Why do you think it is less human to be free? I think that participating in a society where you must constantly hold everyone else in check at the point of a gun makes us less human. What Man would chose live his whole life in constant fear of punishment so that they might exact the same on another? Maturity means not choosing to sacrifice my freedom for the false promise of security. The world today is populated by adult children. I want no part of that.
There is only one political party, and that is the party that believes that they should make your decisions for you. We don't need a few good people to make all our decisions for us, we are perfectly capable to making them on our own.
No sane, balanced person would run for or accept a political office. There is no good reason to take part in a process that can not ever have an acceptable result. When we vote, we are condoning the political process. I will not have my name associated with this process, I want not part of it.
Third parties are just more of the same. Will they write laws to repeal taxes? That only proves that they believe laws and politicians have the ability to solve our problems. No, the only sane choice is to not participate and encourage all your friends to do the same.
I recently saw an article titled this way on CNN. I can't grasp why this is the preferred global warming solution amongst "environmentalists". It is complicated, difficult to understand and difficult to work with.
It seems to me this is the ideal solution as far as a politician is concerned, however, because people won't be able to see whether or not it's working, and even if they could there will be no accountability. Remember, the most recent banking crisis was caused by a similar "liability" trading scheme. Supposedly, no one saw it coming, but it should have been obvious that no good would come from people pouring trillions of dollars into a system they didn't understand.
Cap and trade will be a huge tool for politicians to take away more of our freedoms and make us less able to "get by" so that we have to come crawling to them for help. Remember, a politician's job is gaining political power. Why, then, are there still people out there who think our representatives are there to help us? No one who honestly wants to help people would be a politician.
You can't legally do it yourself unless you have a proper storm-drain system with a NPDES permit. So you have to take it to a car-wash. Yeah, I live in a nanny-state. The weather's nice. . .
"Then you get to the obvious problem of a . . . Good Samaritan who did good all his life"
I don't think there's really one of us who could do such a thing. If there is, I've never met him, or anyone close to being like him. I don't like hypothetical arguments. The reason they're hypothetical is you never encounter them, and it's impossible to fully consider a situation you never encounter.
How do you know? Emotions drive actions, and it is understood that babies find it pleasurable. How do you explain such behavior if it is not driven by an emotional response?
It's a consequence of the way things are tied together. If one of us sins, it affects us all. So simply by being in a world filled with sin, we are tricked into going along with it. It's the worst for children, who are totally dependent on their parents. Once we learn to sin, we need to spend the rest of our lives learning not to.
That's why it's not easier of you die young, time is on your side. The more time you have to learn the truth about the world and start living, the more likely you are to have figured it out by the time you die.
I believe that we can not be saved by our works, and I believe that we all have sin in our lives. Christianity teaches us that we must learn to accept forgiveness for our sins, and apologize for them in order to have eternal life.
So yes, original sin is messed up. The world is a horrible messy place. The question is will you mindlessly perpetuate that, or will you stop and think about the situation. Will you accept your part in it and make a deliberate effort to stop adding to the problem and become a part of the solution. Will you accept God's forgiveness and enter into the kingdom of heaven. Original sin is messed up, but you can chose whether or not that's the final word in you life.
I hope I've helped explain it a little. I can't believe I just posted this on Slashdot.
"At a minimum, admissible evidence needs to be screened for verifiability and proper procedure."
Or you could just tell people about the source, and let them decide whether or not to trust it.
"The standard of admissible evidence is quite clear and agreed upon. It is based on documented court cases and legal experience."
Just because people agree on a standard doesn't mean its not arbitrary. It's based on decisions which have been made in the past, by people, and by the judge's personal judgment about the applicability of such prior rulings. The theory is that as long as our court system is consistent, that makes it fair. I say that's a bunch of nonsense. In any case, new precedents are still being made arbitrarily judges today.
"If you are sitting at an intersection observing the movement of cars, you can logically deduce whether the traffic light is red or green."
