So what are they going to do - install win xp on ther 75 Mhz box?
Read my post man. I said a lot of people would upgrade the entire machine (and likely end up buying something with win xp on it). Those aren't the people I'm talking about. I'm talking about those who at least have enough hardware to consider an OS upgrade. And for them which is going to be easier on their old hardware: win xp or a linux distro? Furthermore, if they are willing to put up with the antiquated hardware then they are more likely to be willing to look into finding linux distros that will be kinder and gentler on their aged boxes then the most popular windows-competitors out there.
Those who are still running Windows98 are most likely to do nothing in the immediate future (as opposed to moving to linux or windowsxp/2000). Those who do upgrade their OS are likely to upgrade the whole machine and therefore end up with winxp box.
That being said, however, there are what, 50 million win 98 users (FTFA, if I remember right)? There's a fair chance that at least some of them are going to upgrade the OS only. And here's the funny thing. If MS really continued support for Win98 for 2 years to keep people from switching to linux, then they had a very stupid strategy. The fact is that linux for the desktop today is far more advanced than linux for the desktop was 2 years ago.
2 years ago a fair amount of users who would have tried switching to linux would have been unsatisfied with the experience to the point of being willing to pay to get back into the MS fold. Now, however, there are not only more people likely to switch to linux (given the publicity of switching over the last 2 years) but I think anyone that's used to using windows 95 or 98 would actually prefer running, say, the newest version of Ubuntu (my particular fave distro). (I'm not mentioning Windows ME, because frankly etching onto a cave wall is preferable to running Windows ME for anything.)
In a nutshell: linux wasn't really ready to replace windows 2 years ago for desktop use. By postponing the switch, MS has just allowed linux (and open source in general like open office) to garner publicity and turn into a truly vialbe alternative.
OK, so the basic idea is that you think that desktop usage will, in the near future, start to look like server usage. But this doesn't make sense to me - you have two different types of computers (desktop vs. server) for a reason. Suppose the future does come as quickly as you think, and it's typical for home users to have a single repository for all audio/video data that is then streamed to the house. In such a case you've basically got a media server - and so sure you'd want high-capacity, fast drives. In fact, you'd have trouble doing that based on a commodity drive today - you'd want enterprise-class hardware to really pull that off reliably.
So on the one hand I'm saying MRAM could be great for desktops, and on the other hand you're saying "we want a server in the house". Well, if a server is what you want, then maybe MRAM won't help you out because you'll want the fast drives to be the high-capacity drives. But unless you plan on having your server ALSO be your gaming rig / coding rig, etc. then you're still going to want MRAM on the computer you use as a desktop.
And if you want your server to also be your desktop at the same time, then you're still SOL since there's really nothing cheap on the market at all that will give you the performance for both programs (gaming/coding) and data without busting the bank.
Clarification: I mean the OS and other executables.
And I just think you're flat out wrong in your assertion. Maybe on a server data is accessed over and over, but for normal desktop use data-access is sporadic. I don't listen to the same mp3s over and over, and I certainly don't watch the same 5 minutes of a DVD on a loop pattern. I suppose if I was doing intensive video editing, I would want that video stored on high-performance drives. Same with any other very intensive read-write activity.
But for the vast majority of desktop users the repeat data access is going to come from the Warcraft III.exe, not from any one section of their vast data collection.
Yes, your thinking is clouded by experience. I'm not talking a multi-user server, I'm talking a single-user machine. The data - in this case videos, mp3s, documents - will be accessed on an as-needed basis. At most you may possibly be streaming mp3s somewhere else on a home network while watching a vid on the machine or something (and really, if you're building a media-center type repository there's a whole host of other considerations to take into account as well). I'm mostly talking about the traditional single-user gaming/entertainment/productivity/coding/whatever rig. In this caes it is the OS that is going to be accessed every time you start your computer, while out of the 500 GB of media/data you have only very small portions will be accessed sporadically.
You seem to be trapped in the current (already outdated?) paradigm of hard drive usage. If I were to put together a high-end machine right now I would certainly throw in at least 2 hard drives. A very small 10RPM drive for the OS, programs, and a much larger (but probably slower) drive for storing all my files.
If you RTFA you'll notice that that's exactly what they mention: using the MRAM to run the OS. So, yeah, it may not work to replace your entire hard drive, but it makes a lot of sense to split hard drive usage between the files you are going to be booting from, accessing constantly, and files you only access when you have a specific need to.
Sure, 4MB is still to small to run an OS on (yeah yeah, except linux, and that's great) - but if you're goal is to get large enough to have a bootable OS and NOT to replace an entire hard drive (especially since hard drive capacity is getting cheaper and cheaper) then I think you start to see the potential of this technology.
It seems like everyone criticizing the eBook is actually criticizing the DRM. I don't know what DRM is going to be used, or how. If they have onerous DRM then yes, it will suck.
But if this gets popular (by this I mean "eBooks") then it's going to do to books what mp3s did to music. I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to download DRM-free copies of books and I will be looking into them.
If the DRM goons manage to keep a tight lid on the whole thing frmo day one, then yes, the whole idea sucks. But if that's the case it's not beucase digital ink wasn't revolutionary tech, it's because some a**hole managed to screw up a really good idea.
In any case, it seems plain to me that digital ink has the potential to be a real breakthrough, but there is the possibility that another utopian vision of free information will come crashing into the wall of corporate pig-like greed.
How is this "insightful"? If this is all it takes for you to see evil, then it's no wonder you see everyone as evil. You need to seriously take a step back and breathe.
It's entirely possible that the reason they want to use people from the bombings of less than a year ago is that people who've been amputees already have artificial limbs and rather than make them go through the hassle of experimenting with something that may or may not work (artifical limbs are very expensive to customize, take a long time to make, and take an even longer time to fully adjust) they want to go with people who probably don't have artificial limbs yet.
I'm not saying I know what's going on, but there are a lot of reasons why this could have nothing to do with politics or evil and everything to do with getting the experiments and trials done as quickly as possible while causing the minimal amount of pain and discomfort to everyone involved.
Until you have any idea why they are making this decision - why jump to conlusions?
This line made me chuckle. Not crippled by DRM? How about a DRM that made it so that if you wanted to make a copy you'd have to either re-write the entire novel or OCR the whole thing? Imagine not even being able to make a quick archive copy for personal back up! You'd be up in arms! Or a DRM that was constructed in such a way that if you lent your copy to a friend you coudln't read your copy until you got it back. And if your friend lost it - you'd have to buy a new copy if you ever wanted to read it.
Books already have the best conceivable DRM policy - the content is died directly to the physical media. And you thought propietary formats were bad!
I'm not saying I'm a fan of DRM, but anyone that compares a hard-copy book to DRM media and sees the DRM media as a pain in the ass is just bonkers. The only reason the DRM is more annoying is because you can break it. And so we're tempted to try and it's a pain in the butt. You can't break the DRM on a book and so we forget that it even exists.
Now maybe you understand why RIAA execs keep cramming insane DRM schemes down our throats. They must believe that if only DRM could be as iron-clad as physical media we'd all stop whining about it.
