Go back to TFA. 50 years is, surely, more than enough to recoup the costs of the album, and an extra 45 on top of that is necessary.
I'm not saying that artists shouldn't be able to recoup their costs. I'm saying that Cliff Richard and The Shadows have more than recouped theirs from their recordings made in 1958.
we have 'em to make sure that our government doesn't herd us into cattle-cars, and send us off [...]
Yeah, if it wasn't for gun owners, the US government might have actually managed to do that to Japanese-American citizens in WW2. Thankfully, it didn't!
We've already got Extrordinary Rendition, what's after that?
Unreasonable search and seizure (war on drugs), perhaps? No right to freedom of association (McCarthy)? Suspending habeas corpus, people being held for five years (and counting) without charge or trial? Legalised torture? Warrantless mass surveillance?
You're an NRA member. I'm sure you can point me to the press releases where the NRA has campaigned against these things.
Bingo. You want money, you do some work. Record an album, do a "one night only" concert, go on tour... if your music is still making money, there won't be a shortage of people willing to pay you for the privilege.
Including new drugs. Without the U.S. as a free market engine to drive the development of new drugs, the entire world would be worse off because of their absence.
Because, of course, there are no drug companies in Europe, Australia etc. They simply can't compete.
The NHS is not a terribly good example of a modern universal health care system. But even in the UK, most independent contractors would surely be able to afford private insurance.
Here in Australia, I pay the equivalent of US$200 or so per month (on top of the universal insurance, of course), and my entire family is covered, with no waiting lists, with an excess (i.e. co-pay) fixed at less than US$200 per hospital visit. Naturally, I could opt for no excess if I paid a slightly higher premium.
If you really want to keep others from patenting something you invented "first," put up a webpage, publish a paper, let the world know about your "obvious" invention -- that's how you can do this.
The trouble there is that time is money, and I get paid to create new things. If I wrote down every time I've solved a problem using the obvious solution, I wouldn't get any real work done.
This, incidentally, cuts to the heart of the problem: Whichever way you cut it, the patent system, as it is, is a barrier to innovation in some industries.
On the contrary, I think you're picking and choosing which religious groups represent "religion".
You take the Pope, for example, as an example of someone who believes that life begins at conception. He's the "leader" of quite a large religious group, so that's fair. Far be it for me to defend the Pope, but I do think that his position on "when life begins" is as philosophically valid as any other philosopher's position. (For the record, I think that even if you follow that position, stem cell research is a question of a small philosophical "harm" vs a large highly-tangible "good", so we should do it in a regulated manner.)
But then you pick a completely different group, far far smaller, and largely unknown outside the USA in any meaningful way, to say that religion is anti-evolution!
Had you asked the Pope instead of the American "religious right", you would have received a completely different answer. I don't know exactly what he'd answer, of course. He might talk about "theistic evolution" or something, which you and I might think is an odd philosophical spin, but at least it explicitly acknowledges that evolution is an observed fact of nature, and is therefore not anti-science.
The reason why your reasoning is a fallacy should be obvious by taking the religion out of the argument. You could use an essentially identical argument to prove that political parties are anti- anything you care to name. You'll always be able to find a political party who is anti-issue. Therefore you use that party as an example to "prove" that politics is anti-issue. Not just that, but there is a conflict between politics and the issue!
Go back over what I wrote. You'll see that I am not trying to "defend the reality of religious belief" in any sense of that phrase. There are many good arguments against religious belief (Dawkins came up with a few), but yours is not one of them.
In what way is there zero conflict between science and religion?
There is no conflict between science as a whole and religion as a whole. Let's pick Christianity, since those are the examples that you came up with...
Are all creationists zealots?
Obviously I can't answer with a definitive "yes" without testing all creationists. But certainly any creationist who attempts to fight science is a zealot. Are we agreed on that?
Is science wrong when it says that man evolved and was not created out of thin air, as in the Bible?
There is no conflict between science and ancient poetry. I can expand on this if you want.
Does the earth really have four corners [...]
There is no conflict between science and ancient poetic licence and/or metaphor. If I say "the Sun came up", there is no conflict between that and heliocentrism, either.
[...] and is Pi exactly 3.
