I say we put them in the same prison cell, and see who'll rat on the other first. Clinton seems like he'd be more willing to bargain for a better deal, but Bush is more athletic, and so might be able to make Bill his bitch.
You know, this could revolutionize how politics are done...
Yeah, but a deterrent to buying videogames? Why not a tax on rap CDs, or slasher films? Hell, why not a tax on fatty foods or Republican/Democratic party campaign materials? All presumably encourage bad behaviour -- violence and rudeness to ho's, serial murder, obesity, and voting for corrupt shitty leaders, respectively. Videogames are innocuous compared to any of the previous. This kind of thing has to be saved for the most extreme problems, because it has a detrimental effect on the economy. Taxing just any old thing leads to, well, basically it leads to Soviet-style communism (as opposed to the much more unencumbered capitalist welfare-state thing that America normally leans towards, at least a little).
I never realized just how insane the American tax system is. I mean, taxation systems are usually deranged even at the best of times, but damn, Americans seem to get the very worst taxation out there. Most countries, when they want money for schools, just raise the sales tax or the income tax (depending on how the current administration feels about what the least harmful way of taxing people is). Taxes for particular goods or services are typically reserved for things that exact heavy costs on the nation, like alcohol or cigarettes.
What amazes me is that the Great Flood receded so quickly and forcefully that it was able to drive a dinosaur bone over two kilometres into the sea floor. That's divine wrath for ya.
I think the problem with drivers' licenses is that, once you get one, it's nearly impossible to lose it short of driving drunk (and even then, you have to get caught doing it a few times). The premier of my province was actually pulled over for drunk driving in Hawaii, with essentially no reprimands. Anyway, I think yearly recertification and a low-bar for losing your license would help, although the effects would be far too destructive in most locales due to the utter necessity of having a car there.
Make it a no-cost feature that people with good driving records can request (like getting a license for automatic weapons or handling high explosives). The average person is way too much of a retard to have a car that doesn't second-guess them... the two occasions when I, as a pedestrian/cyclist, have been struck by cars that weren't paying attention attests to that.
If you're some sort of awesome super-driver that could pass a police offensive driving course while dying of alcohol poisoning and helping your wife give birth, then by all means, you should have a car that lets you "play". But the jackasses that can't get to the grocery store without riding up onto the curb or rear-ending someone, definitely need a car that makes fucking-up harder.
I think it's fantastic that the ESA is getting so serious about space exploration. They're really becoming a leader in the space industry. Between China, Japan, the ESA, Russia, and NASA, the space industry is becoming truly international. Cooperation and competition, side-by-side, is a great way to get things done, especially with the private sector getting more directly involved.
It's definitely an interesting time to be alive...
I suppose the question is whether Microsoft wants you to have success with Applications third party developers. Most operating systems are designed with the assumption that many of the applications that will be run were written by malicious fuckups, curiously inventive hackers, degenerate sociopaths with CS degrees, and children. Microsoft assumes that applications will be written by Microsoft, or at least by certified developers (not that Microsoft is particularly good at developing for their own system). The attitude is that if you're running applications from outside that cozy little clique, you're probably a dangerous free thinker of some kind and don't deserve a functional system.
She does seem to embody liberalism's worst qualities, much in the same way that Dubya embodies conservativism's worst qualities.
Maybe the Conservative party of Canada could open up an American franchise. I bet their brand of rational, secular, balanced conservativism could go far in the US if it got the chance. The conservatives, for their part, would probably dig the chance to work in an environment where the people aren't quite so adamant about having a robust set of social programs, thereby allowing taxes to be slashed down to the marrow. I'm not a fan of conservativism myself, but I can certainly respect it's more logical forms, like what the Reagan administration was trying to push.
Who said they would have liked it? The Clinton administration was about as republican as it gets. But it's always the current administration that's under the spotlight. Don't worry -- if and when the Democrats next hold the presidency, everyone will rip them apart for stripping away freedoms as fast as they can. But until then, it's Bush and the cronies who are fucking you over, and so they're the ones that get all the criticism. Criticizing Clinton is, at this point, an exercise in political futility. He can't really do much damage at this point.
This is very true. Creating the bio-agent (or chemical agent, or conventional explosive that matter) is EASY. Anthrax practically makes itself. And by practically I mean literally. Anyone can make chlorine gas from bleach and ammonia. Gunpowder synthesis isn't exactly hard. And that nasty peroxide-based stuff that Lebanese terrorists are so fond of? The recipe is frighteningly easy, and requires only two ingredients that are available everywhere at low low prices.
