Because the majority of their users (especially since they are at the cheaper end of the market) don't know what an NTP server is, not to mention the difference between Stratum 1, 2, and 3.
Very good post, I just have a couple of things to add.
First of all, I don't believe a massive collapse of civillization and loss of scientific knowledge will happen. We're unaware of anything like that happening in our past (discounting myths like Atlantis).
When the western part of the Roman Empire collapsed, it definitely could be considered a massive collapse of civilization and loss of knowledge. It took Europeans over a thousand years to recover even a portion of what was lost. Obviously this wasn't something that was on the scale of what you're talking about, but with our advanced technology it is possible.
Secondly, this isn't going to be easily accessible. The Yucca Mountain proposal places the waste something like 1000 feet down. It's also all in a very hard and chemically stable ceramic form, encased in concrete and steel.
This is kind of a tangent, but this is one thing people sometimes have a hard time thinking about. Sure, we can ensure that Yucca Mountain is stable for the present, but we really have a hard time thinking on a geological time scale. Yucca Mountain is a freaking volcano! It is in a (relatively) geologically unstable area. Ten thousand years ago, it was under a huge lake. How can we ensure that people thousands of years in the future know where our radioactive dumps are? What happens if hundreds or thousands of years down the line, the volcano becomes active again and spews radioactive material into the atmosphere? Or what if the region becomes less arid, and the radioactive material is leaked into the water table. That is why I have a problem with designating some place as a radioactive dump and pretty much throwing all the shit we can in there (especially since I used to live near there).
It has 42% of all searches and has only 14% more market share than Yahoo. It seems pretty obvious that the search market is very competitive. They got Firefox to default to them because they paid Firefox. It is not anti-competitive to pay people for including your product in a release. Google does not own Firefox, they don't make any money from Firefox, and they are not unfairly leveraging themselves into a previously competitive market through Firefox.
I don't know about the actual legal definition of the term monopoly, but IMO if you can patent software then you can have a monopoly in software. Just because Microsoft's monopoly is a so-called "mindshare" monopoly does not change the fact that it is very real.
You make a good point. We've been drilled since we were kids to think that drunk driving is terrible (as we should), but in reality it really doesn't make you a worse driver than any number of other things that people do regularly. Your driving ability (as far as keeping the car on the road) is still pretty good when you are drunk. What drops is your awareness of what's going on around you and your reaction time.
The real difference between drunk driving and talking on the cell phone while driving (or putting on lipstick, reading the newspaper, etc.) is that once you hang up on the cell phone you are back to being a good driver. But you can't sober up. As far as reducing your driving ability, however, they are pretty close to the same.
I can't believe that this post was modded insightful. This is not true at all. The capitalist (if you can call you that) movement in China started well before Tiananmen.
Deng Xiaoping saw a distinction between socialism as a political system and socialism as an economic system. He knew that socialism as an economic system was not feasible and went about reforming the Chinese economy. Because of the reforms that he started, China started on the track that has turned them into an economic giant today.
This definitely has nothing to do with Tiananmen. That whole thing sucked, but it has had extremely little impact on Chinese economic (or even social) policy.
Monopolies in industries with high barriers to entry usually are harmful.
You disprove your own point. Telecommunications is definitely an industry with high barriers to entry. How exactly are you going to go about laying your own fiber, light it up, and then proceed to offer service with any hope of turning a profit?
The telecoms are definitely a monopoly. The only question is to what extent. The purpose of splitting up Ma Bell was to break a national monopoly and set up companies that were only regional monopolies. The only difference is that their are a few more companies spread across the countries that offer service. But in their own part of the country, they are each monopolies.
The FCC seems to agree with your point that increased competition from cable companies constitutes enough competition to allow for the reinstation of the national monopoly, but if that will actually work remains to be seen.
If you really want an answer to this conundrum, read St. Augustine. His argument, which is still widely accepted among theologians (I think), is that there is no such thing as evil. What we call evil is simply an absence of godliness.
You can make an analogy to atoms. The space in between atoms or sub-atomic particles doesn't have any properties in and of itself, we simply categorize it as emptiness by describing it as the absence of something.
