If -- and right about now it's still a pretty big if -- Bush wins because of Nader taking votes away from Gore, then that's just too bad. Recall that Clinton was elected with less than 50% of the popular vote for both terms, in part because Perot took votes away from Bush Sr., and then Dole.
Presumably they're relying on exit polls. But can't they at least have the decency to wait until a significant number of votes are counted? And in such a very close election, might they not consider that a very small error in the exit polls can make a huge difference in the result? Typical exit polls sample only about 1200 voters statewide; surely with things so close this is not a sufficient sample.
Apparently, the pundits are so confident in their exit polls that they're declaring winners before any votes have even been counted! Such states are invariably projected for Gore. CNN is tracking results here. In New York, they gave the election to Gore (and Clinton) the minute the polls closed. Even as of this writing, they're projecting the vote for Gore with only around 20,000 votes counted. In some states, such as Michigan and Florida, they gave the election to Gore even though Bush is ahead -- well ahead -- in the count!
A lot of the time, the apathy arises from 'Republicrats' -- the "majority" -- telling a voter who chooses an indie/third party candidate that he or she is "throwing away his or her vote".
How does the fact that people are too stupid to see through this ridiculous statement -- which, on the face of it, is no nastier or more damaging than anything the two major party candidates say about each other -- conflict with what I said?
And I'll have you know that the squirrels in my yard get the freshest, tastiest acorns around!
Am I the only one here old enough to remember the Gores' leading role in trying to censor the music industry? And how, in order to prevent government action, the industry "voluntarily" began putting warning labels on their music?
If it's still available, run (don't walk) to the nearest record store and get a copy of "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Prevention". One of the tracks is based around the Senate hearings where Zappa testified against censorship. The shril, whiny female voice you can sometimes hear on that track is Tipper. You might learn something about what the Gores really think of freedom of expression.
There have always been other choices. There have always been "third parties" on the ballot for national office. If the non-voting majority really wanted a change from the Republicrats they could have made it a long time ago. The fact that they haven't, and certainly won't this time around, just goes to demonstrate that for the most part they really are apathetic, lazy, ignorant slugs.
So go tell it to someone who doesn't know any better.
Before he left the bar, [Atanasoff] had also worked out a way of using the positive and negative charges in capacitors to represent the 0's and 1's that make up the binary system. This line of thinking led to what was to be his most significant achievement: the development of an electronic switch known as a logic circuit.
Now don't you think that achievement should put an end to the weenie arguments against drinking?
That's it! I've got me a bottle of single malt scotch, and I'm goin' to invent me the warp drive tonight! That means from now on every starship engineer's gonna have a Scots accent!
Are you the person I was replying to? Who can tell? You're not courageous enough to identify yourself or to say either way in your post. So I'm assuming you are just because it's more convenient that way.
By the way, your logic is ridiculous. I might as well claim that I believe that dying while in the process of killing Zionists is guaranteed to get me a spot in heaven.
No, this proves part of my point. You want me to respect this belief? Really?
The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of topics of polite conversation in today's diverse world, but religion is not one of them.
However, that's what this conversation is about so we might as well do what we can to make the best of it. Is there really something so deeply, fundamentally wrong in saying that it ought to be conducted as civilly and as politely as possible?
Besides, you're just plain wrong. I've had plenty of polite conversations about religion in RL. It's possible when there's genuine respect, not for beliefs necessarily, but for the people that hold them. That's what's lacking here for the most part.
I'm a scientific materialist when solving real-world problems
I don't mean to be critical here, but ISTM this is the key to why you are able to function in this way. You think "outside the box" when it comes to religion, adopting whatever approach seems expedient at the time. Can this be because, to you, "the box" doesn't even exist? If you regard religion as nothing more than an approach to solving philosophical problems, then it's quite natural to pick and choose the model that seems to best attack the problem. A mathemetician may well solve differential equations in the same way, selecting one method out of a sheaf of them that seems to apply to the class of d.e. he's got in front of him.
But this is not what religion claims to be, and no one who takes his religion seriously to the exclusion of all others thinks of it this way. Religion claims to be a description of a portion of objective reality. To people who subscribe to that view, employing another religious system to solve a moral question would be as bad a mistake as using Ptolemaic astronomy to navigate a rocket to the Moon. No sensible person would attempt such a thing, because to do so would be to adopt an erroneous description of reality. You might succeed by sheer chance -- in this example, because with regard to the Moon Ptolemaic astronomy correctly describes it's relationship to the Earth, even if it gets everything else wrong -- but you'll probably fail, disastrously.
Having said that, I quite agree with the quote I included at the top of this post if you subsitute "physical" for "real". Religion only claims to describe a subset of reality, and for those portions of reality outside that subset other methods are clearly called for.
