I'm not. You are a stalker though. That would be what posting the same brain dead idiotic response to my sig over and over indicates.
I'm just trying to kill some time by pointing out your broadbrush hypocrisy
Given the fact that there is no hypocrisy in stating a well established *fact*, that's clearly not what you are trying to do at all. What you are doing is taking a true statement and changing the target while adding a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. Gerbils?!? Yeah right.
You can look here for where I explained the sig to another poster. If you can actually come up with anything to refute it, go for it. You, of course, won't be able to since you're just a moronic little troll, but there you go.
Again I ask, when did the 1st amendment begin to be applied to forms of expression other than speech?
You're missing the point. The first amendment doesn't really mean anything. It was just put in as an afterthought because some people figured that even with it clearly spelled out that the extent of the powers of the government were those specifically granted in the constitution.
The fact is that you have freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and pretty much every other right or freedom you care to make up provided it doesn't infringe on those of others.
You seem to think that the purpose of the constitution is to grant you rights, and that is completely wrong.
You already have those rights. The Bill of Rights are merely those that were seen as so important that they needed to be explicitly listed.
As to why First Amendment defenses are used in cases where people were doing something besides just talking in words, my guess would be that the point of freedom of speech is to allow people to *express* ideas.
Speech is just one form of expression. If you took this too literally, then writing, sign language, or anything except talking wouldn't be covered. Again, it is really beside the point in an ideal situation, snce nothing gives the government the right to limit any of those things or any other form of expression in the first place.
The situation is far from ideal however, as demonstrated by the fact that there are so many cases that even have to mention any of the amendments.
Were our government made up of people who were anything but scum, then it never would have happened because they wouldn't make any flat out treasonous (IMHO) laws that even come close to going against the Bill of Rights.
It seems like you feel that they have the right to restrict anything that they want unless it's specifically denied them in the Bill of Rights. That sounds really odd coming from somebody who claims to be a strict constructionist, so maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
I lean toward "dead document" interpretation, and it chafes me greatly every time I hear someone scream about their non-existent right of "freedom of expression".
Then you clearly do not understand a damn thing about the issue.
You do have a right to free expression. The constitution doesn't grant rights. It limits government powers. The rights in the Bill of Rights were tacked on as an afterthought because a few people (who were considered paranoid at the time) pushed for them because they predicted that there would be people like you. Most of the framers didn't think it would be necessary to explicitly spell them out since the power to deny those rights was never granted to the government.
This should be clear to a dead document type as well (since it is explicitly spelled out), had you actually ever read it instead of repeating some moronic crap you heard somewhere.
The only way the company could get mail again is if they resolved the issue with my friend because my friend had to sign some paperwork allowing the company to start recieving mail again. After that, the company sent my friend a hand written and signed rebate check for the disputed amount.
Did your friend wait 8-12 weeks before signing the form?
And, of course, everybody who filed their application starting 4 months *after* my wife (who is from England of all terrorist haunts) filed hers got put on a fast track meaning if you file today, you'll still probably get your green card before she will.
Although I don't use (and in some cases understand:-) half the stuff they taught me, I feel like the act of trying to understand it increased my ability to understand a larger range of concepts - kind of like working out to increase muscle capacity.
Exactly. I got my degree in math, and I doubt I'll use the fact that I not only understand, but can prove The generalized Stokes Theorem.
However, the fact that I can read a sentence consisting of primarily goofy symbols even worse that the linked one makes me an excellent Perl programmer;-)
Right now the Republicans are winning elections because they stand for something and they can convince people of what they stand for.
Nope.
It's possible that they are winning because they can convince people that they stand for something, which is very different than what you said. The terrifying thing is that what they stand for according to their actions is pretty much diametrically opposed to what they say that they stand for.
but it is certain people would rather have real Republicans than fake Republicans.
Well, this is again totally contrary to the facts.
John McCain is a real Republican, Bush is a fake Republican.
McCain didn't get the nomination, yet Bush did in part because, as a deserter, he cowardly attacked the integrity of a war hero.
So it seems clear that the faker you are, the more likely you are to get elected by Republicans. At least that's what all of the facts would seem to indicate.
Corruption is bound to happen under such a system, but as long as it's kept somewhat in check (dozens of Senators and House Representatives have been forced to resign for ethical violations over the past 50 years, not to mention one President and almost two), then that kind of stuff is under the radar as far as I'm concerned.
