Having grandparents (or anyone else, for that matter, such as doctors) help you along the way is not an example of Darwinism. Having genetic traits which help get you to adulthood is.
But the tendency of people to help each other, especially their close relatives, is a genetic trait. You can't separate behavioral traits (which depend on how your brain operates) from, say, resistance to heart disease (which depends on how your heart operates). Helping your descendants means they have a higher propability of reproducing in turn; it is a helpful genetic trait, in the Darwinian sense.
The same applies to waiters. You want to work here, you either are a smoker or you tolerate smoke. Why cannot I require that? Has it become unusual to require some sort of qualification from a worker? Qualifications don't necessarily only include education and skills. What's next, requiring a chimney sweep to hire and keep an employee with vertigo because he has to accept it? You don't smoke, you're not qualified to work as my waiter. Why can't I say that?
Because historically, allowing employers to say such things have led to what amounts to slavery. "If you don't do 16-hour days using machines with no safety devices whatsoever, and be on-call for the reminding 8 hours, and if I happen to find you attractive bend over whenever I want it, you're not qualified to work for me." It was the standard during early phases of Industrial Revolution, and a natural result of a vast oversupply of labor. It was only stopped once the unions got all employees to bargain collectively, since together their power equals that of all employers; individually, any employee is vastly inferior to any employer.
The sad truth is that in an industrialized world, the natural cost of labor approaches zero: the more you automate, the less people are actually needed for production. Since allowing the market forces free reign here would thus lead to an unlivable society for a majority of its members, laws are required to artificially limit the bargaining power of the employer.
As for your strawman about a chimney sweeper suffering from vertigo, if his vertigo doesn't prevent him from sweeping the chimney, what do you care ? And if it does, well, not doing his job is a valid reason to fire him, is it not ?
I've said this before and I'm saying it again: no matter what businessmen might think, society does not exist to help them make profit. It exists to help and protect its members. And that means putting clear limits for the businesses to operate within, so they can't prey on people.
I suspect most physicists would rather believe that they are working towards a final description of the universe rather than just another step on an infinite progression.
That's a hopeless quest, thought. If you figure out how the universe works, it naturally gives a rise to the question: Why does the universe work that way instead of some other way ? Solve that, and you'll simply end up with another "why".
The Japanese have tiny cars, as do the Europeans. Tiny cars are more fuel efficient (hardly surprising)... but the way American cities have been laid out, you can hardly get anywhere without going on a freeway somewhere, an environment that's hostile to uber-compact vehicles. The lack of fuel efficiency in American automobiles is at least partially due to the REQUIREMENTS of its operating environment.
By no means do high-speed roads require a large car. If anything, the combination of higher acceleration (because of less mass) and better cornering (because of lower center of gravity) make them better for high-speed travel.
Or were you implying that the relative lack of armor in such vechiles is the problem ?
In the meantime the reality is that oil prices are going up, and up, and up, and we cannot allow this to continue until alternative infrastructure is in place.
You cannot stop it either, since the supply of oil is limited, and possibly in outright decline, while the demand is skyrocketing.
What's wrong with this picture is that both men went to jail at all, one for doing it with the hooker and the other for looking at dirty pictures.
The hooker in question was, according to grandparent, 14 years old and had been pimped by her mother since she was 12. This strongly suggests that she was not a free-willed prostitute but rather forced to the job by her mother. Furthermore, it also sounds like a violation of child labor laws.
Please do not confuse prostitutes - who work for themselves out of their free will - and slaves - who work for their masters due to coercion. There are already enough moral police types trying to make prostitution illegal (it isn't here in Finland) in the name of protecting women, who use exactly this kind of fallacious arguments.
Right, because we have ways to magically ship products across the country with the wave of a wand, right?
Why on Earth would you ship something accross a country as huge as the US in a truck ? Simply load it into an electric train and let the nuclear power plants / solar collectors / windmills power it. Much cheaper and more effective.
Obviously you still need a truck for the last mile, thought.
