Your thesis, that the US has moral compunctions about dealing with certain nations while China does not, is naive. The US has been willing to deal with all manner of tyrant, and supports several rather evil dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, for the most obvious example). The US has also been willing to overthrow democratic governments in the support of US business interests (Guatemala for United Fruit, for example).
Now, there are countries the US doesn't deal with and China does, and vice versa, but to try to construe that situations as being due to the moral superiority of the West and/or the "DNA of China" is facile/stupid/oversimple/etc.
The reason the 1st Amendment also applies to state laws is in the 14th Amendment's first section, the due process clause.
The ACLU's justification is that they, and many many many reasonable (and, in fact, brilliant and informed) minds agree with the Supreme Courts repeated rulings that the 2nd Amendment is a collective right, not necessarily an individual right.
Just because reasonable people can disagree on the interpretation of the amendment, it does not follow in any way that the ACLU must support all possible interpretations, which is your implication.
The second amendment is mainly for the states to be allowed to maintain militias separate from the federal government, and that has never come under fire. Hence, there is no need for the ACLU to defend it.
Furthermore, (and I address this point because a lot of people make it) making it harder to get a gun, or impossible to get certain types of weapons, does NOT constitute a constitutional crisis. I doubt you think citizens should be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Doesn't that fall under the (ridiculously broad) interpretation of the 2nd Amendment that would allow ANY 'arms' to the public? There's no logic to most anti-gun-control arguments that is internally consistent and fits into a non-insane worldview.
If I am off the mark and you see the 2nd Amendment actually under fire in some way, lemme know. I am interested to see which Amendment will be the last one standing (just a little black humor, I am not really that pessimistic).
If you change your estimate of the Library of Congress to take up LESS space, you actually should multiply the number of them that fit in an elephant by two. So your upper boundary would be 52 kiloLoCs, and your lower boundary more like 17.24 KLCs
It's all about expecting people to use abilities they don't have, like the ability to fly, or the ability to understand something complex they know nothing about. But just for you, I'll do a political version:
People don't understand microwaves. Expecting them to use their understanding of microwaves would be like asking President Bush to use his understanding of diplomacy.
People do not understand microwaves. Berating them for not using their understanding of microwaves is like watching a Spiderman movie and saying "Why doesn't he just fly out of there?"
Your analogy to air would be reasonable, assuming you mean 'clean, breathable air.' No one saves up, and most people don't do much with their breathing to affect the amount of clean air available. If everyone were to start their own rainforest-tree-fueled miniature power plant, though, it would have an effect. That's why we have laws against such things, and why the Federation would regulate use of replicators somehow. Like laws against backyard smoke-belching power plants, these rules would hardly impact the daily life of the average person.
I won't bother to respond to your intentional obtuseness with regard to storing energy, but I will say that 'no money' doesn't mean there isn't, say, a limit on purchases that doesn't map directly to modern cash. Though we would tell a Stone Age person that our economy doesn't run on 'bartering,' but 'money,' there could be a comparable gap between money and whatever credit system available in Star Trek.
"And what happens when they've spent all that money, and have now learnt to sit and do nothing but live on handouts? And what have the poor done to deserve those giant handouts? They won't work to better themselves, they won't live within the law, they won't know how to spend the money wisely anyway.... Perhaps then the solution is to not be a single parent? It's not societies fault that women get pregnant to men they're not going to spend the rest of their lives with.... But for every poor person who wants to work to better himself, there are a thousand who want to wallow in self-pity and hold out the begging bowl. Society needs more of the former and less of the latter."
Your diatribe against poor people only shows me that you have little compassion and make the worst assumptions about people you don't know. It's classless and classist to try to use this kind of shit as an intelligent argument.
And if you think that every single parent in a society with a 50% divorce rate got was single when they got pregnant, you grossly misunderstand the world, and I pity you.
A single worst example is far inferior to a strong general case, but often tries to pass itself off as one. This is the problem.
"Your complaint that the poster gave the single worst example, implies that you think he should have made a weaker argument. How silly is that?"
It actually implies that he should have made a stronger, more general argument. What is under discussion is not an argument, actually, but an example. An argument would include logic, not description.
