The kind of teachers and administrators who can't adapt their polices to get good use out of an OLPC are also the kind who make up bizarre and illogical polices for textbooks, such as requiring every child to run with a 35 pound load of them between classes, or cutting out the world maps and text that refers favorably to a rival country from the geography books. Before you just say "It didn't work!", ask yourself, "Would anything else have worked any better with these people in charge?"
"Why is "asset accumulation" rather than increasingly productive technology seen as the cause for less money spent on labor? "
Not to say I agree with all of it, but here's just one example of the theory: If businesses need more assets to enter a market, the threshold cost to enter and compete with existing business entities increases - needing more assets is the same thing as a rising barrier to trade. If more people are frozen out of becoming buisiness entities due to these barriers to entry, the available labor pool increases. A capitalist can pay less for exceptional levels of skill and dedication from workers because those workers cannot apply their exceptional dedication or skill to enter businesses for themselves (or at least these abilities are not enough to let the workers target the businesses with the best chance of making a profit, as these are the very businesses that have the most barriers to entry) Classical Marxism models about a dozen links such as this one between increasing capital costs and declining labor costs and how they actually hurt capital and labor in the longer run.
My own feeling is that it's pretty easy to criticise Marx by showing there are exceptions to this or that link, and I'm sure there are exceptions to the barrier to entry link, but it's a lot harder to prove that such exceptions exist for all the links or even a majority, and very hard to show they are frequent enough to shoot down the whole theory. Interestingly, I feel the same about Adam Smyth or Keynes.
You do understand that the real reason governments do things such as this is so they WILL be your government after the next election, and the one after that, ad infinitum?
That's a problem with everything. The position as you state it is a conservative claim, and an extension of similar claims about such things as the National Endowment for the Arts, which inevitably picks some artists viewpoints (and 'art as a form of speech') to favor over others. it sounds pretty logical to many libertarian types.
BUT, it applies to everything! (which is what the people who came up with this argument can't stand to see addressed): The Amish don't want their tax dollars spent on grading high speed curves by the Dept of Transportation. The people who seriously believe the Moon landings were fake don't want a NASA budget just to 'do more fake moonshots'. The Pacifists oppose spending anything at all for the Dept of Defense. The anti-vaccine persons oppose the Center for Disease Control, at least as it stands today. Just ask the nation's 50 million Pot smokers if they want a single dime of their taxes to go to the DEA, or even the BATF, FBI, and others. Many people would claim to oppose a tax on moral grounds if it got them a bigger refund (or whatever) regardless of whether they had an actual moral opinion. If every person has a right to not pay taxes if they run counter to his or her beliefs or alleged beliefs, then there will be next to no taxes at all, and government itself becomes unaffordable. Ultimately, you are demanding absolute Anarchy..
That's fine if you are really an Anarchist. The problem is, are you? Most of the people advancing your argument want it to apply to the parts of government they don't see a need for, and not the rest. Are you willing to apply your argument to Police, Courts, National Defense and such, or just to the things you want "justice tested" Do you want all taxes to be voluntary, or do you want some of yourrs to be avoidable while mine continue to be manditory?
My Ex recently borrowed a GPS device to go to a wedding for some friends. The location was in a city with which she was almost completely unfamilar except for the main interstate route. She told me how this machine gave her instructions like: "There's been an accident a few blocks ahead - Turn left at the movie theater" "Drive around behind the theater and find the 1 lane concrete bridge - look for a green trash dumpster next to it." "Cross the bridge and turn right - the speed limit is 25 - you are in a residential neighborhood, watch for children>" It got her to the wedding with no delays. I've got no idea who makes one like that, and she just assumed they were all like that.
We'll get those back up cameras out of the RVs and Semis right away, Lord AC. Seriously, I'm starting to think/. should abolish AC because it would mean people will actually have to use their brains while posting.
One of the arguments against the death penalty being a deterrent is that many of the people it gets applied to are not capable of looking ten years or so down the road and seeing themselves in the position of a condemned killer actually strapped into an electric chair or on a lethal injection table. Our worst criminals tend to be strongly socially stunted and fixated only on immediate gratification and immediate consequences. They severly lack the empathy to put themselves in another's position, whether it's with their victims, or with other killers who have gotten caught and punished.
Sounds like a corporation - relentless focus on a point no father away than the next quarter's profit statement, little or no concern for the long term consequences of their actions... The very act of calling disbandment a corporate death penalty says corporations have the mentality of criminals, and we are hoping we have come up with something severe enough to get them to look past the immediate gratification mode they are in.
