"will also stagnate due to massively overburdening corporations and governments with beaurocracy"
So you're saying that they'll finally throw off the yoke of western cultural dominance and return to the way they were before Europeans arrived and screwed up their country? (Apologies to Chinese readers, but I couldn't resist.)
Unfortunately, Iron also forms a protective oxide layer very quickly at room temp (same oxidation, actually). Thats why thermite is AlO and Fe(s) powders mixed together, not just Fe ground up by itself. Metal contact for the reduction in activation energy and max change in enthalpy.
Oh, noes, I know how to make a common military sabotage device, guess I'm one of the 1% of chem hobbyists that are making people paranoid about the other 99%.
There's also the danger of them asking why the overall size of the budget is the same, taxes have increased, and schools and roads don't appear to be getting any more funding, if so much money has been saved. (Or rather, the danger of your opponent asking it in the next election year.
"But really, how can you sit there and say that civil liberties work against civil rights?"
Because I said nothing of the sort. How can you argue that we should arbitrarily murder babies in their sleep to prevent them from someday cutting you off in a conversation? (that was sarcastic irony-- tagged to prevent another strawman post)
Seriously, though, you're saying that the good of the individual should be sacrificed for the good of the majority. While I wouldn't necessarily disagree, I'd point out that this is the principle behind despotism, not rights-based republicanism (the government type, not the political party-- tagged again to prevent another strawman) and runs almost directly counter to the idea of civil rights, which are supposed to prevent 51% of the population from voting to remove the other 49%'s voting rights and whatnot.
Voluntarily sacrificing your life, of course, is another set of philosophies entirely. Patriotism, Nationalism, etc. I like 'em jsut fine, but they also have nothing to do with civil rights (beyond being necessary to maintain them, of course).
Yeah, I think we've moved to cross-points. My general concept of civil liberties is not to preserve freedom as such: they are to prevent 99% of the population from deciding that the other 1% should give up all their worldly goods and go live under a bridge, which is the fundamental weakness of any flavor of democracy. So the whole idea is to have a set of laws that protect an arbitrarily small population sample (the individual) from abuse of the power-of-numbers thing. This implies that the individual is more valuable than the group or the descision the group makes, in the underlying philosophy.
Most societies today are a balance of restrictive law (don't shoot your neighbor) that keeps society from collapsing entirely, and civil liberties, which keep restrictive laws from annoying everyone too much (resulting in rebellion, which also collapses societies, generally). Restrictive laws operate on the "it's for everyone's good, so shut up and cooperate" principle, while civil liberties operate on the "I'm an individual, man! you can't tell me what to do, man!" principle.
So I wasn't arguing general politics here, just commenting that the general idea of civil liberties is that people are more important than the laws of society, civil liberties included. It was probably a poor decision on my part to make the comment in the first place, I should have seen it requiring more explanation than I really felt like providing at the time.
(Also, yeah, the clause you quote isn't a logical statement, just a set of assertions, and I'd agree that what you said is how things work, and even agree that that's how they should work. Your argument isn't really based in civil liberties, though, but in restrictive law, as, well, any rational argument regarding restricting action really must be.)
All right, freedom may be a concept, but civil liberties are the institution established in an attempt to implement that concept. Thus, accepting the general idea of individual rights, they are still less important philosophically than the individuals they protect.
On a side note, I think you are right in your conclusion that the protection of some of the basic government institutions (bill of rights, etc) is more important than individual lives. I'm just pointing out that it contradicts the underlying assumption of the institutions, that individual men are free and should necessarily be more important than groups of men (or the rules set forth by groups of men). If you're concluding that I disagree with the assumption of individual importance, you'd be right on. Interesting concept, but generally a stumbling block on the path to getting things done.
"seeing as how those are more important than any individual's life anyway"
If the institution is more important than the individual, then the policy is by definition working against civil rights (which are about protecting the individual from the various institutions). Your statement would seem to contradict itself.
The christian texts were written in Latin and Aramaic, and not translated until the second breaking of the church. Even when the empire was strong, most Christians didn't know Latin. The Q'ran was written in the vernacular that everyone who could read at all could read (the muslim empire had a much stronger universal language than late/post-fall rome did). So, essentially, you have it backwards for most of the history of the religions.
As for the present, I have an english translation of the text sitting on my desk right now, which kind of blows your theory out of the water. I'm informed you have to learn Arabic to be considered a scholar of the text, but since you also have to learn French to be a french major and German to be a German major in college, this requirement does not strike me as particularly unreasonable.
(P.S. - Any seminary worth its salt FORCES you to learn latin and greek, though I've heard some will let you slide on the Aramaic and Hebrew, but not many.)