Because of our tax structure and other factors, class mobility in America is actually low. This is only going to get worse with the damage done to the estate tax by Republicans and useless Democrats. Right now, studies show, "parental income to be a better predictor of whether someone will be rich or poor in America than in Canada or much of Europe. In America about half of the income disparities in one generation are reflected in the next. In Canada and the Nordic countries that proportion is about a fifth." See this in the not-at-all-liberal magazine, The Economist: http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?st ory_id=7055911
She could make bad decisions 99% of the time and still be rich. That's because she is part of the American equivalent to the old landed gentry, and only a huge, HUGE effort can destroy the system of self-perpetuating wealth.
PS - The fact that she has so much DOES diminish what you have. Right now, let's say, she has (using big numbers to prove a positive, the scale is different) 90% of the wealth in America and you have 10 percent. No one else has any wealth. If 8/9 of her money were burned, suddenly you would control half the wealth in America, up from one tenth! Furthermore, right now she can use her wealth to buy fame, notoriety, and back the political candidates who, to get her money, are encouraged to support policies like "Tax everyone who does what mega-monkey does! because they don't work as hard!" and "Tax relief for the Hiltons! They support our economy more than mega-monkey!" etc. etc. And so you get screwed, by virtue of her relative wealth.
Reality is a more complex story, but the same economic motivations for the rich to screw the rest when they can, and our country's morality of "Poor people deserve it, anything for money is OK" means there's less and less social pressure for the rich to act benevolently.
There is a limited amount of wealth in our society. It is not an entirely zero-sum game, but it is true that the more wealth the richest have, the less the rest of us have. If you were to take half the money of the richest 10% of Americans and spread it out among the poorest 40%, you'd probably take one of the biggest steps in history towards eliminating poverty.
Not only does America have greater income inequality, but it matters more in America. There's no universal health care, social security is dependent upon you paying into it (something many people forget), single parents are expected to work full-time from the time their child is about 2 months old, etc. Basic benefits that everyone shares equally reduce effective income inequality, and there is a well-known link between desparate poverty and crime.
Furthermore, think of the social problems associated with income inequality. The rich can basically buy and sell poor people, you can see this with many of the semi-rich sex tourists in SE Asia, but the same kind of things are possible in America. The poor have no reason to trust people who run a society that is blatantly rigged against them. Et cetera et cetera
Well, the amniotic fluid is my main meaning, but it seems possible to me that there could be some viable stem cells in the actual fetus at that point, mainly because I have faith in science and I imagine that not too many people have gotten grants to study aborted fetuses to check.
In the case of 'wireless' phones, I doubt many people have ever considered the 'wireless' to actually refer to the method of charging in a cradle. I would go so far as to say that no one will be impressed by the weak definition of 'wireless' used here, since it could also refer to something like a charging phone or a battery in a bannery charger, since no wire goes into the actual devices being charged.
Induction power is not new, so the 'gets a boost' is surprisingly accurate (in that it doesn't promise something entirely new, just a step forward), but 'true wireless power,' if someone were to bring it to market, would really blow people's minds.
As long as the doctors keep all the money from the stem cells (as if it would be any other way), there will be no new incentive for women to get pregnant, and those same doctors already have a financial incentive to increase the number of abortions, so it's not like any NEW ethical dilemmas are likely
Taking some amniotic fluid will probably cause a slight increase of the risk to the mother or the fetus. There's a very, very easy way around this: harvest stem cells only in the case of abortions. Whether from the fetus or the amniotic fluid, it's just going to be biowaste anyway.
Regardless of your feelings on abortion, why should it bother anyone for stem cells to be retrieved from aborted fetuses? They are already going to be aborted, we just ought to get stem cells out of it so that we can help more people who are alive.
Would this not solve the problem immediately? If not, why the hell not? Perhaps the stem cells available at the stage in pregnancy when it can be detected (and thus, aborted) are of a lower quality than those from frozen embryos of only a cell or three?
There used to be a requirement for opposing viewpoints, but that, along with all other concern for the public good on the airwaves, was pretty much trashed under Reagan. That's why radio and TV stations with such blatant ideological biases (hint: they are owned by rich (mostly white and male) people, they are going to tend to support the interests of the rich) had such a boom in the 90's.
