Really? You think iTunes was well ported? Let's forget for a second the three (last time I checked) processes it creates and sets to run at startup even if you're not using iTunes, the actual program has the slowest UI I've ever seen and it just looks out of place in XP or Vista. It routinely locks up my computer when performing tasks, and every few weeks I get nagged to install safari--and I'm forced to UNCHECK the box.
Apple is worse than either MS or google IMO. Chrome installs googleupdater but at least that's just one tiny process that barely ever does anything.
The liberal (not necessarily Dem) stance is more nuanced than the conservative idea of "More demand so just drill for more oil."
Liberals recognize that fossil fuels are quickly running out and "drilling for more" won't be possible sometime in the future, and that using the fuel as we have been IS environmentally harmful. Conservatives don't care if we run out later, that will be someone else's problem. When you are about to run out of an important and critical resource about the worst thing you can do is ramp up production and burn through your last remaining drops.
Even if we drilled in ANWR and off the coast we would STILL be importing a vast majority of our oil. My objections to those ideas are not based on environmentalism but simple reason. If we could become energy independent by drilling in ANWR I would be the first to say to hell with the wild life, but there just isn't that much oil there when you compare it to how much we use every day. If anything, doing that would simply delay the inevitable and slow our development and adoption of cleaner, sustainable fuel sources.
I'm helping maintain equilibrium; both me and my girlfriend are horrible at math. Actually that means I'll need to produce two math competent offspring to keep the human race evened out.
I don't care so much about the environment in Alaska. Well, I do, but it's not my primary concern. I'm against drilling there for other reasons. Even the highest estimates say we'll only get about a 10 dollar reduction in the price per barrel of oil. That translates to a few cents per gallon. I think the money and time are better spent trying to figure out how to get us off fossil fuels than just postponing the inevitable decline of oil. And as a bonus, all that territory in Alaska can remain untouched by man.
I've said it before that nearly all socio-economic and geo-political problems can be either solved or greatly reduced by a drastic reduction of Earth's population. 1b or less humans would be ideal. Unfortunately that's impossible to accomplish without genocide or some massive abridgment of human rights, neither of which I would like to see. People aren't going to slow their reproductive habits voluntarily. Instead of sustainable low numbers that we can support comfortably the human population will expand until disease, famine, and war provide us with an equilibrium...along with plenty of--unnecessary--suffering.
If you support libertarianism, you have to support that option being on the table. So you have to be the kind of person who is perfectly fine telling someone their only option is to go without care, suffer excruciatingly and eventually die. Which is why libertarianism is so abhorrent to me. It is an inhuman, greedy, me-first, dog-eat-dog philosophy that legitimizes human suffering or any injustice if it's profitable and not "coercion". And a libertarian would be standing over the man dying of cancer getting no treatment or painkillers that he should have made more money to afford insurance, or lived in a more charitable community, or had a wealthier family. Then to add insult to injury he might add that he had plenty of chances to make a life for himself and that if he couldn't succeed in this capitalistic utopia that he has only himself to blame and indeed deserves his present condition.
Libertarianism is the result of wealthy capitalists desperate to assuage their own guilt by creating a system that says it's ok to exploit people for profit, it's ok to be greedy, it's ok to treat people like dollar signs instead of fellow human beings. The stuff about rights and liberty is really nothing more than an after thought since in such a society only those wealthy enough to afford freedom would have it.
Aggression is wrong, even when performed by a public official in full accordance with the written laws; defensive use of force -- including immediate self-defense, restitution, and retribution -- is not wrong The biggest problem I have with libertarianism and its supporters is that this basic idea is presented as some sort of self-evident truism. It's a moral/ethical system (one I happen to generally agree with but with a narrower definition of aggression/coercion), and no more and no less true than any other ethical system. I'm curious as to how you would sell the tenets of libertarianism to someone who flat out rejects your primary ethical principle. Basically, could you convince a moral relativist to be a libertarian? That would involve the theories of libertarianism standing on their own without needing to fall back to the "It's just the right thing to do" argument. You'd need examples of powerful and prosperous libertarian-organized states throughout history comparable to the United States or nations with similar levels of personal freedom. You would need to show that, given the choice, people would generally choose to live in such a libertarian society, and that such a society would be sustainable more so than current states are.
