it. But with the current state of public transportation in the U.S.? Not a chance.
taking advantage of pre-existing, bought-and-paid-for transportation and transit infrastructure, are starting to question why we ought to pay for your eight-lane suburb-to-suburb beltway highways.
Congratulations, you live in one of a handful of cities that have anything that could be called "transit infrastructure" where that doesn't mean just roads and highways.
If I lived in one of those places, I'd happily take public transportation.
I'm not saying everyone should make the same choices I do. I'm just wondering why people seem to believe they have a God-given right to cheap gas and door-to-door taxpayer-subsidized traffic-free one-person-per-car commuting.
Because people have to get to work, and their wanting other options doesn't cause them to magically spring into existence.
Being able to 1) choose where you live and 2) choose where you work such that 3) you can either make use of convenient public transportation or not have to commute at all, is a privilege and not simply a choice. Not everyone could do this, even if they did try to duplicate every choice you made.
I'm not saying you haven't, but I'll bet a lot of people never even think of it.
So? That doesn't change whether it exists. There's me, who has checked and found out that our public transportation is a joke, and then there's Joe Blow across the street, who hasn't. Guess what? We still both have little choice but to drive!
Well what they said was "And a government mandate that citizens pay money to certain government-approved companies is somehow a good idea?"
Picking from a government-approved list is not in any way "free market". I was wrong to refer to it as using tax money, but there is honestly no relevant difference here. Any "Universal Health Care" plan must by necessity mean that people are coerced into buying their own or paying for others to have health care. And I'm saying forcing people to do that via the insurance companies is adding a for-profit corporate middleman to an utterly non-free market and thus amounts to corporate welfare.
Competition in health insurance will lower insurance premiums.
And has it? Or has it resulted in insurance companies lowering costs by providing fewer benefits? Or both? Does it matter? One way or another, the health insurance industry continues to enjoy margins of over 50%. Which right on the face of it means that they are spending less than 2/3rds of the money they take in as premiums on providing health care to their customers. So however much premiums have dropped (if at all), they could clearly drop much more while still keeping these companies profitable. But being for-profit, they don't want to do that unless they absolutely have to.
Maybe that's fine if you're completely pro-free market and don't mind that some people can't afford and thus don't have health care, and that these companies profit off of providing less care, but that's at least in theory not what people like Hillary Clinton stand for. What I'm getting at is that this is completely wrong-headed if what you're trying to do is provide health care for everyone, and to do so affordably. If you can't choose not to pay, then the only way to get the best price is to wield the power of collective bargaining. And, ideally, get rid of unnecessary for-profit middle-men who only turns 2/3rds at best of what you give them into actual health care.
That's my point, that this is an unworkable "compromise" between a free-market and socialized view of providing medicine that takes the worst aspects of both by keeping the profit motive and losing the market forces. I'd rather have the current system over these half-assed attempts at socialization.
Though I am pro-socialization. One thing I think people forget when they think about socialization, and think about government inefficiency vs corporate efficiency, is what exactly it is that corporations are efficient at. Corporations are efficient at finding the maximum price that the market will bear, and minimizing their own costs, so as to maximize profit. Government, on the other hand, is highly inefficient with regards to spending and tends to spend at least as much money as it takes in.
From the standpoint of myself, the person who wants to get the most health care for their buck, I much prefer the government who "inefficiently" spends excessively on health care so as to get a bigger budget the next year, than the insurance company who tries to "efficiently" spend as little of my money on health care as possible so as to get to keep more of it for themselves.
Personally I think it's a no-brainer. There are many hypothetical complaints about how it could never work that I think fall in the face of successful implementations in Canada, UK, and elsewhere. And to the extent that one can level complaints towards any of those systems, those too I think would vanish simply by increasing their spending to the levels that we already are. We spend much more per-capita on health care than say the Canadians. If they started spending as much as we do, then there'd be more doctors and more clinics and all the lines would go away.
But we can't get a candidate who argues that. So instead we get a Democrat pledging "universal health care" in the form of a giant boon to insurance agencies. Yay.
