If you look at the chart, the most disturbing trend is the fact that the violent crime rate has increased since 1970 while the murder rate has decreased. Is this related to the obesity epidemic? We are no longer capable of chasing down our victims and finishing them off?
Roe v. Wade. Reduction in unwanted kids results in less criminals. More abortions for all!
I think we're maxed out on the prenatal. If we're really going to get serious about stopping crime, then let's make it open season on anyone under the age of five!
I support Constitutional democracy. The whole point of having a Constitution was so that the rule of the mob wouldn't be able to easily infringe upon rights.
In that case you support constitutional republicanism. There would be no point to a literal "constitutional democracy," as the constitution would either be unalterable or else a majority vote could change it at whim.
I'd like to know if forcing your beliefs on other people is worth twice as much crime?...Personally I'd say no
If the goal is to reduce crime, independent of any pesky moral beliefs, then we should instituted universal warrantless phone call monitoring, and tag all citizens with a RFID, and store all their movements along with their DNA records in an FBI database. Before we go to that extreme though, the first, most obvious measure would make the death penalty mandatory for ALL types of crimes. A convicted criminal is FAR more likely to commit another crime in his life than ANY unborn child is.
Exactly, it's preventing a lifetime of neglect and misery that makes it right, along with the other benefits to society brought about by decreased population growth.
Oh really? Then killing your child whatever age you determine you no longer want it is also right - yes?
Attributing the changes is crime rate to abortion is just as tenuous as attributing it to lead. If you look at the chart from the study, the most prominent feature of of the crime rate graph is the SPIKE in crime centered around 1992, not the "reduction" in crime that happened after 1992. In fact the violent crime rate is higher now than 1970, not lower.
If there's one thing that that spike can clearly be correlated to, it's the influence of the Backstreet Boys. Alternately Clinton said at the time that it was because he put more cops on the streets. Lastly, I have a computer model that proves it's attributable to greenhouse gases.
How is masturbating and looking at pornography of consenting adults considered "perverted"? That is a very limited view given that your body is wired in such a way as to encourage you to reproduce as frequently and as often as possible. It stands to reason that people need to satisfy their natural urges somehow. It's hard getting laid;
Even given your biologically-based premise, that we are wired for the purpose of reproduction, the idea of masturbating instead of reproducing because "it's hard getting laid" is pretty much a perversion by definition. To those who believe that sexuality is inherently intimate, or even inherently sacred, pornography is a perversion on many additional levels. The fact of bodily urges is irrelevant to question of which expressions of those urges are perversions.
For you lawyer-types: Does this make it illegal for the Federal government to do this ? Or does it make it illegal for any government to enforce these requirements? Basically: Can the state of oregon say that they want to regulate this, or does this ruling make this illegal?
Basically. Any court that determined that particular federal law to be unconstitutional, which the 6th circuit now has, would have to also consider the same identical law unconstitutional if it were a state law. So while state courts aren't bound by federal precedent, someone could successfully sue their state for violating their constitutional rights in federal court. However, at least so far, that would only apply within the 6th circuit, of which Oregon is not a part.
The Supreme Court will not hear the case unless it is appealed by the Government. (And, of course, could refuse to hear it even then. Having just read through the entire decision, if I were a Justice I would let it stand as-is.) And, considering how easily, clearly, and fully the court invalidated the statutes on Constitutional grounds, I doubt very much that the government will appeal. It would be a waste of everyone's time. Every single argument the government made in defense of the statutes has been previously invalidated in other high court cases.
I don't see it that way. First of all, simple and straight-forward cases tend to have a single opinion from the court, not three. To me, their arguments carry little weight, as the law only applies to the making recordings and images of people having sex, and the degree to which such recordings are "speech" as used in the 1st amendment is negligible.
Remember that this is the first and only case so far challenging the 2257 statutes that has ever made it as far as even Superior Court. Having the statutes trounced so thoroughly on the very first case (even if it was appealed) is pretty significant, and probably indicative of what other courts will do if called upon.
We'll see. If other circuits do follow suit, the DOJ will certainly appeal to SCOTUS. If other circuits split, then the defendants will certainly appeal to SCOTUS.
As a final odd point: the philosophical question of whether it is "a law" once it is deemed unconsitutional is actually an unclear point. You can find legal scholars/philosophers who will refer to laws deemed unconstitutional by SCOTUS as invalid, nullified, non-existent, etc.