And you are forgetting that this country was founded by people who wanted us to be free of this type of governmental activity? Actually we wanted representation and a government that was responsive to the needs of the people instead of just extracting money and resources while ignoring us.
Is it OK for me to rob someone take their money and give it to someone else? If you're referring to taxation, yes.
Is the person being robbed being selfish for not wanting to be robbed? If you're referring to taxation, yes.
I don't think anyone has a right to keep 100% of the wealth they produce, unless maybe you live a completely self-sufficient self-sustaining lifestyle off the grid in some remote place. I recognize that an individual does have some responsibility to the collective society which allowed that individual to succeed. For the most part, far right-wingers and libertarians just want to take their ball and go home, forgetting that their success is in part due to the work done by others before them. Wanting to wiggle out of your responsibilities of the social contract while retaining the benefits is pretty self-centered and short sighted.
You clearly have no idea how little oil there is in ANWR. Even after we got production up to full capacity we still would be importing the vast majority of our oil. Is there some oil there, yes, but not enough to make a difference. I don't even care about the wildlife, that's not the point. Drilling there would be a drop in the barrel compared to the total amount of oil we are using. The money would be better spent on alternative sources of energy or building new nuclear reactors.
What is the obsession with pencils in math classes? When I make a mistake with pencil I just scribble it out anyway, so being able to erase is irrelevant. Pen is darker, bolder, easier to read, the tip doesn't break, and you don't have to sharpen a pen. You also don't get annoying and messy graphite powder smudges all over your paper and hand.
They didn't seem very easy when I was in high school just a few years ago. I even failed one of my math classes, Algebra 2 my last year. I barely missed passing. I never fully understood what we were learning and more complex material like calculus--forget about it. Didn't stop me from graduating though because I had already completed enough math credits; it was only required you complete up to geometry. I always thought that was too low. Even though I failed the class, and it would have kept me from graduating on time, I think it should be a requirement to pass the class I failed. Standards are getting lowered all over the place in public school, of course math is going to be hit too.
It shouldn't be difficult to prove the tests are getting easier, just compare representative samples from each decade. Also you have to take into account that students are allowed calculators on a lot of the exams now and portable programmable graphing calculators didn't even exist 50 years ago.
I have sympathy for students who find mathematics a difficult subject, but lowering standards, dumbing down the material, and providing technological crutches are not viable solutions.
It was like a chess game for me. I couldn't wait for them to do a countermeasure... Anyone developing software designed to keep content locked down needs to realize that this is the kind of person they're up against. It's hard to beat that kind of motivation. Forcing an arms race is almost always going to be counter-productive to protecting your business, this company figured that out.
The answers to those points you raise is another type of freedom: freedom of choice--also called free will. We assume that people are in control of their own actions, and that ideas, words, and speech by itself is inherently incapable of causing harm. When someone takes that speech and acts on it, they are responsible for the action and are handled in a way that is considered appropriate by society.
I want to live in that kind of society, not the kind that tries to protect me by limiting what I can and can't talk about because it may possibly put me in danger.
I often wonder how much of the statistics of sexual abuse and child porn are inflated because of our age of consent laws. Not sure what they are in the UK, and this is about a proposed law in the UK, but in the US the age is usually around 18. So a 17 year old taking pictures of herself has the same legal designation as a 10 year old being molested and photographed by her abusers. If we had a law like this then drawings too would be just as bad? They're making a category of crime even larger when it already lacks the subtleties needed to deal with the reality of the world we live in.
The effect they have on real children has not been demonstrated as far as I've seen, and certainly not to the high standard of evidence that should be required given what is at stake and the frightening precedent that would be set.
Even if you're right, that's the price of free speech. You either protect everything, even the vile, disgusting, hateful speech you disagree with or you don't have free speech at all.
