I never met a device with batteries I couldn't remove. Just ignore the warning it contains no user serviceable parts. On the other hand, if it bricks when you give it that treatment, don't buy it.
Moreover, the two denote a different set of relationships in economics:
X is a customer - she makes it her customary practice to do business with Y. If she stops liking the way Y does business, she can change her practice. This name for a person making purchases does not presume much. For example, it doesn't assume that X shops where she does from habit - she may have carefully analysed the market and be ready to switch very quickly, or may have considerable mental inertia (buying habits), but Y does not know.
X is a consumer - X is the end user for the product or service. Even though our Ms. X is overwhelmingly likely to have gained the money to pay for that good in her role as a producer or agent of a producer, Y gets to ignore that, go Galt, and feel all virtuous and superior in his relationship with X. Y labels himself as the Producer, and his customers as Consumers, as though these relationships hold invariably. This leads to business who would claim that they are the Producer who just got a government bailout funded largely by the Consumers. (as Rand would say "Blank Out.").
What's really weird about your counterpoint is: There was a time in the 80's and 90's when the US donated launch vehicles to put up BBC's satelites over various tropical locations such as the Carribean, and the treaties that made this possible spelled out that US citizens who could get line of sight to those birds could legally access the programming. Living in Fla. at the time, I was one of the people who did it. Later, i was told by a US government source that they never meant to have that knowledge become generally public, and actually wrote the BBC to confirm it was as I remembered. BBC reps actually sent me a government address to contact if I wanted more information and confirmed that was their understanding as well, so I have no idea who the US government was acting on behalf of.
If you look at what Adam Smith wrote about a Free Market, his theoretical perfect form of "Free" included everybody having full knowledge of the situation when buying or selling. That's a condition that can only be met if someone (like a government) compels full disclosure. Trade Secrets are anti-free market by that definition, as are all sorts of other things like ultra high speed stock trading. As it stands today, most people who claim to be Capitalists think Smith meant 'Free' as in Government keeps out of their way and lets them take advantage of any disparity in knowledge as much as they possibly can, even though that's the exact opposite of what Smith described. So of course, Capitalism is impossible, in the same way as Democracy is impossible if most of the people claiming to want it think it means noble families rule by inherited right, or Anarchy is impossible if most of the people calling themselves Anarchists think it means the police have the right to detain people indefinitely without charges, or similar distortions of what people meant when they coined the words.
Beyond that, people very soon after Smith published 'The Wealth of nations' were pointing out that, if you can't get a quite perfect free market, but only get pretty close, Smith hadn't proved that that meant you got petty close to the 'Greatest Good for the Greatest Number' or any sort of 'best economic system' in any particular way. Smith's theories left the possibility that 'close to perfectly free' would make a really lousy society and make the vast majority of people miserable. (Sort of like 99% of a perfect vacation flight to Hawaii could mean in the end you had to jump out of the plane 12 miles out to sea and swim for shore with no life vest). So capitalism may be just impossible in another sense unless you can prove that the particular areas where the market is less than perfectly free, even if they seem trivial, don't have a vast negative impact.
When Warren Buffett noticed that he was paying a lower rate than his secretary, that's a connection to a normal human being, right there. When Bill Gates explains why he'd rather focus his foundation on malaria than some of the diseases that mostly affect people with enough income to fund more research themsleves, that's a connection to some normal human beings (whether you would make the same choice or not, it's not like he doesn't understand the facts there). There are plenty of rich people who have a connection to 'normal' human beings, and a few of them actually seem pretty normal themselves. Then there's the ones who seem totally out of touch, regardless of whether they have 1 Million or a thousand million, or more.
There's been a certain subgroup that's attracted to an objectivist/Libertarian position, and seems to proceed from totally insane "pride". That is, they aren't just proud of having made a success of themselves by hard work, but they turn it into "I'm so much better than everyone else, I'm a totally self made man. I built a time machine, went back to invent English, and then taught it to my elementary school teacher so she could pretend to teach me what I already knew. I'm really an omnipotent omnescient god. I made my whole universe in my image from less than nothing. Even though every single person I've met is morally inferior to me and has done nothing but tried to sabotage my success, I don't hate any of them, but they hate me because I'm proud of being a self made man.". These people exist, and they seem to love Rand's argument about second raters who focus on their fellow man instead of reality, and whatever bits of john Wayne, Reagan, or whatever else they can take out of context to shore up this totally untenable position.
I wouldn't tar nearly all Republicans with that brush, but I'm seeing an increasing tendency to this sort of magical thinking there. We're not going to get a good answer to what makes a person do that. I had a boss once who had an increasing touch of talking like that, and he went on to kill the 15 year old he was cheating with, when she told him she was pregnant. Then he shot most of his family and tried to commit suicide by cop, and chickened out. He's in Supermax for life plus, and I don't think we will ever understand it, and knowing he really hammered at the self made man myth towards the end of his free life doesn't tell us anything useful about why he was the way he became.
I'm not saying that every Objectivist, Libertarian or Republican suffers from this. I am saying that these people are out there, in significant numbers, and if someone lets them claim to belong to their philosophical group, political party, or whatever, and doesn't distance themselves, they will eventually destroy themselves anyway, and probably the people who tolerated them unchallenged, and maybe the whole group. Right now, I think too many people in the Republican party are seeing these people as strong, not weak, and this will go on until the whole party pays the price of losing election after election, and the country pays the price of not even hearing any genuinely useful ideas the sane part of the party may have.
