And that is exactly why they won't. They want people on their platform, such that no matter what game you buy, they get a piece of the action. They would only be undermining themselves if they released their titles on another platform.
No, the real problem with cutting the military budget by 50% (which I support btw) is that it is not a "today" solution. The military breakdown from wikipedia (as of 2010) is
Operations and maintenance: $283.3 billion +4.2%
Military Personnel: $154.2 billion +5.0%
Procurement: $140.1 billion 1.8%
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $79.1 billion +1.3%
Military Construction $23.9 billion +19.0%
Family Housing $3.1 billion 20.2%
Total Spending 683.7 billion +3.0%
So lets assume you tried to cut 340 billion today. Cut half from operations, and you will probably end up closing a quarter of the domestic bases, as well as all of the overseas bases. Like it or not, local economies rely on those bases. Right off the bat you have destabilized a gaggle of local economies. Halving personnel costs would flood the job market with hundreds of thousands of out of work soldiers. Also, I am not sure, but I believe that the V.A. is lumped in with that. Procurement seems ripe, but you have to understand, bases have to maintain operational readiness in order to be effective. This means throwing a lot of expired crap and replacing it with new crap. Which, I might add, it buys from your economy. Finally, research is just not something you want to cut. The first country to develop a fast enough, powerful enough, laser is going to make air war obsolete. You would like to be in that country, trust me. However, you could cut it, but in america military research is pretty much the best jobs program we have ever instituted.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that, in order to responsibly reduce the military budget to something manageable, when it accounts for so great a portion of you GDP, is in tiny bites over time. Even 5% a year could be enough to plunge your economy into chaos. You have to have programs that are going to create jobs for the people you lay off, as you lay them off. I certainly believe that it is a worthy goal, we are drowning in our military industrial complex, but it has to be done responsibly. Anyone that suggests that massive cuts to any large portion of the budget overnight clearly doesn't understand how economies work. Any sustainable solution will certainly incorporate cuts, but will ultimately rely more on restoring our manufacturing base.
Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#By_title
Do you know why you step on a roach in your house instead of picking it up gently and putting it outside? Want to know why there are no roaches being brought to animal shelters to find a good home? It is because you share almost no physiological features with a roach, and therefore have severe difficulty empathizing with it. The chances that almost any kind of treatment of an insect will be transferred to a mammal, much less a human, are pretty slim. We are not wired to empathize with things that don't remind us of ourselves in some small way.
I imagine as much or more than the urban poor, seeing as how they have to have a car and quite a bit of gas money to live where they do. And, before you dismiss the urban poor in the game market, allow me to post my anecdotal evidence: My friend, who is the manager for a local gamestop, told me that 80% of her business is poor people, and she posted in the top 20 for preorder percentage in the company last quarter. It is a pretty significant market to be throwing away.
Your numbers are incomplete. According to the 2010 census, 17.7% of the population of the U.S. is rural. That is somewhere around 50 million potential customers. MS would have to be idiots to throw away that profit stream without a way of making it up with something else. Like, say, getting a slice of the resale market. This lock down is just MS trying to tax the resale market, and get at that sweet, sweet free money.
Or as I like to call it, douchery.
Hey buddy! We will have none of that! Reputable scientists that say stuff we can take we can use without examining have conclusivley established that Mars is getting hotter! This was done by correlating over a hundred.. er 50... um 30 years of constant... er... periodic er... 5 readings using a vast martian network of climate stations... er hundreds of weather baloons... er a few probes over the entire surface of mars... er major areas of land... er at least half a mile of martian landscape. And we know it is due to the sun because of photosensors placed on the surface... er reflections from the water.. um... because mars has gotten more tan too!
Awe heck. It has something to do with telescopes I am sure, the point is STOP THINKING FOR YOURSELF!
(punchline shamelessly lifted from a slashdotter whos handle i can't remember)
The only problem that I have with.Net, and mostly just VS.Net, is that it tries to do everything for you, by holding your hand, and letting you drag and drop to do everything. But, then, it doesn't hold your hand enough, and every text box ends up with a name like textbox1, or something like that.
I am curious, do you have the same problem with eclipse?
Then if all someone knows how to do is drag and drop, which is a good portion of.Net programmers...
Ok, since we are gonna pull out unqualified statements, allow me to inject my own personal experience. My job exposes me to quite a few.net, java, and perl/php developers. I can not count the number of perl scripts I have run accross with idiotic variable names, like a or qx. Additionally, I have seen volumes of cargo code that is about 20 lines longer than it needed to be. However, much of the.net code I have run across has been pretty darn nice. My personal oppinion of this is one of scope. Despite the drag and drop potential of VS.net, it will only take you so far. Many buisness apps that get built with a RAD tend to get very big very quick. Help desk software with thousands of lines seems to be in every company I have come in contact with. In my personal experience, more.net coders seem to be well trained and well bloodied than the scripters of this world. In fact, get a catalog from a major training vendor and see how many microsoft programing courses they offer in comparison to java/perl/whatever. Also, do try to remember that these are the same people who had 4 years of java in school. When you talk about the.net coders, you ARE talking about the java coders.