I do well on those ones! I fail at the math questions. Shape selection too because I can usually find logical/artistic ways to justify all the selections.
I'll own up to my score; I got a little over 110. It said something about a penalty for not answering enough questions. I don't think you can ever have a useful test for measuring something as complex as human intelligence either, same with personality tests. They might give you a very course understanding of something if your question is narrow enough, but it will never be very useful, especially when you set out to define something as broad as is attempted by the designers of an IQ test.
And? It's not my job to provide them with a revenue stream if alternatives are available that make more sense. No one has a right to make a profit if people are not willing to pay. The folks at the RIAA and other business that rely on "IP" such as game design companies would do better to spend their time printing resumes and learning new skills or new business models to market their current skills; their current jobs are going to be obsolete pretty fast. And I don't cry for them anymore than I cry for buggy-whip manufacturers. They no longer provide a service that people are willing to pay for, the reasons why are immaterial to that basic point. If people won't pay you anymore, it's time to find a new occupation.
That's what I was thinking. Bigger hard drives maybe? That's all I could come up with, but a price difference of only 7 US dollars doesn't sound right.
I got a lot of replies but I'm going to respond to this one because it caught my eye in particular.
You say that, "...most will err on the side of safety" and I do not dispute this claim. In fact, I am all too aware of how true this is. It's also the wrong stance to take, giving up your small liberties, if you value the larger and important ones. Having your records or documents searched without a warrant isn't even a small liberty to lose, that's one of the big ones. It's one of the most important ones. In the end, the problem I have with this is that the police, a law enforcement agency and agent of the government, are seizing phone records without first obtaining a warrant as is required by law. The phone companies are complicit in this. Erosion of civil liberties starts with small things like this, and trading them in for safety is one of the most effective ways the government has of tricking you into cooperating as your rights are chiseled away a little at a time.
If someone is missing, and it is believed a crime has taken place or they are in danger, there are established protocols for how the police must go about obtaining personal information to aid in the search or investigate a crime. Why does the situation somehow change when an electronic device is involved?
But you're not able to make that distinction beforehand, and if you can then you should have no trouble proving it to a judge. The ethical dilemma is that, if a person goes missing they may or may not be in danger so if you violate their privacy by tracking them down with their cellphone you're only justified if they were in danger. If they just decided they wanted to leave their town without telling anyone, you've committed a huge breach of their personal privacy for nothing. I usually find it best to err on the side of privacy rather than safety. There's also the precedent it sets of cooperation by the phone companies (as if we didn't have enough of that already) with the government without a warrant.
If there is need for phone records to be accessed, we have appropriate channels that law enforcement needs to go through to obtain such information.
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Really? You think iTunes was well ported? Let's forget for a second the three (last time I checked) processes it creates and sets to run at startup even if you're not using iTunes, the actual program has the slowest UI I've ever seen and it just looks out of place in XP or Vista. It routinely locks up my computer when performing tasks, and every few weeks I get nagged to install safari--and I'm forced to UNCHECK the box.
Apple is worse than either MS or google IMO. Chrome installs googleupdater but at least that's just one tiny process that barely ever does anything.
The liberal (not necessarily Dem) stance is more nuanced than the conservative idea of "More demand so just drill for more oil."
Liberals recognize that fossil fuels are quickly running out and "drilling for more" won't be possible sometime in the future, and that using the fuel as we have been IS environmentally harmful. Conservatives don't care if we run out later, that will be someone else's problem. When you are about to run out of an important and critical resource about the worst thing you can do is ramp up production and burn through your last remaining drops.
Even if we drilled in ANWR and off the coast we would STILL be importing a vast majority of our oil. My objections to those ideas are not based on environmentalism but simple reason. If we could become energy independent by drilling in ANWR I would be the first to say to hell with the wild life, but there just isn't that much oil there when you compare it to how much we use every day. If anything, doing that would simply delay the inevitable and slow our development and adoption of cleaner, sustainable fuel sources.
...the damage good ole [President Bill Clinton]...did to us
8 years of peace and prosperity ending with a budget surplus?