The same thing goes with evil. Evil doesn't have any properties by itself, it is just the way we categorize something that is "less divine".
Well that's slightly different. Hawaii had absolutely no cultural or geographic link to the Americas before about 150 years ago. Hawaii is also much further away from the US than Great Britain is from Europe. You can't exactly ride the train from Honolulu to LA. For example, the distance from Honolulu to San Diego (the closest large city from Hawaii) is about the same as the distance from London to Jerusalem.
If this is true, then please explain to me how the US manages to be one of the world's leading exporters of food.
U.S. agricultural exports have been larger than U.S. agricultural imports since 1960, generating a surplus in U.S. agricultural trade.USDA Agricultural Trade Balance
I would like to see some citations for this rather than just pulling some numbers out of your ass. Besides using questionable statistics, you do not take into account the fact that the combination of new breeds of plants and more advanced farming techniques will produce more food per acre in the future than was available in the past. We are not using the same farming techniques that we did fifty or a hundred years ago, and it is ridiculous to assume that the population will keep growing while our agricultural production stays the same.
Also going off-topic, God can't renounce his omnipotence. It is part of his nature. That is, even for God there are limits and omnipotence is one of those things that just "is". So in a way, he's not completely omnipotent. Right now it's really late and it's been a while since freshman philosophy class so that's the best I can come up with.
Is it too much to expect that people think about what they're doing?
Yes. Even intelligent people make mistakes. Putting the burden of security on the user is idiotic, even when you're dealing with people as capable and well-trained as those in the FBI.
I personally am a second year CS student at the University of Utah, and my experience finding internships was incredibly positive. I managed to get an internship with a very successful software company in the midwest after my first interview. I also suspect that I would've had internship offers from two other smaller, local companies had I not already accepted this one.
The best advice that I can give, and what worked for me, is to get your resume out early and often (it's already a little late for a lot of internships). Get into contact with your career services or equivalent organization on campus immediately (even smaller schools should have at least one career counselor). Attend every job fair and recruiting event that you can. Look at other schools nearby and attend their career fairs as well. You should try and aim for a larger corporation that is maybe not as high profile as Microsoft or Google. It will be less of a risk to a large company to hire an inexperienced person, as they will have the resources to be able to train someone without all the necessary technical skills. If you think you're a hotshot, check your ego at the door because right now no matter how good your schooling was, you probably don't have the skills to compete in a competitive business environment.
Make sure that your resume is airtight and highlights your strengths. If you have a high GPA or are involved in leadership at your school(like student government), emphasize that. Most computer students take the same classes early on, so you aren't going to wow anyone with your curriculum. At your level, technical knowledge is not as important, although that should definitely be on there. The most important thing is not to show that you are a great programmer/sysadmin/whatever, it is to show that you have the potential to become great at it. Also, talk about things you do in your free time, especially computer-related stuff. If you show that you have a real passion for what you do, that can set you apart from the pack.
You should make an attempt to talk about any team-oriented project or leadership role you've held, no matter if it was in the CS field. Communication skills are also very important. Any Joe Schmoe off the street can know a little bit about C++, you have to show them that you will retain what they teach you and put it to immediate use. It's all about distinguishing yourself from the other students.
Hopefully by doing that you'll get an interview. In a lot of ways, that's the hardest part. Despite what some people may be saying, in software engineering right now there are a LOT of opportunities for bright, young people. You definitely have a chance to land an internship with somebody, even with your lack of experience. The most important thing is to get into a place where you get hands-on experience. You don't want to end up getting some idiot's coffee all summer.
You probably won't be getting paid much, so money shouldn't be an issue. If it is you might want to wait on the internship until you have more schooling and just try to get a regular summer job that pays better. Internships aren't always low-paying, though. I'll be making $16/hr. at mine, which is pretty good at my level.
If you see an internship that you like, go for it. Have confidence and things will work out. The worst thing that'll happen is that you get shut down for the job and end up doing whatever it is you were going to do this summer anyway, but if you never go for it then you'll never know. Don't wait until your senior year or beyond to try and land some good internships.