I agree. Digital ink is one of those technologies - like flying cars - that's been around in sci-fi for decades and yet somehow never seemed to be realized in real life (even though, unlike FTL travel or universal translators, it doesn't seem that hard to create). It's one of the technological advances that I think will have a geuinely huge and lasting impact on digital media.
Just think about it - any portable device (other than an audio device) has pretty much been constrained to indoor use. Take a laptop outside and try using it. And sure, $900 can buy a lot of paperbacks, but try carrying them all with you at once. On top of that, $900 is what it costs now. What did the first CD or DVD player cost?
And on top of that, you have to realize that this is much, much more than just the capacity to carry around a library with you. With searcheable documents and note-taking ability it's going to grant users the capacity to carry around a library, card catalog, and user-created index.
I've been waiting for this to come out for years. Of course I'm not in a position to get the first model (too expensive, and I imagine that some things like text recognition won't be working quite right) but I honestly believe this is one of those products that will (if quietly) really change the landscape of digital devices. As far as I'm concerned it's 10 times more useful than a laptop for most non-tech-related uses already.
We give out laptops to middle and high school kids in my county. What a waste! Textbooks are pain in the ass to read on laptops. And that horsepower is wasted on kids who don't code, can't game, and don't even use cool programs like Mathematica or something. For note taking, reading, and research this is a real breakthrough. Toss in mp3 support and it's like any bibliophiles idea of portable nirvana.
The only thing that remains to be seen is how they draw the line between eBook devices and laptops. What functaionality will end up where? What will distinquish one from the other - or will they merge into one ultra-device if digital ink gets full color, etc.?
Oh yeah - and did we mention 21 hours of battery life. Now THAT is starting to look like a portable device.
What about letting people take care of their OWN retirement? It's not like social security retirement is actually going to be sufficient for most people's desired standard of living anyway. Let people do their own planning in the form of 401Ks, real estate, and other investments.
Of course phasing it out would be difficult because those paying today are paying for older generations, not themselves, but I'd be happy to continue paying for a decade or so (at least) without expecting any benefits myself if it meant my kids wouldn't have to pay into this program anymore.
First - and before anything else (I'm getting tired of responding to all these posts) - I want to get back to my original point. Your sig is incoherent.
I want a Social Security safety net. You are free to become a stain on life's floor if you don't.
This doesn't make sense because if you get a Social Security safety net then how is someone else supposed to be "free to become a stain on life's floor"? If you have social security, then not only do other people in the country have to pay for it, but they darn well get the same safety net. So before we get into social security the main point I made is simply this: your sig doesn't make logical sense.
Now, moving onto social security, I'm not going to argue with everything that you said because I don't have a problem with all of social security. Social security offers the following benefits:
The main part of social security is retirement. That's what I think is largely overrated. You guys are acting like I think we should take away disability insurance. I don't think that at all.
Anyone who claims to not even understand who the fat cats are is pretty starnge, not for believing that, but for thinking others will believe that he believes that.
No, I'm serious. Is Bill Gates a fat cat? Warren Buffet? Steve Jobs? How about my grandfather. He owned his own business and it was worh over a million. Now my uncle owns it, and it's probably 2 or 3 times as valuable. Are they fat cats? What about my boss? He and his two buddies started a company that now makes revenues of about 1.5 million annually. Are they fat cats? It is owners or CEOs or board members? Are self-made men and women excluded? How about inventors who get rich? What about lottery winners? How about those who inherit wealth?
I know exactly what the idea of a fat cat is. But that's just an idea. I want to know how you would map that idea onto reality. Calling me strange for wanting you to be specific in your rhetoric isn't going to make your arguments sound any less childish.
Anyone who claims that the fat cats don't have a lot more control over society than the thin ones is incredibly naive.
You're typing, so you must be literate, but this comment makes me wonder. Go read my post and tell me where I said rich people don't have more power than poor people in the markets. I believe the term I used was that they had "exponentially" more power. Maybe that word was to big for you?
Anyway - I eagerly await the transformation of your hot-air rhetoric into an actual argument. In the mean time I'd urge you - as a peon - to work on not being a peon instead of becoming a powerful peon. While all these self-declared victims are whining about how poor and mistreated they are, I'm just going to go make shit happen. You could do, if you were more intersted in working for youself instead of trying to get handouts.
The argument that you shouldn't force others to spend on gov't programs is not really useful.
But that's not my argument. There's a difference between gov't programs and re-distributing wealh. Gov't programs are like nat'l defense and publich libraries. Social security is about taking money from some people and giving it to others. The useful value of money, from a societal standpoint, is that it encourages people to be productive, etc. This erodes the utility of money to society at large. The incentive to work hard and be productive is diminished, the incentive to be a parasite is increased every time we richen wealth re-distribution benefits. It's bad for America.
I've never heard anyone from western Europe or Canada, or even Australia say, "I wish we had America's level of social security." The fact is that we have terrible coverage of medical and financial hardships. If we wanted to talk about the usefulness of social securty, the question we should be asking is "How come ours isn't as good as Britain or Canada's?"
Hahahaha. This is a matter of experience. I think I know a prety good amount about the UKs system because my mother is British and her family still lives there (Ipswich and London). Right now her grandfater is going through what should have been a routine sugery. Thanks to UKs state medicine it's turned into a nightmare. I can't tel you how many times my mother (she's over there right now) has told me "if only the lived in America!"
The reason America has bad health care has nothing to do with gov't programs. I know what I'm talking about here because my job is an analyst in the insurance industry. First of all, you have to point out that from the standpoint of sophistication America has the absolute best medical care in the world bar none. If you need cutting-edge medical care, you come to the US (yes, yes - IF you can afford it). Also - everyone in America has free access to this care on an emergency basis. E.g. emergency rooms can't turn you away (or refuse to roll out the expensive stuff) if you show up with a bullet in you or something like that.
Where American medical care falls down is accessibility of non-emergency care. And the main problem here is the rising cost of health care. But what most people dn't realize s that the cost of health care is rising just above inflation on a per-unit/service basis. The reason insurance premiums are going up by double-digit inflation has one cause: utilization.
1. Starting in the 80s health insurance changed from insurance to subsidization. Insurance is when you pay x dollars and then if something catastrophic happens you get 1000x dollars (or whatever). Insurance does NOT mean you pay $150 a month (or whatever) and then get to have MD visits for $25, or tier 3 drugs for $30 a month. But in the 80s that's whay the designed into insurance - copays and other routine utilization subsidies. Well guess what happened. At $10 a visit (instead of say 100) people went to the MDs more than 10 times as much. Combine this with marketing from big pharma and EVERYBODY is on ritalin, prozac, etc - at subsidized prices. If you pay $150 a month for insurance and get $200 a month in benefits from routine care guess what - the price goes up.
The final problem is our elderly population. They use health care like you wouldn't believe I'm talking like 12 visits to primary care physician every year on average! They need more care than young folks, they have more time on their hands, and they're living longer and longer.
This is why Europe's state health care system is a bad, bad bad idea. It takes all the problems American health care has, hides them under high taxes and low payments (the low payments make the problem WORSE) and the result? Rationing at best, total failure at worst. Give it time. Decades, maybe. The system is designed to fail.
