Having your bank's own bank accounts frozen by a foreign power (the main reason Iceland's collapsing so fast) probably does count as "completely unexpected"...
So, while each MCP or MCP's customer may not bear the sole blame for their situation, collectively, what happened was not totally "outside their control", yet another condition necessary to invoke force majeure.
But then, I'm not a lawyer, so maybe in some legal jurisdictions bad government (or national bank; I don't know how Iceland works) policy/announcement is treated like an "Act of God", though God may take offense at that.
Basic scientific research is a "public good". You can't get the proper levels of funding by asking the private sector to do it, simply because the bulk of the benefits will be impossible to monetize.
That's exactly why we didn't see any progress in science until the government started investing heavily in all scientific research around WWII and after.
Wait, what? The whole body of classical physics, including the relativistically-correct Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics AND much of the important results of quantum mechanics were worked out long before the heavy interference from the government. Compared to all the great achievements of the late 19th century and early 20th century, do we have anything in basic science to show for ourselves (other than the atomic bomb, thank you very much), for all the money government stole from people and wasted in "science"?
Basic science was doing perfectly fine before the government started messing with it. Basic science doesn't need government funding to survive and thrive, and history proves it.
Just because the government can provide a public good doesn't mean it should. In fact, anything the government doesn't have to do (i.e. anything that doesn't involve war or law enforcement by force), the government should try *not* doing it and see if the private sector can do it more efficiently (and the whole point of capitalism is that it can).
Money does come in from private sources as well as states, but all of that grant money must be completely separated from the federal money, which funds a LOT of science.
So it looks like the problem is not that Bush stopped federal funding from being wasted on embryonic stem cell research, but it is in fact that the federal government has way too much role in how science is conducted.
The real solution to this real problem is that we should reduce the role of (and perhaps more importantly, taxation by) the government so that the science, including basic science without immediate technical application because *somebody* has to be rich enough and foresighted enough to fund these things, can be properly supported from private sources of funding, rather than money stolen from people, which is euphemistically called "tax" these days.
My point was simply that individuals in Silicon Valley and Hollywood are already paying taxes.
A reasonable answer to "what prevented them from pulling out their checkbooks" would be simply that they felt they already had and now wanted to see the money spent appropriately.
So, you combine the money from people who support killing embryos for scientific research and the money from people who don't support killing embryos at all and somehow the money is good for spending on killing embryos for scientific research?
If these people want to pay for the kind of research they support, well, they should pay for it explicitly. Otherwise they are only trying to steal from people who don't share their view, like so many statists.
You should pick a different term, though it's quite clear why you choose not to.
How about "murdering an embryo"?
Or, if you object to that because "murder" (probably) has a well-defined legal meaning, how about "killing an embryo"?
It's not just anti-abortionists that pick their words, well, carefully. Those who think the federal government should support this kind of research (I'm not—I think ALL research should be funded privately if possible, but especially tax money should not be spent on this kind of research which has political implications) also pick their words very carefully to imply that the embryo is not a life, was never a life, and never could have been a living being (the third implication being blatantly false).
Just because there aren't any yet doesn't mean there won't be any in the future. While if the research into the subject gets banned we will certainly never see the potentially live saving results.
And how much public money (taken from people some of whom strongly disagree with this choice of spending) should be poured into this morally dubious endeavor before we say, "O.K. This is a waste of money. Let's stop creating demand for 'non-viable embryos'"? One year? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? 100 years?
Bush did a lot of bad things, but his "ban" on embryonic stem cell research wasn't one of those. Just because the federal government wasn't funding the research doesn't mean there were others who were more than willing, like biotech companies, mentioned in the summary (and no, there was never a ban in the usual sense of the word, only the decision not to fund). In fact, in this day and age when scientific research is too polluted with money stolen from people (i.e. "tax"), his decision not to fund activities that a good fraction of people disagree with was a refreshingly good one (... of course, that was also before the Iraq war, but I digress...).