Let me outline why I think why high gas prices are a net negative for society:
All of these assume that rising oil prices mean the death of the car, rather than fuel efficiency getting a higher priority in purhcasing decisions (and thus manufacturer design goals).
I'm guessing, although IANAL, that any protections would be civil rather than criminal, but if I had a kid and some sicko (adult or minor) photoshopped it so that my child's recognizable face was doing something suggestive, inappropriate, outright sexual or deviant,
I hope you don't have any images of her and a teddy bear, then:D. Google for "pedobear" if confused.
Seriously, there's nothing that isn't suggestive, given a suitably twisted imagination, so that bar cannot be used.
I think it would be appropriate for that creator/distributor to have to face some consequences.
Yes, but jail time seem somewhat harsh for mere photomanipulation. Now, if the creep also included name and address of the kid, then we're talking about harrashment.
Also, they don't actively seek out being black, whereas you're not born with a thumb drive full of kiddie porn.
I doubt that anyone seeked out being a pedophile, either. What you're attracted to is just as much a part of you than your skin color; perhaps even more, since skin color is skin deep, while attraction is part of your mental makeup - your soul, to risk a religious flamewar.
This is closer to speeding laws, where a certain behavior hasn't harmed someone else yet, but it's increasing the probability of you hurting someone in the future.
Actually, no. Speeding is a cause of accidents, while collecting kiddy porn and molesting children are both caused - at least in some cases - by pedophilia. It is like the old example about ice cream consumption causing drowning deaths, because they both spike in the same days (when it's hot).
Besides, these people aren't just being put into prison because they might abuse children, they're actively supporting and distributing these acts to other people.
They are distributing pictures of said acts - assuming we're talking about hardcore child porn, rather than softcore which could simply depict kids in swimwear by the pool - not the acts themselves. They may or may not support said activites; I've seen people draw or render pictures of some pretty fucked up fantasies and upload them on the Net, but that doesn't mean that they support acting said fantasies out in real life.
Putting someone in jail for kiddie porn is completely reasonable to me, although I do think the process is emotionally charged to the point that it's hard for justice to be done in these cases.
I assume you meant "for distributing kiddie porn". Please further specify what categories do you mean: photographs, photomanipulated photographs, computer-generated images, drawn images, written stories, spoken stories, audio recordings, manipulated audio recordings, computer-generated audio recordings (voice synthesizer etc.), computer games, some combination of the previous ?
And, for that matter, should I go to jail because by listing these categories I might have induced a Slashdot-reading pedophile to think of a dating sim with underage characters, and he might get a hardon from that, so the listing could be considered pornographic in nature ?
It ends up smelling like more of a witch hunt than anything, but, as CS Lewis said, witch hunts are completely reasonable if witches exist.
The process of killing random people who are accused of being witches doesn't become any more reasonable even if one assumes that such things might actually exist. There are also some minor problems even if the accused by some miracle actually happens to be a witch, such as determining what, exactly speaking, has she done and what, if any, punishment does she deserve.
If it makes me a robot for seeing the situation as it stands, rather than in the biased light of some well-intentioned-but-baseless believe in the sanctity of human life, well then, so it goes.
Well, if life isn't sacred, then that simplifies things a lot: Lori Drew is 49 years old and thus likely to cost society more than she'll contribute during the reminder of her life, so simply kill her. It will safe us money, get revenge for Megan, and send a pretty clear message for any other psychos willing to pull this shit.
I'm surprised you didn't simply suggest this in the first place, rather than went on in irrelevant tangents about choices and responsibility. It's not like any of it matters once the taboo against wantom killing is discarded.
If an online friend screws you over, you move on. You don't kill yourself, simple as that.
I don't kill myself. But the girl in question did. And, since the villain here was her next-door neighbour who apparently knew her quite well, it is reasonable to expect her to know that the reaction in this case might be quite extreme. In fact she propably knew it, for why else would she had spent months setting the whole thing up ? You don't spend that kind of time if you think that the subject of your malice is going to shrug her shoulders and move on.