For a few years now, Wizards of the Coast has been running ads with variations of the idea that D&D is 'way more normal' than MMORPGS and such. The way they put it is something like "If you're sitting in your parent's basement and pretending to be an elf, you should at least invite a few friends over and order pizza!".
Really, in a world where people commonly sit in total physical isolation from other humans while getting their jollies from a PC screen for hours and hours, doesn't throwing a party for a few firends and fixing some refreshments sound more and more like what everyone else does. Hey, you might even use tabletop games as an excuse to clean up the place a bit!
1. I'm a type 2 Diabetic. 2. I stand 6'1", and currently weigh 211 lbs. I have a 32" waist and can (and regularly do) bench press 295. I run 9 miles a week. 3. Despite this, I still use pills to control my condition. I still have to have quarterly exams. including several hundred dollars in tests each time. 4. I have better than average response to the meds, see fewer side effects than the average user, and unlike many diabetics, can get by on just a couple of generic drugs that don't cost me much. I have not had to change up to any of the more espensive drugs since I started. Less than a third of the type 2 diabetics under treatment can make that claim. .
So on behalf of all the type 2's who have cut their weight, exercised, and stopped eating sugary foods but still have a serious medical condition, I'd like to offer a hearty "Fuck you, you ignorant idiot!" (I don't usually stoop to such language, but it's obvious that nothing less could possible get through to somebody like you). Really, you are spitting in the faces of thens or hundreds of thousands of people you never met, who have successfully fought a battle I doubt seriously you could win, and you are revealing you are unfamiliar with both the facts about a serious disease and fundamental human decency. I'm torn between being furious with you and pitying you.
The number of people now living who have reported 'post death' experiences is estimated at over one million. This is based on there being over 100,000 cases still living where the event occurred in a western style hospital or other similar setting, with the physical state of the person at time of 'temporary death' being well recorded. I have asked several professional skeptics in this field how many people they think are reporting 'near death' experiences in a given year, and always thesir estimates are low by many orders of magnetude. It's like talking to someone who is skeptical that automobiles exist, and who says that he examined all four reports of 'cars' he found in the literature and all of them appeared flawed (Then he presumably turns around and walks back down the tunnel from his office to the snack machines).
In order to be a skeptic worth listening to, it's necessary to first be an expert on just what the subject being debunked claims. Somebody who is skeptical that the world population is over 7 billion, and who has never left their birth town of Podunk Falls Wyoming, and doesn't recognize the term "Megacity" or know the total habitable surface area of Earth, may indeed be a skeptic, but why does anybody quote them or give their opinions on the subject any credence?
A properly prepared skeptic on NDEs ought to know a few such things as "What is the average time before lack of Oxygen causes irreversable brain death?", "What is the "mammalian diving reflex", and are cases where it may contribute to revival biased by the age of the drowning victim?", or, perhaps "What's the earliest historical account of an NDE outside of religious texts?"
There's probably a near infinite number of basic differences between accurately depicting violence and showing it the way most entertainment does. For just a few examples, take films such as Con Air or the Die Hard series. Are people really attracted to the message of violence itself, or do they like it that the violence seems to fall hardest on the worst villians, as though the violence became proof that there was some sort of God, if only a God of Wrath that would steer a falling villiain into landing in an improvised electric chair? Most people are not attracted to entertainment where violence is shown as part of the random seeming outcomes of the real world. Showing that the Uber-Eeeevil guy still has people who miss him once he's gone - that what one person considers a terrorist, another considers a freedom fighter - that bullets don't always stop in the primary target - these things tend to hurt entertainment sales.
In a way, you could argue that the (fictive, entertainment depiction of) violence is itself never the real problem, and worrying about the effect of it on even children is worrying about the wrong aspect of the TV shows and films in question. Even if we grant the premise that entertainment violence does have bad effects on some people, maybe it's the terrible inaccuracy of films that show people shooting guns out of "perp's" hands with high powered sniper rifles that would take said perp's whole arm off at the shoulder that cause the psychological damage. Maybe showing the randomness of a realistic firefight, showing the consequences with some respect for realism, is what's needed to keep from glamorizing the violence itself. Maybe it's showing guns as surgically precise tools and bullets as steered by the god of the tribe of good guys to achieve instant karma. Maybe it's showing people falling down, but not showing funerals full of grieving families, or people spending the rest of their lives in wheelchairs, or even some poor janitor having to mop up the mess. Maybe it's the claim that the strong and decent are quick to resort to violence rather than reluctant at best.