Of course, what percentage of those were related to sex, and what percentage to things like bouncing checks on their Senate accounts, proposing laws at the behest of large donors against the best interest of the populace etc?
Marriage is the basic unit of family organization upon which our entire civilization is built. While I happen to think that government has no business prohibiting families made up of same-sex couples (or even multiple-partner marriages), there are those who strongly feel otherwise, and not simply for reasons of puritan bigotry. Their objections are not entirely without merit.
Our culture is largely based around this, not our civilization. The people who feel strongly against this do so entirely due to puritan bigotry. Were this not the case, don't you think one of them would have been able to offer any other explanation? They have not.
Their arguments go like this:
"We need to defend the sanctity of marriage". Never do they propose any even theoretical mechanism by which allowing gay people hospital visitation rights and the like could have any possible negative effect. The simple reason is that there is none. This is a purely religious argument which has no validity even within their own religion if they would bother to actually understand what the religion that they claim to follow actually says. So, yes, their objections *are* entirely without merit.
Living wills and abortion both get down to a very fundamental question: At what point do your rights, specifically the single most important right of survival, begin and end? When does a person become a person? When to they cease to be a person? Are we entitled to waive our own right to life under certain circumstances? These are big questions, and the minutae of how the answers are applied can impact millions of people.
Most of what you say is valid here with the exception of:
"Are we entitled to waive our own right to life under certain circumstances? "
This isn't a matter of debate. Of course you do. It is your life. The right to die is a fundamental part of the right to life. There is no rational argument to allow the government to keep you alive against your will at gunpoint. Certain aspects are debatable, such as who gets to make the decision to not force your life to continue when you are not able to do so. "The sanctity of marriage" people would argue that that should be the spouse alone, were their arguments consistent and based on logic, but they are not.
Evolution is the theoretical model upon which all of our modern knowledge of biology is built. It is absolutely vital to the long-term advancement of science that it is taught in schools. At the same time, Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man, runs afowl of several major religions regarding man's relationship to other animals. Balancing the need to teach "this is what our best science has established" with the need to avoid saying "your family's religion must be incorrect superstition" is a challenge which presents no easy answers (unless you are willing to dismiss the other side's concerns out of hand.)
This is a red herring. Religion and Evolution do not conflict in general. The only time that they do is in the minds of people for whom reality conflicts with their religion. These people who want to tell God what tools he is or is not allowed to use in the construction of the universe. This is a very small proportion of the population. The majority of the people who object to the teaching of evolution (Those who do not fall into the above) fall into two groups. 1. Those who don't even understand the theory or the facts surrounding it. 2. Those who want to use it as an excuse to shove their religion down everybody else's throat at gunpoint.
Neither of these groups has any merit whatsoever in a free society.
The religion clause of the First Ammendment is vital to the American concept of protecting the state from church control while protecting the church from state control, and the issues such as public displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses is a terrific example of the massive swath of gray area where many people wish there was a narrow black line.
In any case, it's usually polite practice that, when introducing an argument, one provides the sources they used in order to come up with the argument.
I usually find that when I do, people find some lame excuse (or often just make one up) and claim that my source is wacky. Since this is pretty basic info based merely on publically available information I figured anybody who wanted to dispute it could look it up.
That's also a very intolerant.sig you have there. I thought non-Republicans were supposed to be tolerant? Isn't tolerance like virginity, you have it or you don't?
Hmmm... I fail to see how my sig is anything besides a statement of a very sad fact that was demonstrated in the last election.
Here's my reasoning for it.
The vast majority of the people who voted for Bush (according to exit polls) did so for one reason.
They disagreed with his economic policies. They disagreed with his actions leading up to and during the Iraq invasion.
The one reason most commonly stated was his stance on the gay marriage issue. Now his stance and Kerry's stance on the issue were practically identical. The only difference was that Kerry's stance was directly in line with one of the fundamental planks of the Republican Party. That such things are for the states to decide. Bush's stance was diametrically opposed to the Republican platform (as are a lot of them. See the disagreements with econ. and foreign policy above). He wanted to amend our constitution for the specific purpose of discriminating against one particular group out of a purely religious based hatred which is totally inconsistent with the religion he (and a lot of his supporters) claims to follow.
So what we are left with is that the vast majority of the people who voted for Bush, who are largely Republicans did so primarily from a blind hatred of a group of people who their own god made the way that they hate at the expense of the primary things they claim to stand for as a party.