The end of the fairness doctrine, and regulations surrounding ad hominem attacks (these died in 2000), has pretty much made a mockery of the phrase "public airwaves."
If they sold them all at auction, there would be a shortage at the target price point, but not at the one settled on through the auction. However, selling them at auction would probably provoke a strong backlash instead of the huge wave of positive feelings Nintendo has benefited from. I doubt it would be enough to cancel out how much fun the Wii is, but in the long run good will and a good image is worth much more than selling their first million or so for an extra hundred bucks each.
Actually, it's worse. A rational consumer would be willing to pay less than a dime for a 1/1000+ chance of $100. You can always give away jelly, if you don't like it, and surely get more than a dime's worth of gratitude out of it.
There's no evidence to support the theory of a MS win either, really. The console hasn't done that well, globally speaking. It's certainly very far from a failure, but it's vulnerable enough that I think anyone who gets a wild hair to spout off some random sales order for the life of the consoles has about the same chance of being right. We don't have enough data now to go either way, but people being what they are, they'll pick one small data point and use it to make a huge leap of logic.
Some people would say that MS's huge lead will be enough to make them the most successful. Others would say that the surprising strength of Wii ebay sales and its innovative controller will give Nintendo the best position. Still others would point to the enormous (justifiable? i dunno) hype about the PS3 and figure that its power will lead inevitably to market success.
I don't think I could really denigrate the intelligence of anyone holding one of these beliefs, because there's not enough data to show that anyone is wrong, and people like to follow their hunches.
I can certainly see where you would have that opinion (that saleswise, 360>Wii, PS3=?). I tend to disagree, but it doesn't much matter. I just don't think it's reasonable to dismiss this article as just a product of/.'s anti-MS bias (which is how your comment came off), considering the strong anti-Sony bias also common in these parts. Feel free to dismiss the article because it's a total fluff piece, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Your thesis, that the US has moral compunctions about dealing with certain nations while China does not, is naive. The US has been willing to deal with all manner of tyrant, and supports several rather evil dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, for the most obvious example). The US has also been willing to overthrow democratic governments in the support of US business interests (Guatemala for United Fruit, for example).
Now, there are countries the US doesn't deal with and China does, and vice versa, but to try to construe that situations as being due to the moral superiority of the West and/or the "DNA of China" is facile/stupid/oversimple/etc.
The reason the 1st Amendment also applies to state laws is in the 14th Amendment's first section, the due process clause.
The ACLU's justification is that they, and many many many reasonable (and, in fact, brilliant and informed) minds agree with the Supreme Courts repeated rulings that the 2nd Amendment is a collective right, not necessarily an individual right.
Just because reasonable people can disagree on the interpretation of the amendment, it does not follow in any way that the ACLU must support all possible interpretations, which is your implication.
The second amendment is mainly for the states to be allowed to maintain militias separate from the federal government, and that has never come under fire. Hence, there is no need for the ACLU to defend it.
Furthermore, (and I address this point because a lot of people make it) making it harder to get a gun, or impossible to get certain types of weapons, does NOT constitute a constitutional crisis. I doubt you think citizens should be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Doesn't that fall under the (ridiculously broad) interpretation of the 2nd Amendment that would allow ANY 'arms' to the public? There's no logic to most anti-gun-control arguments that is internally consistent and fits into a non-insane worldview.
If I am off the mark and you see the 2nd Amendment actually under fire in some way, lemme know. I am interested to see which Amendment will be the last one standing (just a little black humor, I am not really that pessimistic).
If you change your estimate of the Library of Congress to take up LESS space, you actually should multiply the number of them that fit in an elephant by two. So your upper boundary would be 52 kiloLoCs, and your lower boundary more like 17.24 KLCs
It's all about expecting people to use abilities they don't have, like the ability to fly, or the ability to understand something complex they know nothing about. But just for you, I'll do a political version:
People don't understand microwaves. Expecting them to use their understanding of microwaves would be like asking President Bush to use his understanding of diplomacy.
People do not understand microwaves. Berating them for not using their understanding of microwaves is like watching a Spiderman movie and saying "Why doesn't he just fly out of there?"