Google doesn't need to give every minute detail about running the company, or even general information beyond that required by the SEC. They file the paperwork just like every other public company. That gives enough information for the market price to be appropriately values, at least according to the current market theory. Anything else they do is just politics, and they can do whatever they want as far as I'm concerned. Like previous posters have pointed out, companies such as Berkshire Hathaway have been very successful without giving a damn what the analysts think.
That's not entirely true. Calling consumers the "product" infers that they have no choice in the matter. The product is sold, it has no control over who it's sold to.
Really, there are two customers. They must provide quality entertainment to you or you will not continue to watch the adverisements. You pay for the ability to watch the TV programs you want, and the advertisers pay for the ability to get people to see their product. The TV company is what brings both of these customers together.
It makes a catchy little sound bite to say that we are the product, but that isn't true. It's a two-sided relationship. They offer the convergence of the two functions, entertainment and advertising. It is still your choice whether to participate in the transaction.
One advantage to hydrogen is that it could be shipped via truck. Rather than invest in thousands of miles of costly transmission lines (and pay the 10% power cost in transmission losses), hydrogen plants could be built next to new reactors located out in the Nevada and Utah deserts, and the hydrogen trucked to market.
And a disadvantage is that those of us who live out in the Nevada and Utah deserts don't want nuclear reactors anywhere near us. We don't use the power(the huge majority of it, anyway), so why should we have to deal with all the problems associated with nuclear power. Other Western states (especially the rural areas) already have enough problems running all the coal power plants that generate power for California, and diverting all of our water and hydro power to California. Why in the world would we want to add nuclear power and all the problems that come with that? I know the "not in my backyard" argument seems lame to outsiders, but it really is how a majority of people feel out here. Just because there aren't as many people out here doesn't mean our interests should be ignored.
Of course Hitler went farther, and of course W isn't the first president to do such things, but that doesn't make it any less creepy.
Actually, I think that does make it a whole lot less creepy. Does it bother me that civil rights have been curbed, and our president has made the issue of transparency in office a joke? Of course it does. Has George Bush tried to exterminate entire races of people by marching them into death camps? No.
Simply comparing the two by saying they were both fierce nationalists that had agressive foreign policies is ridiculous. And comparing the U.S. post 9/11 to Germany after the Treaty of Versailles is equally ridiculous.
If every leader that used a disaster to his advantage and every leader that had an aggressive foreign policy and curbed civil rights was Hitler, the world would be a pretty shitty place to live. Stop using ridiculous comparisons like this. There are enough bad things to say about George Bush that you don't need to make yourself look like an idiot.
Additionally, cross-platform game development needn't add too much additional labour if you start off designing it as such, and generally the quality of the code is better (because you have to sit down and think about how to do things intelligently, not to mention bug fixing).
I seriously doubt that adding cross-platform compatibility to a project of this size will make the quality of the code better. I'm pretty sure that the Civ team didn't just sit down and start hacking out a game. Projects on this level of complexity and quality (assuming it is as good as the other Civ games) are usually pretty well-designed.
This is not the first time that an oil company has tried this. I am from Western Colorado, and the Exxon company already tried to come up with a way to extract oil from oilshale back in the 1980's.
They set up huge operations and employed a ton of people in Western CO. Very quickly it was figured out that there was no profitable way to get oil out of the shale.
They suddenly pulled up operations, giving most of their employees less than a week to know they were out of jobs. Needless to say, this really screwed some people over.
Now with oil prices skyrocketing again, they are going back to their old tricks. They may find a way to extract oil from shale cheaply, but I seriously doubt it. Alternative energy sources will most likely be cheaper much sooner than they figure out how to get oil from those damn rocks.
I'm more likely to think of my grandmother who died of emphysema/lung cancer and my uncle who drank himself to death. But looking at one person and ignoring the entire body of scientific evidence on the subject is probably pretty reasonable.
I hate to get into an obvious off-topic flamewar, but you sir are an idiot. It is one thing to say that creationism should not be taught as science; I agree with that. But to insist that, as you said, "there's a place for Creationists and lawyers: objects of ridicule and pity," is completely ridiculous.