Now, I fail to see how that is indicative of any sort of intolerance on my part. I personally don't care what anybody wants to believe, who they are who they love or anything like that. That is tolerance That does not mean that when a group of people who can not even be consistent in their own stated (VERY LOUDLY) beliefs wants to shove their (bastardized version of) religion down my throat at gunpoint that I should ignore it.
Now, it is true that not all Republicans buy into that ignorant crap, but they sure seem to go along with it rather than stand up in favor of their country at the expense of their party.
Is my reasoning clear to you? Is there some logical flaw that you see in it?
AS long as you take some of what Greene says about string theory with a grain of salt. He rather glosses over the substantial difficulties that string theory still has.
My understanding is that the major difficulties with it are:
It's entirely possible that we will never be able to build a particle accelerator that can generate enough energy to experimentally detect the difference between a zero size point particle and a really freaking small, yet non-zero size string
The actual mathematics of the theory are too complex for anybody to quite know how to write down the equations. Infact even approximations to these equations don't really exist yet.
There are somewhere around 10 thousand different families of manifolds which could possibly be the correct one which the curled up dimensions are in the shape of. Also, we can not experimentally determine which one for essentially the same reason as in #1
Are there other substantial difficulties? These are the ones he makes very clear in his book.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the 'stalker' bit, don't flatter yourself.
I'm not. You are a stalker though. That would be what posting the same brain dead idiotic response to my sig over and over indicates.
I'm just trying to kill some time by pointing out your broadbrush hypocrisy
Given the fact that there is no hypocrisy in stating a well established *fact*, that's clearly not what you are trying to do at all.
What you are doing is taking a true statement and changing the target while adding a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. Gerbils?!? Yeah right.
You can look here
for where I explained the sig to another poster. If you can actually come up with anything to refute it, go for it.
You, of course, won't be able to since you're just a moronic little troll, but there you go.
Again I ask, when did the 1st amendment begin to be applied to forms of expression other than speech?
You're missing the point.
The first amendment doesn't really mean anything.
It was just put in as an afterthought because some people figured that even with it clearly spelled out that the extent of the powers of the government were those specifically granted in the constitution.
The fact is that you have freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and pretty much every other right or freedom you care to make up provided it doesn't infringe on those of others.
You seem to think that the purpose of the constitution is to grant you rights, and that is completely wrong.
You already have those rights.
The Bill of Rights are merely those that were seen as so important that they needed to be explicitly listed.
As to why First Amendment defenses are used in cases where people were doing something besides just talking in words, my guess would be that the point of freedom of speech is to allow people to *express* ideas.
Speech is just one form of expression. If you took this too literally, then writing, sign language, or anything except talking wouldn't be covered.
Again, it is really beside the point in an ideal situation, snce nothing gives the government the right to limit any of those things or any other form of expression in the first place.
The situation is far from ideal however, as demonstrated by the fact that there are so many cases that even have to mention any of the amendments.
Were our government made up of people who were anything but scum, then it never would have happened because they wouldn't make any flat out treasonous (IMHO) laws that even come close to going against the Bill of Rights.
It seems like you feel that they have the right to restrict anything that they want unless it's specifically denied them in the Bill of Rights. That sounds really odd coming from somebody who claims to be a strict constructionist, so maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
Likewise speaking a word that you have only read, but never heard will make you sound equally a fool.
Yeah,
epitome screwed me on that one when I was a kid.
I lean toward "dead document" interpretation, and it chafes me greatly every time I hear someone scream about their non-existent right of "freedom of expression".
Then you clearly do not understand a damn thing about the issue.
You do have a right to free expression. The constitution doesn't grant rights. It limits government powers.
The rights in the Bill of Rights were tacked on as an afterthought because a few people (who were considered paranoid at the time) pushed for them because they predicted that there would be people like you.
Most of the framers didn't think it would be necessary to explicitly spell them out since the power to deny those rights was never granted to the government.
This should be clear to a dead document type as well (since it is explicitly spelled out), had you actually ever read it instead of repeating some moronic crap you heard somewhere.
Wow, my moronic little stalker forgot to hit the "post anonymously" box.
The only way the company could get mail again is if they resolved the issue with my friend because my friend had to sign some paperwork allowing the company to start recieving mail again. After that, the company sent my friend a hand written and signed rebate check for the disputed amount.