In America, on other hand, we're trying to use the laws of capitalism to make the system get better. When is medicine ca
But then if you don't get a job after your US education, you're left with $50000+ of debt and go bankrupt. Not everyone is able to get high paying, high flying jobs. If you're OK with that, fine, but I think it's a rather inhumane and primal attitude.
Oh please, do you live in the US? Do you have any idea how any debt relief programs there are? If you're not making enough you can extend the "no payment" period practcally to eternity. NOt to mention the fact that there are tons of progrms to repay debt if you take jobs as a teacher or other forms of public service.
You're acting like you graduate colleg with $50,000 car loan or something. We get 30-year mortgages for our houses and no one bats an eyelash. And yet you get a loan for a fraction of that principle with much, much easier repayment terms and everyones like "AcK! Cruel, harsh, evil world!!!".
Apparently minimal govt thing wasn't working so well and private enterprise wasn't providing enough so we invented social security.
Yes, it was a time called the Great Depression. The name should indicate it was an emergency, and Social Security was an emergency soluion. Where's the emergency now?
Why don't we look to see if people are better off in those countries then they are in the US or other countries which provide even more social benefits.
Because it makes far more sense to look at how American private organizations work. Other nations have other cultures, other infrastructure, other politics, and other economies. So whatdo you think we could really learn from such a comparison?
I really like the way you approached the Taiwan-China question, and I think it was a good exercise for us to go through.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my attempt to describe in abstract terms the approach that you liked.
1. You observed that "the way things are" is different from "the way things should be" (in this case, the way God wants them to be) 2. You're belief about "the way things should be" was motivated by non-scientific criteia (e.g. "I believe that Taiwan is the Taiwanese people"). Now this point is fascinating becase it's exactly what I've been trying to say wih personhood: it depends on existential definitions. An existential definition bascially means that the meaning comes from what we want it to mean. You're saying that if the Taiwanese people want Taiwan to be a state then - existentialy - it should be a state. Do you see what happened? You've associated your "the way things should be" with existentialism. 3. The critical final piece is that once you've established the discrepency between "the way things are" (objective realty) and "the way things should be" (existential definition) you then believe we have an implicit duty to work from the former to the latter.
Now I ask where science came into this. First of all, science is necessary to describe the objective reality. Without understanding that, we can not see a discrepency (e.g. you can't solve the equation x-y with only a value for x) But science can not directly help with either of two things. 1. the analysis of "what should be" - since it doesn't exist and can't be tested and 2. the criteria for establishing your existential definition.
What science led you to say that if the Taiwanese people want to be Taiwan they should be? Surely according to the Chinese people Taiwan IS China, so there are no Taiwanes people to have an opinion about Taiwan. Why pick one over the other?
So currently most abortions take place by using a vacuum to rip apart an 8-12 week old fetus that has arms, legs, a beating heart, it's own blood system, etc. But it's also legal to have abortions during the full 9-moth term (hence the last picture). Consider partial-birth abortion. Here's a scientific drawing of the process: http://www.truthnet.org/abortion/Partial-Birth_Abo rtion1.jpg and here (warning you do NOT have to click if you don't want to) are pictures of the results: http://www.abortiontv.com/Pics/AbortionPictures6.h tm Clinton vetoed 2 bans on this procedure, and the current state bans have mostly been overturned.
Partial-birth abortion isn't even that late term. They use saline poisoning for late-term abortions. That's possibly an even more hideous procedure than partial-birth abortions.
And to get a final understanding of the objecive reality you have to realize that thanks to th Supreme Court any law that bans or limits abortion without an exceptin for "health of the mother" is unconstitutional. Health has been defined as "all factors relating to the well-being of the mother" which turns the exception into a loop-hole t
there are people that have to support at least themselves on a minimum wage (or close to minimum wage) job and aren't in a position to find a different job or work two jobs
What people? Why are they in this position. Thomas Sowell wrote a great column on poverty back in February that you can get from TowhHall.com (which is down for an upgrade, it appears, or I would link you) and his main points included the following.
The vast majority of people below the poverty line: - don't work full time - have no high school diploma - are not supporting a family
Despite this fact, some people are below the poverty line and supporting a family. Most of them aren't married, by the way, being unmarried and having kids correlates very highly to being poor. But anyway, the point is that the vast majority of the "working poor" manage to move out of poverty in a relatively short time period.
What it comes down to is this. If you make them min wage a "living wage" you prety much guarantee that it becomees a "sticky point". A lot of people will be stuck there. If you get rid of it you can then do intelligent welfare (e.g. adult education, temporary free housing for the working poor, etc) that will accelerate the movement of poor people out of poverty.
There are ALWAYS going to be poor people. If you believe in min wage you are trying to make poverty an OK condition. But no one likes being poor. The alternative is to try and increase the rate at which poor people can stop being poor altogether. Getting rid of the min wage will help that a lot.
And to your example I just think there's this popular mythos in America that the rich guys are bad guys. The only difference, in my opinion, is the rich guys have more capacity to harm. But they also have more capacity to do good. Contrast your example with the Bill and Melinda Gates fund, or Warren Bufet's donation. And it's not like min wage earners are great saints either. Some company exec can give you the legal shaft, some burger flipper can spit in your soda: their are asholes everywher.
THe old trick where someone makes a statement (X) and I reply with "Not X" and then get hit with "what, you don't believe Y? you must be retared"!!
You're a clever one alright.
You said that conglomerists, monopolists, etc. controlled the market. I said they did not. Now you are claiming that they bias investment risk in their favor. That's the sme thing to you is it? "Contol" and "bias risk"? And I'm naive?
Stop whining about the little people trying to get back some control of their lives
I'm "whining" about little people who try to get control of my life, you dolt. You may have this weird pyschological disorder that makes you think a bunch of obese felines are pulling the strings in your life - but I should not have to be legislated into playing a role in your own demented fantasies.
"The market" is not something that can be controlled. Look at how many "fat cats" lose ther shirt from one year to the next (I'd direct you to sources, but the site hosting the article I want appears to be down). And look how many regular Americans make it from rags to riches (e.g. prety much every single tech company founder). Yes - in this chaos the CEO of a 500 billion dollar compan has exponentially times more power than you do. And if you try to go head to head wih his company you'll end up with your ass in a sling - at best. But the idea that the "fat cats" are somehow united in the cause of oppresion is absurd. They're all doing the best they can for themselves and you are essentially jaded. That's it.
You want to cut your nose off to spite your face. What you don't understand is that your high standard of living is the DIRECT result of "fat cats". The drive, the passion, and yes sometimes the greed of these empire builders is what has made America thrive.
It comes to this: any effort to "make things right" for the little man benefits a congolmeration of people who've had a run of bad luck, people who are too stupid to make it big, and people who are too lazy to make it big. This is achieved at the expense of the ones who - for the most part - know how to create wealth for themselves and others. Everybody gets a more equitable slice of the pie but the pie gets smaller. Capitalism leaves things alone. The pie gets A LOT bigger. Enough safety nets are put in place to provide an absolute minimum for those who need the help.