Do you really think there is any hate crime law out there that says crimes against white people are not so bad? Do you really think the laws are written so that a black person who punches you to 'teach whitey his place', or a gay guy who punches you because "breeders are pond-scum, and I'm gonna get them all before the get me" can't be charged with a hate crime? Please read what the actual laws say. If the law in your area actually marks you out as not being a member of a protected class, then by all means complain, lobby, and fight for your equal right to protection, but I'll bet you find that your state's hate crime laws, if any, are written to include actions designed to intimidate or threaten your group too. Or are you trying to claim that these are bad laws in themselves because in your area there's selective enforcement?
In this case, the person saying "hug and run liberal" is revealing his right wing orientation. What amazes me here is that his version of the right is 'tough on crime' (except when they think a tough law is 'Liberal", then they want to give a medal to the criminal). They're tough on immigrants not willing to be assimilated into the American culture (except when somebody thinks they have a right to apply the good old fashioned moral standards of the country they came from in place of US law, even where they have been informed (by the college administration in this case) that they don't).
The basic model for hate crimes in most jurisdictions is that there are multiple victims. There's the person directly assaulted, raped, murdered or whatever, and there's a whole group of other people who were put in fear they might also be singled out for the same treatment (that's what the 1964 civil rights act refers to as additional societal consequences).. For the U.S. federal laws, and for most of the 45 states that have adopted hate crimes legislation, there are also limits to measuring those consequences - direct intent to violate basic rights of the people involved, such as voting, jury duty or public assembly, have to be affected, with intent by the criminal proven by their own speech. Many of these laws don't let a prosecuter even prove intent by membership in a group such as the KKK or Black Panthers that has advocated such consequences, unless the criminals own statements support the charge. But you go right on using the Faux news definition instead of what the law actually says (again in most jurisdictions) * Call people stupid and obtuse for figuring out that the criminal had intent to harm additional victims, and for taking those victims into account. Coddle the criminals. Get modded insightful for repating a lie about the law and sucking up to some of the worst criminal scum on the planet in the process.
* I'm sure somebody can find, somewhere, a 'hate crimes' law that doesn't involve proving the criminal had intent to harm or frighten additional victims, but then I'm sure some place has a law against tresspassing that doesn't actually require physical entrance to the area, or some similarly stupid verion of most laws. It might surprise me if someone found a manslaughter law that didn't require an actual dead person, but even that probably exists somewhere. But go look at the actual laws as written for the federal government or any of the state wide laws that exist in the 45 states plus DC. There are a few that are under state court challenge because some of the rights they think are compromised are not specifically spelled out in those state's constitution or because someone thinks there's a systeminc bias against applying the laws to 'black on white' crimes (for example there's a move in Tennessee to claim that the Christian-Newsome murders in Knoxville were a hate crime, although the prosecuter says he looked at intent by the perps to target the couple for their ethinc background and was thoroughly convinced the four assalants would have done the same crimes regardless of race.).
Since no one claims that evolution has anything to do with these (evolution talks about the diversification of life after life arose, nothing more),...
Really? Do you really want to claim that there is no one out there who claims to accept evolution and speaks as though it explains the origin of life and not just descent through modification? I guess you never heard of anybody speaking of "Stellar Evolution", or "Cosmic Evolution" either? And nobody ever adopted any form of evolutionary argument where it could be called "Social Darwinism" around you either, I suppose?
Do you realize how extraordinary, how utterly, phenominally, miraculous your claim is? No one on your side of the point gets the argument wrong!
The problem with that is, the usual 'scientific' argument for God being unfalsifiable is that "He" has supernatural power and knowledge, so if "He" wanted to hide some aspect of truth from us. "He" would always succeed. This sounds good, until you consider the question of the existence of alien intelligences and similar issues. For example, many people have postulated the existence of non-supernatural species of aliens. While not having magical powers, what happens if those aliens have any of several perfectly natural conditions, ones which science tells us are quite possible, or even more likely than not? For example, what if the hypothetical aliens have, on average, 10E5 times as many neurons as humans?. Or if we accept what some pople have suggested from the Drake equation, that we are very unlikely to be the first species to evolve to technological means of detecting aliens, and being detected in turn, and somewhere out there is a species that had radio level technology ten thousand generations ago, and has progressed at a similar rate to us ever since? Is their any realistic chance we could detect any lie imposed on our data by such a group of beings? We've just defined a being or group of beings that could be effectively omnescient or omnipotent by any test our science could apply, even if they weren't technically "supernaturally" powerful.
