Perhaps, but large trucks make up a large percentage of the traffic on our interstate highway system, and the increases in gas tax will hit them the hardest.
That cost will simply be passed to the consumer, maybe rightfully so, but it won't discourage interstate trucking. It will just mean that everyone ends up paying more for eggs, electronics, etc. Seems like a dangerous road to go down in tough economic times, as it won't take much for people to cut back spending on those things. A 10-15% increase in the cost of goods across the board would probably cripple us.
This is where I realized that you were talking through your hat. No one really knows what the fan-base for things like CP is like, because of the social and legal stigma attached to it. We know what SOME of the audience looks like, specifically the stupid members of the audience, because they end up getting arrested occasionally.
I think it is quite a stretch to say that you re-injure the person in the photograph by looking at it. How could looking at something produce a victim? While some vague, insufficiently substantiated arguments exist for the notion that it "increases demand" (as if modern CP were being created and sold, instead of created by fathers and sex tourists and freely distributed) they are simply "hollow" (dunno about vile, not placing value judgments here) when applied to CP.
platonic, perfectly personality matched non sex addicted couples, and i'l show you the extinction of homo sapiens
It's sad that the first thought that came to mind for me here was that it would be pretty easy to extract semen samples from those couples, storing them in a genetic database in the cryo-freezer in the closet, and then artificially inseminating the females.../facepalm
Oh well. At least Northrend will help me through the pain.
How about you talk to the lawyers your school keeps around for this kind of stuff? Since you're going to be obligated to follow whatever their rules are anyway, you might as well defer to them now instead of after their lawsuit.
[Oh, so you don't really understand Darwinism. Unless you get heart disease or have a stroke before you hit sexual maturity, this is irrelevant. [...] and getting there is all that Darwinism cares about.]
I'm not sure this is completely true... Even if our hypothetical morbidly obese examples reach breading age Darwinian evolutionary theory isn't completely done with them.
We could continue to speculate that the morbidly obese would have a more difficult time earning a living and providing for their offspring (putting them in good schools / college / transportation to social networking opportunities).
Even aside from that, we aren't talking about individuals here (or shouldn't be). Even in the current environment where being an obese average-Joe is tolerated, it provides significant personal, social, and environmental hurtles. If the social climate were to change, it may become even more difficult to live as an obese person.
By the same token, such a wide range of physical traits may be useful to our species as a whole if the environment changes to make those traits desirable (not specifically talking about obesity here, but it could conceivably be one such trait).
Maybe you have a different idea of what science is than most people, but we should not be looking for evidence of ET, we should be looking for evidence which will refute the theoretical underpinnings of ET (at least in Poppers vision of science). So no, absence of radio transmission != evidence of no ET, it's simply an absence of unusual radio waves.
The trouble is, falsifying the existance of ET is difficult (mostly unfeasable) and expensive. It's cheap to scan for radio waves, so we've convinced ourselves that radio is the most likely form of interstellar noise produced by intelligent life.
I'll happily agree with you that pretty much any theory surrounding ET, or the universe as a whole in such aspects that are difficult to measure/quantify, are pretty shakey. You have to draw the line at saying "no radio transmissions = evidence of no ET," if you want to stay objective, though. Otherwise you might as well jump on the other non-scientific theory bandwagons, ala intelligent design.
music is the only product for which they set up stores that emulate, not the successful store, but the unsuccessful stores Shhh! If they actually made a profit, there would be no losses to blame on the pirates! That would look terrible in court!
Gambling, (other)gaming, and drug use may be different things in your eyes, but they are all intimately related. For starters they are frequently comorbid: You will often find that clinics treating gambling problems also must treat alcoholism (and/or the abuse of other drugs). I don't know if anyone has studied online gaming and alcoholism, but I'd bet good money that there are papers waiting to be written in that area.
Now for the good stuff: Dopamine pathways in the brain play a huge role in drug addictions. More recently it's believed that the mesolimbic dopamine pathway plays a large part in "teaching" (in the behavioralist sense) all addicts to be addicts, regardless of the object of their addiction. There was a study a few years ago that actually showed in real time the effect that gambling had on these dopamine pathways: gambling addicts playing cards elicited no abnormal response, but the second a wager was made (and the game became gambling for money) those pathways lit up like christmas trees.