The fact is that Christianity is a very valid belief. The key word there is belief. Christianity is absolutely valid as philosophy and theology, just not as science. That is where people get mixed up. Christians believe that there are things we can know about the world, and some things that we can not. Creationism is one way of explaining those things that we can't know. There is absolutely no reason why theology and science have to clash, because they really deal with two different subjects: the physical and the metaphysical.
of course people who insist on believing in an imaginary spirit that created the universe 7000 years ago, inserting dinosaur bones in the ground to fool us, and who insist children should be taught their myth is as valid as Evolution, are ridiculous.
Guess what, most Creationists don't believe that the earth was created 7000 years ago, and that God put dinosaur bones in the earth to fool us. That's just a ridiculous claim, and most Christian theologists in fact would disagree with it. You talk about straw man arguments, maybe you should look at yourself before criticizing someone else.
If you think that religion should not be taught in science classes, I agree with you. But to insinuate that Creationism was the cause for racism, and flat-out claim that a U.S. decline is imminent because of Creationism, that is just ridiculous. Some of the greatest thinkers in the history of our country have been extremely religious, including most of the founding fathers. If you think that all Christians or Creationists are stupid and ignorant, just because in your experience some have been, we have a word for that. It's called bigotry.
I agree with you on all but number 3. All speculation is not bad. What hurts you is when you put enough money into "speculative" stocks that when they go downhill, you lose your shirt. Being successful in the stock market has a lot to do with analysis, but you also have to be prepared to take risks. If everything was obvious simply by analyzing the numbers, the "chartists" would be the rich ones. You'll lose just as much money being too cautious as you will being overzealous. You have to take calculated risks, sometimes on speculation and intuition.
The high-risk stocks are the ones that have potentially greater yields (and losses). Just make sure that that they take up a small enough percentage of your portfolio that you won't be hurt permanently.
Underage kids aren't allowed to buy guns. You have always had to be eighteen years old to own firearms, even before Columbine. And no matter how hard you make it for people to obtain weapons, they can still be obtained illegally extremely easily. I don't think there's a country in the world where I couldn't find and purchase an assault rifle within a day, if not hours.
The thing is, Moore disproves his own point. As you pointed out, Canada has as many guns as the United States, but has a lower murder rate. So therefore the problem isn't with the guns! It's with society. Canada has proven that a society can have guns without restrictive ownership laws and still have a low murder rate.
The problem is, how do you know the difference? You can't sell guns to people who intend to hunt, but stop people who intend to kill other people. It's impossible to tell the difference. The only people restrictive gun laws save are honest people. Criminals will still kill people. You can't take away somebody's liberty to make somebody else feel a little safer.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the majority of their users (especially since they are at the cheaper end of the market) don't know what an NTP server is, not to mention the difference between Stratum 1, 2, and 3.
Very good post, I just have a couple of things to add.
First of all, I don't believe a massive collapse of civillization and loss of scientific knowledge will happen. We're unaware of anything like that happening in our past (discounting myths like Atlantis).
When the western part of the Roman Empire collapsed, it definitely could be considered a massive collapse of civilization and loss of knowledge. It took Europeans over a thousand years to recover even a portion of what was lost. Obviously this wasn't something that was on the scale of what you're talking about, but with our advanced technology it is possible.
This is kind of a tangent, but this is one thing people sometimes have a hard time thinking about. Sure, we can ensure that Yucca Mountain is stable for the present, but we really have a hard time thinking on a geological time scale. Yucca Mountain is a freaking volcano! It is in a (relatively) geologically unstable area. Ten thousand years ago, it was under a huge lake. How can we ensure that people thousands of years in the future know where our radioactive dumps are? What happens if hundreds or thousands of years down the line, the volcano becomes active again and spews radioactive material into the atmosphere? Or what if the region becomes less arid, and the radioactive material is leaked into the water table. That is why I have a problem with designating some place as a radioactive dump and pretty much throwing all the shit we can in there (especially since I used to live near there).