Yes, we can all loathe the evil Lori Drew, and she very much deserves the shunning of her community. But to say she "murdered" Megan? get serious.
Yes, I think it's reasonable to say that she did indeed murder Megan. She deliberately set up as nasty and vicious blow as she could, and Megan died as a result of that.
We always have choices. Killing ourselves - or not - Always counts as a choice, one which Megan chose over "dealing".
Yes, a very logical and rational response. Now guess what depression and other mental problems do to your ability to be reasonable ? Especially since we are talking about a teenager; they are under their parent's guardianship precisely because they can't be trusted to act rationally at all times.
p>>Simply because an uninvolved outside observer can see things in context doesn't mean that a person caught in the middle of it can.
It mystifies me until today how those douchebags got away that cheaply.
Aristocrats aren't subject to the same laws as commoners. Hesse is an aristocrat, the pimple-faced teen is a commoner. That these positions are not formally encoded in law by those names does not make them any less real now than in the Dark Ages.
Trailer designers and technicians have made an art out of what they do: making the most boring movies look exciting and fun. Honestly, they're good at what they do!
So maybe Hollywood should simply give them random clips and let them put the whole movie together. Hey, it worked for AMV Hell. AMV Hell 3: The Motion Picture II: AMV Hell 4: The Last One:).
Where did I exactly say "NYC harbour"? I don't know the topology of NYC and I most certainly don't know where it would be most effective to detonate one. It is clear that a detonation in the air is preferable and since I didn't say where the potential terrorist would detonate it, we don't know.
If it's in a shipping container arriving by ship, it's going to end up in the harbor, right ? While you could of course move it, you risk detection with every move, and the harbor is actually a pretty good place for a ground-zero detonation: not only is it relatively open area (compared, say, to downtown Manhattan), but it also contains a huge amount of goods and acts as a transportation nexus with many ships present at any time, maximizing the economic impact of the blast. If you're lucky, you might even get a small tidal wave.
For example, they could detonate it in the top floor of one of the tallest buildings?
How are you going to get it up there ? Do you realize how large and heavy a shipping container really is ? About the size of a truck. And a nuke itself isn't going to be much smaller.
Or, since we're at it... A small airplane (I know it's a no fly-zone) could carry it and a suicide bomber could detonate it at the "sweet" spot.
A small airplane is not capable of carrying a nuke. Not the kind which a terrorist could realistically hope to get his hands on, at least. It takes quite a lot of auxiliary equipment to make plutonium explode, you know.
Anyway, I never specified the exact detionation location. I'm well aware that the full 8million won't perish. However, fallout mostly comes from what goes *up* in the atomic cloud that falls down over the non-exploded areas. I am no nuclear physicist, so I'm probably wrong, but the surroundings of NYC after such an hypothetical attack aren't going to be fun to live and most certainly the people being in the non-exploding area will get a dose of radiation that will cause cancer in the future.
Of course it's not fun to live in a fallout area, and of course people will die. But it's not something which will "dwarf regular natural disasters".
On the other hand, with a population of over 8 million people, a nuclear bomb isn't even in the same ballpark as the above mentioned earthquake. An unannounced nuclear attack on NYC is going to dwarf regular natural disasters. (Ignoring supervolcanoes and meteor impacts)
A 15kt nuclear device, detonated at ground level in a New York City harbor, is unlikely to kill a significant portion of those 8 million people. The height of the detonation would mean that the heat radiation would be completely ineffective - it would be absorbed and blocked by nearby buildings. Same with ionizing radiation; it would simply not penetrate that far into the city. The pressure wave would destroy the harbor itself and the nearest buildings, but not spread very far either.
It would cause one Hell of a radiactive burning mess, but it would come nowhere close to causing as much damage as a major earthquake, much less destroying the city or killing all of its inhabitants. Nuclear weapons are powerfull, but not that powerful.
Self-Organisation could also explain the fine tuning.
No it can't.
