Uh - the people who think that at least Kerry has _some_ experience in the military, and who might therefore be a better Commander in Chief (as in - understanding when & where it is effective to use military force, and when & where it is appropriate to listen to your military commanders)?
Given the pattern of retaliation by this administration, such people are likely to keep their mouths shut, but I'm sure there's a few of them in there.
You lose, because you're not smart enough to realize that things that don't have a physical presence (well, not a physical presence in the sense most people are used to), can have value.
I don't "lose" diddly-squat. Apparently your mind is not flexible enough to understand anything outside of your tiny little world view. These particular "things" only have a value because unnatural laws have been passed to enforce restrictions on their use. These unnatural laws were passed as part of a social experiment by the Founders to improve the availability of public domain creative works, a social experiment which is quite obviously showing signs of failure. In the absence of those unnatural laws, the "value" of those things would be priced properly according to normal supply & demand dynamics.
What you fail to understand is the basic economic principle that ideas have value. Since a song is just someone's idea put into practice, the song has value.
"Songs having value" isn't even remotely near an "economic principle". The only reason they have value is because some laws give them artificially-inflated value. In the absence of such laws, songs have no inherent value, other than what someone would pay to hear a performance.
Since you are destroying that value while gaining something of theirs, you are, in fact, depriving the artists* of something, which is theft.
Complete fantasy. By copying something, I do not deprive the artist of anything. The so-called value which is being destroyed is just imaginary - the equivalent of me getting a law passed saying that everyone has to pay me money whenever they see the color mauve. With your logic, I would be complaining that people who aren't paying me are "destroying the value of the color mauve", and are thus stealing from me, even though I am not doing any work to deserve getting paid for.
People should get compensation for providing a real good or service. Anything else is greed.
The speaker had open access too. One of my coworkers got into BIG trouble for playing the audio of the "beans" scene of Blazing Saddles for one of his coworkers in a remote location right when one of the bigwigs was giving a tour to a VIP through the server room. (He didn't know about the tour when he decided to pull this prank.)
I'm only vaguely aware of the differences between Unitarianism & a real Christian sect, but as long as you don't claim to be a practicing "Christian" or Buddhist or something with similar views about "loving everything", then I've got no complaints about hypocrisy.
I consider myself to be agnostic - gives me much more opportunity to get into moral dilemmas:-)
In no religious or political tradition is the forceful opposition of tyranny considered a sin or a crime.
Really? I always wondered who "good" Christians could reconcile this kind of thing with the "turn the other cheek" philosophy I remember from Sunday school. I certainly don't remember any parables from Jesus advocating force to overthrow tyrants. Sure, peaceful opposition (e.g. Ghandi/Martin Luther King) sounds compatible with Jesus' philosophy - but advocating _forceful_ opposition sounds like a bellowings of a hypocrite.
I, like Christ Jesus, will agitate for a change in this situation until my dying day. If violence is required to make it happen, then so be it.
If you're going to threaten somebody with violence or death, even in self-defense or for a "righteous" cause, don't even pretend like you're a "real" Christian. It's views like that which give Christianity a bad image.
It's the phrase "skilled in the art" that does it. Anyone who is already skilled in the art of creating ethical robots with an AI controlled by 10 nonsensical ramblings should be able to create said device with the aid of this patent.
There's an idea - the patent has to be written in such a way so that the _patent examiner(s)_ can recreate the invention. That takes care of obfuscated patents & stupid patent examiners in one definition!
The way I understood it, photons aren't really "attracted" to anything - it's just that the space/time that they are travelling through gets bent/stretched/dimpled by the presence of mass (visualize the rubber-sheet analogy). The photon(s) "think" they are going straight relative to their own local space/time fabric, but to a distant observer it is obvious that the path is curved (even though we can't see the actual curvature of the space/time area since it is higher-dimensional).