If a law is unconstitutional it must be considered void. Part of the checks and balances and separation of powers is that each branch of government makes this determination independently. If Congress determines it to be unconstitutional, they can obviously repeal it. If SCOTUS determines it to be unconstitutional, the judicial branch considers it void and will not convict anyone under it. If the Office of Legal Council determines it to be unconstitutional, the the entire executive branch considers it void it will not enforce it.
Some people will argue that SCOTUS is some "final arbiter" of what is and is not Constitutional, but the founding fathers argue strongly against this view. They are only the final arbiter for their branch of government, and for the cases brought before them.
While it might be untrue that the Internet owes its' existence to the porn industry to the degree that is claimed, it is true from what I've read that the porn industry and the material's distributors generally are early adopters of new technologies, particularly in such relevant areas as media storage. (DVDs and such)
When you think about it, this is actually extremely logical. It follows that individuals who are broad minded in at least one category of their thinking are more likely to thus be similarly broad minded in others.
Hurricane Mitch was hanging off the coast. It stayed there for days. But if you looked at the forecasts at the time, they basically said it was coming straight for the town I lived in, in 2 days. But it said that for about 4 or 5 days straight. Then, suddenly, Mitch shot off South and hit Honduras instead....Now, let's say, armed with that kind of forecast and a hurricane predicted to hit New Orleans is "modified" however they plan to modify it so that it will miss. But it turns out conditions change and the hurricane hits New Orleans BECAUSE they modified it. There's no way to be sure that the modification is what caused it to hit, because as I mentioned earlier, it's something we don't really understand as well as we like to think. Is the team now responsible for the damage to New Orleans? Are they going to pick up the tab?
I don't think the unpredictability of the path of hurricanes is because we don't understand them, but because their path is largely dependent on the accumulation of very small differences in energy interacting with it that simply cannot be predicted very far in advance in a chaotic weather system. During the 4 or 5 days that Mitch was stationary, it would presumably be very difficult to know where the first imbalance of energy was going to come from. But if we could provide that first imbalance of energy, it's no longer a mystery. Agreed, we had beter make darn sure we know what we're talking about before we do anything.
They are powered by huge amounts of energy, which is why weakening them substantially may never be possible; but the path they take is largely determined by small imbalances of energy.
They are worried about getting sued by the small towns they direct the storms to in the effort to avoid large cities. But if the space-based approach can be done efficiently, and we methodically steer all tropical storms over a certain size, couldn't we theoretically get them all to end up harmlessly in the North Atlantic?
Also for a gratuitous Star Trek II reference, "we are dealing with something that could be perverted into a dreadful weapon."
That poor burglar most likely won't even try to 'defend' himself, beyond running for the window.
This seems to summarize your world view. There aren't any really vicious people out there. People would never be violent, except that they get scared of each other, and start shooting in fear. If there are any places like that on this planet, I would be most content to live there without a gun. That's not how most the world is though. For all of history the world has been full of people who have wanted to conquer others for their own self-aggrandizement, take their lives, their possessions, their freedom, and anything else that could be of use to the conquerer. Those unable or unwilling to resist violently have always lost all these things. Unless you believe in a Garden of Eden, freedom has NEVER existed where it couldn't be defended with a gun, sword, ax or club.
Are you in favor of helping the FBI when they're digging up dirt on someone for the president to use politcally?
I agree that the FBI has done things in the past that were not legitimate; however I think the vast majority of their work is of great service to the public good.
In fact, I'd argue that it's a bad thing even if their aims are worthwhile. If they need a certain kind of information, they should either get a warrant, or convince Congress that they should have the authority to obtain it without a warrant.
Whether it's the FBI or your next-door neighbor, by what logic is it bad to voluntarily help someone who is doing something that you have determined to be worthwhile?
In the case at hand, there were very good reasons why FISA prohibited exactly the kind of things the NSA was doing. The assertion that the NSA was doing it to fight terrorism does not justify letting them break the law, or letting the telecom carriers break the law at the NSA's request. They didn't get a warrant because they knew that the court wouldn't give them one, so they just proceeded without one.
If we are going to throw out the Rule of Law any time that the president claims there's some kind of threat, we may as well not bother having Rule of Law at all.