Where's the line on this? Is it scientific to look for aliens who are just a little more technologically advanced or intillectually gifted than we are, but unscientific to look for ones a bit farther on? How would you define, in scientific terms, just how much smarter, or more technically advanced, an alien species would have to be before there was no point in trying to spot evidence of their existence? Science has a lot of trouble defining the limits of the testable. If falsifiability, per Sir Karl Popper, is a fundamental attribute of the scientific method, then it seems to take a whole lot less than "Godlike" abilities to model something that sounds apparently possible, and apparently part of scientific thought, but actually exists beyond scientific verification.
In a sense, no amount of Scotland yard's science can catch Moriarity, only Holmes' science.
The whole idea of defensive patent barricades is grimly and deeply flawed, if corporations are indeed people (as Mitt Romney says).
We have corporations where the supposed value of their intellectual property is many times greater than their total physical assets. If that IP is a tool for struggling with other corporations, that means those patents and trademarks and such are the equivalent of a guy living in a tar paper roofed shack and driving a 14 year old chevy with bald tires, but having 300 guns in his collection, and 100,000 rounds of ammo for them. If that's people, it's not people I want for my next door neighbors.
The very idea of thinking you need "defenses" against your neighboring corporations that are far greater than every other asset you have, describes these "people" as violent paranoids. It's behavior we would be begging the police or social services to investigate if actual people were doing it.
The bigger point here is that we don't define any other government programs as bankrupt or "deep into the red" because 25 years from now if they aren't adjusted a bit, they will be dipping into negative balances, if population growth follows one particular projected trend. We (as a nation) don't look at how fast the budget for homeland security services is growing, and say "25 years from now, funding the DEA will cost more than it would cost to just buy Columbia and make it into a giant Walmart superstore.". We don't say "25 years from now, the number of BATF agents with law degrees will be greater than the number of lawyers graduating in those same 25 years.". We don't even say "25 years from now, that new carrier we're building will doubtless be easily defeated by a weapon costing less than 5,000 dollars U.S.". All of those are real possibilities if you just blindly extrapolate a graph for 25 years and pick assumptions that support only what you want to prove. Why are we letting the people who oppose Social Security on ideological grounds handpick their data points and extrapolate wildly in their preselected direction?
Before you criticise national dick-waving contests, the usual form those take is called WAR . Space programs, high speed rail, big dams or just about any other ways of competing without applying communal skill at high energy physics just to deliberately kill people are much better alternatives.
See, you don't get to say "I've got a really brilliant opinion if the lion will just lie down with the lamb first to make it not a stupid opinion.". Fix war, and then you can criticise anythng that at least subliminates the normally violent dick-waving, for still having a dick-waving element.
It may be binding contract law, but it's still simply not contract law "as well" (as well as copyright, I infer, since that's what the article summary says). "Something written down is involved" is not the same as "copyright is involved". "Somebody made notes we don't like" is not the same as "Sombody violated our copyright", etc. The problem here seems to be that one type of law may be being broken, but the exam people are hollering about a completely different type of law. For just one, any contract is probably state law and would be tried in the courts of whatever state the exam was offered in. Copyright violation would be a matter for the federal courts instead. Now, normally, if you get Raped in Chicago, and you try to have somebody charged with Tax Fraud in Texas to fix the problem, the court sees you as the problem. You don't get to win just because you have the right name on some papers, but the wrong crime, the wrong jurisdiction, and so on.
It's two dimensional, in that the graph of the atomic bonds is a flat, 2 dimensional graph. That's not "a different definition... than the rest of us", that's called context. It's the definition a chemist would normally use. If you're trying to prove your brilliance by pointing out that the whole universe has nothing physical that is infinitely thin, sorry, but we stopped giving away Nobel prizes for that. At least four people basically modded you insightful for pointing out that atoms are not infinitely small - that makes Slashdot clearly three dimensional, because we have something infinitely thick around here.
Slashdot Mirror
The kind of teachers and administrators who can't adapt their polices to get good use out of an OLPC are also the kind who make up bizarre and illogical polices for textbooks, such as requiring every child to run with a 35 pound load of them between classes, or cutting out the world maps and text that refers favorably to a rival country from the geography books. Before you just say "It didn't work!", ask yourself, "Would anything else have worked any better with these people in charge?"
