You are repeating conventional wisdom without making a single logically defendable point. Just because a particular advance was made by gov't funded research doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been made some other way if the gov't wasn't taking your money from you to do it instead. There is no point in a company doing anything that the gov't is doing, because the gov't can force people to invest.
Which is why the US Post Office is the sole mail delivery service? Oh, wait, it's not...
Have you looked into the history of the amendment that supposedly authorizes the income tax? There is a question as to whether it was even legitimately passed. You pay it without questioning it just like you repeat these arguments without questioning them.
What? The arguement is that due to differences in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation, the amendment is somehow not valid. I'd suggest you look up the case United States v. Thomas, which specificly smacks that arguement down.
The tuberculosis vaccine was created by a private foundation. I can't find a source saying that gov't funding led to aspirin--Bayer was a private company, wasn't it? In any case, it's noteworthy that you bring up things invented in Germany and France in a discussion about American income tax. I think you just grabbed those out of the air to make your point sound valid.
The tuberculosis vaccine was only widely used after WW2, when UNICEF (an organization which relies on government funds) was able to get it out to millions. As far as Bayer goes, you're probably right, though Bayer did lose it's US trademark on aspirin in WW1 when the government confiscated it's name, US assets and trademarks.
People would pay to use highways--highways are completely achievable with private money. Insured bank deposits are probably also doable privately, but it's unlikely that anyone will want to step up to do that when the gov't is in the business.
I don't know about you, but I like knowing that roads will be built and operated to where I live, even if it's not profitable to do so. That's one of the main reasons why the government needs to be able to build highways. That doesn't mean that I think the government does a good job most of the time, but it doesn't end up screwing you over just because it wants to eek out another 2% profit next quarter.
As for banks, we tried it. From 1837 to 1862 only state chartered banks existed. The average lifespan of banks in that time was 5 years, and money supply and price levels were increadibly unstable compared to today.
Don't try to say "hey, but look at all the really good things we did with the money we stole from people!". I would be very surprised to find that the gov't effectively used half of what it took--maybe you should be asking yourself what else we would have cured by now if the money that would have done it wasn't going into bureaucrats' pockets.
The government is corrupt, yes. We all get it. Don't pretend that corporations are any better. Neither is looking out for your interests, so instead of bashing the goverment and supporting corporations, look for what both can do to help you, and then do what you can to prevent them from screwing you over, which usually comes from balancing them against each other.
And I'm sure that a copyright infringement suit would end up costing most people a lot more than 112% of their net income for a 3 month period.
But it's really much worse, because any individual who did what Sony did could be convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and sent to jail for up to a decade. Instead, Sony has to give up what, 10% of their profits over a 3 month period? Less than 3% of their yearly profit (give or take)? How is that justice?
I did what the voice in my head told me. Now my room has nice padded walls.
Seriously, though, if you can pick and choose which morals you want from the Bible, why even have the Bible? If it comes down to a person's own conscience as to whether or not to favor the death penalty, gay marriage, or abortion, why should one keep reading an archaic book every Sunday as if it were the authoritative source of morality? Instead, why not let the Bible go, and look at the facts and arguements founded on reason, so you can at least come up with a defensible position as to what is "right" or not?
Too bad confiscation of private property is illegal and unconstitutional. That's what socialist and communist states do.
Look up Kelo v. City of New London. The city authorized a "private" entity that was directly under the control of the local government to condemn 115 houses, all to make the city look better for Pfizer. If eminent domain can be used like that (which I honestly don't think it should, but the Supreme Court made their decision), it can be used to screw corporations to help the rest of us.
Besides, subsidies very rarely make sense - especially when the recipients large, profitable corporations. You can fix most of the problems by removing the regulations and removing subsidies.
Removing regulations would leave us with exploitation of workers and inevitable short sightedness to maximize current profit (for those in the position to do so) at the expense of most of the rest of us (see the early industrial revolution, or modern day sweat shops). But hey, I'm all for removing subsidies, even though it's political suicide. I'm tired of bloated defense contracts for new weapon systems while we ignore the real reasons why people are pissed at us (mostly our large military sticking it's nose in various places it doesn't nessicarily need to be).