So my countryman WASN'T kidnapped by the CIA, shipped to Syria, then tortured for months?
Oh wait, he was.
Depending on who your "countryman" was. If he's not American, well, you know CIA does some things that are less than honorable to non-Americans so that Americans may live—I have no shame regarding that. If terrorists need to be tortured so that Americans may live, so be it (and I say this as a self-claimed libertarian; in this case it's one fundamental right (right to live) against another fundamental right (right to be treated as a human); if it can be shown that the terrorist violated another's fundamental right, as far as I am concerned, he forfeited his).
If your countryman was in U.S. legally (hence the protections of the U.S. Constitution extends to him; if he was not in the U.S., as so many foreigners are fond of saying, U.S. laws do not apply outside U.S.), well, would you care to quote a specific incident?
What you are not making clear is the existence of the facts you claim that proves my position wrong.
I bet the CIA is filled with pride when you use your first amendment to free speech on the entire plane ride to Syria, then use it while being dragged into a Syrian prison, then continue using it while being tortured for months.
CIA was never meant to operate against Americans (even the disloyal and violent ones). If I'm being dragged anywhere, starting from America, it would be by FBI, and FBI, being a domestic agency, would not fly me to a foreign country.
I know intelligence services and the military have come to a bit of bad reputation because of a few bad eggs, but try and give me a single example of CIA (or FBI, if you'd like) so much as laying hands on a U.S. citizen (or anyone else in U.S. legally and not caught in the act of crime), much less using "enhanced interrogation techniques".
Even CIA, when you compare it against its counterparts in other countries, is much more benign—it's just the anti-American media that tries to portray it in a different light while hiding the faults of any other country that isn't the U.S.A.
Encryption is different from a physical safe in that it can be prohibitively difficult to break into without the owner's cooperation. I'm not really sure exactly what legal implications that has, but I'm certain it's relevant.
Yes, that is relevant and that's why we need to fight for this right.
We finally have a "safe" that is so strong that if the government wanted to break it, it couldn't (save by a variant of Rubberhose attack, but I pray it never comes to that during my lifetime), and we are being asked to willingly give up the protection of this safe.
If you would open up the "safe" for anyone who asked (and the government, no less!), why would you have anything in the "safe" in the first place?
Yeah, next time I go to the US (I don't, because Americans are terrifying and amoral bastards who send foreigners to Syria to be tortured for months or years), I'll have to plead the fifth when they ask anything. "Sorry, going to have to plead the fifth on this one, because a court opinion shows that if I don't plead it now, I won't get another chance."
Well, at least here you have that right, before you "waive it".
In a lot of places, you don't have such right (U.K. already claimed that password for encryption is not a protected information under *any* circumstance), not to mention the broad protection of First and Second Amendment (again, U.K. doesn't have a "First Amendment", as in any free speech in U.K. is at the government's mercy, and in U.S., with its high standards for libel, the free speech rights are *least* infringed here).
The police already knows what's in the safe, and they could also use brute-force to open it, but it's reasonable to ask the suspect to surrender without violation of the 5th amendment.
Sure, it's reasonable for the police to ask. Now, is it still reasonable for the suspect to decline the request?
Unless the suspect has the option to say "No" to the request, it's not really a request after all.
Now the question is, is it reasonable for the court to compel the defendant himself to open the safe (or suffer the consequences...)?
I don't think, in this analogy, anyone is saying that it's wrong for the police to force open the safe. It's perfectly fine for them to, if they have the warrant (and I guess they do, in this case). It's a matter of whether one should be forced to incriminate himself, and I, for one, think the Fifth Amendment is fairly clear on that.
If I can add super-luminar expansion to the big-bang to make it fit the observations what's stopping me from saying it could have been lopsided exansion?
Because the theory that describes the expansion, including the inflation era [1], specifically assumes a homogeneous, isotropic universe, as verified by CMB [2]. That's what's stopping you from saying that it could have been a lopsided expansion. There is no theory to support it, except by twisting existing observation to fit someone's ill-conceived idea.