I believe MMORPG-style video games have the potential to be even more addictive and destructive due to the embedded social component inherent in their playstyle. Not only are you being rewarded (and addicted) by your neurochemical system for in-game successes, but as you spend more time in-game your game "friends" begin to supplant your real-life friends. They fill the desire for socialization as well as potentially lead you to virtual (and neurochemical) rewards. They become more useful to your limbic system than your real friends. (just as an aside, this may also help explain some extreme emotional responses to in-game problems. Listen to this audio http://www.ytmnd.com/keyword/Cloud%20Song and tell me it doesn't sound a bit like a drug addict being denied his fix.)
Which is kind of like having the fifth largest army in the world (Iraq). After the first couple, there's a big fucking drop-off.
Okay, it sounded better coming from Bill Hicks, but it's still true.;)
Amazon is totally within their rights to bill people for the orders because they took advantage of them.
It's scary to think how many of these sleezy little bastards read slashdot. Gimmie gimmie, mine mine, Ha-Ha!
On the other hand, Amazon could make a killing selling digital recordings of the whiney little cunts when they call to complain that their basket full of free shit wasn't really free. I'd pay for it, but I'd pay more for names and addresses.
What I do not enjoy, however, is his political commentary. The same can be said for Orson Scott Card. Why is it that authors, singers, actors, etc feel the need to get political? Are we enveloped in a society where it is expected that if you have any leverage, you push your beliefs on other people?
I happen to agree with you about Card. I love his books, but his political beliefs aren't any more influential to me than any other stranger's. That being said, Crichton (who graduated from Harvard Medical School) has a more influential (if not entirely unique) perspective on biological matters. His opinion on genetics, even in the political sphere, carries a lot more weight with me than those of someone without a medical degree.
If the trouble with a lot of people is that they cannot delineate between a person's public life and their other abilities. He/She's an incredible singer, so her opinion on taxes must be worth listening to. Don't make the same mistake you criticize others for; Crichton went to a prestigious medical school and earned the right for his opinions to carry a bit more weight with regards to subjects like this. His works of fiction are entirely separate and unrelated.
State universities like mine (U of Memphis) don't really have "their own" police / fire. They have a special division of the state police, and when you really think about the property rights involved (Controlled by the TBR in my case) it makes a lot of sense. As far as FD, as far as I know we do not have our own but make use of the local FD (for a price).
Be careful with your assumptions too... Memphis is a fairly dangerous city, usually around the top in the nation percap for car theft, rape, domestic abuse, etc... But not at the U of M. We have one of the safest campuses in the region, with almost no violent crime to speak of at all. Despite being a fairly large school (or as you describe, a dense town).
Sex has some built-in controls, as well as being considered socially as an appropriate bedroom behavior (at least in most cultures). Let's look at this "training" a little more closely:
It's more appropriately referred to as classical conditioning, and it's best spoke of in SR psychology terms. You don't want to pair the bed stimulus with any non-bedroom behavior, or you risk fucking up your sleep. You're right, though, sex is not exempt from this s-r pairing-- you might find yourself becoming aroused when laying down to sleep, even if your wife is not there (and therefore there is no evolutionary reason for you to want to procreate) it is only a conditioned response from the previous pairings of bed and sex.
Now, for the built in protection: you either have sex, or masturbate. It's not as risky as say, watching TV, eating, or doing other non-bedroom behaviors, because unless you have an abnormal sexual appetite, sex/masturbation does not have to be a massive time consumer. There is a definite beginning/ending to sex, as opposed to the other behaviors, so when you're done, you're done. Go to sleep.
(note that it's 3:00am just about, and I'm reading slashdot and posting a response. Damn. I know I should have had sex instead.)
One reason potentially dangerous recessive genes hang around is because the carrier gains some secondary benefit from having it in the recessive form. The classic example is cicle cell (the blood cell deformity that can lead to cicle cell anemia). Carriers (even recessive carriers) gain the benefit of increased protection against malaria; of course, two recessive individuals have a 25% chance of having a cicle cell anemic child, but from an evolutionary perspective it is still a good thing.