The government has a horrible track record of efficiency. The Social Security slush fund is filled with T-Bills - the government is writing IOU notes to itself so Congress can spend your social security check. Congressmen get paid $dough for barely 100 days of work and little accomplished. The USDA does little of use other than enforce food quality standards, yet only a handful of its myriad of sub-agencies are actually tasked with this. The armed services ordered $400 toilet seats, and the FBI is scrapping a ridiculously expensive, over-budget computer system it purchased for another more expensive one - and they still don't know what they want it to do. The government decided, in its infinite wisdom, that it could provide passenger service much more efficiently than railroad companies (which the governmentalso regulated into maintaining unused passenger routes, because evidently the only way people can travel is by train). Now, look at the mess AMTRAK has become - it's bleeding cache, it's stops were decided for political reasons rather than where there were actual passengers.
Any sufficiently large organization will invariable fuck up and fuck over those that it ostensibly tries to serve. This applies to corporations and governments alike.
Government has a horrible track record in "efficiency" because the individual agents of the government are motiviated not to provide the best possible services to the nation, but to keep their desk and telephone another term.
That's why we have civil service employees, who aren't politicly affiliated. We've moved past the spoils system here.
I hear you saying "If this is true, then it would be easy for private corporations to do it on 'their own penny', right?" Wrong. You just took every telephone, cable, and fiber line in the United States. Building new lines apart from these is worthless - an ISP is useful because it can connect you to the rest of the internet, not just the two ends of the cable the telco just rebuilt between your house and itself.
I think the point was that the companies are trying to claim that they can do whatever they want with "their" lines, but in reality, the lines were built with an incredible amount of taxpayer funding. It would be like if your local phone company said "yeah, we'll let you call whoever you want, except for any home that's connecting through our competitor, or any business using the competitor who hasn't paid us too". Since the ISPs can't seem to play nice, the idea would be to take it out of their hands. Now, I don't nessicarily think that that's
The limit of a constant over x as x approaches zero would depend on which direction you're approaching x from. For 23/x, if you approach 0 from the left, you get -inf, and if you approach it from the right you get a positive inf. Really, though, the behavior is better defined as an unbounded number approaching positive or negative infinity.
If it was a silent prayer, how would anyone know it was done? Seems like a huge stretch to even make it up the chain, let alone to the realm of punishment. Precident is pretty clear- so long as it isn't disruptive of class, no student can be prevented from expressing any belief, religious or otherwise. Faculty and staff are in a bit of a harder position, and generally can't talk about pro or anti religious sentiments (because the kids are a captive audiance to the government employee).
Really, though, there is no persecution of religion in this country, though there are idiot school administrators who don't bother to read the laws/court decisions (and they go to both sides on this). Overall though, I don't understand how you can claim religious persecution in a country where the president is a born agan Christian, over 99% of the legislature follows a Jeudeo-Christian religion, all of the Supreme Court is Jewish or Christian, and every state governor is religious. Heck, can you come up with a single politician on the national scale that doesn't wear their religion on their sleeve?
If you had your house opened up for a community walkthrough (say for some sort of historical touring for a week) and you had a painting on your wall. If I sat down and managed to create a replica painting, would you have a (reasonable) complaint? You haven't lost anything, even though I have the same thing. Say you were the painter of the original. Did you lose anything? I doubt it. I wouldn't pay for an original painting (I don't have that kind of cash laying around), so there is no sale to lose. In all likelyhood, the artist will actually get more noticed, now that there is somewhere else for their work to be noticed.
I don't recall that either. What I do remember is that the US declared war on the British Empire in 1812 after the British took US citizens on merchant ships and forced the to fight in the British Navy, refused to recognize that the US could trade with France, and refused to stop supporting Native American attacks in the US frontier. Even though, yes, the British invasion into the US burned much of DC, the US invasion of Canada burned York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, including it's parliment building. As far as New Orleans is concerned, Canada can't possibly take credit for the attack (and wouldn't want to). It was a naval invasion that utterly failed, with a US force half the size of the British taking a handful of casualties, yet killing/wounding/capturing over 2000 British troops (the irony of this is that it was after the peace treaty was signed). The war itself ended with neither side really winning anything (though both claim victory).