Remember the real power of any theory is not in the power of explanation ("God did it" is a perfectly good explanation for a lot of people), it's in the power of prediction. What I describing is the currently-accepted standard theory of the universe, and it has proven its worth by predicting a few astronomical phenomena before they were actually observed.
And, according to the current, standard theory of the universe (a lot can go wrong with this theory the closer you get to the Big Bang and the smaller you get, where quantum mechanics and general relativity somehow have to merge; but in the macroscopic scale, we have no evidence that this tested and proven theory might be wrong), CMB is one thing that every observer in the universe—even in the parts of the universe that is not observable from our insignificant vintage point—will see, and compare whether they are moving with respect to the CMB, like we are, or not (as one might, at the "center of the universe").
Notes
[1] Which is specifically necessary to explain CMB, which shows that regions of space that are farther apart than the lifetime of universe are somehow causally connected, which means they had to be closer together in the past and some superluminal expansion drove them farther away than any light could reach it in time.
[2] Which shows an isotropic distribution of background photons, except for the systematic anisotropy that arises from the Doppler shift and quantum fluctuation which was responsible for forming galaxies and stars.
Observing the CMBR I can deduce I am at the 'center of the universe' (big-bang's ground-zero).
I'm not talking about where the origin of your coordinate system is. I'm talking about how fast your coordinate system is moving relative to any other inertial coordinate system (when people talk about inertial reference frame, they are far less interested in the origin of the coordinate system than they are about how fast it is moving relative to something else).
Try getting yourself a picture of CMB. The largest feature in CMB is the anisotropy that comes from Doppler shift, that is, one side of CMB is blue-shifted, and the other is red-shifted. From this Doppler shift, one can actually calculate how fast Earth is moving relative to the inertial frame of universe.
The expansion itself is unimportant as far as this reference frame business is concerened. The expansion happens *everywhere* (as you said, everything else moving away from everything else). The Big Bang is important from this point of view only in that it is the source of CMB, which gives a reference frame for comparison from *anywhere* *anytime* in the universe.
The fluctuations in CMB that you hear about these days is nonuniformities you get *after* you remove these systematic anisotropies.
There's no "fixed" time reference for the universe, so it seems perfectly reasonable to use the one on Earth where all the readers live.
Well, while the special relativity may claim that all inertial reference frames are equal, the general relativity—especially the Big Bang theory—suggests that there *is* one inertial reference frame that is more equal than others: the rest frame of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which could be termed the "inertial reference frame for the universe".
Having said that, yes, we should give the dates for when the events were observed on Earth. The universe may not revolve around earth (earth is not even at the inertial reference frame of the universe), but it sure gets confusing if we start dating events by when they actually happen, since then, in order not to get utterly confused, one must know how far this Crab Nebula (or any other intra-galaxy or deep-space objects) is.
You pretending that it's business owners who, on their own, created that much value, what about all the lawyers, investment bankers, home flippers, and slum lords? CEOs? I'm sure you can think of others.
It's an opinion; everyone has one, and it doesn't need a citation. If you disagree, well, then you disagree.
I find your logic, that because *some* of the rich people have gotten rich through dishonest means, *all* the rich people need to be taxed to death, very troubling.
I mean, isn't that the same logic you could use to argue that because some Arabs were responsible for terrorism, including 9/11, we should imprison all Arabs and make wars on all Arab nations?
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? If someone becomes rich by illegal means, then a strong law enforcement should bring justice to them. If someone became rich by taking unreasonable risks, well, perhaps we can start righting things by *not* rescuing them when their risky investments fail (the very exact opposite of what the Obama administration is doing).
As for lawyers, well, as hated as they are, they are in that position because they had to go through many, many years of education. Somehow, they thought that education was worth what they would be getting for it, and well, perhaps they are justified in that someone is willing to pay them enough money to repay their cost (real and opportunity) of education many times over. While it is true that America has become an overly litigious society, but those people who sue over truly trivial matters will sue, lawyers or not.
