It brings up a interesting point. What percentage of drugs leave the body in the same molecular form as when they went in? Caffeine and alcohol do, I think. What about morphine, mescaline, and other active ingredients? The assumption of the article seems to imply that most stay intact. If that's the case, stop blowing all that money on drugs, you dumb addicts! Buy it once, and then just keep recycling it from your own urine!
No, not the legislation, the literal sewage. I'd love to see the the drug usage pattern changes after a power shift between parties....or for that matter when Ted Kennedy goes on vacation. If they could display the results in real time on the CSPAN feed, that would be perfect.
All the DNA molecules and drug molecules would be mixed together in the suspension. You're not going to find a morphine molecule stuck to a chromosome molecule of the guy who used it.
The only thing that could still be "owned" about the original books are the trademark rights, which could be maintained indefinitely if they're continually exercised. I'm pretty sure MGM has done its job in maintaining "The Wizard of Oz" and the distinctive likenesses of Judy Garland, Margaret Hamilton, Bolger, Haley, Lahr, etc. as trademarks, and they're powerful enough to get away with claiming just "Oz" as a trademark if they set their legal will to it.
I did a trademark search, and Turner Entertainment Co does own 10 live "typed drawing" trademarks for "Wizard of Oz," and a number of dead ones, mostly for merchandising. However, this wouldn't prevent anyone else from making a new movie version, as long as the typeface used for the title didn't make it look confusingly similar to the original registered mark.
Pay attention to your fucking kids and what they consume! Don't require that the nanny corporate state do it for you.
A) My kids don't buy their own CDs. B) If they did, it's a good thing that there's a store available that provides an environment and selection that I find appropriate for them.
Whatever then "nanny corporate state" is, and whatever it is doing for me, is limited to the confines of your own imagination.
The majority of parents (or at least a large enough minority that you can build a shopping empire around them) like the freedom of letting their kids pick any CD in the store to buy, knowing that none of the "music" contained therein will contain explicit descriptions of deviant sexual exploits. And those who whine because there is a store who won't sell them such are not considered "sophisticated" by the rest of us, nor presumably by the executive management of Walmart.
Huh? Since when does this violate the ideals of capitalism? Capitalism has nothing to do with the "best ideas rising to the top" unless you are ascribing some sort of Randian idealism. What is happening here is pure capitalism. People with wealth are using it to further their own agenda, which ultimately they hope will generate a suitable return.
If the other is Randian idealism, what you express is Marxist idealism. If you don't want to call "the best ideas rising to the top" "capitalism," (which term was coined by Marx after all) then call it "the free market." This behavior clearly undermines open competition and therefore the free market. And while I doubt it violates any US laws, any free market society would be justified in creating laws to protect against such actions.
I doubt all customers want any particular product or service. The more important question is whether or not enough want this product in order for it to be worth offering.
No, that's not the question. I don't think there's any doubt that the sales of unedited CDs would more than pay for the actual expense of carrying them. The question is whether those sales would make up for the loss of business Walmart would receive from abandoning its "family-friendly" policies. The answer is that Walmart's family-friendly-cred with its customer base is one of it's most important assets, and there is no way that the sales of unedited CDs would ever even approach the value of that.
What I don't get, though, is why Walmart censors stuff at all. It may have made sense back in the 1980s when their primary market was bible-belt rural, but now? It just seems self-limiting.
You should see the miles of cars every Sunday outside the mega-church near me, just outside of philadelphia, a very liberal city. The demand for family-friendly shopping is everywhere in North America, not just the Bible Belt. South America even more so.
I think the idea behind it is that civility breeds civility. Don't expose the kids to the nasty language and they'll be respectful. (Yeah, I agree, silly.)
I personally see nothing silly about censoring things like graphic descriptions of group sex out of the music one's children listen to. Censoring such "artists" altogether would make even more sense.
Wal-mart has authority over what they sell and the music produces have authority over what they sell, so edited copies of records are censored. Therefore, the music companies and the retailer are in the practice of censorship.