The fat cats have taken control of everybody's lives in order to eliminate risk to them, and that is the abdication of personal responsibility that you ought to be decrying. Picking on the little people for getting back a small bit of control is pathetic.
You're just raving at this point. I really wish you could hear yourself. You ARE the crazy-eyed guy on the subway grabbing people's lapels and telling them the end is near. Your argument is nothing but ad hominem. Please, tell me what the hell the word "fat cat" means to you. It's like these people aren't human to you. THey are are alien overlords. And also tell them what on earth you mean by "they have taken control of everybody's lives". Look at Africa man. The warlords, the starvation, the chaos. That's what life looks like with out the fat cats. Look at feudalism or theocracies. That's where we came from. What are these mysterious freedoms that have gone by the way side and when in history did we have them?
I'll take you as more than a deranged lunatic when you can answer those two questoins. 1. What is a "fat cat"? 2. How, precisely, did they gain "control over our lives"
See me post to this topic already. I didn't say terrorism did not exist before 20th century, so stop acting like I did. I said it didn't exist in a meaningful way.
And the reason for that is that the power of terrorists was (to approximate roughly) linearly related to the number of terrorists you had. Because in order to inflict harm they had to each physically carry out the harm with very crude tools. Furthermore, they had to expose themselves to harm, so they could be neutralized more effectively.
Starting with gun powder (which wasn't cheap enough to be available to terrorists until 20th century) the equation switches. Instead of damage being linear to # of terrorists it's more like exponential. Now a small band of terrorists (say 20) can fairly easily take out several thousand and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
You tell me that 20 people flying planes into buldings is the same TYPE of thing as a couple of guys with swords murdering people.
Ahh, the academic ranking's argument... I guess you are aware of the criticism surrounding its measurement methods (citations count, diversity of fields taught, etc.), no?
There's a reason America is the #1 destination for foreigners looking for an advanced degree. Do you dispute that?
So how comes, by your reasoning, that the university of Cambridge is ranked as number 2, with low tuition rates of about 5'435 USD per year compared to Harvard's astronomically high rates?
That's kind of silly. If I say "you get what you pay for" are you actually going to figure out the amount paid in tuition per class day and then say "Monday was SO much better than Wednesday, clearly this is false" or even "that five minutes the professor was late were worthless academically, so this is false".
It's a general statement and it holds true in general. In general the US system for higher education is better. Not every American university is better than every European university.
Then I conclude that according to you, personhood is not part of external reality.
This is incorrect. Here's the counterexample. Personhood is not objective in the sense that China is not objective. You can't prove the existence of China objectively. Proof: is Taiwan part of China? Prove that with science. It's impossible. That doesn't mean China doesn't exist. Merely that there's something more complex going on then objectivity.
Personhood is not part of external reality, so the only reason that we use it is for its utility.
Utility is an empty word. I agree that,in general, the only reason is utility, but utility means use for something. Unless we define that something we're just substituting one variable for another. My problem was that you jumped straight to utility - economically. Why does that make sense? Why not it's utility in terms of capacity to be used as a means to achieve morality? Why not aesthetics?
But we don't even need to go there because, as I pointed out, we haven't proved that personhood is not part of reality. Just that it can't be proved objectively.
Now - on to your criteria.
it took thousands of years to determine that tribe or race affiliation didn't affect whether you were a person or not. We have had, what, 50 years to be able to think intelligently about at what stage in gestation a fertilized egg becomes a person. I don't think we completely understand what it means to be a person, so I don't think we know how to draw a line that says "personhood begins here."
I agree. Which is why I point out that, historically, we've ALWAYS erred on the side of being too exclusive. If someone asks "is this a human?" and, historically, EVERYTIME we've said "no" (I'm leaving out questiosn like "is the rock human?" because no one would seriously ask that) we've been wrong and the result has been misery then, all things been equal, when the questin was raised again why wouldn't we err on the side of inclusiveness for once? That's not a proof - just a reason to get people thinking.
I have issues with your complexity argument but I think it's fascinating. The simplest issue is this, however, we do not know how a fetus develops. It's beyond clock-work at such an early stage that using your definition would rule out every method of abortion except, possibly, the morning after pill. So I disagree with it philosophhically, but I'dbe overjoyed if you actually followed it because from a practical standpoint we'd be almsot identical.
But I can say that a fertilized egg, or a blastula is on the not-a-person side of it, because people are not simply cells.
Contrast this (what I just quoted) with this:
And I can say that all the mentally retarded kids I have met are certainly people in that they have emotions and are capable of moral action in so far as they can conceive the consequences of their actions, they are just less smart (I am much less sure about psychopaths, assuming they exist, but that is a different issue.)
I'd say the REAL difference you consider retarded kids kids is that you have met them. We consider things human not by their innate qualities, but by our relationships to them. Believe me - if you're pregnant (meaning you and your wife/sig other if you're a guy) than the fetus MATTERS to you. It's real. Because you think about it (even though you haven't met it). So if you thought about an unborn child thenI think it would seem real to you as well. They've been so successfully dehumanized that you lack the capacity to imagine a relationship with them. It's a failure of imagination. (And for the record, sociopaths do exist. We have a family that is friends with ours, and their son is a real sociopath. It's a very sad condition. Any "immoral" act to him is like making a careless gramatical error to you.)
It turns out that we can't even talk about the electron having an exa
First off, you make some very good points about the problems with the rising generation of elderly in our own country. We're facing the same type of problem as in Europe, but since we have fewer entitlements we're not as badly off as they are.
Secondly, you're absolutely right about Europe going into a depression/recession. It would havea negative impacton the world at large. So I'm not eager to have my point "proved" at all. I'm not being sarcastic when I say I'm glad you can choose to live where you want. I hope Europe doesn't fall - but I think it will face some serious economic hardship in the years ahead with associate social turmoil (the French riots were just the tremors before an earthquake).
There are some issues as well, however. First off, I don't think we should raise min wage. I don't evne think we should have one. Practically no one actually tries to support a family on min wage jobs. Those that do either move up quickly or would benefit from a lack of minimum wage. Why? Because having to pay retired folks and teenagers min wage means there's less wages for those who might actually treat the job as a career. So you're paying Joe from high school the same for working one summer as you're paying the (hypothetical) family-wage earner. That doesn't make sense - and raising min wage makes it worse, not better.
The tech out-sourcing thing is also way over-rated. 1 - Most companies that outsourced used saved money to reinvest in America: with more jobs. Outsourcing hits a ceiling pretty quickly anyway as the nations where you outsource start to demand wages more inline with their foreign counterparts.
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So what are they going to do - install win xp on ther 75 Mhz box?
Read my post man. I said a lot of people would upgrade the entire machine (and likely end up buying something with win xp on it). Those aren't the people I'm talking about. I'm talking about those who at least have enough hardware to consider an OS upgrade. And for them which is going to be easier on their old hardware: win xp or a linux distro? Furthermore, if they are willing to put up with the antiquated hardware then they are more likely to be willing to look into finding linux distros that will be kinder and gentler on their aged boxes then the most popular windows-competitors out there.
-stormin
Those who are still running Windows98 are most likely to do nothing in the immediate future (as opposed to moving to linux or windowsxp/2000). Those who do upgrade their OS are likely to upgrade the whole machine and therefore end up with winxp box.