But if it's left to the same pressures that drive stereos, gym memberships and washing machines, it would be a non-issue.
This is, most likely, not the case. Healthcare, like gasoline, fresh water, and electricity is less an elective service, and more of a utility. In order to survive, you will most likely need health care at some point. It is highly unlikely that you will shop around while your appendix is bursting. And ultimately, you will pay whatever they tell you to pay, because you could die without it. In fact, a company could raise its profits considerably by raising the cost of curing whatever Bill Gates happens to have at the moment to 1 billion dollars. Huge profits and you only have to pay a few doctors to do it. Forget everyone else; you were only getting 20 bucks profit off of them anyhow. I realize this is an extreme example, but I use it to illustrate a principle.
It is unlikely that the free market will ever take over your municipality's provision of water to your home, due to the incredible cost involved to compete over a low priced product. The same holds true with your current energy provider. Also, there is unlikely to be a business to spring up that will remove the dead people who had no health care littering your streets and causing disease, as this is the sort of thing that only governments, through some law or measure, have proven in the past that they will respond to.
Please remember, there have been several times in human history where the totally free market concept has been in full effect and found severely wanting.
Actually, last week Bush was threatening to veto ANY extension to the patriot act that wasn't permanent. I didn't pay attention to how wide the margin was on this one, but I wonder if he will pulling out the veto stamp (even if it is just in protest) for this one.
That would be wonderful if that described ID at all. The problem is that ID is not a QUESTION, it is a STATEMENT.
ID doesn't ask "If evolution can't explain everything, can an intellegent being do it? How would that being do it?"
ID simply says "Evolution can't explain every change, so it MUST be an intelligent being. End of debate." And leaves us hanging without a rational question that we can ask, and no scientific tests to devise. How does one test an omnipotent god or space alien?
The problem with intelligent design is not the question, it is simply that when one starts to look at it rationally, it bares absolutely no resemblance to actual science.
Science will happily give up Evolution and start taking ID seriously just as soon as ID offers us one shred of actual evidence.
There are a host of reasons, due to soft definitions of terms, particularly the definition of "game" but the big one for me is this:
If your child is running around buying 50 bucks worth of anything, and playing with it for 40 hours, without you having any idea of what it is, that is YOUR bad, not the stores.
These types of laws all boil down to the same thing. It isn't that those who push them want to protect their own children, it is that they want to remove the rights of other parents to choose what is acceptable for thier children.
I am not going to debate your first paragraph, as it is probably one of the most lucid descriptions of how and why one should address their personal religions I have ever heard.
I will, however, take a shot at your last two sentences.
I believe the evidence for God is larger than the evidence against, BTW. Mainly because there is circumstancial evidence for, and no evidence against.
The problem with this is that their exists a whole lot of anecdotal evidence for all manner of things, with no real way of disproving them. Faeries, trolls, the yeti, psychic healing, UFOs, military intelligence, etc.
After all is said and done, they call if faith for a reason. You are going to have to understand that you can't prove, or disprove belief. You can only try to prove scientific hypothesis. The two are ultimately incompatible.
Since neither of these technologies will work on an LCD TV (no scan beam to track) is anyone aware of functional replacements for 3D viewing and gun tracking? Sure, my retro collection is useless no matter what, but is there any hope for the future?
Because unless the government has good reason to fear the people, they will have no reason to respect their rights and liberties
Well, since we (the usa) kill something like 13,000 (about five 9/11s worth?) of ourselves a year with guns, they might have a legitimate worry. Not that we will revolt, but that we will deny the right of life from a few too many of our peers.
Nobody bigger and stronger preys on those who are smaller and weaker?
Is it your suggestion that all criminals are big and strong, and all victims are tiny and weak? Look, I am sorry that all people are not the same size as each other, but that is no justification to increase your lethality. Carry some pepper spray, you will be fine. If your kid is getting picked on at school, do you hand him a knife?
Honestly, do you say such things about hammers? "We don't think a hammer is useful just because it's a hammer. Just cause you can hammer nails in doesn't mean you should get to use one. After all, you might hit someone in the head with it. Maybe even in self defense! The horror!"
I am sorry, could you please bring up the plans for the last house you built using a gun? Guns kill. That is what they are for. They don't have any alternate use.
Again, don't let the facts get in the way of your wild speculation there. In fact, in every state in the US where Gun laws are relaxed or where concealed carry (or open carry) are available as options crime goes down. More than that, statistically, the fear such laws put in criminals means that for every one of us that carries a gun, 12 other people who live near them will not become a victim of a crime. Yes, no benefit to society there.
All of this overwhelming evidence, and yet you didn't link any examples. I live in Louisiana. Several years ago, we were the highest in the nation for per capita murders. Our then governor instituted a carry concealed law, and guess what, we are still number 1. In fact, our murders per capita are going up. Don't believe me? Here is a link: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=1 2&did=169
Regardless, statistics (yours or mine) don't equal "facts." If they did, it would be a "fact" that the number of pirates roaming the open water is inversly proportional to the mean temperature of the earth.