The hard part is weaponizing them. Anthrax is hard to spread around; you have to figure out how to prevent the bacterial particls from clumping, and you have to be able to aerosilize them. Chlorine, being a gas, is nigh-impossible to trap, store, and distribute in large amounts without a factory. You're more likely to just gas yourself (which, if you're in the habit of making chlorine for weapon purposes, is just as well). Gunpowder is easy enough to make a small, pipebomb-style weapon out of, but anything bigger and you really need a plane, rocket, or mortar to get it where you want it. And that peroxide stuff whose name I can't recall? The terrorist engineers who make have short careers for a reason, and when the survivors are arrested they are typically missing fingers and/or hands and/or notable sections of face.
It's a huge jump from something deadly to a practical weapon. Just look how much money the world's researching militaries throw at the problem; if it were just a matter of finding more lethal substances, the art of killing would have been perfected long, long ago.
Hasn't the commercial microprocessor industry already been flirting with the idea of asynchronous electronics? Looking at developments like DDR, execution units in processors that accept instructions on both the up and down parts of the clock cycle, and whatnot, it seems as if the idea of strictly obeying a clock signal is becoming a bottleneck. Granted, it's a big jump to actual clock-less operation, but it seems as many of the big players in the processor market have already taken the first baby steps in this direction.
My point was that sometimes it isn't worthwhile to learn how to do something if there is a tool that will do a better job for less effort. After all, isn't that why you use a computer to write software and develop graphics, rather than punching holes in cards and drawing using pencils, charcoal, and paints? If autists find it difficult to learn to understand facial expressions, and a tool makes it easy, why shouldn't they use the tool? I'm not quite sure why you think autists should have to do things the hard way, just to satisfy some odd naturalistic obsession about the evils of using tools to avoid challenges.
b.) Well said. It never ceases to amaze me that people want the US to leave Iraq. Invading Iraq was an enormously evil and stupid mistake, but abandoning Iraq now would be even worse -- it would leave the Iraqi people in a much, much worse situation than they were in before the invasion. And that would be a real breeding ground for terrorism AT BEST; at worst, it could breed a monstrous empire-building dictatorship that absorbs the entire middle east and turns it into our new best enemy.
This is a great point, and well made. The first few paragraphs of my biology textbook expound upon that very topic, that "life" is a nearly impossible concept to define.
For example, ask yourself this: given that a paramecium is considered "life", then which is the living organism -- you, or your cells? Is a heart cell alive, or are you? Or both? If you try to define "life" against the paramecium, the a human isn't a living thing at all, but rather a bizarre cohesive colony of trillions of living things. Obviously then we need to include more than one type of thing in the definition of Life. That's about as clear an issue as you'll find in this discussion though. It all gets more ambiguous from there.
This is extremely true. The "disabled", include paraplegics, the blind, the deaf, people with motor control problems, and a bewildering variety of others, and each group has different accessibility needs. Some (maybe even most) disabled people don't need any help with their software -- schizophrenics are probably fine, for example. Computers enable obsessive-compulsive behaviour in a way that is unparalleled:p . In general, even the least accessible software is a great boon to the disabled.
Why do people think that voting for a third party is throwing your vote away? It may not make a difference, but in a country of 270 million (or whatever it's up to), the only way you can possibly make a difference at all at election time is to set fire to a polling station or something. Not that I'm suggesting arson or vandalism. Wait, I take that back. Next election, vote Arson!
Cell phones require substantially less power than even the most efficient laptop computers. You can already get cranking systems for cell phones too, ostensibly to allow them to be recharged during extended power outages. And when someone is facing starvation, even the tiny screen and awful data entry system on a cell phone will seem like a godsend if it allows them to access information on how to keep their crops from failing.
Not that I disagree with the idea of the MIT laptops -- I think they're a great idea, and I hope they actually make it into the hands of people that can do some good with them. I'm just saying that a web-enabled cell phone is a considerable tool in its own right, and shouldn't be discounted.
The problem with your roommate could be resolved by simply taxing him the cost of healthcare (or part of it, if you cotton to the idea of non-flat taxes), and then ensuring that he receives said healthcare in a reasonably efficient manner. Even the most generous welfare programs need sense.
Helping out lazy leeches? Of course that's a problem. Here in BC, you can't receive income assistance (a more flexible variant that also covers people who earn too little money to support themselves) unless you apply for a certain number of jobs each week (they even check with the businesses you applied at from time to time), complete employability courses, and demonstrate a reasonable level of effort at job hunting. Disability assistance and persistent-multiple-barriers assistance aren't quite as demanding; they provide the same employability courses (the majority of disabled people actually want to work), they're just not mandatory. It's still far from perfect, but at least the beauracrats are thinking, and that's far better than the customary alternative.