There is a difference between precision and accuracy, go back to numeric analysis class if you don't know what it is. As it is, the Bible does not give a value for pi. The number that you give is extrapolated from the imprecise measurements of an ancient nomadic culture which didn't even have fractions. There is no conflict here.
The Pope says life begins at conception. Does it?
At the moment, science doesn't have a good definition as to the difference between "life" and "non-life" when you get into the grey areas. Until it does, this is a philosophical question. The Pope's answer is as good as that of any other philosopher, given his philosophical assumptions.
Could the big bang theory be correct or did god create the universe?
There is no conflict between science and ancient poetry.
Do abortions cause breast cancer and does sex education increase the number of abortions (Answer: no) Some religious groups say they do.
I previously admitted that there's a conflict between science and "some religious groups". As it is, the Bible is silent on the topic of breast cancer.
Can we ignore Global warming because it is part of God's plan for armageddon?
I'm pretty certain that the Bible is silent on the topic of global warming. Some religious groups of course make this argument as part of an ultra-conservative agenda which, I might add, is virtually unknown outside the USA. Yes, there's therefore a conflict between science and "some religious groups".
There is no war between religion and science. There is a war between some religious zealots (pick your favourite conservative religious right-er) and some atheist zealots (Richard Dawkins being the obvious example).
The religious zealots in question would have you believe that there is some kind of conflict between religion and science, but there's not. It's a few religious zealots throwing insults and a large number scientists ignoring it unless it spills into the science classroom.
The atheist zealots, typified by Dawkins, are, for the most part, actually just calling out the religious zealots, but this point gets lost in the rhetoric.
It's not the transistors that concern me. I'm pretty convinced that Chaum's system is a very good way to make plurality voting quite secure and auditable.
But it's ONLY designed for plurality voting. I live in a country which uses single-candidate IRV for the House and IRV/STV (Hare-Clarke) for the Senate. It's fairly obvious that the system as it is wouldn't work for more expressive (and more fair!) voting systems than plurality.
For example, it would be easy to adopt the system for approval voting by allowing a voter to mark more than one candidate. (Approval voting is a very simple extension to plurality voting. Basically, you get to tick every candidate that you approve of, not just one. The candidate with the highest approval wins.) But then it would be possible to prove how many candidates you voted for by looking at the receipt. The evil special interest group who is holding your family hostage could tell that you voted for more than one candidate when they explicitly told you only to vote for their candidate.
So you could make each candidate a binary choice, so that for N candidates, you have 2N boxes and must mark N of them. However, now the voter can't just scan down the columns to see who they voted for, because the "approve"/"don't approve" boxes would have to be randomised for each candidate. Lining up the columns would mean that the evil special interest group could tell that you voted for either k or N-k candidates. And on the 2003 California recall ballot, there were 135 candidates. That's 135 boxes you have to fill out, with no discernable visual pattern to aid you.
The usual "user interface" for approval voting is to mark each candidate that you approve of and leave the others unmarked. Since marks are visible Simply count the marks and you have the number of candidates that you voted for.
In principle, you could treat an approval election as N individual binary choices, but that would require the voter to explicitly vote for or against each candidate. The 2003 California recall election, you may remember, had 135 candidates. Admittedly, that was an extreme case, but I consider that to be an unreasonable workload.
I think that capital punishment is archaic and barbaric too. I think a lifetime in an Iraqi prison has more vengeance value than hanging. I think lowering our standards to that of a murderer makes us worse.
But I don't think we'll see Amnesty International going in to bat for this guy. And I won't either.
First off, there are many "abolitionist" countries, especially in South America, which still technically retain the option of the death penalty for crimes more serious than murder, which usually only refers to war crimes and crimes against humanity. This isn't a mentally disabled teenager, or a mother who went psychotic one day, or even a small-time drug dealer who killed a rival. Saddam Hussein committed acts that are so horrific, and on such a mass scale, that even many progressive nations still legally retain the option of death. Yes, it probably would have been better to send him to The Hague, especially since Milosevic's cell is now conveniently empty. But that didn't happen.
