We are currently at war and there is no such thing as 'ending' a War; you win or lose them and losing them has really undesirable consequences.
Indeed, you might even lose an inch of penis size! On the other hand, fewer people get killed and in many cases, the ultimate end result is almost as good as if you stayed in and won. Seriously, I can name plenty of examples of wars where, if one side just gave up halfway through and decided to sue for peace, they would have been much better off. Discretion is the better part of valor, and pigheadedness in a cause whose costs have far exceeded any possible benefits is simple pigheadedness, not courage. Any leader who sends wave after wave of men into a pointless war simply for the sake of saving face is a coward morally responsible for each and every one of their needless deaths.
Vigorious debate before the war is both desirable and Patrotic, anklebiting and lending aid to enemies after the choice to begin a War is not.
Don't give us that rehashed Vietnam bullshit. When the public is lied into a war, they have every right to turn against it when the jig is up and the trickery revealed. When the cost of war has far exceeded any possible benefit, it's the public's responsibility to pull the plug. But that's not the damning point at all--if you have to choose to begin a war, the war is automatically wrong and you are the aggressor. At that point, the only saving grace you have left as a free country is whether or not you allow your own citizens to dissent. A warmongering democracy where a minority of the population speaks out against its government's aggression is only slightly better than a warmongering dictatorship where all dissent is suppressed, but it is better. The true enemy of Russia was the Soviet government, not Czechoslovakia. And the true enemy of America is not foreign, but domestic.
Judges rule on the law and Constituition as written, any attempts to legislate from the bench will be seen as an act of usurpation of the Rightful powers reserved to the other two branches and considered as just cause to commence proceedings for removal on those grounds.
In other words, the Supreme Court can only make rulings you agree with. "Legislating from the bench" is a bullshit notion that stems from a complete ignorance of the common law system. See, your implicit assumption is that the law (specifically the Constitution), as written, express simply and exactly what to do in a given situation, and that the Court's job is to simply read it and apply it to the case at hand. That's called a civil law system. In that kind of system, court precedents aren't binding (and are indeed unimportant) since the law specifically states what it means in implementation-level detail.
The common law system is a little different. Under common law, the law is only supposed to state the general principle at hand, with the specific details worked out case-by-case by educated jurists. As each case is handled, the precedent of that case is used to inform future judgments in a process known as stare decisis. Try actually reading the Constitution--"equal protection under the law" (14th amendment), "regulate commerce with foreign nations and between the several states", "general welfare", "necessary and proper", "regarding the establishment of a religion", "cruel and unusual", etc. are all very vague phrases whose meanings and applicability to a given situation require significant judgment calls and good-faith attempts to apply general principles.
And aside from all that, you seem to take the solipsistic view that even for a vaguely-written Constitution meant to apply general principles, its true meaning is very clear and simple to you and that no one, in good faith, could possibly interpret it differently than you do.
In short, your presidency would be defined by warmongering, squashing of dissent, arrogance, and despite your salutory neglect towards most issues, a highly dangerous and unconstitutional consolidation of power on the few matters you do consider important. I hardly see an improvement over the current situation here.
What the fuck does spelling or even grammar have to do with the ability to program?
Attention to detail and the ability to apply proper syntax have everything to do with the ability to program. I'm not sure how people are able to program without those two traits.
I'm not doubting the value of goodwill, as it's central to acquisitions in the first place. But accounting usually only deals with more tangible assets, with "goodwill" as a notable exception.
In Business Terms: The accounting term is called "goodwill". That's what the single user-demos are building.
sigh I hate to nit-pick these things, but "goodwill" in an accounting context means something completely different. Specifically, when one company acquires another, they pay an amount of cash, often (usually) well above the value of the other company's assets. To balance this difference, the purchasing company is said to have acquired a fictitious asset called "goodwill" that accounts for the difference in value between the company's assets and the paid value of the acquired company. So if you pay $10,000,000 for a company that has $2,000,000 in assets, you've acquired (in accounting terms) $2,000,000 in assets and $8,000,000 in goodwill.
You joke, but (from a story I've found many places, most recently here):
The campaign for a national ID card is not new. It first got serious consideration early in the Reagan administration, when Attorney General William French Smith suggested it during a Cabinet meeting. At first there were murmurs of assent. Then presidential assistant Martin Anderson (husband of Annelise) spoke up.