The fact that such a miserable, hate-filled screed filled with questionable facts and flaccid self-justification got modded up to 4 is proof that the statement in the subject line is true.
I'm not the person to whom you were replying, but I'll answer your question anyway. No, I do not respect the beliefs of others. Frankly, there are a lot of religions out there that are just plain silly, and no thought police are going to force me to respect them.
What I do respect is people's right to hold whatever religious beliefs they want. I respect that right enough to allow others to state their beliefs in public without my trying to silence them, regardless of how silly or erroneous I think those beliefs are.
Modding someone down for their sincerely held religious beliefs just because they dare to say them out loud is offensive and repugnant to any enlightened moral system.
There are a number of overlapping Orthodox jurisdictions in the US, and the Ukrainians are only one of them. Some jurisdictions tend to stay very ethnic and closed. They were originally formed to serve immigrant or refugee communities, as the Ukrainian jurisdiction was, and have a hard time breaking out of that mold. This is not the case for most jurisdictions, and it is certainly not true historically. Orthodox Churches have always been deeply involved in charitable works, sometimes even when and where it has not been legal for them to do so.
I think the tendency towards mysticism is more evident in the modern belief system called Gnosticism than in the ancient cult, where gnosis was achieved more through what I would call intellection than mysticism.
I'm not certain ESR understands what is meant by the term. Genuine Gnosticism achieves the effects of mysticism by obfuscation for the most part. The concepts are generally simple, but they tend to be expressed in needlessly complex language.
I do see a bit of a Gnostic attitude in many hackers, though, and it conflates with the anti-orgnaized religion tendency. Gnostics believed that the world was created not by God, but by an evil being called Demiurge. ISTM that many hackers feel the world is far too fscked up to have been created by a perfect, good being. A general preference for the intellectual (not to say noetic) over the physical, corresponding roughly to the Gnostic belief that material existence is inherently evil, exemplifies this as well.
Me? I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian. This is the Christian group that has best preserved it's mystical traditions, so in a way I'm an example of what Chaoli the Grey was talking about.
Well, maybe. Even if all 4000 of the customers they hope to sign up are only receiving residential service, that adds up to nearly $2M/year income. Office space is pretty cheap in those parts, and I'd bet the cost of routers, servers etc. is folded in with the $10M figure cited. Depending on how the equipment costs are amortized, I could easily see this being profitable, if only marginally so.
Up my way in the Santa Cruz mountains, Gary down at the ISP & Feed Store tells me he's planning something similar, but will be locating the antennas along the ridgetop. This will allow him to serve everyone within a 10-mile radius with approximately a T-1 equivalent, but will require substantial upgrades to his own equipment, since he serves his entire customer base with a dual T-1 right now.
You don't have to be in the rural midwest to have trouble getting broadband service. I'm right over the hill from the Santa Clara Valley. ("Silicon Valley" for you folks down in LA LA land.) DSL is theoretically available in my area, but in fact the copper's so antique that you can't get broadband unless you live right next door to the telco office.
If it was all indie music, the RIAA wouldn't have had a leg to stand on. Fact is, more than a little RIAA-copyrighted music was distributed. You might was well have handed them a loaded gun.
Napster could also be a venue for distributing indie music, and it is in fact being used that way. This fact ought to shield the company from any liability by the time this case works itself out, since Napster (the company) doesn't host any of the music itself, RIAA-owned or not. Napster is really no more threatening than gopher.
Thank you for that informative link. I don't consult the Cato Institute's site anywhere near often enough, and I had forgotten about the valuable contributions of Justice Kennedy.
Uhh...judges aren't law enforcement officers. Nominally at least, law enforcement is tasked to the executive branch (e.g., DOJ, FBI.) Interpretation is the purview of the judicial branch.
Leave off the basic civics lesson and read the article. "Colgate" is Stephen Colgate, Assistant Attorney General.
We have twelve years of Reagan/Bush to thank for no small part of this, so remember that in November
You don't even pay attention, do you? Justice Scalia, a Reagan appointee, takes a strict view of the Constitution and most often rules in favor of individual rights over governmental intrusion. Thomas often joins his opinions. The others are generally disappointments, but recall that the Democrat-controlled Senate consistently rejected any other Supreme Court nominees who thought along these lines, even if that meant they had to lie outright about his record. There's a reason "bork" is now a verb in Washington.
That's what you get, and what you deserve, for insisting on "rights" that are not in the Constitution and making them a litmus test for the Supreme Court. If the Constitution can be misconstrued so as to give you something you want it can be misconstrued for other purposes as well, and the same people who are willing to do the job for you are just as happy to do it for someone else.
They (supposedly) base their decisions in part on previous applicable rulings...
