Well there's always John Searle's Chinese Room arguments and his general biological naturalism positions, but they're pretty crappy arguments too and they still boil down to claiming that a sack of properly arranged meat can think but a wafer of properly arranged circuitry can't. I personally don't know if Von Neumann architecture computers are capable of sentience (or for that matter what a concise definition of sentience is), but sooner or later we will probably have robots that seem to be "close enough" that we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
In first-order logic terms, you'd have the following:
~Ex Price_floor(x) There does not exist a producer that can set a price floor.
~~Ex Price_floor(x) Negation of the above, which, after canceling out the double negation is:
Ex Price_floor(x) There exists some producer (or producers) that can set a price floor.
In other words, Joey has no clue what he's doing with logic.
That's funny. I had no idea that velocity was defined otherwise. It is still v = dx/dt, is it not? Whoever thought that your post was insightful needs a lesson in reading comprehension.
Well, for one, equations for distance involving spacetime already result in interesting situations that you wouldn't get from Euclidean geometry, distances that are positive, zero, or imaginary. I'm pretty sure that you can see at this point where there's a problem, namely that using time as a dimension gives you unintuitive results (though it's certainly a plus that they, you know, work).
The evidence that cesium clocks slow down is not evidence for time dilation. It is evidence that cesium clocks slow down under certain conditions, nothing more. Anybody who insists that time can change (an oxymoron) is either an idiot, an ass kisser, or is talking about something he/she is clueless about. IOW, he or she is talking out of his/her ass. ahahaha... Uhh, given that the difference in time kept by the clocks matches almost exactly with what is predicted by relativity, I'd say that's pretty damn conclusive evidence for time dilation occuring. Unless you've got some other mechanism that you can pull out of your ass that is repeatabe, can be verified, and is otherwise examinable, then you are the one talking out of your ass.
Peer review is synonymous with ass review, IMO. ahahaha... This is why people like John Cramer, David Deutsch, Stephen Hawking, etc.. can get away with their time-travel crap and still pass as serious scientists. They're all a bunch of crackpots kissing each other's asses. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha... Phew! Making phun of crackpot physicists is so much phucking phun. ahahaha...
Getting your methodology, results, conclusions and every other piece of information about your theories, experiments, crackpot ideas, etc out to other people who are experts in the field so that they can run your experiment, analyze your data, comb through the reasoning behind your conclusion, and otherwise do anything else to vet your theories as being good or bad is the cornerstone of science. Unless you want to attempt a system of science where everything ends up on obscure websites that attempt to find support in the bible for physics theories with no apparent grounding in reality. Hell, that same website says that not only does time not exist, but space doesn't either and instead says that everything is particles and their properties. Well, if he wanted to rebel against science he sure has done it, because as far as I can see he has no evidence backing his theories. No experiments, no models, no readily testable properties, nothing. No wonder you and the site go against peer review so much, you would have to actually put up or shut up. Instead, you and the site take pot shots at science and scientists who actually bother to follow a systematic approach to increasing knowlege.
I'm pretty sure that defining velocity in terms of Newtonian mechanics and then using modern understanding of time counts as being wrong. Attempting to define motion through time as a simple substitution is bound to create problems, mostly because it's making shit up.
Heck, the site even says that time dilation doesn't occur and instead attributes it to clocks slowing down ("for whatever reason"). Now, experiments in time dilation have shown that cesium atomic clocks, devices accurate to within a billionth of a second every day, show results extremely close to that predicted in general reletivity. Unless this site wants to come up with an explaination of mechanical failure for devices with such accuracy, I'm going to stick with the evidence for time dilation.
Overall, I have to say that crackpot sites by people who as far I can tell have submitted no papers to peer reviewed journals or otherwise shown expertise in the field are probably not the best place to get information on physics.
Perhaps you should read up on Katz v. United States. The fourth ammendment doesn't just protect a place (i.e. your home), it protects you. So long as you can justifiably believe that your communication will be private (and yes, we all know the internet is insecure, but we still think that most of what we send isn't being looked into), then you are protected from the police looking into what you're doing.
No, it's the high tech equivalent of writing some threatening remarks (in jest) in big bold letters on a piece of paper and then sending it through the mail. Yeah, if it's found out, you could be in hot water, but unless there's a warrant that piece of mail should never be looked at by the police. If you send that letter over the internet instead of through the USPO, it doesn't mean that it should be any easier for the powers that be to peruse your communication.
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
California law and therefore it's judges are bound by the constituion.