Realistically, outsiders can't reform the fledgling Iraqi criminal justice system in the next 30 days (which is the deadline for appeal proceedings in this case), and even if we could, this is not the case to do it with. You also have to consider the current security situation in Iraq. A lot of of judges and lawyers have already been murdered in this case. How many people connected with his hypothetical future life imprisonment might suffer the same fate? Of course, the same could be said for those connected with his execution.
Rightly or not, a small part (a very small part) of the motivation for invading Iraq was always to oust the Ba'ath party and institute some kind of democracy. Now is not the time to tell Iraq that they've messed up in some small detail.
The international community should put their in-principle objection to capital punishment on the record, and then leave it at that. Let's save the calls for legal reform for later, when there's a case worth fighting over.
Think of it as a minor victory for realpolitik over principle.
Once the shield is down, our cruisers will create a perimeter, while the fighters fly into the superstructure and attempt to knock out the main reactor.
Actually, this is one of the more insightful things that W has said, though possibly not for the intended reason.
Al Qaeda was never an international organisation with fortresses in the mountains, sleeper cells and fingers in every conspiratorial pie. And they certainly had no friends in the previous Iraqi government. It was always an idea. What you saw a little over five years ago could have been the last desperate act of group on the way out. Instead, by making the monster seem larger than it really was, they've made the idea seem bigger than it was. And as a result, it's an idea that desperate people around the world think they can latch onto.
That's why we've only seen smaller attacks since (London, Bali etc), perpetrated by small groups of home-grown nutters instead of members of a large non-existent shadowy organisation of evil. They've caught onto the idea.
This is a war of ideas. It's one that the US is losing, and you have friendly fire to thank.
If the second amendment is a final line, then in practice it's toothless, because no government is ever going to go near that line.
A US government can easily get away with oppressing unpopular groups (be they Japanese-Americans, suspected communists, Arabs, people who happen to be in Afghanistan at the wrong time or whatever). All they need to do is not obviously oppress the majority (e.g. convince everyone that "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear") and there will be no recourse.
My point is that guns would not have helped, say, the Japanese-Americans interned in WW2. Indeed, if they were armed and prepared to defend themselves, it would have "proved" the government correct. Remember Waco?
You'll pardon me if I retain my skepticism that the second amendment has any value in protection against government.
Slashdot Mirror
Me do agree. Just syntax was a languages.
Go back to TFA. 50 years is, surely, more than enough to recoup the costs of the album, and an extra 45 on top of that is necessary.
I'm not saying that artists shouldn't be able to recoup their costs. I'm saying that Cliff Richard and The Shadows have more than recouped theirs from their recordings made in 1958.
Yeah, if it wasn't for gun owners, the US government might have actually managed to do that to Japanese-American citizens in WW2. Thankfully, it didn't!
Unreasonable search and seizure (war on drugs), perhaps? No right to freedom of association (McCarthy)? Suspending habeas corpus, people being held for five years (and counting) without charge or trial? Legalised torture? Warrantless mass surveillance?
You're an NRA member. I'm sure you can point me to the press releases where the NRA has campaigned against these things.
Have you heard of The Shadows? That was originally Cliff Richard's band.
Bingo. You want money, you do some work. Record an album, do a "one night only" concert, go on tour... if your music is still making money, there won't be a shortage of people willing to pay you for the privilege.
Because, of course, there are no drug companies in Europe, Australia etc. They simply can't compete.
...who should really make it less obvious that he is clearly touting for business.
The NHS is not a terribly good example of a modern universal health care system. But even in the UK, most independent contractors would surely be able to afford private insurance.
Here in Australia, I pay the equivalent of US$200 or so per month (on top of the universal insurance, of course), and my entire family is covered, with no waiting lists, with an excess (i.e. co-pay) fixed at less than US$200 per hospital visit. Naturally, I could opt for no excess if I paid a slightly higher premium.
The trouble there is that time is money, and I get paid to create new things. If I wrote down every time I've solved a problem using the obvious solution, I wouldn't get any real work done.
This, incidentally, cuts to the heart of the problem: Whichever way you cut it, the patent system, as it is, is a barrier to innovation in some industries.
On the contrary, I think you're picking and choosing which religious groups represent "religion".
