I don't see why you're surprised at the claim. Are you picturing them carefully picking countries on the basis of how those places treat copyright law and how widespread piracy is in them? Choosing IP blocks because they belong to service providers that don't cooperate with take-down notices? If they were sticking pretty close to the known numbers there, it might be ethically acceptable, and whether it was or not, claims of racism wouldn't hold water. But historically, some major sites have made some terrible mistakes if that's all they are trying to do.
When some site management discovers a DOS attack is coming from Belgum and does nothing for two days, then runs across a very odd unconfirmable rumor that the attack originates in an African nation and starts a blanket block of all of them within the next half hour, then hears another rumor the attack comes from a North Korean group and blocks NK, China, Hong Kong and Tibet (of all things), what more do you need to take a claim of racism seriously? No one's going to call themselves Klu Klux Internet and use little white conical cable modems with orange and yellow flickering activity lights in a cross shape.
I count myself as a liberal, of late, but I'm probably more conservative on drugs than you are. I support full legalisation of marijuana, but for now at least, I wouldn't go past decriminalizing simple possession of the harder drugs and would keep dealing illegal until we see more about what the pot law changes actually do. It bothers me that there are currently 17 federal agencies where some agents have full automatic weapons carry powers (outside of the Military itself). I don't just want to repeal the USAPATRIOT act, I'd like to cut that 17 way down, maybe to the point where the BATF and the IRS have to get an FBI agent or US Marshall to come along if they need physical force, certainly at least to the point where the only people at Treasury routinely carrying guns are either Secret Service on presidential guard duty or are guarding gold shipments. Never-the-less, you sound at least semi-rational in your views.
With that said, I'm trying to figure out how you can claim with a straight face that Fox is the only network that doesn't lean left. It sounds to me like you are drawing a line that puts 65% or so of all Americans on the hard left, (in which case, I suggest you surrender to the inevitable.). I've seen stories where I thought there was a leftwards bias, but there are quite a few that go the opposite way. For example, remember the Rod Blagojevich scandal? One of Blagojevich's flunkies was recorded in a wiretap as saying the Obama camp was 'a bunch of boy scouts', who wouldn't play ball at all. ABC and MSN ran that story as an update to the scandal, and both had a headline with it saying some variation on " Obama has some explaining to do.". That's right wing bias right there - when the same evidence that shows a perp is guilty suggests you were as pure as the driven snow and didn't associate with the criminal act is when you don't have some 'splainin' to do, in any normal, sane world. Alternately, it was because some parts of the press were locked in pro Hillary mode at that time, or just trying to keep the race close so they could draw more viewers. Maybe it doesn't fit neatly into left/right at all, but it sure as shootin' doesn't make a good example of left wing bias.
Just recently, we had the nutcase who took over the Discovery channel offices. NBC excerpted the part of the frootloop's manifesto where he referred to Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" as proof he was inspired by Liberal sources, but left out the parts where he talked about "ending all immigration and completely closing our borders", and "Eliminating the Anchor Babies". For the first 48 hours after the story broke, to see the whole manifesto you had to go to the BBC. I've seen dozens of stories such as that.
You do know, don't you, that the real, classical left wants to try Bush and Cheney for war crimes? The real left (to the extent there is a single 'real' left) wants to nationalize all the investment banks that are 'too big to fail'. The left doesn't just want to repeal the Bush tax cuts on people making over 250 K a year, they want to raise the maximum rate - some of them to something like what it was in the Eisenhower era (90%). Yeah, I remember CBS giving time to Noam Chomsky's arguments on the 2010 Supreme court revocation of campaign finance limits. No wait, not one national news outlet put Chomsky on the air on that (AFAIK). A lot of the people who were, or are, the left wing equivalent of Rush and Glenn don't get any airtime at all. Actors shooting off their mouths get used instead to 'present both sides'.
A forced perspective prop, like the cart you mention, involves building something with odd angles that look like they could be normal right angles from a certain POV only. (I'm sure you are well aware of this, I point it out for anyone reading the thread who isn't) Shots using that prop only work from a selected angle and distance range because those angles will look increasingly distorted with only minor changes of POV. The more you want somebody to be 20 feet away from the camera, so they look half the size of the person ten feet away, yet want them to appear to be sitting side by side, the smaller the angles and distances allowed become. But that doesn't stop the special effects people from creating multiple props to allow more shooting flexibility. Budget will usually drive the director to limit his angles so as to not need so many props built, but that's like anything else in film-making - how bad does the director want the shot? Jackson could have used a second cart if he had really been able to justify the expense, but I doubt he felt he needed such shots that badly.
Forced perspective can make the actors have to learn to react to a marker floating in space rather than the other actors, but there are so many other things driving that skillset all I can say is the actors better get used to it. As soon as some director puts a Rancor monster in the scene or says "OK Bill, two big spaceships just blew each other up on the viewscreen, now act.", the actor has to deal with acting with their imagination rather than a real target.
I can think of at least one case where it probably could have.
When the scientific team nicknamed the Seven Samurai started working on such questions as large scale movements of galaxies and whole galactic clusters, and just how big the largest structures in the universe are, they found that there had been very few precise measurements of galactic red shifts. It seems, once the first few dozen were determined back in Hubble's time (essentially before about 1945 at the latest), nobody bothered to do more than the most desultory work in the field for 30 years or so. If a bunch of grad students and hobbyist astronomers had bothered to gather data at the same rate as just the same sort of observers had for the first few observations, the Seven themselves said somebody among them would most likely have quickly found their conclusions, as many of them would have been so obvious no special skill would have been required. I don't know if I'd compare this work to Shakespeare or General Relativity, but we are talking about a Nobel prize that the people who claimed it feel could have fallen to just about anyone in the field if they had been willing to do a lot of unexciting grind work.
Right now, less than half the lines in various stellar spectra have been associated with a particular ion. There was a golden age of spectroscopy where people identified wholly new elements such as Helium, and determined that a given line in a spectrum was caused, say, by iron with three electrons knocked off, but that effort petered out long before all the data was analysed. Nobody important in astrophysics expects to find anything really exciting in the part that's left. Wouldn't it be remarkable if it turned out there was something significant yet to be discovered in spectroscopy?
I'm starting to think the very term 'Carbs' is meaningless from a health standpoint. Our digestive tracts are so long to handle the complex carbohydrates found in green vegetables and related sources - it is not required for the simple starches and sugars that are also lumped in together as carbs. You just said something that is technically true, but terribly misleading, in much the same way as showing nine homeless bums in the same room with Bill Gates, telling us what their average income is, and not giving a damn what some people would assume about poverty in America from the evidence you've supplied. You're correcting a technical point, but it sounds like you're saying the first poster is wrong about his conclusions instead, and that's how many people are going to take it. While we are at it, there's naturally occurring sugars and synthettic sugars, and even though glucose is a naturally occurring sugar, it has one important difference from all the more complex sugars - it directly crosses the blood/brain barrier. We need some clear words to descrivbe the three types of sugars as separate health factors. We probably need several other new words to let people discuss this with more light than heat being shed. Despite this, here's trying to say it with only a few, rather basic phrases substituted for single words.