If someone is arrested for just saying something, then it is very sad. I do not agree with hatred, and I long for the day where people can all live in peace with eachother, but putting people in jail for speech that does not threaten an individual with harm is not the way to stop people from spreading hate. Letting people critisize freely is the only way to shed light on organizations that would otherwise keep secrets in the dark. It does not matter if you're critisizing Neo-Nazis, the Catholic Church, Scientology, Islam, Republicans, Democrats, Communism, Pastafarianism or any other group you can think of, big or small. It's a fundamental right that no one should be restricting and we should all be celebrating.
I thought it was inherent in the definition, but property is any resource over which there can be a dispute regarding how it is employed. In other words, a resource can only be employed one way at a time, and the property right is the determination of which person has the right to decide which way. Those things which are not rivalrous (which can be employed in an unlimited number of different ways simultaneously) are not subject to property rights. Everything else is. But that's creating a false impression. The concept that owning a patch of dirt makes you the emperor of your own tiny fiefdom (which is what pure free market essentially says) is nuts. Not only is it completely unnessicary for nearly everything that exists, it's also impossible. If your neighbor decides that he wants a glowing green lawn, so he covers it in plutonium, it affects you, your kids, and everyone who travels anywhere near it, and indirectly it affects most of the world. I'm not saying that it's "right" for the government to ultimate control of everything (well, eventually in any country it does, though in most this theoretically points right back to the people as a whole), but it's crazy to think that restricting your economic freedom to screw up your own land is infringing on your rights as a person.
Every single one of your examples requires the use of property. That property is either private or "public" (State-owned), and if it's "public" then the State controls how it is used, i.e. whether you can use it to practice your "free speach", which means the State controls which speach takes place and which does not by allocating resources according to its own goals. Are you being intentionally dense? Assuming a politically free country, but not a free market, the political figures in the government shouldn't have a direct hand in the programming. Not every government relies on a spoils system where politicians pack their cronies into whatever high level positions they can. Some actually use a civil meritocracy within certain departments, specifically to avoid political winds having too much power over policy.
Are you being intentionally dense? Those "protections" are, in the vast majority, legal codifications of property rights -- particularly when it comes to the common-law system on which both the British and U.S. legal systems are based. There's all sorts of protections which have nothing to do with your property at all. Freedom of expression(be it religion, press, speech, petition, assembly, etc) isn't about property. Habeas corpus isn't about property. Due process isn't about property. Protection from self incrimination isn't about property. Jury trials aren't about property. Voting isn't about property. Protection from slavery isn't about property (at least from the modern perspective). A lot of "property" protections can still exist in an a slightly more abstract way (i.e. police would still need a warrant to go into a residential building, communication would still be unrecordable, etc). Just because "the state" physically could do certain activities doesn't mean that it legally could.
property right: the right to control how a piece of property is employed. What counts as property? Is it money that exists only by government fiat (or as bits inside a computer)? Is it your house (which for most people in this country is at least partly "owned" by the bank)? Is it the software on your computer (which you may be "prohibited" from modifying, due to laws, contracts, EULAs, etc)?
Move to where? That "somewhere" is either unowned, or someone's property. With private property rights you can own that place -- or receive permission from the owner -- and move to it freely. No one else can legitimately prevent you from doing so. Unless you don't have money, in which case you'd be fucked.
On the other hand, if all the property is collectively owned, or belongs to the State, you'll need to get permission to move. Your right to move is thus artificially subject to someone else's will. (If all property is unowned and cannot be homesteaded then it cannot be employed by anyone (see the definition above), in which case you don't have the right to move anywhere. This is a fairly useless case but it ought to be mentioned. When most people speak of an absence of property rights they really mean ownership by the State, or collective ownership by all, which in a democracy is the same thing.) Ultimately, yes, land is an inelastic commodity. That doesn't mean that a socialist/communist system has to rely on miles of red tape or homesteading. Still, the reality is that in any system, it's a bitch to move, mostly because if you want recognition of "property rights" on said land, there's bound to be a process of notifying local authorities so everything is in their records.
You want to speak? I assume that means you want to address a group? Where will you do it, if no one owns any property? Parks, street corners, the internet, arranging for some time in an auditorium, going on the radio or tv, writing a book, writing a newspaper, yelling from a rooftop, wearing a breadboard sign, etc. There are plenty of ways, means, and locations to pracice free speech even if you don't have "property" to do it on.