In a way, it's very much the same. Before the US grain belt was developed and planted, the average biodiversity was very high, on the order of being able to find upwards of 1,000 different plant types in a given acre. The modern number for the region is only 6 different plant specie per acre. This doesn't mean that all those plants went extinct, just that they now often occur much less than once per acre on average, but many cases are definitely known to be extinctions. So yes, fields of wheat or corn are tending towards the same risky situation as monoculture tree farming. Wheat monoculture practices contributed greatly to the 1930's dustbowl, and so it's reasonable to argue they helped worsen and prolong the great depression. Personally, I'd think that was a stromg incentive to avoid large acreage monocultures whenever possible.
Science starts dealing with each phenomenon with the assumption that the phenomenon can be explained. It continues with an assumption that the researchers have a realistic chance of figuring out what that explanation is. By some models of science, at least, it then adopts the assumption that the explanation is a naturalistic one. Assuming that the whole universe (or its origin) fits these assumptions may be arrogant, but if so, then isn't it arrogant for a scientist to assume he or she is smart enough to deal with any scientific question? To determine if apples contain a chemical that may increase the risk of cancer, or why some variable star has a particular graph of the variation in luminosity, or what factors contribute to a person overestimating their own competency, seems by your definition to include that same arrogance.
It's quite possible that the question why isn't there just nothing instead of something, is not a scientific question. I tend to agree with that. But is it outside the boundaries of science because the answer could stem from non-naturalistic principles? To grant that means the question of whether there is or is not a supernatural is also outside the boundaries of science. Is it possible the researcher (and all merely human researchers) is (are) simply not intelligent enough to deal with the question? Yes it's possible, but there are plenty of cases where a person gave up trying and then somebody else found an answer. Just look at all the researchers who decided we would never know anything more about the nature of the stars than we could see with regular telescopes - the persons who invented the various techniques of Spectroscopy are the ones who 'arrogantly' decided they could learn more. Even if humans are not intelligent enough to find answers to some questions, it would seem we should try, if only to be sure we didn't give up too early. In essence, you have a point - the only truly logical reason for excluding the origin problem from science is to do it at the very start - to say it's simple outside the very definition of things science can deal with. If we go as far as thinking that the origin problem might be shot down by some secondary rule of science, we are stuck trying to deal with it scientifically - we have to exclude it from the very beginning, by fiat.
The trouble with this is, most of us don't want to claim that "It's just that way because it is, Dammit!" is logically better in any circumstances what-so-ever than "We can at least take a look at the question and see if there are any obstacles to learning more."
To put it another way: having a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing one is. Antitrust and similar laws usually require any prosecutor to first show that a monopoly exists, so they can then go on to prove that the laws were broken, so many people have the mistaken idea that the monopoly itself is being prosecuted. Telecomunications is an area where proving the monopoly exists is usually trivial. One corporation gets a special government grant of a frequency range or similar limited domain - that's a granted monopoly, so obvious that a judge out to be able to quickly compel a defense lawyer to move on to the issues that are actually needing arbitrated. Since just about all telecoms have a monopoly on something (in fact, I can't think of one commercial telecom that doesn't qualify), the only point to judge is whether they telecom is using that monopoly to do something illegal - i.e. is it their monopoly that is letting them stifle competition, realize vhigher than average profits, keep new competitors from even entering the areana, or enter 'gentelman's non-compete agreements.
There's something paradoxical about all these libertarian calls for freedom, when it becomes freedom to use what you and I granted a company to leverage the market. There's certainly no free market right to take something which was granted with certain terms attached and use it in defiance of those terms, any more than me giving a person permission to walk across my land means I can't forbid them hunting deer on it.
I don't have a source for this, but I seem to remember, in the context of a discussion about Cheetah evolution, the figure of 50 breeding pairs being suggested. It seems cheetahs passed through a period when there were very few of them alive at the same time, a near extinction phase, so that all cheetahs alive today are descended from the same small cluster of breeding pairs. The gestimate there is that 50 is about the minimum that a mammalian species might rebound insead of going extinct, particularly from accumulating lethal recessive genes during the bottleneck phase (I think that's what you really mean where you mention 'genetic deterioration' due to inbreeding). That's a figure the molecular biologists were basing on a complex calculation, particularly limited to mammals on the basis of the evidence they had as of the year 2000 or so, but it sounds like it would apply pretty well to Mastadons or Mammoths, and big predatory marsupials or birds are likely to not be too far from that number either. I'm pretty sure we could get some DNA from 100 different mammoths, less sure if we could narrow that number down by knowing what the mammoth lethal recessives are and screening for them all, or knowing where modern elephant DNA strings could be used to repair damaged samples, or any of the other suggested ways to get a decent sized starting population.
The dolphins don't live on islands, they live around islands. They will need to be able to get onto an island to build Humanasic Park. They also are very far from evolving hands, which they will need to drive electric SUVs and push the buttons on UNIX systems. If the apes bring us back, they will chase us on horseback and make us wear dirty leather loincloths. I'm not seeing an upside to this.
I'll go on record here. I've bought sex toys from an overseas company online, as gifts for my ex. (That part's complicated). I used a Visa card to pay, so it's pretty likely that's integrated in a database. The point is, I'm extremely anomalous that way - what percentage of people are in a happy, long-term, successful monogamous relationship with the person they are no longer married to?
What I worry about here is not just the persons who might judge me for this, but the ones who would believe the literal truth in this case simply never happens, and I must be concealing something else. I'm concerned about the background check that goes to an employer who's really big about 'family values' style marriage, but more concerned about the 'progressive' employer who would be ok with my dating whomever I chose, and might even have a policy forbidding gender orientation discrimination, etc., but would drop me from their lists because I was in some undefinable way different and it's too much trouble to figure out if it's a harmless difference or one they already have procedures and policies to cover, or not.