But that only has any meaning in the context of your emotions. Why do you wish to cross the street? Why do you wish not to be hit by a car while doing so? The core of every decision and judgment is an emotional response.
"You can care about being a good juror without being emotionally involved in the outcome."
I good juror is, in my opinion, someone who cares about the outcome. People who only care about upholding an ideal (I just want to be the best juror I can be) are generally self-centered sociopaths. And they are in total denial about the emotions that are driving them to want to be a "good juror". Rationality without emotion serves no purpose and can drive no action. People who claim to be driven by a rational process are lying.
"It seems you would substitute your judgment for that of the jury that heard the original case and found him innocent."
OJ has practically come out and said that he did it. If the jury heard him say that, they would convict him too.
"The jury is not the one to decide if it is relevant."
If you don't have open access to information, you can't make a decision the way you normally would, because selecting information is an important part of how we make decisions. It is not reasonable to say that these decisions constitute the judgment of the jury, if they would have made a different decision were they in full possession of the facts.
Why do you assume that just because I was wrong it means I was lying. It is what my friend told me, I knew it was a joke, but I didn't know where it came from.
The only reasonable standard for what information is admissible in court is that all information should be. Anything else is really just an arbitrary standard which has to be drawn by someone, and we know that people should not make such decisions because no one is beyond bias.
All of our rational judgments are based on our emotional response to external stimuli. Claiming "detached rationalism" is unrealistic, and is a contradiction in itself. People only care about something if they are emotionally involved in it, and they only give attention to things they care about.
"Another premise of our justice system is that a person declared innocent isn't haunted for the rest of his life by past allegations."
But the reality is that they are. There is no point trying to turn a fantasy into reality by pretending, and it makes no sense to try to do that in a court of law, where peoples lives are on the line.
"If the jury starts assuming the duties of the judge, you undermine the ability of the court to provide a fair trial."
The opposite is also true. The jury can not be reasonably said to make its own decisions if relevant information is deliberately and systematically withheld from them. Any information a jury member seeks out could be relevant, so deliberately concealing information from them disrupts the process.
the money doesn't come from nowhere. They are counting on most people to forget about the warranty so they don't have to pay. The fact that it is a highly profitable business is a testament to the fact it works. Seriously, who would keep track of warranty information for as long as it takes for a battery to expire (would it even still be covered? batteries last several years). It's a waste to time and money. And whenever someone offers you free money (give us $XX now and we'll give you $3XX later) they are trying to screw you.
Buying a warranty from the manufacturer is different, because many times they will try to add perceived value to their products by having a low cost extended warranty option. They can do it, because it gives them an incentive to try to reduce costs through better quality control. A separate company, however, has no such incentive and simply adds 40 or 50 percent to the expected cost of fulfilling the warranty. It makes no sense to have this kind of coverage on a low-cost item like a laptop (or a digital camera! I can't believe anyone buys that).
I have to pay $60/month, and put up with what is arguably the most inadequate major cellular network out there. What is this free service you use? How can I sign up?
"There are facts that would sway the jury via emotion that should not be considered in the case at hand."
Doesn't that mean that the judge is manipulating the jury's emotions (after all, avoiding them is manipulating them too). That is dishonest.
"The judge has control over the information available to the jury because the jury is only supposed to consider the information that is relevant to the case."
I think the question of relevance is best answered by the jurors, given that the resolution of the case is supposed to reflect their views and opinions. I think my married friend explained this problem the best:
When he got married they decided that he would make all the major decisions, and she would make all the minor ones. However, it turns out that the deciding between what constitutes a major and a what constitutes a minor decision is I minor decision, and in the ten years he's been married, they've never come across a major decision.
"How about a case where a woman is charged with a crime and in the past lost her children to Child Protective Services. Should the fact that her children are in foster care be considered in her current case?"
Does the jury think it's relevant?