Neither I nor the President has ever argued that it is excusable to disregard FISA merely because doing so was beneficial to fighting terrorism. The only reason to disregard FISA is because FISA is unconstitutional and therefore void. It just so happens that its unconstitutionality is highly related to its irrationality: The FISA court requires "probable cause" for a warrant, as required by the Constitution for warrants. However requiring a warrant (and by extension probable cause) for military intelligence gathering is irrational. It's never to my knowledge been done before in history before FISA, and was certainly not done at the time the Constitution was written. Warrants are for domestic law enforcement. They exist because their execution has historically involved the seizing of property of citizens, and therefore required due process similar to a conviction, but under different standards. Requiring them for non-obstructive information gathering is itself a perversion, but is not necessarily unconstitutional. However, legislating a judicial role into the functioning and execution of the US military IS unconstitutional. (And the NSA IS by law a part of the US military.)
Humans have only been breeding dogs for about a hundred thousand years, which on the evolutionary timescale is astonishingly short. Yet we have a huge diversity of dog breeds now, many of which differ in more than just appearance: behavioral traits (take a Pointer, for example) to physical capabilities (Bloodhounds have a sense of smell that is roughly an order of magnitude more sensitive than the average for dogs), etc.
I have no problem comprehending the linear changes and exaggeration of traits that can be done by either selective breeding or natural selection over thousands of generations. However, it can be done orders of magnitude more effectively with selective breeding. Given that, how would we go about using selective breeding to make a dog develop gills? This is obviously a vastly different problem set. If it can't be done with selective breeding, neither can it be done with natural selection.
If you can accept that a population of fish can go from being unwilling to leave the water to doing it routinely in a few hundred generations, why can you not accept that as they spend more and more time being outside of the water, their gill covers might not become more substantial? That cartilage might not extend into the gill covering tissue to strengthen it? These are small changes, but before you know it, you have an animal which has covered gills and a hole in the front which it passes water into. While this makes it less dynamic in the water, it gives it the ability to stay on the shore longer, evade predators, and eat more insects. Each time you're making a very small change. Each takes a few hundred generations; but after a million generations, well, you've made 10 thousand small changes at this rate. 10 thousand small changes is likely to seem pretty large when taken in aggregate.
If someone could map out the entire progression from gills to lungs, separated into individual steps each of which could have been reachable by an individual random mutation, and spread to the general population by that individual step's inherent advantage, then I would believe it to be possible. I don't know that enough is known about the genetic encoding of these morphological changes to know what exactly is reachable by a single mutation. But I would certainly like to see this attempted in a methodical and quantified way. Until it is, I don't see why it is considered serious theory. If this exists somewhere, please point me to where. I'm not interested in one species splitting off into a two different colored species. I'm interested in the formation of new organs. This case, the upgrading of an existing organ, will do as well.
The timescales here are very important, because these things happen slowly. Think of it in terms of probabilities. If you flip a coin 10 times in a row, the chances of flipping heads 10 times is very low. But if you flip the coin 100 times, the chances of flipping heads ten times in a row is much better; flip it 10000 times, and the chances are better yet. Flip it constantly for 2 billion years, and the probability, for all intents and purposes, is 1. Then add the fact that you're not the only person doing the flipping; for the whole 2 billion years, there are billions of "people", all flipping coins, all continuously. If even one of you succeeds, you all win.
Sure, with the time scales involved, it's easy for intuition to fail. But you also can't just say that give that much time anything could happen, because it can't. I think it's agreed that none of these large changes could plausibly randomly take place in a single jump, but how large a jump is required? I don't believe that the mere optimization of a fish will turn him into a frog. Optimization doesn't increase complexity. So what is required is a highly complex random mutation to jump the fish out of one optimization local maxima well and into another one. It's like a flying fish who jumps out of one stream and en
Actually, the US military has tortured people who were known to be innocent to death because they sounded funny when they screamed (google Bagram and Dilawar).
I googled this. The accurate statement would be that the US military learned of criminal manslaughter perpetrated by some of its soldiers, and convicted and punished the perpetrators.
One problem is that there is a strong tendency to use torture to establish guilt. This has resusulted in hundreds of innocent people being tortured by the US government (some of them even to death - as noted above). Basically, the USA would pay people in the Middle East to kidnap each other and then torture the people who had been kidnapped in the hopes that some of them were guilty of something.