That being said, however, there are what, 50 million win 98 users (FTFA, if I remember right)? There's a fair chance that at least some of them are going to upgrade the OS only. And here's the funny thing. If MS really continued support for Win98 for 2 years to keep people from switching to linux, then they had a very stupid strategy. The fact is that linux for the desktop today is far more advanced than linux for the desktop was 2 years ago.
2 years ago a fair amount of users who would have tried switching to linux would have been unsatisfied with the experience to the point of being willing to pay to get back into the MS fold. Now, however, there are not only more people likely to switch to linux (given the publicity of switching over the last 2 years) but I think anyone that's used to using windows 95 or 98 would actually prefer running, say, the newest version of Ubuntu (my particular fave distro). (I'm not mentioning Windows ME, because frankly etching onto a cave wall is preferable to running Windows ME for anything.)
In a nutshell: linux wasn't really ready to replace windows 2 years ago for desktop use. By postponing the switch, MS has just allowed linux (and open source in general like open office) to garner publicity and turn into a truly vialbe alternative.
Way to go MS.
-stormin
OK, so the basic idea is that you think that desktop usage will, in the near future, start to look like server usage. But this doesn't make sense to me - you have two different types of computers (desktop vs. server) for a reason. Suppose the future does come as quickly as you think, and it's typical for home users to have a single repository for all audio/video data that is then streamed to the house. In such a case you've basically got a media server - and so sure you'd want high-capacity, fast drives. In fact, you'd have trouble doing that based on a commodity drive today - you'd want enterprise-class hardware to really pull that off reliably.
So on the one hand I'm saying MRAM could be great for desktops, and on the other hand you're saying "we want a server in the house". Well, if a server is what you want, then maybe MRAM won't help you out because you'll want the fast drives to be the high-capacity drives. But unless you plan on having your server ALSO be your gaming rig / coding rig, etc. then you're still going to want MRAM on the computer you use as a desktop.
And if you want your server to also be your desktop at the same time, then you're still SOL since there's really nothing cheap on the market at all that will give you the performance for both programs (gaming/coding) and data without busting the bank.
-stormin
Clarification: I mean the OS and other executables.
.exe, not from any one section of their vast data collection.
And I just think you're flat out wrong in your assertion. Maybe on a server data is accessed over and over, but for normal desktop use data-access is sporadic. I don't listen to the same mp3s over and over, and I certainly don't watch the same 5 minutes of a DVD on a loop pattern. I suppose if I was doing intensive video editing, I would want that video stored on high-performance drives. Same with any other very intensive read-write activity.
But for the vast majority of desktop users the repeat data access is going to come from the Warcraft III
-stormin
Yes, your thinking is clouded by experience. I'm not talking a multi-user server, I'm talking a single-user machine. The data - in this case videos, mp3s, documents - will be accessed on an as-needed basis. At most you may possibly be streaming mp3s somewhere else on a home network while watching a vid on the machine or something (and really, if you're building a media-center type repository there's a whole host of other considerations to take into account as well). I'm mostly talking about the traditional single-user gaming/entertainment/productivity/coding/whatever rig. In this caes it is the OS that is going to be accessed every time you start your computer, while out of the 500 GB of media/data you have only very small portions will be accessed sporadically.
It's just a very different usage pattern.
-stormin
You seem to be trapped in the current (already outdated?) paradigm of hard drive usage. If I were to put together a high-end machine right now I would certainly throw in at least 2 hard drives. A very small 10RPM drive for the OS, programs, and a much larger (but probably slower) drive for storing all my files.
If you RTFA you'll notice that that's exactly what they mention: using the MRAM to run the OS. So, yeah, it may not work to replace your entire hard drive, but it makes a lot of sense to split hard drive usage between the files you are going to be booting from, accessing constantly, and files you only access when you have a specific need to.
Sure, 4MB is still to small to run an OS on (yeah yeah, except linux, and that's great) - but if you're goal is to get large enough to have a bootable OS and NOT to replace an entire hard drive (especially since hard drive capacity is getting cheaper and cheaper) then I think you start to see the potential of this technology.
-stormin
It seems like everyone criticizing the eBook is actually criticizing the DRM. I don't know what DRM is going to be used, or how. If they have onerous DRM then yes, it will suck.
But if this gets popular (by this I mean "eBooks") then it's going to do to books what mp3s did to music. I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to download DRM-free copies of books and I will be looking into them.
If the DRM goons manage to keep a tight lid on the whole thing frmo day one, then yes, the whole idea sucks. But if that's the case it's not beucase digital ink wasn't revolutionary tech, it's because some a**hole managed to screw up a really good idea.
In any case, it seems plain to me that digital ink has the potential to be a real breakthrough, but there is the possibility that another utopian vision of free information will come crashing into the wall of corporate pig-like greed.
-stormin
How is this "insightful"? If this is all it takes for you to see evil, then it's no wonder you see everyone as evil. You need to seriously take a step back and breathe.
It's entirely possible that the reason they want to use people from the bombings of less than a year ago is that people who've been amputees already have artificial limbs and rather than make them go through the hassle of experimenting with something that may or may not work (artifical limbs are very expensive to customize, take a long time to make, and take an even longer time to fully adjust) they want to go with people who probably don't have artificial limbs yet.
I'm not saying I know what's going on, but there are a lot of reasons why this could have nothing to do with politics or evil and everything to do with getting the experiments and trials done as quickly as possible while causing the minimal amount of pain and discomfort to everyone involved.
Until you have any idea why they are making this decision - why jump to conlusions?
-stormin
"But I don't wanna explode!"
-Jayne
Books are also not crippled by DRM either.
This line made me chuckle. Not crippled by DRM? How about a DRM that made it so that if you wanted to make a copy you'd have to either re-write the entire novel or OCR the whole thing? Imagine not even being able to make a quick archive copy for personal back up! You'd be up in arms! Or a DRM that was constructed in such a way that if you lent your copy to a friend you coudln't read your copy until you got it back. And if your friend lost it - you'd have to buy a new copy if you ever wanted to read it.
Books already have the best conceivable DRM policy - the content is died directly to the physical media. And you thought propietary formats were bad!
I'm not saying I'm a fan of DRM, but anyone that compares a hard-copy book to DRM media and sees the DRM media as a pain in the ass is just bonkers. The only reason the DRM is more annoying is because you can break it. And so we're tempted to try and it's a pain in the butt. You can't break the DRM on a book and so we forget that it even exists.
Now maybe you understand why RIAA execs keep cramming insane DRM schemes down our throats. They must believe that if only DRM could be as iron-clad as physical media we'd all stop whining about it.
-stormin
I agree. Digital ink is one of those technologies - like flying cars - that's been around in sci-fi for decades and yet somehow never seemed to be realized in real life (even though, unlike FTL travel or universal translators, it doesn't seem that hard to create). It's one of the technological advances that I think will have a geuinely huge and lasting impact on digital media.
Just think about it - any portable device (other than an audio device) has pretty much been constrained to indoor use. Take a laptop outside and try using it. And sure, $900 can buy a lot of paperbacks, but try carrying them all with you at once. On top of that, $900 is what it costs now. What did the first CD or DVD player cost?