"It could cause members of the jury to vote guilty, not for the allegation in the case, but rather for the case he has already been acquitted of."
Like OJ Simpson? I'm going to be honest, I don't really have a problem with that.
"Who is going to monitor, for how long, and how?"
The legal teams involved in the case, or the court. They already try to do this sometimes, when appealing decisions.
"One thing to keep in mind is that most people are terrible at determining what is relevant to making a decision and, as a result, make bad decisions."
And your solution to this is giving jurors even less information to make their decision?! I don't know about you, but I always do better with more information.
Do you think it may be possible to attempt to explain such issues to a jury? Also, I think that it may be better to presint all the facts to the jury. Seems like anything else is just asking for corruption.
They say it's supposed to be a jury of your peers, but then they say that the Judge should have absolute control over the information the Jury can consider when reaching it's verdict. That kind of defeats the point, right? What makes a judge so smart he can decide to withhold information and outside consultation from Jurors, when we normally would have that available to us when making decisions in real life.
I know that there's a concern an outside party may try to manipulate the outcome of the trial (by threatening jurors or deliberately planting misinformation) but it seems to me that this is how our court system works anyway (with the party best able to game the system and manipulate the jury winning out). And such jury tampering could just as easily be prevented by monitoring communications and arresting people who are trying to manipulate the outcome for personal gain.
There's a difference between adding functionality and fixing bugs/conducting security updates. The user of a piece of software buys it with the expectation that those minor updates will happen over time, and it shows that the developer stands behind their product. New functionality, however, is not something the purchaser paid for at the time of their purchase, so it is reasonable to charge for it.
Why do you have a problem with paying for additional functionality? Didn't you agree that you paid a fair price for the device at the time you bought it? So then if you are upgrading it's software, that isn't upholding the original purchase value, it is adding new value. Isn't it completely fair and reasonable to charge for that? You don't have to upgrade, after all, unless you want the new features. Don't you know that it costs money to develop software?
Look, the question of insurance is a no-brainer. Insurance companies charge for their services, but saving money so that you can replace failed devices costs nothing.
Some people win the lottery too, but the majority lose. It makes no sense to throw your money away on an extended warranty.
The point of selling attachments is that you can misrepresent the cost of the computer to your customers, or rather, you can give them a "great deal" on the laptop, but then charge them through the nose of overpriced attachment items. Any time your goal is to hide the true cost, it is a deceptive business practice.
I used to work there. I can see how their employee incentives would lead to these kind of practices. There's something wrong when your focus has to be selling an "attachment" item over the actual product. And no one ever uses their extended warranty (don't tell me a story about a time you used it, you're the exception, not the rule) It's dishonest. Insurance on an item you can afford to replace is always a bad deal.
"yet consider the prospect of biking to work unthinkable, despite the benefits it would grant them in terms of reduced risks of heart diseases and stroke."
I think you have failed to include the increased risk of being hit by a car. It only has to happen to you once, and you will probably not be willing to ever ride to work again, even if you weren't injured. Heart disease it distant and uncertain, any kind of exercise can prevent it. Getting hit by a car while you're riding you bike is a real wake-up call.
"If the Chinese want to hurt the US, they call in their loans."
Why do people think this? The loans are fixed rate bonds that mature at a set date. They can not "call in" their bonds early, we are obligated to pay only when they mature. They could sell the bonds, and inhibit our ability to issue now bonds, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because we issue too many bonds anyway.
Also, you seem to think we owe them more than we really do, but that's a different matter. . .
There aren't really jobs out there for physicists. So, whatever you will be doing for a job if you get a degree in physics will probably be learned on the job. The vast majority of skills for any job are learned through experience. The theory you learn in school is no substitute for real-world experience. Think of it more as a supplement, and experience dealing with mind-numbing crap or "learning to learn," if you like that phrase better.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think it is less human to be free? I think that participating in a society where you must constantly hold everyone else in check at the point of a gun makes us less human. What Man would chose live his whole life in constant fear of punishment so that they might exact the same on another? Maturity means not choosing to sacrifice my freedom for the false promise of security. The world today is populated by adult children. I want no part of that.
