So, what you're saying is, if I have a medical condition correctly diagnosed, and five different doctors recommend five different treatments for that condition, that medicine is bullshit? That happens all the time, with different doctors obviously having different training and idiosyncratic preferences, and even different basic theories on how to attack a particular ailment. Sometimes they even disagree on what the condition is or is caused by (cf. Post Lyme Syndrome, any and all cancers, etc.). If you want to stop going to doctors, be my guest. I wouldn't want you to throw away money on bullshit.
Throwing more money at it won't fix the problem. We've spent hundreds of billions in new funds on top of what we were going to spend in the last 15 years and test scores are virtually unchanged. It is a social problem caused mostly by parents who don't care because they are too busy working two-and-a-half jobs paying for rent, heat and food.
See? Fixed that for you. Besides that though, (and a small quibble about your unemployment statistic being based upon a reality-denying formula the government invented to make the problem sound not so bad), I generally agree that the problems mentioned are systemic, tenacious, and in many cases directly caused by human nature itself. Still, it really doesn't hurt to occasionally try to help people every now and then. Sure, you can't help everyone, but it sure is meaningful to those you can.
Oddly enough, most American Catholics don't really in practice give a damn about what the Pope says regarding contraception. They don't even care as much about abortion as you might think; the two most Catholic states (by far) are Rhode Island and Maryland, both of whom have decently liberal laws regarding abortion, and while the institution of the Catholic Church bitches constantly about it (I live in one of those two states) the parishioners kindly and gently ignore them. No, most of the religiously-based conservatism in the US comes out of Dominionist churches and sources in the south and midwest.
Economist may have something there; last year I did a report on the Israeli educational system which showed an interesting trend of the ever proportionately increasing size of religiously-based education as opposed to the secular system, and the main causal agent was that the Orthodox and Haredim simply have more kids than the more secularized segments of the population. But, methinks in the US of A two other major factors are the still sizable agricultural sector (and the large families that traditionally entails) and poverty, which usually has a significant direct relationship with family size.
Yeah, defenestrate, in at least the metaphorical sense. Most barratry statutes include provisions for disbarment, as well as general fines, so it is the equivalent of throwing the lawyer out the window. The court has other, less extreme and somewhat subtler methods for dealing with vexatious or annoying litigants, anywhere from 'contempt of court' all the way down to 'judge ignores every third motion for practice' and even 'judge makes personal fun of the lawyer in ruling'.
In other words, a very few rich aristocrats in 14th and 15th century Europe decided one day that a certain set of values like 'rule by the people', 'scientific inquiry and understanding', 'free press' and the like were great in theory and it would be kinda neat if someone tried them. A few hundred years later one rabblerousing asshat or two actually took them seriously and started revolutions on both sides of the pond. Since the crazy fuckers actually won a few times, we, a few hundred years after that, have come to reflexively believe that these ideological precepts are somehow universally good, since they worked out so well for us. They are embedded very deeply in our cultural vocabulary.
GP's point, I imagine, had something to do with China having been around and doing A-OK in one form or another for the last three thousand years operating under entirely different assumptions, ideologies, and whatnot than the west. What make us so arrogant to think that because our stuff, like freedom of information, works so well for us, that it would for them or that they would even want it at all?
Barratry charges are unbelievably rare, and the main reasons are:
1. Everyone involved is a lawyer, so there is a version of that blue wall of silence that every profession has to some degree
2. Our system needs to be accessible, and so it is better overall to err on the side of an occasional asshat filing a frivolous lawsuit and letting it slide, rather than an important casue of action being barred and a wronged person denied their day in court.
3. Courts generally have better things to do than defenestrate annoying lawyers.
Honestly, I think in many jurisdictions it's more number one than number two, but number two sure does make a dandy fig leaf. And number three is always a factor; many jurisdictions have dockets jammed to the hilt and extremely finite resources.
Thing is - there isn't much more time than that between the handover deadline and the game's release...
And perhaps you nailed it right on the head. Sometimes, when a judge wants to have a little fun with a particularly vexatious or obtuse litigant, he'll take their more absurd motions and put constrainst on them that make their fulfillment render the cause of action moot. So, perhaps this judge thinks it silly and so requested something (like 100 hours of gameplay) that can't be fulfilled before general release to make sure that he won't be placed in the awkward position of having to rule on the legality of its distribution. (And, anyway, wouldn't that be a flagrant case of Prior Restraint?)
