>>However, I do think that the gov't should encourage breeding amongst people who are productive as they tend to produce more productive people.
Do you have any support for that belief? The majority of the highly-motivated people I know seem to come from mostly modest economic backgrounds.
Your logic here also assumes: 1. Gay people will enter reproductive heterosexual relationships if they're not allowed to marry. 2. Gay people are more "productive" than straight people on average, thus making it benefit society to encourage them to breed. 3. The government has any place at all performing that kind of social engineering.
The funny thing is, your argument here (as you've defined it) is more totalitarian than libertarian. You're recommending exactly the kind of "social engineering" that conservatives used to decry Democrats for.
The best part is that one of the questions on that survey was something like, "Fact or fiction: Vista will not be a stable platform until the SP1 update."
Looks like they were right about that one being "fiction" after all!
They're not. Ex-post-facto laws are explicitly forbidden by the Constitution. But the Supreme Court hasn't always held up this restriction, and since it's primarily intended to prevent after-the-fact punishment, after-the-fact immunity might be considered okay, especially by an extremely biased Supreme Court like the one we have now.
Yes, I do think that. Because it's well-known that self-censorship tends to be more thorough than external censorship.
Right now, the Chinese government can keep their restrictions very vague, and companies like Google will be forced to either filter anything that MIGHT piss off the Chinese government or else risk getting in big legal trouble.
If it was the actual government doing the filtering, it would be known exactly what the government didn't want people to know (not what Google thought the government didn't want people to know). They'd be under scrutiny for each term they blacklisted. And most importantly, internet users would be staring their oppression in the face, rather than having it hidden behind a shiny Google facade.
Last I heard, Sony was still losing a ton of money on every PS3 they sold. So even if this upgrade makes it significantly cheaper to manufacture PS3s, I don't see why that would lead to a drop in retail price.
If anything, I'd guess Sony wants to keep the PS3 at its current price, now that they've basically won the next-gen DVD skirmish. Plenty of people who want Blu-Ray players probably already see the PS3 as a good choice (just like I bought a PS2 to play DVDs back in the days of yore).
>>Seriously, it's important that we realize that religion makes people nuts.
Yeah, because the French Reign of Terror, the USSR, and Nazi Germany were all paragons of sanity and humanism.
>>As always, the best tool is ridicule.
Maybe the best tool is TOLERANCE of the kind you're accusing Muslims of not having? Cutting the "us vs. them" rhetoric that's responsible for all this zealotry in the first place? Realizing that differing metaphysical beliefs shouldn't preclude peaceful coexistence?
Oh, sorry, I forgot. The 90% of the world that believes in god is all crazy, and atheists with mod points are the only ones who see through the bullshit.
>>Best way to prevent this inevitable evil? Force the infrastructure to become a shared resource of multiple companies by making it economically less efficient for all of them not to inter-operate.
Fortunately, part of Google's current "sexiness" comes from them embracing various standards and open-source projects that allow them to "interoperate", whereas Microsoft famously tries to hold on to its "infrastructural lock-in" with stuff like MS Office document formats and file-system formats.
>>So far as laws against Sodomy and Suicide, and unenforceable laws is concerned, the answer is that they're unenforceable and consequently irrelevant to this discussion.
Our current immigration laws ARE unenforceable. Our economy is currently dependent upon having a ton of illegal immigrant workers. Moreover, much like those sodomy laws, they've never BEEN enforced.
>>Furthermore, I don't really understand how you can call a nation that accepts people from literally every country on the planet as being in any way racist.
Granted, this site is hardly unbiased, but it's hard to argue that before 50 years ago our immigration laws were anything but racist. Thus, when people start bringing racism into immigration debates, it might be a good idea to research and consider the history of their argument rather than dismiss it out of hand (even if they don't articulate the issue very well).
>>What I'm trying to get across is that laws will not get changed in any intelligent way unless we stop calling each other names, stop trying to scare each other, and look at what's really going on.
And what I'm trying to get across is that sometimes issues are more subtle than you might initially think, and that what you consider "calling names" might have some actual basis in reality.