Cut. Off. Your. Leg. For a reasonably healthy righty like myself, I might just need to go for my left arm.
I wish I knew as much about members of my society as you apparently do, and cared as little.
Your analogy to air would be reasonable, assuming you mean 'clean, breathable air.' No one saves up, and most people don't do much with their breathing to affect the amount of clean air available. If everyone were to start their own rainforest-tree-fueled miniature power plant, though, it would have an effect. That's why we have laws against such things, and why the Federation would regulate use of replicators somehow. Like laws against backyard smoke-belching power plants, these rules would hardly impact the daily life of the average person.
I won't bother to respond to your intentional obtuseness with regard to storing energy, but I will say that 'no money' doesn't mean there isn't, say, a limit on purchases that doesn't map directly to modern cash. Though we would tell a Stone Age person that our economy doesn't run on 'bartering,' but 'money,' there could be a comparable gap between money and whatever credit system available in Star Trek.
Energy supplies are the limit on replication, so there are actual scarcities, just not noticeable by someone who doesn't examine the overall economy.
"And what happens when they've spent all that money, and have now learnt to sit and do nothing but live on handouts? And what have the poor done to deserve those giant handouts? They won't work to better themselves, they won't live within the law, they won't know how to spend the money wisely anyway. ... ...
Perhaps then the solution is to not be a single parent? It's not societies fault that women get pregnant to men they're not going to spend the rest of their lives with.
But for every poor person who wants to work to better himself, there are a thousand who want to wallow in self-pity and hold out the begging bowl. Society needs more of the former and less of the latter."
Your diatribe against poor people only shows me that you have little compassion and make the worst assumptions about people you don't know. It's classless and classist to try to use this kind of shit as an intelligent argument.
And if you think that every single parent in a society with a 50% divorce rate got was single when they got pregnant, you grossly misunderstand the world, and I pity you.
A single worst example is far inferior to a strong general case, but often tries to pass itself off as one. This is the problem.
"Your complaint that the poster gave the single worst example, implies that you think he should have made a weaker argument. How silly is that?"
It actually implies that he should have made a stronger, more general argument. What is under discussion is not an argument, actually, but an example. An argument would include logic, not description.
Because of our tax structure and other factors, class mobility in America is actually low. This is only going to get worse with the damage done to the estate tax by Republicans and useless Democrats. Right now, studies show, "parental income to be a better predictor of whether someone will be rich or poor in America than in Canada or much of Europe. In America about half of the income disparities in one generation are reflected in the next. In Canada and the Nordic countries that proportion is about a fifth." See this in the not-at-all-liberal magazine, The Economist: http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?st ory_id=7055911
She could make bad decisions 99% of the time and still be rich. That's because she is part of the American equivalent to the old landed gentry, and only a huge, HUGE effort can destroy the system of self-perpetuating wealth.
PS - The fact that she has so much DOES diminish what you have. Right now, let's say, she has (using big numbers to prove a positive, the scale is different) 90% of the wealth in America and you have 10 percent. No one else has any wealth. If 8/9 of her money were burned, suddenly you would control half the wealth in America, up from one tenth! Furthermore, right now she can use her wealth to buy fame, notoriety, and back the political candidates who, to get her money, are encouraged to support policies like "Tax everyone who does what mega-monkey does! because they don't work as hard!" and "Tax relief for the Hiltons! They support our economy more than mega-monkey!" etc. etc. And so you get screwed, by virtue of her relative wealth.
Reality is a more complex story, but the same economic motivations for the rich to screw the rest when they can, and our country's morality of "Poor people deserve it, anything for money is OK" means there's less and less social pressure for the rich to act benevolently.
There is a limited amount of wealth in our society. It is not an entirely zero-sum game, but it is true that the more wealth the richest have, the less the rest of us have. If you were to take half the money of the richest 10% of Americans and spread it out among the poorest 40%, you'd probably take one of the biggest steps in history towards eliminating poverty.
Not only does America have greater income inequality, but it matters more in America. There's no universal health care, social security is dependent upon you paying into it (something many people forget), single parents are expected to work full-time from the time their child is about 2 months old, etc. Basic benefits that everyone shares equally reduce effective income inequality, and there is a well-known link between desparate poverty and crime.