Remember folks, California is the only state that can do so because of how we joined.
Bwa ha ha ha ha! Oh, that's rich!
You know in Texas they say the same thing, and they have a strong case too since the actual legal agreement that they made with the U.S. government to enter the Union specifically gave them the right to secede whenever they wished. When they actually started talking about using it some time later, they learned the harsh truth: The U.S. is a country that breaks treaties, and it doesn't much matter what their legal document says about it, they weren't going to be allowed to leave once they'd joined.
You think you can just amend your Constitution and be free of the federal government? Ha ha ha! Sorry, suckers, you've been scammed! Same scam the Texans fell for, hell same scam so many nations of Native American fell for. A lot of them thought they'd get to remain autonomous, and be able to back out of their deal later if they didn't like it. Reality was far different! But hey, I bet you can just pass an amendment that repeals Federalism in California and it'll work! Ha ha ha!
But we're too dumb to vote for the guy who tells us what he's going to do. We'd rather vote for the guy who tells us what we want to hear.
I'm sorry, but did you just call me dumb and gullible, and say that I need to change how I view candidates? That's not what I want to hear. I want to hear that I'm smart and wonderful just the way I am, and not gullible at all because you're telling me the truth when you say I'm smart and wonderful.
And a government mandate that citizens pay money to certain government-approved companies is somehow a good idea? Mandatory health insurance is just a new tax payed directly to the campaign contributors. I mean, sure, the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry love this plan - but it's worse for the people than *either* legitimate socialized health care or an actual free market would be.
Yeah you really have to be some kind of crack-head to think giving the government billions in tax dollars to spend on health care is a bad idea, but think giving the government billions in tax dollars to give to insurance companies who will spend some of that money on health care, but will also try to keep as much of that money as profit as possible, is a great idea.
Either be for socialized medicine or not. This half-assed "compromise" is just not going to cut it.
To some extent, this is us "playing God" with nature. Somewhere down the road, a wholly "created" being will gain consciousness, evolve some (if left alone long enough), then wonder where he came from. Then they will have the same argument we are having now.
Right, and it is at least theoretically possible that we ourselves are such a creation made by Martians or whatever, though the evidence seems to point very strongly to the contrary (for the arrival of humans anyway, maybe not for the beginnings of life on earth).
And this is the point at which ID becomes completely self-contradictory in its attempt to hide its religious origins. ID claims that it is impossible for humans to be naturally occurring, because our bodies and intelligence are "irreducibly complex" and thus must be of artificial origin. But this Designer must, themselves, be intelligent in order to design. But intelligence can't arise naturally. So the Designer must therefore have been Designed, and their Designer too must have been Designed, and that Designer too, and there can never be a first Designer because no Designer could arise without another Designer behind them. It's a contradiction.
Now were this Religion, this question of "Who created the Creator?" is much easier to answer -- God exists outside time, He has no "beginning" or "end", He just IS. If you already have faith in a supernatural deity that created the universe, then this isn't that hard an answer to grasp. But because the whole point of Intelligent Design is to hide the fact that it is really just a way to dress up Creationism as though it were Science, they can't just come out and say that. Thus they are stuck with this obvious contradiction.
I'm no fan of ID as having "scientific" merit. But it does have philosophical merit. And some of the thought experiments make my head hurt.
Well as a philosophical question, yes it's interesting. How can we know the difference between "natural" and "artificial" if the artificial is so sophisticated as to able to perfectly imitate the natural? And is there any difference at that point? This isn't so different from the philosophical question of how one can ever know that the reality that we perceive is the reality that exists since we only know of it through our subjective senses.
But that's not the question ID is asking. It's not philosophical at all, because in ID it isn't even a question. It attempts to be empirical, but in doing so just creates contradictions that can't be resolved without appealing to religion.
2 mods: Auctioneer and Enchantrix. These two combined will give you a very good insight into just how much a certain item is worth on the Auctionhouse, and what it might disenchant to. This then gives you a base point as to how much it'd be worth disenchanted.
I've used this combination for 2 years or so now, and you'd be surprised at how few items there are that are actually worth more being sold than being disenchanted.