Without private ownership the use of suitable gathering places much necessarily be decided by majority vote, and/or the State. Resources are limited; not everyone who wishes to speak will be able to do so. If your position is in the minority good luck finding a place for your audience to hear you. It's not that difficult to find places and means right now that are public, why would it be any harder if everything is public?
At a more fundamental level, if you don't own anything you cannot ensure your own survival -- food, shelter, defense -- or save for the future. If the Majority doesn't care much for you they can reallocate your rations elsewhere, leaving you to starve. If you objected then you'd be claiming a right to that food, that shelter; a property right, to be exact. But on what basis? You didn't produce that food, or construct that shelter. In a private property system you could claim that the prior owner gave it to you in exchange for something else of value, but without private property you are necessarily at the mercy of the State. That's why most countries have this thing called a "constitution" (or a long tradition of laws, treaties, common law precident, etc, for the British). In it, a country guarantees it's citizens certain protections from government abuse. Sure, I know it sounds crazy, but governments can occasionally manage to follow their own guidelines.
Property rights are essential for survival. Private property rights are essential for freedom. No, private property rights help some people game the system while providing no actual benefit to society. Perhaps if we had fewer people viewing property as "private" and more viewing it as "an ultimately fleeting posession which I should share", I might have fewer qualms with our current system, but rampant corporatism at the expense of the common man has left me disillusioned about the "free market".
As much as I dislike Microsoft and think that the Gates Foundation is little more than a PR move to make Gates appear slightly less like Faust, get your facts right. Their support of the Discovery Institute is limited to the Cascadia project, which is merely about regional transportation issues in the Pacific Northwest. While I think that that there probably would've been better ways to go about the same choice, they have been putting money into Cascadia since 2000, so they probably want to finish what they started. So, if you're going to call them on a point, at least put in a minute or two of research.
It depends on the state, actually. For California it's roughly 1 senator for 17 million people, but for Wyoming it's 1 for ~250,000 people. It's certainly one vestage of the political system that I wouldn't more people to take a good hard look at: The 26 least populated states, representing ~1/6th of the population, can block the rest of the country from passing national legislation. Strange indeed.
As a college freshman in computer science, I can assure you that yes, I have in fact had to write a linked list implimentation (single and double linked) and yes, even a freshman CS student can see that this patent is absurdly obvious on a level that is frightening. This type of patent being granted just shows the absurdity of the patent office, and how completely out of touch they are with the rest of the world.
So here's a question: can something be all powerful, but not able to exercise facets of that power due to a deterministic system? If some powers can't be used, then in what way is the entity "all powerful"? Can god construct handcuffs so secure that even he could not break out of them?
We have evidence for the physical, that being the world around us (provided you at least accept that we aren't controled by some demon out of Descartes' Meditation on First Philosophy). We have some physical explaination for dreams, and though the conscious experience is currently beyond our reach, there's little that suggests a dualist or idealist origin for thoughts. Any assertion of an afterlife, be it in a dream world, a Christian interpretation of heaven/hell/purgatory, or even a beer volcano and stripper factory, has absolutely no evidence. Due to the lack of evidence for an afterlife (or even a mechanism for such an action to work), and the evidence for the mind arising from the brain, it follows that if the brain is no longer functioning, the mind no longer exists.
Well, some big issues would be navigation (not even a simple compass, let alone an astrolabe. You can only use the north star in the northern hemisphere, so even thata is out of the question for a decent chunk of the world. Beyond that, it would be difficult to deal with the wide variety of environments that one would come across (good luck having the native to Indonesia cross the Himalayas or find his way in the Sahara. It may not have been "impossible", but it would be highly improbable.
Uhh, examining every packet of my internet traffic while a warrant only covers the guy down the street is in no way "plain view". There would need to be extensive analysis that's well outside of the purpose of the original investigation. That's kind of the point of requiring a warrant to view traffic. Anything they get that's not related to the person on the warrant shouldn't be looked at, and if it is, it should be tossed out. No, it's not perfect that some particularly nasty crimes might go unpunished, but if you want 100% punishment of crime, go live in a totalitarian state.
My question is, why are the troops supporting this government? If anyone, anyone has the power to put an end to all of this, it is they. Why hasn't the military staged a coup d'état? Why haven't the troops themselves simply said "enough is enough?"
Maybe that's why Bush seems hell bent on sending more and more troops over: The more troops sent outside the US, the fewer there are in a position to rebel.