You take the Pope, for example, as an example of someone who believes that life begins at conception. He's the "leader" of quite a large religious group, so that's fair. Far be it for me to defend the Pope, but I do think that his position on "when life begins" is as philosophically valid as any other philosopher's position. (For the record, I think that even if you follow that position, stem cell research is a question of a small philosophical "harm" vs a large highly-tangible "good", so we should do it in a regulated manner.)
But then you pick a completely different group, far far smaller, and largely unknown outside the USA in any meaningful way, to say that religion is anti-evolution!
Had you asked the Pope instead of the American "religious right", you would have received a completely different answer. I don't know exactly what he'd answer, of course. He might talk about "theistic evolution" or something, which you and I might think is an odd philosophical spin, but at least it explicitly acknowledges that evolution is an observed fact of nature, and is therefore not anti-science.
The reason why your reasoning is a fallacy should be obvious by taking the religion out of the argument. You could use an essentially identical argument to prove that political parties are anti- anything you care to name. You'll always be able to find a political party who is anti-issue. Therefore you use that party as an example to "prove" that politics is anti-issue. Not just that, but there is a conflict between politics and the issue!
Go back over what I wrote. You'll see that I am not trying to "defend the reality of religious belief" in any sense of that phrase. There are many good arguments against religious belief (Dawkins came up with a few), but yours is not one of them.
There is no conflict between science as a whole and religion as a whole. Let's pick Christianity, since those are the examples that you came up with...
Obviously I can't answer with a definitive "yes" without testing all creationists. But certainly any creationist who attempts to fight science is a zealot. Are we agreed on that?
There is no conflict between science and ancient poetry. I can expand on this if you want.
There is no conflict between science and ancient poetic licence and/or metaphor. If I say "the Sun came up", there is no conflict between that and heliocentrism, either.
There is a difference between precision and accuracy, go back to numeric analysis class if you don't know what it is. As it is, the Bible does not give a value for pi. The number that you give is extrapolated from the imprecise measurements of an ancient nomadic culture which didn't even have fractions. There is no conflict here.
At the moment, science doesn't have a good definition as to the difference between "life" and "non-life" when you get into the grey areas. Until it does, this is a philosophical question. The Pope's answer is as good as that of any other philosopher, given his philosophical assumptions.
There is no conflict between science and ancient poetry.
I previously admitted that there's a conflict between science and "some religious groups". As it is, the Bible is silent on the topic of breast cancer.
I'm pretty certain that the Bible is silent on the topic of global warming. Some religious groups of course make this argument as part of an ultra-conservative agenda which, I might add, is virtually unknown outside the USA. Yes, there's therefore a conflict between science and "some religious groups".
There is no war between religion and science. There is a war between some religious zealots (pick your favourite conservative religious right-er) and some atheist zealots (Richard Dawkins being the obvious example).
The religious zealots in question would have you believe that there is some kind of conflict between religion and science, but there's not. It's a few religious zealots throwing insults and a large number scientists ignoring it unless it spills into the science classroom.
The atheist zealots, typified by Dawkins, are, for the most part, actually just calling out the religious zealots, but this point gets lost in the rhetoric.
Be fair, now. Those air guitar t-shirts don't come cheap.
I must be the only person who found Amanda via Ze, rather than the other way around.
No. No, no, NO.
This suffers from exactly the same problem as land mines. When a human doesn't make the targeting decision, innocent people get maimed and killed.
Admittedly, robot guns degrade more gracefully than land mines. But still, this is highly immoral.
I've been to the lab. I've seen the shirt. It's real, and it's controlling the sound.
Right. It only seems like Debian stable releases are a quarter century apart.
It's not the transistors that concern me. I'm pretty convinced that Chaum's system is a very good way to make plurality voting quite secure and auditable.
But it's ONLY designed for plurality voting. I live in a country which uses single-candidate IRV for the House and IRV/STV (Hare-Clarke) for the Senate. It's fairly obvious that the system as it is wouldn't work for more expressive (and more fair!) voting systems than plurality.
For example, it would be easy to adopt the system for approval voting by allowing a voter to mark more than one candidate. (Approval voting is a very simple extension to plurality voting. Basically, you get to tick every candidate that you approve of, not just one. The candidate with the highest approval wins.) But then it would be possible to prove how many candidates you voted for by looking at the receipt. The evil special interest group who is holding your family hostage could tell that you voted for more than one candidate when they explicitly told you only to vote for their candidate.