And finally, slum lords do not pay income taxes. That's why they get caught over tax evasion, not any real crimes they committed.
Who benefits the most from having a stable, working society, the rich or the poor?
The poor. The rich are (generally, although you will always find exceptions) very capable people who will always find a way to get a job done, or make a living, with or without a strong law enforcement, or with or without a strong infrastructure (heck, if there wasn't an infrastructure, the first thing the rich would do is build one and make a profit out of it).
Many of the poor, on the other hand, well, would be dead, if it weren't for the welfare system—after all, isn't that the whole point of the welfare system, for those who do advocate it? (I do not.)
If being rich is so hard they can change that if they choose.
'Careful what you wish for. The day when you make it so hard that the rich decide they do not want to be rich with all the taxation... is the day America collapses.
You can oppress the rich only so much before being rich no longer makes sense to these rational people.
Social Security is a Federal tax, and it's actually regressive. Medicare is a Federal tax. Fuel tax is partially Federal tax.
You will note that GP did include those taxes (well, maybe not the gas tax, but do you have any evidence that the rich, who would be driving more than the poor not to mention use it more for their business, do not pay more than the poor?) and it still came out 20% of the population paid 70% of those taxes.
If you don't like social security and medicare, by all means repeal them—as the member of the generation who will not receive a single benefit before these programs collapse, I heartily support it.
Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households.
Have you ever thought about whether they deserved all that income? Of course they did! The Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and on smaller scale, successful restaurant/shop/other business owners earned all those gains, and more, given the levels of taxation before the Reagan era.
Those who have grown dependent on the government handouts, on the other hand, did not deserve a single penny of those handouts.
Your well-formatted, statistically dense post conveniently glossed over the fact that income taxes are not reflective of the entire tax burden.
Is there any other federal tax burden that the poor and middle class, as a whole, bear more heavily than the rich?
Sales tax is local. Property tax is local. Even vehicle tax is, seeing how it's levied by the DMV of each state, local.
At the federal level, the rich have been getting shafted on the income tax and haven't even been getting a word of thanks for supporting the rest of the country (federally-supported-program-wise, which is most of the welfare program in U.S.).
Yes, perhaps the poor pay more sales tax. But sales tax is not part of the presidential (or even congressional) platform.
If you think the Slashdot crowd hasn't been making any sensible arguments (either pro or con) on the issue of copyright, well, there *are* people elsewhere who do make well-reasoned argument not based on ad hominem attacks but on the disastrous consequences of overly strong copyright laws.
Why don't you go read what they have to say and decide for yourself whether the copyright laws as they stand currently are worth defending?
If you want to make sure that you get all your arguments from a proven liberal (I don't know which side of the political spectrum the QuestionCopyright guys associate themselves with), you can always read what Lawrence Lessig has to say.
I'm not aware of a way you can "change" an image once it is uploaded. You can "delete it," but it won't go away - there's no way to overwrite it.
Yes, that indeed is a problem that you cannot solve via Facebook's web interface. If you, however, hack into the server though, I think you will find that your options expand.;)
Except, of course, in a capitalist system, the person who lends the money or tool has a choice.
You don't have such choice when the government decides to "borrow" from you to fund some "capitalistic" venture. And, to note this distinction, most people use a different word when the government engages in a "capitalistic" activity. They call it fascism.
You can look up what Mussolini said about merging of the government and corporation. As long as these two stay far apart, we are good. The moment they start touching each other (as they are now, especially with this stimulus package), you have a disaster like WWII brewing.
More than just backups. When you "delete" something your just setting a Is_Deleted flag on their database. As far as facebook is concerned, your information is just as easily available as if you were an active member.
What if you simply change it, say, to something bogus?
They might have some kind of version control system, but a version control system is really a kind of backup with a particular purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Having your bank's own bank accounts frozen by a foreign power (the main reason Iceland's collapsing so fast) probably does count as "completely unexpected"...