Yeah, I used both those mods, they're basically a necessity if you're going to be enchanting.
The thing is, even if you figure out that a given item is worth -more- if you disenchant it, the fact is that it was already worth something to begin with. Your profit is merely the extra value you get by disenchanting. That profit is rarely more than the value of the item to begin with, plus the value of whatever you would have picked up with a gathering skill in the course of getting the disenchantable item.
Sometimes you score big, but overall gathering skills are better money makers. The nice thing is that enchanting is in reality a trade skill, though as a trade skill it's ahuge money sink. In part because selling the enchants is so hard... I could have sworn Blizzard said they were going to implement some kind of 'enchanting stone' that you could create then sell on the AH. That would have made things so much easier.
Yeah, pedantry aside, I get what you're saying wrt running events.
At least you admit it. I hate it when people deliberately avoid understanding just to make a pedantic point.
Yes there are separate events with machines in them, like I already mentioned. Those machines themselves are regulated -- i.e. no rocket skis, no gas-engine bikes.
The "finish line" for the tech is still to replicate a normal foot, it's not there yet, let alone past it.
Uh... not for his leg. They aren't even trying to create a normal foot. Have you seen his prosthetics? They're basically big carbon-fiber leaf springs. They are custom-designed for running, and running only. He has a more traditional prosthetic for normal use.
The drive to create a general-purpose functional replacement for a human leg is, indeed, a long way off from its goal. That is not what this is. This is a special-purpose device, and just like many special purpose machines, for that purpose it has significant advantages over human limbs. Its lack of generality doesn't matter. There isn't a dancing portion of the race.
His short story, the Country of the Blind in which he challenges the assertion that "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Turns out that sight isn't nearly as much of an advantage in a society designed by the blind as one may think.
Which is a very good story, actually. Though I would have spent more time re-arranging their furniture.
Anyway, I think this means the saying needs an update. How about: "In the land of the formerly-sighted people who had their eyes poked out by the one-eyed man, the one-eyed man is king".
Okay, well, since they're just human technology, let's let the athletes use electric engine drag cycles which can run a quarter mile race in the time top sprinters can run 100m. Oh wait, then that would be drag racing.
We already *have* races that are meant to showcase the powers of human technology, or various combinations of human strength and machinery such as cycling.
This is a showcase of the human body. It only makes sense to keep it that way.
Ultimately, a prosthetic limb is no different than any other machine. The only reason why this is even a question is because before now, prosthetics were always worse than natural limbs for just about everything. Now that a prosthetic limb that has emerged that is superior to natural limbs for a certain task, people are still reacting as though he's 'handicapped'. Which in the larger sense he is, but for the purposes of a foot race, he's mechanically enhanced.
I don't think having artificial legs is "cheating", though. He couldn't live a life close to normal without them. Because of a device he needs to live as well as he can, he's being blocked from his profession/hobby/avocation/whatever.
Using a mechanical device that provides an advantage over natural body parts is in fact cheating. The Olympics are not about what can be done by machines, it's about achieving the limits of the human body. When machines are involved, e.g. bicycling, they're a separate event unto themselves. We have devices that could hurl a discus farther than any human possibly could. But that's not what the Discus Throw is about, now is it?
Not that it really matters to the fundamental argument, but really, he does -not- need these particular legs to live a close to normal life. These are legs specifically designed for sprinting, not to let him walk around. He has other legs for that.
a chess tournament that banned players with hearing aids (seriously, WTF?)
I don't know anything about it, but I would wager that it's more about the fear that the hearing aid is actually a wireless speaker and they are receiving coaching. It is presumably a one-on-one chess tournament, and just like using mechanical devices in a foot race is cheating, so is using extra brains.
Though the policy is probably stupid, I'm sure there's a better way to ensure nobody gets remote coaching.
I'm not sure I like this trend of accusing anyone who has artificial replacements for body parts that don't work right of doing something naughty.
He isn't being accused of doing something "naughty". He isn't "accused" of anything. It's just a matter of fact assessment that his synthetic legs provide a mechanical advantage over human limbs, and that this is not what the Olympics are about.