I'm an apex predator, you insensitive clod! Tuna are a level down on my pyramid. (And I must admit, I'm doubtless tasty.)
"Why is "asset accumulation" rather than increasingly productive technology seen as the cause for less money spent on labor? "
Not to say I agree with all of it, but here's just one example of the theory: If businesses need more assets to enter a market, the threshold cost to enter and compete with existing business entities increases - needing more assets is the same thing as a rising barrier to trade. If more people are frozen out of becoming buisiness entities due to these barriers to entry, the available labor pool increases. A capitalist can pay less for exceptional levels of skill and dedication from workers because those workers cannot apply their exceptional dedication or skill to enter businesses for themselves (or at least these abilities are not enough to let the workers target the businesses with the best chance of making a profit, as these are the very businesses that have the most barriers to entry) Classical Marxism models about a dozen links such as this one between increasing capital costs and declining labor costs and how they actually hurt capital and labor in the longer run.
My own feeling is that it's pretty easy to criticise Marx by showing there are exceptions to this or that link, and I'm sure there are exceptions to the barrier to entry link, but it's a lot harder to prove that such exceptions exist for all the links or even a majority, and very hard to show they are frequent enough to shoot down the whole theory. Interestingly, I feel the same about Adam Smyth or Keynes.
You do understand that the real reason governments do things such as this is so they WILL be your government after the next election, and the one after that, ad infinitum?
That's a problem with everything. The position as you state it is a conservative claim, and an extension of similar claims about such things as the National Endowment for the Arts, which inevitably picks some artists viewpoints (and 'art as a form of speech') to favor over others. it sounds pretty logical to many libertarian types.
BUT, it applies to everything! (which is what the people who came up with this argument can't stand to see addressed): The Amish don't want their tax dollars spent on grading high speed curves by the Dept of Transportation. The people who seriously believe the Moon landings were fake don't want a NASA budget just to 'do more fake moonshots'. The Pacifists oppose spending anything at all for the Dept of Defense. The anti-vaccine persons oppose the Center for Disease Control, at least as it stands today. Just ask the nation's 50 million Pot smokers if they want a single dime of their taxes to go to the DEA, or even the BATF, FBI, and others. Many people would claim to oppose a tax on moral grounds if it got them a bigger refund (or whatever) regardless of whether they had an actual moral opinion. If every person has a right to not pay taxes if they run counter to his or her beliefs or alleged beliefs, then there will be next to no taxes at all, and government itself becomes unaffordable. Ultimately, you are demanding absolute Anarchy..
That's fine if you are really an Anarchist. The problem is, are you? Most of the people advancing your argument want it to apply to the parts of government they don't see a need for, and not the rest. Are you willing to apply your argument to Police, Courts, National Defense and such, or just to the things you want "justice tested"
Do you want all taxes to be voluntary, or do you want some of yourrs to be avoidable while mine continue to be manditory?
My Ex recently borrowed a GPS device to go to a wedding for some friends. The location was in a city with which she was almost completely unfamilar except for the main interstate route. She told me how this machine gave her instructions like:
"There's been an accident a few blocks ahead - Turn left at the movie theater"
"Drive around behind the theater and find the 1 lane concrete bridge - look for a green trash dumpster next to it."
"Cross the bridge and turn right - the speed limit is 25 - you are in a residential neighborhood, watch for children>"
It got her to the wedding with no delays. I've got no idea who makes one like that, and she just assumed they were all like that.
We'll get those back up cameras out of the RVs and Semis right away, Lord AC. /. should abolish AC because it would mean people will actually have to use their brains while posting.
Seriously, I'm starting to think
Let's push that whole analogy a little farther:
One of the arguments against the death penalty being a deterrent is that many of the people it gets applied to are not capable of looking ten years or so down the road and seeing themselves in the position of a condemned killer actually strapped into an electric chair or on a lethal injection table. Our worst criminals tend to be strongly socially stunted and fixated only on immediate gratification and immediate consequences. They severly lack the empathy to put themselves in another's position, whether it's with their victims, or with other killers who have gotten caught and punished.
Sounds like a corporation - relentless focus on a point no father away than the next quarter's profit statement, little or no concern for the long term consequences of their actions... The very act of calling disbandment a corporate death penalty says corporations have the mentality of criminals, and we are hoping we have come up with something severe enough to get them to look past the immediate gratification mode they are in.