Did your friend wait 8-12 weeks before signing the form?
"10 to the 22nd, 10 to the 23rd, 10 to the 24th... fuck this.. infinity. . goodnight"
;-)
Not to disturb you sleep or anything, but once you hit that basic infinity, you're far from done.
Here's a good jumping off point.
Pleasant dreams
Yeah, but exactly how slowly are you willing to wait.
I, for one, get extremely impatient if I am not waiting very near the optimum speed.
Well, does the rollback fail silently as well? ;-)
At least it is consistent if so
The whole chain of events makes me wonder when we'll have our 'Reichstag fire'.
That would have been 9/11
Well, little troll, that would only be true if you think that knowing that is great which I suspect most people don't.
And, of course, everybody who filed their application starting 4 months *after* my wife (who is from England of all terrorist haunts) filed hers got put on a fast track meaning if you file today, you'll still probably get your green card before she will.
INS bastards.
Although I don't use (and in some cases understand :-) half the stuff they taught me, I feel like the act of trying to understand it increased my ability to understand a larger range of concepts - kind of like working out to increase muscle capacity.
;-)
Exactly.
I got my degree in math, and I doubt I'll use the fact that I not only understand, but can prove
The generalized Stokes Theorem.
However, the fact that I can read a sentence consisting of primarily goofy symbols even worse that the linked one makes me an excellent Perl programmer
Loki did a port of 3 to Linux, which runs natively. Since they went out of business, I'm not sure where you can get it.
4 only has a windows version, but I can't get it working with Cedega/WineX
Right now the Republicans are winning elections because they stand for something and they can convince people of what they stand for.
Nope.
It's possible that they are winning because they can convince people that they stand for something, which is very different than what you said.
The terrifying thing is that what they stand for according to their actions is pretty much diametrically opposed to what they say that they stand for.
but it is certain people would rather have real Republicans than fake Republicans.
Well, this is again totally contrary to the facts.
John McCain is a real Republican, Bush is a fake Republican.
McCain didn't get the nomination, yet Bush did in part because, as a deserter, he cowardly attacked the integrity of a war hero.
So it seems clear that the faker you are, the more likely you are to get elected by Republicans. At least that's what all of the facts would seem to indicate.
i'm not the only one that plays/likes heros 4!
I actually got into the series when I got Heroes 3 from Loki.
It's really cool to see the disk case with the penguin on it.
Oh well, hopefully someone else will try it again and the market for Linux games will be better than it was.
(1) MySQL is not an enterprise level database, its nice and I use it for some small thigs around the office but I would never run an ENT app on it.
However, Postgres *is*.
Nice strawman argument, though.
Cedega. WineX. I have YET to purchase a game I can't run in Linux.
I can't even get the Red Alert installer to run.
Also, Heroes of Might and Magic 4 won't run.
Morrowind and Civ3 work great though.
Ka ching! I'm sure every nerd...erm, guy, would like to play out his fantasies, at least with his head on some other guy's body.
Dude, fuck that.
My head.
My body.
6 totally hot chicks I'll never know doing things that are illegal in half the states.
Now you're talking.
No, all wrong.
Goreans use Gnome.
Koreans use KDE.
All of the above might or might not be GNUreans depnding on who you ask.
The "PEOPLE DIED" thing was a joke, referencing the tired "BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED" chants of endless droves of groupthink protesters.
I think you mean "Referencing a basic statement of fact".
Corruption is bound to happen under such a system, but as long as it's kept somewhat in check (dozens of Senators and House Representatives have been forced to resign for ethical violations over the past 50 years, not to mention one President and almost two), then that kind of stuff is under the radar as far as I'm concerned.
Of course, what percentage of those were related to sex, and what percentage to things like bouncing checks on their Senate accounts, proposing laws at the behest of large donors against the best interest of the populace etc?
Marriage is the basic unit of family organization upon which our entire civilization is built. While I happen to think that government has no business prohibiting families made up of same-sex couples (or even multiple-partner marriages), there are those who strongly feel otherwise, and not simply for reasons of puritan bigotry. Their objections are not entirely without merit.
Our culture is largely based around this, not our civilization.
The people who feel strongly against this do so entirely due to puritan bigotry. Were this not the case, don't you think one of them would have been able to offer any other explanation? They have not.
Their arguments go like this:
"We need to defend the sanctity of marriage". Never do they propose any even theoretical mechanism by which allowing gay people hospital visitation rights and the like could have any possible negative effect. The simple reason is that there is none.