"Naughty" would be if he were trying to somehow hide the fact that he was using performance-enhancing limbs, like athletes lie about using performance enhancing drugs. Maybe if cybernetics become more advanced, this will become an actual issue. In this case though he approached them openly and they said "um, no." It's not a value judgment of his character.
Personally I think this guy and his limbs are pretty awesome. But I also think that a competition about human performance should be about human performance.
Barry Bonds testified today before a Congressional committee that he had never used performance-enhancing double-amputation prosthetic-limb-replacement surgery, in accordance with MLB policy.
He then bounded over the table and out the door at 40mph.
Speak for yourself! I'm waiting for the day I can plug my ear into the USB port of my computer and download pr0n straight to my brain.
I'm actually hoping for the opposite: that the computer will be able to download pr0n from my brain. I'll then open my imagination as not just one of the most eclectic pay sites on the internet, but also one of the most prolific with new content updates approximately every seven seconds.
I'll be rich, from doing the same thing I'm already doing anyway!
Maybe just once we Americans actually made the right decision passing on a technology that is popular elsewhere in order to embrace a superior one?
Not that having a DVDR as part of your PVR wouldn't be cool so you could take the disc to a friend's house for example, but really with a big HD in your tivo/freevo/mythtv/time warner POS, there just isn't that much need.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's what confuses me. Much like light and sound travel at different speeds, but nobody claims a causality violation when you see something before you hear it (a distant explosion, say) why would my example violate causality?
Now imagine that you were waiting for this distant explosion because you were supposed to set off one of your own as soon as you saw the first one. And you did so faithfully. And then, when you radioed to your distant partner in pointless pyrotechnics, he was irate because he claimed that you had set off your explosive first! Either one of you is wrong/lying, or causality is broken.
One of the key aspects of relativity is that there are no privileged reference frames. Which means that for causality to mean anything, cause must precede effect according to all reference points that can observe them. Yet relativity also says that time can pass differently for different reference points based on speed/mass, and thus can have different views on when events happened. It is this combined with faster-than-light communication which would make it possible to effectively send information into the past.
Your example by itself would not result in a causality violation. But once you involve another reference frame that itself has instantaneous communication through gravity waves, then it becomes possible to create a chain in which the sender of one message receives a response before sending the message. I don't have the technical knowledge of relativity to show you, but here's a website with pretty pictures.
See, there is a fundamental and unproved ASSUMPTION in Physics that gravity waves must travel at the speed of light
Well, if you're referring to gravity waves being limited to at most c, then that's a pretty safe assumption. It basically means you're assuming that causality exists (i.e. effects occur after causes). It would be an extremely bizarre universe if that were not true.
Though I suppose Newton considered it a pretty safe assumption that time was constant for all frames of reference. Must have seemed like a no-brainer, because in what kind of crazy universe did time pass at an objectively different 'rate' for different people?
But at least we can reason about a universe in which that isn't the case. A universe which doesn't obey causality? I'm not sure it would be possible to make sense of such a thing.
The outcome of pvp encounters used to be maybe 50% skill and preparation, 20% luck and 30% gear and class make-up. With all of the changes they've introduced this past year, your typical arena match is determined by 10% skill and preparation, 5% luck, 85% gear and class make-up. Doesn't that sound exhilarating kids?
Don't kid yourself. PvP has always been 80% gear. Arena just makes that painfully obvious because you "win" based on a single death match between equal numbers of equal leveled players.
BGs mask the fact because a single "encounter" (as in two groups of people fighting) isn't what determines victory. If you lose most of your fights, but accomplish the objectives, then you win. But the fights themselves? Well mostly about numbers, but then it was all about the gear. Same with world PvP, where the side who got more high-level reinforcements would win, but given equal numbers it was still all about the gear.
Now personally I like the BGs exactly because it opens up other avenues for victory -- as in, I may get completely smoked by the better-geared player, but if I distracted them long enough that the flag carrier could escape, then that was a successful strategy. But as far as the actualy "PvP" aspect of trying to kill the other guy? Yeah, that's gear. And then maybe some skill and luck.