What is there to examine? Books that are hundreds or thousands of years old that are themselves based off of second hand accounts, oral tradition, or "revelations". Those same books have been translated, retranslated, edited, translated again, then usually abridged down into a form of the language that people can understand, all the while being subject to political influence and the whims of those who were transcribing. It doesn't really matter which book you claim to derive your belief in a god from, they are all subject to the same problems- a total lack of evidence, contradicting evidence that we know otherwise, or contradicting themselves.
Let's face it, how many Christians go and read the Koran? How many Muslims learn the oral traditions of the Navahos? How many Navahos read the Tripitaka? So on and so forth. If you expect an atheist to examine every religion out there from Atenism to Zoroastrianism to decide that the lack of evidence for supernatural entities seriously diminishes the likelyhood of any god to some chance approaching zero, perhaps all relgious groups should find a way to argue why their particular flavor of gods/goddesses is a better fit than any other group's.
Least common denominator stems from least common multiple, which is the lowest number that can be divided by a given set of numbers. Least common denominator is when you're trying to find the LCM for the denominator of two fractions. It is almost never 1 (the case where it is, you don't need to use fractions).
You're confusing the term dividend with devisor (as in, greatest common divisor, which is the greatest number that divides into a set of numbers without causing a remainder). The least common divisor in any case is 1, but that's a given, since you can divide anything by 1 and get the same thing.
Well, the phrase "life, liberty, and property" originated with John Locke, Adam Smith coined the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property", with the expression "pursuit of happyness" originating with Dr. Samuel Johnson. As far as being found in a constitution, it is found in the 1947 Constitution of Japan, but it's in Chapter 3, Article 13.
Any school that does this is ignorant of the law. It is perfectly legal to have a Christian club on a school campus, provided they are treated equally with any group that wants to form a Wicca club, a GLBT club, a NASA club, or a "Pimp my ride" club. I'm not religious, and I'm very much for seperation of church and state, however, I also have to balance that against groups of people who wish to freely associate in non-class time, regardless of what I think about the group.
Fortunately, the will of the majority can't overrule the rights of the minority. Even if 99% of a community wanted to outlaw someone from distributing communist pamphlets, it wouldn't (and definitely shouldn't) stand as a law in America.
Is there anyone who isn't aware of Burger King at this point who will suddenly see this and say to themselves "hmm, the creepy guy sneaking up on people makes me want to buy a burger from a multinational chain"? Then again, I doubt it will make anyone boycott Burger King either, so it really doesn't matter. For the record, I don't like BK because I don't enjoy fast food burgers (or most other kinds of fast food).
And there's no better way to do that than by giving kids who have no philosophical training 25 minutes to write answers to questions that could've been the basis for another book by Descartes? At least the ACT gives a concrete writing requirement, which solves some of the issue, but it's still nearly impossible to come up with a real response in the short time frame given (this coming from someone who got a 10/12 on the ACT writing and a 680 on the SAT writing, and I know that I wrote crap).
They copied and/or did it with friends (which essentially means they did about 20% of the "work" while being distracted, thus learning next to nothing). Seriously, I understand where you're coming from. I don't think I did more than a handful of my math assignments senior year any earlier than the class before (if at all). Still managed to ace the class (I don't think my teacher was too pleased about it either).
Since when has DRM stopped piracy? Perhaps a few kids won't be able to copy their friends CDs directly. Instead, they'll learn that they can go online and get it off of Kazaa, the Limewire, then bittorrent, then whatever else comes up. If the executives really think that DRM is preventing privacy, then they really are insulated. Heck, a lot of people pirate to get around DRM.
Perhaps the real issue should be looked at: that even though CDs cost almost nothing to manufacture compared to the tapes and 8 tracks of yesteryear, it's still as expensive as ever to go out and buy a CD. Digital downloads which cost virtually nothing are sold for a buck. If songs online sold for a fraction of the cost without shackling me to a particular device (I'm looking at you, every music service that uses clunky, proprietary DRM), it would be far more palatable to buy music.