There is only one political party, and that is the party that believes that they should make your decisions for you. We don't need a few good people to make all our decisions for us, we are perfectly capable to making them on our own.
No sane, balanced person would run for or accept a political office. There is no good reason to take part in a process that can not ever have an acceptable result. When we vote, we are condoning the political process. I will not have my name associated with this process, I want not part of it.
Third parties are just more of the same. Will they write laws to repeal taxes? That only proves that they believe laws and politicians have the ability to solve our problems. No, the only sane choice is to not participate and encourage all your friends to do the same.
I recently saw an article titled this way on CNN. I can't grasp why this is the preferred global warming solution amongst "environmentalists". It is complicated, difficult to understand and difficult to work with.
It seems to me this is the ideal solution as far as a politician is concerned, however, because people won't be able to see whether or not it's working, and even if they could there will be no accountability. Remember, the most recent banking crisis was caused by a similar "liability" trading scheme. Supposedly, no one saw it coming, but it should have been obvious that no good would come from people pouring trillions of dollars into a system they didn't understand.
Cap and trade will be a huge tool for politicians to take away more of our freedoms and make us less able to "get by" so that we have to come crawling to them for help. Remember, a politician's job is gaining political power. Why, then, are there still people out there who think our representatives are there to help us? No one who honestly wants to help people would be a politician.
You can't legally do it yourself unless you have a proper storm-drain system with a NPDES permit. So you have to take it to a car-wash. Yeah, I live in a nanny-state. The weather's nice. . .
Apples are selling just fine, what is he talking about?
"Then you get to the obvious problem of a . . . Good Samaritan who did good all his life"
I don't think there's really one of us who could do such a thing. If there is, I've never met him, or anyone close to being like him. I don't like hypothetical arguments. The reason they're hypothetical is you never encounter them, and it's impossible to fully consider a situation you never encounter.
How do you know? Emotions drive actions, and it is understood that babies find it pleasurable. How do you explain such behavior if it is not driven by an emotional response?
It's a consequence of the way things are tied together. If one of us sins, it affects us all. So simply by being in a world filled with sin, we are tricked into going along with it. It's the worst for children, who are totally dependent on their parents. Once we learn to sin, we need to spend the rest of our lives learning not to.
That's why it's not easier of you die young, time is on your side. The more time you have to learn the truth about the world and start living, the more likely you are to have figured it out by the time you die.
I believe that we can not be saved by our works, and I believe that we all have sin in our lives. Christianity teaches us that we must learn to accept forgiveness for our sins, and apologize for them in order to have eternal life.
So yes, original sin is messed up. The world is a horrible messy place. The question is will you mindlessly perpetuate that, or will you stop and think about the situation. Will you accept your part in it and make a deliberate effort to stop adding to the problem and become a part of the solution. Will you accept God's forgiveness and enter into the kingdom of heaven. Original sin is messed up, but you can chose whether or not that's the final word in you life.
I hope I've helped explain it a little. I can't believe I just posted this on Slashdot.
"At a minimum, admissible evidence needs to be screened for verifiability and proper procedure."
Or you could just tell people about the source, and let them decide whether or not to trust it.
"The standard of admissible evidence is quite clear and agreed upon. It is based on documented court cases and legal experience."
Just because people agree on a standard doesn't mean its not arbitrary. It's based on decisions which have been made in the past, by people, and by the judge's personal judgment about the applicability of such prior rulings. The theory is that as long as our court system is consistent, that makes it fair. I say that's a bunch of nonsense. In any case, new precedents are still being made arbitrarily judges today.
"If you are sitting at an intersection observing the movement of cars, you can logically deduce whether the traffic light is red or green."