To bring this back to stem cells - it's clearly true that right now, nobody is killing fetuses specifically to harvest stem cells. But what if researchers found a miracle cure for, say, cancer that required non-immortalized fetal stem cells? At that point, there's probably a lot more demand for stem cells than can be provided by donated aborted fetuses, and we're stuck with a black market for cloned or (more gruesomely) specifically harvested fetuses. This is the long-term fear when it comes to fetal stem cells, and it's a fear you'd do better to address than to dismiss as hysteria, even when it's expressed in a shorthand manner like "stem cell research kills babies."
>>Take illegal immigration. As soon as anyone brings up the idea of enforcing the law as written, some asshole immediately starts crying "racism! racism!". At that point, any rational discussion becomes impossible, because anyone who believes we should enforce our own laws has now been labeled a bigot. Doesn't matter what the facts are any longer.
Well, as a parallel example, some states still have anti-sodomy laws on the record. If you were to recommend "enforcing those laws as written," don't you think people would be right to decry you as anti-gay?
The laws already on the record aren't automatically morally neutral. They may very well be racist laws. You certainly don't have to try too hard to find laws that WERE explicitly racist in our nation's recent history. If you're going to argue in favor of current immigration policy, you're going to have to come up with a better argument for why the current laws are acceptable than merely that they're the current laws.
>>The way I see it is: If the content is so terrible, don't download it. As you will not be infringing on anyone's copyright, you will not get sued.
The problem (at least according to one semi-conspiracy-theory) is that there's lots of GOOD music on those Big 4 labels as well, but the labels don't respect what they "own." They'd much rather have people encountering music through avenues they basically own, like ClearChannel radio and MTV and big chain record stores. Why? Because bands that become popular on their merits will eventually figure out they can do without the labels, like Radiohead did, whereas artists that are totally reliant on the industry's marketing (like Britney Spears) aren't likely to stray from the flock.
>>I also don't see that universities need to cover for students engaging in copyright infringement.
The issue is that the RIAA isn't just using due process to get colleges to turn over IP records. They're trying to strong-arm universities into installing programs to monitor their students' internet downloads. For a lot of universities, this is seen as a bad idea on principle, since they want to at least seem "pro-free-speech." (They've got the free-speech zones and everything!)
Basically, Obama says that Hillary Clinton's push for universal health care early in Bill Clinton's administration failed largely because the Clintons grabbed a group of smart policy people and had them draw up a plan behind closed doors. This allowed the pharmaceutical and insurance companies to start spending millions with scare-tactic advertisements saying the government wanted to take away their medicine and kill their puppies. Because nobody outside the administration saw the policy being made, people fell for it. Obama says he'd instead bring everyone together (insurance companies, doctors, unions, etc.) for a very public discussion of the issues.
So in this case, he's arguing that you need transparency in order to successfully MAKE the law, and to get the American people on board. You can debate whether he's being too optimistic here, but he's definitely not just handwaving and muttering "transparency" like a buzzword.
>>Therefore, in a real free market, producers bear the cost of the societal problems they cause (pollution, etc.), rather than that burden being borne by the taxpayers. Is there anything wrong with that?
Well, yeah - it doesn't work.
Ron Paul's page on the issue makes it sound like he thinks every environmental danger is like an oil spill - you "pollute" someone else's property, and you should have to pay for it. What about CO2 production from factories and cars? If I buy a Hummer do I owe everyone in the world.03 cents for the pollution I've added to the air they breathe? If I buy a big tract of forest and chop it down, do I owe the entire nation money because I've deprived them of oxygen? If I waste our limited natural gas reserves, do I owe money to people 200 years in the future from when we run out of natural gas? If companies contribute now to global warming, and in 50 years all the coastal cities in the world suffer massive destruction by flooding... what then? Those companies get sued and go bankrupt, and that makes it okay?
And if the answer is "yes" to ALL of these, how is the government that assures these payments any less restrictive than a government whose environmental policies aren't theoretically based on these economic principles?
Environmental issues are global and long-term. "Market-based solutions" to them require an omniscient and omnipotent government keeping track of myriad factors.
I know this is hard to hear, but Paul won't win because most people don't want him to win.
A lot of his supporters seem to be under the impression that if we switched to a runoff-voting system, Ron Paul would jump to the majority position. I really don't think this is the case. He's a libertarian in some very satisfying ways, but his social conservatism alone would keep me from voting for him, and his positions on many other issues would drive off tons of other voters.