Because the spectrum isn't unlimited. Because the electromagnetic waves are passing around us at all times. Because giant corporations don't nessicarily know what's best. Because I'm tired of the FCC restricting speech. How about any of those reasons?
The difference is that Turnitin has permission from the school, which obtained permission from the students (i.e. "you can't take this class if you don't agree to submit your work through Turnitin.")
That doesn't fly in a public high school. If you have no options besides take a zero or let Turnitin check your work (and add it to their database), then getting permission is just a formality, not a choice.
Not every school has programming classes, and not every teacher understands (or cares) that some kids can learn the material on their own or at least at a much faster pace than the rest of their classmates. Besides, what do you do in English, History, or Math where the teacher doesn't have a whole lot of choice besides getting up and lecturing? Most of the time they won't let you do your own thing, even if you can consistently show that you know the material.
Since when could you experiment in high school? Most of the classes are set for you, with maybe 2 elective classes from a list which probably has no more than 2 dozen possibilities, with most of those being art or business classes. A lot of schools don't even have computer science, or any sort of engineering, let alone philosophy, IT, or psychology. Most high school classes are crap anyway, even at the AP level. Trying to fit experimentation into a setting as rigid as high school is nearly impossible. Besides, it's not like at high school graduation you suddenly become an adult. Sure, you can set a far off goal, but more likely then not, you'll consider changing your major (I know I did, I went from Comp Sci/Computer and Systems Engineering dual major to Comp Sci/Philosophy within the first few weeks of classes). So why say that college is a time to stop experimenting and exploring new ideas? It's possibly the last time you'll have to really think about what you want to be, so look around a bit before getting entrenched into what you think you want to do.
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As for banks, we tried it. From 1837 to 1862 only state chartered banks existed. The average lifespan of banks in that time was 5 years, and money supply and price levels were increadibly unstable compared to today. The government is corrupt, yes. We all get it. Don't pretend that corporations are any better. Neither is looking out for your interests, so instead of bashing the goverment and supporting corporations, look for what both can do to help you, and then do what you can to prevent them from screwing you over, which usually comes from balancing them against each other.
And I'm sure that a copyright infringement suit would end up costing most people a lot more than 112% of their net income for a 3 month period.
But it's really much worse, because any individual who did what Sony did could be convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and sent to jail for up to a decade. Instead, Sony has to give up what, 10% of their profits over a 3 month period? Less than 3% of their yearly profit (give or take)? How is that justice?
I did what the voice in my head told me. Now my room has nice padded walls.
Seriously, though, if you can pick and choose which morals you want from the Bible, why even have the Bible? If it comes down to a person's own conscience as to whether or not to favor the death penalty, gay marriage, or abortion, why should one keep reading an archaic book every Sunday as if it were the authoritative source of morality? Instead, why not let the Bible go, and look at the facts and arguements founded on reason, so you can at least come up with a defensible position as to what is "right" or not?
I'm sure you'll love them to death, just like Leviticus 20:13 says to.
Look up Kelo v. City of New London. The city authorized a "private" entity that was directly under the control of the local government to condemn 115 houses, all to make the city look better for Pfizer. If eminent domain can be used like that (which I honestly don't think it should, but the Supreme Court made their decision), it can be used to screw corporations to help the rest of us.
Removing regulations would leave us with exploitation of workers and inevitable short sightedness to maximize current profit (for those in the position to do so) at the expense of most of the rest of us (see the early industrial revolution, or modern day sweat shops). But hey, I'm all for removing subsidies, even though it's political suicide. I'm tired of bloated defense contracts for new weapon systems while we ignore the real reasons why people are pissed at us (mostly our large military sticking it's nose in various places it doesn't nessicarily need to be).
Any sufficiently large organization will invariable fuck up and fuck over those that it ostensibly tries to serve. This applies to corporations and governments alike.
That's why we have civil service employees, who aren't politicly affiliated. We've moved past the spoils system here.