Really? This is the reason why taxes are so high? There are roughly 37 million people in California. Given an average of 2.9 persons to a household (California is slightly above average in this demographic), that's about 12.75 million households. If everyone got the same $34k as Calibax did, that's $433.5 billion. Yes, it's a lot, and I don't deny that, but compare it to the US military budget, which is $470 billion (and that figure doesn't even include the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, nuclear weapons budgeting, or veterans affairs). Quite a bit of the military budget goes into fueling corporate pipe dreams (i.e. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc), so perhaps when you're done railing against helping the average person, you can go write about the insane budgetary excesses that are elsewhere in our government.
If that's the way you want to go with GTA 4, they should have a prison part where if you get caught you will spend many in game days in jail doing essentially nothing and in game rehab, where after you are "killed" you spend in game months to get back to the point of walking. Now that would be realistic.
Note: I have GTA: SA running in the backround at the moment to play in a bit, so I have nothing against the games, I just don't like bad examples.
I don't know about you, but I can't think of a quantifiable way to compare the amount of culture in Notre Dame vs the amount of culture in the Chrysler Building. Is Stonehenge more culturally significant than the Gateway Arch? Sure, one could argue that Shakespeare generated more culture than Mark Twain, but can you compare the work of Feynman to the work of Farenheit? Beyond that, did you consider the cultures of the Native Americans? Taos Pueblo has been in constant use for 1000 years, surviving Spanish takeover, American takeover, and the subsequent return to the natives.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there's always John Searle's Chinese Room arguments and his general biological naturalism positions, but they're pretty crappy arguments too and they still boil down to claiming that a sack of properly arranged meat can think but a wafer of properly arranged circuitry can't. I personally don't know if Von Neumann architecture computers are capable of sentience (or for that matter what a concise definition of sentience is), but sooner or later we will probably have robots that seem to be "close enough" that we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Uhh, you're wrong.
In first-order logic terms, you'd have the following:
~Ex Price_floor(x)
There does not exist a producer that can set a price floor.
~~Ex Price_floor(x)
Negation of the above, which, after canceling out the double negation is:
Ex Price_floor(x)
There exists some producer (or producers) that can set a price floor.
In other words, Joey has no clue what he's doing with logic.
Well, for one, equations for distance involving spacetime already result in interesting situations that you wouldn't get from Euclidean geometry, distances that are positive, zero, or imaginary. I'm pretty sure that you can see at this point where there's a problem, namely that using time as a dimension gives you unintuitive results (though it's certainly a plus that they, you know, work).
The evidence that cesium clocks slow down is not evidence for time dilation. It is evidence that cesium clocks slow down under certain conditions, nothing more. Anybody who insists that time can change (an oxymoron) is either an idiot, an ass kisser, or is talking about something he/she is clueless about. IOW, he or she is talking out of his/her ass. ahahaha... Uhh, given that the difference in time kept by the clocks matches almost exactly with what is predicted by relativity, I'd say that's pretty damn conclusive evidence for time dilation occuring. Unless you've got some other mechanism that you can pull out of your ass that is repeatabe, can be verified, and is otherwise examinable, then you are the one talking out of your ass.
Peer review is synonymous with ass review, IMO. ahahaha... This is why people like John Cramer, David Deutsch, Stephen Hawking, etc.. can get away with their time-travel crap and still pass as serious scientists. They're all a bunch of crackpots kissing each other's asses. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha... Phew! Making phun of crackpot physicists is so much phucking phun. ahahaha...
Getting your methodology, results, conclusions and every other piece of information about your theories, experiments, crackpot ideas, etc out to other people who are experts in the field so that they can run your experiment, analyze your data, comb through the reasoning behind your conclusion, and otherwise do anything else to vet your theories as being good or bad is the cornerstone of science. Unless you want to attempt a system of science where everything ends up on obscure websites that attempt to find support in the bible for physics theories with no apparent grounding in reality. Hell, that same website says that not only does time not exist, but space doesn't either and instead says that everything is particles and their properties. Well, if he wanted to rebel against science he sure has done it, because as far as I can see he has no evidence backing his theories. No experiments, no models, no readily testable properties, nothing. No wonder you and the site go against peer review so much, you would have to actually put up or shut up. Instead, you and the site take pot shots at science and scientists who actually bother to follow a systematic approach to increasing knowlege.
I'm pretty sure that defining velocity in terms of Newtonian mechanics and then using modern understanding of time counts as being wrong. Attempting to define motion through time as a simple substitution is bound to create problems, mostly because it's making shit up.