You are using logic and rationality, two of many things that any self-respecting Joe who is scared shitless of the world is currently incapable. Remember, Iraq didn't have a lick to do with Al-Qaeda, but that didn't stop innumerable scared-Joes from supporting invading it to 'protect them from the scary world' or somesuch.
Actually, the law as written before this BS program was started allowed warrants after the fact in cases where timing was critical and a few other criteria were met. So...they don't even have that excuse.
Except for the ones with dark skin, right? They were 3/5ths as equal, IIRC. Except for the natives. They get dick. Otherwise, sure. All men, created equal, just like you said.
Let us please remember that, for all its florid prose, the Declaration of Independence was primarily a propaganda tool to drum up support against an unpopular king an ocean away. Please don't forget that a shooting war of rebellion had already started with England nearly a year before at Concord and Lexington, and a guerilla 'terrorist' war in Rhode Island a year-and-a-half before that.
The Constitution, on the other hand, is the law of the land, and it completely gives this game away.
If your assertion is true, then there is nothing wrong with US troops in Berlin searching the homes of German citizens. After all, the violation of rights occurs outside of American territory.
There IS nothing wrong, according to American Law with that scenario (assuming the order was given legally through the chain of command). The 4th Amendment to USCon does not protect German citizens in Berlin. What DOES protect the German citizens in Berlin is International Law (specifically the concept of National sovereignty), and also, incidentally, the German Military. I imagine that German law also looks down pretty poorly upon foreign armies executing searches on citizens in their country.
Not stable enough. Most mesons have a half-life on the order of milliseconds or less. Besides, there is a theoretical upper limit for clock speed where one clock cycle is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to cross the chip (which, ostensibly, is the amount of time it takes for light to cross about a centimeter), and a more practical limitation that involves the functional switching speed of whatever it is you are building your logic gates out of. The matter/anti-matter occilation observed has a period that seriously pushes those limits.
I agree with you except for the part about it being only applicable to engineering. All subjects have depth enough to design assignments that require understanding to complete. One of my Theology professors required us to write fictitious dialogues between two or more of the theologians we were studying. A Philosophy professor had a group of assignments for a Marx/Nietzsche/Freud unit where we would review a movie as if it was the philosopher doing the review. In order to get a good grade you really had to know your stuff, and good bloody luck copying your answer from anywhere.
I don't know about you, but I think it is a rare person indeed who thinks 'kicked in the balls' is anywhere on the same level with 'shot in the head'. It's not a hard choice.
Well, at least according to the Bible, no. The Bible describes quickly decaying lifespans from the first generation to each subsequent generative iteration. At the end of this decay, it is legislated divinely than no human would live past twelve decades.
I'm an atheist, and don't put much stock in such things. Still, you gotta wonder why, biologically and medically, we've done a fantastic job of getting people to live to a hundred, and have been very frustrated not much past that. And interestingly, no recorded lifespan in modern history has been longer than 122 years.
As an addendum, some problems (extending the language analogy) would be inappropriate to apprach using some tool sets. It is like trying to write an AI a text markup language, or write a web page in LISP. So, one could argue, some books can't be made into movies really effectively (and vice versa). And so when those are attempted, sure, the original is always going to be better than the port. That is not a deficiency of the medium, only an error of the director and screenwriter not understanding what can and cannot be done using film. I would never, for example, try to make a film out of Principia Mathematica, or Whitehead's Process and Reality.
I disagree heartily. Certainly the way most book-to-movie adaptations are done, its true, becuase the director (or screenwriter) can't get it out of their head that cinema is a completely different medium in almost every way. It's like directors think its like porting between operating systems, when it should be more like writing it again from the ground up in a different language. You approach a problem differently in LISP than, say, Java or C. If you wanted to do the smne thing, you would go about it using different tools.
For evidence, two examples. One, Dr. Strangelove (etc. rest of title etc.) was based on a very serious book "Red Alert", and while the novel was good, the movie was excellent. The movie was better because Kubrick realized the sort of accidental and very black humor that was easily exploitable on film in a way that the book could not put across. As a point of reference, someone about the same time made a direct book-to-movie port of "Red Alert". It was decent, but nobody remembers it.