Google is not a monopoly, nor is it near a monopoly. Search Engine Ratings
It has 42% of all searches and has only 14% more market share than Yahoo. It seems pretty obvious that the search market is very competitive. They got Firefox to default to them because they paid Firefox. It is not anti-competitive to pay people for including your product in a release. Google does not own Firefox, they don't make any money from Firefox, and they are not unfairly leveraging themselves into a previously competitive market through Firefox.
I don't know about the actual legal definition of the term monopoly, but IMO if you can patent software then you can have a monopoly in software. Just because Microsoft's monopoly is a so-called "mindshare" monopoly does not change the fact that it is very real.
You make a good point. We've been drilled since we were kids to think that drunk driving is terrible (as we should), but in reality it really doesn't make you a worse driver than any number of other things that people do regularly. Your driving ability (as far as keeping the car on the road) is still pretty good when you are drunk. What drops is your awareness of what's going on around you and your reaction time.
The real difference between drunk driving and talking on the cell phone while driving (or putting on lipstick, reading the newspaper, etc.) is that once you hang up on the cell phone you are back to being a good driver. But you can't sober up. As far as reducing your driving ability, however, they are pretty close to the same.
I can't believe that this post was modded insightful. This is not true at all. The capitalist (if you can call you that) movement in China started well before Tiananmen.
Deng Xiaoping saw a distinction between socialism as a political system and socialism as an economic system. He knew that socialism as an economic system was not feasible and went about reforming the Chinese economy. Because of the reforms that he started, China started on the track that has turned them into an economic giant today.
This definitely has nothing to do with Tiananmen. That whole thing sucked, but it has had extremely little impact on Chinese economic (or even social) policy.
You disprove your own point. Telecommunications is definitely an industry with high barriers to entry. How exactly are you going to go about laying your own fiber, light it up, and then proceed to offer service with any hope of turning a profit?
The telecoms are definitely a monopoly. The only question is to what extent. The purpose of splitting up Ma Bell was to break a national monopoly and set up companies that were only regional monopolies. The only difference is that their are a few more companies spread across the countries that offer service. But in their own part of the country, they are each monopolies.
The FCC seems to agree with your point that increased competition from cable companies constitutes enough competition to allow for the reinstation of the national monopoly, but if that will actually work remains to be seen.
If you really want an answer to this conundrum, read St. Augustine. His argument, which is still widely accepted among theologians (I think), is that there is no such thing as evil. What we call evil is simply an absence of godliness.
You can make an analogy to atoms. The space in between atoms or sub-atomic particles doesn't have any properties in and of itself, we simply categorize it as emptiness by describing it as the absence of something.
The same thing goes with evil. Evil doesn't have any properties by itself, it is just the way we categorize something that is "less divine".
Well that's slightly different. Hawaii had absolutely no cultural or geographic link to the Americas before about 150 years ago. Hawaii is also much further away from the US than Great Britain is from Europe. You can't exactly ride the train from Honolulu to LA. For example, the distance from Honolulu to San Diego (the closest large city from Hawaii) is about the same as the distance from London to Jerusalem.
If this is true, then please explain to me how the US manages to be one of the world's leading exporters of food.
I would like to see some citations for this rather than just pulling some numbers out of your ass. Besides using questionable statistics, you do not take into account the fact that the combination of new breeds of plants and more advanced farming techniques will produce more food per acre in the future than was available in the past. We are not using the same farming techniques that we did fifty or a hundred years ago, and it is ridiculous to assume that the population will keep growing while our agricultural production stays the same.
If you would like to look at some more statistics, here is a good place to start. USDA Agricultural Trade Balance
Also going off-topic, God can't renounce his omnipotence. It is part of his nature. That is, even for God there are limits and omnipotence is one of those things that just "is". So in a way, he's not completely omnipotent. Right now it's really late and it's been a while since freshman philosophy class so that's the best I can come up with.
Yes. Even intelligent people make mistakes. Putting the burden of security on the user is idiotic, even when you're dealing with people as capable and well-trained as those in the FBI.