If you're like most Americans, you need to eat more carbs and to eat fewer carbs. See how nonsensical that sounds, until it's rephrased: We need to eat more complex carbs, as found in vegetables, and fewer simple starches and many fewer sugars.
Also, gluten is found chiefly in wheat, not oats or rice. Gluten may not be that much of a health factor for most people - the evidence is not conclusive, at least yet. But we probably need some clear way to distinguish the starchy food type that has lots of gluten from all the other starchy foods that have less or even trivial amounts, or again, disscussions are mostly heat not light.
That's easy, Galileo first submitted his papers to a non-peer reviewed journal (The only 'peer' review available at the time being within the Roman Catholic church, which was going through a stuffy phase at the time). Galileo self published in the popular press ahead of such review (A definite no-no for a working scientist). Darwin went through a (admittedly a bit rudimentary by modern standards) peer-review process (that correspondence with Wallace and others).
I'm only half being tongue in cheek with this. Darwin used parts of the scientific method that were simply unknown in Galileo's time. For example, Darwin described a number of ways to falsify his theory, one of them being: "It being admitted that, if it were ever shown that the mechanisms of heredity allow unlimited blending, the entire proposal would become of no account". Darwin was more fully a scientist simply in the sense that he thought more about identifying what alternate explanations he considered and their implications, and how to test them. His work sustained more modern science (Crick and Watson's Noble for the discovery of the DNA coding mechanism was awarded in part because they had demonstrated that the genetic code the way it was implemented in real organisms didn't allow unlimited blending and so their research led inexorably to testing a never fully verified consequence of the theory of natural selection. Showing that a specific code that didn't support blending was the one nature actually used finished the process of putting Natural Selection on a solid footing that Mendel only started.). I'm not sure if there are any predictions made by Galileo that were unverifiable at the time but eventually proved to be more and more testable, so that generations of other scientists kept coming back to them, but I can't think of any.
The Placebo effect doesn't work the way most doctors think it does. It's an area where modern medicine is toting around a strange idea, as odd in its own way as bleeding to release humors was back 300 years ago, just not as dangerous to retain. I say this because there were some research studies on the Placebo effect that make no sense at all if it works like most people think it does. In them, test subjects were given real opiate pain meds, and/or placebo opiates, in various combinations. After about a week of getting used to the drugs, then either a chemical which blocks opiate uptake in the brain was administered, or a placebo version of it. No one is really sure why, but the real blocker blocked either the real opiates or the placebos from relieving the pain equally well, and the placebo version of the blocker most often didn't work on either, but where it did, it was about equally likely to block real opiates and let the placebo versions still work, or vice versa. Various versions of this experiment have gotten many rather quirky results, but never ones that really make sense by any known theory of how placebos work.
It wasn't obvious until atomic theory got established. Until somebody does enough experiments to figure out something of what the fundamental pieces are, it makes perfect sense to test things, to see if gold is what it is because the weightyness of it is combined with its ductility, color, and resistance to aqua regia as though they were all fundamentals, and maybe you can move one or more fundamentals around from one pile to another. So you start with lead because it has similar weightyness and somewhat similar softness, and you try mixing in mercury because it is fluid and so the fluidness might pass from the mercury and make the maliable lead more maliable, able to be beaten into thinner sheets. You try to get one observed property to decouple from another and jump from one type of substance to another. Antimony gets all sorts of colored sheens to it, maybe you can get the yellow sheen to split off and pass into the lead. Now you're researching splitting and recombining colors.
All you're doing is, you're hurting yourself (and maybe, arguably, other taxpayers). The IRS has informed all the commercial tax prep firms of their error rates in submissions, and often tells individual commercial tax preparers what their error rates are like. When they do this for a particular year, they tell us what the year's error rate for paper filers is like, and what the rate for the IRS's own temp agency help that types those paper returns into the computers is. I'm not going to argue over whether your personal error rate is higher than it would be with good software, or not, because it doesn't really matter. When you file by paper, your documents get turned over to temps in large cities such as Austin TX, or even the DC area itself. The temp contracts pay less than 10 dollars an hour. They have an average error rate of about 25% per return. (My own error rate is all on the right side of the decimal place, with a couple of zeros before it. A huge part of that is the software catching 90% plus of the possible errors, although I like to think my own professionalism adds another decimal place or so.). Congress has chosen to construct the IRS's annual budget so as to specifically fill these positions with seasonal temp labor, supposedly to save taxpayer money, but given the quality, I don't see any overall benefit from the cost cutting. I know some agents who have real doubts about the effects it puts on their case load and whether it's saving anything at all.
Paper also adds the time spent in the US mail system. If you're getting a refund, it delays it, and if you owe, the IRS will deposit the check while those temps are still keying in the return, and if you're counting on the delay to get funds in to cover your payment, that will probably be the time the mail runs efficiently.
I mostly do commercial prep, now specializing in S corps. About the only private returns I bother with are a few old clients and some involving K-1s for some SF authors or their estates, and that last is for the fun of hearing industry gossip, and occasional autographed copies. You just got advice you probably couldn't afford, unless you are in the top bracket.
For the last few years, the biggest increase in audits has been focused on the Earned Income Credit (EIC). About the middle of the Bush administration, IRS testified to Congress about tax fraud sources, and for the 2003 year (which was the most recent they had finished analyzing at the time), they came up with these estimates:
1st place, fraud for small business filers using schedule C = approximately 100 Billion a year. 2nd place, fraud for filers using EIC = approximately 9 Billion a year.
Congress told them all that EIC fraud was terrible, and directed them to toughen up on auditing EIC. (Make of that what you will). The IRS has complied with these directions. While the IRS proposed increased business auditing, congress's choice of what to deal with first means you weren't the one at a 300-400% increased risk for random spot check audits, at least until very recently. The IRS is just starting to go after schedule C - as a sometimes paid preparer I started seeing some of the same changes that began hitting EIC filers in 2005-2007 being adapted for schedule C situations this regular filing season.
Triggered audits are, of course, a different story. You'll probably see the IRS checking whenever someone claims self employed income that exceeds the amount reported on 1099-MISCs, before long. For many 'Sched C. people', that will be routine - that is, they will just write a note on a support form saying "I run a retail business, naturally most customers don't provide me with 1099-MISCs when they buy something, since it's not required.". But what about a self employed carpenter, saying "I have X total income, and 81% of it is supported by 1099's from the home builders I contract with, but the other 19% is smaller jobs"? He or she will probably have to state he or she has proper written records, which will become something sworn under penalty of law if he does not in fact have them complete and to standard, just as people claiming vehicle mileage now have to make the same statement.*
This year, I had a client who runs a commercial lawn care service, and who was audited. While it came out well, I was surprised that the IRS wanted to see a record of all the small one shot jobs the service did much more than they cared about the much more easily documented ongoing contracts that were all big enough to generate 1099-MISCs. My client was verbally instructed that his log of small clients should be in consistent order, always by full name of the person or business, rather than having some clients listed by address, and that he should list businesses by business name only and not by the owner's or manager's or other contact's personal name. (Note he was not dinged for it - the auditor merely said "We recommend you use this sort of system for responsible record keeping.").