And on top of that, you have to realize that this is much, much more than just the capacity to carry around a library with you. With searcheable documents and note-taking ability it's going to grant users the capacity to carry around a library, card catalog, and user-created index.
I've been waiting for this to come out for years. Of course I'm not in a position to get the first model (too expensive, and I imagine that some things like text recognition won't be working quite right) but I honestly believe this is one of those products that will (if quietly) really change the landscape of digital devices. As far as I'm concerned it's 10 times more useful than a laptop for most non-tech-related uses already.
We give out laptops to middle and high school kids in my county. What a waste! Textbooks are pain in the ass to read on laptops. And that horsepower is wasted on kids who don't code, can't game, and don't even use cool programs like Mathematica or something. For note taking, reading, and research this is a real breakthrough. Toss in mp3 support and it's like any bibliophiles idea of portable nirvana.
The only thing that remains to be seen is how they draw the line between eBook devices and laptops. What functaionality will end up where? What will distinquish one from the other - or will they merge into one ultra-device if digital ink gets full color, etc.?
Oh yeah - and did we mention 21 hours of battery life. Now THAT is starting to look like a portable device.
-stormin
What about letting people take care of their OWN retirement? It's not like social security retirement is actually going to be sufficient for most people's desired standard of living anyway. Let people do their own planning in the form of 401Ks, real estate, and other investments.
Of course phasing it out would be difficult because those paying today are paying for older generations, not themselves, but I'd be happy to continue paying for a decade or so (at least) without expecting any benefits myself if it meant my kids wouldn't have to pay into this program anymore.
-stormin
First - and before anything else (I'm getting tired of responding to all these posts) - I want to get back to my original point. Your sig is incoherent.
I want a Social Security safety net. You are free to become a stain on life's floor if you don't.
This doesn't make sense because if you get a Social Security safety net then how is someone else supposed to be "free to become a stain on life's floor"? If you have social security, then not only do other people in the country have to pay for it, but they darn well get the same safety net. So before we get into social security the main point I made is simply this: your sig doesn't make logical sense.
Now, moving onto social security, I'm not going to argue with everything that you said because I don't have a problem with all of social security. Social security offers the following benefits:
- retirement
- survivor/spouse benefit
-disability benefit
The main part of social security is retirement. That's what I think is largely overrated. You guys are acting like I think we should take away disability insurance. I don't think that at all.
-stormin
Anyone who claims to not even understand who the fat cats are is pretty starnge, not for believing that, but for thinking others will believe that he believes that.
No, I'm serious. Is Bill Gates a fat cat? Warren Buffet? Steve Jobs? How about my grandfather. He owned his own business and it was worh over a million. Now my uncle owns it, and it's probably 2 or 3 times as valuable. Are they fat cats? What about my boss? He and his two buddies started a company that now makes revenues of about 1.5 million annually. Are they fat cats? It is owners or CEOs or board members? Are self-made men and women excluded? How about inventors who get rich? What about lottery winners? How about those who inherit wealth?
I know exactly what the idea of a fat cat is. But that's just an idea. I want to know how you would map that idea onto reality. Calling me strange for wanting you to be specific in your rhetoric isn't going to make your arguments sound any less childish.
Anyone who claims that the fat cats don't have a lot more control over society than the thin ones is incredibly naive.
You're typing, so you must be literate, but this comment makes me wonder. Go read my post and tell me where I said rich people don't have more power than poor people in the markets. I believe the term I used was that they had "exponentially" more power. Maybe that word was to big for you?
Anyway - I eagerly await the transformation of your hot-air rhetoric into an actual argument. In the mean time I'd urge you - as a peon - to work on not being a peon instead of becoming a powerful peon. While all these self-declared victims are whining about how poor and mistreated they are, I'm just going to go make shit happen. You could do, if you were more intersted in working for youself instead of trying to get handouts.
-stormin
The argument that you shouldn't force others to spend on gov't programs is not really useful.
But that's not my argument. There's a difference between gov't programs and re-distributing wealh. Gov't programs are like nat'l defense and publich libraries. Social security is about taking money from some people and giving it to others. The useful value of money, from a societal standpoint, is that it encourages people to be productive, etc. This erodes the utility of money to society at large. The incentive to work hard and be productive is diminished, the incentive to be a parasite is increased every time we richen wealth re-distribution benefits. It's bad for America.
I've never heard anyone from western Europe or Canada, or even Australia say, "I wish we had America's level of social security." The fact is that we have terrible coverage of medical and financial hardships. If we wanted to talk about the usefulness of social securty, the question we should be asking is "How come ours isn't as good as Britain or Canada's?"
Hahahaha. This is a matter of experience. I think I know a prety good amount about the UKs system because my mother is British and her family still lives there (Ipswich and London). Right now her grandfater is going through what should have been a routine sugery. Thanks to UKs state medicine it's turned into a nightmare. I can't tel you how many times my mother (she's over there right now) has told me "if only the lived in America!"
The reason America has bad health care has nothing to do with gov't programs. I know what I'm talking about here because my job is an analyst in the insurance industry. First of all, you have to point out that from the standpoint of sophistication America has the absolute best medical care in the world bar none. If you need cutting-edge medical care, you come to the US (yes, yes - IF you can afford it). Also - everyone in America has free access to this care on an emergency basis. E.g. emergency rooms can't turn you away (or refuse to roll out the expensive stuff) if you show up with a bullet in you or something like that.
Where American medical care falls down is accessibility of non-emergency care. And the main problem here is the rising cost of health care. But what most people dn't realize s that the cost of health care is rising just above inflation on a per-unit/service basis. The reason insurance premiums are going up by double-digit inflation has one cause: utilization.
1. Starting in the 80s health insurance changed from insurance to subsidization. Insurance is when you pay x dollars and then if something catastrophic happens you get 1000x dollars (or whatever). Insurance does NOT mean you pay $150 a month (or whatever) and then get to have MD visits for $25, or tier 3 drugs for $30 a month. But in the 80s that's whay the designed into insurance - copays and other routine utilization subsidies. Well guess what happened. At $10 a visit (instead of say 100) people went to the MDs more than 10 times as much. Combine this with marketing from big pharma and EVERYBODY is on ritalin, prozac, etc - at subsidized prices. If you pay $150 a month for insurance and get $200 a month in benefits from routine care guess what - the price goes up.
The final problem is our elderly population. They use health care like you wouldn't believe I'm talking like 12 visits to primary care physician every year on average! They need more care than young folks, they have more time on their hands, and they're living longer and longer.
This is why Europe's state health care system is a bad, bad bad idea. It takes all the problems American health care has, hides them under high taxes and low payments (the low payments make the problem WORSE) and the result? Rationing at best, total failure at worst. Give it time. Decades, maybe. The system is designed to fail.
In America, on other hand, we're trying to use the laws of capitalism to make the system get better. When is medicine ca
But then if you don't get a job after your US education, you're left with $50000+ of debt and go bankrupt. Not everyone is able to get high paying, high flying jobs. If you're OK with that, fine, but I think it's a rather inhumane and primal attitude.