Just about all of us have some area where we are in 'less than 1%' land. Something we share with less than 1% of the populace. That means 99% of people out there don't share the interest, but also that 80% or so really have no idea what the difference is. So when a report says, for example, that somebody is into Zydeco, 80% or so of the people dealing wiith that report may have no Idea what that is. Why bother to find out when you can waste-can that resume and move on, or flag that police report for the attention of higher-ups at homeland security just on the off chance that Zydeco is an Arabic word? Ubiquitous reporting makes such rejections and actions more and more a random thing, a sort of lottery. And it's legal to discriminate against Philatelists, say, even if you thought that term was gender, ethnicity or political party related, even in areas where it's illegal to discriminate on those actual grounds. You can think a Phillatelist means he's from an ex-Soviet periphery state, and fire someone for being one, and If you'd been right, you could be sued, but if you're wrong (and a damned fool), you can't.
That sounds UNMUTUAL, number 41. No, I didn't say Commy-terrorist-pedo, I said something worse. To call you a commie, I'd have to have some proof, like you saying commie things to the last guy we called a commie, or a card in your wallet, or something. Otherwise, somebody might debate whether you're a commie at all. There could still be an honest journalist out there. We can't go calling eveyone we don't like a pedo, cause a few of them would still demand actual trials and evidence and stuff, and it just might make other people aware of what we are doing. But unmutual - that's perfect. If we say you are, you are. If our databases says you are, you are. No trials - you're auto guilty. Nobody can debate if you really are, because we get to define what it means, and it means whatever our database says.
I just found out I'm running 15. (Kubuntu, some experimental repositories enabled, and I still do most of my updating by 'sudo apt-get' on the command line, so I genuinely didn't know - I thought I was still on FF 13 until I looked just now). You can go more bleeding edge with the buntus, for example for Kubuntu, try adding "ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports" to your repository list, and the others should be someting similar. If you want the absolute latest, your best bet is to learn enough about repositories to add new ones to the standard lists and then let a modern graphical app manager take care of it for you - I'm just old fashioned I guess, but you can generally have the absolute latest and shiniest pretty damned fast if you want to bother.
I suspect FF 15 will be the default available in the October Ubuntu/Ku/Xu/Edu/Myth etc. cycle. For me, firefox was running OK 6 months ago, it still seems to run OK in the new iteration, and so I guess I'll have even fewer memory hog issues with it from now on, but i'm at over 60 days continuous uptime as is, and that was a reboot for a new kernel, so how will I really know? I'm very happy for all of you that the new version helps.
When I read this debate, I always think of the bits on Dragnet, such as the one where LSD supposedly has this kid afraid he's turning into an orange and if anyone opens the closet door, he'll be 'juiced' into oblivion, or where the character "Blue Boy' supposedly overdoses on LSD (only to have the scrolling text at the end of the show mention it was actually Barbituates that killed the real person he was based on). We have people calling themselves 'experts' and speaking out publicly against drugs who still think that everything Joe Friday said came straight from a real case and not something made up by the Dragnet writers.
Drugs share at least one thing in common with everything else. Nothing can be learned from the people who have their basics wrong. When the government has pressured researchers to redefine addiction so it covers drugs it didn't, or to redefine"Narcotic", "Chromosome Damage" and other scientific and medical terms to let them persuade people who still think the words mean what they once did, what really happens is people stop trusting anything their government says.
I'm a little reassured that the researchers on this study are mostly from Duke University, but include some form the UK and New Zealand. Just the fact that some of them work where the DEA might not be able to influence them so easily makes me trust the paper a bit more. But this is an area where the US government has lied so much, so deliberately, and so cynically, that the people here on slashdot who are talking 'addiction denial' and 'conspiracy nut' lines come off like a shady lawyer saying "Just because my client comitted lebenty-leben bombings using this exact same M.O., shouldn't raise the remotest suspicion it's him again.". Read up on COINTELPRO, and learn that the conspiracy nuts in this area have usually been right. Or ignore what the US government's history in this area is like, and don't be surprised when the same people try to redefine 'terrorist' so they can jail the Dixie Chicks, or 'hacker' so that disabling region encoding on your DVD player is a felony, or whatever.
The problem with citing Santa is, he definitely did exist as a historic being. There's a reason Santa Claus is often called Saint Nicholas. That's a historic personage, well documented (In fact, the Roman Catholc church has at least two of them, one (Nick of Myra) the patron saint of giving, and the other (Nick of Cusa), the patron saint of astronomers and rocket scientists. Documentation on the real life history of "The" Saint Nicholas and his living acts of charity, is probably better than the documentation available on the life of, say, Geoffrey Chaucer, or at least Lucius Junius Brutus, so it's rather irrational to believe he didn't exist, unless you also doubt the real existence of, say, Francis Bacon or Edsel Ford. Fortunately, there's no support in those documents for North Pole factories, Elves, or Rudolph and the rest of the flying reindeer. The sensible thing is to believe that Santa Claus existed, but that he didn't do some or all of the more fantastic things attributed to him, just as it's sensible to believe that the stories about throwing a dollar across the Potomac or chopping down cherry trees are apocryphal, but George Washington was still real.
My Dad's 82, I'm late 50's right now. Today, I had some free time, so I dropped by and retarred his carport roof. I had to - he was threatening to do it himself if somebody didn't get on it soon. Mom called and told me he was at the hardwear store buying the roofing compound and . He ended up working the pullys I hung on the ham radio mast, to haul six 40 lb. buckets of tar and plasticisers up to me, in 90 degree heat. One of his neighbors came over with iced tea and fussed at him a bit for working so hard in the heat at his age, and started he teasing her about how she should trade places with me on the roof, and she said, Oh no, people over 40 shouldn't climb on high roofs. Then he went inside and fixed dinner for everyone. My little brother, only 50, has a class tonight - he's back for an advanced degree that he probably won't finish until he's 56 or so, but he likes his job and plans to stick with it till about 75, so why not shoot for moving up some more.