I'm helping maintain equilibrium; both me and my girlfriend are horrible at math. Actually that means I'll need to produce two math competent offspring to keep the human race evened out.
I don't care so much about the environment in Alaska. Well, I do, but it's not my primary concern. I'm against drilling there for other reasons. Even the highest estimates say we'll only get about a 10 dollar reduction in the price per barrel of oil. That translates to a few cents per gallon. I think the money and time are better spent trying to figure out how to get us off fossil fuels than just postponing the inevitable decline of oil. And as a bonus, all that territory in Alaska can remain untouched by man.
That post took a strange turn the last few lines.
I've said it before that nearly all socio-economic and geo-political problems can be either solved or greatly reduced by a drastic reduction of Earth's population. 1b or less humans would be ideal. Unfortunately that's impossible to accomplish without genocide or some massive abridgment of human rights, neither of which I would like to see. People aren't going to slow their reproductive habits voluntarily. Instead of sustainable low numbers that we can support comfortably the human population will expand until disease, famine, and war provide us with an equilibrium...along with plenty of--unnecessary--suffering.
5. Die
If you support libertarianism, you have to support that option being on the table. So you have to be the kind of person who is perfectly fine telling someone their only option is to go without care, suffer excruciatingly and eventually die. Which is why libertarianism is so abhorrent to me. It is an inhuman, greedy, me-first, dog-eat-dog philosophy that legitimizes human suffering or any injustice if it's profitable and not "coercion". And a libertarian would be standing over the man dying of cancer getting no treatment or painkillers that he should have made more money to afford insurance, or lived in a more charitable community, or had a wealthier family. Then to add insult to injury he might add that he had plenty of chances to make a life for himself and that if he couldn't succeed in this capitalistic utopia that he has only himself to blame and indeed deserves his present condition.
Libertarianism is the result of wealthy capitalists desperate to assuage their own guilt by creating a system that says it's ok to exploit people for profit, it's ok to be greedy, it's ok to treat people like dollar signs instead of fellow human beings. The stuff about rights and liberty is really nothing more than an after thought since in such a society only those wealthy enough to afford freedom would have it.
I'm disappointed that I made your foes list. Seeing posts you disagree with should improve the entire discussion, no?
Nice sig, btw.
Next question?
I don't think anyone has a right to keep 100% of the wealth they produce, unless maybe you live a completely self-sufficient self-sustaining lifestyle off the grid in some remote place. I recognize that an individual does have some responsibility to the collective society which allowed that individual to succeed. For the most part, far right-wingers and libertarians just want to take their ball and go home, forgetting that their success is in part due to the work done by others before them. Wanting to wiggle out of your responsibilities of the social contract while retaining the benefits is pretty self-centered and short sighted.
You clearly have no idea how little oil there is in ANWR. Even after we got production up to full capacity we still would be importing the vast majority of our oil. Is there some oil there, yes, but not enough to make a difference. I don't even care about the wildlife, that's not the point. Drilling there would be a drop in the barrel compared to the total amount of oil we are using. The money would be better spent on alternative sources of energy or building new nuclear reactors.
What is the obsession with pencils in math classes? When I make a mistake with pencil I just scribble it out anyway, so being able to erase is irrelevant. Pen is darker, bolder, easier to read, the tip doesn't break, and you don't have to sharpen a pen. You also don't get annoying and messy graphite powder smudges all over your paper and hand.
They didn't seem very easy when I was in high school just a few years ago. I even failed one of my math classes, Algebra 2 my last year. I barely missed passing. I never fully understood what we were learning and more complex material like calculus--forget about it. Didn't stop me from graduating though because I had already completed enough math credits; it was only required you complete up to geometry. I always thought that was too low. Even though I failed the class, and it would have kept me from graduating on time, I think it should be a requirement to pass the class I failed. Standards are getting lowered all over the place in public school, of course math is going to be hit too.
It shouldn't be difficult to prove the tests are getting easier, just compare representative samples from each decade. Also you have to take into account that students are allowed calculators on a lot of the exams now and portable programmable graphing calculators didn't even exist 50 years ago.