The evidence opposes this contention. The only people the CIA tortured are the handful of the 13-16 IIRC high-level Al Qeada who didn't submit to lessor interrogation techniques. As I already said, the only technique that could be called torture used by the CIA is waterboarding, and this does not lead to death or any other physical harm. They followed leads from the information obtained, and in no cases used this information as the sole determinant of guilt. In fact, in the military tribunals at Guantanamo, this information is inadmissible, and presumably officially denied by the CIA. The evidence presented for conviction is obtained from subsequently obtained evidence. In the case of KSM, the judge was very vigilant about allegations of torture, and verified repeatedly with KSM that he was not saying anything under threat of torture, etc.
Second, torture underminds the USA's moral authority. The USA looks like total hypocrites claiming that they removed Saddam Hussein from power because he was a bad man who tortured people when the USA frequently uses torture itself.
There is some truth in these statements, but the problem with them is that by world standards, certainly by Saddam's standards, water-boarding isn't torture, it's just a tough interrogation technique. If we were pulling out teeth and drilling into legs, and cutting off fingers, leaving them dead, we would absolutely be on the level of Saddam and Al Qaeda. Playing on someone's fears without inflicting sever physical pain is a much different thing. It may not be as "aesthetic" as being a Quaker, but it is no less "aesthetic" than any forceful military action. While I can't deny that it has adversely affected Europe's opinion of us, my philosophy, and obviously Bush's philosophy, has always been that the question of the right thing to do should be independent of the question of anyone else's opinion of you for doing it. Furthermore, like what happened with Abu Ghraib, if it is the world opinion that is what's important, then the people in the media and general citizenry who brought it to global attention and kept it there, and made it the very face of the US military, are every bit as guilty of undermining that as the people who were guilty of the actual isolated crimes.
It might be possible to overlook the aesthetic problems with torture if torture was the only way to prevent terrorism. But it's not. In fact, falling back on torture shows a rather pathitic lack of creativity on the part of the USA. Suppose, for example, that you want to know who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed associates with. Sure, you could capture him and torture him and maybe he'll give up a few real guys along with some random innocent guys. Or, you could let him stay free but keep him under the most aggressive surveilence you can manage (which, for the USA with a budget of hundreds of billions would be quite substantial) and then you could know for certain who he associates with.
I think people must to confuse the term "superpower" with the term "superhero". The idea of letting KSM go after we finally caught him, and the idea that we could track him and find out his secrets by doing so, are,
Agent Orange was badly misused by the military in Viet Nam. That doesn't mean that it is not a useful herbicide when used responsibly in the appropriate situations.
Things like Terminator Seeds and Bovine Growth Hormone are good things. Terminator Seeds mean there can be an economic framework to make it profitable for companies to invent and sell better types of plants, which in turn could mean cheaper and/or healthier foods. The idea that it will somehow completely replace natural, reproducing plants, or force anyone to buy these seeds instead of gathering their own seeds from their own crops, makes no sense.
Bovine Growth Hormone, likewise makes milk far more plentiful and affordable. While there are valid arguments to be weighed against its use, which results in antibiotics ending up in the milk, these arguments are only even rational within a Western context. In developing economies, the advantage of using the hormones and therefore being able to feed people, is a no-brainer. Those who oppose it are doing the same kind of damage that they are doing by opposing DDT, inflicting enormous harm from malaria instead of the small damage from the insecticide.
I can't find any actual estimates of the linear mass of the various theoretical materials to be used. But if the momentum is really too great for starting and stopping, it could just be kept rotating indefinitely, and loads going up or down could just clip onto or off of the appropriate side at the beginning and end of the journey.
What's the point of doing the whole laser-powered thing? If it's possible to have a ribbon to space, it should be just as possible to have a closed loop of ribbon to space, with a motor that drives it at either the top or the bottom, no? They could even engineer it like the common cable cars that take people to the tops of mountains. Imagine how stupid it would be for them to engineer one of those cable car systems with the car being self-driven.
"The company has been found guilty of bribery, suppression of truth, negligence, wantonness and outrage."
Uh, since those aren't actual criminal charges, what the heck are you talking about. Or should I just say that you have been found guilty of hyperbole, paranoia, and general left-wing nuttiness?
Everyone has a right to minimum force, and everyone has a right to due process. A gun provides neither.
If someone is trying to murder or rape another human being they have the right to any amount of force that will stop them from following through, lethal or non-lethal. They have no right to any theoretical minimum that might stop them. How would one even go about determining what that minimum would be?