I've seen both my parents deal with lots of new situations over the last few years. They're politically involved and cautiously optomistic about the future, and tend to discuss issues rather than personalities. One of the easiest ways to lose their vote is to play the nostalga card, as though of course old people think the past was so much better than the present.
Just because somebody puts something in a contract doesn't mean it's legally enforcible. In the US, it's the individual estate laws of the various states that determines what can be transferred upon death. Saying that the terms of service can override this may look to a state judge like someone is effectively saying the individual states cannot make estate law. Worse, since the basis for the TOS is grounded in Federal law (Trade and Tarriff, and quite possibly Copyright - that is some clauses of a TOS may be designed to support copyright), the people behind the TOS are claiming that there is federal law trumping state law, but you will note the example situation is in a state court, not federal, and nobody seems to be asking the Federal government if it wants them to try and enforce a ( non-existant) federal decision on its behalf. There's something fundamentally absurd with asking a state court to give away some of its own sovreignty to the Federal system when the Federal system doesn't even want it. A lawyer making it has effectively argued the court he is in has no right to try the case. Again, not the best legal strategy if you want an actual decision.
The rest of what you wrote is equally bullshit. (Sorry, but it is, and I'm out of polite ways to tell an idiot he's an idiot, for once). A court will not give a damn about what an asset is worth when you have raised a kid to 24 and all that other blather, they will care about whether it has value at the time of death and probate. The Federal government will take the same side, both because they don't want to claim estate law to themselves and because the contents of an estate are taxable by the IRS.
What you would have here is the legal bequeathment of an asset, which then turns out to not have the cash equivalent value it would otherwise have because the company refuses to allow the recipient to take it up and use it. That's called an encumberment. At that point, people will be contacting the IRS to show that they recieved an encumbered asset that is not worth taxing, and the IRS will be (probably), giving them that point. Then the IRS will be explaining to Congress that they had X loss of potential tax revenues because of that encumberment attached to all such property. Then the US will realize it can collect all those taxes if the encumberment is removed or they can spend money to deal with litigation and to try to educate all those tax lawyers not to let people put that asset in their wills in the first place. The decision becomes butt heads with a bunch of state attorney generals and local lawyers to help a company make something non-taxable post facto, or tell the company their terms are invalid, and incidentally end up getting some tax revenue out of the decision. So, either the fed gets a court decision, or Congress passes a new law, or the IRS makes a very bad decision and thousands of people wealthy enough to pay estate taxes start adding that to their reasons for tax revolt, and a whole bunch of state v. fed lawsuits get launched anyways.
It's not just that there are subgroups that are hateful.
There's a guy who shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville, TN, and he had a big selection of books by Ann Coulter with highlighted passages that seem to explain why he did it. There's another guy who shot Representitive Giffords (and a six year old to get to her), and again, had a bunch of material by Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and others in his personal library. There's another guy who shot a guard at a Holocaust memorial center, again with a bunch of right wing connections, and many of the same books. (I'm not naming any of these scumbags. It's their victims that deserve to be remembered.) The amount of hate mail and death threats sent to the current president in his first month in office was at least 10x as large as anyone before him recieved in the same time. Just today in the news, there's a sitting judge in Texas who advocates raising taxes for one reason and one only - to fund training his local Sherrif's dept. into a force that can fight off the invading UN troops he expects momentarily.
So it's not a case of arguing that there are more in one group or another. There's no logical argument as to the actual facts.There are about 10 times as many in your group as the other, if you go by the hate letters, or an infinitely higher percentage if you go by the bodycounts. That's the point. ALL the murderers are on your side. Apologists for the right keep pointing to people such as reverend Wright, or some 'eco-group' that pours paint stripper on gas guzzlers, as though some jerk who never actually killed anyone cancels out at least one mass murderer, maybe all of them, however many you get. What's wrong with your party, the whole party, is that it is willing to equivocate so that when there is a nutbar fanatic actually killing in the name of your cause, they are willing to claim that is balanced by a person on the other side saying something mean spirited. You just stooped to that same tired argument, so I will label you, you personally and not you as part of any larger group, as the one who is the problem. Stop coddling killers! Stop helping a political party that coddles killers. Stop using this false equivalency, or stop being surprised when decent people start talking about you like you need tarred and feathered and run out of their town.
When you are already serving time for murder of another adult male, most of those violent criminals fear you at least as much as you fear them, and try to work out an acceptable detente. it's when you are in that same prison for doing something that says you are prey, that you get the real trouble. Prisons have people who get beaten and worse for being 'pedos', but the guy who molested all those little girls AND killed an armed police officer with only a tire iron somehow never becomes the target for those pedo beat-downs. And, the guy who just transported dope across state lines tends to get about as many beatings and rapes as the typical molester. There are exceptions - like Jeffery Dahmer. The man who killed Dahmer was already serving time for murder himself and had reported messianic delusions, but he does claim to have acted in the interest of justice, and given Dahmer, I'm not saying he's wrong. It's not the common story, far from it. More common is to serve a lot less than life, typically only about 5 years actual time served, and have relatively little to fear from the other inmates.
The distinction is often being made by the same sort of person who counts using a date rape drug as not using force, making threats of force as different from actually carrying out those threats, and so on. If these people are consistent in their views as politicians, they will be reluctant to presecute fraud or extortion, and seek to make the laws in those cases apply only to actual armed robbery. They will regard all consumer protection functions of the government as liberal paternalism, not as legitimate law enforcement related actions, and so on. If these same people are not consistent, then you may at least hope your own grievances will fall on the beneficial side of their mental line. Better an inconsistent politician than one who is consistently 100% wrong.
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Uhm, I'm pretty sure that the New Madrid fault IS in Jesusland.
I never met a device with batteries I couldn't remove. Just ignore the warning it contains no user serviceable parts. On the other hand, if it bricks when you give it that treatment, don't buy it.