This is silly. First, reselling a censored work is not censorship. Second, what we are talking about is self-censorship. These are alternate versions of CDs produced with the blessing, if not heavy involvement, of the artist, for the purpose of getting more radio play and making more money. Self-censorship is not a bad thing. And even if you think it's a bad thing, it is certainly not Walmart's fault that the artists offer those products.
Don't confuse censorship in general with the public freedom of speech. Editing the work of another party to remove something you disagree with is still an offense of censorship against the work -- it is just not a violation of constitutional rights. Wal-Mart is unlike your theoretical bar and grill in that it is offering those works for sale and is making objectionable edits to them. It's not a crime, and it's not a violation of civil liberties. It's just wrong and offensive.
Nonsense! First, Walmart isn't editing anything. It is reselling a particular product offered by the artists via their publisher, i.e. the edited versions of CDs; and not reselling another product, i.e. the unedited versions. Second, it's every individual's and every corporation's duty to conduct their business in what they view as a responsible and ethical manner. If you are a reseller, that means it's your duty to act with conscience when deciding what products to carry. If you're a private citizen, this means moderating what comes out of your mouth, so as not to say things that will degrade society and lower the quality of public discourse. This can be called "self-censorship," but if it is, then self-censorship is the foundation of any kind of public or private morality.
Calling Walmart's good-faith decision about what it will sell "wrong and offensive" is itself wrong and offensive. Those who say it doesn't make business sense are ignorant of the retail market, and can't see beyond what they would personally like to buy. Walmart will lose some sales to people who would buy the unedited version, but in exchange, they by provide family-friendly atmosphere, and a place where parents who care about that sort of thing can let their kids go and pick out a CD to buy. In other words, they provide an invaluable service to their market that no one else is providing.
Agreed. When has Congress ever used an oversight hearing to do anything constructive? All they are interested in doing is turning important issues into political weaponry. I say the more is hidden from Congress the better. If the laws establishing the NRC need adjusting, let the executive branch bring it to their attention.
Luxembourg... I can never remember, is that in Kentucky or Virginia?
(i'm joking. last time i read an article about skype, i thought it said they were hq'd in the uk. good for them for being in luxembourg. if i were making millions, i'd be in luxembourg too. or maybe dubai. or even mexico. definitely not the uk.)
Relativistic time dilation makes no sense by human common sense experience. Relativity says there is literally *no such thing* as "at the same time" across two separate locations... that "before" and "after" are largely meaningless and reversible between two separate locations. You can't trust "common sense expectations" when outside the range of human experience. Quantum-style effects are simply outside the range of human experience.
I have no problem with concepts that are merely contrary to what sensory experience has prepared me for, like Relativity, and for that matter like many mathematical concepts, which I consider as real as physical reality, like transcendental numbers and like calculus. But when we deny things like cause and effect, and allow ourselves to say that things just happen nondeterministically, it seems to me that we violate the principles which allowed us to start doing science in the first place. Violating common sense is one thing, violating reason is another. And at least so far, I haven't seen the evidence requiring us to do so.
One example of the bizarreness and the "quantum reality" of things that didn't happen, one paper I recall was about how you can have an unknown object in an opaque box with a hole in the side, you can send photons outside the box *past* the hole, you can have *none* of the photons actually pass through the hole into the box, no photon ever hits the object inside the box, but the fact that there was in infinitesimally small chance that any given photon *could* have gone through the hole and *could* have hit the object changes the shape of the virtual wave function outside the box, and you can create a "photograph" of the object inside the box. No photon ever went into the box, no photon ever hit the object, but the fact that (no matter how remote the chance) that it *could* have and *didn't* is in some sense a real event that did happen and did have an effect.
For example in this, which is very interesting, it seems that X went into the box, and X wasn't a photon. The real bizarreness seems to come from describing X as the potentiality of the photon's motion, rather than some real, physical, and unknown wave which happens to determine the motion of the photon. I.e., the wave that all photons surf on.
Given that this baby [wiretaping law] was steamrolled through the Congress two weeks ago, the outage seems coincidental.
Consider that Skype could not tell the users of the real reason even if they wanted to: the law mandates that the forced cooperation be kept in secret.