I do, however, have a fact for you. Guns make killing things a heck of a lot easier. IMO, it isn't very healthy for us make it too easy for our populace to kill. But, hey, I am a big guy who knows how to defend myself with my hands, so YMMV.
Wow... 13 huh. Better get those tinfoil hats on now, the odds of you being number 14 are pretty... infinitesimal.
What is the opposite of a tinfoil hat? Yarn hat? The idea that you can trust any organization with power to dissapear people without being answerable to their government is every bit as unreasonable as a paranoid delusion that the aliens are listening to your brainwaves. Abuses of power happen every day on every level of government. All the patriot act does is make them easier to get away with through a lack of accountablility.
And just so you know, some of us consider right to privacy violations against our fellow citizens just as unconscionable as when they happen to us.
I am sorry, I think you lost me on this one. Could you provide a source to someone accidentally hacking into a network, or the spontaneous creation of a trojan?
If my software causes your computer to explode and burn down your house with your family in it, feel free to sue me. If someone exploits a flaw in it to steal from you or do something illegal, that is THEIR bad, not mine. IMO, security should be a selling point, not a mandate. If I advertise a secure environment and don't deliver, sue me for false advertising.
I'm sure there are folks here who can clearify the importance of that number though.
I will take a stab, though there are surely those who could do better. What that graph represents is the national deficite, not the national DEBT. They are 2 very different things. In short, if that graph were at the 0 mark, our national debt would stay the same + intrest. When the graph goes in the blue, we start to pay down our debt, but we are nowhere near clearing it. When it goes red, we start to get into DEEPER debt.
However, the Govt. should never, never, never be in the black.
While I understand your point, and it is not a bad one, I submit that there are some good reasons for a government to be somewhat in the black. 9/11 and Katrina are excellent examples. Government mandate put a hurting on the airline industry, which a surplus could have been used to aliviate. Katrina blew down a lot of houses, a surplus would have been handy there. Also, having a certain surplus would help us in the advent of a major war. Now, I agree, too much of a surplus needs to be avoided, but honestly, if a government has money, it is going to spend it anyway, so I doubt we will see such a thing in our lifetimes.
Why should we care about the national debt? Well, because when everything comes out in the wash, it influences what your dollar is worth on the international market. You will end up having to pay more for that Sony TV you want so bad. Well, you may not want it after the broadcast flag, but that is a different subject.
1. They use our root servers on a VOULENTARY basis today. We can't FORCE them not to do so. All they have to do is spoof them and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.
2. When they set up their own root servers, if we are not playing nice, they can sell domains that already belong to companies in the US to companies outside the US. Anyone not in the US will be going to a completely different company (lets say eBay) than they currently are.
3. Overseas web customers are a GOOD thing.
4. If we had realized all of the above was inevitable anyway, and become part of the process when they started it, instead of stomping our feet and saying no, we would have been able to protect the US registrars that this will impact the most. We could have, you know, REPRESENTED our people in the face of INEVITABLE change.
Regardless what you think of it, this is how it is going down, and we need to get our act together and make sure we don't destroy American interests by being all damn huffy about it. Right here, right now, we are blowing the game.
Having a repeating rifle in your gun safe at home is a benign thing... But having a nuke in your gun safe at home is, on the face of it, reckless.
Am I wrong in assuming that both items are intended to kill SOMETHING? Am I missing some obscure use of a repeating rifle in horticulture? Are they implicitly usefull in feeding your baby, which, until this very moment I was somehow ignorant? And you are purposly leaving out the many grays between. I can defend my home with a rocket launcher. I would be stupid to do so, but I can. Does that mean you should be fine with me having one?
And, of course, thousands and thousands of people find that trust to have been misplaced, at the expense of their lives, every year. Compare that to the number of people killed by a repeating rifle, and re-evaluate your position.
Once again, apples and oranges. At least you can argue that a car has a benign, non-violent purpose. What again is the benign, non-violent purpose to say, a sub machinegun? Do you have an urgent need to put 40 rounds into a deer?
...is that you think rights come from the government. That's exactly, precisely wrong. Rights simply are.
Well, I won't argue this, other than to say what you consider rights are not always so. You may have been born with the "right" to be an axe-wielding psycopath, but guess what, that one is gonna get taken away eventually. Just because a behavior has yet to be enumerated, does not mean that it is a devinely endowed "right." A couple of hundred years ago, we considered slave ownership a "right." It took our evolving government many, many years to figure out that it was abhorent. It could be that we come to the same conclusion about your "right" to own a gun, albeit at a much slower pace.
Well, in Oklahoma, I'd have gotten a concealed carry license. It costs money and requires you to go through a course on gun handling and lethal force. In Illinois, any gun owner is required to have a firearm owner's ID card. I have no idea what Illinois' concealed carry laws are. It varies depending on your state.
Just for the record, I want to give you actual kudos on this. I have met one too many dipwads that didn't even know the basics of gun saftey, and applaud you for going through requirements to carry concealed. Many people wouldn't bother and just take their chances. Those people tend to get shot with their own weapons.