That's how I remember it from my undergrad general relativity class, although I would certainly hope that somebody competent would either correct or support me. And does the same principle apply to normal masses as well (like planet orbits), or is there a true gravitational attractive force between normal masses?
This is the typical conflict between individual rights vs. society's good. You look like you believe that "individual rights" trump society's good at almost all costs. I believe that, where a policy is clearly demonstrated to be beneficial to the society as a whole, that it can override individual rights. I would also point out, in a more practical sense, that most societies _will_ use force against individuals to secure its own wellbeing, so my viewpoint is more "realistic" than the rather ephemeral individual-rights-over-all viewpoint
OTOH, I will also state that I think it is important for a society's overall benefit to _respect_ the rights of individuals, just not to the point where an individual's rights overrule the good of the society. I would also point out that in many cases where someone claims to be working for the good of society (e.g., political leaders), I think they are often really working for themselves at the expense of the overall good of society, in which case my case about "society's good" overruling individual rights does not apply.
Again, I feel compelled to mention that I may provide assistance to others out of a sense of compassion for my fellow man, but that most definitely does not imply he has a right to my possessions.
As mentioned above, I believe you are wrong. If it is winter, you have two coats and someone else has none, then from the viewpoint of the overall population it is better for one of your coats to be taken from you & given to the coatless person so that both of you will survive, even if you don't want to give up one of your coats. You might not like it, but it is still a better outcome from the viewpoint of the overall population than letting that other person die.
Watch as three hundred other passengers pull out handguns, knives, and other assorted weaponry.
Oh yeah, that's what I want - dozens of yahoos with guns on a flying tin can full of jet fuel.
A more likely scenario: watch as a couple of drunk passengers get into a fight, pull out their handguns and start shooting at each other in the middle of a crowded plane.
You are partially incorrect; not only are you not allowed to kill someone, but that "inalienable" right also means that YOU do not have the right to deny resources (if you have control over access to those resources) which that person might need to maintain their own life.
Or it's possible that conservatives might actually support this ruling. You know, the whole individual freedom and limited government thing.
That's Libertarianism, not "conservatives". The current crop of conservatives only believe in limited government regulation when it comes to their pocketbooks, like regulations for public safety (clean air/water) or public welfare (education). When it comes to stuff like personal behavior, like consensual behavior in the bedroom, then they're all in favor the government cracking down on crap like that, since allowing that kind of immoral behavior that will "destroy the fabric of society". (Apparently letting poor people die due to pollution, disease and/or crime isn't really a problem for the fabric of society.)
The current crop of liberals tend to push the exact opposite viewpoint.
Either viewpoint leads to "big" government, although I'll leave it to the audience to decide which one is more likely to result in a "healthy" overall society (I'm sure my own biases are glaring through.)
Well, I have to admit that Lurch was kind and helpful, if a bit scary-looking, but Kerry refused to tell us what his ideas are other than in vague generalities.
It seems to me that, when you're trying to figure out how you're going to help something as vague as an economy, or health care, or war, it's going to be hard to honestly describe anything more specific than a philosophy & a vague set of tactics. It's like putting together a huge programming project - sure you can put together a top-down architecture & a whole bunch of principles, but you're not actually going to document the details until you're actually in the middle of the project, and have all your data to work with.
Similarly, Kerry isn't going to be able to say, "I'm going to pay $500 to Ms. Milly Nantucket of Hoboken to go to job-training" until he's had a chance to put the programs together, see how they are working, and tweaked them (or trashed them) appropriately.
If you couple that kind of "pre-planning fog" with the fact that he's essentially trying to give the "executive summary" (i.e., dumbed down version) to the generic public (_really_ dumbed down version) & make it sound good for the press (really-dumbed-down reduced to a bunch of sound bites), I'm surprised anyone is surprised that he isn't talking about more than a bunch of generalities.
Of course, with Bush, he's got a job record (or lack of) that people can point to, so Bush can directly reference things that he has already done. (If he can't or won't, then you should be suspicious about his "achievements".)