Yes, the US government ordered Skype (a UK company, btw) to shut down for two days and blame it on Microsoft, and they complied. Hint: The aluminum foil goes on your head, not crammed forcibly into your ear.
If you want to get more subtle still, it actually is not known whether Quantum Mechanics is fundamentally random or deterministic. It's possible that it's somehow deterministic at its core (e.g. the Many-Worlds Interpretation is a deterministic one). However, various experiments (coupled to Bell's theorem) have shown that there are no "local hidden variables." That is, particles do not carry hidden information that tells them which choice they should pick. So, "local observers" (i.e. people like us, who are *inside* the universe and doomed to forever be entangled with other particles in the universe) cannot, even in principle, obtain knowledge that allows us to be predictive beyond this randomness.
I did a little more background reading on the Bell Inequality experiments. It seems first of all, that theorizing that events are random, which is to say acausal, is a much extreme position than to say, for example, that particles are interacting instantaneously at a distance. I acknowledge that with my limited knowledge I could be way off base, but my inclination is that the up and down spins being measured could be so much more easily explained by considering that the measurement techniques are actually aligning the spin along the axis being measured. If that is so, the probabilities referring to spin along multiple axes simultaneously make no sense, because they can't t exist simultaneously, and so Bell's Inequalities should not be valid as applied to those experiments.
Anyway, I have no problem with the idea that such-and-such follows a certain distribution, and we currently have no way to know more than that. But it seems like the default assumption should be that such-and-such is following some sort of deterministic law, and we just haven't figured out how to see the mechanism for it yet. The leap to non-causality seems extreme for the amount of evidence that exists to suggest it.
There are basically three different ways of explaining / dealing with quantum mechanical nondeterminism(randomness). One is the metaphysical Copenhagen Interpretation, which pretty much says that A does not have a value until you look at it and it randomly becomes +1 or -1. The second is the metaphysical Many-Worlds Interpretation, which pretty much says that there is both a +1 A and a -1 A, and that when you look at it everything splits into two subjective universes and there's a version of you that sees +1 A and a version of you that sees -1 A... and while that makes the universe as a whole non-random it is *subjectively* random whether any given version of you will see a +1 or -1. The third way of dealing with it is the Practical NonInterpretation that the math is works and the physics is right and it doesn't matter if it doesn't make any sense quit wasting time with silly meaningless issues about how or why it happens and whether it is random or not... it is what it is and just do the damn math and get the right answer.
At the risk of sounding closed-minded, I find none of the three satisfactory. I need to do some serious reading on the actual experiments; but as far as the dual-slit experiment goes, it has always seemed to me that there were better explanations than a particle that can tell if it's being watched. But like I said, I should read more before criticizing.
Imagine you have a particle with three values A B and C (or three entangled particles with one value each). These values can each be +1 or -1. Due to the laws of physics it is impossible to measure all three of them... there is simply no way to even attempt it. You can measure any two. If you mere A and B, they are always opposite signs. If you measure B and C, they are always opposite signs. If you measure A and C, they are always opposite signs.
There is no possible way to fill in three actual values for A B and C at the same time.
Based upon what was it decided that it's the principle of measuring the particle itself, rather than the our technological limitations of measuring a particle without disturbing it, that is the cause of the particle changing the state (or collapsing the wave function or whatnot)?
What I'd really like is a text that not only details the theory, but gives all the experimental background for why the the theory is what it is. Any recommendations?
Your point about abiogenisis shows that you do not even understand what evolution is. It is the variance of life, not the origins.
Since my point WAS that evolution treats of the variance of life, not the origins; apparently neither of us know what evolution is.
Um, no. There are various theories and hypothesises as to how evolution works. All of which may be true, by the way. But evolution, unto itself, is a fact. It has been observed.
By simply "evolution" most people are referring to Neodarwinism. If you're talking about micro-evolution, not even young earth creationists deny that that occurs. And no, not all evolutionary theories and hypotheses can be true. For example, Phyletic Gradualism and Punctuated Equilibrium cannot both be true.
The slow slide to fascism began some time ago, but has really accelerated over the past six years or so. We have fewer rights now than ever before in the USA and I fear for where we are going.