You don't want to let people walk around with rocket launchers? That's OK with me. I don't currently have the right anyway, and I'm not greedy.
You probably did at some point, just after the invention of the rocket launcher. You probably didn't have it for long, but for a short time there, you most likely had that "right." Which brings me to...
If you want to take away my rights, that's where I have a problem with you.
So if the whole world got together and decided that handguns were just as bad for society as rocket launchers, at which point would it be ok to take them away from you? Where is the deviding point between rocket launchers and handguns? I am pretty sure that I could take out at least 5 people with a decent pistol if I were to pull it out of my pocket in a grocery store checkout line. Is it just the fact that a right is being taken from you? As far as I am aware, you still have the right to carry around a pound of antimater in your pocket, were you able to devise a way to create and contain it. This would make a very big boom. If that right gets taken away from you in the future, will you be upset?
You choose to live in fear. And hey, that's your right. Just leave mine alone.
In a word, no. Now, I hardly live in fear. In fact, I would argue that if you feel need to carry a gun around under your coat, you live in a lot more fear than I do. Take a martial arts class and carry a knife, you will feel better for it. Maybe some mace. But, I have a right not to HAVE to live in fear. If you threaten that right, you need to be acountable. I will happily infringe on your "right" to carry around a point and click death device.
I am having a hard time understanding whatever it is you are trying to convey in this post, so I will take my best stab at it.
It wasn't slavery as a first option. Rome had really interesting punishments for those that resisted such as enslaving large portions of the populations and moving them to a different part of the empire, cowing an enemy and deminishing their population base is a good idea.
Well hell yeah, it is actually a good idea for me to go out and slaughter 90% of the population of my own town. It frees up a lot of resources that I can then take as my own. It is especially a good idea if I can get away with it without getting caught or adversely effected.
But here is the newsflash, just because something is a good idea does not always mean it is rightous or moral. How is it that you can pass this behavior off as the panultimate best thing that could have been done? It is irrelevant that "the other guy was worse." You have an all seeing, all powerful god on your side. All he had was a couple of statues. Considering the awe-inspiring cleverness of God, don't you think that he could have come up with a better plan? Something a little bit better than settling just above the level of the lowest common denominator? I am sorry, even a moron can come up with "loot them before they loot you." And for the record, if you are trying to protect your population, you might not want to march them into pre-emtive battles.
Also, as I understand it, Theodesius (II, I believe) actually instituted christianity as the official state religion of unified rome prior to it's collapse, and in all likelyhood is the whole reason you have even heard of christians. At least, that is what I have heard, though IANAH(historian)
Fix the no-consequences culture, and leave the machetes, knives, baseball bats, guns, flammable liquids, garden fertilizer, and family cars out of the personal behavior regulation equation.
YEAH! And make it legal for citizens to own their own nukes!
I know that is a trollish way to start off a reply, but I hope it illustrates a point. There are certain freedoms, such as owning your own nuclear warhead, which are so potentially dangerous for our citizens, we deny them to ourselves. Anyone who ever finds themselves arguing that we need to be allowed whatever weapons we desire would do well to think of the crazy guy down the street with his finger on the detonator of something that could take out your whole city.
I think even the most rabid "gimme my gun" person should be able to agree with this.
Now that we have established that certain weapons are more dangerous than others, we have to decide the maximum lethality weapon we trust our citizenry with. My viewpoint is probably a bit extreme on the issue, being that I think all handguns should be banned. However, I think everyone can agree that a fully automatic assault rifle could take out quite a few people in an airport in no time flat. Replace airport with school/office/courtroom at your leisure. The point is, do you feel it is responsible for a government to give that type of power to it's citizens? How about for bio-weapons?
This is what consequences are really about. The consequence of letting some segment of your population run around willy nilly with something far too dangerous in their hands, without even bothering to ask them what they plan to do with it. If you want to defend yourself, fine. Buy yourself a shotgun and keep it in your house, it is one of your better options. If you want to carry around something that you can keep in your pocket, point at someone, pull the trigger and become judge-jury-and-executioner, ask yourself this one question. What have you done to show me that you can be trusted with this kind of power? Once again, how deadly can you become before I am being negligent to my neighbors and children by letting you walk around?
I could care less if the guy is a christian. I think you will find that liberals are MUCH more tollerant of religion than the average "conservative". If Bush were a bhuddist, he wouldn't have ever gotten his parties nomination.
Liberals are pro-spending, as long as you don't spend more than you have. Lax imigration? What are you smoking, the guy is building a wall around the country! Most liberals will tell you he is destroying federalized health care, education, and already destroyed emergency management by rolling FEMA into the DHL.
All these things aside, what you need to concentrate on is not that he is a "persecuted christian", but that liberals recognize him for what he is.... the anti-christ.
Slashdot Mirror
And that is exactly why they won't. They want people on their platform, such that no matter what game you buy, they get a piece of the action. They would only be undermining themselves if they released their titles on another platform.