This is a purely religious argument which has no validity even within their own religion if they would bother to actually understand what the religion that they claim to follow actually says.
So, yes, their objections *are* entirely without merit.
Living wills and abortion both get down to a very fundamental question: At what point do your rights, specifically the single most important right of survival, begin and end? When does a person become a person? When to they cease to be a person? Are we entitled to waive our own right to life under certain circumstances? These are big questions, and the minutae of how the answers are applied can impact millions of people.
Most of what you say is valid here with the exception of:
"Are we entitled to waive our own right to life under certain circumstances? "
This isn't a matter of debate.
Of course you do. It is your life. The right to die is a fundamental part of the right to life. There is no rational argument to allow the government to keep you alive against your will at gunpoint.
Certain aspects are debatable, such as who gets to make the decision to not force your life to continue when you are not able to do so. "The sanctity of marriage" people would argue that that should be the spouse alone, were their arguments consistent and based on logic, but they are not.
Evolution is the theoretical model upon which all of our modern knowledge of biology is built. It is absolutely vital to the long-term advancement of science that it is taught in schools. At the same time, Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man, runs afowl of several major religions regarding man's relationship to other animals. Balancing the need to teach "this is what our best science has established" with the need to avoid saying "your family's religion must be incorrect superstition" is a challenge which presents no easy answers (unless you are willing to dismiss the other side's concerns out of hand.)
This is a red herring. Religion and Evolution do not conflict in general. The only time that they do is in the minds of people for whom reality conflicts with their religion. These people who want to tell God what tools he is or is not allowed to use in the construction of the universe. This is a very small proportion of the population.
The majority of the people who object to the teaching of evolution (Those who do not fall into the above) fall into two groups.
1. Those who don't even understand the theory or the facts surrounding it.
2. Those who want to use it as an excuse to shove their religion down everybody else's throat at gunpoint.
Neither of these groups has any merit whatsoever in a free society.
The religion clause of the First Ammendment is vital to the American concept of protecting the state from church control while protecting the church from state control, and the issues such as public displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses is a terrific example of the massive swath of gray area where many people wish there was a narrow black line.
In any case, it's usually polite practice that, when introducing an argument, one provides the sources they used in order to come up with the argument.
.sig you have there. I thought non-Republicans were supposed to be tolerant? Isn't tolerance like virginity, you have it or you don't?
I usually find that when I do, people find some lame excuse (or often just make one up) and claim that my source is wacky.
Since this is pretty basic info based merely on publically available information I figured anybody who wanted to dispute it could look it up.
That's also a very intolerant
Hmmm... I fail to see how my sig is anything besides a statement of a very sad fact that was demonstrated in the last election.
Here's my reasoning for it.
The vast majority of the people who voted for Bush (according to exit polls) did so for one reason.
They disagreed with his economic policies.
They disagreed with his actions leading up to and during the Iraq invasion.
The one reason most commonly stated was his stance on the gay marriage issue.
Now his stance and Kerry's stance on the issue were practically identical. The only difference was that Kerry's stance was directly in line with one of the fundamental planks of the Republican Party. That such things are for the states to decide.
Bush's stance was diametrically opposed to the Republican platform (as are a lot of them. See the disagreements with econ. and foreign policy above). He wanted to amend our constitution for the specific purpose of discriminating against one particular group out of a purely religious based hatred which is totally inconsistent with the religion he (and a lot of his supporters) claims to follow.
So what we are left with is that the vast majority of the people who voted for Bush, who are largely Republicans did so primarily from a blind hatred of a group of people who their own god made the way that they hate at the expense of the primary things they claim to stand for as a party.
Now, I fail to see how that is indicative of any sort of intolerance on my part.
I personally don't care what anybody wants to believe, who they are who they love or anything like that.
That is tolerance
That does not mean that when a group of people who can not even be consistent in their own stated (VERY LOUDLY) beliefs wants to shove their (bastardized version of) religion down my throat at gunpoint that I should ignore it.
Now, it is true that not all Republicans buy into that ignorant crap, but they sure seem to go along with it rather than stand up in favor of their country at the expense of their party.
Is my reasoning clear to you?
Is there some logical flaw that you see in it?
My understanding is that the major difficulties with it are:
Are there other substantial difficulties? These are the ones he makes very clear in his book.