And yet you go on to list things that show no loss of rights and have absolutely nothing to do with "fascism." Do you even know what the word means?
1) We now torture as part of imprisonment along with imprison people without the protections that the Geneva Convention provides and appear to detain people without formally charging them or letting them know what they are being charged with.
Interrogation methods have, if anything, been more restrained over the last decades. Our basic policy for dealing with ununiformed enemy combatants has remained basically unchanged since the revolution. We extend far more rights to enemy combatants today than we did during WWII. In both cases we've extended the rights of the Geneva Convention to all who it applied to.
2) We have a fear mongering national obsession with security that despite all the money and bureaucracy spent and created still leaves us wide open to security threats while taxing business and limiting travel. Threat levels are increased without justification to apparently further political goals.
So we have a fearful nation. How does this make anyone "fascist" or mean that you have fewer rights than ever before?
3) We have politicized education and science for political gain while at the same time stifled scientists from telling the facts/truth/scientific findings.
Yes, science has been turned into a political battleground. How does this make anyone "fascist" or mean that you have fewer rights than ever before?
4) We have completely conflated religion and government funneling money into religious groups with strong ties into the government.
That is silly. We have so gone the opposite from conflating religion and government, that they don't even hold worship services in public schools anymore (although they do in the Congress) because schools are allegedly extensions of the federal government. Although, I suppose you could call the banning of religion in school, "the slide into fascism" since Mussolini did the same thing.
5) Taxation is only low for corporate and the most wealthy, while at the same time we have suppressed labor power and limited funding for intellectual and artistic pursuits.
We have a Constitution which limits the powers of the federal government. Among its powers are not included funding intellectual or artistic pursuits. As for taxes, we have a progressive tax system, where low-income people pay a smaller percentage and high-income people pay a higher percentage. In fact, the top 5% of wage earners pay more than half of all federal taxes.
6) We have rampant government corruption and funneling of government "no-bid" contracts to companies with strong ties to government.
Sure, every government that has ever existed has had such corruption. But we have far less now that we have had in the past. Regardless, it has nothing to do with "fascism" or you having fewer rights than ever before.
7...... How much more do we have to add to really start becoming scared?
You might consider aiming for quality rather than quantity.
Is there a link somewhere to the actual order? Or anything else more objective than a press release from the ACLU? As it is, the significance of this is nearly indeterminable.
If it cannot be falsified it is not Science and does NOT belong in a science class. At all. Not even to "teach the controversy". Period. End of statement.
Now, do they accept that "Intelligent Design" does not belong in science class? Yes/No?
If "Yes", how would they falsify it do demonstrate that it IS scientific?
I'd be happy to follow that standard, but that would rule out teaching parts of neodarwinism, such as the randomness of mutation; string theory / M-theory; and a fair amount of current quantum dynamics IMO.
Uh, primates have many physiological similarities to humans. Mice do as well. That's why they're used for testing in lieu of humans. It doesn't have a lot to do with whether they got that way because of neodarwinism, some other kind of evolution, or some kind of immediate creation.
Slashdot Mirror
It brings up a interesting point. What percentage of drugs leave the body in the same molecular form as when they went in? Caffeine and alcohol do, I think. What about morphine, mescaline, and other active ingredients? The assumption of the article seems to imply that most stay intact. If that's the case, stop blowing all that money on drugs, you dumb addicts! Buy it once, and then just keep recycling it from your own urine!
No, not the legislation, the literal sewage. I'd love to see the the drug usage pattern changes after a power shift between parties. ...or for that matter when Ted Kennedy goes on vacation. If they could display the results in real time on the CSPAN feed, that would be perfect.
All the DNA molecules and drug molecules would be mixed together in the suspension. You're not going to find a morphine molecule stuck to a chromosome molecule of the guy who used it.
I did a trademark search, and Turner Entertainment Co does own 10 live "typed drawing" trademarks for "Wizard of Oz," and a number of dead ones, mostly for merchandising. However, this wouldn't prevent anyone else from making a new movie version, as long as the typeface used for the title didn't make it look confusingly similar to the original registered mark.
A) My kids don't buy their own CDs. B) If they did, it's a good thing that there's a store available that provides an environment and selection that I find appropriate for them.