Example the second, Fight Club, a very good novel by Chuck Palahniuk, was I think improved upon in the film. Many of David Finscher's directorial trademarks helped to disorient the viewer in a way that I think Palahniuk was trying to directly explain, all using nothing but mood and deft editing. A direct port book-to-movie would have been terrible, instead of better.
Ultimately a story can be enriched by its introduction to celluloid (or, these days, virtual celluloid; Baudrillard is somewhere creaming his pants) so long as the director keeps in mind the advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the medium and also how those adv. and dis. compare to those of novel storytelling. The key is tha the director must at first be respectful of teh message(s) being conveyed by the original author and find ways to express them that are available in the new medium, especially to make up for those that are not. Mixed example: in Starship Troopers, (a movie I am heavily conflicted over), does a good job at least of building the federal society's parameters not through exposition, but rather through clever advert propaganda snippets. In a movie, the audience would have collectively suicided rather than listen to (rather than read) Heinlein's political musings.
I'll tell ya, I wouldn't cry a single tear if every interaction I had from now on was with a flesh-and-blood human being with no intervening wires or carrier waves (or pipes, or dumptrucks...whatever). I agree with your 'Web as library' analogy for the most part, but I can't help thinking that e-mail is the world's biggest post-office only because every 'letter' is written as if by a 5 year old in crayon. To say nothing of cell-phones, which, taken together with e-mail and IM, have completely and utterly destroyed everyone's sense of what information is urgent and what information is trivial, or that there once was a continuum between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what you're saying is, if I have a medical condition correctly diagnosed, and five different doctors recommend five different treatments for that condition, that medicine is bullshit? That happens all the time, with different doctors obviously having different training and idiosyncratic preferences, and even different basic theories on how to attack a particular ailment. Sometimes they even disagree on what the condition is or is caused by (cf. Post Lyme Syndrome, any and all cancers, etc.). If you want to stop going to doctors, be my guest. I wouldn't want you to throw away money on bullshit.
Throwing more money at it won't fix the problem. We've spent hundreds of billions in new funds on top of what we were going to spend in the last 15 years and test scores are virtually unchanged. It is a social problem caused mostly by parents who don't care because they are too busy working two-and-a-half jobs paying for rent, heat and food.
See? Fixed that for you. Besides that though, (and a small quibble about your unemployment statistic being based upon a reality-denying formula the government invented to make the problem sound not so bad), I generally agree that the problems mentioned are systemic, tenacious, and in many cases directly caused by human nature itself. Still, it really doesn't hurt to occasionally try to help people every now and then. Sure, you can't help everyone, but it sure is meaningful to those you can.
Yeah, I know. What we really need is an alien species that we can unite in opposition to. Then we will have truly grown up!
Oddly enough, most American Catholics don't really in practice give a damn about what the Pope says regarding contraception. They don't even care as much about abortion as you might think; the two most Catholic states (by far) are Rhode Island and Maryland, both of whom have decently liberal laws regarding abortion, and while the institution of the Catholic Church bitches constantly about it (I live in one of those two states) the parishioners kindly and gently ignore them. No, most of the religiously-based conservatism in the US comes out of Dominionist churches and sources in the south and midwest.
How does that saying go?
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night; light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Economist may have something there; last year I did a report on the Israeli educational system which showed an interesting trend of the ever proportionately increasing size of religiously-based education as opposed to the secular system, and the main causal agent was that the Orthodox and Haredim simply have more kids than the more secularized segments of the population. But, methinks in the US of A two other major factors are the still sizable agricultural sector (and the large families that traditionally entails) and poverty, which usually has a significant direct relationship with family size.
Sliced bread. Silly putty. Eyeglasses. Key chain tags. Clothes buttons. Pocket protectors. Toupees. Leather Waterproofing Wax. Shoe Polish. Artificial flowers. Bookmarks. Deodorant. Velcro. Food preservatives. Picture frames. Food scales. Dustbusters. Plush Carpeting. *nix accounts w/out write privileges. Pencil/Pen gel grips. Change purses.