"Due Process" is the process by which the government tries, convicts, and punishes a criminal. One citizen owes another citizen no "due process" in defending himself from him, besides to do whatever he feels is necessary to protect himself. If someone uses more force than he honestly deems necessary to defend himself, one could argue that that should be a crime. But it would be nearly impossible to prove guilt
It's unimaginable to me that we don't just imprison people who make or purchase firearms. Who wants to be shot? What else is a gun good for?
Er, it's also good for shooting some other sap.
Of course, people act like it makes a difference who is doing the killing. Americans are even fond of the notion that if they own the gun, it's ok, the only problem is when 'criminals' have guns - rather missing the point that by owning a gun they are undertaking a plan to kill somebody - from which it is readily concluded that they are criminals.
Er, the fact that I'm planning on killing the first person who tries to break into my house and kill and rape my family does not make me a criminal. It makes me worthy of having a family. It further makes me a deterrent of criminals and an asset to my community.
Even in the civilised world, it is widely held that it is legitimate for agents of the state to be armed. But guess what? A state that plans to kill people is a terrorist state, and has no legitimacy left - dead people, after all, cannot vote.
Unassailable logic. Truly bulletproof. Also, people who even know what a gun looks like, are idealizing terrorism, and should be pushed off a cliff or clubbed to death.
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If you look at the chart, the most disturbing trend is the fact that the violent crime rate has increased since 1970 while the murder rate has decreased. Is this related to the obesity epidemic? We are no longer capable of chasing down our victims and finishing them off?
I think we're maxed out on the prenatal. If we're really going to get serious about stopping crime, then let's make it open season on anyone under the age of five!
In that case you support constitutional republicanism. There would be no point to a literal "constitutional democracy," as the constitution would either be unalterable or else a majority vote could change it at whim.
If the goal is to reduce crime, independent of any pesky moral beliefs, then we should instituted universal warrantless phone call monitoring, and tag all citizens with a RFID, and store all their movements along with their DNA records in an FBI database. Before we go to that extreme though, the first, most obvious measure would make the death penalty mandatory for ALL types of crimes. A convicted criminal is FAR more likely to commit another crime in his life than ANY unborn child is.
Oh really? Then killing your child whatever age you determine you no longer want it is also right - yes?
Attributing the changes is crime rate to abortion is just as tenuous as attributing it to lead. If you look at the chart from the study, the most prominent feature of of the crime rate graph is the SPIKE in crime centered around 1992, not the "reduction" in crime that happened after 1992. In fact the violent crime rate is higher now than 1970, not lower.
If there's one thing that that spike can clearly be correlated to, it's the influence of the Backstreet Boys. Alternately Clinton said at the time that it was because he put more cops on the streets. Lastly, I have a computer model that proves it's attributable to greenhouse gases.
Even given your biologically-based premise, that we are wired for the purpose of reproduction, the idea of masturbating instead of reproducing because "it's hard getting laid" is pretty much a perversion by definition. To those who believe that sexuality is inherently intimate, or even inherently sacred, pornography is a perversion on many additional levels. The fact of bodily urges is irrelevant to question of which expressions of those urges are perversions.
Basically. Any court that determined that particular federal law to be unconstitutional, which the 6th circuit now has, would have to also consider the same identical law unconstitutional if it were a state law. So while state courts aren't bound by federal precedent, someone could successfully sue their state for violating their constitutional rights in federal court. However, at least so far, that would only apply within the 6th circuit, of which Oregon is not a part.
I don't see it that way. First of all, simple and straight-forward cases tend to have a single opinion from the court, not three. To me, their arguments carry little weight, as the law only applies to the making recordings and images of people having sex, and the degree to which such recordings are "speech" as used in the 1st amendment is negligible.
We'll see. If other circuits do follow suit, the DOJ will certainly appeal to SCOTUS. If other circuits split, then the defendants will certainly appeal to SCOTUS.
If a law is unconstitutional it must be considered void. Part of the checks and balances and separation of powers is that each branch of government makes this determination independently. If Congress determines it to be unconstitutional, they can obviously repeal it. If SCOTUS determines it to be unconstitutional, the judicial branch considers it void and will not convict anyone under it. If the Office of Legal Council determines it to be unconstitutional, the the entire executive branch considers it void it will not enforce it.
Some people will argue that SCOTUS is some "final arbiter" of what is and is not Constitutional, but the founding fathers argue strongly against this view. They are only the final arbiter for their branch of government, and for the cases brought before them.