Basically its the notion that sometimes there is only a few ways that components will fit together (despite the fact that it doesn't look that way), so it reduces the possible combination space drastically. We see this in chemistry and biology all the time.
Yes, and that's the whole reason why an explanation is required.
If pieces only fit together in a way hich produces an organized universe with life in it, rather than one of the night-infinite possible highly entropic messes, then either you got incredible lucky or the pieces were fine-tuned to fit together this way. And we seem to be getting lucky "all the time", so an explanation for the tuning mechanism is needed.
As long as the components can impact one another then they tune themselves to a stable state where they can all coexist at the minimum energy.
The question is: Why is the stable state so interesting, rather than an uninteresting mess with high entropy ?
4 is not enough because of Alaska. 4 is only sufficient if all countries are contiguous.
That is only true if there's a requirement that discontiguous areas of a single country be painted the same color; if they can be different color, they are different countries as far as the algorithm goes. Since we simply want the border to be visible, this requirement can be discarded, so 4 is sufficient.
The original article, consisting of REAL journalists, avoid the provocative term "spying" because they are professional. Slashdot is sensational. You give me a nice list of definitions there, but maybe you should continue searching reference.com for deeper meanings.
No matter what deeper meaning the word "spying" might have, using it to describe someone listening in on my data stream in order to gather data about me and my personal habits is perfectly appropriate. The action described is provocative, no matter what it is called.
And a journalist who doesn't dare call a provocative action by its proper name is not a REAL journalist, but a lily-livered wannabe.
Besides, I have a 15+ year career in Intelligence, so I think I know a little bit about the subtleties relating to spying.
If data is stored, with the intent and purpose of actually being retrievable at some time in the future, and a mechanism exists to access said data, then it is not absolutely secure because it has been designed to be retrieved.
Yes, but AFAIK quantum cryptography is not about storing and later retrieving data, it is about communicating data between two parties. AFAIK it simply lets the sender and recipient to know if anyone else besides them got the data. From there it is a simple matter of using an insecure channel to transfer random data to act as one-time pad and then, if and only if the pad was not listened to, XOR the actual data with it and send it over.
Yah, but what is so sad is that the LDS church has a HUGE online presence, uses the internet on a frequent basis to distribute media and is an early adopter of a lot of technology.
Secondly, these books aren't secret. Any member can walk into any LDS distribution center and pick up a copy. I've got a copy. 95% of the book is on how meetings run, proper activities for youth, how to distribute tithing and how to put in requisition forms for repairs.
Put these two facts together, add a third fact, let's say "giving out paper copies costs us money while having anyone interested download the book from an Internet site operated by someone else does not, especially if we can get free advertizing for the fact that it's available there", and what do you get ?-)
Except you got the priorities backward. It's like you have a hangnail and somebody kicks me in the balls, and you keep complaining about your hangnail. Wouldya shut up for a minute? We'll talk about your hangnail again when I stop writhing on the ground.
Dictatorship is not a hangnail. It is a cancer. It isn't a small inconvenience; it kills people just as dead as an earthquake, and has killed a lot more of them than this particular earthquake.
Chinese dictatorship is no less a disaster than this earthquake; it is simply a chronic one, rather than an acute one. In fact, by body count, it is a worse disaster than the earthquake, just less flashy.
So, while it is idiotic to criticize the Chinese government when it actually seems to be doing right by its subjects for once, it is just as idiotic to compare it to a hangnail.
And if you live inside this mile-wide swath? What country are you part of, then?
Don't paint the color on the border but just inside it so that the actual border follows the outer edge of the color (think Civilization 4). This, of course, requires neighboring countries to have different colors; a total of 4 should be enough.
For extra effect, have the color fade away at the inner edge of the mile-wide swath, rather than just end suddenly.
Politics stops being "garbage" when people get jailed, killed or otherwise abused because of it.
People are suffering and all you guys can think of is "youtube block", "human rights", and so on.