Yeah, defenestrate, in at least the metaphorical sense. Most barratry statutes include provisions for disbarment, as well as general fines, so it is the equivalent of throwing the lawyer out the window. The court has other, less extreme and somewhat subtler methods for dealing with vexatious or annoying litigants, anywhere from 'contempt of court' all the way down to 'judge ignores every third motion for practice' and even 'judge makes personal fun of the lawyer in ruling'.
In other words, a very few rich aristocrats in 14th and 15th century Europe decided one day that a certain set of values like 'rule by the people', 'scientific inquiry and understanding', 'free press' and the like were great in theory and it would be kinda neat if someone tried them. A few hundred years later one rabblerousing asshat or two actually took them seriously and started revolutions on both sides of the pond. Since the crazy fuckers actually won a few times, we, a few hundred years after that, have come to reflexively believe that these ideological precepts are somehow universally good, since they worked out so well for us. They are embedded very deeply in our cultural vocabulary.
GP's point, I imagine, had something to do with China having been around and doing A-OK in one form or another for the last three thousand years operating under entirely different assumptions, ideologies, and whatnot than the west. What make us so arrogant to think that because our stuff, like freedom of information, works so well for us, that it would for them or that they would even want it at all?
Barratry charges are unbelievably rare, and the main reasons are:
1. Everyone involved is a lawyer, so there is a version of that blue wall of silence that every profession has to some degree
2. Our system needs to be accessible, and so it is better overall to err on the side of an occasional asshat filing a frivolous lawsuit and letting it slide, rather than an important casue of action being barred and a wronged person denied their day in court.
3. Courts generally have better things to do than defenestrate annoying lawyers.
Honestly, I think in many jurisdictions it's more number one than number two, but number two sure does make a dandy fig leaf. And number three is always a factor; many jurisdictions have dockets jammed to the hilt and extremely finite resources.
Thing is - there isn't much more time than that between the handover deadline and the game's release...
And perhaps you nailed it right on the head. Sometimes, when a judge wants to have a little fun with a particularly vexatious or obtuse litigant, he'll take their more absurd motions and put constrainst on them that make their fulfillment render the cause of action moot. So, perhaps this judge thinks it silly and so requested something (like 100 hours of gameplay) that can't be fulfilled before general release to make sure that he won't be placed in the awkward position of having to rule on the legality of its distribution. (And, anyway, wouldn't that be a flagrant case of Prior Restraint?)
You are using logic and rationality, two of many things that any self-respecting Joe who is scared shitless of the world is currently incapable. Remember, Iraq didn't have a lick to do with Al-Qaeda, but that didn't stop innumerable scared-Joes from supporting invading it to 'protect them from the scary world' or somesuch.
Actually, the law as written before this BS program was started allowed warrants after the fact in cases where timing was critical and a few other criteria were met. So...they don't even have that excuse.
Except for the ones with dark skin, right? They were 3/5ths as equal, IIRC. Except for the natives. They get dick. Otherwise, sure. All men, created equal, just like you said.
Let us please remember that, for all its florid prose, the Declaration of Independence was primarily a propaganda tool to drum up support against an unpopular king an ocean away. Please don't forget that a shooting war of rebellion had already started with England nearly a year before at Concord and Lexington, and a guerilla 'terrorist' war in Rhode Island a year-and-a-half before that.
The Constitution, on the other hand, is the law of the land, and it completely gives this game away.
My turn to go, 'wait...what?'
If your assertion is true, then there is nothing wrong with US troops in Berlin searching the homes of German citizens. After all, the violation of rights occurs outside of American territory.
There IS nothing wrong, according to American Law with that scenario (assuming the order was given legally through the chain of command). The 4th Amendment to USCon does not protect German citizens in Berlin. What DOES protect the German citizens in Berlin is International Law (specifically the concept of National sovereignty), and also, incidentally, the German Military. I imagine that German law also looks down pretty poorly upon foreign armies executing searches on citizens in their country.
Now replace "Demi Moore" with "the Bush Administration "
Now, if that only worked in reverse...
Heck, you could make personal armor three times thicker, stick on an antigrav pack, and still that fscking heavy plasma...wait...oh, hell.