I think the point was that the companies are trying to claim that they can do whatever they want with "their" lines, but in reality, the lines were built with an incredible amount of taxpayer funding. It would be like if your local phone company said "yeah, we'll let you call whoever you want, except for any home that's connecting through our competitor, or any business using the competitor who hasn't paid us too". Since the ISPs can't seem to play nice, the idea would be to take it out of their hands. Now, I don't nessicarily think that that's
The limit of a constant over x as x approaches zero would depend on which direction you're approaching x from. For 23/x, if you approach 0 from the left, you get -inf, and if you approach it from the right you get a positive inf. Really, though, the behavior is better defined as an unbounded number approaching positive or negative infinity.
lim x->0+ (1/x) = inf
lim x->0- (1/x) = -inf
If it was a silent prayer, how would anyone know it was done? Seems like a huge stretch to even make it up the chain, let alone to the realm of punishment. Precident is pretty clear- so long as it isn't disruptive of class, no student can be prevented from expressing any belief, religious or otherwise. Faculty and staff are in a bit of a harder position, and generally can't talk about pro or anti religious sentiments (because the kids are a captive audiance to the government employee).
Really, though, there is no persecution of religion in this country, though there are idiot school administrators who don't bother to read the laws/court decisions (and they go to both sides on this). Overall though, I don't understand how you can claim religious persecution in a country where the president is a born agan Christian, over 99% of the legislature follows a Jeudeo-Christian religion, all of the Supreme Court is Jewish or Christian, and every state governor is religious. Heck, can you come up with a single politician on the national scale that doesn't wear their religion on their sleeve?
If you had your house opened up for a community walkthrough (say for some sort of historical touring for a week) and you had a painting on your wall. If I sat down and managed to create a replica painting, would you have a (reasonable) complaint? You haven't lost anything, even though I have the same thing. Say you were the painter of the original. Did you lose anything? I doubt it. I wouldn't pay for an original painting (I don't have that kind of cash laying around), so there is no sale to lose. In all likelyhood, the artist will actually get more noticed, now that there is somewhere else for their work to be noticed.
I don't recall that either. What I do remember is that the US declared war on the British Empire in 1812 after the British took US citizens on merchant ships and forced the to fight in the British Navy, refused to recognize that the US could trade with France, and refused to stop supporting Native American attacks in the US frontier. Even though, yes, the British invasion into the US burned much of DC, the US invasion of Canada burned York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, including it's parliment building. As far as New Orleans is concerned, Canada can't possibly take credit for the attack (and wouldn't want to). It was a naval invasion that utterly failed, with a US force half the size of the British taking a handful of casualties, yet killing/wounding/capturing over 2000 British troops (the irony of this is that it was after the peace treaty was signed). The war itself ended with neither side really winning anything (though both claim victory).
What is there to examine? Books that are hundreds or thousands of years old that are themselves based off of second hand accounts, oral tradition, or "revelations". Those same books have been translated, retranslated, edited, translated again, then usually abridged down into a form of the language that people can understand, all the while being subject to political influence and the whims of those who were transcribing. It doesn't really matter which book you claim to derive your belief in a god from, they are all subject to the same problems- a total lack of evidence, contradicting evidence that we know otherwise, or contradicting themselves.
Let's face it, how many Christians go and read the Koran? How many Muslims learn the oral traditions of the Navahos? How many Navahos read the Tripitaka? So on and so forth. If you expect an atheist to examine every religion out there from Atenism to Zoroastrianism to decide that the lack of evidence for supernatural entities seriously diminishes the likelyhood of any god to some chance approaching zero, perhaps all relgious groups should find a way to argue why their particular flavor of gods/goddesses is a better fit than any other group's.
Least common denominator stems from least common multiple, which is the lowest number that can be divided by a given set of numbers. Least common denominator is when you're trying to find the LCM for the denominator of two fractions. It is almost never 1 (the case where it is, you don't need to use fractions).
You're confusing the term dividend with devisor (as in, greatest common divisor, which is the greatest number that divides into a set of numbers without causing a remainder). The least common divisor in any case is 1, but that's a given, since you can divide anything by 1 and get the same thing.