How many voters do you think want to abolish the DOE, bring all our troops home NOW (possibly leaving Iraq to dissolve into even worse chaos), repeal the Brady Bill and other gun-control laws, etc.? I know you personally may agree with all those positions, as may many on Slashdot, but do you think the majority of American voters are with Ron?
I agree that the electoral system needs reform, but saying that Ron Paul in particular only has no chance because people don't believe hard enough is misleading. He doesn't have any chance because most people don't agree with him.
THAT guy was "foiled" because he was extra-special dumb. He was trying to light his shoe IN THE SEAT OF THE PLANE. All he had to do was go in the bathroom - worst case scenario, the smoke alarm goes off and they think he's smoking in there.
Remember when that idiot put a bomb in his shoe and tried to blow up a plane? Ever wonder how many other idiots would have copied this brilliant idea if security DIDN'T make a show of inspecting shoes? Ever wonder if maybe a few of them would have succeeded?
I dunno, I guess I need some of that psychological help you were recommending.
>>Besides, if your enemy expects your robots to defeat their army, what would be the point of fighting them in the first place? Attacking civilians seems a more logical step...
I'd think this would be pretty easy to figure out, given the current world stage. Robot armies are great for invading foreign countries that don't pose any actual threat to the invaders, like Iraq.
Imagine if Bush had a robot army right now. Many fewer U.S. casualties, and also (if they nail this robot ethics thing) fewer egregious cases of U.S. soldiers raping, torturing and murdering innocent Iraqis.
Slashdot Mirror
>>However, I do think that the gov't should encourage breeding amongst people who are productive as they tend to produce more productive people.
Do you have any support for that belief? The majority of the highly-motivated people I know seem to come from mostly modest economic backgrounds.
Your logic here also assumes:
1. Gay people will enter reproductive heterosexual relationships if they're not allowed to marry.
2. Gay people are more "productive" than straight people on average, thus making it benefit society to encourage them to breed.
3. The government has any place at all performing that kind of social engineering.
The funny thing is, your argument here (as you've defined it) is more totalitarian than libertarian. You're recommending exactly the kind of "social engineering" that conservatives used to decry Democrats for.
The best part is that one of the questions on that survey was something like, "Fact or fiction: Vista will not be a stable platform until the SP1 update."
Looks like they were right about that one being "fiction" after all!
Guess what, you (apparently) get paid RIGHT AWAY for your work, not in royalties over a period of years.
Fifty years is more than long enough, but that should be whether the artist is alive or not.
They're not. Ex-post-facto laws are explicitly forbidden by the Constitution. But the Supreme Court hasn't always held up this restriction, and since it's primarily intended to prevent after-the-fact punishment, after-the-fact immunity might be considered okay, especially by an extremely biased Supreme Court like the one we have now.
Yes, I do think that. Because it's well-known that self-censorship tends to be more thorough than external censorship.
Right now, the Chinese government can keep their restrictions very vague, and companies like Google will be forced to either filter anything that MIGHT piss off the Chinese government or else risk getting in big legal trouble.
If it was the actual government doing the filtering, it would be known exactly what the government didn't want people to know (not what Google thought the government didn't want people to know). They'd be under scrutiny for each term they blacklisted. And most importantly, internet users would be staring their oppression in the face, rather than having it hidden behind a shiny Google facade.
Last I heard, Sony was still losing a ton of money on every PS3 they sold. So even if this upgrade makes it significantly cheaper to manufacture PS3s, I don't see why that would lead to a drop in retail price.
If anything, I'd guess Sony wants to keep the PS3 at its current price, now that they've basically won the next-gen DVD skirmish. Plenty of people who want Blu-Ray players probably already see the PS3 as a good choice (just like I bought a PS2 to play DVDs back in the days of yore).
>>Seriously, it's important that we realize that religion makes people nuts.
Yeah, because the French Reign of Terror, the USSR, and Nazi Germany were all paragons of sanity and humanism.
>>As always, the best tool is ridicule.
Maybe the best tool is TOLERANCE of the kind you're accusing Muslims of not having? Cutting the "us vs. them" rhetoric that's responsible for all this zealotry in the first place? Realizing that differing metaphysical beliefs shouldn't preclude peaceful coexistence?