* For those of you wondering "Why would the IRS be worried that someone would report more income than they (or the IRS) can prove?", there are reasons some crooks do this. For one, to keep calling something a business, it generally needs to show a profit now and then - the rule of thumb is 3 years in 5. Pad your expenses a couple of years in a row to remove all profitability, and then the economy goes bad, the next year is unexpectedly low, and now the scoundrel is worried that the IRS will audit everything, including the fraudulent years, if they challenge whether he's running a business at all. There's also cases where someone wants to hide illegal income by tweaking their legal business to show enough profit to explain their lifestyle, or for money laundering activities.
The owner of any business makes 'his' money only if he succeeds, while he has to pay his employees on an ongoing basis. Lawyers are not special in that regard.
I've always wondered why the trinity still bugs some people in this day and age. Mr. Smith can call me on the phone while I'm in Sri Lanka and I hear his voice, while his body is in Frostbite Falls, MN., and yet I don't see an absolute disconnect. Clearly Mr. Smith's voice is, in some ways, Mr. Smith and in other ways, isn't. People now simply take this situation for granted in real life, yet feel it's a paradox in Christianity. I won't argue your Cainism here as that's an entire different level of intellectual dispute, better addressed by watching a Kevin Smith movie or reading P. K. Dick's Valis. (Oooh, does the Metatron make five? You did say "at least 4").
Beings that don't think everything can be expressed as the ratio of two numbers? Post Pythagorean mathematicians?
Or do you mean as in 'rationale' not 'ratio'? Lizzy Borden either really gave her father 40 whacks or she didn't. Knowing a rationale that explains why she might have wanted her father dead still won't convince a jury she actually did it, and not knowing rationally why she might have wanted to whack him won't necessarily convince them she didn't.
We have kept words such as logical, reasonable and rational as separate terms in English because they do not all mean the exact same thing and can't all be used interchangeably. Reasoning about religion isn't the same thing as rationalising it. When Jesus said "Greater love hath no man than he who lays down his life for another", it's an irrational statement, whether it's an unreasonable one or not. You can't put numbers to it and conclude that laying down your life is worth unity, while buying her chocolates is only worth 0.000341% of that, and driving faster to get to a charity ball is worth 0.0728%. You can't say that an old person who probably only lost a couple of years anyway had less love than an young healthy person making the same sacrifice. You can't bring in a whole mess of calculations about just how much one person or anther would value what's been given up, or who has the most utility to the greater society or any of thousands of other number schemes, and say that objectively better defines love than what this Jesus guy said. Or maybe you can, but no one has been able to get anywhere near universal agreement their complex mathematically organised schema is better yet.
Which does nothing about free will one way or another. Let's say you are a very rich man. You put up millions to start a business. Your analysis tells you that statistically, you will get X amount of work out of Y employees and make Z profit. Y' employees will quit within a year, Y" employees will have to be fired, and Y'" employees will need maternity leave. You now know the future enough that you are willing to risk millions on being right, and most of your employees don't know it. Even if you handed one of them the money to do the same thing you are doing, they wouldn't know enough to risk doing it, so by the argument they have become puppets on strings and lost their free will. You don't have to have infinite, supernatural knowledge, or prefect foresight to take away at least some of their free will.
By the original argument, just having some natural and finite amount of knowledge, even if it's knowledge that other people could freely acquire but didn't, takes away some portion of their free will. Normally, that's just not how we think of it. If I gain the knowledge to read fluent French, then I gain an option to freely choose to read Proust in the original version, but that doesn't mean I've somehow diminished anyone else's ability to make the same decision. I suspect it's that pesky word infinite. It's like some people are saying "God has infinite knowledge and infinite choices, including choosing to read Proust in the original French without first knowing French." Defined that way, there's a simple internal paradox (God knows everything and God doesn't know French). Then they apply their self paradoxical statement to only a selected part of the premises and say the paradox negates the part they choose and not the other part. (They don't say "God knows everything so He can't not know French, so when He reads Proust, He can read it in the original French"). You know, if you start with a paradox, you can prove anything - that means the very method some of you are using to "prove" God doesn't exist, or Free Will doesn't exist, or whatever, can also 'prove' they do. In fact, I now don't have to do any real work to attempt to prove anything to anyone who's starting from this paradox - they've just handed me all the ammo to logically prove that free will exists, God exists, actual infinites exist, Oakland will win the pennant this year, and they should freely send all their money to me.
Did this get modded offtopic by someone who just didn't get the Lucifer's Hammer reference?
Re:Can atheists refute one simple fact?
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Largest Genome Ever
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What about Carl Sagan's argument? He argued (in 'Cosmos') that if it was necessary to postulate a cause for the universe, it was necessary to postulate a cause for whatever caused the universe, and if it was not necessary to claim there was a cause for "God", it was also not necessary to claim a cause for the universe. But not 15 pages before he made that claim, he discussed the old Steady State theory and how it was succeeded by the Big Bang model. Sagan allowed the steady state to be causeless, since there was no first moment for an infinitely old universe. But if that's true, Dr. Sagan was also arguing that a 'Big Bang' type universe had a special reason for needing a cause that the Steady State version did not. He was claiming that it was sufficient in one case for science to simply say that not everything has to have a cause, but in the other case that science was only specifically able to skip reasoning about the cause of a thing because it did not have an origin. Why then was it fair to allow the steady state to be causeless, but demand that God must have a cause if the current (Big Bang) model must have a cause? Wouldn''t "God" be more like the steady state than the big bang (at least as most religions define God)? Why did Carl Sagan reason from Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else to conclude that something that had no beginning didn't need a first cause, and then reject the very same idea not 15 pages later? Why did he treat a question as strictly rhetorical when he in fact had given a straight, non-rhetorical answer to it not 15 pages before? So, going by the way the first post was modded and responded to, Carl Sagan was nothing better than a slashtroll who made us all dumber. Personally, I disagreed with him on several points, but thought he was legitimately brilliant and certainly worthy of publication. I guess I should adopt some of your attitudes and burn his books instead.
Fact: Dozens of distinguished scientists in the 1930s and 40s pointed to the Steady State model as a positive disproof of God, and fought against accepting the Big Bang model because they claimed it was bringing religious superstition back into science. Not one of them was willing to admit after the Big Bang won out by actual evidence that they had been wrong to interpret the science that way. Most of them, when pressed on it, stipulated two things: 1) That even if the Steady State and Big Bang theories were opposite in their predictions in just about every other respect, they were not opposite in their implications about religion, and 2) that the Big Bang would not be a scientific theory unless it shared the common property of disproving the existence of God.
I see several logical flaws in the initial post. In particular, the claim that an actual infinite cannot exist is highly suspect. A lot of the post is rehashed Augustine, and the debate about Augustine's reasoning has echoed through philosophy for over a millennium now. Some of it borrows from Pascal, but then, most people don't reject Pascal's contributions to probability theory and logic just because there are flaws with "Pascal's Wager". However, the refutations here are just as flawed, if not more-so, and I've seen some brilliant men make the same sort of errors many of you are mocking, in the modern era. If you're not prepared to stoop to Karma mods and dumb one-liners for them, maybe some of you just might want to set yourself a better standard here.
Actually, Tennessee has a Good Samaritan law that would protect the fire fighters if they went in to save a life, such as your hypothetical wife or son. The way those fire fighters are insured for health and injury, the state requires a contract where they would be covered for injuries resulting if they were attempting to actually save a human life. The law also protects them from being sued individually in such cases.