According to Blizzard that is anybody who has ever touched the game for the course of its history. Which includes those who already cancelled their accounts ... and probably even accounts way back from open beta, since technically those to were free promotional subscriptions
You mean according to you. According to Blizzard, which you actually quoted though clearly misread:
"The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards."
So no, it does not include anyone who has ever touched the game. It in fact is a pretty reasonable definition that includes only people who are currently paying for access to the game.
True. Just as it's true that wanting gas to be cheap and roads to be free doesn't make cause them to magically be such. That's my point.
And thus they grumble and pay for the gas anyway.
Whereas they can't grumble and take the public transportation that doesn't exist.
You can't look down on people for not doing the impossible.
You could always:
1) Move to a place where public transport links are better
In the real world, people aren't always free to move wherever they want at the drop of a hat. There's these things called "jobs" that tend to play a large role in where people choose to live. And no, not everyone can have the kind of job that grants them mobility. Or, the kind of job that grants mobility doesn't grant the money to move.
2) Vote for politicians who will fund public transport
Been trying. Even got an actual light rail proposal passed -- 5 years on, and we've barely got one rail route that serves only a fraction of the city, no plans for more. And meanwhile traffic only gets worse...
It doesn't help that our state government is entirely in the pocket of big business. Our governor is even trying to shut down key bus stops in our city, actually making our already mediocre-at-best public transportation worse!
Yeah that does suck. But it's much more rare than people buying houses nowhere near public transit and then complaining that it doesn't come close to their house.
It would be impossible for everyone to buy a house near public transit.
Hell it would be highly impractical in many places to make the existence of nearby public transport a major purchasing concern. You don't get to dictate what houses are for sale, what their prices are, what the local property taxes are, and so on and so forth. If the place that you can afford isn't near a bus stop, that's all there is to it.
If you're going to actually put forward using public transportation as a solution, and in fact blame people for not buying their houses where they can use it, then there's only one solution: Provide more public transportation. When it is in fact easy to be near public transportation, and to be sure that your work place is also near public transportation, THEN you can blame people for moving someplace where they can't make use of it. But with the current state of public transportation in the U.S.? Not a chance.
taking advantage of pre-existing, bought-and-paid-for transportation and transit infrastructure, are starting to question why we ought to pay for your eight-lane suburb-to-suburb beltway highways.
Congratulations, you live in one of a handful of cities that have anything that could be called "transit infrastructure" where that doesn't mean just roads and highways.
If I lived in one of those places, I'd happily take public transportation.
I'm not saying everyone should make the same choices I do. I'm just wondering why people seem to believe they have a God-given right to cheap gas and door-to-door taxpayer-subsidized traffic-free one-person-per-car commuting.
Because people have to get to work, and their wanting other options doesn't cause them to magically spring into existence.
Being able to 1) choose where you live and 2) choose where you work such that 3) you can either make use of convenient public transportation or not have to commute at all, is a privilege and not simply a choice. Not everyone could do this, even if they did try to duplicate every choice you made.
I'm not saying you haven't, but I'll bet a lot of people never even think of it.
So? That doesn't change whether it exists. There's me, who has checked and found out that our public transportation is a joke, and then there's Joe Blow across the street, who hasn't. Guess what? We still both have little choice but to drive!
Well what they said was "And a government mandate that citizens pay money to certain government-approved companies is somehow a good idea?"
Picking from a government-approved list is not in any way "free market". I was wrong to refer to it as using tax money, but there is honestly no relevant difference here. Any "Universal Health Care" plan must by necessity mean that people are coerced into buying their own or paying for others to have health care. And I'm saying forcing people to do that via the insurance companies is adding a for-profit corporate middleman to an utterly non-free market and thus amounts to corporate welfare.
Competition in health insurance will lower insurance premiums.
And has it? Or has it resulted in insurance companies lowering costs by providing fewer benefits? Or both? Does it matter? One way or another, the health insurance industry continues to enjoy margins of over 50%. Which right on the face of it means that they are spending less than 2/3rds of the money they take in as premiums on providing health care to their customers. So however much premiums have dropped (if at all), they could clearly drop much more while still keeping these companies profitable. But being for-profit, they don't want to do that unless they absolutely have to.