"Mr. President, I would like to suggest another way that I think is a lot better," he counseled. "It's a lot cheaper. It can't be counterfeited. It's very lightweight, and impossible to lose. It's even waterproof. All we have to do is tattoo an identification number on the inside of everybody's arm."
Reagan snorted. "Maybe we should just brand all the babies," he jibed. The idea was never again taken seriously. Until now.
For those who aren't aware, tattooing identification numbers on the inside of the arm was how prisoners were identified in the German concentration camps.
I was going to expand my thoughts by sharing Quine's views on knowledge, but I thought it would be total overkill. But since you brought it up--Quine teaches us that we all hold a body of beliefs that are consistent with each other, and that any given belief has more or less credence to us based upon evidence (i.e. the other beliefs within the system) and the need to make the system itself consistent. So if I am investigating a murder, and believe that one of three men committed the murder, I investigate each of them and ask for an alibi. If all three of them give me an alibi and it's corroborated, I have to decide: which one of them is lying? Or perhaps did some fourth person commit the murder? I have to toss out one belief so the others fit. (And if I really wanted to, I could hold on to any belief, just as long as I adjust the others to fit. This is what conspiracy theorists do. But that's not very practical, so Quine advises us not to do that.)
The same process occurs in science. When we find something that seems like a perpetual motion machine, we have to either believe that it isn't a perpetual motion machine, or that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. Given how much we have invested in the laws of thermodynamics, it's usually easier to give more credence to the notion that the alleged perpetual motion machine isn't. Now, if we had enough evidence that a supposed machine was capable of perpetual motion, then we would overturn the laws of thermodynamics. But it would take a great deal.
Perpetual motion is impossible. Fundamentally. Furthermore, some chemical reactions take in heat instead of giving it off. But back to the main point, perpetual motion contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, and as a consequence, if perpetual motion machines did exist, almost everything we know about physics would be wrong.
Which makes the purchase of diamonds far less excusable than the purchase of petroleum products. I'm not giving anything near a complete moral accounting of purchasing either product, I'm simply explaining how the economics works.
Which shows an utter misunderstanding of the subject at hand--the argument wasn't "some items of X are bad therefore boycott X", it was "purchasing diamonds increases demand for diamonds, which is the precise market force that causes blood diamonds to be a profitable business venture". My criticism remains: you have failed to understand the original argument, therefore your counterargument fails.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file transfer protocol, not a commodity. It has no price, and there is no "supply and demand" for more BitTorrent or less BitTorrent. Diamonds, on the other hand, are a commodity that is bought and sold on a market that has a supply and a demand.
It doesn't matter where your diamond in particular comes from. If you buy a diamond at all, you're contributing to the high demand for diamonds. It's the same reason that US oil consumption props up the Saudis, even if we buy more oil from Canada than we do from Saudi Arabia.
Colbert the actor, perhaps. (I doubt it, as much as I doubt that Charlie Chaplain or Jonathan Swift would have made good presidents). But Colbert the character is exactly the self-aggrandizing blowhard who should never be in charge, and I think that was a central point in Colbert's campaign.
Well the other part of it is that smoking really does make you look cool. Or at least it gives you a prop to gesture around with. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
I never understood why smoking in this day and age is cool and rebellious.
Because you're not supposed to do it, certainly not if you're 16 years old. But even if you're a 30 year old productive member of society you have to go stand outside, 25 feet from the entrance to any building, and endure the dirty looks of everyone else on the street. You may never have realized this, but teenagers rebel against sanctimonious assholes of all stripes, not just Republicans. That includes the anti-smoking movement.
So you're saying that most motorcycling injuries occur at less than 10 MPH because riders are more careful at lower speeds? Or have you completely forgotten that "more injuries" is a totally different metric than "severity of injuries"? Anyway, if you want to be a militant troll about your own fallacies, feel free to wallow in your own stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, you might even lose an inch of penis size! On the other hand, fewer people get killed and in many cases, the ultimate end result is almost as good as if you stayed in and won. Seriously, I can name plenty of examples of wars where, if one side just gave up halfway through and decided to sue for peace, they would have been much better off. Discretion is the better part of valor, and pigheadedness in a cause whose costs have far exceeded any possible benefits is simple pigheadedness, not courage. Any leader who sends wave after wave of men into a pointless war simply for the sake of saving face is a coward morally responsible for each and every one of their needless deaths.