But that only has any meaning in the context of your emotions. Why do you wish to cross the street? Why do you wish not to be hit by a car while doing so? The core of every decision and judgment is an emotional response.
"You can care about being a good juror without being emotionally involved in the outcome."
I good juror is, in my opinion, someone who cares about the outcome. People who only care about upholding an ideal (I just want to be the best juror I can be) are generally self-centered sociopaths. And they are in total denial about the emotions that are driving them to want to be a "good juror". Rationality without emotion serves no purpose and can drive no action. People who claim to be driven by a rational process are lying.
"It seems you would substitute your judgment for that of the jury that heard the original case and found him innocent."
OJ has practically come out and said that he did it. If the jury heard him say that, they would convict him too.
"The jury is not the one to decide if it is relevant."
If you don't have open access to information, you can't make a decision the way you normally would, because selecting information is an important part of how we make decisions. It is not reasonable to say that these decisions constitute the judgment of the jury, if they would have made a different decision were they in full possession of the facts.
Why do you assume that just because I was wrong it means I was lying. It is what my friend told me, I knew it was a joke, but I didn't know where it came from.
The only reasonable standard for what information is admissible in court is that all information should be. Anything else is really just an arbitrary standard which has to be drawn by someone, and we know that people should not make such decisions because no one is beyond bias.
All of our rational judgments are based on our emotional response to external stimuli. Claiming "detached rationalism" is unrealistic, and is a contradiction in itself. People only care about something if they are emotionally involved in it, and they only give attention to things they care about.
"Another premise of our justice system is that a person declared innocent isn't haunted for the rest of his life by past allegations."
But the reality is that they are. There is no point trying to turn a fantasy into reality by pretending, and it makes no sense to try to do that in a court of law, where peoples lives are on the line.
"If the jury starts assuming the duties of the judge, you undermine the ability of the court to provide a fair trial."
The opposite is also true. The jury can not be reasonably said to make its own decisions if relevant information is deliberately and systematically withheld from them. Any information a jury member seeks out could be relevant, so deliberately concealing information from them disrupts the process.
the money doesn't come from nowhere. They are counting on most people to forget about the warranty so they don't have to pay. The fact that it is a highly profitable business is a testament to the fact it works. Seriously, who would keep track of warranty information for as long as it takes for a battery to expire (would it even still be covered? batteries last several years). It's a waste to time and money. And whenever someone offers you free money (give us $XX now and we'll give you $3XX later) they are trying to screw you.
Buying a warranty from the manufacturer is different, because many times they will try to add perceived value to their products by having a low cost extended warranty option. They can do it, because it gives them an incentive to try to reduce costs through better quality control. A separate company, however, has no such incentive and simply adds 40 or 50 percent to the expected cost of fulfilling the warranty. It makes no sense to have this kind of coverage on a low-cost item like a laptop (or a digital camera! I can't believe anyone buys that).
I have to pay $60/month, and put up with what is arguably the most inadequate major cellular network out there. What is this free service you use? How can I sign up?
"There are facts that would sway the jury via emotion that should not be considered in the case at hand."
Doesn't that mean that the judge is manipulating the jury's emotions (after all, avoiding them is manipulating them too). That is dishonest.
"The judge has control over the information available to the jury because the jury is only supposed to consider the information that is relevant to the case."
I think the question of relevance is best answered by the jurors, given that the resolution of the case is supposed to reflect their views and opinions. I think my married friend explained this problem the best:
When he got married they decided that he would make all the major decisions, and she would make all the minor ones. However, it turns out that the deciding between what constitutes a major and a what constitutes a minor decision is I minor decision, and in the ten years he's been married, they've never come across a major decision.
"How about a case where a woman is charged with a crime and in the past lost her children to Child Protective Services. Should the fact that her children are in foster care be considered in her current case?"
Does the jury think it's relevant?
"It could cause members of the jury to vote guilty, not for the allegation in the case, but rather for the case he has already been acquitted of."