More basic civics. Look, I know this. Why do you think this is so worrisome? The situation will take decades to repair, if it even can be repaired - and once that process is begun, which may not happen.
Justice's Colgate counters the FBI already has laws it must follow to intercept e-mail. "What we don't want is a debate over the government's inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance. If researchers find there are issues that have to be addressed, we can do that," he says. (Emphasis mine.)
Here is a government official, one of the top law enforcement officers in the country, who does not understand his own Constitution. The government has no inherent authority whatsoever! All the government's authority is delegated to it by the American people. If our Supreme Court weren't populated by a bunch of balless pinheads, they would have made that clear by now in numerous rulings. Instead they are by and large content to expand the government's ability to invade our privacy and usurp our rights pretty much whenever they are asked to.
It's things like this that make me despair of the Republic.
Maybe I can finally unload that 286 that's been sitting in the corner of my dining room for the past 8 years! 12 MHz of raw computing power, and 1 whole MB of RAM! How could anyone turn it down?
I quite agree with you. Unfortunately, the scientists do not create public policy. Politicians, pressured by their constituencies which are in turn misinformed by the press as you describe, do. The public debate, the one that affects what we actually do about the problem, is in consequence irrational.
Slashdot Mirror
It's trite, but turnabout is fair play.
CNN has taken Florida out of the Gore column, for a big hit in his ev count. Apparently they're losing confidence in their polls.
Yeah, I wonder if they've patented it.
Presumably they're relying on exit polls. But can't they at least have the decency to wait until a significant number of votes are counted? And in such a very close election, might they not consider that a very small error in the exit polls can make a huge difference in the result? Typical exit polls sample only about 1200 voters statewide; surely with things so close this is not a sufficient sample.
What bullshit!
How does the fact that people are too stupid to see through this ridiculous statement -- which, on the face of it, is no nastier or more damaging than anything the two major party candidates say about each other -- conflict with what I said?
And I'll have you know that the squirrels in my yard get the freshest, tastiest acorns around!
Am I the only one here old enough to remember the Gores' leading role in trying to censor the music industry? And how, in order to prevent government action, the industry "voluntarily" began putting warning labels on their music?
If it's still available, run (don't walk) to the nearest record store and get a copy of "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Prevention". One of the tracks is based around the Senate hearings where Zappa testified against censorship. The shril, whiny female voice you can sometimes hear on that track is Tipper. You might learn something about what the Gores really think of freedom of expression.
I fell for this one.
anybody else? - or am I the only Idiot!
It's just you. Sorry.
There have always been other choices. There have always been "third parties" on the ballot for national office. If the non-voting majority really wanted a change from the Republicrats they could have made it a long time ago. The fact that they haven't, and certainly won't this time around, just goes to demonstrate that for the most part they really are apathetic, lazy, ignorant slugs.
So go tell it to someone who doesn't know any better.
Now don't you think that achievement should put an end to the weenie arguments against drinking?
That's it! I've got me a bottle of single malt scotch, and I'm goin' to invent me the warp drive tonight! That means from now on every starship engineer's gonna have a Scots accent!
YEEEE-HAAAAAA!
By the way, your logic is ridiculous. I might as well claim that I believe that dying while in the process of killing Zionists is guaranteed to get me a spot in heaven.
No, this proves part of my point. You want me to respect this belief? Really?
The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of topics of polite conversation in today's diverse world, but religion is not one of them.
However, that's what this conversation is about so we might as well do what we can to make the best of it. Is there really something so deeply, fundamentally wrong in saying that it ought to be conducted as civilly and as politely as possible?
Besides, you're just plain wrong. I've had plenty of polite conversations about religion in RL. It's possible when there's genuine respect, not for beliefs necessarily, but for the people that hold them. That's what's lacking here for the most part.
I don't mean to be critical here, but ISTM this is the key to why you are able to function in this way. You think "outside the box" when it comes to religion, adopting whatever approach seems expedient at the time. Can this be because, to you, "the box" doesn't even exist? If you regard religion as nothing more than an approach to solving philosophical problems, then it's quite natural to pick and choose the model that seems to best attack the problem. A mathemetician may well solve differential equations in the same way, selecting one method out of a sheaf of them that seems to apply to the class of d.e. he's got in front of him.
But this is not what religion claims to be, and no one who takes his religion seriously to the exclusion of all others thinks of it this way. Religion claims to be a description of a portion of objective reality. To people who subscribe to that view, employing another religious system to solve a moral question would be as bad a mistake as using Ptolemaic astronomy to navigate a rocket to the Moon. No sensible person would attempt such a thing, because to do so would be to adopt an erroneous description of reality. You might succeed by sheer chance -- in this example, because with regard to the Moon Ptolemaic astronomy correctly describes it's relationship to the Earth, even if it gets everything else wrong -- but you'll probably fail, disastrously.