Well, the phrase "life, liberty, and property" originated with John Locke, Adam Smith coined the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property", with the expression "pursuit of happyness" originating with Dr. Samuel Johnson. As far as being found in a constitution, it is found in the 1947 Constitution of Japan, but it's in Chapter 3, Article 13.
Any school that does this is ignorant of the law. It is perfectly legal to have a Christian club on a school campus, provided they are treated equally with any group that wants to form a Wicca club, a GLBT club, a NASA club, or a "Pimp my ride" club. I'm not religious, and I'm very much for seperation of church and state, however, I also have to balance that against groups of people who wish to freely associate in non-class time, regardless of what I think about the group.
Any law is voluntary. You can ignore them as much as you want, so long as you don't mind prison.
Fortunately, the will of the majority can't overrule the rights of the minority. Even if 99% of a community wanted to outlaw someone from distributing communist pamphlets, it wouldn't (and definitely shouldn't) stand as a law in America.
Is there anyone who isn't aware of Burger King at this point who will suddenly see this and say to themselves "hmm, the creepy guy sneaking up on people makes me want to buy a burger from a multinational chain"? Then again, I doubt it will make anyone boycott Burger King either, so it really doesn't matter. For the record, I don't like BK because I don't enjoy fast food burgers (or most other kinds of fast food).
And there's no better way to do that than by giving kids who have no philosophical training 25 minutes to write answers to questions that could've been the basis for another book by Descartes? At least the ACT gives a concrete writing requirement, which solves some of the issue, but it's still nearly impossible to come up with a real response in the short time frame given (this coming from someone who got a 10/12 on the ACT writing and a 680 on the SAT writing, and I know that I wrote crap).
They copied and/or did it with friends (which essentially means they did about 20% of the "work" while being distracted, thus learning next to nothing). Seriously, I understand where you're coming from. I don't think I did more than a handful of my math assignments senior year any earlier than the class before (if at all). Still managed to ace the class (I don't think my teacher was too pleased about it either).
Since when has DRM stopped piracy? Perhaps a few kids won't be able to copy their friends CDs directly. Instead, they'll learn that they can go online and get it off of Kazaa, the Limewire, then bittorrent, then whatever else comes up. If the executives really think that DRM is preventing privacy, then they really are insulated. Heck, a lot of people pirate to get around DRM.
Perhaps the real issue should be looked at: that even though CDs cost almost nothing to manufacture compared to the tapes and 8 tracks of yesteryear, it's still as expensive as ever to go out and buy a CD. Digital downloads which cost virtually nothing are sold for a buck. If songs online sold for a fraction of the cost without shackling me to a particular device (I'm looking at you, every music service that uses clunky, proprietary DRM), it would be far more palatable to buy music.
I know, and in this Faraday and age!
*ducks*
Because the spectrum isn't unlimited. Because the electromagnetic waves are passing around us at all times. Because giant corporations don't nessicarily know what's best. Because I'm tired of the FCC restricting speech. How about any of those reasons?
It's not non-profit, it's 80 cents per student for the school to use Turnitin.
Not every school has programming classes, and not every teacher understands (or cares) that some kids can learn the material on their own or at least at a much faster pace than the rest of their classmates. Besides, what do you do in English, History, or Math where the teacher doesn't have a whole lot of choice besides getting up and lecturing? Most of the time they won't let you do your own thing, even if you can consistently show that you know the material.
Since when could you experiment in high school? Most of the classes are set for you, with maybe 2 elective classes from a list which probably has no more than 2 dozen possibilities, with most of those being art or business classes. A lot of schools don't even have computer science, or any sort of engineering, let alone philosophy, IT, or psychology. Most high school classes are crap anyway, even at the AP level. Trying to fit experimentation into a setting as rigid as high school is nearly impossible. Besides, it's not like at high school graduation you suddenly become an adult. Sure, you can set a far off goal, but more likely then not, you'll consider changing your major (I know I did, I went from Comp Sci/Computer and Systems Engineering dual major to Comp Sci/Philosophy within the first few weeks of classes). So why say that college is a time to stop experimenting and exploring new ideas? It's possibly the last time you'll have to really think about what you want to be, so look around a bit before getting entrenched into what you think you want to do.