Uh...we already do it with alcohol and tobacco. Check your beer can, it says you should drive or operate machinery, and your pack of Marlboro 100s warn that they cause lung cancer. I'm saying legalize other drugs and apply this same standard.
I think it's worthwhile that we have some kind of system in place that stops such dangerous drugs and remedies from reaching the public at all, BEFORE anyone is harmed/defrauded. It shouldn't have to come to a legal battle because those dangerous products should have never made it to the pharmacy shelf.
And I fully agree that our bodies are not property of the state. I am for the decriminalization of all drugs, I just think they should be regulated like we do with alcohol and tobacco.
I think it's a matter of finding where you can maximize the saving of lives. Either extreme would result in more people dying than somewhere in the middle. Absolutely no restriction would result in dangerous drugs being released to he public, or more likely, drugs that simply do nothing at all. At the other extreme, full government control will be too costly and take too long and people will die waiting for drugs that we know work to get approved. Arguing that we need no regulation makes as little sense as arguing that the government should run the entire thing top to bottom. Both notions are absurd.
Now, where in the middle is the life saving power of medicine maximized? I do not know the answer to that.
For the record, I think all drug prohibition should end and I am against the "war on drugs". But I am not a wing-nut libertarian who thinks the market will adequately regulate those products. If they were not forced to by the government alcohol and tobacco companies wouldn't disclose the dangers and would make products far more dangerous than they already are.
Furthermore, alcohol does exactly what it's intended to do and when used responsibly is perfectly safe, and in certain forms and doses may even be beneficial. Also, the risks are well understood, documented, and labeled. And when discussing alcohol you can't ignore the intoxicating effects which are considered desirable by much of the population. A similar case can be made for tobacco. I don't hear anyone clamoring to lose their sense of smell permanently because they used a product they thought was safe to prevent a cold.
There are nuances to the situation that you seem reluctant to recognize.
This product needs to be removed from the market. I'd like to see stricter controls on things like this. Anything that attempts to cure or prevent disease needs to be evaluated and tested by the FDA. All supplements, vitamins, these cold prevention products should all have to shown to be safe and do what they claim BEFORE they can be sold.
To be a "professional blogger," which is really just a professional writer who publishes on the internet, you have to already be interesting and well known enough to attract readers or start from nothing and prove that you are interesting and talented enough to be worth reading. Then you can either sell ad space/content from your own site or get hired to write for someone else. Both of those scenarios are possible and there are examples of each. Writing is just like any form of artistic expression. The majority of people simply aren't good enough at it to make enough money to survive without also having another source of income. Even many who are talented don't get enough recognition to allow them to quit their day job.
But I think that is missing the point entirely. I suspect the vast majority of people who blog aren't doing it to make money and they never hope to. Blogging is essentially free, and at that price point there are plenty of voices that are worth checking out that wouldn't be worthwhile at any other price point, and maybe some of those people will even mature into successful writers in the traditional sense.
So yeah, you probably won't ever be a professional blogger, or novelist, or painter, or musician but that doesn't stop people from enjoying those creative outlets for their own sake.
We are designing our babies when we choose (often poorly) who we want to reproduce with. It's the same way we've been doing "genetic engineering" for centuries with species of plants and animals. All the different food you eat wouldn't exist without man interfering and selectively breeding crops and livestock for desirable traits like larger body mass an higher resistance to frost. New techniques just make the process faster and easier with a higher success rate but when we apply these same technologies to H. sapiens people freak out.
So afraid of repeating the mistakes of the past they gladly trade a tyrannical dictatorship for a tyrannical politically correct "democracy." When I see what Germany has been reduced to I'm amazed that only a few generations ago they nearly conquered Europe for the second time. It isn't just Germany though, the UK has been rushing headlong into a police state with such speed it's like they think Orwell's 1984 was an instruction manual. My own country isn't much better, although here in the US it seems like we aren't moving as fast towards a police state as the rest of the world.
I sincerely hope this does not come to pass in Germany. The loss of freedom for anyone anywhere in the world should outrage us all. In the end though the Germans have to fix this themselves, and they'll end up with the government they deserve just like the rest of us.
Re:"Flight Consoles in the US"?
on
Wired for War
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· Score: 1
I'm sure the connection doesn't go over the open internet. They probably have satellites dedicated to just relaying the commands from the pilot.
In order for something to be a crime, it must be demonstrated that it causes harm, suffering, or loss. There has to be a victim. Now, the victim could be argued to be society as a whole, but I've not seen any actual proof that rape games make people rape or violent games make people violent.