1. Then he argues that the agreement is invalid as it was signed under duress, and refuses to pay/sues. Tennessee law gives two working days to change your mind after signing any contract, so the state law would have to have an exception added for this case. 2. To represent the city in negotiating an agreement, one of your fire fighters has to be a city legal agent, with the additional training, and the costs of getting the person recognised as a legal agent. I'm currently recognised as a legal agent for two banks. It's not cheap, either in cash or in the time I put in updating that agency status every year. A city government might be able to do it without thinking they need to renew the record every single year, but that depends in large part on what the city's insurance contract says. However often they have additional costs, to make agency work, the city has to have enough fire fighters or other first responders trained to be sure there's always going to be one on each team, or send the city's lawyer along on every county fire call even at 2 a.m., or something like that. The fire fighters aren't particularly trained to ask the sort of questions that would better let them judge the risk, and there's not a lot of time to fiddle with them while the home burns, but if they are going to be signing contracts, there's an insurance company somewhere that expects them to be exceptionally well trained as it's such a high financial risk situation. (and I'll explain why there's such a high financial risk below). 3. If the home owner was still paying off a mortgage, the typical contract says he had to have fire service. Statistically, there are a lot more people with mortgages outstanding than completely own their homes and it's actually more likely than not that if he has a mortgage, this home owner has either let coverage lapse without telling the bank (which he is required to do), or managed to get a local bank to take him on trust without showing the proof he ever had fire service. You're talking about signing a contract, where the odds are probably above 50% that the home owner has already at least technically cheated on an existing contract. So, these contracts will end up in court a whole lot - which is cost, fuss and bother to the city, for people who aren't citizens, and chose to live under a county government that is cheaper because it's not having to meet those costs.
Once laptops started including DVD players, some people started watching movies on them. This results in keeping the machine going for around 90 minutes to two hours, with the added heat from the DVD being continuously on (and usually the screen brightness being as high as possible). while entering the same hypnogogic state as any other movie watching. Just as that brilliant student of human behavior William Cosby pointed out how common it is for your arm to go to sleep when you put it around your girl's shoulder at the movies and leave it there for two and a half hours, so it is with excessively warm laps.
This is not obvious to most people on Slashdot, as they tend to a) play games, which results in a more active mental state where they still notice minor discomforts from their physical environment, or b) they only watch a movie for 2 minutes and c) can't put the player on their lap for that kind of movie anyway.
It's begging the question. The question is phrased to make you accept, as a fact, without presenting evidence, that there are 'many abortion clinics known for doing illegal late-term abortions'. So long as there's an overriding argument that violence can be justifed if it's in self defense or support of the law, then the Troll AC is claiming that violence CAN sometimes be appropriate, AND he's advancing a claim that the abortion clinics are doing something that does make it appropriate. He uses the word "many" to imply that the actions are so common the legal system must be ignoring a violation of the law deliberately, and "known", without specifying if it's 'known' to a legal standard, or just 'known' by somebody having started a rumor without any evidence.
Abortion is also a much bigger hot-button issue than the RIAA. The chance of rational discourse drops when Abortion is brought up, and on Slashdot, the chance of people managing to discuss a local hot topic such as the RIAA was already low. (Hell, the way Slashdot is these days, the chance of rationality is too low even without it being a sensitive topic).
The Library of Congress used to have a goal of including complete hard copies, at least for items of US origin and 'good grade' (that is, they aimed to have copies of things such as hardback books that were intended to last, more than, say, ephemera such as the pulp magazines). However, that goal has become an obvious impossibility due to sheer volume. After about 1960, the library began being more selective.
That's bad enough in some senses, but unfortunately, there's also a secondary effect. Pick a subject you know well, and go to the library, and examine the LOC page at the front of the book for a few dozen volumes of varying ages. That information will tell you if the book has been archived in the LOC, but it will also include other details, such as what topics it is indexed under. For example, a biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall might be indexed more specifically under 'Biographies of Prominent Americans' and not just 'Biography', and it might also be indexed under "Non-fiction', 'Legal Commentary', and "20th Century History". Many of these index terms were developed as a standard system, but that system seems to have more and more glitches with time. In general, you'll see more and more errors, both of accuracy and by simple omission, for the newer books. I don't know if there's any real explanation of why the indexing seems to become worse after the LOC gave up trying to have physical copies of all significant works, but many people think they have noticed a certain 'sloppyness'.
For works such as audio or video recordings, it could be very hard to get any useful information if the same pattern holds. Imagine for example, researching video and 30% of all the westerns aren't indexed as westerns, while some documentary footage about life in the old west has been miss-classified as 'fiction' and 'western'. Then add there was also once a rule that anything shorter than 8 commercial reels was considered a short, but somebody forgot that rule about 1976 and started thinking it was anything under 30 minutes running time. Whatever the subject, problems such as these are likely to crop up.
That's genuinely insightful, not just Slashdot "insightful".
Religion, even as just organised religion and not real spiritual philosophy, relies on reasoning and logic more than most non-religious people realise. Take the Christian concept of Original Sin. Within some limits, like being reasonably mature and of at least moderate intelligence, some of what early Christians called sin is really a universal phenomenon in humans. Everyone does things they themselves think they shouldn't do, at least now and then, makes choices they know they may regret but simply hope to get away with this time, and so on. Everyone has weak moments. Everyone feels internally conflicted. It's like magnetism - it's a fundamental phenomenon of a certain class of objects (in this case, people over about the age of three and of sufficient intelligence to be verbal tool users). I've fallen short of what I myself think is right, I've felt internally divided over ethical actions, you have too, anybody bothering to read this has too, and when I meet an adult human who swears they never, ever, ever have they invariably turn out to be a dangerous sociopathic politician type.
Now whether that phenomenon has anything to do with a serpent in a garden, some god of fire and trickery who is jealous of the god of thunder, or some woman opening a box full of troubles, or any of many other mythological sources, or not, what's the scientific thing to do with a universal phenomenon? Just like teaching physics generally begins with treating matter, Energy, Space and Time as fundamentals, so many religions build from the idea that there's a universal flaw in human nature. Some of them teach it can be overcome or must always be struggled against, some that it's simply something to be transcended, some that behind it lies a hidden aspect of a truly flawless reality, but all of them are being clinically, scientifically accurate in saying that it exists as a universal phenomenon.
Criticising an organised religion for just what it classifies as sin, or what stories it accumulates about the cause of the phenomenon may be valid, but that's different from rejecting the initial observation. If the initial observation of a problem is correct, it argues for the need of some way of correcting the problem, and that the solution must be on the same level, that is, another universal. The jump from that conclusion to a Jesus or John Galt figure, to various forms of supernaturalism, dualism, or any other religious doctrines, may have tremendous logical errors, but does that invalidate the initial claim and its conclusion, that the flaw in human nature is omnipresent, and is therefore an axiom we must adopt and do our further reasoning about human nature from? Is the initial observation every bit as scientifically accurate as "When an iron object is sufficiently heated, all trace of magnetism disappears"?