Moreover, the two denote a different set of relationships in economics:
X is a customer - she makes it her customary practice to do business with Y. If she stops liking the way Y does business, she can change her practice. This name for a person making purchases does not presume much. For example, it doesn't assume that X shops where she does from habit - she may have carefully analysed the market and be ready to switch very quickly, or may have considerable mental inertia (buying habits), but Y does not know.
X is a consumer - X is the end user for the product or service. Even though our Ms. X is overwhelmingly likely to have gained the money to pay for that good in her role as a producer or agent of a producer, Y gets to ignore that, go Galt, and feel all virtuous and superior in his relationship with X. Y labels himself as the Producer, and his customers as Consumers, as though these relationships hold invariably. This leads to business who would claim that they are the Producer who just got a government bailout funded largely by the Consumers. (as Rand would say "Blank Out.").
What's really weird about your counterpoint is: There was a time in the 80's and 90's when the US donated launch vehicles to put up BBC's satelites over various tropical locations such as the Carribean, and the treaties that made this possible spelled out that US citizens who could get line of sight to those birds could legally access the programming. Living in Fla. at the time, I was one of the people who did it. Later, i was told by a US government source that they never meant to have that knowledge become generally public, and actually wrote the BBC to confirm it was as I remembered. BBC reps actually sent me a government address to contact if I wanted more information and confirmed that was their understanding as well, so I have no idea who the US government was acting on behalf of.
If you look at what Adam Smith wrote about a Free Market, his theoretical perfect form of "Free" included everybody having full knowledge of the situation when buying or selling. That's a condition that can only be met if someone (like a government) compels full disclosure. Trade Secrets are anti-free market by that definition, as are all sorts of other things like ultra high speed stock trading. As it stands today, most people who claim to be Capitalists think Smith meant 'Free' as in Government keeps out of their way and lets them take advantage of any disparity in knowledge as much as they possibly can, even though that's the exact opposite of what Smith described. So of course, Capitalism is impossible, in the same way as Democracy is impossible if most of the people claiming to want it think it means noble families rule by inherited right, or Anarchy is impossible if most of the people calling themselves Anarchists think it means the police have the right to detain people indefinitely without charges, or similar distortions of what people meant when they coined the words.
Beyond that, people very soon after Smith published 'The Wealth of nations' were pointing out that, if you can't get a quite perfect free market, but only get pretty close, Smith hadn't proved that that meant you got petty close to the 'Greatest Good for the Greatest Number' or any sort of 'best economic system' in any particular way. Smith's theories left the possibility that 'close to perfectly free' would make a really lousy society and make the vast majority of people miserable. (Sort of like 99% of a perfect vacation flight to Hawaii could mean in the end you had to jump out of the plane 12 miles out to sea and swim for shore with no life vest). So capitalism may be just impossible in another sense unless you can prove that the particular areas where the market is less than perfectly free, even if they seem trivial, don't have a vast negative impact.
When Warren Buffett noticed that he was paying a lower rate than his secretary, that's a connection to a normal human being, right there. When Bill Gates explains why he'd rather focus his foundation on malaria than some of the diseases that mostly affect people with enough income to fund more research themsleves, that's a connection to some normal human beings (whether you would make the same choice or not, it's not like he doesn't understand the facts there). There are plenty of rich people who have a connection to 'normal' human beings, and a few of them actually seem pretty normal themselves. Then there's the ones who seem totally out of touch, regardless of whether they have 1 Million or a thousand million, or more.
There's been a certain subgroup that's attracted to an objectivist/Libertarian position, and seems to proceed from totally insane "pride". That is, they aren't just proud of having made a success of themselves by hard work, but they turn it into "I'm so much better than everyone else, I'm a totally self made man. I built a time machine, went back to invent English, and then taught it to my elementary school teacher so she could pretend to teach me what I already knew. I'm really an omnipotent omnescient god. I made my whole universe in my image from less than nothing. Even though every single person I've met is morally inferior to me and has done nothing but tried to sabotage my success, I don't hate any of them, but they hate me because I'm proud of being a self made man.". These people exist, and they seem to love Rand's argument about second raters who focus on their fellow man instead of reality, and whatever bits of john Wayne, Reagan, or whatever else they can take out of context to shore up this totally untenable position.
I wouldn't tar nearly all Republicans with that brush, but I'm seeing an increasing tendency to this sort of magical thinking there. We're not going to get a good answer to what makes a person do that. I had a boss once who had an increasing touch of talking like that, and he went on to kill the 15 year old he was cheating with, when she told him she was pregnant. Then he shot most of his family and tried to commit suicide by cop, and chickened out. He's in Supermax for life plus, and I don't think we will ever understand it, and knowing he really hammered at the self made man myth towards the end of his free life doesn't tell us anything useful about why he was the way he became.
I'm not saying that every Objectivist, Libertarian or Republican suffers from this. I am saying that these people are out there, in significant numbers, and if someone lets them claim to belong to their philosophical group, political party, or whatever, and doesn't distance themselves, they will eventually destroy themselves anyway, and probably the people who tolerated them unchallenged, and maybe the whole group. Right now, I think too many people in the Republican party are seeing these people as strong, not weak, and this will go on until the whole party pays the price of losing election after election, and the country pays the price of not even hearing any genuinely useful ideas the sane part of the party may have.
In a way, it's very much the same. Before the US grain belt was developed and planted, the average biodiversity was very high, on the order of being able to find upwards of 1,000 different plant types in a given acre. The modern number for the region is only 6 different plant specie per acre. This doesn't mean that all those plants went extinct, just that they now often occur much less than once per acre on average, but many cases are definitely known to be extinctions. So yes, fields of wheat or corn are tending towards the same risky situation as monoculture tree farming. Wheat monoculture practices contributed greatly to the 1930's dustbowl, and so it's reasonable to argue they helped worsen and prolong the great depression. Personally, I'd think that was a stromg incentive to avoid large acreage monocultures whenever possible.