On the specific topic of drug testing, I'd say that the Giuliani approach is a bit backwards. It keeps with the harmful notion of treating drug addiction as a criminal activity, rather than a mental illness. Putting drug addicts in psych hospitals and rehabilitating them is far better than making them homeless. You are right about treating the disease. My dispute is with the idea that you should stop treating the symptoms as well. If you don't treat symptoms, patients wont last long enough to ever be cured.
Strictly speaking though, what is the difference between a welfare recipient who rents $5 worth of movies each week as recreation, a welfare recipient who leases a $20 internet connection each month for recreational web surfing, and a welfare recipient who buys a joint each week to relax with? Just because someone has no job doesn't mean that they shouldn't be free to spend a small reasonable amount of their money on R&R in a manner of their chooosing. That's setting aside the ridiculous fact that non-harmful drugs like pot are illegal of course.
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You know, this could revolutionize how politics are done...
Yeah, but a deterrent to buying videogames? Why not a tax on rap CDs, or slasher films? Hell, why not a tax on fatty foods or Republican/Democratic party campaign materials? All presumably encourage bad behaviour -- violence and rudeness to ho's, serial murder, obesity, and voting for corrupt shitty leaders, respectively. Videogames are innocuous compared to any of the previous. This kind of thing has to be saved for the most extreme problems, because it has a detrimental effect on the economy. Taxing just any old thing leads to, well, basically it leads to Soviet-style communism (as opposed to the much more unencumbered capitalist welfare-state thing that America normally leans towards, at least a little).
I never realized just how insane the American tax system is. I mean, taxation systems are usually deranged even at the best of times, but damn, Americans seem to get the very worst taxation out there. Most countries, when they want money for schools, just raise the sales tax or the income tax (depending on how the current administration feels about what the least harmful way of taxing people is). Taxes for particular goods or services are typically reserved for things that exact heavy costs on the nation, like alcohol or cigarettes.
That's the best thing I've ever heard!
I think the problem with drivers' licenses is that, once you get one, it's nearly impossible to lose it short of driving drunk (and even then, you have to get caught doing it a few times). The premier of my province was actually pulled over for drunk driving in Hawaii, with essentially no reprimands. Anyway, I think yearly recertification and a low-bar for losing your license would help, although the effects would be far too destructive in most locales due to the utter necessity of having a car there.
A no-cost "feature" is generally one of those flip-a-switch options in the car's internal computer.
If you're some sort of awesome super-driver that could pass a police offensive driving course while dying of alcohol poisoning and helping your wife give birth, then by all means, you should have a car that lets you "play". But the jackasses that can't get to the grocery store without riding up onto the curb or rear-ending someone, definitely need a car that makes fucking-up harder.
It's definitely an interesting time to be alive...
I suppose the question is whether Microsoft wants you to have success with Applications third party developers. Most operating systems are designed with the assumption that many of the applications that will be run were written by malicious fuckups, curiously inventive hackers, degenerate sociopaths with CS degrees, and children. Microsoft assumes that applications will be written by Microsoft, or at least by certified developers (not that Microsoft is particularly good at developing for their own system). The attitude is that if you're running applications from outside that cozy little clique, you're probably a dangerous free thinker of some kind and don't deserve a functional system.
Maybe the Conservative party of Canada could open up an American franchise. I bet their brand of rational, secular, balanced conservativism could go far in the US if it got the chance. The conservatives, for their part, would probably dig the chance to work in an environment where the people aren't quite so adamant about having a robust set of social programs, thereby allowing taxes to be slashed down to the marrow. I'm not a fan of conservativism myself, but I can certainly respect it's more logical forms, like what the Reagan administration was trying to push.
Who said they would have liked it? The Clinton administration was about as republican as it gets. But it's always the current administration that's under the spotlight. Don't worry -- if and when the Democrats next hold the presidency, everyone will rip them apart for stripping away freedoms as fast as they can. But until then, it's Bush and the cronies who are fucking you over, and so they're the ones that get all the criticism. Criticizing Clinton is, at this point, an exercise in political futility. He can't really do much damage at this point.
Actually, this is the class of chemicals that I was thinking of. Nasty stuff, absolutely terrible.
The hard part is weaponizing them. Anthrax is hard to spread around; you have to figure out how to prevent the bacterial particls from clumping, and you have to be able to aerosilize them. Chlorine, being a gas, is nigh-impossible to trap, store, and distribute in large amounts without a factory. You're more likely to just gas yourself (which, if you're in the habit of making chlorine for weapon purposes, is just as well). Gunpowder is easy enough to make a small, pipebomb-style weapon out of, but anything bigger and you really need a plane, rocket, or mortar to get it where you want it. And that peroxide stuff whose name I can't recall? The terrorist engineers who make have short careers for a reason, and when the survivors are arrested they are typically missing fingers and/or hands and/or notable sections of face.