Whatever then "nanny corporate state" is, and whatever it is doing for me, is limited to the confines of your own imagination.
The majority of parents (or at least a large enough minority that you can build a shopping empire around them) like the freedom of letting their kids pick any CD in the store to buy, knowing that none of the "music" contained therein will contain explicit descriptions of deviant sexual exploits. And those who whine because there is a store who won't sell them such are not considered "sophisticated" by the rest of us, nor presumably by the executive management of Walmart.
If the other is Randian idealism, what you express is Marxist idealism. If you don't want to call "the best ideas rising to the top" "capitalism," (which term was coined by Marx after all) then call it "the free market." This behavior clearly undermines open competition and therefore the free market. And while I doubt it violates any US laws, any free market society would be justified in creating laws to protect against such actions.
No, that's not the question. I don't think there's any doubt that the sales of unedited CDs would more than pay for the actual expense of carrying them. The question is whether those sales would make up for the loss of business Walmart would receive from abandoning its "family-friendly" policies. The answer is that Walmart's family-friendly-cred with its customer base is one of it's most important assets, and there is no way that the sales of unedited CDs would ever even approach the value of that.
You should see the miles of cars every Sunday outside the mega-church near me, just outside of philadelphia, a very liberal city. The demand for family-friendly shopping is everywhere in North America, not just the Bible Belt. South America even more so.
I personally see nothing silly about censoring things like graphic descriptions of group sex out of the music one's children listen to. Censoring such "artists" altogether would make even more sense.
This is silly. First, reselling a censored work is not censorship. Second, what we are talking about is self-censorship. These are alternate versions of CDs produced with the blessing, if not heavy involvement, of the artist, for the purpose of getting more radio play and making more money. Self-censorship is not a bad thing. And even if you think it's a bad thing, it is certainly not Walmart's fault that the artists offer those products.
Nonsense! First, Walmart isn't editing anything. It is reselling a particular product offered by the artists via their publisher, i.e. the edited versions of CDs; and not reselling another product, i.e. the unedited versions. Second, it's every individual's and every corporation's duty to conduct their business in what they view as a responsible and ethical manner. If you are a reseller, that means it's your duty to act with conscience when deciding what products to carry. If you're a private citizen, this means moderating what comes out of your mouth, so as not to say things that will degrade society and lower the quality of public discourse. This can be called "self-censorship," but if it is, then self-censorship is the foundation of any kind of public or private morality.
Calling Walmart's good-faith decision about what it will sell "wrong and offensive" is itself wrong and offensive. Those who say it doesn't make business sense are ignorant of the retail market, and can't see beyond what they would personally like to buy. Walmart will lose some sales to people who would buy the unedited version, but in exchange, they by provide family-friendly atmosphere, and a place where parents who care about that sort of thing can let their kids go and pick out a CD to buy. In other words, they provide an invaluable service to their market that no one else is providing.
Agreed. When has Congress ever used an oversight hearing to do anything constructive? All they are interested in doing is turning important issues into political weaponry. I say the more is hidden from Congress the better. If the laws establishing the NRC need adjusting, let the executive branch bring it to their attention.
Luxembourg... I can never remember, is that in Kentucky or Virginia?
(i'm joking. last time i read an article about skype, i thought it said they were hq'd in the uk. good for them for being in luxembourg. if i were making millions, i'd be in luxembourg too. or maybe dubai. or even mexico. definitely not the uk.)
I have no problem with concepts that are merely contrary to what sensory experience has prepared me for, like Relativity, and for that matter like many mathematical concepts, which I consider as real as physical reality, like transcendental numbers and like calculus. But when we deny things like cause and effect, and allow ourselves to say that things just happen nondeterministically, it seems to me that we violate the principles which allowed us to start doing science in the first place. Violating common sense is one thing, violating reason is another. And at least so far, I haven't seen the evidence requiring us to do so.
For example in this, which is very interesting, it seems that X went into the box, and X wasn't a photon. The real bizarreness seems to come from describing X as the potentiality of the photon's motion, rather than some real, physical, and unknown wave which happens to determine the motion of the photon. I.e., the wave that all photons surf on.