As far as what Kerry has accomplished, all we can do is look at his Senate voting record, which as a minority-party non-party-leader member is probably not going to be as high-profile as actions taken by an incumbent President. From what I've read about his decisions, he seems to be able to analyze very complicated issues and follow through on decisions about them (although he's not as good as Clinton at explaining those issues in a simple manner to his audience). Considering how polarized our country has ended up due to a bunch of "leaders" who reduce everything to black & white, I strongly believe we need such a person to take their place.
My only concern is that he might not be aggressive enough once he is in power to root out the ideologues who the current administration has been trying to embed in the political power structures.
I thought it was hilarious - almost a perfect live version of a super-corny Asian-style anime episode, but adding in stunts & fight scenes for Jackie. The comedy routines were classic for that genre.
Of course, if you don't like that kind of humor, then you won't like the show - but I don't think you should call something "the worst movie of all time" until you can get general agreement from everyone who watched the show.
It's essentially recycled carbon, though - you're burning carbon which was collected by the plants during their recent growing cycle, versus releasing carbon stored in fossil-fuel deposits which are millions of years old.
If you can keep growing the plants that you're using to create the biodiesel fast enough, then you can have a sustainable carbon cycle.
I'm a little more interested in the "thermal refining" (I think that's what it's called) process that a company is developing which, with a little tweaking, can turn just about any form of organic matter into the equivalent of light-Texas crude. (I read about them building a prototype plant.) They can apparently get enough energy out of the process to run their own refinery off it. With that kind of process, we could recycle almost all of our organic garbage, plus the overflow from some algae farms, and have oil coming out of our ears w/o worrying about upsetting the carbon cycle.
I think people should be required to bid on patents in an auction (including the person submitting the patent).
Let the market do the due-diligence to determine how much a patent is worth (obviously, an idea with prior art, obviousness, or hard-to-enforce won't be deemed worth much). Patent examiners won't have to be so important using this scheme.
A few other possible ideas: patents have to be reauctioned every few years of their life, so that each owner has to keep paying for their monopoly, with some kind of max limit (the current 17-20 years?). The payment from a new owner has to go to the old owner. (If an existing owner keeps a patent, where should their payment go?)
A fixed number of patents, say the patents with the top N auction-sell prices. Any old patents which aren't valuable enough to be in the top N, will automatically be released into the public domain.
I still think forcing ppl to fight, and paying them janitor wages to risk their life is poor planning at best.
Some ppl think if half your forces are looking to dodge the fighting , and half are trying to keep them in line you are just running in circles.
Well, that's a lot of the issue - anyone who doesn't feel they have a good reason to be fighting won't want to fight, and probably won't fight very well if you try and force them to.
I can almost guarantee that if those same people are directly attacked first (ala Pearl Harbor), they'll be a lot more enthusiastic (although not any better trained) about fighting an enemy, especially if they feel like their homes, families & friends are in danger (i.e., they've got no place to run). They are only unenthusiastic if your "leaders" try to use them to do things which they (the soldiers) don't feel are all that important (i.e., more important than their own lives).
One could argue that this is as it should be - a so-called leader shouldn't be able to send the troops into harm's way unless he/she can absolutely convince most of them that there's a damn good reason for them to risk their lives.
Granted, to maintain some kind of reasonable competency, you need to have a decent "elite" core of soldiers, whose job is to study & train in warfare. But the bulk of the military should be drawn from the general population, so that they feel empathy for the general population, and can't be used to suppress the general population.
The current system of volunteer, trained military + barely-trained National Reserves seems to fit this model fairly well, actually. And I have a feeling that those Reservists who don't agree with the reasons for them being sent into harm's way, are going to express their displeasure about it when they get back (if they ever get back).
Maybe a peer-to-peer "escort service" network could be established? It might be the only P2P application that geeks would be willing to pay a subscription for...
overcoming the brand takes much more time than overcoming the product.