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I don't see why you're surprised at the claim. Are you picturing them carefully picking countries on the basis of how those places treat copyright law and how widespread piracy is in them? Choosing IP blocks because they belong to service providers that don't cooperate with take-down notices? If they were sticking pretty close to the known numbers there, it might be ethically acceptable, and whether it was or not, claims of racism wouldn't hold water. But historically, some major sites have made some terrible mistakes if that's all they are trying to do.
When some site management discovers a DOS attack is coming from Belgum and does nothing for two days, then runs across a very odd unconfirmable rumor that the attack originates in an African nation and starts a blanket block of all of them within the next half hour, then hears another rumor the attack comes from a North Korean group and blocks NK, China, Hong Kong and Tibet (of all things), what more do you need to take a claim of racism seriously? No one's going to call themselves Klu Klux Internet and use little white conical cable modems with orange and yellow flickering activity lights in a cross shape.
I count myself as a liberal, of late, but I'm probably more conservative on drugs than you are. I support full legalisation of marijuana, but for now at least, I wouldn't go past decriminalizing simple possession of the harder drugs and would keep dealing illegal until we see more about what the pot law changes actually do. It bothers me that there are currently 17 federal agencies where some agents have full automatic weapons carry powers (outside of the Military itself). I don't just want to repeal the USAPATRIOT act, I'd like to cut that 17 way down, maybe to the point where the BATF and the IRS have to get an FBI agent or US Marshall to come along if they need physical force, certainly at least to the point where the only people at Treasury routinely carrying guns are either Secret Service on presidential guard duty or are guarding gold shipments. Never-the-less, you sound at least semi-rational in your views.
With that said, I'm trying to figure out how you can claim with a straight face that Fox is the only network that doesn't lean left. It sounds to me like you are drawing a line that puts 65% or so of all Americans on the hard left, (in which case, I suggest you surrender to the inevitable.). I've seen stories where I thought there was a leftwards bias, but there are quite a few that go the opposite way. For example, remember the Rod Blagojevich scandal? One of Blagojevich's flunkies was recorded in a wiretap as saying the Obama camp was 'a bunch of boy scouts', who wouldn't play ball at all. ABC and MSN ran that story as an update to the scandal, and both had a headline with it saying some variation on " Obama has some explaining to do.". That's right wing bias right there - when the same evidence that shows a perp is guilty suggests you were as pure as the driven snow and didn't associate with the criminal act is when you don't have some 'splainin' to do, in any normal, sane world. Alternately, it was because some parts of the press were locked in pro Hillary mode at that time, or just trying to keep the race close so they could draw more viewers. Maybe it doesn't fit neatly into left/right at all, but it sure as shootin' doesn't make a good example of left wing bias.
Just recently, we had the nutcase who took over the Discovery channel offices. NBC excerpted the part of the frootloop's manifesto where he referred to Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" as proof he was inspired by Liberal sources, but left out the parts where he talked about "ending all immigration and completely closing our borders", and "Eliminating the Anchor Babies". For the first 48 hours after the story broke, to see the whole manifesto you had to go to the BBC. I've seen dozens of stories such as that.
You do know, don't you, that the real, classical left wants to try Bush and Cheney for war crimes? The real left (to the extent there is a single 'real' left) wants to nationalize all the investment banks that are 'too big to fail'. The left doesn't just want to repeal the Bush tax cuts on people making over 250 K a year, they want to raise the maximum rate - some of them to something like what it was in the Eisenhower era (90%). Yeah, I remember CBS giving time to Noam Chomsky's arguments on the 2010 Supreme court revocation of campaign finance limits. No wait, not one national news outlet put Chomsky on the air on that (AFAIK). A lot of the people who were, or are, the left wing equivalent of Rush and Glenn don't get any airtime at all. Actors shooting off their mouths get used instead to 'present both sides'.
A forced perspective prop, like the cart you mention, involves building something with odd angles that look like they could be normal right angles from a certain POV only. (I'm sure you are well aware of this, I point it out for anyone reading the thread who isn't) Shots using that prop only work from a selected angle and distance range because those angles will look increasingly distorted with only minor changes of POV. The more you want somebody to be 20 feet away from the camera, so they look half the size of the person ten feet away, yet want them to appear to be sitting side by side, the smaller the angles and distances allowed become. But that doesn't stop the special effects people from creating multiple props to allow more shooting flexibility. Budget will usually drive the director to limit his angles so as to not need so many props built, but that's like anything else in film-making - how bad does the director want the shot? Jackson could have used a second cart if he had really been able to justify the expense, but I doubt he felt he needed such shots that badly.
Forced perspective can make the actors have to learn to react to a marker floating in space rather than the other actors, but there are so many other things driving that skillset all I can say is the actors better get used to it. As soon as some director puts a Rancor monster in the scene or says "OK Bill, two big spaceships just blew each other up on the viewscreen, now act.", the actor has to deal with acting with their imagination rather than a real target.
Can diligence replace genius?
I can think of at least one case where it probably could have.
When the scientific team nicknamed the Seven Samurai started working on such questions as large scale movements of galaxies and whole galactic clusters, and just how big the largest structures in the universe are, they found that there had been very few precise measurements of galactic red shifts. It seems, once the first few dozen were determined back in Hubble's time (essentially before about 1945 at the latest), nobody bothered to do more than the most desultory work in the field for 30 years or so. If a bunch of grad students and hobbyist astronomers had bothered to gather data at the same rate as just the same sort of observers had for the first few observations, the Seven themselves said somebody among them would most likely have quickly found their conclusions, as many of them would have been so obvious no special skill would have been required. I don't know if I'd compare this work to Shakespeare or General Relativity, but we are talking about a Nobel prize that the people who claimed it feel could have fallen to just about anyone in the field if they had been willing to do a lot of unexciting grind work.
Right now, less than half the lines in various stellar spectra have been associated with a particular ion. There was a golden age of spectroscopy where people identified wholly new elements such as Helium, and determined that a given line in a spectrum was caused, say, by iron with three electrons knocked off, but that effort petered out long before all the data was analysed. Nobody important in astrophysics expects to find anything really exciting in the part that's left. Wouldn't it be remarkable if it turned out there was something significant yet to be discovered in spectroscopy?
I'm starting to think the very term 'Carbs' is meaningless from a health standpoint. Our digestive tracts are so long to handle the complex carbohydrates found in green vegetables and related sources - it is not required for the simple starches and sugars that are also lumped in together as carbs. You just said something that is technically true, but terribly misleading, in much the same way as showing nine homeless bums in the same room with Bill Gates, telling us what their average income is, and not giving a damn what some people would assume about poverty in America from the evidence you've supplied. You're correcting a technical point, but it sounds like you're saying the first poster is wrong about his conclusions instead, and that's how many people are going to take it.
While we are at it, there's naturally occurring sugars and synthettic sugars, and even though glucose is a naturally occurring sugar, it has one important difference from all the more complex sugars - it directly crosses the blood/brain barrier. We need some clear words to descrivbe the three types of sugars as separate health factors. We probably need several other new words to let people discuss this with more light than heat being shed. Despite this, here's trying to say it with only a few, rather basic phrases substituted for single words.
If you're like most Americans, you need to eat more carbs and to eat fewer carbs. See how nonsensical that sounds, until it's rephrased: We need to eat more complex carbs, as found in vegetables, and fewer simple starches and many fewer sugars.