It's a huge jump from something deadly to a practical weapon. Just look how much money the world's researching militaries throw at the problem; if it were just a matter of finding more lethal substances, the art of killing would have been perfected long, long ago.
Hasn't the commercial microprocessor industry already been flirting with the idea of asynchronous electronics? Looking at developments like DDR, execution units in processors that accept instructions on both the up and down parts of the clock cycle, and whatnot, it seems as if the idea of strictly obeying a clock signal is becoming a bottleneck. Granted, it's a big jump to actual clock-less operation, but it seems as many of the big players in the processor market have already taken the first baby steps in this direction.
My point was that sometimes it isn't worthwhile to learn how to do something if there is a tool that will do a better job for less effort. After all, isn't that why you use a computer to write software and develop graphics, rather than punching holes in cards and drawing using pencils, charcoal, and paints? If autists find it difficult to learn to understand facial expressions, and a tool makes it easy, why shouldn't they use the tool? I'm not quite sure why you think autists should have to do things the hard way, just to satisfy some odd naturalistic obsession about the evils of using tools to avoid challenges.
b.) Well said. It never ceases to amaze me that people want the US to leave Iraq. Invading Iraq was an enormously evil and stupid mistake, but abandoning Iraq now would be even worse -- it would leave the Iraqi people in a much, much worse situation than they were in before the invasion. And that would be a real breeding ground for terrorism AT BEST; at worst, it could breed a monstrous empire-building dictatorship that absorbs the entire middle east and turns it into our new best enemy.
For example, ask yourself this: given that a paramecium is considered "life", then which is the living organism -- you, or your cells? Is a heart cell alive, or are you? Or both? If you try to define "life" against the paramecium, the a human isn't a living thing at all, but rather a bizarre cohesive colony of trillions of living things. Obviously then we need to include more than one type of thing in the definition of Life. That's about as clear an issue as you'll find in this discussion though. It all gets more ambiguous from there.
This is extremely true. The "disabled", include paraplegics, the blind, the deaf, people with motor control problems, and a bewildering variety of others, and each group has different accessibility needs. Some (maybe even most) disabled people don't need any help with their software -- schizophrenics are probably fine, for example. Computers enable obsessive-compulsive behaviour in a way that is unparalleled :p . In general, even the least accessible software is a great boon to the disabled.
Why do people think that voting for a third party is throwing your vote away? It may not make a difference, but in a country of 270 million (or whatever it's up to), the only way you can possibly make a difference at all at election time is to set fire to a polling station or something. Not that I'm suggesting arson or vandalism. Wait, I take that back. Next election, vote Arson!
Damn, of all the days to not have a mod point for you. That's some well-stated thinkification.
Not that I disagree with the idea of the MIT laptops -- I think they're a great idea, and I hope they actually make it into the hands of people that can do some good with them. I'm just saying that a web-enabled cell phone is a considerable tool in its own right, and shouldn't be discounted.
Helping out lazy leeches? Of course that's a problem. Here in BC, you can't receive income assistance (a more flexible variant that also covers people who earn too little money to support themselves) unless you apply for a certain number of jobs each week (they even check with the businesses you applied at from time to time), complete employability courses, and demonstrate a reasonable level of effort at job hunting. Disability assistance and persistent-multiple-barriers assistance aren't quite as demanding; they provide the same employability courses (the majority of disabled people actually want to work), they're just not mandatory. It's still far from perfect, but at least the beauracrats are thinking, and that's far better than the customary alternative.
On the specific topic of drug testing, I'd say that the Giuliani approach is a bit backwards. It keeps with the harmful notion of treating drug addiction as a criminal activity, rather than a mental illness. Putting drug addicts in psych hospitals and rehabilitating them is far better than making them homeless. You are right about treating the disease. My dispute is with the idea that you should stop treating the symptoms as well. If you don't treat symptoms, patients wont last long enough to ever be cured.
Strictly speaking though, what is the difference between a welfare recipient who rents $5 worth of movies each week as recreation, a welfare recipient who leases a $20 internet connection each month for recreational web surfing, and a welfare recipient who buys a joint each week to relax with? Just because someone has no job doesn't mean that they shouldn't be free to spend a small reasonable amount of their money on R&R in a manner of their chooosing. That's setting aside the ridiculous fact that non-harmful drugs like pot are illegal of course.
Let's be honest -- this guy needs to go to jail NOW. Privacy is almost as treasonous as sharing or questioning your leaders.