The former is reminiscent of "imminent domain" (pun intended),
Well, here in America at least, eminent domain doesn't mean no compensation. When the state government or whatever decides they need to build a highway bypass through your house, they usually stipulate that you will be given "fair market value." It might not be what you want, but it's usually not a lowball figure, either.
Although... Can you imagine what kind of cash would be needed to buy out all the lucrative.com sex site domains at "fair market value"? And of course, how to go about deciding which domain is worth more, sex.com or 12345wewerelategettingoursexpicsdomain.net (and how much extra money that would cost).
It is time to take a stand, and not budge one micron until the traitors who propose this have been excised from the fabric of the legislature.
Jefferson would know how to handle this; it's not much more of a stretch to say that the people whose names are attached to that bill should be excised from their mortal coils, or at the very least rot in jail for treason. Jails are expensive, however, and courthouse hangings are cheap and make a more lasting impression.
To me it's not so terribly scary that the United States congress might be considering this type of legislation, (after all much of the rest of the world has similar issues with critical individual liberties that involve a risk to individual safety, as disgusting and cowardly as it sounds) but rather how sad it is that a nation that had such high ambitions and was willing to sacrifice so much for liberty has been brought so low. We are nearing the bottom of the slippery slope of the defense of liberty and the poor bitch is just about dead. And we're ready to kill her off just to be rid of the burden.
I would be interested to see the quality of a Blue-Ray / HD-DVD porn because I would imagine it would be amazing.
I don't know how much porn you watch, but the average porn actress is a hideous looking human being. I suspect one of the reasons porn hasn't adopted a standard en masse already is because, among other considerations, extremely high resolution porn isn't nearly as much fun to watch.
Just the thought of those 39 year old stretch-mark bearing bimbos pumped full of silicone "acting" in high res is enough to set my stomach churning.
A frequent criticism I have of their work in terms of scientific methodology is that they often only have a single (or very few) subjects per condition, even when it would be a simple matter to add more and achieve a greater degree of generalization. One that comes to mind is the testing of motion sickness remedies; the bias present in this bust precludes generalizability mostly because they only used a few subjects, all of them on the research team.
Conducting good research of publishable quality would probably take far too much time to fit into their shooting schedule, but I don't see that as a big loss. If anything I think their show is a perfect example of the division between research and entertainment. I think that if their show encourages a single child to pursue a career in science, it has had more of an impact than a dozen published papers a year, regardless of their quality. Science in America is already far to maligned by politicians and misunderstood by the general public.
Slashdot Mirror
They are? Where?
You've never been to a bookstore that sells photographic art books? Sheesh.
Perhaps, but large trucks make up a large percentage of the traffic on our interstate highway system, and the increases in gas tax will hit them the hardest.
That cost will simply be passed to the consumer, maybe rightfully so, but it won't discourage interstate trucking. It will just mean that everyone ends up paying more for eggs, electronics, etc. Seems like a dangerous road to go down in tough economic times, as it won't take much for people to cut back spending on those things. A 10-15% increase in the cost of goods across the board would probably cripple us.
This is where I realized that you were talking through your hat. No one really knows what the fan-base for things like CP is like, because of the social and legal stigma attached to it. We know what SOME of the audience looks like, specifically the stupid members of the audience, because they end up getting arrested occasionally.
I think it is quite a stretch to say that you re-injure the person in the photograph by looking at it. How could looking at something produce a victim? While some vague, insufficiently substantiated arguments exist for the notion that it "increases demand" (as if modern CP were being created and sold, instead of created by fathers and sex tourists and freely distributed) they are simply "hollow" (dunno about vile, not placing value judgments here) when applied to CP.
It's sad that the first thought that came to mind for me here was that it would be pretty easy to extract semen samples from those couples, storing them in a genetic database in the cryo-freezer in the closet, and then artificially inseminating the females... /facepalm
Oh well. At least Northrend will help me through the pain.
How about you talk to the lawyers your school keeps around for this kind of stuff? Since you're going to be obligated to follow whatever their rules are anyway, you might as well defer to them now instead of after their lawsuit.