Your last two sentences are equally accurate if we substitute "Star Wars" for "Existance".
Science starts dealing with each phenomenon with the assumption that the phenomenon can be explained. It continues with an assumption that the researchers have a realistic chance of figuring out what that explanation is. By some models of science, at least, it then adopts the assumption that the explanation is a naturalistic one. Assuming that the whole universe (or its origin) fits these assumptions may be arrogant, but if so, then isn't it arrogant for a scientist to assume he or she is smart enough to deal with any scientific question? To determine if apples contain a chemical that may increase the risk of cancer, or why some variable star has a particular graph of the variation in luminosity, or what factors contribute to a person overestimating their own competency, seems by your definition to include that same arrogance.
It's quite possible that the question why isn't there just nothing instead of something, is not a scientific question. I tend to agree with that. But is it outside the boundaries of science because the answer could stem from non-naturalistic principles? To grant that means the question of whether there is or is not a supernatural is also outside the boundaries of science. Is it possible the researcher (and all merely human researchers) is (are) simply not intelligent enough to deal with the question? Yes it's possible, but there are plenty of cases where a person gave up trying and then somebody else found an answer. Just look at all the researchers who decided we would never know anything more about the nature of the stars than we could see with regular telescopes - the persons who invented the various techniques of Spectroscopy are the ones who 'arrogantly' decided they could learn more. Even if humans are not intelligent enough to find answers to some questions, it would seem we should try, if only to be sure we didn't give up too early. In essence, you have a point - the only truly logical reason for excluding the origin problem from science is to do it at the very start - to say it's simple outside the very definition of things science can deal with. If we go as far as thinking that the origin problem might be shot down by some secondary rule of science, we are stuck trying to deal with it scientifically - we have to exclude it from the very beginning, by fiat.
The trouble with this is, most of us don't want to claim that "It's just that way because it is, Dammit!" is logically better in any circumstances what-so-ever than "We can at least take a look at the question and see if there are any obstacles to learning more."
Ooops! Please make that "ought to", not "out to". Thanks.
To put it another way: having a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing one is. Antitrust and similar laws usually require any prosecutor to first show that a monopoly exists, so they can then go on to prove that the laws were broken, so many people have the mistaken idea that the monopoly itself is being prosecuted. Telecomunications is an area where proving the monopoly exists is usually trivial. One corporation gets a special government grant of a frequency range or similar limited domain - that's a granted monopoly, so obvious that a judge out to be able to quickly compel a defense lawyer to move on to the issues that are actually needing arbitrated. Since just about all telecoms have a monopoly on something (in fact, I can't think of one commercial telecom that doesn't qualify), the only point to judge is whether they telecom is using that monopoly to do something illegal - i.e. is it their monopoly that is letting them stifle competition, realize vhigher than average profits, keep new competitors from even entering the areana, or enter 'gentelman's non-compete agreements.
There's something paradoxical about all these libertarian calls for freedom, when it becomes freedom to use what you and I granted a company to leverage the market. There's certainly no free market right to take something which was granted with certain terms attached and use it in defiance of those terms, any more than me giving a person permission to walk across my land means I can't forbid them hunting deer on it.
I don't have a source for this, but I seem to remember, in the context of a discussion about Cheetah evolution, the figure of 50 breeding pairs being suggested. It seems cheetahs passed through a period when there were very few of them alive at the same time, a near extinction phase, so that all cheetahs alive today are descended from the same small cluster of breeding pairs. The gestimate there is that 50 is about the minimum that a mammalian species might rebound insead of going extinct, particularly from accumulating lethal recessive genes during the bottleneck phase (I think that's what you really mean where you mention 'genetic deterioration' due to inbreeding). That's a figure the molecular biologists were basing on a complex calculation, particularly limited to mammals on the basis of the evidence they had as of the year 2000 or so, but it sounds like it would apply pretty well to Mastadons or Mammoths, and big predatory marsupials or birds are likely to not be too far from that number either. I'm pretty sure we could get some DNA from 100 different mammoths, less sure if we could narrow that number down by knowing what the mammoth lethal recessives are and screening for them all, or knowing where modern elephant DNA strings could be used to repair damaged samples, or any of the other suggested ways to get a decent sized starting population.
The dolphins don't live on islands, they live around islands. They will need to be able to get onto an island to build Humanasic Park. They also are very far from evolving hands, which they will need to drive electric SUVs and push the buttons on UNIX systems. If the apes bring us back, they will chase us on horseback and make us wear dirty leather loincloths. I'm not seeing an upside to this.
I'll go on record here. I've bought sex toys from an overseas company online, as gifts for my ex. (That part's complicated). I used a Visa card to pay, so it's pretty likely that's integrated in a database. The point is, I'm extremely anomalous that way - what percentage of people are in a happy, long-term, successful monogamous relationship with the person they are no longer married to?
What I worry about here is not just the persons who might judge me for this, but the ones who would believe the literal truth in this case simply never happens, and I must be concealing something else. I'm concerned about the background check that goes to an employer who's really big about 'family values' style marriage, but more concerned about the 'progressive' employer who would be ok with my dating whomever I chose, and might even have a policy forbidding gender orientation discrimination, etc., but would drop me from their lists because I was in some undefinable way different and it's too much trouble to figure out if it's a harmless difference or one they already have procedures and policies to cover, or not.