No, the real problem with cutting the military budget by 50% (which I support btw) is that it is not a "today" solution. The military breakdown from wikipedia (as of 2010) is Operations and maintenance: $283.3 billion +4.2% Military Personnel: $154.2 billion +5.0% Procurement: $140.1 billion 1.8% Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $79.1 billion +1.3% Military Construction $23.9 billion +19.0% Family Housing $3.1 billion 20.2% Total Spending 683.7 billion +3.0% So lets assume you tried to cut 340 billion today. Cut half from operations, and you will probably end up closing a quarter of the domestic bases, as well as all of the overseas bases. Like it or not, local economies rely on those bases. Right off the bat you have destabilized a gaggle of local economies. Halving personnel costs would flood the job market with hundreds of thousands of out of work soldiers. Also, I am not sure, but I believe that the V.A. is lumped in with that. Procurement seems ripe, but you have to understand, bases have to maintain operational readiness in order to be effective. This means throwing a lot of expired crap and replacing it with new crap. Which, I might add, it buys from your economy. Finally, research is just not something you want to cut. The first country to develop a fast enough, powerful enough, laser is going to make air war obsolete. You would like to be in that country, trust me. However, you could cut it, but in america military research is pretty much the best jobs program we have ever instituted. Anyway, the point of all of this is that, in order to responsibly reduce the military budget to something manageable, when it accounts for so great a portion of you GDP, is in tiny bites over time. Even 5% a year could be enough to plunge your economy into chaos. You have to have programs that are going to create jobs for the people you lay off, as you lay them off. I certainly believe that it is a worthy goal, we are drowning in our military industrial complex, but it has to be done responsibly. Anyone that suggests that massive cuts to any large portion of the budget overnight clearly doesn't understand how economies work. Any sustainable solution will certainly incorporate cuts, but will ultimately rely more on restoring our manufacturing base. Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#By_title
Do you know why you step on a roach in your house instead of picking it up gently and putting it outside? Want to know why there are no roaches being brought to animal shelters to find a good home? It is because you share almost no physiological features with a roach, and therefore have severe difficulty empathizing with it. The chances that almost any kind of treatment of an insect will be transferred to a mammal, much less a human, are pretty slim. We are not wired to empathize with things that don't remind us of ourselves in some small way.
I imagine as much or more than the urban poor, seeing as how they have to have a car and quite a bit of gas money to live where they do. And, before you dismiss the urban poor in the game market, allow me to post my anecdotal evidence: My friend, who is the manager for a local gamestop, told me that 80% of her business is poor people, and she posted in the top 20 for preorder percentage in the company last quarter. It is a pretty significant market to be throwing away.
Your numbers are incomplete. According to the 2010 census, 17.7% of the population of the U.S. is rural. That is somewhere around 50 million potential customers. MS would have to be idiots to throw away that profit stream without a way of making it up with something else. Like, say, getting a slice of the resale market. This lock down is just MS trying to tax the resale market, and get at that sweet, sweet free money. Or as I like to call it, douchery.
You can take my protein from my cold, dead hands! I suggest the bits around the base of the thumb, there is a lot of good meat there.
Hey buddy! We will have none of that! Reputable scientists that say stuff we can take we can use without examining have conclusivley established that Mars is getting hotter! This was done by correlating over a hundred.. er 50... um 30 years of constant... er ... periodic er... 5 readings using a vast martian network of climate stations... er hundreds of weather baloons... er a few probes over the entire surface of mars... er major areas of land... er at least half a mile of martian landscape. And we know it is due to the sun because of photosensors placed on the surface... er reflections from the water.. um... because mars has gotten more tan too!
Awe heck. It has something to do with telescopes I am sure, the point is STOP THINKING FOR YOURSELF!
(punchline shamelessly lifted from a slashdotter whos handle i can't remember)
The only problem that I have with .Net, and mostly just VS.Net, is that it tries to do everything for you, by holding your hand, and letting you drag and drop to do everything. But, then, it doesn't hold your hand enough, and every text box ends up with a name like textbox1, or something like that.
.Net programmers...
.net, java, and perl/php developers. I can not count the number of perl scripts I have run accross with idiotic variable names, like a or qx. Additionally, I have seen volumes of cargo code that is about 20 lines longer than it needed to be. However, much of the .net code I have run across has been pretty darn nice. My personal oppinion of this is one of scope. Despite the drag and drop potential of VS.net, it will only take you so far. Many buisness apps that get built with a RAD tend to get very big very quick. Help desk software with thousands of lines seems to be in every company I have come in contact with. In my personal experience, more .net coders seem to be well trained and well bloodied than the scripters of this world. In fact, get a catalog from a major training vendor and see how many microsoft programing courses they offer in comparison to java/perl/whatever. Also, do try to remember that these are the same people who had 4 years of java in school. When you talk about the .net coders, you ARE talking about the java coders.
I am curious, do you have the same problem with eclipse?
Then if all someone knows how to do is drag and drop, which is a good portion of
Ok, since we are gonna pull out unqualified statements, allow me to inject my own personal experience. My job exposes me to quite a few
when you don't contribute to enough political campaigns. Just a few hundred thousand dollars and this wouldn't have been an issue.