I personally am a second year CS student at the University of Utah, and my experience finding internships was incredibly positive. I managed to get an internship with a very successful software company in the midwest after my first interview. I also suspect that I would've had internship offers from two other smaller, local companies had I not already accepted this one.
The best advice that I can give, and what worked for me, is to get your resume out early and often (it's already a little late for a lot of internships). Get into contact with your career services or equivalent organization on campus immediately (even smaller schools should have at least one career counselor). Attend every job fair and recruiting event that you can. Look at other schools nearby and attend their career fairs as well. You should try and aim for a larger corporation that is maybe not as high profile as Microsoft or Google. It will be less of a risk to a large company to hire an inexperienced person, as they will have the resources to be able to train someone without all the necessary technical skills. If you think you're a hotshot, check your ego at the door because right now no matter how good your schooling was, you probably don't have the skills to compete in a competitive business environment.
Make sure that your resume is airtight and highlights your strengths. If you have a high GPA or are involved in leadership at your school(like student government), emphasize that. Most computer students take the same classes early on, so you aren't going to wow anyone with your curriculum. At your level, technical knowledge is not as important, although that should definitely be on there. The most important thing is not to show that you are a great programmer/sysadmin/whatever, it is to show that you have the potential to become great at it. Also, talk about things you do in your free time, especially computer-related stuff. If you show that you have a real passion for what you do, that can set you apart from the pack.
You should make an attempt to talk about any team-oriented project or leadership role you've held, no matter if it was in the CS field. Communication skills are also very important. Any Joe Schmoe off the street can know a little bit about C++, you have to show them that you will retain what they teach you and put it to immediate use. It's all about distinguishing yourself from the other students.
Hopefully by doing that you'll get an interview. In a lot of ways, that's the hardest part. Despite what some people may be saying, in software engineering right now there are a LOT of opportunities for bright, young people. You definitely have a chance to land an internship with somebody, even with your lack of experience. The most important thing is to get into a place where you get hands-on experience. You don't want to end up getting some idiot's coffee all summer.
You probably won't be getting paid much, so money shouldn't be an issue. If it is you might want to wait on the internship until you have more schooling and just try to get a regular summer job that pays better. Internships aren't always low-paying, though. I'll be making $16/hr. at mine, which is pretty good at my level.
If you see an internship that you like, go for it. Have confidence and things will work out. The worst thing that'll happen is that you get shut down for the job and end up doing whatever it is you were going to do this summer anyway, but if you never go for it then you'll never know. Don't wait until your senior year or beyond to try and land some good internships.
Google doesn't need to give every minute detail about running the company, or even general information beyond that required by the SEC. They file the paperwork just like every other public company. That gives enough information for the market price to be appropriately values, at least according to the current market theory. Anything else they do is just politics, and they can do whatever they want as far as I'm concerned. Like previous posters have pointed out, companies such as Berkshire Hathaway have been very successful without giving a damn what the analysts think.
That's not entirely true. Calling consumers the "product" infers that they have no choice in the matter. The product is sold, it has no control over who it's sold to.
Really, there are two customers. They must provide quality entertainment to you or you will not continue to watch the adverisements. You pay for the ability to watch the TV programs you want, and the advertisers pay for the ability to get people to see their product. The TV company is what brings both of these customers together.
It makes a catchy little sound bite to say that we are the product, but that isn't true. It's a two-sided relationship. They offer the convergence of the two functions, entertainment and advertising. It is still your choice whether to participate in the transaction.
And a disadvantage is that those of us who live out in the Nevada and Utah deserts don't want nuclear reactors anywhere near us. We don't use the power(the huge majority of it, anyway), so why should we have to deal with all the problems associated with nuclear power. Other Western states (especially the rural areas) already have enough problems running all the coal power plants that generate power for California, and diverting all of our water and hydro power to California. Why in the world would we want to add nuclear power and all the problems that come with that? I know the "not in my backyard" argument seems lame to outsiders, but it really is how a majority of people feel out here. Just because there aren't as many people out here doesn't mean our interests should be ignored.
Actually, I think that does make it a whole lot less creepy. Does it bother me that civil rights have been curbed, and our president has made the issue of transparency in office a joke? Of course it does. Has George Bush tried to exterminate entire races of people by marching them into death camps? No.