In his defense, I think most of us would interpret that as being submission to the will of god, not necessarily to that of his clerics. Since god tends to speak to us in ways not strictly defined by human language, I'd say that implies a certain amount of personal responsibility for the interpretation of policy.
Optimizing their own products to work with their other products? How dastardly. And definitely not the sensible thing to do since their own format is not subject to change without notice to them, nope.
Movies are Union/Mob deals, at least if the parent company is California based. That's why no movie has ever turned a profit, especially ones with a greater revenue than cost, if you get what I'm saying here.
Companies require at least an image of professionalism. If you don't at least make an effort to keep your quirky shit to yourself in public, you are a liability to the image of the company, and thus the company iteslf. Being indiscreet is, believe it or not, both a vice and a business detriment.
So, yes, it has everything to do with job performance. It means that you're less qualified to do the job than the other 100 (or other 1000000, if you do anything in the computer field) people that applied.
More likely, professional clothing will be long enough to cover any body markings present on one's skin, and people will develop methods of tattoo removal involving laser treatment and abrasion... oh, wait, welcome to TWENTY YEARS AGO, when all the tattooed rebels of the 60s and 70s went out to find real jobs.
Seriously, it's a nice fantasy, but history does not support your suppositions. Also, what is this 'rise in body art in the last 15 years'? My impression is that there's been a decrease in that period... and since my impression is the dissenting one i'm going to say that the burden of proof/citation is on you, sir.
In the old folks' defense, our morals are in fact much looser nowadays and only the most educated are capable of basic arithmetic without a calculator, so at best we haven't seen any improvement in the brain-rot factor.
Eh, Graham is a sort of faux-Aristotelian thinker: he has his logic, he doesn't need any of your damned facts. The conclusions are always perfectly logical if you accept his premises: this is what makes his writing so attractive. The fact that his premises are incorrect and incomplete doesn't matter, what matters is that his world is consistent and simple, in a manner this 'reality' nonsense isn't. Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking, and all the children are above average.
The irony of this being, if the Texans all moved to silicon valley, they'd still be hanging out at the beach and skiing because 3 hour drive = next door in Texas.
I don't get it, you're saying a culture based on startups, where inventors starve to death during economic downturns because each idea has its own company, is better for inventors than one where economic downturns just mean they can't take leaps with risky ideas on company time?
Probably in India. I have the impression that they are a culture actually interested in making improvements to their lives through application of the sciences, while the US has too many slack-jawed mouthbreathers who only go to college at all to make themselves more employable (as opposed to making themselves better at their jobs). That's probably because most of the Indians I know are exchange students, though.
"California focuses on brilliance and creativity."
While your comment was not necessarily meant in poor taste and I wouldn't presume to take actual offense, I feel bound to point out that it's this kind of crap that makes the rest of the US think that California's focus is arrogant jackasses.
Brilliance and creativity are everywhere, and California is one of the most unionized states I've ever lived in, meaning that getting tied up in the formalities of contract negotiation and execution is practically the state motto.
I've also heard there are a number of states in the middle of the country. Some are even tech leaders. I think Texas Instruments might be named after one of them, but geography was never my strong point;)
He's being facetious, sort of. He's pointing out that Silicon valley refers specifically to the place (not the process), so the OP question is like asking if the Italian Renaissance, which by definition happened in Italy, could happen anywhere else.
Considering how many liguistic purists there are floating around the dark corners of the boards, I kind of feel odd having to point this one out. You guys should really be used to it by now.
Yeah, the relevant documents pretty much account for the shades of gray. Thus the language "unreasonable searches and seizures" and the dependence on Judicial opinion to determine when a breach of privacy is legal.
"If I establish that it's okay for me to fire someone purely for being gay/Commie/whatever, then I've also established that it's okay for you to fire me for being ugly/Democrat/whatever."
This would be a very wise statement if it wasn't completely logically invalid as well as totally incorrect.
I'm also going to add that moral relativism is a stupid way to go about looking at the world, and that if tolerating people having different ideas than you necessitates you actually accepting those ideas as well, then there is something severely wrong with your brain, which you should really see a doctor about.
Isn't the whole point of man in the middle to decrypt the message and then reincrypt it completely? You're contacting the middleman, and sending him your encryption key, and he's then initiating an unrelated link to your intended recipient and just relaying the information. Complicating the encryption key will do fuck-all to disrupt this, unless I'm missing something here. You would actually have to change the communication channel itself to damage the process.
It will always be free, because lavasoft's spyware sweeper is free and probably better. If you charge (i.e. stop bundling) you lose the convenience factor, which is all that you had going for you.
Plus, I'm picking up form context that the utility is just part of the OS, not a separate program you'd think to charge for. Could be wrong, though, didn't read the article.