Like OJ Simpson? I'm going to be honest, I don't really have a problem with that.
"Who is going to monitor, for how long, and how?"
The legal teams involved in the case, or the court. They already try to do this sometimes, when appealing decisions.
"One thing to keep in mind is that most people are terrible at determining what is relevant to making a decision and, as a result, make bad decisions."
And your solution to this is giving jurors even less information to make their decision?! I don't know about you, but I always do better with more information.
Do you think it may be possible to attempt to explain such issues to a jury? Also, I think that it may be better to presint all the facts to the jury. Seems like anything else is just asking for corruption.
They say it's supposed to be a jury of your peers, but then they say that the Judge should have absolute control over the information the Jury can consider when reaching it's verdict. That kind of defeats the point, right? What makes a judge so smart he can decide to withhold information and outside consultation from Jurors, when we normally would have that available to us when making decisions in real life.
I know that there's a concern an outside party may try to manipulate the outcome of the trial (by threatening jurors or deliberately planting misinformation) but it seems to me that this is how our court system works anyway (with the party best able to game the system and manipulate the jury winning out). And such jury tampering could just as easily be prevented by monitoring communications and arresting people who are trying to manipulate the outcome for personal gain.
There's a difference between adding functionality and fixing bugs/conducting security updates. The user of a piece of software buys it with the expectation that those minor updates will happen over time, and it shows that the developer stands behind their product. New functionality, however, is not something the purchaser paid for at the time of their purchase, so it is reasonable to charge for it.
Why do you have a problem with paying for additional functionality? Didn't you agree that you paid a fair price for the device at the time you bought it? So then if you are upgrading it's software, that isn't upholding the original purchase value, it is adding new value. Isn't it completely fair and reasonable to charge for that? You don't have to upgrade, after all, unless you want the new features. Don't you know that it costs money to develop software?
Look, the question of insurance is a no-brainer. Insurance companies charge for their services, but saving money so that you can replace failed devices costs nothing.
Some people win the lottery too, but the majority lose. It makes no sense to throw your money away on an extended warranty.
The point of selling attachments is that you can misrepresent the cost of the computer to your customers, or rather, you can give them a "great deal" on the laptop, but then charge them through the nose of overpriced attachment items. Any time your goal is to hide the true cost, it is a deceptive business practice.
I used to work there. I can see how their employee incentives would lead to these kind of practices. There's something wrong when your focus has to be selling an "attachment" item over the actual product. And no one ever uses their extended warranty (don't tell me a story about a time you used it, you're the exception, not the rule) It's dishonest. Insurance on an item you can afford to replace is always a bad deal.
"the energy of a microwave photon is too low to do anything interesting."
Cut a grape into quarters and put one slice in the microwave for ten or twenty seconds. It will do something "interesting".
"yet consider the prospect of biking to work unthinkable, despite the benefits it would grant them in terms of reduced risks of heart diseases and stroke."
I think you have failed to include the increased risk of being hit by a car. It only has to happen to you once, and you will probably not be willing to ever ride to work again, even if you weren't injured. Heart disease it distant and uncertain, any kind of exercise can prevent it. Getting hit by a car while you're riding you bike is a real wake-up call.
"If the Chinese want to hurt the US, they call in their loans."
Why do people think this? The loans are fixed rate bonds that mature at a set date. They can not "call in" their bonds early, we are obligated to pay only when they mature. They could sell the bonds, and inhibit our ability to issue now bonds, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because we issue too many bonds anyway.
Also, you seem to think we owe them more than we really do, but that's a different matter. . .
"In Physics?"
There aren't really jobs out there for physicists. So, whatever you will be doing for a job if you get a degree in physics will probably be learned on the job. The vast majority of skills for any job are learned through experience. The theory you learn in school is no substitute for real-world experience. Think of it more as a supplement, and experience dealing with mind-numbing crap or "learning to learn," if you like that phrase better.