Yes. We can do nothing about the earthquake or its victims, but we can rejoice that Chinese government's grip on its subjects is not as tight as it seems, since that will likely curb the worst abuses of power it will subject said subjects to - in other words, make them suffer less.
C'mon, guys, people are dying there and please, have a heart, wilya ??
People also suffer and die when human rights are violated. That's the very reason they are so important. Should we ignore those people just because the earthquake is flashier ?
We are finding cures in nature that have baffled science for many years. Science is about studying nature and learning from it. You're creating a dichotomy where there is none.
This is a non sequitur.
No it itsn't. A non-sequiter is a logical fallacy where the conclusion doesn't follow from premises. The grandparents claim is, as you noted yourself, a false dichotomy, which is a different fallacy than non-sequiter.
Slashdot Mirror
But the tendency of people to help each other, especially their close relatives, is a genetic trait. You can't separate behavioral traits (which depend on how your brain operates) from, say, resistance to heart disease (which depends on how your heart operates). Helping your descendants means they have a higher propability of reproducing in turn; it is a helpful genetic trait, in the Darwinian sense.
Because historically, allowing employers to say such things have led to what amounts to slavery. "If you don't do 16-hour days using machines with no safety devices whatsoever, and be on-call for the reminding 8 hours, and if I happen to find you attractive bend over whenever I want it, you're not qualified to work for me." It was the standard during early phases of Industrial Revolution, and a natural result of a vast oversupply of labor. It was only stopped once the unions got all employees to bargain collectively, since together their power equals that of all employers; individually, any employee is vastly inferior to any employer.
The sad truth is that in an industrialized world, the natural cost of labor approaches zero: the more you automate, the less people are actually needed for production. Since allowing the market forces free reign here would thus lead to an unlivable society for a majority of its members, laws are required to artificially limit the bargaining power of the employer.
As for your strawman about a chimney sweeper suffering from vertigo, if his vertigo doesn't prevent him from sweeping the chimney, what do you care ? And if it does, well, not doing his job is a valid reason to fire him, is it not ?
I've said this before and I'm saying it again: no matter what businessmen might think, society does not exist to help them make profit. It exists to help and protect its members. And that means putting clear limits for the businesses to operate within, so they can't prey on people.
That's a hopeless quest, thought. If you figure out how the universe works, it naturally gives a rise to the question: Why does the universe work that way instead of some other way ? Solve that, and you'll simply end up with another "why".
It's elephants all the way down.
By no means do high-speed roads require a large car. If anything, the combination of higher acceleration (because of less mass) and better cornering (because of lower center of gravity) make them better for high-speed travel.
Or were you implying that the relative lack of armor in such vechiles is the problem ?
You cannot stop it either, since the supply of oil is limited, and possibly in outright decline, while the demand is skyrocketing.
The hooker in question was, according to grandparent, 14 years old and had been pimped by her mother since she was 12. This strongly suggests that she was not a free-willed prostitute but rather forced to the job by her mother. Furthermore, it also sounds like a violation of child labor laws.
Please do not confuse prostitutes - who work for themselves out of their free will - and slaves - who work for their masters due to coercion. There are already enough moral police types trying to make prostitution illegal (it isn't here in Finland) in the name of protecting women, who use exactly this kind of fallacious arguments.
Why on Earth would you ship something accross a country as huge as the US in a truck ? Simply load it into an electric train and let the nuclear power plants / solar collectors / windmills power it. Much cheaper and more effective.
Obviously you still need a truck for the last mile, thought.
All of these assume that rising oil prices mean the death of the car, rather than fuel efficiency getting a higher priority in purhcasing decisions (and thus manufacturer design goals).
I hope you don't have any images of her and a teddy bear, then :D. Google for "pedobear" if confused.
Seriously, there's nothing that isn't suggestive, given a suitably twisted imagination, so that bar cannot be used.
Yes, but jail time seem somewhat harsh for mere photomanipulation. Now, if the creep also included name and address of the kid, then we're talking about harrashment.