Heck, the site even says that time dilation doesn't occur and instead attributes it to clocks slowing down ("for whatever reason"). Now, experiments in time dilation have shown that cesium atomic clocks, devices accurate to within a billionth of a second every day, show results extremely close to that predicted in general reletivity. Unless this site wants to come up with an explaination of mechanical failure for devices with such accuracy, I'm going to stick with the evidence for time dilation.
Overall, I have to say that crackpot sites by people who as far I can tell have submitted no papers to peer reviewed journals or otherwise shown expertise in the field are probably not the best place to get information on physics.
Perhaps you should read up on Katz v. United States. The fourth ammendment doesn't just protect a place (i.e. your home), it protects you. So long as you can justifiably believe that your communication will be private (and yes, we all know the internet is insecure, but we still think that most of what we send isn't being looked into), then you are protected from the police looking into what you're doing.
No, it's the high tech equivalent of writing some threatening remarks (in jest) in big bold letters on a piece of paper and then sending it through the mail. Yeah, if it's found out, you could be in hot water, but unless there's a warrant that piece of mail should never be looked at by the police. If you send that letter over the internet instead of through the USPO, it doesn't mean that it should be any easier for the powers that be to peruse your communication.
Reread Article 6 of the constitution, specificly:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
California law and therefore it's judges are bound by the constituion.
If someone is arrested for just saying something, then it is very sad. I do not agree with hatred, and I long for the day where people can all live in peace with eachother, but putting people in jail for speech that does not threaten an individual with harm is not the way to stop people from spreading hate. Letting people critisize freely is the only way to shed light on organizations that would otherwise keep secrets in the dark. It does not matter if you're critisizing Neo-Nazis, the Catholic Church, Scientology, Islam, Republicans, Democrats, Communism, Pastafarianism or any other group you can think of, big or small. It's a fundamental right that no one should be restricting and we should all be celebrating.
The Church of the SubGenius?
Move to where? That "somewhere" is either unowned, or someone's property. With private property rights you can own that place -- or receive permission from the owner -- and move to it freely. No one else can legitimately prevent you from doing so. Unless you don't have money, in which case you'd be fucked.
On the other hand, if all the property is collectively owned, or belongs to the State, you'll need to get permission to move. Your right to move is thus artificially subject to someone else's will. (If all property is unowned and cannot be homesteaded then it cannot be employed by anyone (see the definition above), in which case you don't have the right to move anywhere. This is a fairly useless case but it ought to be mentioned. When most people speak of an absence of property rights they really mean ownership by the State, or collective ownership by all, which in a democracy is the same thing.) Ultimately, yes, land is an inelastic commodity. That doesn't mean that a socialist/communist system has to rely on miles of red tape or homesteading. Still, the reality is that in any system, it's a bitch to move, mostly because if you want recognition of "property rights" on said land, there's bound to be a process of notifying local authorities so everything is in their records.
You want to speak? I assume that means you want to address a group? Where will you do it, if no one owns any property? Parks, street corners, the internet, arranging for some time in an auditorium, going on the radio or tv, writing a book, writing a newspaper, yelling from a rooftop, wearing a breadboard sign, etc. There are plenty of ways, means, and locations to pracice free speech even if you don't have "property" to do it on.
Without private ownership the use of suitable gathering places much necessarily be decided by majority vote, and/or the State. Resources are limited; not everyone who wishes to speak will be able to do so. If your position is in the minority good luck finding a place for your audience to hear you. It's not that difficult to find places and means right now that are public, why would it be any harder if everything is public?
At a more fundamental level, if you don't own anything you cannot ensure your own survival -- food, shelter, defense -- or save for the future. If the Majority doesn't care much for you they can reallocate your rations elsewhere, leaving you to starve. If you objected then you'd be claiming a right to that food, that shelter; a property right, to be exact. But on what basis? You didn't produce that food, or construct that shelter. In a private property system you could claim that the prior owner gave it to you in exchange for something else of value, but without private property you are necessarily at the mercy of the State. That's why most countries have this thing called a "constitution" (or a long tradition of laws, treaties, common law precident, etc, for the British). In it, a country guarantees it's citizens certain protections from government abuse. Sure, I know it sounds crazy, but governments can occasionally manage to follow their own guidelines.
Property rights are essential for survival. Private property rights are essential for freedom. No, private property rights help some people game the system while providing no actual benefit to society. Perhaps if we had fewer people viewing property as "private" and more viewing it as "an ultimately fleeting posession which I should share", I might have fewer qualms with our current system, but rampant corporatism at the expense of the common man has left me disillusioned about the "free market".