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"will also stagnate due to massively overburdening corporations and governments with beaurocracy"
So you're saying that they'll finally throw off the yoke of western cultural dominance and return to the way they were before Europeans arrived and screwed up their country? (Apologies to Chinese readers, but I couldn't resist.)
Unfortunately, Iron also forms a protective oxide layer very quickly at room temp (same oxidation, actually). Thats why thermite is AlO and Fe(s) powders mixed together, not just Fe ground up by itself. Metal contact for the reduction in activation energy and max change in enthalpy.
Oh, noes, I know how to make a common military sabotage device, guess I'm one of the 1% of chem hobbyists that are making people paranoid about the other 99%.
I'm seeing the rationals being countable (injective function to N) but i'm not seeing them having the same cardinality as N (bijective function to N).
There's also the danger of them asking why the overall size of the budget is the same, taxes have increased, and schools and roads don't appear to be getting any more funding, if so much money has been saved. (Or rather, the danger of your opponent asking it in the next election year.
"But really, how can you sit there and say that civil liberties work against civil rights?"
Because I said nothing of the sort. How can you argue that we should arbitrarily murder babies in their sleep to prevent them from someday cutting you off in a conversation? (that was sarcastic irony-- tagged to prevent another strawman post)
Seriously, though, you're saying that the good of the individual should be sacrificed for the good of the majority. While I wouldn't necessarily disagree, I'd point out that this is the principle behind despotism, not rights-based republicanism (the government type, not the political party-- tagged again to prevent another strawman) and runs almost directly counter to the idea of civil rights, which are supposed to prevent 51% of the population from voting to remove the other 49%'s voting rights and whatnot.
Voluntarily sacrificing your life, of course, is another set of philosophies entirely. Patriotism, Nationalism, etc. I like 'em jsut fine, but they also have nothing to do with civil rights (beyond being necessary to maintain them, of course).
Yeah, I think we've moved to cross-points. My general concept of civil liberties is not to preserve freedom as such: they are to prevent 99% of the population from deciding that the other 1% should give up all their worldly goods and go live under a bridge, which is the fundamental weakness of any flavor of democracy. So the whole idea is to have a set of laws that protect an arbitrarily small population sample (the individual) from abuse of the power-of-numbers thing. This implies that the individual is more valuable than the group or the descision the group makes, in the underlying philosophy.
Most societies today are a balance of restrictive law (don't shoot your neighbor) that keeps society from collapsing entirely, and civil liberties, which keep restrictive laws from annoying everyone too much (resulting in rebellion, which also collapses societies, generally). Restrictive laws operate on the "it's for everyone's good, so shut up and cooperate" principle, while civil liberties operate on the "I'm an individual, man! you can't tell me what to do, man!" principle.
So I wasn't arguing general politics here, just commenting that the general idea of civil liberties is that people are more important than the laws of society, civil liberties included. It was probably a poor decision on my part to make the comment in the first place, I should have seen it requiring more explanation than I really felt like providing at the time.
(Also, yeah, the clause you quote isn't a logical statement, just a set of assertions, and I'd agree that what you said is how things work, and even agree that that's how they should work. Your argument isn't really based in civil liberties, though, but in restrictive law, as, well, any rational argument regarding restricting action really must be.)
God damn, but I'm long-winded. Apologies.
All right, freedom may be a concept, but civil liberties are the institution established in an attempt to implement that concept. Thus, accepting the general idea of individual rights, they are still less important philosophically than the individuals they protect.
On a side note, I think you are right in your conclusion that the protection of some of the basic government institutions (bill of rights, etc) is more important than individual lives. I'm just pointing out that it contradicts the underlying assumption of the institutions, that individual men are free and should necessarily be more important than groups of men (or the rules set forth by groups of men). If you're concluding that I disagree with the assumption of individual importance, you'd be right on. Interesting concept, but generally a stumbling block on the path to getting things done.
"seeing as how those are more important than any individual's life anyway"
If the institution is more important than the individual, then the policy is by definition working against civil rights (which are about protecting the individual from the various institutions). Your statement would seem to contradict itself.
The christian texts were written in Latin and Aramaic, and not translated until the second breaking of the church. Even when the empire was strong, most Christians didn't know Latin. The Q'ran was written in the vernacular that everyone who could read at all could read (the muslim empire had a much stronger universal language than late/post-fall rome did). So, essentially, you have it backwards for most of the history of the religions.
As for the present, I have an english translation of the text sitting on my desk right now, which kind of blows your theory out of the water. I'm informed you have to learn Arabic to be considered a scholar of the text, but since you also have to learn French to be a french major and German to be a German major in college, this requirement does not strike me as particularly unreasonable.
(P.S. - Any seminary worth its salt FORCES you to learn latin and greek, though I've heard some will let you slide on the Aramaic and Hebrew, but not many.)