For a few years now, Wizards of the Coast has been running ads with variations of the idea that D&D is 'way more normal' than MMORPGS and such. The way they put it is something like "If you're sitting in your parent's basement and pretending to be an elf, you should at least invite a few friends over and order pizza!".
Really, in a world where people commonly sit in total physical isolation from other humans while getting their jollies from a PC screen for hours and hours, doesn't throwing a party for a few firends and fixing some refreshments sound more and more like what everyone else does. Hey, you might even use tabletop games as an excuse to clean up the place a bit!
1. I'm a type 2 Diabetic.
2. I stand 6'1", and currently weigh 211 lbs. I have a 32" waist and can (and regularly do) bench press 295. I run 9 miles a week.
3. Despite this, I still use pills to control my condition. I still have to have quarterly exams. including several hundred dollars in tests each time.
4. I have better than average response to the meds, see fewer side effects than the average user, and unlike many diabetics, can get by on just a couple of generic drugs that don't cost me much. I have not had to change up to any of the more espensive drugs since I started. Less than a third of the type 2 diabetics under treatment can make that claim. .
So on behalf of all the type 2's who have cut their weight, exercised, and stopped eating sugary foods but still have a serious medical condition, I'd like to offer a hearty "Fuck you, you ignorant idiot!" (I don't usually stoop to such language, but it's obvious that nothing less could possible get through to somebody like you). Really, you are spitting in the faces of thens or hundreds of thousands of people you never met, who have successfully fought a battle I doubt seriously you could win, and you are revealing you are unfamiliar with both the facts about a serious disease and fundamental human decency. I'm torn between being furious with you and pitying you.
The number of people now living who have reported 'post death' experiences is estimated at over one million. This is based on there being over 100,000 cases still living where the event occurred in a western style hospital or other similar setting, with the physical state of the person at time of 'temporary death' being well recorded. I have asked several professional skeptics in this field how many people they think are reporting 'near death' experiences in a given year, and always thesir estimates are low by many orders of magnetude. It's like talking to someone who is skeptical that automobiles exist, and who says that he examined all four reports of 'cars' he found in the literature and all of them appeared flawed (Then he presumably turns around and walks back down the tunnel from his office to the snack machines).
In order to be a skeptic worth listening to, it's necessary to first be an expert on just what the subject being debunked claims. Somebody who is skeptical that the world population is over 7 billion, and who has never left their birth town of Podunk Falls Wyoming, and doesn't recognize the term "Megacity" or know the total habitable surface area of Earth, may indeed be a skeptic, but why does anybody quote them or give their opinions on the subject any credence?
A properly prepared skeptic on NDEs ought to know a few such things as "What is the average time before lack of Oxygen causes irreversable brain death?", "What is the "mammalian diving reflex", and are cases where it may contribute to revival biased by the age of the drowning victim?", or, perhaps "What's the earliest historical account of an NDE outside of religious texts?"
There's probably a near infinite number of basic differences between accurately depicting violence and showing it the way most entertainment does. For just a few examples, take films such as Con Air or the Die Hard series. Are people really attracted to the message of violence itself, or do they like it that the violence seems to fall hardest on the worst villians, as though the violence became proof that there was some sort of God, if only a God of Wrath that would steer a falling villiain into landing in an improvised electric chair? Most people are not attracted to entertainment where violence is shown as part of the random seeming outcomes of the real world. Showing that the Uber-Eeeevil guy still has people who miss him once he's gone - that what one person considers a terrorist, another considers a freedom fighter - that bullets don't always stop in the primary target - these things tend to hurt entertainment sales.
In a way, you could argue that the (fictive, entertainment depiction of) violence is itself never the real problem, and worrying about the effect of it on even children is worrying about the wrong aspect of the TV shows and films in question. Even if we grant the premise that entertainment violence does have bad effects on some people, maybe it's the terrible inaccuracy of films that show people shooting guns out of "perp's" hands with high powered sniper rifles that would take said perp's whole arm off at the shoulder that cause the psychological damage. Maybe showing the randomness of a realistic firefight, showing the consequences with some respect for realism, is what's needed to keep from glamorizing the violence itself. Maybe it's showing guns as surgically precise tools and bullets as steered by the god of the tribe of good guys to achieve instant karma. Maybe it's showing people falling down, but not showing funerals full of grieving families, or people spending the rest of their lives in wheelchairs, or even some poor janitor having to mop up the mess. Maybe it's the claim that the strong and decent are quick to resort to violence rather than reluctant at best.