[Oh, so you don't really understand Darwinism. Unless you get heart disease or have a stroke before you hit sexual maturity, this is irrelevant. [...] and getting there is all that Darwinism cares about.]
I'm not sure this is completely true... Even if our hypothetical morbidly obese examples reach breading age Darwinian evolutionary theory isn't completely done with them.
We could continue to speculate that the morbidly obese would have a more difficult time earning a living and providing for their offspring (putting them in good schools / college / transportation to social networking opportunities).
Even aside from that, we aren't talking about individuals here (or shouldn't be). Even in the current environment where being an obese average-Joe is tolerated, it provides significant personal, social, and environmental hurtles. If the social climate were to change, it may become even more difficult to live as an obese person.
By the same token, such a wide range of physical traits may be useful to our species as a whole if the environment changes to make those traits desirable (not specifically talking about obesity here, but it could conceivably be one such trait).
Leeching, of course.
Maybe you have a different idea of what science is than most people, but we should not be looking for evidence of ET, we should be looking for evidence which will refute the theoretical underpinnings of ET (at least in Poppers vision of science). So no, absence of radio transmission != evidence of no ET, it's simply an absence of unusual radio waves.
The trouble is, falsifying the existance of ET is difficult (mostly unfeasable) and expensive. It's cheap to scan for radio waves, so we've convinced ourselves that radio is the most likely form of interstellar noise produced by intelligent life.
I'll happily agree with you that pretty much any theory surrounding ET, or the universe as a whole in such aspects that are difficult to measure/quantify, are pretty shakey. You have to draw the line at saying "no radio transmissions = evidence of no ET," if you want to stay objective, though. Otherwise you might as well jump on the other non-scientific theory bandwagons, ala intelligent design.
This is an ignorant argument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Perhaps radio communication is not as ubiquitous as we believe it to be.
Large people are easier for the bullets to find.
It's the "alarm in your car" that sets the vehicle on fire when the clicker batteries die.
Gambling, (other)gaming, and drug use may be different things in your eyes, but they are all intimately related. For starters they are frequently comorbid: You will often find that clinics treating gambling problems also must treat alcoholism (and/or the abuse of other drugs). I don't know if anyone has studied online gaming and alcoholism, but I'd bet good money that there are papers waiting to be written in that area.
Now for the good stuff: Dopamine pathways in the brain play a huge role in drug addictions. More recently it's believed that the mesolimbic dopamine pathway plays a large part in "teaching" (in the behavioralist sense) all addicts to be addicts, regardless of the object of their addiction. There was a study a few years ago that actually showed in real time the effect that gambling had on these dopamine pathways: gambling addicts playing cards elicited no abnormal response, but the second a wager was made (and the game became gambling for money) those pathways lit up like christmas trees.
I believe MMORPG-style video games have the potential to be even more addictive and destructive due to the embedded social component inherent in their playstyle. Not only are you being rewarded (and addicted) by your neurochemical system for in-game successes, but as you spend more time in-game your game "friends" begin to supplant your real-life friends. They fill the desire for socialization as well as potentially lead you to virtual (and neurochemical) rewards. They become more useful to your limbic system than your real friends. (just as an aside, this may also help explain some extreme emotional responses to in-game problems. Listen to this audio http://www.ytmnd.com/keyword/Cloud%20Song and tell me it doesn't sound a bit like a drug addict being denied his fix.)
The current administration provides the best IT jobs... All you have to do is delete a few emails a day!
I am ashamed that no one shot this fool before he died of old age. An armed populace? What's it good for if this jackass can live to be 85?
Which is kind of like having the fifth largest army in the world (Iraq). After the first couple, there's a big fucking drop-off. Okay, it sounded better coming from Bill Hicks, but it's still true. ;)
Amazon is totally within their rights to bill people for the orders because they took advantage of them.
It's scary to think how many of these sleezy little bastards read slashdot. Gimmie gimmie, mine mine, Ha-Ha!
On the other hand, Amazon could make a killing selling digital recordings of the whiney little cunts when they call to complain that their basket full of free shit wasn't really free. I'd pay for it, but I'd pay more for names and addresses.