Yes, the US government ordered Skype (a UK company, btw) to shut down for two days and blame it on Microsoft, and they complied. Hint: The aluminum foil goes on your head, not crammed forcibly into your ear.
RTFA. It's not bad planning. It's a bug in their networking software.
I did a little more background reading on the Bell Inequality experiments. It seems first of all, that theorizing that events are random, which is to say acausal, is a much extreme position than to say, for example, that particles are interacting instantaneously at a distance. I acknowledge that with my limited knowledge I could be way off base, but my inclination is that the up and down spins being measured could be so much more easily explained by considering that the measurement techniques are actually aligning the spin along the axis being measured. If that is so, the probabilities referring to spin along multiple axes simultaneously make no sense, because they can't t exist simultaneously, and so Bell's Inequalities should not be valid as applied to those experiments.
Anyway, I have no problem with the idea that such-and-such follows a certain distribution, and we currently have no way to know more than that. But it seems like the default assumption should be that such-and-such is following some sort of deterministic law, and we just haven't figured out how to see the mechanism for it yet. The leap to non-causality seems extreme for the amount of evidence that exists to suggest it.
At the risk of sounding closed-minded, I find none of the three satisfactory. I need to do some serious reading on the actual experiments; but as far as the dual-slit experiment goes, it has always seemed to me that there were better explanations than a particle that can tell if it's being watched. But like I said, I should read more before criticizing.
Based upon what was it decided that it's the principle of measuring the particle itself, rather than the our technological limitations of measuring a particle without disturbing it, that is the cause of the particle changing the state (or collapsing the wave function or whatnot)?
What I'd really like is a text that not only details the theory, but gives all the experimental background for why the the theory is what it is. Any recommendations?
Since my point WAS that evolution treats of the variance of life, not the origins; apparently neither of us know what evolution is.
By simply "evolution" most people are referring to Neodarwinism. If you're talking about micro-evolution, not even young earth creationists deny that that occurs. And no, not all evolutionary theories and hypotheses can be true. For example, Phyletic Gradualism and Punctuated Equilibrium cannot both be true.
And yet you go on to list things that show no loss of rights and have absolutely nothing to do with "fascism." Do you even know what the word means?
Interrogation methods have, if anything, been more restrained over the last decades. Our basic policy for dealing with ununiformed enemy combatants has remained basically unchanged since the revolution. We extend far more rights to enemy combatants today than we did during WWII. In both cases we've extended the rights of the Geneva Convention to all who it applied to.
So we have a fearful nation. How does this make anyone "fascist" or mean that you have fewer rights than ever before?
Yes, science has been turned into a political battleground. How does this make anyone "fascist" or mean that you have fewer rights than ever before?
That is silly. We have so gone the opposite from conflating religion and government, that they don't even hold worship services in public schools anymore (although they do in the Congress) because schools are allegedly extensions of the federal government. Although, I suppose you could call the banning of religion in school, "the slide into fascism" since Mussolini did the same thing.
We have a Constitution which limits the powers of the federal government. Among its powers are not included funding intellectual or artistic pursuits. As for taxes, we have a progressive tax system, where low-income people pay a smaller percentage and high-income people pay a higher percentage. In fact, the top 5% of wage earners pay more than half of all federal taxes.
Sure, every government that has ever existed has had such corruption. But we have far less now that we have had in the past. Regardless, it has nothing to do with "fascism" or you having fewer rights than ever before.
You might consider aiming for quality rather than quantity.
Is there a link somewhere to the actual order? Or anything else more objective than a press release from the ACLU? As it is, the significance of this is nearly indeterminable.
Maybe we should save these questions for the confirmation hearings for the Philosopher Laureate.
I'd be happy to follow that standard, but that would rule out teaching parts of neodarwinism, such as the randomness of mutation; string theory / M-theory; and a fair amount of current quantum dynamics IMO.
Uh, primates have many physiological similarities to humans. Mice do as well. That's why they're used for testing in lieu of humans. It doesn't have a lot to do with whether they got that way because of neodarwinism, some other kind of evolution, or some kind of immediate creation.