The meme around these parts is: "I do not think that word means what you think it means."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Montoya
Do you really think there is any hate crime law out there that says crimes against white people are not so bad? Do you really think the laws are written so that a black person who punches you to 'teach whitey his place', or a gay guy who punches you because "breeders are pond-scum, and I'm gonna get them all before the get me" can't be charged with a hate crime? Please read what the actual laws say. If the law in your area actually marks you out as not being a member of a protected class, then by all means complain, lobby, and fight for your equal right to protection, but I'll bet you find that your state's hate crime laws, if any, are written to include actions designed to intimidate or threaten your group too. Or are you trying to claim that these are bad laws in themselves because in your area there's selective enforcement?
In this case, the person saying "hug and run liberal" is revealing his right wing orientation. What amazes me here is that his version of the right is 'tough on crime' (except when they think a tough law is 'Liberal", then they want to give a medal to the criminal). They're tough on immigrants not willing to be assimilated into the American culture (except when somebody thinks they have a right to apply the good old fashioned moral standards of the country they came from in place of US law, even where they have been informed (by the college administration in this case) that they don't).
The basic model for hate crimes in most jurisdictions is that there are multiple victims. There's the person directly assaulted, raped, murdered or whatever, and there's a whole group of other people who were put in fear they might also be singled out for the same treatment (that's what the 1964 civil rights act refers to as additional societal consequences).. For the U.S. federal laws, and for most of the 45 states that have adopted hate crimes legislation, there are also limits to measuring those consequences - direct intent to violate basic rights of the people involved, such as voting, jury duty or public assembly, have to be affected, with intent by the criminal proven by their own speech. Many of these laws don't let a prosecuter even prove intent by membership in a group such as the KKK or Black Panthers that has advocated such consequences, unless the criminals own statements support the charge. But you go right on using the Faux news definition instead of what the law actually says (again in most jurisdictions) * Call people stupid and obtuse for figuring out that the criminal had intent to harm additional victims, and for taking those victims into account. Coddle the criminals. Get modded insightful for repating a lie about the law and sucking up to some of the worst criminal scum on the planet in the process.
* I'm sure somebody can find, somewhere, a 'hate crimes' law that doesn't involve proving the criminal had intent to harm or frighten additional victims, but then I'm sure some place has a law against tresspassing that doesn't actually require physical entrance to the area, or some similarly stupid verion of most laws. It might surprise me if someone found a manslaughter law that didn't require an actual dead person, but even that probably exists somewhere. But go look at the actual laws as written for the federal government or any of the state wide laws that exist in the 45 states plus DC. There are a few that are under state court challenge because some of the rights they think are compromised are not specifically spelled out in those state's constitution or because someone thinks there's a systeminc bias against applying the laws to 'black on white' crimes (for example there's a move in Tennessee to claim that the Christian-Newsome murders in Knoxville were a hate crime, although the prosecuter says he looked at intent by the perps to target the couple for their ethinc background and was thoroughly convinced the four assalants would have done the same crimes regardless of race.).
Since no one claims that evolution has anything to do with these (evolution talks about the diversification of life after life arose, nothing more), ...
Really? Do you really want to claim that there is no one out there who claims to accept evolution and speaks as though it explains the origin of life and not just descent through modification? I guess you never heard of anybody speaking of "Stellar Evolution", or "Cosmic Evolution" either? And nobody ever adopted any form of evolutionary argument where it could be called "Social Darwinism" around you either, I suppose?
Do you realize how extraordinary, how utterly, phenominally, miraculous your claim is? No one on your side of the point gets the argument wrong!
The problem with that is, the usual 'scientific' argument for God being unfalsifiable is that "He" has supernatural power and knowledge, so if "He" wanted to hide some aspect of truth from us. "He" would always succeed. This sounds good, until you consider the question of the existence of alien intelligences and similar issues. For example, many people have postulated the existence of non-supernatural species of aliens. While not having magical powers, what happens if those aliens have any of several perfectly natural conditions, ones which science tells us are quite possible, or even more likely than not? For example, what if the hypothetical aliens have, on average, 10E5 times as many neurons as humans?. Or if we accept what some pople have suggested from the Drake equation, that we are very unlikely to be the first species to evolve to technological means of detecting aliens, and being detected in turn, and somewhere out there is a species that had radio level technology ten thousand generations ago, and has progressed at a similar rate to us ever since? Is their any realistic chance we could detect any lie imposed on our data by such a group of beings? We've just defined a being or group of beings that could be effectively omnescient or omnipotent by any test our science could apply, even if they weren't technically "supernaturally" powerful.