But it appears that Iceland was not completely blameless, as the seizure was prompted by the announcement that U.K. depositors' money would not be guaranteed.
So, while each MCP or MCP's customer may not bear the sole blame for their situation, collectively, what happened was not totally "outside their control", yet another condition necessary to invoke force majeure.
But then, I'm not a lawyer, so maybe in some legal jurisdictions bad government (or national bank; I don't know how Iceland works) policy/announcement is treated like an "Act of God", though God may take offense at that.
Basic scientific research is a "public good". You can't get the proper levels of funding by asking the private sector to do it, simply because the bulk of the benefits will be impossible to monetize.
That's exactly why we didn't see any progress in science until the government started investing heavily in all scientific research around WWII and after.
Wait, what? The whole body of classical physics, including the relativistically-correct Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics AND much of the important results of quantum mechanics were worked out long before the heavy interference from the government. Compared to all the great achievements of the late 19th century and early 20th century, do we have anything in basic science to show for ourselves (other than the atomic bomb, thank you very much), for all the money government stole from people and wasted in "science"?
Basic science was doing perfectly fine before the government started messing with it. Basic science doesn't need government funding to survive and thrive, and history proves it.
Just because the government can provide a public good doesn't mean it should. In fact, anything the government doesn't have to do (i.e. anything that doesn't involve war or law enforcement by force), the government should try *not* doing it and see if the private sector can do it more efficiently (and the whole point of capitalism is that it can).
Money does come in from private sources as well as states, but all of that grant money must be completely separated from the federal money, which funds a LOT of science.
So it looks like the problem is not that Bush stopped federal funding from being wasted on embryonic stem cell research, but it is in fact that the federal government has way too much role in how science is conducted.
The real solution to this real problem is that we should reduce the role of (and perhaps more importantly, taxation by) the government so that the science, including basic science without immediate technical application because *somebody* has to be rich enough and foresighted enough to fund these things, can be properly supported from private sources of funding, rather than money stolen from people, which is euphemistically called "tax" these days.
My point was simply that individuals in Silicon Valley and Hollywood are already paying taxes.
A reasonable answer to "what prevented them from pulling out their checkbooks" would be simply that they felt they already had and now wanted to see the money spent appropriately.
So, you combine the money from people who support killing embryos for scientific research and the money from people who don't support killing embryos at all and somehow the money is good for spending on killing embryos for scientific research?
If these people want to pay for the kind of research they support, well, they should pay for it explicitly. Otherwise they are only trying to steal from people who don't share their view, like so many statists.
You should pick a different term, though it's quite clear why you choose not to.
How about "murdering an embryo"?
Or, if you object to that because "murder" (probably) has a well-defined legal meaning, how about "killing an embryo"?
It's not just anti-abortionists that pick their words, well, carefully. Those who think the federal government should support this kind of research (I'm not—I think ALL research should be funded privately if possible, but especially tax money should not be spent on this kind of research which has political implications) also pick their words very carefully to imply that the embryo is not a life, was never a life, and never could have been a living being (the third implication being blatantly false).
Just because there aren't any yet doesn't mean there won't be any in the future. While if the research into the subject gets banned we will certainly never see the potentially live saving results.
And how much public money (taken from people some of whom strongly disagree with this choice of spending) should be poured into this morally dubious endeavor before we say, "O.K. This is a waste of money. Let's stop creating demand for 'non-viable embryos'"? One year? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? 100 years?
Bush did a lot of bad things, but his "ban" on embryonic stem cell research wasn't one of those. Just because the federal government wasn't funding the research doesn't mean there were others who were more than willing, like biotech companies, mentioned in the summary (and no, there was never a ban in the usual sense of the word, only the decision not to fund). In fact, in this day and age when scientific research is too polluted with money stolen from people (i.e. "tax"), his decision not to fund activities that a good fraction of people disagree with was a refreshingly good one (... of course, that was also before the Iraq war, but I digress...).
No. One year is 9 months in East Asia. Haven't you seen the lunar calendar?