Maybe that's fine if you're completely pro-free market and don't mind that some people can't afford and thus don't have health care, and that these companies profit off of providing less care, but that's at least in theory not what people like Hillary Clinton stand for. What I'm getting at is that this is completely wrong-headed if what you're trying to do is provide health care for everyone, and to do so affordably. If you can't choose not to pay, then the only way to get the best price is to wield the power of collective bargaining. And, ideally, get rid of unnecessary for-profit middle-men who only turns 2/3rds at best of what you give them into actual health care.
That's my point, that this is an unworkable "compromise" between a free-market and socialized view of providing medicine that takes the worst aspects of both by keeping the profit motive and losing the market forces. I'd rather have the current system over these half-assed attempts at socialization.
Though I am pro-socialization. One thing I think people forget when they think about socialization, and think about government inefficiency vs corporate efficiency, is what exactly it is that corporations are efficient at. Corporations are efficient at finding the maximum price that the market will bear, and minimizing their own costs, so as to maximize profit. Government, on the other hand, is highly inefficient with regards to spending and tends to spend at least as much money as it takes in.
From the standpoint of myself, the person who wants to get the most health care for their buck, I much prefer the government who "inefficiently" spends excessively on health care so as to get a bigger budget the next year, than the insurance company who tries to "efficiently" spend as little of my money on health care as possible so as to get to keep more of it for themselves.
Personally I think it's a no-brainer. There are many hypothetical complaints about how it could never work that I think fall in the face of successful implementations in Canada, UK, and elsewhere. And to the extent that one can level complaints towards any of those systems, those too I think would vanish simply by increasing their spending to the levels that we already are. We spend much more per-capita on health care than say the Canadians. If they started spending as much as we do, then there'd be more doctors and more clinics and all the lines would go away.
But we can't get a candidate who argues that. So instead we get a Democrat pledging "universal health care" in the form of a giant boon to insurance agencies. Yay.
Remember folks, California is the only state that can do so because of how we joined.
Bwa ha ha ha ha! Oh, that's rich!
You know in Texas they say the same thing, and they have a strong case too since the actual legal agreement that they made with the U.S. government to enter the Union specifically gave them the right to secede whenever they wished. When they actually started talking about using it some time later, they learned the harsh truth: The U.S. is a country that breaks treaties, and it doesn't much matter what their legal document says about it, they weren't going to be allowed to leave once they'd joined.
You think you can just amend your Constitution and be free of the federal government? Ha ha ha! Sorry, suckers, you've been scammed! Same scam the Texans fell for, hell same scam so many nations of Native American fell for. A lot of them thought they'd get to remain autonomous, and be able to back out of their deal later if they didn't like it. Reality was far different! But hey, I bet you can just pass an amendment that repeals Federalism in California and it'll work! Ha ha ha!
But we're too dumb to vote for the guy who tells us what he's going to do. We'd rather vote for the guy who tells us what we want to hear.
I'm sorry, but did you just call me dumb and gullible, and say that I need to change how I view candidates? That's not what I want to hear. I want to hear that I'm smart and wonderful just the way I am, and not gullible at all because you're telling me the truth when you say I'm smart and wonderful.
I won't be voting for you!
And a government mandate that citizens pay money to certain government-approved companies is somehow a good idea? Mandatory health insurance is just a new tax payed directly to the campaign contributors. I mean, sure, the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry love this plan - but it's worse for the people than *either* legitimate socialized health care or an actual free market would be.
Yeah you really have to be some kind of crack-head to think giving the government billions in tax dollars to spend on health care is a bad idea, but think giving the government billions in tax dollars to give to insurance companies who will spend some of that money on health care, but will also try to keep as much of that money as profit as possible, is a great idea.
Either be for socialized medicine or not. This half-assed "compromise" is just not going to cut it.