Because, pornographers are... broad minded???
I don't think the unpredictability of the path of hurricanes is because we don't understand them, but because their path is largely dependent on the accumulation of very small differences in energy interacting with it that simply cannot be predicted very far in advance in a chaotic weather system. During the 4 or 5 days that Mitch was stationary, it would presumably be very difficult to know where the first imbalance of energy was going to come from. But if we could provide that first imbalance of energy, it's no longer a mystery. Agreed, we had beter make darn sure we know what we're talking about before we do anything.
They are powered by huge amounts of energy, which is why weakening them substantially may never be possible; but the path they take is largely determined by small imbalances of energy.
They are worried about getting sued by the small towns they direct the storms to in the effort to avoid large cities. But if the space-based approach can be done efficiently, and we methodically steer all tropical storms over a certain size, couldn't we theoretically get them all to end up harmlessly in the North Atlantic?
Also for a gratuitous Star Trek II reference, "we are dealing with something that could be perverted into a dreadful weapon."
This seems to summarize your world view. There aren't any really vicious people out there. People would never be violent, except that they get scared of each other, and start shooting in fear. If there are any places like that on this planet, I would be most content to live there without a gun. That's not how most the world is though. For all of history the world has been full of people who have wanted to conquer others for their own self-aggrandizement, take their lives, their possessions, their freedom, and anything else that could be of use to the conquerer. Those unable or unwilling to resist violently have always lost all these things. Unless you believe in a Garden of Eden, freedom has NEVER existed where it couldn't be defended with a gun, sword, ax or club.
I agree that the FBI has done things in the past that were not legitimate; however I think the vast majority of their work is of great service to the public good.
Whether it's the FBI or your next-door neighbor, by what logic is it bad to voluntarily help someone who is doing something that you have determined to be worthwhile?
Neither I nor the President has ever argued that it is excusable to disregard FISA merely because doing so was beneficial to fighting terrorism. The only reason to disregard FISA is because FISA is unconstitutional and therefore void. It just so happens that its unconstitutionality is highly related to its irrationality: The FISA court requires "probable cause" for a warrant, as required by the Constitution for warrants. However requiring a warrant (and by extension probable cause) for military intelligence gathering is irrational. It's never to my knowledge been done before in history before FISA, and was certainly not done at the time the Constitution was written. Warrants are for domestic law enforcement. They exist because their execution has historically involved the seizing of property of citizens, and therefore required due process similar to a conviction, but under different standards. Requiring them for non-obstructive information gathering is itself a perversion, but is not necessarily unconstitutional. However, legislating a judicial role into the functioning and execution of the US military IS unconstitutional. (And the NSA IS by law a part of the US military.)
I have no problem comprehending the linear changes and exaggeration of traits that can be done by either selective breeding or natural selection over thousands of generations. However, it can be done orders of magnitude more effectively with selective breeding. Given that, how would we go about using selective breeding to make a dog develop gills? This is obviously a vastly different problem set. If it can't be done with selective breeding, neither can it be done with natural selection.
If someone could map out the entire progression from gills to lungs, separated into individual steps each of which could have been reachable by an individual random mutation, and spread to the general population by that individual step's inherent advantage, then I would believe it to be possible. I don't know that enough is known about the genetic encoding of these morphological changes to know what exactly is reachable by a single mutation. But I would certainly like to see this attempted in a methodical and quantified way. Until it is, I don't see why it is considered serious theory. If this exists somewhere, please point me to where. I'm not interested in one species splitting off into a two different colored species. I'm interested in the formation of new organs. This case, the upgrading of an existing organ, will do as well.
Sure, with the time scales involved, it's easy for intuition to fail. But you also can't just say that give that much time anything could happen, because it can't. I think it's agreed that none of these large changes could plausibly randomly take place in a single jump, but how large a jump is required? I don't believe that the mere optimization of a fish will turn him into a frog. Optimization doesn't increase complexity. So what is required is a highly complex random mutation to jump the fish out of one optimization local maxima well and into another one. It's like a flying fish who jumps out of one stream and en
I googled this. The accurate statement would be that the US military learned of criminal manslaughter perpetrated by some of its soldiers, and convicted and punished the perpetrators.