OTOH, that inertia bites both ways. Once the brand has been overcome, it's a bitch to get past the "has-been" reputation.
Witness the progression from "you can never going wrong buying IBM", to quite a few years of criticising IBM engineering/marketing decisions (Big Iron! MCA bus!), and now they're slowly creeping back as purveyors of open standard equipment.
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Uh - the people who think that at least Kerry has _some_ experience in the military, and who might therefore be a better Commander in Chief (as in - understanding when & where it is effective to use military force, and when & where it is appropriate to listen to your military commanders)?
Given the pattern of retaliation by this administration, such people are likely to keep their mouths shut, but I'm sure there's a few of them in there.
I don't "lose" diddly-squat. Apparently your mind is not flexible enough to understand anything outside of your tiny little world view. These particular "things" only have a value because unnatural laws have been passed to enforce restrictions on their use. These unnatural laws were passed as part of a social experiment by the Founders to improve the availability of public domain creative works, a social experiment which is quite obviously showing signs of failure. In the absence of those unnatural laws, the "value" of those things would be priced properly according to normal supply & demand dynamics.
"Songs having value" isn't even remotely near an "economic principle". The only reason they have value is because some laws give them artificially-inflated value. In the absence of such laws, songs have no inherent value, other than what someone would pay to hear a performance.
Complete fantasy. By copying something, I do not deprive the artist of anything. The so-called value which is being destroyed is just imaginary - the equivalent of me getting a law passed saying that everyone has to pay me money whenever they see the color mauve. With your logic, I would be complaining that people who aren't paying me are "destroying the value of the color mauve", and are thus stealing from me, even though I am not doing any work to deserve getting paid for.
People should get compensation for providing a real good or service. Anything else is greed.
The speaker had open access too. One of my coworkers got into BIG trouble for playing the audio of the "beans" scene of Blazing Saddles for one of his coworkers in a remote location right when one of the bigwigs was giving a tour to a VIP through the server room. (He didn't know about the tour when he decided to pull this prank.)
I'm only vaguely aware of the differences between Unitarianism & a real Christian sect, but as long as you don't claim to be a practicing "Christian" or Buddhist or something with similar views about "loving everything", then I've got no complaints about hypocrisy.
:-)
I consider myself to be agnostic - gives me much more opportunity to get into moral dilemmas
Really? I always wondered who "good" Christians could reconcile this kind of thing with the "turn the other cheek" philosophy I remember from Sunday school. I certainly don't remember any parables from Jesus advocating force to overthrow tyrants. Sure, peaceful opposition (e.g. Ghandi/Martin Luther King) sounds compatible with Jesus' philosophy - but advocating _forceful_ opposition sounds like a bellowings of a hypocrite.
If you're going to threaten somebody with violence or death, even in self-defense or for a "righteous" cause, don't even pretend like you're a "real" Christian. It's views like that which give Christianity a bad image.
Eh? That's not what I've seen. From my viewpoint, it's more like liberals ARGUE & conservatives FOLLOW.
If you're smart enough to realize this, then why did you waste everyone's time trolling?
There's an idea - the patent has to be written in such a way so that the _patent examiner(s)_ can recreate the invention. That takes care of obfuscated patents & stupid patent examiners in one definition!
The way I understood it, photons aren't really "attracted" to anything - it's just that the space/time that they are travelling through gets bent/stretched/dimpled by the presence of mass (visualize the rubber-sheet analogy). The photon(s) "think" they are going straight relative to their own local space/time fabric, but to a distant observer it is obvious that the path is curved (even though we can't see the actual curvature of the space/time area since it is higher-dimensional).
That's how I remember it from my undergrad general relativity class, although I would certainly hope that somebody competent would either correct or support me. And does the same principle apply to normal masses as well (like planet orbits), or is there a true gravitational attractive force between normal masses?