To some extent, this is us "playing God" with nature. Somewhere down the road, a wholly "created" being will gain consciousness, evolve some (if left alone long enough), then wonder where he came from. Then they will have the same argument we are having now.
Right, and it is at least theoretically possible that we ourselves are such a creation made by Martians or whatever, though the evidence seems to point very strongly to the contrary (for the arrival of humans anyway, maybe not for the beginnings of life on earth).
And this is the point at which ID becomes completely self-contradictory in its attempt to hide its religious origins. ID claims that it is impossible for humans to be naturally occurring, because our bodies and intelligence are "irreducibly complex" and thus must be of artificial origin. But this Designer must, themselves, be intelligent in order to design. But intelligence can't arise naturally. So the Designer must therefore have been Designed, and their Designer too must have been Designed, and that Designer too, and there can never be a first Designer because no Designer could arise without another Designer behind them. It's a contradiction.
Now were this Religion, this question of "Who created the Creator?" is much easier to answer -- God exists outside time, He has no "beginning" or "end", He just IS. If you already have faith in a supernatural deity that created the universe, then this isn't that hard an answer to grasp. But because the whole point of Intelligent Design is to hide the fact that it is really just a way to dress up Creationism as though it were Science, they can't just come out and say that. Thus they are stuck with this obvious contradiction.
I'm no fan of ID as having "scientific" merit. But it does have philosophical merit. And some of the thought experiments make my head hurt.
Well as a philosophical question, yes it's interesting. How can we know the difference between "natural" and "artificial" if the artificial is so sophisticated as to able to perfectly imitate the natural? And is there any difference at that point? This isn't so different from the philosophical question of how one can ever know that the reality that we perceive is the reality that exists since we only know of it through our subjective senses.
But that's not the question ID is asking. It's not philosophical at all, because in ID it isn't even a question. It attempts to be empirical, but in doing so just creates contradictions that can't be resolved without appealing to religion.
2 mods: Auctioneer and Enchantrix. These two combined will give you a very good insight into just how much a certain item is worth on the Auctionhouse, and what it might disenchant to. This then gives you a base point as to how much it'd be worth disenchanted.
I've used this combination for 2 years or so now, and you'd be surprised at how few items there are that are actually worth more being sold than being disenchanted.
Yeah, I used both those mods, they're basically a necessity if you're going to be enchanting.
The thing is, even if you figure out that a given item is worth -more- if you disenchant it, the fact is that it was already worth something to begin with. Your profit is merely the extra value you get by disenchanting. That profit is rarely more than the value of the item to begin with, plus the value of whatever you would have picked up with a gathering skill in the course of getting the disenchantable item.
Sometimes you score big, but overall gathering skills are better money makers. The nice thing is that enchanting is in reality a trade skill, though as a trade skill it's ahuge money sink. In part because selling the enchants is so hard... I could have sworn Blizzard said they were going to implement some kind of 'enchanting stone' that you could create then sell on the AH. That would have made things so much easier.
Yeah, pedantry aside, I get what you're saying wrt running events.
At least you admit it. I hate it when people deliberately avoid understanding just to make a pedantic point.
Yes there are separate events with machines in them, like I already mentioned. Those machines themselves are regulated -- i.e. no rocket skis, no gas-engine bikes.
Which is an accepted part of the sport, like bicycles in cycling.
If he wants to compete in a sport where everyone has carbon fiber spring feet, then that would be fair.
I just love pedantry at the expense of understanding...
Anyone can put on a pair of running shoes, and they're accepted as part of the event just like skis are accepted in downhill skiing.
But try to make rocket-powered wheeled shoes and you'd have a problem.
I'm sure this is obvious and you're just being pedantic. Good show I say.
The "finish line" for the tech is still to replicate a normal foot, it's not there yet, let alone past it.
Uh... not for his leg. They aren't even trying to create a normal foot. Have you seen his prosthetics? They're basically big carbon-fiber leaf springs. They are custom-designed for running, and running only. He has a more traditional prosthetic for normal use.