Vigorious debate before the war is both desirable and Patrotic, anklebiting and lending aid to enemies after the choice to begin a War is not.Don't give us that rehashed Vietnam bullshit. When the public is lied into a war, they have every right to turn against it when the jig is up and the trickery revealed. When the cost of war has far exceeded any possible benefit, it's the public's responsibility to pull the plug. But that's not the damning point at all--if you have to choose to begin a war, the war is automatically wrong and you are the aggressor. At that point, the only saving grace you have left as a free country is whether or not you allow your own citizens to dissent. A warmongering democracy where a minority of the population speaks out against its government's aggression is only slightly better than a warmongering dictatorship where all dissent is suppressed, but it is better. The true enemy of Russia was the Soviet government, not Czechoslovakia. And the true enemy of America is not foreign, but domestic.
Judges rule on the law and Constituition as written, any attempts to legislate from the bench will be seen as an act of usurpation of the Rightful powers reserved to the other two branches and considered as just cause to commence proceedings for removal on those grounds.In other words, the Supreme Court can only make rulings you agree with. "Legislating from the bench" is a bullshit notion that stems from a complete ignorance of the common law system. See, your implicit assumption is that the law (specifically the Constitution), as written, express simply and exactly what to do in a given situation, and that the Court's job is to simply read it and apply it to the case at hand. That's called a civil law system. In that kind of system, court precedents aren't binding (and are indeed unimportant) since the law specifically states what it means in implementation-level detail.
The common law system is a little different. Under common law, the law is only supposed to state the general principle at hand, with the specific details worked out case-by-case by educated jurists. As each case is handled, the precedent of that case is used to inform future judgments in a process known as stare decisis. Try actually reading the Constitution--"equal protection under the law" (14th amendment), "regulate commerce with foreign nations and between the several states", "general welfare", "necessary and proper", "regarding the establishment of a religion", "cruel and unusual", etc. are all very vague phrases whose meanings and applicability to a given situation require significant judgment calls and good-faith attempts to apply general principles.
And aside from all that, you seem to take the solipsistic view that even for a vaguely-written Constitution meant to apply general principles, its true meaning is very clear and simple to you and that no one, in good faith, could possibly interpret it differently than you do.
In short, your presidency would be defined by warmongering, squashing of dissent, arrogance, and despite your salutory neglect towards most issues, a highly dangerous and unconstitutional consolidation of power on the few matters you do consider important. I hardly see an improvement over the current situation here.
Plato's Republic: Philosopher suggests philosophers should be put in charge, decries the influence of political ambition.
Isn't 40-50 hours a week enough though? I mean, of all the things I enjoy doing I can't imagine devoting more than that much time to them on average.
What, you think eugenics is some type of social responsibility, and that clever people have a duty to breed with each other?
Attention to detail and the ability to apply proper syntax have everything to do with the ability to program. I'm not sure how people are able to program without those two traits.
No, I don't think Kelsey Grammer is a very good programmer at all.
I'm not doubting the value of goodwill, as it's central to acquisitions in the first place. But accounting usually only deals with more tangible assets, with "goodwill" as a notable exception.
sigh I hate to nit-pick these things, but "goodwill" in an accounting context means something completely different. Specifically, when one company acquires another, they pay an amount of cash, often (usually) well above the value of the other company's assets. To balance this difference, the purchasing company is said to have acquired a fictitious asset called "goodwill" that accounts for the difference in value between the company's assets and the paid value of the acquired company. So if you pay $10,000,000 for a company that has $2,000,000 in assets, you've acquired (in accounting terms) $2,000,000 in assets and $8,000,000 in goodwill.
Have you perhaps considered that dairy products just aren't for you? Non-dairy ice cream sounds like a worse abomination than vegetarian burgers.
You joke, but (from a story I've found many places, most recently here):
The campaign for a national ID card is not new. It first got serious consideration early in the Reagan administration, when Attorney General William French Smith suggested it during a Cabinet meeting. At first there were murmurs of assent. Then presidential assistant Martin Anderson (husband of Annelise) spoke up.