So my countryman WASN'T kidnapped by the CIA, shipped to Syria, then tortured for months?
Oh wait, he was.
Depending on who your "countryman" was. If he's not American, well, you know CIA does some things that are less than honorable to non-Americans so that Americans may live—I have no shame regarding that. If terrorists need to be tortured so that Americans may live, so be it (and I say this as a self-claimed libertarian; in this case it's one fundamental right (right to live) against another fundamental right (right to be treated as a human); if it can be shown that the terrorist violated another's fundamental right, as far as I am concerned, he forfeited his).
If your countryman was in U.S. legally (hence the protections of the U.S. Constitution extends to him; if he was not in the U.S., as so many foreigners are fond of saying, U.S. laws do not apply outside U.S.), well, would you care to quote a specific incident?
What you are not making clear is the existence of the facts you claim that proves my position wrong.
I heard iPhones get angry if you anthropomorphize them.
Better than deifying them. At least they can't smite you down ...
I bet the CIA is filled with pride when you use your first amendment to free speech on the entire plane ride to Syria, then use it while being dragged into a Syrian prison, then continue using it while being tortured for months.
CIA was never meant to operate against Americans (even the disloyal and violent ones). If I'm being dragged anywhere, starting from America, it would be by FBI, and FBI, being a domestic agency, would not fly me to a foreign country.
I know intelligence services and the military have come to a bit of bad reputation because of a few bad eggs, but try and give me a single example of CIA (or FBI, if you'd like) so much as laying hands on a U.S. citizen (or anyone else in U.S. legally and not caught in the act of crime), much less using "enhanced interrogation techniques".
Even CIA, when you compare it against its counterparts in other countries, is much more benign—it's just the anti-American media that tries to portray it in a different light while hiding the faults of any other country that isn't the U.S.A.
Encryption is different from a physical safe in that it can be prohibitively difficult to break into without the owner's cooperation. I'm not really sure exactly what legal implications that has, but I'm certain it's relevant.
Yes, that is relevant and that's why we need to fight for this right.
We finally have a "safe" that is so strong that if the government wanted to break it, it couldn't (save by a variant of Rubberhose attack, but I pray it never comes to that during my lifetime), and we are being asked to willingly give up the protection of this safe.
If you would open up the "safe" for anyone who asked (and the government, no less!), why would you have anything in the "safe" in the first place?
Yeah, next time I go to the US (I don't, because Americans are terrifying and amoral bastards who send foreigners to Syria to be tortured for months or years), I'll have to plead the fifth when they ask anything. "Sorry, going to have to plead the fifth on this one, because a court opinion shows that if I don't plead it now, I won't get another chance."
Well, at least here you have that right, before you "waive it".
In a lot of places, you don't have such right (U.K. already claimed that password for encryption is not a protected information under *any* circumstance), not to mention the broad protection of First and Second Amendment (again, U.K. doesn't have a "First Amendment", as in any free speech in U.K. is at the government's mercy, and in U.S., with its high standards for libel, the free speech rights are *least* infringed here).
The police already knows what's in the safe, and they could also use brute-force to open it, but it's reasonable to ask the suspect to surrender without violation of the 5th amendment.
Sure, it's reasonable for the police to ask. Now, is it still reasonable for the suspect to decline the request?
Unless the suspect has the option to say "No" to the request, it's not really a request after all.
Now the question is, is it reasonable for the court to compel the defendant himself to open the safe (or suffer the consequences ...)?
I don't think, in this analogy, anyone is saying that it's wrong for the police to force open the safe. It's perfectly fine for them to, if they have the warrant (and I guess they do, in this case). It's a matter of whether one should be forced to incriminate himself, and I, for one, think the Fifth Amendment is fairly clear on that.
If I can add super-luminar expansion to the big-bang to make it fit the observations what's stopping me from saying it could have been lopsided exansion?