In his defense, I think most of us would interpret that as being submission to the will of god, not necessarily to that of his clerics. Since god tends to speak to us in ways not strictly defined by human language, I'd say that implies a certain amount of personal responsibility for the interpretation of policy.
Optimizing their own products to work with their other products? How dastardly. And definitely not the sensible thing to do since their own format is not subject to change without notice to them, nope.
Movies are Union/Mob deals, at least if the parent company is California based. That's why no movie has ever turned a profit, especially ones with a greater revenue than cost, if you get what I'm saying here.
It's funny because you think I'm exaggerating.
Companies require at least an image of professionalism. If you don't at least make an effort to keep your quirky shit to yourself in public, you are a liability to the image of the company, and thus the company iteslf. Being indiscreet is, believe it or not, both a vice and a business detriment.
So, yes, it has everything to do with job performance. It means that you're less qualified to do the job than the other 100 (or other 1000000, if you do anything in the computer field) people that applied.
More likely, professional clothing will be long enough to cover any body markings present on one's skin, and people will develop methods of tattoo removal involving laser treatment and abrasion... oh, wait, welcome to TWENTY YEARS AGO, when all the tattooed rebels of the 60s and 70s went out to find real jobs.
Seriously, it's a nice fantasy, but history does not support your suppositions. Also, what is this 'rise in body art in the last 15 years'? My impression is that there's been a decrease in that period... and since my impression is the dissenting one i'm going to say that the burden of proof/citation is on you, sir.
In the old folks' defense, our morals are in fact much looser nowadays and only the most educated are capable of basic arithmetic without a calculator, so at best we haven't seen any improvement in the brain-rot factor.
Eh, Graham is a sort of faux-Aristotelian thinker: he has his logic, he doesn't need any of your damned facts. The conclusions are always perfectly logical if you accept his premises: this is what makes his writing so attractive. The fact that his premises are incorrect and incomplete doesn't matter, what matters is that his world is consistent and simple, in a manner this 'reality' nonsense isn't. Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking, and all the children are above average.
The irony of this being, if the Texans all moved to silicon valley, they'd still be hanging out at the beach and skiing because 3 hour drive = next door in Texas.
I don't get it, you're saying a culture based on startups, where inventors starve to death during economic downturns because each idea has its own company, is better for inventors than one where economic downturns just mean they can't take leaps with risky ideas on company time?
I'll take the not starving option, thanks.
Probably in India. I have the impression that they are a culture actually interested in making improvements to their lives through application of the sciences, while the US has too many slack-jawed mouthbreathers who only go to college at all to make themselves more employable (as opposed to making themselves better at their jobs). That's probably because most of the Indians I know are exchange students, though.
"California focuses on brilliance and creativity."
;)
While your comment was not necessarily meant in poor taste and I wouldn't presume to take actual offense, I feel bound to point out that it's this kind of crap that makes the rest of the US think that California's focus is arrogant jackasses.
Brilliance and creativity are everywhere, and California is one of the most unionized states I've ever lived in, meaning that getting tied up in the formalities of contract negotiation and execution is practically the state motto.
I've also heard there are a number of states in the middle of the country. Some are even tech leaders. I think Texas Instruments might be named after one of them, but geography was never my strong point
He's being facetious, sort of. He's pointing out that Silicon valley refers specifically to the place (not the process), so the OP question is like asking if the Italian Renaissance, which by definition happened in Italy, could happen anywhere else.
Considering how many liguistic purists there are floating around the dark corners of the boards, I kind of feel odd having to point this one out. You guys should really be used to it by now.
Yeah, the relevant documents pretty much account for the shades of gray. Thus the language "unreasonable searches and seizures" and the dependence on Judicial opinion to determine when a breach of privacy is legal.
"If I establish that it's okay for me to fire someone purely for being gay/Commie/whatever, then I've also established that it's okay for you to fire me for being ugly/Democrat/whatever."
This would be a very wise statement if it wasn't completely logically invalid as well as totally incorrect.
I'm also going to add that moral relativism is a stupid way to go about looking at the world, and that if tolerating people having different ideas than you necessitates you actually accepting those ideas as well, then there is something severely wrong with your brain, which you should really see a doctor about.
Isn't the whole point of man in the middle to decrypt the message and then reincrypt it completely? You're contacting the middleman, and sending him your encryption key, and he's then initiating an unrelated link to your intended recipient and just relaying the information. Complicating the encryption key will do fuck-all to disrupt this, unless I'm missing something here. You would actually have to change the communication channel itself to damage the process.
It will always be free, because lavasoft's spyware sweeper is free and probably better. If you charge (i.e. stop bundling) you lose the convenience factor, which is all that you had going for you.
Plus, I'm picking up form context that the utility is just part of the OS, not a separate program you'd think to charge for. Could be wrong, though, didn't read the article.