Furthermore, think of the social problems associated with income inequality. The rich can basically buy and sell poor people, you can see this with many of the semi-rich sex tourists in SE Asia, but the same kind of things are possible in America. The poor have no reason to trust people who run a society that is blatantly rigged against them. Et cetera et cetera
Well, the amniotic fluid is my main meaning, but it seems possible to me that there could be some viable stem cells in the actual fetus at that point, mainly because I have faith in science and I imagine that not too many people have gotten grants to study aborted fetuses to check.
In the case of 'wireless' phones, I doubt many people have ever considered the 'wireless' to actually refer to the method of charging in a cradle. I would go so far as to say that no one will be impressed by the weak definition of 'wireless' used here, since it could also refer to something like a charging phone or a battery in a bannery charger, since no wire goes into the actual devices being charged.
Induction power is not new, so the 'gets a boost' is surprisingly accurate (in that it doesn't promise something entirely new, just a step forward), but 'true wireless power,' if someone were to bring it to market, would really blow people's minds.
As long as the doctors keep all the money from the stem cells (as if it would be any other way), there will be no new incentive for women to get pregnant, and those same doctors already have a financial incentive to increase the number of abortions, so it's not like any NEW ethical dilemmas are likely
Taking some amniotic fluid will probably cause a slight increase of the risk to the mother or the fetus. There's a very, very easy way around this: harvest stem cells only in the case of abortions. Whether from the fetus or the amniotic fluid, it's just going to be biowaste anyway.
Regardless of your feelings on abortion, why should it bother anyone for stem cells to be retrieved from aborted fetuses? They are already going to be aborted, we just ought to get stem cells out of it so that we can help more people who are alive.
Would this not solve the problem immediately? If not, why the hell not? Perhaps the stem cells available at the stage in pregnancy when it can be detected (and thus, aborted) are of a lower quality than those from frozen embryos of only a cell or three?
There used to be a requirement for opposing viewpoints, but that, along with all other concern for the public good on the airwaves, was pretty much trashed under Reagan. That's why radio and TV stations with such blatant ideological biases (hint: they are owned by rich (mostly white and male) people, they are going to tend to support the interests of the rich) had such a boom in the 90's.
The end of the fairness doctrine, and regulations surrounding ad hominem attacks (these died in 2000), has pretty much made a mockery of the phrase "public airwaves."
If they sold them all at auction, there would be a shortage at the target price point, but not at the one settled on through the auction. However, selling them at auction would probably provoke a strong backlash instead of the huge wave of positive feelings Nintendo has benefited from. I doubt it would be enough to cancel out how much fun the Wii is, but in the long run good will and a good image is worth much more than selling their first million or so for an extra hundred bucks each.
Surely you meant "this is capitalism, and rights are dependent upon wealth"?
Actually, it's worse. A rational consumer would be willing to pay less than a dime for a 1/1000+ chance of $100. You can always give away jelly, if you don't like it, and surely get more than a dime's worth of gratitude out of it.
There's no evidence to support the theory of a MS win either, really. The console hasn't done that well, globally speaking. It's certainly very far from a failure, but it's vulnerable enough that I think anyone who gets a wild hair to spout off some random sales order for the life of the consoles has about the same chance of being right. We don't have enough data now to go either way, but people being what they are, they'll pick one small data point and use it to make a huge leap of logic.
Some people would say that MS's huge lead will be enough to make them the most successful.
Others would say that the surprising strength of Wii ebay sales and its innovative controller will give Nintendo the best position.
Still others would point to the enormous (justifiable? i dunno) hype about the PS3 and figure that its power will lead inevitably to market success.
I don't think I could really denigrate the intelligence of anyone holding one of these beliefs, because there's not enough data to show that anyone is wrong, and people like to follow their hunches.
I can certainly see where you would have that opinion (that saleswise, 360>Wii, PS3=?). I tend to disagree, but it doesn't much matter. I just don't think it's reasonable to dismiss this article as just a product of /.'s anti-MS bias (which is how your comment came off), considering the strong anti-Sony bias also common in these parts. Feel free to dismiss the article because it's a total fluff piece, though.