Because the theory that describes the expansion, including the inflation era [1], specifically assumes a homogeneous, isotropic universe, as verified by CMB [2]. That's what's stopping you from saying that it could have been a lopsided expansion. There is no theory to support it, except by twisting existing observation to fit someone's ill-conceived idea.
Remember the real power of any theory is not in the power of explanation ("God did it" is a perfectly good explanation for a lot of people), it's in the power of prediction. What I describing is the currently-accepted standard theory of the universe, and it has proven its worth by predicting a few astronomical phenomena before they were actually observed.
And, according to the current, standard theory of the universe (a lot can go wrong with this theory the closer you get to the Big Bang and the smaller you get, where quantum mechanics and general relativity somehow have to merge; but in the macroscopic scale, we have no evidence that this tested and proven theory might be wrong), CMB is one thing that every observer in the universe—even in the parts of the universe that is not observable from our insignificant vintage point—will see, and compare whether they are moving with respect to the CMB, like we are, or not (as one might, at the "center of the universe").
Notes
[1] Which is specifically necessary to explain CMB, which shows that regions of space that are farther apart than the lifetime of universe are somehow causally connected, which means they had to be closer together in the past and some superluminal expansion drove them farther away than any light could reach it in time.
[2] Which shows an isotropic distribution of background photons, except for the systematic anisotropy that arises from the Doppler shift and quantum fluctuation which was responsible for forming galaxies and stars.
Observing the CMBR I can deduce I am at the 'center of the universe' (big-bang's ground-zero).
I'm not talking about where the origin of your coordinate system is. I'm talking about how fast your coordinate system is moving relative to any other inertial coordinate system (when people talk about inertial reference frame, they are far less interested in the origin of the coordinate system than they are about how fast it is moving relative to something else).
Try getting yourself a picture of CMB. The largest feature in CMB is the anisotropy that comes from Doppler shift, that is, one side of CMB is blue-shifted, and the other is red-shifted. From this Doppler shift, one can actually calculate how fast Earth is moving relative to the inertial frame of universe.
The expansion itself is unimportant as far as this reference frame business is concerened. The expansion happens *everywhere* (as you said, everything else moving away from everything else). The Big Bang is important from this point of view only in that it is the source of CMB, which gives a reference frame for comparison from *anywhere* *anytime* in the universe.
The fluctuations in CMB that you hear about these days is nonuniformities you get *after* you remove these systematic anisotropies.
There's no "fixed" time reference for the universe, so it seems perfectly reasonable to use the one on Earth where all the readers live.
Well, while the special relativity may claim that all inertial reference frames are equal, the general relativity—especially the Big Bang theory—suggests that there *is* one inertial reference frame that is more equal than others: the rest frame of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which could be termed the "inertial reference frame for the universe".
Having said that, yes, we should give the dates for when the events were observed on Earth. The universe may not revolve around earth (earth is not even at the inertial reference frame of the universe), but it sure gets confusing if we start dating events by when they actually happen, since then, in order not to get utterly confused, one must know how far this Crab Nebula (or any other intra-galaxy or deep-space objects) is.
Citation needed.
You pretending that it's business owners who, on their own, created that much value, what about all the lawyers, investment bankers, home flippers, and slum lords? CEOs? I'm sure you can think of others.
It's an opinion; everyone has one, and it doesn't need a citation. If you disagree, well, then you disagree.
I find your logic, that because *some* of the rich people have gotten rich through dishonest means, *all* the rich people need to be taxed to death, very troubling.
I mean, isn't that the same logic you could use to argue that because some Arabs were responsible for terrorism, including 9/11, we should imprison all Arabs and make wars on all Arab nations?
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? If someone becomes rich by illegal means, then a strong law enforcement should bring justice to them. If someone became rich by taking unreasonable risks, well, perhaps we can start righting things by *not* rescuing them when their risky investments fail (the very exact opposite of what the Obama administration is doing).