So you could make each candidate a binary choice, so that for N candidates, you have 2N boxes and must mark N of them. However, now the voter can't just scan down the columns to see who they voted for, because the "approve"/"don't approve" boxes would have to be randomised for each candidate. Lining up the columns would mean that the evil special interest group could tell that you voted for either k or N-k candidates. And on the 2003 California recall ballot, there were 135 candidates. That's 135 boxes you have to fill out, with no discernable visual pattern to aid you.
It's also impractical for the typical voter when N=135.
The usual "user interface" for approval voting is to mark each candidate that you approve of and leave the others unmarked. Since marks are visible Simply count the marks and you have the number of candidates that you voted for.
In principle, you could treat an approval election as N individual binary choices, but that would require the voter to explicitly vote for or against each candidate. The 2003 California recall election, you may remember, had 135 candidates. Admittedly, that was an extreme case, but I consider that to be an unreasonable workload.
It would work just fine with approval voting, although how many people you voted for wouldn't be a secret.
I think that capital punishment is archaic and barbaric too. I think a lifetime in an Iraqi prison has more vengeance value than hanging. I think lowering our standards to that of a murderer makes us worse.
But I don't think we'll see Amnesty International going in to bat for this guy. And I won't either.
First off, there are many "abolitionist" countries, especially in South America, which still technically retain the option of the death penalty for crimes more serious than murder, which usually only refers to war crimes and crimes against humanity. This isn't a mentally disabled teenager, or a mother who went psychotic one day, or even a small-time drug dealer who killed a rival. Saddam Hussein committed acts that are so horrific, and on such a mass scale, that even many progressive nations still legally retain the option of death. Yes, it probably would have been better to send him to The Hague, especially since Milosevic's cell is now conveniently empty. But that didn't happen.
Realistically, outsiders can't reform the fledgling Iraqi criminal justice system in the next 30 days (which is the deadline for appeal proceedings in this case), and even if we could, this is not the case to do it with. You also have to consider the current security situation in Iraq. A lot of of judges and lawyers have already been murdered in this case. How many people connected with his hypothetical future life imprisonment might suffer the same fate? Of course, the same could be said for those connected with his execution.
Rightly or not, a small part (a very small part) of the motivation for invading Iraq was always to oust the Ba'ath party and institute some kind of democracy. Now is not the time to tell Iraq that they've messed up in some small detail.
The international community should put their in-principle objection to capital punishment on the record, and then leave it at that. Let's save the calls for legal reform for later, when there's a case worth fighting over.
Think of it as a minor victory for realpolitik over principle.
That is the quote you meant, right?
Actually, this is one of the more insightful things that W has said, though possibly not for the intended reason.
Al Qaeda was never an international organisation with fortresses in the mountains, sleeper cells and fingers in every conspiratorial pie. And they certainly had no friends in the previous Iraqi government. It was always an idea. What you saw a little over five years ago could have been the last desperate act of group on the way out. Instead, by making the monster seem larger than it really was, they've made the idea seem bigger than it was. And as a result, it's an idea that desperate people around the world think they can latch onto.
That's why we've only seen smaller attacks since (London, Bali etc), perpetrated by small groups of home-grown nutters instead of members of a large non-existent shadowy organisation of evil. They've caught onto the idea.
This is a war of ideas. It's one that the US is losing, and you have friendly fire to thank.
If the second amendment is a final line, then in practice it's toothless, because no government is ever going to go near that line.
A US government can easily get away with oppressing unpopular groups (be they Japanese-Americans, suspected communists, Arabs, people who happen to be in Afghanistan at the wrong time or whatever). All they need to do is not obviously oppress the majority (e.g. convince everyone that "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear") and there will be no recourse.
My point is that guns would not have helped, say, the Japanese-Americans interned in WW2. Indeed, if they were armed and prepared to defend themselves, it would have "proved" the government correct. Remember Waco?
You'll pardon me if I retain my skepticism that the second amendment has any value in protection against government.