But if it's left to the same pressures that drive stereos, gym memberships and washing machines, it would be a non-issue.
This is, most likely, not the case. Healthcare, like gasoline, fresh water, and electricity is less an elective service, and more of a utility. In order to survive, you will most likely need health care at some point. It is highly unlikely that you will shop around while your appendix is bursting. And ultimately, you will pay whatever they tell you to pay, because you could die without it. In fact, a company could raise its profits considerably by raising the cost of curing whatever Bill Gates happens to have at the moment to 1 billion dollars. Huge profits and you only have to pay a few doctors to do it. Forget everyone else; you were only getting 20 bucks profit off of them anyhow. I realize this is an extreme example, but I use it to illustrate a principle.
It is unlikely that the free market will ever take over your municipality's provision of water to your home, due to the incredible cost involved to compete over a low priced product. The same holds true with your current energy provider. Also, there is unlikely to be a business to spring up that will remove the dead people who had no health care littering your streets and causing disease, as this is the sort of thing that only governments, through some law or measure, have proven in the past that they will respond to.
Please remember, there have been several times in human history where the totally free market concept has been in full effect and found severely wanting.
Actually, last week Bush was threatening to veto ANY extension to the patriot act that wasn't permanent. I didn't pay attention to how wide the margin was on this one, but I wonder if he will pulling out the veto stamp (even if it is just in protest) for this one.
Or will he cave...
That would be wonderful if that described ID at all. The problem is that ID is not a QUESTION, it is a STATEMENT.
ID doesn't ask "If evolution can't explain everything, can an intellegent being do it? How would that being do it?"
ID simply says "Evolution can't explain every change, so it MUST be an intelligent being. End of debate." And leaves us hanging without a rational question that we can ask, and no scientific tests to devise. How does one test an omnipotent god or space alien?
The problem with intelligent design is not the question, it is simply that when one starts to look at it rationally, it bares absolutely no resemblance to actual science.
Science will happily give up Evolution and start taking ID seriously just as soon as ID offers us one shred of actual evidence.
There are a host of reasons, due to soft definitions of terms, particularly the definition of "game" but the big one for me is this:
If your child is running around buying 50 bucks worth of anything, and playing with it for 40 hours, without you having any idea of what it is, that is YOUR bad, not the stores.
These types of laws all boil down to the same thing. It isn't that those who push them want to protect their own children, it is that they want to remove the rights of other parents to choose what is acceptable for thier children.
I am not going to debate your first paragraph, as it is probably one of the most lucid descriptions of how and why one should address their personal religions I have ever heard.
I will, however, take a shot at your last two sentences.
I believe the evidence for God is larger than the evidence against, BTW. Mainly because there is circumstancial evidence for, and no evidence against.
The problem with this is that their exists a whole lot of anecdotal evidence for all manner of things, with no real way of disproving them. Faeries, trolls, the yeti, psychic healing, UFOs, military intelligence, etc.
After all is said and done, they call if faith for a reason. You are going to have to understand that you can't prove, or disprove belief. You can only try to prove scientific hypothesis. The two are ultimately incompatible.
Since neither of these technologies will work on an LCD TV (no scan beam to track) is anyone aware of functional replacements for 3D viewing and gun tracking? Sure, my retro collection is useless no matter what, but is there any hope for the future?
My karma is gonna regret this, but here goes:
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Because unless the government has good reason to fear the people, they will have no reason to respect their rights and liberties
Well, since we (the usa) kill something like 13,000 (about five 9/11s worth?) of ourselves a year with guns, they might have a legitimate worry. Not that we will revolt, but that we will deny the right of life from a few too many of our peers.
Nobody bigger and stronger preys on those who are smaller and weaker?
Is it your suggestion that all criminals are big and strong, and all victims are tiny and weak? Look, I am sorry that all people are not the same size as each other, but that is no justification to increase your lethality. Carry some pepper spray, you will be fine. If your kid is getting picked on at school, do you hand him a knife?
Honestly, do you say such things about hammers? "We don't think a hammer is useful just because it's a hammer. Just cause you can hammer nails in doesn't mean you should get to use one. After all, you might hit someone in the head with it. Maybe even in self defense! The horror!"
I am sorry, could you please bring up the plans for the last house you built using a gun? Guns kill. That is what they are for. They don't have any alternate use.
Again, don't let the facts get in the way of your wild speculation there. In fact, in every state in the US where Gun laws are relaxed or where concealed carry (or open carry) are available as options crime goes down. More than that, statistically, the fear such laws put in criminals means that for every one of us that carries a gun, 12 other people who live near them will not become a victim of a crime. Yes, no benefit to society there.
All of this overwhelming evidence, and yet you didn't link any examples. I live in Louisiana. Several years ago, we were the highest in the nation for per capita murders. Our then governor instituted a carry concealed law, and guess what, we are still number 1. In fact, our murders per capita are going up. Don't believe me? Here is a link: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=
Regardless, statistics (yours or mine) don't equal "facts." If they did, it would be a "fact" that the number of pirates roaming the open water is inversly proportional to the mean temperature of the earth.