I have played the game mentioned in TFA out of curiosity. It was linked to on a forum I frequent. It wasn't disturbing to me at all because I took it for what it is: fiction. Fictional depictions of death don't disturb me either, and I think any reasonable person would consider death worse than rape.
Rape is terrible, so is murder. Those crimes are even more disturbing and tragic when they happen to children. But that's not these people are arguing against. Raping children (or anyone) is ALREADY illegal. The opponents of this game are not arguing against rape, they are arguing against free speech but are confusing the debate by painting the other side as being pro-rape. Stop confusing the issue and argue on the facts. You are talking about banning a form of expression. What is being expressed is a terrible thing, yes, but freedom of speech doesn't just protect things you find agreeable. Polite speech doesn't require protection.
Censorship is always worse than what is being censored.
Hopefully the test doesn't require burning too much of the purchase;)
I'm not that experienced when it comes to whiskey, but is there a huge difference (a £20,000 difference) between a 50 year old bottle and a 150 year old bottle in terms of the actual quality of the whiskey or does the price simply reflect the rarity and status? Is there ever a point where the whiskey doesn't get better after more time?
Why are willfully ignorant religious morons making technical and scientific policy?
It's this whole democracy thing. When a large enough percentage of your population believes a certain way that eventually gets expressed in laws and policy. Just read this thread about the large hadron collider to get an idea what we're up against in America today. Some great quotes if you don't want to follow the link:
The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth." What other answers do [scientists] need?
I find it strangely humorous, that man will spend billions of dollars to find the starting of life, and all we spent was maybe forty dollars for a bible.
I pray that if this "man-made" machine proves anything, it gives a totally unexpected and confusing answer (confusing at least to those who don't know the TRUTH!)
I'm very uncomfortable with this thing and pray that it fails again!
I believe in the Big Bang Theory! It's found in Genesis 1-God spoke, and BANG, it happenend.
They are supposedly looking for the "Higgs Boson" aka. the God particle, but I still say they are attempting to open a portal into the spirit realm with that thing.
On facebook you can limit your information to only be accessible to friends, friends of friends or your network. It's quite granular, if your information is accessible by people you don't want it to be then that's your fault for not using the privacy settings that facebook provides.
Shhhh! Don't let frivolous things like logic and facts get in the way of bashing the environmentalism movement. Protecting the environment is bad for business and in a truly free market there shouldn't be any restrictions on my megacorporation's right to pollute the atmosphere. After all, people are smart, rational, and think ahead so if my company pollutes they'll just take their business elsewhere and I'll go out of business. Can't you see how beautiful libertarianism and the free market is? It solves climate change better than those silly scientists and regulations ever could.
I WOULD argue that they should do otherwise if they are charging 100 times the price necessary to cover their costs. Now, they should make some profit, but selling bandwidth at 1000% the cost to provide it *is* gouging. If they want to sell me on a metered plan then it should costs a few cents per GB AT MOST, a cost to reflect the actual expenses of delivering me the bandwidth.
If all the customers are using their connection in such a way then that is the capacity that is being demanded and that is the capacity that the infrastructure needs to be able to handle. If it can't handle it, then the answer is simple; upgrade the network. Now that's an exaggeration, but the truth that no one at the ISPs wants to deal with is that raising price to encourage people to use less is not a long term solution. Eventually there is just going to be too much data being moved around and they'll have to expand their capacity. This is going to cost money and no one wants to spend it, especially when it's easier (in the short term at least, but they're shooting their own foot) to just charge more and change their business model to an arbitrarily priced metered service with hard caps.
You're never going to convince the private sector that investing in more capacity is a good business move. Business can't look that far into the future. They see an easy way to make more money and that's what they will go for despite the fact that it's completely irresponsible and shortsighted.
Because the cost to the ISP isn't based on how much I use. They have to maintain the infrastructure no matter how much it's being utilized. Their operating costs are the same whether their customers are using 50% of their bandwidth capacity or 99%. I shouldn't have to pay more because I use the resource that is available. If they are unable to deliver the service they are selling then they need to invest in upgrading their capacity. Bandwidth demand is only going to increase, gouging customers is not a solution to the problem.
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Uh...we already do it with alcohol and tobacco. Check your beer can, it says you should drive or operate machinery, and your pack of Marlboro 100s warn that they cause lung cancer. I'm saying legalize other drugs and apply this same standard.