As much as I dislike Microsoft and think that the Gates Foundation is little more than a PR move to make Gates appear slightly less like Faust, get your facts right. Their support of the Discovery Institute is limited to the Cascadia project, which is merely about regional transportation issues in the Pacific Northwest. While I think that that there probably would've been better ways to go about the same choice, they have been putting money into Cascadia since 2000, so they probably want to finish what they started. So, if you're going to call them on a point, at least put in a minute or two of research.
It depends on the state, actually. For California it's roughly 1 senator for 17 million people, but for Wyoming it's 1 for ~250,000 people. It's certainly one vestage of the political system that I wouldn't more people to take a good hard look at: The 26 least populated states, representing ~1/6th of the population, can block the rest of the country from passing national legislation. Strange indeed.
As a college freshman in computer science, I can assure you that yes, I have in fact had to write a linked list implimentation (single and double linked) and yes, even a freshman CS student can see that this patent is absurdly obvious on a level that is frightening. This type of patent being granted just shows the absurdity of the patent office, and how completely out of touch they are with the rest of the world.
So here's a question: can something be all powerful, but not able to exercise facets of that power due to a deterministic system? If some powers can't be used, then in what way is the entity "all powerful"? Can god construct handcuffs so secure that even he could not break out of them?
We have evidence for the physical, that being the world around us (provided you at least accept that we aren't controled by some demon out of Descartes' Meditation on First Philosophy). We have some physical explaination for dreams, and though the conscious experience is currently beyond our reach, there's little that suggests a dualist or idealist origin for thoughts. Any assertion of an afterlife, be it in a dream world, a Christian interpretation of heaven/hell/purgatory, or even a beer volcano and stripper factory, has absolutely no evidence. Due to the lack of evidence for an afterlife (or even a mechanism for such an action to work), and the evidence for the mind arising from the brain, it follows that if the brain is no longer functioning, the mind no longer exists.
Well, some big issues would be navigation (not even a simple compass, let alone an astrolabe. You can only use the north star in the northern hemisphere, so even thata is out of the question for a decent chunk of the world. Beyond that, it would be difficult to deal with the wide variety of environments that one would come across (good luck having the native to Indonesia cross the Himalayas or find his way in the Sahara. It may not have been "impossible", but it would be highly improbable.
Uhh, examining every packet of my internet traffic while a warrant only covers the guy down the street is in no way "plain view". There would need to be extensive analysis that's well outside of the purpose of the original investigation. That's kind of the point of requiring a warrant to view traffic. Anything they get that's not related to the person on the warrant shouldn't be looked at, and if it is, it should be tossed out. No, it's not perfect that some particularly nasty crimes might go unpunished, but if you want 100% punishment of crime, go live in a totalitarian state.
Really? This is the reason why taxes are so high? There are roughly 37 million people in California. Given an average of 2.9 persons to a household (California is slightly above average in this demographic), that's about 12.75 million households. If everyone got the same $34k as Calibax did, that's $433.5 billion. Yes, it's a lot, and I don't deny that, but compare it to the US military budget, which is $470 billion (and that figure doesn't even include the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, nuclear weapons budgeting, or veterans affairs). Quite a bit of the military budget goes into fueling corporate pipe dreams (i.e. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc), so perhaps when you're done railing against helping the average person, you can go write about the insane budgetary excesses that are elsewhere in our government.
Well, I suppose that's why they replaced their "Army of One" slogan.
Is it bad that when I saw the word "dazzled" I was afraid of taking a -1 penalty to my attack, search, and spot rolls?
If that's the way you want to go with GTA 4, they should have a prison part where if you get caught you will spend many in game days in jail doing essentially nothing and in game rehab, where after you are "killed" you spend in game months to get back to the point of walking. Now that would be realistic.
Note: I have GTA: SA running in the backround at the moment to play in a bit, so I have nothing against the games, I just don't like bad examples.
I don't know about you, but I can't think of a quantifiable way to compare the amount of culture in Notre Dame vs the amount of culture in the Chrysler Building. Is Stonehenge more culturally significant than the Gateway Arch? Sure, one could argue that Shakespeare generated more culture than Mark Twain, but can you compare the work of Feynman to the work of Farenheit? Beyond that, did you consider the cultures of the Native Americans? Taos Pueblo has been in constant use for 1000 years, surviving Spanish takeover, American takeover, and the subsequent return to the natives.
Or hit two birds with one stone and watch some football porn. Think of all the free time you'll have!