Oh please, do you live in the US? Do you have any idea how any debt relief programs there are? If you're not making enough you can extend the "no payment" period practcally to eternity. NOt to mention the fact that there are tons of progrms to repay debt if you take jobs as a teacher or other forms of public service.
You're acting like you graduate colleg with $50,000 car loan or something. We get 30-year mortgages for our houses and no one bats an eyelash. And yet you get a loan for a fraction of that principle with much, much easier repayment terms and everyones like "AcK! Cruel, harsh, evil world!!!".
Makes no sense.
-stormin (current student debt ~ $50,000)
Apparently minimal govt thing wasn't working so well and private enterprise wasn't providing enough so we invented social security.
Yes, it was a time called the Great Depression. The name should indicate it was an emergency, and Social Security was an emergency soluion. Where's the emergency now?
Why don't we look to see if people are better off in those countries then they are in the US or other countries which provide even more social benefits.
Because it makes far more sense to look at how American private organizations work. Other nations have other cultures, other infrastructure, other politics, and other economies. So whatdo you think we could really learn from such a comparison?
-stormin
I really like the way you approached the Taiwan-China question, and I think it was a good exercise for us to go through.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my attempt to describe in abstract terms the approach that you liked.
1. You observed that "the way things are" is different from "the way things should be" (in this case, the way God wants them to be)
2. You're belief about "the way things should be" was motivated by non-scientific criteia (e.g. "I believe that Taiwan is the Taiwanese people"). Now this point is fascinating becase it's exactly what I've been trying to say wih personhood: it depends on existential definitions. An existential definition bascially means that the meaning comes from what we want it to mean. You're saying that if the Taiwanese people want Taiwan to be a state then - existentialy - it should be a state. Do you see what happened? You've associated your "the way things should be" with existentialism.
3. The critical final piece is that once you've established the discrepency between "the way things are" (objective realty) and "the way things should be" (existential definition) you then believe we have an implicit duty to work from the former to the latter.
Now I ask where science came into this. First of all, science is necessary to describe the objective reality. Without understanding that, we can not see a discrepency (e.g. you can't solve the equation x-y with only a value for x) But science can not directly help with either of two things.
1. the analysis of "what should be" - since it doesn't exist and can't be tested and
2. the criteria for establishing your existential definition.
What science led you to say that if the Taiwanese people want to be Taiwan they should be? Surely according to the Chinese people Taiwan IS China, so there are no Taiwanes people to have an opinion about Taiwan. Why pick one over the other?
In any case, this is exactly what I want to do with abortion. First of all, we should look at the objective reality. In this case the objective reality is that there have been something like 25-30 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. The most common occurs from 8-12 weeks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_development#Fet al_Period - see "The fetal period" See also: http://www.catholic.net/rcc/loveboth/tinyfeet.jpg (that's around 8-weeks, it's a famous picture) and also http://www.alexanderandturner.com/assets/images/cy 13c.jpg
So currently most abortions take place by using a vacuum to rip apart an 8-12 week old fetus that has arms, legs, a beating heart, it's own blood system, etc. But it's also legal to have abortions during the full 9-moth term (hence the last picture). Consider partial-birth abortion. Here's a scientific drawing of the process: http://www.truthnet.org/abortion/Partial-Birth_Abo rtion1.jpg and here (warning you do NOT have to click if you don't want to) are pictures of the results: http://www.abortiontv.com/Pics/AbortionPictures6.h tm Clinton vetoed 2 bans on this procedure, and the current state bans have mostly been overturned.
Partial-birth abortion isn't even that late term. They use saline poisoning for late-term abortions. That's possibly an even more hideous procedure than partial-birth abortions.
And to get a final understanding of the objecive reality you have to realize that thanks to th Supreme Court any law that bans or limits abortion without an exceptin for "health of the mother" is unconstitutional. Health has been defined as "all factors relating to the well-being of the mother" which turns the exception into a loop-hole t
there are people that have to support at least themselves on a minimum wage (or close to minimum wage) job and aren't in a position to find a different job or work two jobs
What people? Why are they in this position. Thomas Sowell wrote a great column on poverty back in February that you can get from TowhHall.com (which is down for an upgrade, it appears, or I would link you) and his main points included the following.
The vast majority of people below the poverty line:
- don't work full time
- have no high school diploma
- are not supporting a family
Despite this fact, some people are below the poverty line and supporting a family. Most of them aren't married, by the way, being unmarried and having kids correlates very highly to being poor. But anyway, the point is that the vast majority of the "working poor" manage to move out of poverty in a relatively short time period.
What it comes down to is this. If you make them min wage a "living wage" you prety much guarantee that it becomees a "sticky point". A lot of people will be stuck there. If you get rid of it you can then do intelligent welfare (e.g. adult education, temporary free housing for the working poor, etc) that will accelerate the movement of poor people out of poverty.
There are ALWAYS going to be poor people. If you believe in min wage you are trying to make poverty an OK condition. But no one likes being poor. The alternative is to try and increase the rate at which poor people can stop being poor altogether. Getting rid of the min wage will help that a lot.
And to your example I just think there's this popular mythos in America that the rich guys are bad guys. The only difference, in my opinion, is the rich guys have more capacity to harm. But they also have more capacity to do good. Contrast your example with the Bill and Melinda Gates fund, or Warren Bufet's donation. And it's not like min wage earners are great saints either. Some company exec can give you the legal shaft, some burger flipper can spit in your soda: their are asholes everywher.
-stormin
OK, I fell for that one.
THe old trick where someone makes a statement (X) and I reply with "Not X" and then get hit with "what, you don't believe Y? you must be retared"!!
You're a clever one alright.
You said that conglomerists, monopolists, etc. controlled the market. I said they did not. Now you are claiming that they bias investment risk in their favor. That's the sme thing to you is it? "Contol" and "bias risk"? And I'm naive?
Stop whining about the little people trying to get back some control of their lives
I'm "whining" about little people who try to get control of my life, you dolt. You may have this weird pyschological disorder that makes you think a bunch of obese felines are pulling the strings in your life - but I should not have to be legislated into playing a role in your own demented fantasies.
"The market" is not something that can be controlled. Look at how many "fat cats" lose ther shirt from one year to the next (I'd direct you to sources, but the site hosting the article I want appears to be down). And look how many regular Americans make it from rags to riches (e.g. prety much every single tech company founder). Yes - in this chaos the CEO of a 500 billion dollar compan has exponentially times more power than you do. And if you try to go head to head wih his company you'll end up with your ass in a sling - at best. But the idea that the "fat cats" are somehow united in the cause of oppresion is absurd. They're all doing the best they can for themselves and you are essentially jaded. That's it.
You want to cut your nose off to spite your face. What you don't understand is that your high standard of living is the DIRECT result of "fat cats". The drive, the passion, and yes sometimes the greed of these empire builders is what has made America thrive.
It comes to this: any effort to "make things right" for the little man benefits a congolmeration of people who've had a run of bad luck, people who are too stupid to make it big, and people who are too lazy to make it big. This is achieved at the expense of the ones who - for the most part - know how to create wealth for themselves and others. Everybody gets a more equitable slice of the pie but the pie gets smaller. Capitalism leaves things alone. The pie gets A LOT bigger. Enough safety nets are put in place to provide an absolute minimum for those who need the help.