As for lawyers, well, as hated as they are, they are in that position because they had to go through many, many years of education. Somehow, they thought that education was worth what they would be getting for it, and well, perhaps they are justified in that someone is willing to pay them enough money to repay their cost (real and opportunity) of education many times over. While it is true that America has become an overly litigious society, but those people who sue over truly trivial matters will sue, lawyers or not.
And finally, slum lords do not pay income taxes. That's why they get caught over tax evasion, not any real crimes they committed.
Who benefits the most from having a stable, working society, the rich or the poor?
The poor. The rich are (generally, although you will always find exceptions) very capable people who will always find a way to get a job done, or make a living, with or without a strong law enforcement, or with or without a strong infrastructure (heck, if there wasn't an infrastructure, the first thing the rich would do is build one and make a profit out of it).
Many of the poor, on the other hand, well, would be dead, if it weren't for the welfare system—after all, isn't that the whole point of the welfare system, for those who do advocate it? (I do not.)
If being rich is so hard they can change that if they choose.
'Careful what you wish for. The day when you make it so hard that the rich decide they do not want to be rich with all the taxation ... is the day America collapses.
You can oppress the rich only so much before being rich no longer makes sense to these rational people.
Social Security is a Federal tax, and it's actually regressive. Medicare is a Federal tax. Fuel tax is partially Federal tax.
You will note that GP did include those taxes (well, maybe not the gas tax, but do you have any evidence that the rich, who would be driving more than the poor not to mention use it more for their business, do not pay more than the poor?) and it still came out 20% of the population paid 70% of those taxes.
If you don't like social security and medicare, by all means repeal them—as the member of the generation who will not receive a single benefit before these programs collapse, I heartily support it.
Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households.
Have you ever thought about whether they deserved all that income? Of course they did! The Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and on smaller scale, successful restaurant/shop/other business owners earned all those gains, and more, given the levels of taxation before the Reagan era.
Those who have grown dependent on the government handouts, on the other hand, did not deserve a single penny of those handouts.
Your well-formatted, statistically dense post conveniently glossed over the fact that income taxes are not reflective of the entire tax burden.
Is there any other federal tax burden that the poor and middle class, as a whole, bear more heavily than the rich?
Sales tax is local. Property tax is local. Even vehicle tax is, seeing how it's levied by the DMV of each state, local.
At the federal level, the rich have been getting shafted on the income tax and haven't even been getting a word of thanks for supporting the rest of the country (federally-supported-program-wise, which is most of the welfare program in U.S.).
Yes, perhaps the poor pay more sales tax. But sales tax is not part of the presidential (or even congressional) platform.
If you think the Slashdot crowd hasn't been making any sensible arguments (either pro or con) on the issue of copyright, well, there *are* people elsewhere who do make well-reasoned argument not based on ad hominem attacks but on the disastrous consequences of overly strong copyright laws.
Why don't you go read what they have to say and decide for yourself whether the copyright laws as they stand currently are worth defending?
If you want to make sure that you get all your arguments from a proven liberal (I don't know which side of the political spectrum the QuestionCopyright guys associate themselves with), you can always read what Lawrence Lessig has to say.
I'm not aware of a way you can "change" an image once it is uploaded. You can "delete it," but it won't go away - there's no way to overwrite it.
Yes, that indeed is a problem that you cannot solve via Facebook's web interface. If you, however, hack into the server though, I think you will find that your options expand. ;)
Except, of course, in a capitalist system, the person who lends the money or tool has a choice.
You don't have such choice when the government decides to "borrow" from you to fund some "capitalistic" venture. And, to note this distinction, most people use a different word when the government engages in a "capitalistic" activity. They call it fascism.
You can look up what Mussolini said about merging of the government and corporation. As long as these two stay far apart, we are good. The moment they start touching each other (as they are now, especially with this stimulus package), you have a disaster like WWII brewing.
More than just backups. When you "delete" something your just setting a Is_Deleted flag on their database. As far as facebook is concerned, your information is just as easily available as if you were an active member.
What if you simply change it, say, to something bogus?
They might have some kind of version control system, but a version control system is really a kind of backup with a particular purpose.