Also, gluten is found chiefly in wheat, not oats or rice. Gluten may not be that much of a health factor for most people - the evidence is not conclusive, at least yet. But we probably need some clear way to distinguish the starchy food type that has lots of gluten from all the other starchy foods that have less or even trivial amounts, or again, disscussions are mostly heat not light.
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That's easy, Galileo first submitted his papers to a non-peer reviewed journal (The only 'peer' review available at the time being within the Roman Catholic church, which was going through a stuffy phase at the time). Galileo self published in the popular press ahead of such review (A definite no-no for a working scientist). Darwin went through a (admittedly a bit rudimentary by modern standards) peer-review process (that correspondence with Wallace and others).
I'm only half being tongue in cheek with this. Darwin used parts of the scientific method that were simply unknown in Galileo's time. For example, Darwin described a number of ways to falsify his theory, one of them being: "It being admitted that, if it were ever shown that the mechanisms of heredity allow unlimited blending, the entire proposal would become of no account". Darwin was more fully a scientist simply in the sense that he thought more about identifying what alternate explanations he considered and their implications, and how to test them. His work sustained more modern science (Crick and Watson's Noble for the discovery of the DNA coding mechanism was awarded in part because they had demonstrated that the genetic code the way it was implemented in real organisms didn't allow unlimited blending and so their research led inexorably to testing a never fully verified consequence of the theory of natural selection. Showing that a specific code that didn't support blending was the one nature actually used finished the process of putting Natural Selection on a solid footing that Mendel only started.). I'm not sure if there are any predictions made by Galileo that were unverifiable at the time but eventually proved to be more and more testable, so that generations of other scientists kept coming back to them, but I can't think of any.
The Placebo effect doesn't work the way most doctors think it does. It's an area where modern medicine is toting around a strange idea, as odd in its own way as bleeding to release humors was back 300 years ago, just not as dangerous to retain.
I say this because there were some research studies on the Placebo effect that make no sense at all if it works like most people think it does. In them, test subjects were given real opiate pain meds, and/or placebo opiates, in various combinations. After about a week of getting used to the drugs, then either a chemical which blocks opiate uptake in the brain was administered, or a placebo version of it. No one is really sure why, but the real blocker blocked either the real opiates or the placebos from relieving the pain equally well, and the placebo version of the blocker most often didn't work on either, but where it did, it was about equally likely to block real opiates and let the placebo versions still work, or vice versa. Various versions of this experiment have gotten many rather quirky results, but never ones that really make sense by any known theory of how placebos work.
It wasn't obvious until atomic theory got established. Until somebody does enough experiments to figure out something of what the fundamental pieces are, it makes perfect sense to test things, to see if gold is what it is because the weightyness of it is combined with its ductility, color, and resistance to aqua regia as though they were all fundamentals, and maybe you can move one or more fundamentals around from one pile to another. So you start with lead because it has similar weightyness and somewhat similar softness, and you try mixing in mercury because it is fluid and so the fluidness might pass from the mercury and make the maliable lead more maliable, able to be beaten into thinner sheets. You try to get one observed property to decouple from another and jump from one type of substance to another. Antimony gets all sorts of colored sheens to it, maybe you can get the yellow sheen to split off and pass into the lead. Now you're researching splitting and recombining colors.
All you're doing is, you're hurting yourself (and maybe, arguably, other taxpayers). The IRS has informed all the commercial tax prep firms of their error rates in submissions, and often tells individual commercial tax preparers what their error rates are like. When they do this for a particular year, they tell us what the year's error rate for paper filers is like, and what the rate for the IRS's own temp agency help that types those paper returns into the computers is. I'm not going to argue over whether your personal error rate is higher than it would be with good software, or not, because it doesn't really matter. When you file by paper, your documents get turned over to temps in large cities such as Austin TX, or even the DC area itself. The temp contracts pay less than 10 dollars an hour. They have an average error rate of about 25% per return. (My own error rate is all on the right side of the decimal place, with a couple of zeros before it. A huge part of that is the software catching 90% plus of the possible errors, although I like to think my own professionalism adds another decimal place or so.). Congress has chosen to construct the IRS's annual budget so as to specifically fill these positions with seasonal temp labor, supposedly to save taxpayer money, but given the quality, I don't see any overall benefit from the cost cutting. I know some agents who have real doubts about the effects it puts on their case load and whether it's saving anything at all.
Paper also adds the time spent in the US mail system. If you're getting a refund, it delays it, and if you owe, the IRS will deposit the check while those temps are still keying in the return, and if you're counting on the delay to get funds in to cover your payment, that will probably be the time the mail runs efficiently.
I mostly do commercial prep, now specializing in S corps. About the only private returns I bother with are a few old clients and some involving K-1s for some SF authors or their estates, and that last is for the fun of hearing industry gossip, and occasional autographed copies. You just got advice you probably couldn't afford, unless you are in the top bracket.
For the last few years, the biggest increase in audits has been focused on the Earned Income Credit (EIC). About the middle of the Bush administration, IRS testified to Congress about tax fraud sources, and for the 2003 year (which was the most recent they had finished analyzing at the time), they came up with these estimates:
1st place, fraud for small business filers using schedule C = approximately 100 Billion a year.
2nd place, fraud for filers using EIC = approximately 9 Billion a year.
Congress told them all that EIC fraud was terrible, and directed them to toughen up on auditing EIC. (Make of that what you will). The IRS has complied with these directions. While the IRS proposed increased business auditing, congress's choice of what to deal with first means you weren't the one at a 300-400% increased risk for random spot check audits, at least until very recently. The IRS is just starting to go after schedule C - as a sometimes paid preparer I started seeing some of the same changes that began hitting EIC filers in 2005-2007 being adapted for schedule C situations this regular filing season.
Triggered audits are, of course, a different story. You'll probably see the IRS checking whenever someone claims self employed income that exceeds the amount reported on 1099-MISCs, before long. For many 'Sched C. people', that will be routine - that is, they will just write a note on a support form saying "I run a retail business, naturally most customers don't provide me with 1099-MISCs when they buy something, since it's not required.". But what about a self employed carpenter, saying "I have X total income, and 81% of it is supported by 1099's from the home builders I contract with, but the other 19% is smaller jobs"? He or she will probably have to state he or she has proper written records, which will become something sworn under penalty of law if he does not in fact have them complete and to standard, just as people claiming vehicle mileage now have to make the same statement.*
This year, I had a client who runs a commercial lawn care service, and who was audited. While it came out well, I was surprised that the IRS wanted to see a record of all the small one shot jobs the service did much more than they cared about the much more easily documented ongoing contracts that were all big enough to generate 1099-MISCs. My client was verbally instructed that his log of small clients should be in consistent order, always by full name of the person or business, rather than having some clients listed by address, and that he should list businesses by business name only and not by the owner's or manager's or other contact's personal name. (Note he was not dinged for it - the auditor merely said "We recommend you use this sort of system for responsible record keeping.").