Oh, sorry, I forgot. The 90% of the world that believes in god is all crazy, and atheists with mod points are the only ones who see through the bullshit.
>>Mod points wasted. AAAL... And here we have it, folks, proof that NOBODY reads any fine print you append to an electronic communication.
http://www.antiqueathlete.com/penn-state-football.jpg
N/T
>>Best way to prevent this inevitable evil? Force the infrastructure to become a shared resource of multiple companies by making it economically less efficient for all of them not to inter-operate.
Fortunately, part of Google's current "sexiness" comes from them embracing various standards and open-source projects that allow them to "interoperate", whereas Microsoft famously tries to hold on to its "infrastructural lock-in" with stuff like MS Office document formats and file-system formats.
If it was Saturday we Hasidic Jews couldn't turn on our TVs, you insensitive clod!
>>So far as laws against Sodomy and Suicide, and unenforceable laws is concerned, the answer is that they're unenforceable and consequently irrelevant to this discussion.
Our current immigration laws ARE unenforceable. Our economy is currently dependent upon having a ton of illegal immigrant workers. Moreover, much like those sodomy laws, they've never BEEN enforced.
>>Furthermore, I don't really understand how you can call a nation that accepts people from literally every country on the planet as being in any way racist.
http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/USMigrat.html
Granted, this site is hardly unbiased, but it's hard to argue that before 50 years ago our immigration laws were anything but racist. Thus, when people start bringing racism into immigration debates, it might be a good idea to research and consider the history of their argument rather than dismiss it out of hand (even if they don't articulate the issue very well).
>>What I'm trying to get across is that laws will not get changed in any intelligent way unless we stop calling each other names, stop trying to scare each other, and look at what's really going on.
And what I'm trying to get across is that sometimes issues are more subtle than you might initially think, and that what you consider "calling names" might have some actual basis in reality.
To bring this back to stem cells - it's clearly true that right now, nobody is killing fetuses specifically to harvest stem cells. But what if researchers found a miracle cure for, say, cancer that required non-immortalized fetal stem cells? At that point, there's probably a lot more demand for stem cells than can be provided by donated aborted fetuses, and we're stuck with a black market for cloned or (more gruesomely) specifically harvested fetuses. This is the long-term fear when it comes to fetal stem cells, and it's a fear you'd do better to address than to dismiss as hysteria, even when it's expressed in a shorthand manner like "stem cell research kills babies."
>>Take illegal immigration. As soon as anyone brings up the idea of enforcing the law as written, some asshole immediately starts crying "racism! racism!". At that point, any rational discussion becomes impossible, because anyone who believes we should enforce our own laws has now been labeled a bigot. Doesn't matter what the facts are any longer.
Well, as a parallel example, some states still have anti-sodomy laws on the record. If you were to recommend "enforcing those laws as written," don't you think people would be right to decry you as anti-gay?
The laws already on the record aren't automatically morally neutral. They may very well be racist laws. You certainly don't have to try too hard to find laws that WERE explicitly racist in our nation's recent history. If you're going to argue in favor of current immigration policy, you're going to have to come up with a better argument for why the current laws are acceptable than merely that they're the current laws.
>>The way I see it is: If the content is so terrible, don't download it. As you will not be infringing on anyone's copyright, you will not get sued.
The problem (at least according to one semi-conspiracy-theory) is that there's lots of GOOD music on those Big 4 labels as well, but the labels don't respect what they "own." They'd much rather have people encountering music through avenues they basically own, like ClearChannel radio and MTV and big chain record stores. Why? Because bands that become popular on their merits will eventually figure out they can do without the labels, like Radiohead did, whereas artists that are totally reliant on the industry's marketing (like Britney Spears) aren't likely to stray from the flock.
>>I also don't see that universities need to cover for students engaging in copyright infringement.
The issue is that the RIAA isn't just using due process to get colleges to turn over IP records. They're trying to strong-arm universities into installing programs to monitor their students' internet downloads. For a lot of universities, this is seen as a bad idea on principle, since they want to at least seem "pro-free-speech." (They've got the free-speech zones and everything!)