Just about all of us have some area where we are in 'less than 1%' land. Something we share with less than 1% of the populace. That means 99% of people out there don't share the interest, but also that 80% or so really have no idea what the difference is. So when a report says, for example, that somebody is into Zydeco, 80% or so of the people dealing wiith that report may have no Idea what that is. Why bother to find out when you can waste-can that resume and move on, or flag that police report for the attention of higher-ups at homeland security just on the off chance that Zydeco is an Arabic word? Ubiquitous reporting makes such rejections and actions more and more a random thing, a sort of lottery. And it's legal to discriminate against Philatelists, say, even if you thought that term was gender, ethnicity or political party related, even in areas where it's illegal to discriminate on those actual grounds. You can think a Phillatelist means he's from an ex-Soviet periphery state, and fire someone for being one, and If you'd been right, you could be sued, but if you're wrong (and a damned fool), you can't.
That sounds UNMUTUAL, number 41. No, I didn't say Commy-terrorist-pedo, I said something worse. To call you a commie, I'd have to have some proof, like you saying commie things to the last guy we called a commie, or a card in your wallet, or something. Otherwise, somebody might debate whether you're a commie at all. There could still be an honest journalist out there. We can't go calling eveyone we don't like a pedo, cause a few of them would still demand actual trials and evidence and stuff, and it just might make other people aware of what we are doing. But unmutual - that's perfect. If we say you are, you are. If our databases says you are, you are. No trials - you're auto guilty. Nobody can debate if you really are, because we get to define what it means, and it means whatever our database says.
I just found out I'm running 15. (Kubuntu, some experimental repositories enabled, and I still do most of my updating by 'sudo apt-get' on the command line, so I genuinely didn't know - I thought I was still on FF 13 until I looked just now). You can go more bleeding edge with the buntus, for example for Kubuntu, try adding "ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports" to your repository list, and the others should be someting similar. If you want the absolute latest, your best bet is to learn enough about repositories to add new ones to the standard lists and then let a modern graphical app manager take care of it for you - I'm just old fashioned I guess, but you can generally have the absolute latest and shiniest pretty damned fast if you want to bother.
I suspect FF 15 will be the default available in the October Ubuntu/Ku/Xu/Edu/Myth etc. cycle. For me, firefox was running OK 6 months ago, it still seems to run OK in the new iteration, and so I guess I'll have even fewer memory hog issues with it from now on, but i'm at over 60 days continuous uptime as is, and that was a reboot for a new kernel, so how will I really know? I'm very happy for all of you that the new version helps.
When I read this debate, I always think of the bits on Dragnet, such as the one where LSD supposedly has this kid afraid he's turning into an orange and if anyone opens the closet door, he'll be 'juiced' into oblivion, or where the character "Blue Boy' supposedly overdoses on LSD (only to have the scrolling text at the end of the show mention it was actually Barbituates that killed the real person he was based on). We have people calling themselves 'experts' and speaking out publicly against drugs who still think that everything Joe Friday said came straight from a real case and not something made up by the Dragnet writers.
Drugs share at least one thing in common with everything else. Nothing can be learned from the people who have their basics wrong. When the government has pressured researchers to redefine addiction so it covers drugs it didn't, or to redefine"Narcotic", "Chromosome Damage" and other scientific and medical terms to let them persuade people who still think the words mean what they once did, what really happens is people stop trusting anything their government says.
I'm a little reassured that the researchers on this study are mostly from Duke University, but include some form the UK and New Zealand. Just the fact that some of them work where the DEA might not be able to influence them so easily makes me trust the paper a bit more. But this is an area where the US government has lied so much, so deliberately, and so cynically, that the people here on slashdot who are talking 'addiction denial' and 'conspiracy nut' lines come off like a shady lawyer saying "Just because my client comitted lebenty-leben bombings using this exact same M.O., shouldn't raise the remotest suspicion it's him again.". Read up on COINTELPRO, and learn that the conspiracy nuts in this area have usually been right. Or ignore what the US government's history in this area is like, and don't be surprised when the same people try to redefine 'terrorist' so they can jail the Dixie Chicks, or 'hacker' so that disabling region encoding on your DVD player is a felony, or whatever.
The problem with citing Santa is, he definitely did exist as a historic being. There's a reason Santa Claus is often called Saint Nicholas. That's a historic personage, well documented (In fact, the Roman Catholc church has at least two of them, one (Nick of Myra) the patron saint of giving, and the other (Nick of Cusa), the patron saint of astronomers and rocket scientists. Documentation on the real life history of "The" Saint Nicholas and his living acts of charity, is probably better than the documentation available on the life of, say, Geoffrey Chaucer, or at least Lucius Junius Brutus, so it's rather irrational to believe he didn't exist, unless you also doubt the real existence of, say, Francis Bacon or Edsel Ford. Fortunately, there's no support in those documents for North Pole factories, Elves, or Rudolph and the rest of the flying reindeer. The sensible thing is to believe that Santa Claus existed, but that he didn't do some or all of the more fantastic things attributed to him, just as it's sensible to believe that the stories about throwing a dollar across the Potomac or chopping down cherry trees are apocryphal, but George Washington was still real.
My Dad's 82, I'm late 50's right now. Today, I had some free time, so I dropped by and retarred his carport roof. I had to - he was threatening to do it himself if somebody didn't get on it soon. Mom called and told me he was at the hardwear store buying the roofing compound and . He ended up working the pullys I hung on the ham radio mast, to haul six 40 lb. buckets of tar and plasticisers up to me, in 90 degree heat. One of his neighbors came over with iced tea and fussed at him a bit for working so hard in the heat at his age, and started he teasing her about how she should trade places with me on the roof, and she said, Oh no, people over 40 shouldn't climb on high roofs. Then he went inside and fixed dinner for everyone. My little brother, only 50, has a class tonight - he's back for an advanced degree that he probably won't finish until he's 56 or so, but he likes his job and plans to stick with it till about 75, so why not shoot for moving up some more.