I doubt that anyone seeked out being a pedophile, either. What you're attracted to is just as much a part of you than your skin color; perhaps even more, since skin color is skin deep, while attraction is part of your mental makeup - your soul, to risk a religious flamewar.
Actually, no. Speeding is a cause of accidents, while collecting kiddy porn and molesting children are both caused - at least in some cases - by pedophilia. It is like the old example about ice cream consumption causing drowning deaths, because they both spike in the same days (when it's hot).
They are distributing pictures of said acts - assuming we're talking about hardcore child porn, rather than softcore which could simply depict kids in swimwear by the pool - not the acts themselves. They may or may not support said activites; I've seen people draw or render pictures of some pretty fucked up fantasies and upload them on the Net, but that doesn't mean that they support acting said fantasies out in real life.
I assume you meant "for distributing kiddie porn". Please further specify what categories do you mean: photographs, photomanipulated photographs, computer-generated images, drawn images, written stories, spoken stories, audio recordings, manipulated audio recordings, computer-generated audio recordings (voice synthesizer etc.), computer games, some combination of the previous ?
And, for that matter, should I go to jail because by listing these categories I might have induced a Slashdot-reading pedophile to think of a dating sim with underage characters, and he might get a hardon from that, so the listing could be considered pornographic in nature ?
The process of killing random people who are accused of being witches doesn't become any more reasonable even if one assumes that such things might actually exist. There are also some minor problems even if the accused by some miracle actually happens to be a witch, such as determining what, exactly speaking, has she done and what, if any, punishment does she deserve.
Well, if life isn't sacred, then that simplifies things a lot: Lori Drew is 49 years old and thus likely to cost society more than she'll contribute during the reminder of her life, so simply kill her. It will safe us money, get revenge for Megan, and send a pretty clear message for any other psychos willing to pull this shit.
I'm surprised you didn't simply suggest this in the first place, rather than went on in irrelevant tangents about choices and responsibility. It's not like any of it matters once the taboo against wantom killing is discarded.
I don't kill myself. But the girl in question did. And, since the villain here was her next-door neighbour who apparently knew her quite well, it is reasonable to expect her to know that the reaction in this case might be quite extreme. In fact she propably knew it, for why else would she had spent months setting the whole thing up ? You don't spend that kind of time if you think that the subject of your malice is going to shrug her shoulders and move on.
Yes, I think it's reasonable to say that she did indeed murder Megan. She deliberately set up as nasty and vicious blow as she could, and Megan died as a result of that.
Yes, a very logical and rational response. Now guess what depression and other mental problems do to your ability to be reasonable ? Especially since we are talking about a teenager; they are under their parent's guardianship precisely because they can't be trusted to act rationally at all times.
p>>Simply because an uninvolved outside observer can see things in context doesn't mean that a person caught in the middle of it can.Aristocrats aren't subject to the same laws as commoners. Hesse is an aristocrat, the pimple-faced teen is a commoner. That these positions are not formally encoded in law by those names does not make them any less real now than in the Dark Ages.
So maybe Hollywood should simply give them random clips and let them put the whole movie together. Hey, it worked for AMV Hell. AMV Hell 3: The Motion Picture II: AMV Hell 4: The Last One :).
If it's in a shipping container arriving by ship, it's going to end up in the harbor, right ? While you could of course move it, you risk detection with every move, and the harbor is actually a pretty good place for a ground-zero detonation: not only is it relatively open area (compared, say, to downtown Manhattan), but it also contains a huge amount of goods and acts as a transportation nexus with many ships present at any time, maximizing the economic impact of the blast. If you're lucky, you might even get a small tidal wave.
How are you going to get it up there ? Do you realize how large and heavy a shipping container really is ? About the size of a truck. And a nuke itself isn't going to be much smaller.
A small airplane is not capable of carrying a nuke. Not the kind which a terrorist could realistically hope to get his hands on, at least. It takes quite a lot of auxiliary equipment to make plutonium explode, you know.