I think it's worthwhile that we have some kind of system in place that stops such dangerous drugs and remedies from reaching the public at all, BEFORE anyone is harmed/defrauded. It shouldn't have to come to a legal battle because those dangerous products should have never made it to the pharmacy shelf.
And I fully agree that our bodies are not property of the state. I am for the decriminalization of all drugs, I just think they should be regulated like we do with alcohol and tobacco.
I think it's a matter of finding where you can maximize the saving of lives. Either extreme would result in more people dying than somewhere in the middle. Absolutely no restriction would result in dangerous drugs being released to he public, or more likely, drugs that simply do nothing at all. At the other extreme, full government control will be too costly and take too long and people will die waiting for drugs that we know work to get approved. Arguing that we need no regulation makes as little sense as arguing that the government should run the entire thing top to bottom. Both notions are absurd.
Now, where in the middle is the life saving power of medicine maximized? I do not know the answer to that.
For the record, I think all drug prohibition should end and I am against the "war on drugs". But I am not a wing-nut libertarian who thinks the market will adequately regulate those products. If they were not forced to by the government alcohol and tobacco companies wouldn't disclose the dangers and would make products far more dangerous than they already are.
Furthermore, alcohol does exactly what it's intended to do and when used responsibly is perfectly safe, and in certain forms and doses may even be beneficial. Also, the risks are well understood, documented, and labeled. And when discussing alcohol you can't ignore the intoxicating effects which are considered desirable by much of the population. A similar case can be made for tobacco. I don't hear anyone clamoring to lose their sense of smell permanently because they used a product they thought was safe to prevent a cold.
There are nuances to the situation that you seem reluctant to recognize.
This product needs to be removed from the market. I'd like to see stricter controls on things like this. Anything that attempts to cure or prevent disease needs to be evaluated and tested by the FDA. All supplements, vitamins, these cold prevention products should all have to shown to be safe and do what they claim BEFORE they can be sold.
To be a "professional blogger," which is really just a professional writer who publishes on the internet, you have to already be interesting and well known enough to attract readers or start from nothing and prove that you are interesting and talented enough to be worth reading. Then you can either sell ad space/content from your own site or get hired to write for someone else. Both of those scenarios are possible and there are examples of each. Writing is just like any form of artistic expression. The majority of people simply aren't good enough at it to make enough money to survive without also having another source of income. Even many who are talented don't get enough recognition to allow them to quit their day job.
But I think that is missing the point entirely. I suspect the vast majority of people who blog aren't doing it to make money and they never hope to. Blogging is essentially free, and at that price point there are plenty of voices that are worth checking out that wouldn't be worthwhile at any other price point, and maybe some of those people will even mature into successful writers in the traditional sense.
So yeah, you probably won't ever be a professional blogger, or novelist, or painter, or musician but that doesn't stop people from enjoying those creative outlets for their own sake.
We are designing our babies when we choose (often poorly) who we want to reproduce with. It's the same way we've been doing "genetic engineering" for centuries with species of plants and animals. All the different food you eat wouldn't exist without man interfering and selectively breeding crops and livestock for desirable traits like larger body mass an higher resistance to frost. New techniques just make the process faster and easier with a higher success rate but when we apply these same technologies to H. sapiens people freak out.
So afraid of repeating the mistakes of the past they gladly trade a tyrannical dictatorship for a tyrannical politically correct "democracy." When I see what Germany has been reduced to I'm amazed that only a few generations ago they nearly conquered Europe for the second time. It isn't just Germany though, the UK has been rushing headlong into a police state with such speed it's like they think Orwell's 1984 was an instruction manual. My own country isn't much better, although here in the US it seems like we aren't moving as fast towards a police state as the rest of the world.
I sincerely hope this does not come to pass in Germany. The loss of freedom for anyone anywhere in the world should outrage us all. In the end though the Germans have to fix this themselves, and they'll end up with the government they deserve just like the rest of us.
I'm sure the connection doesn't go over the open internet. They probably have satellites dedicated to just relaying the commands from the pilot.
In order for something to be a crime, it must be demonstrated that it causes harm, suffering, or loss. There has to be a victim. Now, the victim could be argued to be society as a whole, but I've not seen any actual proof that rape games make people rape or violent games make people violent.
I have played the game mentioned in TFA out of curiosity. It was linked to on a forum I frequent. It wasn't disturbing to me at all because I took it for what it is: fiction. Fictional depictions of death don't disturb me either, and I think any reasonable person would consider death worse than rape.