The fat cats have taken control of everybody's lives in order to eliminate risk to them, and that is the abdication of personal responsibility that you ought to be decrying. Picking on the little people for getting back a small bit of control is pathetic.
You're just raving at this point. I really wish you could hear yourself. You ARE the crazy-eyed guy on the subway grabbing people's lapels and telling them the end is near. Your argument is nothing but ad hominem. Please, tell me what the hell the word "fat cat" means to you. It's like these people aren't human to you. THey are are alien overlords. And also tell them what on earth you mean by "they have taken control of everybody's lives". Look at Africa man. The warlords, the starvation, the chaos. That's what life looks like with out the fat cats. Look at feudalism or theocracies. That's where we came from. What are these mysterious freedoms that have gone by the way side and when in history did we have them?
I'll take you as more than a deranged lunatic when you can answer those two questoins.
1. What is a "fat cat"?
2. How, precisely, did they gain "control over our lives"
-stormin
No. I would agree with it in that case. And even if I didn't agree with it; at least it wouldn't be patently nonsensical.
You're assuming that I'm somehow disagreeing with your politics. I probably do, but also probably not as much as you think I do.
I just really don't like arguments that are utter nonsense regardless of the conclusion.
-stormin
blah blah blah
See me post to this topic already. I didn't say terrorism did not exist before 20th century, so stop acting like I did. I said it didn't exist in a meaningful way.
And the reason for that is that the power of terrorists was (to approximate roughly) linearly related to the number of terrorists you had. Because in order to inflict harm they had to each physically carry out the harm with very crude tools. Furthermore, they had to expose themselves to harm, so they could be neutralized more effectively.
Starting with gun powder (which wasn't cheap enough to be available to terrorists until 20th century) the equation switches. Instead of damage being linear to # of terrorists it's more like exponential. Now a small band of terrorists (say 20) can fairly easily take out several thousand and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
You tell me that 20 people flying planes into buldings is the same TYPE of thing as a couple of guys with swords murdering people.
-stormin
Ahh, the academic ranking's argument... I guess you are aware of the criticism surrounding its measurement methods (citations count, diversity of fields taught, etc.), no?
There's a reason America is the #1 destination for foreigners looking for an advanced degree. Do you dispute that?
So how comes, by your reasoning, that the university of Cambridge is ranked as number 2, with low tuition rates of about 5'435 USD per year compared to Harvard's astronomically high rates?
That's kind of silly. If I say "you get what you pay for" are you actually going to figure out the amount paid in tuition per class day and then say "Monday was SO much better than Wednesday, clearly this is false" or even "that five minutes the professor was late were worthless academically, so this is false".
It's a general statement and it holds true in general. In general the US system for higher education is better. Not every American university is better than every European university.
-stormin
A couple of issues:
Personhood is not objective.
Then I conclude that according to you, personhood is not part of external reality.
This is incorrect. Here's the counterexample. Personhood is not objective in the sense that China is not objective. You can't prove the existence of China objectively. Proof: is Taiwan part of China? Prove that with science. It's impossible. That doesn't mean China doesn't exist. Merely that there's something more complex going on then objectivity.
Personhood is not part of external reality, so the only reason that we use it is for its utility.
Utility is an empty word. I agree that,in general, the only reason is utility, but utility means use for something. Unless we define that something we're just substituting one variable for another. My problem was that you jumped straight to utility - economically. Why does that make sense? Why not it's utility in terms of capacity to be used as a means to achieve morality? Why not aesthetics?
But we don't even need to go there because, as I pointed out, we haven't proved that personhood is not part of reality. Just that it can't be proved objectively.
Now - on to your criteria.
it took thousands of years to determine that tribe or race affiliation didn't affect whether you were a person or not. We have had, what, 50 years to be able to think intelligently about at what stage in gestation a fertilized egg becomes a person. I don't think we completely understand what it means to be a person, so I don't think we know how to draw a line that says "personhood begins here."
I agree. Which is why I point out that, historically, we've ALWAYS erred on the side of being too exclusive. If someone asks "is this a human?" and, historically, EVERYTIME we've said "no" (I'm leaving out questiosn like "is the rock human?" because no one would seriously ask that) we've been wrong and the result has been misery then, all things been equal, when the questin was raised again why wouldn't we err on the side of inclusiveness for once? That's not a proof - just a reason to get people thinking.
I have issues with your complexity argument but I think it's fascinating. The simplest issue is this, however, we do not know how a fetus develops. It's beyond clock-work at such an early stage that using your definition would rule out every method of abortion except, possibly, the morning after pill. So I disagree with it philosophhically, but I'dbe overjoyed if you actually followed it because from a practical standpoint we'd be almsot identical.
But I can say that a fertilized egg, or a blastula is on the not-a-person side of it, because people are not simply cells.
Contrast this (what I just quoted) with this:
And I can say that all the mentally retarded kids I have met are certainly people in that they have emotions and are capable of moral action in so far as they can conceive the consequences of their actions, they are just less smart (I am much less sure about psychopaths, assuming they exist, but that is a different issue.)
I'd say the REAL difference you consider retarded kids kids is that you have met them. We consider things human not by their innate qualities, but by our relationships to them. Believe me - if you're pregnant (meaning you and your wife/sig other if you're a guy) than the fetus MATTERS to you. It's real. Because you think about it (even though you haven't met it). So if you thought about an unborn child thenI think it would seem real to you as well. They've been so successfully dehumanized that you lack the capacity to imagine a relationship with them. It's a failure of imagination. (And for the record, sociopaths do exist. We have a family that is friends with ours, and their son is a real sociopath. It's a very sad condition. Any "immoral" act to him is like making a careless gramatical error to you.)
It turns out that we can't even talk about the electron having an exa
First off, you make some very good points about the problems with the rising generation of elderly in our own country. We're facing the same type of problem as in Europe, but since we have fewer entitlements we're not as badly off as they are.
Secondly, you're absolutely right about Europe going into a depression/recession. It would havea negative impacton the world at large. So I'm not eager to have my point "proved" at all. I'm not being sarcastic when I say I'm glad you can choose to live where you want. I hope Europe doesn't fall - but I think it will face some serious economic hardship in the years ahead with associate social turmoil (the French riots were just the tremors before an earthquake).
There are some issues as well, however. First off, I don't think we should raise min wage. I don't evne think we should have one. Practically no one actually tries to support a family on min wage jobs. Those that do either move up quickly or would benefit from a lack of minimum wage. Why? Because having to pay retired folks and teenagers min wage means there's less wages for those who might actually treat the job as a career. So you're paying Joe from high school the same for working one summer as you're paying the (hypothetical) family-wage earner. That doesn't make sense - and raising min wage makes it worse, not better.
The tech out-sourcing thing is also way over-rated. 1 - Most companies that outsourced used saved money to reinvest in America: with more jobs. Outsourcing hits a ceiling pretty quickly anyway as the nations where you outsource start to demand wages more inline with their foreign counterparts.
-stormin