The drive to create a general-purpose functional replacement for a human leg is, indeed, a long way off from its goal. That is not what this is. This is a special-purpose device, and just like many special purpose machines, for that purpose it has significant advantages over human limbs. Its lack of generality doesn't matter. There isn't a dancing portion of the race.
His short story, the Country of the Blind in which he challenges the assertion that "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Turns out that sight isn't nearly as much of an advantage in a society designed by the blind as one may think.
Which is a very good story, actually. Though I would have spent more time re-arranging their furniture.
Anyway, I think this means the saying needs an update. How about: "In the land of the formerly-sighted people who had their eyes poked out by the one-eyed man, the one-eyed man is king".
Okay, well, since they're just human technology, let's let the athletes use electric engine drag cycles which can run a quarter mile race in the time top sprinters can run 100m. Oh wait, then that would be drag racing.
We already *have* races that are meant to showcase the powers of human technology, or various combinations of human strength and machinery such as cycling.
This is a showcase of the human body. It only makes sense to keep it that way.
Ultimately, a prosthetic limb is no different than any other machine. The only reason why this is even a question is because before now, prosthetics were always worse than natural limbs for just about everything. Now that a prosthetic limb that has emerged that is superior to natural limbs for a certain task, people are still reacting as though he's 'handicapped'. Which in the larger sense he is, but for the purposes of a foot race, he's mechanically enhanced.
I don't think having artificial legs is "cheating", though. He couldn't live a life close to normal without them. Because of a device he needs to live as well as he can, he's being blocked from his profession/hobby/avocation/whatever.
Using a mechanical device that provides an advantage over natural body parts is in fact cheating. The Olympics are not about what can be done by machines, it's about achieving the limits of the human body. When machines are involved, e.g. bicycling, they're a separate event unto themselves. We have devices that could hurl a discus farther than any human possibly could. But that's not what the Discus Throw is about, now is it?
Not that it really matters to the fundamental argument, but really, he does -not- need these particular legs to live a close to normal life. These are legs specifically designed for sprinting, not to let him walk around. He has other legs for that.
a chess tournament that banned players with hearing aids (seriously, WTF?)
I don't know anything about it, but I would wager that it's more about the fear that the hearing aid is actually a wireless speaker and they are receiving coaching. It is presumably a one-on-one chess tournament, and just like using mechanical devices in a foot race is cheating, so is using extra brains.
Though the policy is probably stupid, I'm sure there's a better way to ensure nobody gets remote coaching.
I'm not sure I like this trend of accusing anyone who has artificial replacements for body parts that don't work right of doing something naughty.
He isn't being accused of doing something "naughty". He isn't "accused" of anything. It's just a matter of fact assessment that his synthetic legs provide a mechanical advantage over human limbs, and that this is not what the Olympics are about.
"Naughty" would be if he were trying to somehow hide the fact that he was using performance-enhancing limbs, like athletes lie about using performance enhancing drugs. Maybe if cybernetics become more advanced, this will become an actual issue. In this case though he approached them openly and they said "um, no." It's not a value judgment of his character.
Personally I think this guy and his limbs are pretty awesome. But I also think that a competition about human performance should be about human performance.
Barry Bonds testified today before a Congressional committee that he had never used performance-enhancing double-amputation prosthetic-limb-replacement surgery, in accordance with MLB policy.
He then bounded over the table and out the door at 40mph.
It was plenty enough time to know those documents are inadequate. If they aren't giving out any new information, then this is, in fact, just PR fluff.
Speak for yourself! I'm waiting for the day I can plug my ear into the USB port of my computer and download pr0n straight to my brain.
I'm actually hoping for the opposite: that the computer will be able to download pr0n from my brain. I'll then open my imagination as not just one of the most eclectic pay sites on the internet, but also one of the most prolific with new content updates approximately every seven seconds.
I'll be rich, from doing the same thing I'm already doing anyway!
Maybe just once we Americans actually made the right decision passing on a technology that is popular elsewhere in order to embrace a superior one?
Not that having a DVDR as part of your PVR wouldn't be cool so you could take the disc to a friend's house for example, but really with a big HD in your tivo/freevo/mythtv/time warner POS, there just isn't that much need.