Of course it's not fun to live in a fallout area, and of course people will die. But it's not something which will "dwarf regular natural disasters".
A 15kt nuclear device, detonated at ground level in a New York City harbor, is unlikely to kill a significant portion of those 8 million people. The height of the detonation would mean that the heat radiation would be completely ineffective - it would be absorbed and blocked by nearby buildings. Same with ionizing radiation; it would simply not penetrate that far into the city. The pressure wave would destroy the harbor itself and the nearest buildings, but not spread very far either.
It would cause one Hell of a radiactive burning mess, but it would come nowhere close to causing as much damage as a major earthquake, much less destroying the city or killing all of its inhabitants. Nuclear weapons are powerfull, but not that powerful.
No it can't.
Yes, and that's the whole reason why an explanation is required.
If pieces only fit together in a way hich produces an organized universe with life in it, rather than one of the night-infinite possible highly entropic messes, then either you got incredible lucky or the pieces were fine-tuned to fit together this way. And we seem to be getting lucky "all the time", so an explanation for the tuning mechanism is needed.
The question is: Why is the stable state so interesting, rather than an uninteresting mess with high entropy ?
That is only true if there's a requirement that discontiguous areas of a single country be painted the same color; if they can be different color, they are different countries as far as the algorithm goes. Since we simply want the border to be visible, this requirement can be discarded, so 4 is sufficient.
No matter what deeper meaning the word "spying" might have, using it to describe someone listening in on my data stream in order to gather data about me and my personal habits is perfectly appropriate. The action described is provocative, no matter what it is called.
And a journalist who doesn't dare call a provocative action by its proper name is not a REAL journalist, but a lily-livered wannabe.
Do you, by any chance, work for Charter ?-)
Yes, but AFAIK quantum cryptography is not about storing and later retrieving data, it is about communicating data between two parties. AFAIK it simply lets the sender and recipient to know if anyone else besides them got the data. From there it is a simple matter of using an insecure channel to transfer random data to act as one-time pad and then, if and only if the pad was not listened to, XOR the actual data with it and send it over.
Put these two facts together, add a third fact, let's say "giving out paper copies costs us money while having anyone interested download the book from an Internet site operated by someone else does not, especially if we can get free advertizing for the fact that it's available there", and what do you get ?-)
These people are either morons or geniuses.
Oh, and in Soviet Russia, informants sue YOU !
Then again, the Book of Vile Darkness is relatively benign compared to Scientology's stuff :).
Dictatorship is not a hangnail. It is a cancer. It isn't a small inconvenience; it kills people just as dead as an earthquake, and has killed a lot more of them than this particular earthquake.
Chinese dictatorship is no less a disaster than this earthquake; it is simply a chronic one, rather than an acute one. In fact, by body count, it is a worse disaster than the earthquake, just less flashy.
So, while it is idiotic to criticize the Chinese government when it actually seems to be doing right by its subjects for once, it is just as idiotic to compare it to a hangnail.
Don't paint the color on the border but just inside it so that the actual border follows the outer edge of the color (think Civilization 4). This, of course, requires neighboring countries to have different colors; a total of 4 should be enough.
For extra effect, have the color fade away at the inner edge of the mile-wide swath, rather than just end suddenly.
Politics stops being "garbage" when people get jailed, killed or otherwise abused because of it.
Yes. We can do nothing about the earthquake or its victims, but we can rejoice that Chinese government's grip on its subjects is not as tight as it seems, since that will likely curb the worst abuses of power it will subject said subjects to - in other words, make them suffer less.
People also suffer and die when human rights are violated. That's the very reason they are so important. Should we ignore those people just because the earthquake is flashier ?
No it itsn't. A non-sequiter is a logical fallacy where the conclusion doesn't follow from premises. The grandparents claim is, as you noted yourself, a false dichotomy, which is a different fallacy than non-sequiter.
Actually, the moral is: Don't believe that everything is well just because someone who's job it is to keep you pacified says so.
Now get off my lawn, you neo-pagan hippie :D!