* For those of you wondering "Why would the IRS be worried that someone would report more income than they (or the IRS) can prove?", there are reasons some crooks do this. For one, to keep calling something a business, it generally needs to show a profit now and then - the rule of thumb is 3 years in 5. Pad your expenses a couple of years in a row to remove all profitability, and then the economy goes bad, the next year is unexpectedly low, and now the scoundrel is worried that the IRS will audit everything, including the fraudulent years, if they challenge whether he's running a business at all. There's also cases where someone wants to hide illegal income by tweaking their legal business to show enough profit to explain their lifestyle, or for money laundering activities.
The owner of any business makes 'his' money only if he succeeds, while he has to pay his employees on an ongoing basis. Lawyers are not special in that regard.
I've always wondered why the trinity still bugs some people in this day and age. Mr. Smith can call me on the phone while I'm in Sri Lanka and I hear his voice, while his body is in Frostbite Falls, MN., and yet I don't see an absolute disconnect. Clearly Mr. Smith's voice is, in some ways, Mr. Smith and in other ways, isn't. People now simply take this situation for granted in real life, yet feel it's a paradox in Christianity. I won't argue your Cainism here as that's an entire different level of intellectual dispute, better addressed by watching a Kevin Smith movie or reading P. K. Dick's Valis. (Oooh, does the Metatron make five? You did say "at least 4").
If we don't rationalise - then what are we ?
Beings that don't think everything can be expressed as the ratio of two numbers? Post Pythagorean mathematicians?
Or do you mean as in 'rationale' not 'ratio'? Lizzy Borden either really gave her father 40 whacks or she didn't. Knowing a rationale that explains why she might have wanted her father dead still won't convince a jury she actually did it, and not knowing rationally why she might have wanted to whack him won't necessarily convince them she didn't.
We have kept words such as logical, reasonable and rational as separate terms in English because they do not all mean the exact same thing and can't all be used interchangeably. Reasoning about religion isn't the same thing as rationalising it. When Jesus said "Greater love hath no man than he who lays down his life for another", it's an irrational statement, whether it's an unreasonable one or not. You can't put numbers to it and conclude that laying down your life is worth unity, while buying her chocolates is only worth 0.000341% of that, and driving faster to get to a charity ball is worth 0.0728%. You can't say that an old person who probably only lost a couple of years anyway had less love than an young healthy person making the same sacrifice. You can't bring in a whole mess of calculations about just how much one person or anther would value what's been given up, or who has the most utility to the greater society or any of thousands of other number schemes, and say that objectively better defines love than what this Jesus guy said. Or maybe you can, but no one has been able to get anywhere near universal agreement their complex mathematically organised schema is better yet.
Which does nothing about free will one way or another. Let's say you are a very rich man. You put up millions to start a business. Your analysis tells you that statistically, you will get X amount of work out of Y employees and make Z profit. Y' employees will quit within a year, Y" employees will have to be fired, and Y'" employees will need maternity leave. You now know the future enough that you are willing to risk millions on being right, and most of your employees don't know it. Even if you handed one of them the money to do the same thing you are doing, they wouldn't know enough to risk doing it, so by the argument they have become puppets on strings and lost their free will. You don't have to have infinite, supernatural knowledge, or prefect foresight to take away at least some of their free will.
By the original argument, just having some natural and finite amount of knowledge, even if it's knowledge that other people could freely acquire but didn't, takes away some portion of their free will. Normally, that's just not how we think of it. If I gain the knowledge to read fluent French, then I gain an option to freely choose to read Proust in the original version, but that doesn't mean I've somehow diminished anyone else's ability to make the same decision. I suspect it's that pesky word infinite. It's like some people are saying "God has infinite knowledge and infinite choices, including choosing to read Proust in the original French without first knowing French." Defined that way, there's a simple internal paradox (God knows everything and God doesn't know French). Then they apply their self paradoxical statement to only a selected part of the premises and say the paradox negates the part they choose and not the other part. (They don't say "God knows everything so He can't not know French, so when He reads Proust, He can read it in the original French"). You know, if you start with a paradox, you can prove anything - that means the very method some of you are using to "prove" God doesn't exist, or Free Will doesn't exist, or whatever, can also 'prove' they do. In fact, I now don't have to do any real work to attempt to prove anything to anyone who's starting from this paradox - they've just handed me all the ammo to logically prove that free will exists, God exists, actual infinites exist, Oakland will win the pennant this year, and they should freely send all their money to me.
Did this get modded offtopic by someone who just didn't get the Lucifer's Hammer reference?
What about Carl Sagan's argument?
He argued (in 'Cosmos') that if it was necessary to postulate a cause for the universe, it was necessary to postulate a cause for whatever caused the universe, and if it was not necessary to claim there was a cause for "God", it was also not necessary to claim a cause for the universe. But not 15 pages before he made that claim, he discussed the old Steady State theory and how it was succeeded by the Big Bang model. Sagan allowed the steady state to be causeless, since there was no first moment for an infinitely old universe. But if that's true, Dr. Sagan was also arguing that a 'Big Bang' type universe had a special reason for needing a cause that the Steady State version did not. He was claiming that it was sufficient in one case for science to simply say that not everything has to have a cause, but in the other case that science was only specifically able to skip reasoning about the cause of a thing because it did not have an origin. Why then was it fair to allow the steady state to be causeless, but demand that God must have a cause if the current (Big Bang) model must have a cause? Wouldn''t "God" be more like the steady state than the big bang (at least as most religions define God)? Why did Carl Sagan reason from Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else to conclude that something that had no beginning didn't need a first cause, and then reject the very same idea not 15 pages later? Why did he treat a question as strictly rhetorical when he in fact had given a straight, non-rhetorical answer to it not 15 pages before?
So, going by the way the first post was modded and responded to, Carl Sagan was nothing better than a slashtroll who made us all dumber. Personally, I disagreed with him on several points, but thought he was legitimately brilliant and certainly worthy of publication. I guess I should adopt some of your attitudes and burn his books instead.
Fact: Dozens of distinguished scientists in the 1930s and 40s pointed to the Steady State model as a positive disproof of God, and fought against accepting the Big Bang model because they claimed it was bringing religious superstition back into science. Not one of them was willing to admit after the Big Bang won out by actual evidence that they had been wrong to interpret the science that way. Most of them, when pressed on it, stipulated two things: 1) That even if the Steady State and Big Bang theories were opposite in their predictions in just about every other respect, they were not opposite in their implications about religion, and 2) that the Big Bang would not be a scientific theory unless it shared the common property of disproving the existence of God.
I see several logical flaws in the initial post. In particular, the claim that an actual infinite cannot exist is highly suspect. A lot of the post is rehashed Augustine, and the debate about Augustine's reasoning has echoed through philosophy for over a millennium now. Some of it borrows from Pascal, but then, most people don't reject Pascal's contributions to probability theory and logic just because there are flaws with "Pascal's Wager". However, the refutations here are just as flawed, if not more-so, and I've seen some brilliant men make the same sort of errors many of you are mocking, in the modern era. If you're not prepared to stoop to Karma mods and dumb one-liners for them, maybe some of you just might want to set yourself a better standard here.
Actually, Tennessee has a Good Samaritan law that would protect the fire fighters if they went in to save a life, such as your hypothetical wife or son. The way those fire fighters are insured for health and injury, the state requires a contract where they would be covered for injuries resulting if they were attempting to actually save a human life. The law also protects them from being sued individually in such cases.