I've seen both my parents deal with lots of new situations over the last few years. They're politically involved and cautiously optomistic about the future, and tend to discuss issues rather than personalities. One of the easiest ways to lose their vote is to play the nostalga card, as though of course old people think the past was so much better than the present.
Just because somebody puts something in a contract doesn't mean it's legally enforcible. In the US, it's the individual estate laws of the various states that determines what can be transferred upon death. Saying that the terms of service can override this may look to a state judge like someone is effectively saying the individual states cannot make estate law. Worse, since the basis for the TOS is grounded in Federal law (Trade and Tarriff, and quite possibly Copyright - that is some clauses of a TOS may be designed to support copyright), the people behind the TOS are claiming that there is federal law trumping state law, but you will note the example situation is in a state court, not federal, and nobody seems to be asking the Federal government if it wants them to try and enforce a ( non-existant) federal decision on its behalf. There's something fundamentally absurd with asking a state court to give away some of its own sovreignty to the Federal system when the Federal system doesn't even want it. A lawyer making it has effectively argued the court he is in has no right to try the case. Again, not the best legal strategy if you want an actual decision.
The rest of what you wrote is equally bullshit. (Sorry, but it is, and I'm out of polite ways to tell an idiot he's an idiot, for once). A court will not give a damn about what an asset is worth when you have raised a kid to 24 and all that other blather, they will care about whether it has value at the time of death and probate. The Federal government will take the same side, both because they don't want to claim estate law to themselves and because the contents of an estate are taxable by the IRS.
What you would have here is the legal bequeathment of an asset, which then turns out to not have the cash equivalent value it would otherwise have because the company refuses to allow the recipient to take it up and use it. That's called an encumberment. At that point, people will be contacting the IRS to show that they recieved an encumbered asset that is not worth taxing, and the IRS will be (probably), giving them that point. Then the IRS will be explaining to Congress that they had X loss of potential tax revenues because of that encumberment attached to all such property. Then the US will realize it can collect all those taxes if the encumberment is removed or they can spend money to deal with litigation and to try to educate all those tax lawyers not to let people put that asset in their wills in the first place. The decision becomes butt heads with a bunch of state attorney generals and local lawyers to help a company make something non-taxable post facto, or tell the company their terms are invalid, and incidentally end up getting some tax revenue out of the decision. So, either the fed gets a court decision, or Congress passes a new law, or the IRS makes a very bad decision and thousands of people wealthy enough to pay estate taxes start adding that to their reasons for tax revolt, and a whole bunch of state v. fed lawsuits get launched anyways.
It's not just that there are subgroups that are hateful.
There's a guy who shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville, TN, and he had a big selection of books by Ann Coulter with highlighted passages that seem to explain why he did it.
There's another guy who shot Representitive Giffords (and a six year old to get to her), and again, had a bunch of material by Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and others in his personal library.
There's another guy who shot a guard at a Holocaust memorial center, again with a bunch of right wing connections, and many of the same books.
(I'm not naming any of these scumbags. It's their victims that deserve to be remembered.)
The amount of hate mail and death threats sent to the current president in his first month in office was at least 10x as large as anyone before him recieved in the same time.
Just today in the news, there's a sitting judge in Texas who advocates raising taxes for one reason and one only - to fund training his local Sherrif's dept. into a force that can fight off the invading UN troops he expects momentarily.
So it's not a case of arguing that there are more in one group or another. There's no logical argument as to the actual facts.There are about 10 times as many in your group as the other, if you go by the hate letters, or an infinitely higher percentage if you go by the bodycounts. That's the point. ALL the murderers are on your side. Apologists for the right keep pointing to people such as reverend Wright, or some 'eco-group' that pours paint stripper on gas guzzlers, as though some jerk who never actually killed anyone cancels out at least one mass murderer, maybe all of them, however many you get. What's wrong with your party, the whole party, is that it is willing to equivocate so that when there is a nutbar fanatic actually killing in the name of your cause, they are willing to claim that is balanced by a person on the other side saying something mean spirited. You just stooped to that same tired argument, so I will label you, you personally and not you as part of any larger group, as the one who is the problem. Stop coddling killers! Stop helping a political party that coddles killers. Stop using this false equivalency, or stop being surprised when decent people start talking about you like you need tarred and feathered and run out of their town.
When you are already serving time for murder of another adult male, most of those violent criminals fear you at least as much as you fear them, and try to work out an acceptable detente. it's when you are in that same prison for doing something that says you are prey, that you get the real trouble. Prisons have people who get beaten and worse for being 'pedos', but the guy who molested all those little girls AND killed an armed police officer with only a tire iron somehow never becomes the target for those pedo beat-downs. And, the guy who just transported dope across state lines tends to get about as many beatings and rapes as the typical molester. There are exceptions - like Jeffery Dahmer. The man who killed Dahmer was already serving time for murder himself and had reported messianic delusions, but he does claim to have acted in the interest of justice, and given Dahmer, I'm not saying he's wrong. It's not the common story, far from it. More common is to serve a lot less than life, typically only about 5 years actual time served, and have relatively little to fear from the other inmates.
That, or the poster is carrying Matt Smith's love child (or Tennant's, Eccleston's, etc.).
The distinction is often being made by the same sort of person who counts using a date rape drug as not using force, making threats of force as different from actually carrying out those threats, and so on. If these people are consistent in their views as politicians, they will be reluctant to presecute fraud or extortion, and seek to make the laws in those cases apply only to actual armed robbery. They will regard all consumer protection functions of the government as liberal paternalism, not as legitimate law enforcement related actions, and so on. If these same people are not consistent, then you may at least hope your own grievances will fall on the beneficial side of their mental line. Better an inconsistent politician than one who is consistently 100% wrong.