Simply comparing the two by saying they were both fierce nationalists that had agressive foreign policies is ridiculous. And comparing the U.S. post 9/11 to Germany after the Treaty of Versailles is equally ridiculous.
If every leader that used a disaster to his advantage and every leader that had an aggressive foreign policy and curbed civil rights was Hitler, the world would be a pretty shitty place to live. Stop using ridiculous comparisons like this. There are enough bad things to say about George Bush that you don't need to make yourself look like an idiot.
This is not the first time that an oil company has tried this. I am from Western Colorado, and the Exxon company already tried to come up with a way to extract oil from oilshale back in the 1980's.
They set up huge operations and employed a ton of people in Western CO. Very quickly it was figured out that there was no profitable way to get oil out of the shale.
They suddenly pulled up operations, giving most of their employees less than a week to know they were out of jobs. Needless to say, this really screwed some people over.Now with oil prices skyrocketing again, they are going back to their old tricks. They may find a way to extract oil from shale cheaply, but I seriously doubt it. Alternative energy sources will most likely be cheaper much sooner than they figure out how to get oil from those damn rocks.
I'm more likely to think of my grandmother who died of emphysema/lung cancer and my uncle who drank himself to death. But looking at one person and ignoring the entire body of scientific evidence on the subject is probably pretty reasonable.
I hate to get into an obvious off-topic flamewar, but you sir are an idiot. It is one thing to say that creationism should not be taught as science; I agree with that. But to insist that, as you said, "there's a place for Creationists and lawyers: objects of ridicule and pity," is completely ridiculous.
The fact is that Christianity is a very valid belief. The key word there is belief. Christianity is absolutely valid as philosophy and theology, just not as science. That is where people get mixed up. Christians believe that there are things we can know about the world, and some things that we can not. Creationism is one way of explaining those things that we can't know. There is absolutely no reason why theology and science have to clash, because they really deal with two different subjects: the physical and the metaphysical.
Guess what, most Creationists don't believe that the earth was created 7000 years ago, and that God put dinosaur bones in the earth to fool us. That's just a ridiculous claim, and most Christian theologists in fact would disagree with it. You talk about straw man arguments, maybe you should look at yourself before criticizing someone else.
If you think that religion should not be taught in science classes, I agree with you. But to insinuate that Creationism was the cause for racism, and flat-out claim that a U.S. decline is imminent because of Creationism, that is just ridiculous. Some of the greatest thinkers in the history of our country have been extremely religious, including most of the founding fathers. If you think that all Christians or Creationists are stupid and ignorant, just because in your experience some have been, we have a word for that. It's called bigotry.
I agree with you on all but number 3. All speculation is not bad. What hurts you is when you put enough money into "speculative" stocks that when they go downhill, you lose your shirt. Being successful in the stock market has a lot to do with analysis, but you also have to be prepared to take risks. If everything was obvious simply by analyzing the numbers, the "chartists" would be the rich ones. You'll lose just as much money being too cautious as you will being overzealous. You have to take calculated risks, sometimes on speculation and intuition.
The high-risk stocks are the ones that have potentially greater yields (and losses). Just make sure that that they take up a small enough percentage of your portfolio that you won't be hurt permanently.
Underage kids aren't allowed to buy guns. You have always had to be eighteen years old to own firearms, even before Columbine. And no matter how hard you make it for people to obtain weapons, they can still be obtained illegally extremely easily. I don't think there's a country in the world where I couldn't find and purchase an assault rifle within a day, if not hours.
The thing is, Moore disproves his own point. As you pointed out, Canada has as many guns as the United States, but has a lower murder rate. So therefore the problem isn't with the guns! It's with society. Canada has proven that a society can have guns without restrictive ownership laws and still have a low murder rate.
The problem is, how do you know the difference? You can't sell guns to people who intend to hunt, but stop people who intend to kill other people. It's impossible to tell the difference. The only people restrictive gun laws save are honest people. Criminals will still kill people. You can't take away somebody's liberty to make somebody else feel a little safer.