Rape is terrible, so is murder. Those crimes are even more disturbing and tragic when they happen to children. But that's not these people are arguing against. Raping children (or anyone) is ALREADY illegal. The opponents of this game are not arguing against rape, they are arguing against free speech but are confusing the debate by painting the other side as being pro-rape. Stop confusing the issue and argue on the facts. You are talking about banning a form of expression. What is being expressed is a terrible thing, yes, but freedom of speech doesn't just protect things you find agreeable. Polite speech doesn't require protection.
Censorship is always worse than what is being censored.
Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies, P. Bear. He's also an MD specializing in pediatric gynecology.
I'm going to see it tonight. This is the first Star Trek movie ever to have been made, and there have never been any TV shows.
That's what I'm choosing to believe because everything else is either incredibly dated, unremarkable or just plain bad.
Hopefully the test doesn't require burning too much of the purchase ;)
I'm not that experienced when it comes to whiskey, but is there a huge difference (a £20,000 difference) between a 50 year old bottle and a 150 year old bottle in terms of the actual quality of the whiskey or does the price simply reflect the rarity and status? Is there ever a point where the whiskey doesn't get better after more time?
I think I'll stick with J&B.
Why are willfully ignorant religious morons making technical and scientific policy?
It's this whole democracy thing. When a large enough percentage of your population believes a certain way that eventually gets expressed in laws and policy. Just read this thread about the large hadron collider to get an idea what we're up against in America today. Some great quotes if you don't want to follow the link:
The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth." What other answers do [scientists] need?
I find it strangely humorous, that man will spend billions of dollars to find the starting of life, and all we spent was maybe forty dollars for a bible.
I pray that if this "man-made" machine proves anything, it gives a totally unexpected and confusing answer (confusing at least to those who don't know the TRUTH!)
I'm very uncomfortable with this thing and pray that it fails again!
I believe in the Big Bang Theory! It's found in Genesis 1-God spoke, and BANG, it happenend.
They are supposedly looking for the "Higgs Boson" aka. the God particle, but I still say they are attempting to open a portal into the spirit realm with that thing.
There are ads on facebook?
On facebook you can limit your information to only be accessible to friends, friends of friends or your network. It's quite granular, if your information is accessible by people you don't want it to be then that's your fault for not using the privacy settings that facebook provides.
My understanding was that it is skewed towards white adult males, it's not as accurate for anyone else.
They're a big tent...err, pirate ship.
and "pro-ana" sites
I'm pretty hip, but I don't know what that means.
It's not worth the effort. With the exception of just a few exclusives, all the games worth playing on the PS3 are also on the 360 or PC.
Shhhh! Don't let frivolous things like logic and facts get in the way of bashing the environmentalism movement. Protecting the environment is bad for business and in a truly free market there shouldn't be any restrictions on my megacorporation's right to pollute the atmosphere. After all, people are smart, rational, and think ahead so if my company pollutes they'll just take their business elsewhere and I'll go out of business. Can't you see how beautiful libertarianism and the free market is? It solves climate change better than those silly scientists and regulations ever could.
I WOULD argue that they should do otherwise if they are charging 100 times the price necessary to cover their costs. Now, they should make some profit, but selling bandwidth at 1000% the cost to provide it *is* gouging. If they want to sell me on a metered plan then it should costs a few cents per GB AT MOST, a cost to reflect the actual expenses of delivering me the bandwidth.
But right now I have no bandwidth cap and a flat rate per month.
If all the customers are using their connection in such a way then that is the capacity that is being demanded and that is the capacity that the infrastructure needs to be able to handle. If it can't handle it, then the answer is simple; upgrade the network. Now that's an exaggeration, but the truth that no one at the ISPs wants to deal with is that raising price to encourage people to use less is not a long term solution. Eventually there is just going to be too much data being moved around and they'll have to expand their capacity. This is going to cost money and no one wants to spend it, especially when it's easier (in the short term at least, but they're shooting their own foot) to just charge more and change their business model to an arbitrarily priced metered service with hard caps.
You're never going to convince the private sector that investing in more capacity is a good business move. Business can't look that far into the future. They see an easy way to make more money and that's what they will go for despite the fact that it's completely irresponsible and shortsighted.
Because the cost to the ISP isn't based on how much I use. They have to maintain the infrastructure no matter how much it's being utilized. Their operating costs are the same whether their customers are using 50% of their bandwidth capacity or 99%. I shouldn't have to pay more because I use the resource that is available. If they are unable to deliver the service they are selling then they need to invest in upgrading their capacity. Bandwidth demand is only going to increase, gouging customers is not a solution to the problem.