I do, however, have a fact for you. Guns make killing things a heck of a lot easier. IMO, it isn't very healthy for us make it too easy for our populace to kill. But, hey, I am a big guy who knows how to defend myself with my hands, so YMMV.
Wow ... 13 huh. Better get those tinfoil hats on now, the odds of you being number 14 are pretty ... infinitesimal.
What is the opposite of a tinfoil hat? Yarn hat? The idea that you can trust any organization with power to dissapear people without being answerable to their government is every bit as unreasonable as a paranoid delusion that the aliens are listening to your brainwaves. Abuses of power happen every day on every level of government. All the patriot act does is make them easier to get away with through a lack of accountablility.
And just so you know, some of us consider right to privacy violations against our fellow citizens just as unconscionable as when they happen to us.
I am sorry, I think you lost me on this one. Could you provide a source to someone accidentally hacking into a network, or the spontaneous creation of a trojan?
If my software causes your computer to explode and burn down your house with your family in it, feel free to sue me. If someone exploits a flaw in it to steal from you or do something illegal, that is THEIR bad, not mine. IMO, security should be a selling point, not a mandate. If I advertise a secure environment and don't deliver, sue me for false advertising.
I'm sure there are folks here who can clearify the importance of that number though.
I will take a stab, though there are surely those who could do better. What that graph represents is the national deficite, not the national DEBT. They are 2 very different things. In short, if that graph were at the 0 mark, our national debt would stay the same + intrest. When the graph goes in the blue, we start to pay down our debt, but we are nowhere near clearing it. When it goes red, we start to get into DEEPER debt.
However, the Govt. should never, never, never be in the black.
While I understand your point, and it is not a bad one, I submit that there are some good reasons for a government to be somewhat in the black. 9/11 and Katrina are excellent examples. Government mandate put a hurting on the airline industry, which a surplus could have been used to aliviate. Katrina blew down a lot of houses, a surplus would have been handy there. Also, having a certain surplus would help us in the advent of a major war. Now, I agree, too much of a surplus needs to be avoided, but honestly, if a government has money, it is going to spend it anyway, so I doubt we will see such a thing in our lifetimes.
Why should we care about the national debt? Well, because when everything comes out in the wash, it influences what your dollar is worth on the international market. You will end up having to pay more for that Sony TV you want so bad. Well, you may not want it after the broadcast flag, but that is a different subject.
Actually, here is what you fail to understand:
1. They use our root servers on a VOULENTARY basis today. We can't FORCE them not to do so. All they have to do is spoof them and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.
2. When they set up their own root servers, if we are not playing nice, they can sell domains that already belong to companies in the US to companies outside the US. Anyone not in the US will be going to a completely different company (lets say eBay) than they currently are.
3. Overseas web customers are a GOOD thing.
4. If we had realized all of the above was inevitable anyway, and become part of the process when they started it, instead of stomping our feet and saying no, we would have been able to protect the US registrars that this will impact the most. We could have, you know, REPRESENTED our people in the face of INEVITABLE change.
Regardless what you think of it, this is how it is going down, and we need to get our act together and make sure we don't destroy American interests by being all damn huffy about it. Right here, right now, we are blowing the game.
Cute, but you start with a flawed premise:
...is that you think rights come from the government. That's exactly, precisely wrong. Rights simply are.
Having a repeating rifle in your gun safe at home is a benign thing... But having a nuke in your gun safe at home is, on the face of it, reckless.
Am I wrong in assuming that both items are intended to kill SOMETHING? Am I missing some obscure use of a repeating rifle in horticulture? Are they implicitly usefull in feeding your baby, which, until this very moment I was somehow ignorant? And you are purposly leaving out the many grays between. I can defend my home with a rocket launcher. I would be stupid to do so, but I can. Does that mean you should be fine with me having one?
And, of course, thousands and thousands of people find that trust to have been misplaced, at the expense of their lives, every year. Compare that to the number of people killed by a repeating rifle, and re-evaluate your position.
Once again, apples and oranges. At least you can argue that a car has a benign, non-violent purpose. What again is the benign, non-violent purpose to say, a sub machinegun? Do you have an urgent need to put 40 rounds into a deer?
Well, I won't argue this, other than to say what you consider rights are not always so. You may have been born with the "right" to be an axe-wielding psycopath, but guess what, that one is gonna get taken away eventually. Just because a behavior has yet to be enumerated, does not mean that it is a devinely endowed "right." A couple of hundred years ago, we considered slave ownership a "right." It took our evolving government many, many years to figure out that it was abhorent. It could be that we come to the same conclusion about your "right" to own a gun, albeit at a much slower pace.
Well, in Oklahoma, I'd have gotten a concealed carry license. It costs money and requires you to go through a course on gun handling and lethal force. In Illinois, any gun owner is required to have a firearm owner's ID card. I have no idea what Illinois' concealed carry laws are. It varies depending on your state.