Where's the line on this? Is it scientific to look for aliens who are just a little more technologically advanced or intillectually gifted than we are, but unscientific to look for ones a bit farther on? How would you define, in scientific terms, just how much smarter, or more technically advanced, an alien species would have to be before there was no point in trying to spot evidence of their existence? Science has a lot of trouble defining the limits of the testable. If falsifiability, per Sir Karl Popper, is a fundamental attribute of the scientific method, then it seems to take a whole lot less than "Godlike" abilities to model something that sounds apparently possible, and apparently part of scientific thought, but actually exists beyond scientific verification.
In a sense, no amount of Scotland yard's science can catch Moriarity, only Holmes' science.
The whole idea of defensive patent barricades is grimly and deeply flawed, if corporations are indeed people (as Mitt Romney says).
We have corporations where the supposed value of their intellectual property is many times greater than their total physical assets. If that IP is a tool for struggling with other corporations, that means those patents and trademarks and such are the equivalent of a guy living in a tar paper roofed shack and driving a 14 year old chevy with bald tires, but having 300 guns in his collection, and 100,000 rounds of ammo for them. If that's people, it's not people I want for my next door neighbors.
The very idea of thinking you need "defenses" against your neighboring corporations that are far greater than every other asset you have, describes these "people" as violent paranoids. It's behavior we would be begging the police or social services to investigate if actual people were doing it.
The bigger point here is that we don't define any other government programs as bankrupt or "deep into the red" because 25 years from now if they aren't adjusted a bit, they will be dipping into negative balances, if population growth follows one particular projected trend. We (as a nation) don't look at how fast the budget for homeland security services is growing, and say "25 years from now, funding the DEA will cost more than it would cost to just buy Columbia and make it into a giant Walmart superstore.". We don't say "25 years from now, the number of BATF agents with law degrees will be greater than the number of lawyers graduating in those same 25 years.". We don't even say "25 years from now, that new carrier we're building will doubtless be easily defeated by a weapon costing less than 5,000 dollars U.S.". All of those are real possibilities if you just blindly extrapolate a graph for 25 years and pick assumptions that support only what you want to prove. Why are we letting the people who oppose Social Security on ideological grounds handpick their data points and extrapolate wildly in their preselected direction?
Before you criticise national dick-waving contests, the usual form those take is called WAR . Space programs, high speed rail, big dams or just about any other ways of competing without applying communal skill at high energy physics just to deliberately kill people are much better alternatives.
See, you don't get to say "I've got a really brilliant opinion if the lion will just lie down with the lamb first to make it not a stupid opinion.". Fix war, and then you can criticise anythng that at least subliminates the normally violent dick-waving, for still having a dick-waving element.
It may be binding contract law, but it's still simply not contract law "as well" (as well as copyright, I infer, since that's what the article summary says). "Something written down is involved" is not the same as "copyright is involved". "Somebody made notes we don't like" is not the same as "Sombody violated our copyright", etc. The problem here seems to be that one type of law may be being broken, but the exam people are hollering about a completely different type of law. For just one, any contract is probably state law and would be tried in the courts of whatever state the exam was offered in. Copyright violation would be a matter for the federal courts instead. Now, normally, if you get Raped in Chicago, and you try to have somebody charged with Tax Fraud in Texas to fix the problem, the court sees you as the problem. You don't get to win just because you have the right name on some papers, but the wrong crime, the wrong jurisdiction, and so on.
It's two dimensional, in that the graph of the atomic bonds is a flat, 2 dimensional graph. That's not "a different definition ... than the rest of us", that's called context. It's the definition a chemist would normally use. If you're trying to prove your brilliance by pointing out that the whole universe has nothing physical that is infinitely thin, sorry, but we stopped giving away Nobel prizes for that. At least four people basically modded you insightful for pointing out that atoms are not infinitely small - that makes Slashdot clearly three dimensional, because we have something infinitely thick around here.
Those past high school age may want to cling to their principles instead.
I call dibs on the world wide contract to fix the P1M bug. Don't wait till the last second, pay me now.