I happen to agree with you about Card. I love his books, but his political beliefs aren't any more influential to me than any other stranger's. That being said, Crichton (who graduated from Harvard Medical School) has a more influential (if not entirely unique) perspective on biological matters. His opinion on genetics, even in the political sphere, carries a lot more weight with me than those of someone without a medical degree.
If the trouble with a lot of people is that they cannot delineate between a person's public life and their other abilities. He/She's an incredible singer, so her opinion on taxes must be worth listening to. Don't make the same mistake you criticize others for; Crichton went to a prestigious medical school and earned the right for his opinions to carry a bit more weight with regards to subjects like this. His works of fiction are entirely separate and unrelated.
State universities like mine (U of Memphis) don't really have "their own" police / fire. They have a special division of the state police, and when you really think about the property rights involved (Controlled by the TBR in my case) it makes a lot of sense. As far as FD, as far as I know we do not have our own but make use of the local FD (for a price).
Be careful with your assumptions too... Memphis is a fairly dangerous city, usually around the top in the nation percap for car theft, rape, domestic abuse, etc... But not at the U of M. We have one of the safest campuses in the region, with almost no violent crime to speak of at all. Despite being a fairly large school (or as you describe, a dense town).
Sex has some built-in controls, as well as being considered socially as an appropriate bedroom behavior (at least in most cultures). Let's look at this "training" a little more closely:
It's more appropriately referred to as classical conditioning, and it's best spoke of in SR psychology terms. You don't want to pair the bed stimulus with any non-bedroom behavior, or you risk fucking up your sleep. You're right, though, sex is not exempt from this s-r pairing-- you might find yourself becoming aroused when laying down to sleep, even if your wife is not there (and therefore there is no evolutionary reason for you to want to procreate) it is only a conditioned response from the previous pairings of bed and sex.
Now, for the built in protection: you either have sex, or masturbate. It's not as risky as say, watching TV, eating, or doing other non-bedroom behaviors, because unless you have an abnormal sexual appetite, sex/masturbation does not have to be a massive time consumer. There is a definite beginning/ending to sex, as opposed to the other behaviors, so when you're done, you're done. Go to sleep. (note that it's 3:00am just about, and I'm reading slashdot and posting a response. Damn. I know I should have had sex instead.)
One reason potentially dangerous recessive genes hang around is because the carrier gains some secondary benefit from having it in the recessive form. The classic example is cicle cell (the blood cell deformity that can lead to cicle cell anemia). Carriers (even recessive carriers) gain the benefit of increased protection against malaria; of course, two recessive individuals have a 25% chance of having a cicle cell anemic child, but from an evolutionary perspective it is still a good thing.
Although... Can you imagine what kind of cash would be needed to buy out all the lucrative
Jefferson would know how to handle this; it's not much more of a stretch to say that the people whose names are attached to that bill should be excised from their mortal coils, or at the very least rot in jail for treason. Jails are expensive, however, and courthouse hangings are cheap and make a more lasting impression.
To me it's not so terribly scary that the United States congress might be considering this type of legislation, (after all much of the rest of the world has similar issues with critical individual liberties that involve a risk to individual safety, as disgusting and cowardly as it sounds) but rather how sad it is that a nation that had such high ambitions and was willing to sacrifice so much for liberty has been brought so low. We are nearing the bottom of the slippery slope of the defense of liberty and the poor bitch is just about dead. And we're ready to kill her off just to be rid of the burden.
I am ashamed!
A frequent criticism I have of their work in terms of scientific methodology is that they often only have a single (or very few) subjects per condition, even when it would be a simple matter to add more and achieve a greater degree of generalization. One that comes to mind is the testing of motion sickness remedies; the bias present in this bust precludes generalizability mostly because they only used a few subjects, all of them on the research team.
Conducting good research of publishable quality would probably take far too much time to fit into their shooting schedule, but I don't see that as a big loss. If anything I think their show is a perfect example of the division between research and entertainment. I think that if their show encourages a single child to pursue a career in science, it has had more of an impact than a dozen published papers a year, regardless of their quality. Science in America is already far to maligned by politicians and misunderstood by the general public.