I have sympathy for students who find mathematics a difficult subject, but lowering standards, dumbing down the material, and providing technological crutches are not viable solutions.
The answers to those points you raise is another type of freedom: freedom of choice--also called free will. We assume that people are in control of their own actions, and that ideas, words, and speech by itself is inherently incapable of causing harm. When someone takes that speech and acts on it, they are responsible for the action and are handled in a way that is considered appropriate by society.
I want to live in that kind of society, not the kind that tries to protect me by limiting what I can and can't talk about because it may possibly put me in danger.
I often wonder how much of the statistics of sexual abuse and child porn are inflated because of our age of consent laws. Not sure what they are in the UK, and this is about a proposed law in the UK, but in the US the age is usually around 18. So a 17 year old taking pictures of herself has the same legal designation as a 10 year old being molested and photographed by her abusers. If we had a law like this then drawings too would be just as bad? They're making a category of crime even larger when it already lacks the subtleties needed to deal with the reality of the world we live in.
The effect they have on real children has not been demonstrated as far as I've seen, and certainly not to the high standard of evidence that should be required given what is at stake and the frightening precedent that would be set.
Even if you're right, that's the price of free speech. You either protect everything, even the vile, disgusting, hateful speech you disagree with or you don't have free speech at all.
I do well on those ones! I fail at the math questions. Shape selection too because I can usually find logical/artistic ways to justify all the selections.
I'll own up to my score; I got a little over 110. It said something about a penalty for not answering enough questions. I don't think you can ever have a useful test for measuring something as complex as human intelligence either, same with personality tests. They might give you a very course understanding of something if your question is narrow enough, but it will never be very useful, especially when you set out to define something as broad as is attempted by the designers of an IQ test.
And? It's not my job to provide them with a revenue stream if alternatives are available that make more sense. No one has a right to make a profit if people are not willing to pay. The folks at the RIAA and other business that rely on "IP" such as game design companies would do better to spend their time printing resumes and learning new skills or new business models to market their current skills; their current jobs are going to be obsolete pretty fast. And I don't cry for them anymore than I cry for buggy-whip manufacturers. They no longer provide a service that people are willing to pay for, the reasons why are immaterial to that basic point. If people won't pay you anymore, it's time to find a new occupation.
That's what I was thinking. Bigger hard drives maybe? That's all I could come up with, but a price difference of only 7 US dollars doesn't sound right.
I got a lot of replies but I'm going to respond to this one because it caught my eye in particular.
You say that, "...most will err on the side of safety" and I do not dispute this claim. In fact, I am all too aware of how true this is. It's also the wrong stance to take, giving up your small liberties, if you value the larger and important ones. Having your records or documents searched without a warrant isn't even a small liberty to lose, that's one of the big ones. It's one of the most important ones. In the end, the problem I have with this is that the police, a law enforcement agency and agent of the government, are seizing phone records without first obtaining a warrant as is required by law. The phone companies are complicit in this. Erosion of civil liberties starts with small things like this, and trading them in for safety is one of the most effective ways the government has of tricking you into cooperating as your rights are chiseled away a little at a time.
If someone is missing, and it is believed a crime has taken place or they are in danger, there are established protocols for how the police must go about obtaining personal information to aid in the search or investigate a crime. Why does the situation somehow change when an electronic device is involved?
But you're not able to make that distinction beforehand, and if you can then you should have no trouble proving it to a judge. The ethical dilemma is that, if a person goes missing they may or may not be in danger so if you violate their privacy by tracking them down with their cellphone you're only justified if they were in danger. If they just decided they wanted to leave their town without telling anyone, you've committed a huge breach of their personal privacy for nothing. I usually find it best to err on the side of privacy rather than safety. There's also the precedent it sets of cooperation by the phone companies (as if we didn't have enough of that already) with the government without a warrant.
If there is need for phone records to be accessed, we have appropriate channels that law enforcement needs to go through to obtain such information.
...first blowjob at a [boy]scout camp. Wait a minute, there's something wrong with this story; slashdotters don't have sex!