"Mr. President, I would like to suggest another way that I think is a lot better," he counseled. "It's a lot cheaper. It can't be counterfeited. It's very lightweight, and impossible to lose. It's even waterproof. All we have to do is tattoo an identification number on the inside of everybody's arm."
Reagan snorted. "Maybe we should just brand all the babies," he jibed. The idea was never again taken seriously. Until now.
For those who aren't aware, tattooing identification numbers on the inside of the arm was how prisoners were identified in the German concentration camps.
I was going to expand my thoughts by sharing Quine's views on knowledge, but I thought it would be total overkill. But since you brought it up--Quine teaches us that we all hold a body of beliefs that are consistent with each other, and that any given belief has more or less credence to us based upon evidence (i.e. the other beliefs within the system) and the need to make the system itself consistent. So if I am investigating a murder, and believe that one of three men committed the murder, I investigate each of them and ask for an alibi. If all three of them give me an alibi and it's corroborated, I have to decide: which one of them is lying? Or perhaps did some fourth person commit the murder? I have to toss out one belief so the others fit. (And if I really wanted to, I could hold on to any belief, just as long as I adjust the others to fit. This is what conspiracy theorists do. But that's not very practical, so Quine advises us not to do that.)
The same process occurs in science. When we find something that seems like a perpetual motion machine, we have to either believe that it isn't a perpetual motion machine, or that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. Given how much we have invested in the laws of thermodynamics, it's usually easier to give more credence to the notion that the alleged perpetual motion machine isn't. Now, if we had enough evidence that a supposed machine was capable of perpetual motion, then we would overturn the laws of thermodynamics. But it would take a great deal.
I think that was a joke. I think his point was that perfection is unattainable in the real world of computers and networking and Ruby on Rails.
Perpetual motion is impossible. Fundamentally. Furthermore, some chemical reactions take in heat instead of giving it off. But back to the main point, perpetual motion contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, and as a consequence, if perpetual motion machines did exist, almost everything we know about physics would be wrong.
Was the distinction between British-style parliaments and American-style legislatures set at that point?
Which makes the purchase of diamonds far less excusable than the purchase of petroleum products. I'm not giving anything near a complete moral accounting of purchasing either product, I'm simply explaining how the economics works.
Which shows an utter misunderstanding of the subject at hand--the argument wasn't "some items of X are bad therefore boycott X", it was "purchasing diamonds increases demand for diamonds, which is the precise market force that causes blood diamonds to be a profitable business venture". My criticism remains: you have failed to understand the original argument, therefore your counterargument fails.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file transfer protocol, not a commodity. It has no price, and there is no "supply and demand" for more BitTorrent or less BitTorrent. Diamonds, on the other hand, are a commodity that is bought and sold on a market that has a supply and a demand.
It doesn't matter where your diamond in particular comes from. If you buy a diamond at all, you're contributing to the high demand for diamonds. It's the same reason that US oil consumption props up the Saudis, even if we buy more oil from Canada than we do from Saudi Arabia.
Colbert the actor, perhaps. (I doubt it, as much as I doubt that Charlie Chaplain or Jonathan Swift would have made good presidents). But Colbert the character is exactly the self-aggrandizing blowhard who should never be in charge, and I think that was a central point in Colbert's campaign.
You're probably right.
Are you kidding? The vast majority of people looking down on it makes it even more cool.
Being cool is like being funny. If you need the prop then you really aren't.Nah. I'd say being cool is like being funny in a different sense--if you really aren't, the prop isn't going to help you.
Well the other part of it is that smoking really does make you look cool. Or at least it gives you a prop to gesture around with. Sorry, that's just the way it is.
Because you're not supposed to do it, certainly not if you're 16 years old. But even if you're a 30 year old productive member of society you have to go stand outside, 25 feet from the entrance to any building, and endure the dirty looks of everyone else on the street. You may never have realized this, but teenagers rebel against sanctimonious assholes of all stripes, not just Republicans. That includes the anti-smoking movement.
So you're saying that most motorcycling injuries occur at less than 10 MPH because riders are more careful at lower speeds? Or have you completely forgotten that "more injuries" is a totally different metric than "severity of injuries"? Anyway, if you want to be a militant troll about your own fallacies, feel free to wallow in your own stupidity.
Here's a rhetorical question for you: What about John Lennon's death? Princess Diana's?