>>Ditto for health care. Only a change of law will fix that - not transparency.
At least on this one, Obama had a pretty clear and well-stated argument that transparency IS necessary.
Here's the Youtube link (it's either this one or the second half): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nnj7r1wCD4
Basically, Obama says that Hillary Clinton's push for universal health care early in Bill Clinton's administration failed largely because the Clintons grabbed a group of smart policy people and had them draw up a plan behind closed doors. This allowed the pharmaceutical and insurance companies to start spending millions with scare-tactic advertisements saying the government wanted to take away their medicine and kill their puppies. Because nobody outside the administration saw the policy being made, people fell for it. Obama says he'd instead bring everyone together (insurance companies, doctors, unions, etc.) for a very public discussion of the issues.
So in this case, he's arguing that you need transparency in order to successfully MAKE the law, and to get the American people on board. You can debate whether he's being too optimistic here, but he's definitely not just handwaving and muttering "transparency" like a buzzword.
>>Therefore, in a real free market, producers bear the cost of the societal problems they cause (pollution, etc.), rather than that burden being borne by the taxpayers. Is there anything wrong with that?
.03 cents for the pollution I've added to the air they breathe? If I buy a big tract of forest and chop it down, do I owe the entire nation money because I've deprived them of oxygen? If I waste our limited natural gas reserves, do I owe money to people 200 years in the future from when we run out of natural gas? If companies contribute now to global warming, and in 50 years all the coastal cities in the world suffer massive destruction by flooding... what then? Those companies get sued and go bankrupt, and that makes it okay?
Well, yeah - it doesn't work.
Ron Paul's page on the issue makes it sound like he thinks every environmental danger is like an oil spill - you "pollute" someone else's property, and you should have to pay for it. What about CO2 production from factories and cars? If I buy a Hummer do I owe everyone in the world
And if the answer is "yes" to ALL of these, how is the government that assures these payments any less restrictive than a government whose environmental policies aren't theoretically based on these economic principles?
Environmental issues are global and long-term. "Market-based solutions" to them require an omniscient and omnipotent government keeping track of myriad factors.
I know this is hard to hear, but Paul won't win because most people don't want him to win.
A lot of his supporters seem to be under the impression that if we switched to a runoff-voting system, Ron Paul would jump to the majority position. I really don't think this is the case. He's a libertarian in some very satisfying ways, but his social conservatism alone would keep me from voting for him, and his positions on many other issues would drive off tons of other voters.
How many voters do you think want to abolish the DOE, bring all our troops home NOW (possibly leaving Iraq to dissolve into even worse chaos), repeal the Brady Bill and other gun-control laws, etc.? I know you personally may agree with all those positions, as may many on Slashdot, but do you think the majority of American voters are with Ron?
I agree that the electoral system needs reform, but saying that Ron Paul in particular only has no chance because people don't believe hard enough is misleading. He doesn't have any chance because most people don't agree with him.
>>Right now Apple needs a rival.
But surely nobody can hope to rival Apple's mighty 0.1% market share!
THAT guy was "foiled" because he was extra-special dumb. He was trying to light his shoe IN THE SEAT OF THE PLANE. All he had to do was go in the bathroom - worst case scenario, the smoke alarm goes off and they think he's smoking in there.
Remember when that idiot put a bomb in his shoe and tried to blow up a plane? Ever wonder how many other idiots would have copied this brilliant idea if security DIDN'T make a show of inspecting shoes? Ever wonder if maybe a few of them would have succeeded?
I dunno, I guess I need some of that psychological help you were recommending.
Well, you've apparently got lies built right into your name - not a bad start!
>>Besides, if your enemy expects your robots to defeat their army, what would be the point of fighting them in the first place? Attacking civilians seems a more logical step...
I'd think this would be pretty easy to figure out, given the current world stage. Robot armies are great for invading foreign countries that don't pose any actual threat to the invaders, like Iraq.
Imagine if Bush had a robot army right now. Many fewer U.S. casualties, and also (if they nail this robot ethics thing) fewer egregious cases of U.S. soldiers raping, torturing and murdering innocent Iraqis.
No problem, we'll just switch to gloating about how you pay a surcharge on books and stuff for no good reason now!
I find it hilarious that you think the second option was my "dream solution."