Having said that, I quite agree with the quote I included at the top of this post if you subsitute "physical" for "real". Religion only claims to describe a subset of reality, and for those portions of reality outside that subset other methods are clearly called for.
The fact that such a miserable, hate-filled screed filled with questionable facts and flaccid self-justification got modded up to 4 is proof that the statement in the subject line is true.
What I do respect is people's right to hold whatever religious beliefs they want. I respect that right enough to allow others to state their beliefs in public without my trying to silence them, regardless of how silly or erroneous I think those beliefs are.
Modding someone down for their sincerely held religious beliefs just because they dare to say them out loud is offensive and repugnant to any enlightened moral system.
There are a number of overlapping Orthodox jurisdictions in the US, and the Ukrainians are only one of them. Some jurisdictions tend to stay very ethnic and closed. They were originally formed to serve immigrant or refugee communities, as the Ukrainian jurisdiction was, and have a hard time breaking out of that mold. This is not the case for most jurisdictions, and it is certainly not true historically. Orthodox Churches have always been deeply involved in charitable works, sometimes even when and where it has not been legal for them to do so.
I think the tendency towards mysticism is more evident in the modern belief system called Gnosticism than in the ancient cult, where gnosis was achieved more through what I would call intellection than mysticism.
I do see a bit of a Gnostic attitude in many hackers, though, and it conflates with the anti-orgnaized religion tendency. Gnostics believed that the world was created not by God, but by an evil being called Demiurge. ISTM that many hackers feel the world is far too fscked up to have been created by a perfect, good being. A general preference for the intellectual (not to say noetic) over the physical, corresponding roughly to the Gnostic belief that material existence is inherently evil, exemplifies this as well.
Me? I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian. This is the Christian group that has best preserved it's mystical traditions, so in a way I'm an example of what Chaoli the Grey was talking about.
Well, maybe. Even if all 4000 of the customers they hope to sign up are only receiving residential service, that adds up to nearly $2M/year income. Office space is pretty cheap in those parts, and I'd bet the cost of routers, servers etc. is folded in with the $10M figure cited. Depending on how the equipment costs are amortized, I could easily see this being profitable, if only marginally so.
You don't have to be in the rural midwest to have trouble getting broadband service. I'm right over the hill from the Santa Clara Valley. ("Silicon Valley" for you folks down in LA LA land.) DSL is theoretically available in my area, but in fact the copper's so antique that you can't get broadband unless you live right next door to the telco office.
Napster could also be a venue for distributing indie music, and it is in fact being used that way. This fact ought to shield the company from any liability by the time this case works itself out, since Napster (the company) doesn't host any of the music itself, RIAA-owned or not. Napster is really no more threatening than gopher.
Thank you for that informative link. I don't consult the Cato Institute's site anywhere near often enough, and I had forgotten about the valuable contributions of Justice Kennedy.
Leave off the basic civics lesson and read the article. "Colgate" is Stephen Colgate, Assistant Attorney General.
We have twelve years of Reagan/Bush to thank for no small part of this, so remember that in November
You don't even pay attention, do you? Justice Scalia, a Reagan appointee, takes a strict view of the Constitution and most often rules in favor of individual rights over governmental intrusion. Thomas often joins his opinions. The others are generally disappointments, but recall that the Democrat-controlled Senate consistently rejected any other Supreme Court nominees who thought along these lines, even if that meant they had to lie outright about his record. There's a reason "bork" is now a verb in Washington.
That's what you get, and what you deserve, for insisting on "rights" that are not in the Constitution and making them a litmus test for the Supreme Court. If the Constitution can be misconstrued so as to give you something you want it can be misconstrued for other purposes as well, and the same people who are willing to do the job for you are just as happy to do it for someone else.
They (supposedly) base their decisions in part on previous applicable rulings... More basic civics. Look, I know this. Why do you think this is so worrisome? The situation will take decades to repair, if it even can be repaired - and once that process is begun, which may not happen.
Here is a government official, one of the top law enforcement officers in the country, who does not understand his own Constitution. The government has no inherent authority whatsoever! All the government's authority is delegated to it by the American people. If our Supreme Court weren't populated by a bunch of balless pinheads, they would have made that clear by now in numerous rulings. Instead they are by and large content to expand the government's ability to invade our privacy and usurp our rights pretty much whenever they are asked to.
It's things like this that make me despair of the Republic.
San Jose, here I come!
I quite agree with you. Unfortunately, the scientists do not create public policy. Politicians, pressured by their constituencies which are in turn misinformed by the press as you describe, do. The public debate, the one that affects what we actually do about the problem, is in consequence irrational.