1. Then he argues that the agreement is invalid as it was signed under duress, and refuses to pay/sues. Tennessee law gives two working days to change your mind after signing any contract, so the state law would have to have an exception added for this case.
2. To represent the city in negotiating an agreement, one of your fire fighters has to be a city legal agent, with the additional training, and the costs of getting the person recognised as a legal agent. I'm currently recognised as a legal agent for two banks. It's not cheap, either in cash or in the time I put in updating that agency status every year. A city government might be able to do it without thinking they need to renew the record every single year, but that depends in large part on what the city's insurance contract says. However often they have additional costs, to make agency work, the city has to have enough fire fighters or other first responders trained to be sure there's always going to be one on each team, or send the city's lawyer along on every county fire call even at 2 a.m., or something like that. The fire fighters aren't particularly trained to ask the sort of questions that would better let them judge the risk, and there's not a lot of time to fiddle with them while the home burns, but if they are going to be signing contracts, there's an insurance company somewhere that expects them to be exceptionally well trained as it's such a high financial risk situation. (and I'll explain why there's such a high financial risk below).
3. If the home owner was still paying off a mortgage, the typical contract says he had to have fire service. Statistically, there are a lot more people with mortgages outstanding than completely own their homes and it's actually more likely than not that if he has a mortgage, this home owner has either let coverage lapse without telling the bank (which he is required to do), or managed to get a local bank to take him on trust without showing the proof he ever had fire service. You're talking about signing a contract, where the odds are probably above 50% that the home owner has already at least technically cheated on an existing contract. So, these contracts will end up in court a whole lot - which is cost, fuss and bother to the city, for people who aren't citizens, and chose to live under a county government that is cheaper because it's not having to meet those costs.
Once laptops started including DVD players, some people started watching movies on them. This results in keeping the machine going for around 90 minutes to two hours, with the added heat from the DVD being continuously on (and usually the screen brightness being as high as possible). while entering the same hypnogogic state as any other movie watching. Just as that brilliant student of human behavior William Cosby pointed out how common it is for your arm to go to sleep when you put it around your girl's shoulder at the movies and leave it there for two and a half hours, so it is with excessively warm laps.
This is not obvious to most people on Slashdot, as they tend to a) play games, which results in a more active mental state where they still notice minor discomforts from their physical environment, or b) they only watch a movie for 2 minutes and c) can't put the player on their lap for that kind of movie anyway.
Why -1 Troll?
It's begging the question. The question is phrased to make you accept, as a fact, without presenting evidence, that there are 'many abortion clinics known for doing illegal late-term abortions'. So long as there's an overriding argument that violence can be justifed if it's in self defense or support of the law, then the Troll AC is claiming that violence CAN sometimes be appropriate, AND he's advancing a claim that the abortion clinics are doing something that does make it appropriate. He uses the word "many" to imply that the actions are so common the legal system must be ignoring a violation of the law deliberately, and "known", without specifying if it's 'known' to a legal standard, or just 'known' by somebody having started a rumor without any evidence.
Abortion is also a much bigger hot-button issue than the RIAA. The chance of rational discourse drops when Abortion is brought up, and on Slashdot, the chance of people managing to discuss a local hot topic such as the RIAA was already low. (Hell, the way Slashdot is these days, the chance of rationality is too low even without it being a sensitive topic).
The Library of Congress used to have a goal of including complete hard copies, at least for items of US origin and 'good grade' (that is, they aimed to have copies of things such as hardback books that were intended to last, more than, say, ephemera such as the pulp magazines). However, that goal has become an obvious impossibility due to sheer volume. After about 1960, the library began being more selective.
That's bad enough in some senses, but unfortunately, there's also a secondary effect. Pick a subject you know well, and go to the library, and examine the LOC page at the front of the book for a few dozen volumes of varying ages. That information will tell you if the book has been archived in the LOC, but it will also include other details, such as what topics it is indexed under. For example, a biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall might be indexed more specifically under 'Biographies of Prominent Americans' and not just 'Biography', and it might also be indexed under "Non-fiction', 'Legal Commentary', and "20th Century History". Many of these index terms were developed as a standard system, but that system seems to have more and more glitches with time. In general, you'll see more and more errors, both of accuracy and by simple omission, for the newer books. I don't know if there's any real explanation of why the indexing seems to become worse after the LOC gave up trying to have physical copies of all significant works, but many people think they have noticed a certain 'sloppyness'.
For works such as audio or video recordings, it could be very hard to get any useful information if the same pattern holds. Imagine for example, researching video and 30% of all the westerns aren't indexed as westerns, while some documentary footage about life in the old west has been miss-classified as 'fiction' and 'western'. Then add there was also once a rule that anything shorter than 8 commercial reels was considered a short, but somebody forgot that rule about 1976 and started thinking it was anything under 30 minutes running time. Whatever the subject, problems such as these are likely to crop up.
For once, it's a pity there isn't a step:
N) ???
in that slashmeme. Oh wait - from the perspective of biology, there is!
That's genuinely insightful, not just Slashdot "insightful".
Religion, even as just organised religion and not real spiritual philosophy, relies on reasoning and logic more than most non-religious people realise. Take the Christian concept of Original Sin. Within some limits, like being reasonably mature and of at least moderate intelligence, some of what early Christians called sin is really a universal phenomenon in humans. Everyone does things they themselves think they shouldn't do, at least now and then, makes choices they know they may regret but simply hope to get away with this time, and so on. Everyone has weak moments. Everyone feels internally conflicted. It's like magnetism - it's a fundamental phenomenon of a certain class of objects (in this case, people over about the age of three and of sufficient intelligence to be verbal tool users). I've fallen short of what I myself think is right, I've felt internally divided over ethical actions, you have too, anybody bothering to read this has too, and when I meet an adult human who swears they never, ever, ever have they invariably turn out to be a dangerous sociopathic politician type.
Now whether that phenomenon has anything to do with a serpent in a garden, some god of fire and trickery who is jealous of the god of thunder, or some woman opening a box full of troubles, or any of many other mythological sources, or not, what's the scientific thing to do with a universal phenomenon? Just like teaching physics generally begins with treating matter, Energy, Space and Time as fundamentals, so many religions build from the idea that there's a universal flaw in human nature. Some of them teach it can be overcome or must always be struggled against, some that it's simply something to be transcended, some that behind it lies a hidden aspect of a truly flawless reality, but all of them are being clinically, scientifically accurate in saying that it exists as a universal phenomenon.
Criticising an organised religion for just what it classifies as sin, or what stories it accumulates about the cause of the phenomenon may be valid, but that's different from rejecting the initial observation. If the initial observation of a problem is correct, it argues for the need of some way of correcting the problem, and that the solution must be on the same level, that is, another universal. The jump from that conclusion to a Jesus or John Galt figure, to various forms of supernaturalism, dualism, or any other religious doctrines, may have tremendous logical errors, but does that invalidate the initial claim and its conclusion, that the flaw in human nature is omnipresent, and is therefore an axiom we must adopt and do our further reasoning about human nature from? Is the initial observation every bit as scientifically accurate as "When an iron object is sufficiently heated, all trace of magnetism disappears"?
Nah, I'm a figment of Alan Moore's imagination, not yours.