Just for the record, I want to give you actual kudos on this. I have met one too many dipwads that didn't even know the basics of gun saftey, and applaud you for going through requirements to carry concealed. Many people wouldn't bother and just take their chances. Those people tend to get shot with their own weapons.
You don't want to let people walk around with rocket launchers? That's OK with me. I don't currently have the right anyway, and I'm not greedy.
You probably did at some point, just after the invention of the rocket launcher. You probably didn't have it for long, but for a short time there, you most likely had that "right." Which brings me to...
If you want to take away my rights, that's where I have a problem with you.
So if the whole world got together and decided that handguns were just as bad for society as rocket launchers, at which point would it be ok to take them away from you? Where is the deviding point between rocket launchers and handguns? I am pretty sure that I could take out at least 5 people with a decent pistol if I were to pull it out of my pocket in a grocery store checkout line. Is it just the fact that a right is being taken from you? As far as I am aware, you still have the right to carry around a pound of antimater in your pocket, were you able to devise a way to create and contain it. This would make a very big boom. If that right gets taken away from you in the future, will you be upset?
You choose to live in fear. And hey, that's your right. Just leave mine alone.
In a word, no. Now, I hardly live in fear. In fact, I would argue that if you feel need to carry a gun around under your coat, you live in a lot more fear than I do. Take a martial arts class and carry a knife, you will feel better for it. Maybe some mace. But, I have a right not to HAVE to live in fear. If you threaten that right, you need to be acountable. I will happily infringe on your "right" to carry around a point and click death device.
I am having a hard time understanding whatever it is you are trying to convey in this post, so I will take my best stab at it.
It wasn't slavery as a first option. Rome had really interesting punishments for those that resisted such as enslaving large portions of the populations and moving them to a different part of the empire, cowing an enemy and deminishing their population base is a good idea.
Well hell yeah, it is actually a good idea for me to go out and slaughter 90% of the population of my own town. It frees up a lot of resources that I can then take as my own. It is especially a good idea if I can get away with it without getting caught or adversely effected.
But here is the newsflash, just because something is a good idea does not always mean it is rightous or moral. How is it that you can pass this behavior off as the panultimate best thing that could have been done? It is irrelevant that "the other guy was worse." You have an all seeing, all powerful god on your side. All he had was a couple of statues. Considering the awe-inspiring cleverness of God, don't you think that he could have come up with a better plan? Something a little bit better than settling just above the level of the lowest common denominator? I am sorry, even a moron can come up with "loot them before they loot you." And for the record, if you are trying to protect your population, you might not want to march them into pre-emtive battles.
Also, as I understand it, Theodesius (II, I believe) actually instituted christianity as the official state religion of unified rome prior to it's collapse, and in all likelyhood is the whole reason you have even heard of christians. At least, that is what I have heard, though IANAH(historian)
Fix the no-consequences culture, and leave the machetes, knives, baseball bats, guns, flammable liquids, garden fertilizer, and family cars out of the personal behavior regulation equation.
YEAH! And make it legal for citizens to own their own nukes!
I know that is a trollish way to start off a reply, but I hope it illustrates a point. There are certain freedoms, such as owning your own nuclear warhead, which are so potentially dangerous for our citizens, we deny them to ourselves. Anyone who ever finds themselves arguing that we need to be allowed whatever weapons we desire would do well to think of the crazy guy down the street with his finger on the detonator of something that could take out your whole city.
I think even the most rabid "gimme my gun" person should be able to agree with this.
Now that we have established that certain weapons are more dangerous than others, we have to decide the maximum lethality weapon we trust our citizenry with. My viewpoint is probably a bit extreme on the issue, being that I think all handguns should be banned. However, I think everyone can agree that a fully automatic assault rifle could take out quite a few people in an airport in no time flat. Replace airport with school/office/courtroom at your leisure. The point is, do you feel it is responsible for a government to give that type of power to it's citizens? How about for bio-weapons?
This is what consequences are really about. The consequence of letting some segment of your population run around willy nilly with something far too dangerous in their hands, without even bothering to ask them what they plan to do with it. If you want to defend yourself, fine. Buy yourself a shotgun and keep it in your house, it is one of your better options. If you want to carry around something that you can keep in your pocket, point at someone, pull the trigger and become judge-jury-and-executioner, ask yourself this one question. What have you done to show me that you can be trusted with this kind of power? Once again, how deadly can you become before I am being negligent to my neighbors and children by letting you walk around?
Ummm. Wow, where to begin?
I could care less if the guy is a christian. I think you will find that liberals are MUCH more tollerant of religion than the average "conservative". If Bush were a bhuddist, he wouldn't have ever gotten his parties nomination.
Liberals are pro-spending, as long as you don't spend more than you have.
Lax imigration? What are you smoking, the guy is building a wall around the country!
Most liberals will tell you he is destroying federalized health care, education, and already destroyed emergency management by rolling FEMA into the DHL.
All these things aside, what you need to concentrate on is not that he is a "persecuted christian", but that liberals recognize him for what he is.... the anti-christ.