Not stable enough. Most mesons have a half-life on the order of milliseconds or less. Besides, there is a theoretical upper limit for clock speed where one clock cycle is shorter than the time it takes for the signal to cross the chip (which, ostensibly, is the amount of time it takes for light to cross about a centimeter), and a more practical limitation that involves the functional switching speed of whatever it is you are building your logic gates out of. The matter/anti-matter occilation observed has a period that seriously pushes those limits.
I agree with you except for the part about it being only applicable to engineering. All subjects have depth enough to design assignments that require understanding to complete. One of my Theology professors required us to write fictitious dialogues between two or more of the theologians we were studying. A Philosophy professor had a group of assignments for a Marx/Nietzsche/Freud unit where we would review a movie as if it was the philosopher doing the review. In order to get a good grade you really had to know your stuff, and good bloody luck copying your answer from anywhere.
I don't know about you, but I think it is a rare person indeed who thinks 'kicked in the balls' is anywhere on the same level with 'shot in the head'. It's not a hard choice.
Slaughtering endangered species like that will have the EPA all over your ass in no time.
Well, at least according to the Bible, no. The Bible describes quickly decaying lifespans from the first generation to each subsequent generative iteration. At the end of this decay, it is legislated divinely than no human would live past twelve decades.
I'm an atheist, and don't put much stock in such things. Still, you gotta wonder why, biologically and medically, we've done a fantastic job of getting people to live to a hundred, and have been very frustrated not much past that. And interestingly, no recorded lifespan in modern history has been longer than 122 years.
As an addendum, some problems (extending the language analogy) would be inappropriate to apprach using some tool sets. It is like trying to write an AI a text markup language, or write a web page in LISP. So, one could argue, some books can't be made into movies really effectively (and vice versa). And so when those are attempted, sure, the original is always going to be better than the port. That is not a deficiency of the medium, only an error of the director and screenwriter not understanding what can and cannot be done using film. I would never, for example, try to make a film out of Principia Mathematica, or Whitehead's Process and Reality.
I disagree heartily. Certainly the way most book-to-movie adaptations are done, its true, becuase the director (or screenwriter) can't get it out of their head that cinema is a completely different medium in almost every way. It's like directors think its like porting between operating systems, when it should be more like writing it again from the ground up in a different language. You approach a problem differently in LISP than, say, Java or C. If you wanted to do the smne thing, you would go about it using different tools.
For evidence, two examples. One, Dr. Strangelove (etc. rest of title etc.) was based on a very serious book "Red Alert", and while the novel was good, the movie was excellent. The movie was better because Kubrick realized the sort of accidental and very black humor that was easily exploitable on film in a way that the book could not put across. As a point of reference, someone about the same time made a direct book-to-movie port of "Red Alert". It was decent, but nobody remembers it.
Example the second, Fight Club, a very good novel by Chuck Palahniuk, was I think improved upon in the film. Many of David Finscher's directorial trademarks helped to disorient the viewer in a way that I think Palahniuk was trying to directly explain, all using nothing but mood and deft editing. A direct port book-to-movie would have been terrible, instead of better.
Ultimately a story can be enriched by its introduction to celluloid (or, these days, virtual celluloid; Baudrillard is somewhere creaming his pants) so long as the director keeps in mind the advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the medium and also how those adv. and dis. compare to those of novel storytelling. The key is tha the director must at first be respectful of teh message(s) being conveyed by the original author and find ways to express them that are available in the new medium, especially to make up for those that are not. Mixed example: in Starship Troopers, (a movie I am heavily conflicted over), does a good job at least of building the federal society's parameters not through exposition, but rather through clever advert propaganda snippets. In a movie, the audience would have collectively suicided rather than listen to (rather than read) Heinlein's political musings.
I'll tell ya, I wouldn't cry a single tear if every interaction I had from now on was with a flesh-and-blood human being with no intervening wires or carrier waves (or pipes, or dumptrucks...whatever). I agree with your 'Web as library' analogy for the most part, but I can't help thinking that e-mail is the world's biggest post-office only because every 'letter' is written as if by a 5 year old in crayon. To say nothing of cell-phones, which, taken together with e-mail and IM, have completely and utterly destroyed everyone's sense of what information is urgent and what information is trivial, or that there once was a continuum between the two.
Besides, post-it tag is fun.