The evidence opposes this contention. The only people the CIA tortured are the handful of the 13-16 IIRC high-level Al Qeada who didn't submit to lessor interrogation techniques. As I already said, the only technique that could be called torture used by the CIA is waterboarding, and this does not lead to death or any other physical harm. They followed leads from the information obtained, and in no cases used this information as the sole determinant of guilt. In fact, in the military tribunals at Guantanamo, this information is inadmissible, and presumably officially denied by the CIA. The evidence presented for conviction is obtained from subsequently obtained evidence. In the case of KSM, the judge was very vigilant about allegations of torture, and verified repeatedly with KSM that he was not saying anything under threat of torture, etc.
There is some truth in these statements, but the problem with them is that by world standards, certainly by Saddam's standards, water-boarding isn't torture, it's just a tough interrogation technique. If we were pulling out teeth and drilling into legs, and cutting off fingers, leaving them dead, we would absolutely be on the level of Saddam and Al Qaeda. Playing on someone's fears without inflicting sever physical pain is a much different thing. It may not be as "aesthetic" as being a Quaker, but it is no less "aesthetic" than any forceful military action. While I can't deny that it has adversely affected Europe's opinion of us, my philosophy, and obviously Bush's philosophy, has always been that the question of the right thing to do should be independent of the question of anyone else's opinion of you for doing it. Furthermore, like what happened with Abu Ghraib, if it is the world opinion that is what's important, then the people in the media and general citizenry who brought it to global attention and kept it there, and made it the very face of the US military, are every bit as guilty of undermining that as the people who were guilty of the actual isolated crimes.
I think people must to confuse the term "superpower" with the term "superhero". The idea of letting KSM go after we finally caught him, and the idea that we could track him and find out his secrets by doing so, are,
Agent Orange was badly misused by the military in Viet Nam. That doesn't mean that it is not a useful herbicide when used responsibly in the appropriate situations.
Things like Terminator Seeds and Bovine Growth Hormone are good things. Terminator Seeds mean there can be an economic framework to make it profitable for companies to invent and sell better types of plants, which in turn could mean cheaper and/or healthier foods. The idea that it will somehow completely replace natural, reproducing plants, or force anyone to buy these seeds instead of gathering their own seeds from their own crops, makes no sense.
Bovine Growth Hormone, likewise makes milk far more plentiful and affordable. While there are valid arguments to be weighed against its use, which results in antibiotics ending up in the milk, these arguments are only even rational within a Western context. In developing economies, the advantage of using the hormones and therefore being able to feed people, is a no-brainer. Those who oppose it are doing the same kind of damage that they are doing by opposing DDT, inflicting enormous harm from malaria instead of the small damage from the insecticide.
I can't find any actual estimates of the linear mass of the various theoretical materials to be used. But if the momentum is really too great for starting and stopping, it could just be kept rotating indefinitely, and loads going up or down could just clip onto or off of the appropriate side at the beginning and end of the journey.
What's the point of doing the whole laser-powered thing? If it's possible to have a ribbon to space, it should be just as possible to have a closed loop of ribbon to space, with a motor that drives it at either the top or the bottom, no? They could even engineer it like the common cable cars that take people to the tops of mountains. Imagine how stupid it would be for them to engineer one of those cable car systems with the car being self-driven.
"The company has been found guilty of bribery, suppression of truth, negligence, wantonness and outrage."
Uh, since those aren't actual criminal charges, what the heck are you talking about. Or should I just say that you have been found guilty of hyperbole, paranoia, and general left-wing nuttiness?
If someone is trying to murder or rape another human being they have the right to any amount of force that will stop them from following through, lethal or non-lethal. They have no right to any theoretical minimum that might stop them. How would one even go about determining what that minimum would be?
"Due Process" is the process by which the government tries, convicts, and punishes a criminal. One citizen owes another citizen no "due process" in defending himself from him, besides to do whatever he feels is necessary to protect himself. If someone uses more force than he honestly deems necessary to defend himself, one could argue that that should be a crime. But it would be nearly impossible to prove guilt
Er, it's also good for shooting some other sap.
Er, the fact that I'm planning on killing the first person who tries to break into my house and kill and rape my family does not make me a criminal. It makes me worthy of having a family. It further makes me a deterrent of criminals and an asset to my community.
Unassailable logic. Truly bulletproof. Also, people who even know what a gun looks like, are idealizing terrorism, and should be pushed off a cliff or clubbed to death.
It's because of us crazy neocons who think that preventing murder is more important than preventing death in general.