Sounds like Charlie was a real asshole who liked to lord it over someone who was just following procedures the way he was taught.
Yes, I can tell.
This is the typical conflict between individual rights vs. society's good. You look like you believe that "individual rights" trump society's good at almost all costs. I believe that, where a policy is clearly demonstrated to be beneficial to the society as a whole, that it can override individual rights. I would also point out, in a more practical sense, that most societies _will_ use force against individuals to secure its own wellbeing, so my viewpoint is more "realistic" than the rather ephemeral individual-rights-over-all viewpoint
OTOH, I will also state that I think it is important for a society's overall benefit to _respect_ the rights of individuals, just not to the point where an individual's rights overrule the good of the society. I would also point out that in many cases where someone claims to be working for the good of society (e.g., political leaders), I think they are often really working for themselves at the expense of the overall good of society, in which case my case about "society's good" overruling individual rights does not apply.
As mentioned above, I believe you are wrong. If it is winter, you have two coats and someone else has none, then from the viewpoint of the overall population it is better for one of your coats to be taken from you & given to the coatless person so that both of you will survive, even if you don't want to give up one of your coats. You might not like it, but it is still a better outcome from the viewpoint of the overall population than letting that other person die.
Oh yeah, that's what I want - dozens of yahoos with guns on a flying tin can full of jet fuel.
A more likely scenario: watch as a couple of drunk passengers get into a fight, pull out their handguns and start shooting at each other in the middle of a crowded plane.
You are partially incorrect; not only are you not allowed to kill someone, but that "inalienable" right also means that YOU do not have the right to deny resources (if you have control over access to those resources) which that person might need to maintain their own life.
That's Libertarianism, not "conservatives". The current crop of conservatives only believe in limited government regulation when it comes to their pocketbooks, like regulations for public safety (clean air/water) or public welfare (education). When it comes to stuff like personal behavior, like consensual behavior in the bedroom, then they're all in favor the government cracking down on crap like that, since allowing that kind of immoral behavior that will "destroy the fabric of society". (Apparently letting poor people die due to pollution, disease and/or crime isn't really a problem for the fabric of society.)
The current crop of liberals tend to push the exact opposite viewpoint.
Either viewpoint leads to "big" government, although I'll leave it to the audience to decide which one is more likely to result in a "healthy" overall society (I'm sure my own biases are glaring through.)
It seems to me that, when you're trying to figure out how you're going to help something as vague as an economy, or health care, or war, it's going to be hard to honestly describe anything more specific than a philosophy & a vague set of tactics. It's like putting together a huge programming project - sure you can put together a top-down architecture & a whole bunch of principles, but you're not actually going to document the details until you're actually in the middle of the project, and have all your data to work with.
Similarly, Kerry isn't going to be able to say, "I'm going to pay $500 to Ms. Milly Nantucket of Hoboken to go to job-training" until he's had a chance to put the programs together, see how they are working, and tweaked them (or trashed them) appropriately.
If you couple that kind of "pre-planning fog" with the fact that he's essentially trying to give the "executive summary" (i.e., dumbed down version) to the generic public (_really_ dumbed down version) & make it sound good for the press (really-dumbed-down reduced to a bunch of sound bites), I'm surprised anyone is surprised that he isn't talking about more than a bunch of generalities.
Of course, with Bush, he's got a job record (or lack of) that people can point to, so Bush can directly reference things that he has already done. (If he can't or won't, then you should be suspicious about his "achievements".)
As far as what Kerry has accomplished, all we can do is look at his Senate voting record, which as a minority-party non-party-leader member is probably not going to be as high-profile as actions taken by an incumbent President. From what I've read about his decisions, he seems to be able to analyze very complicated issues and follow through on decisions about them (although he's not as good as Clinton at explaining those issues in a simple manner to his audience). Considering how polarized our country has ended up due to a bunch of "leaders" who reduce everything to black & white, I strongly believe we need such a person to take their place.
My only concern is that he might not be aggressive enough once he is in power to root out the ideologues who the current administration has been trying to embed in the political power structures.
That should be: tied _upside down_ to a tree and fed exlax for a week.
Worst movie?
I thought it was hilarious - almost a perfect live version of a super-corny Asian-style anime episode, but adding in stunts & fight scenes for Jackie. The comedy routines were classic for that genre.
Of course, if you don't like that kind of humor, then you won't like the show - but I don't think you should call something "the worst movie of all time" until you can get general agreement from everyone who watched the show.
I prefer the ever-changing 24-bit color Satori screensaver effect myself, but to each his/her/its own...
It's essentially recycled carbon, though - you're burning carbon which was collected by the plants during their recent growing cycle, versus releasing carbon stored in fossil-fuel deposits which are millions of years old.
If you can keep growing the plants that you're using to create the biodiesel fast enough, then you can have a sustainable carbon cycle.
I'm a little more interested in the "thermal refining" (I think that's what it's called) process that a company is developing which, with a little tweaking, can turn just about any form of organic matter into the equivalent of light-Texas crude. (I read about them building a prototype plant.) They can apparently get enough energy out of the process to run their own refinery off it. With that kind of process, we could recycle almost all of our organic garbage, plus the overflow from some algae farms, and have oil coming out of our ears w/o worrying about upsetting the carbon cycle.
I think people should be required to bid on patents in an auction (including the person submitting the patent).
Let the market do the due-diligence to determine how much a patent is worth (obviously, an idea with prior art, obviousness, or hard-to-enforce won't be deemed worth much). Patent examiners won't have to be so important using this scheme.
A few other possible ideas: patents have to be reauctioned every few years of their life, so that each owner has to keep paying for their monopoly, with some kind of max limit (the current 17-20 years?). The payment from a new owner has to go to the old owner. (If an existing owner keeps a patent, where should their payment go?)
A fixed number of patents, say the patents with the top N auction-sell prices. Any old patents which aren't valuable enough to be in the top N, will automatically be released into the public domain.
Well, that's a lot of the issue - anyone who doesn't feel they have a good reason to be fighting won't want to fight, and probably won't fight very well if you try and force them to.
I can almost guarantee that if those same people are directly attacked first (ala Pearl Harbor), they'll be a lot more enthusiastic (although not any better trained) about fighting an enemy, especially if they feel like their homes, families & friends are in danger (i.e., they've got no place to run). They are only unenthusiastic if your "leaders" try to use them to do things which they (the soldiers) don't feel are all that important (i.e., more important than their own lives).
One could argue that this is as it should be - a so-called leader shouldn't be able to send the troops into harm's way unless he/she can absolutely convince most of them that there's a damn good reason for them to risk their lives.
Granted, to maintain some kind of reasonable competency, you need to have a decent "elite" core of soldiers, whose job is to study & train in warfare. But the bulk of the military should be drawn from the general population, so that they feel empathy for the general population, and can't be used to suppress the general population.
The current system of volunteer, trained military + barely-trained National Reserves seems to fit this model fairly well, actually. And I have a feeling that those Reservists who don't agree with the reasons for them being sent into harm's way, are going to express their displeasure about it when they get back (if they ever get back).
No it's not. Everything he said were perfectly rational reasons to dislike the U.S. government's policies.
Maybe a peer-to-peer "escort service" network could be established? It might be the only P2P application that geeks would be willing to pay a subscription for...
OTOH, that inertia bites both ways. Once the brand has been overcome, it's a bitch to get past the "has-been" reputation.
Witness the progression from "you can never going wrong buying IBM", to quite a few years of criticising IBM engineering/marketing decisions (Big Iron! MCA bus!), and now they're slowly creeping back as purveyors of open standard equipment.
No, this is the right order - before you can pick between _any_ choices (good or bad), you've got to make sure that your selection process is working.