The Federal government is a creature of the states, and the state governments elect the chief executive of the federal government that they created together.
The problem, of course, is that when the Federal government has so much direct power over individuals, superseding that of the states, those individuals have a much higher interest in who is President. Maybe in 1800 it was a decent system, but now? The Electoral college is a useless relic of a past time and needs to be excised. The President and VP should be elected by direct popular vote.
Holy shit, so because I was *slightly* wrong about Ghandi means that stealing people's IP is right? Good thing you have it all fucking figured out.
Calm down, dude. All he did was point out that your Gandhi analogy was false. He didn't say that it disproved your point about IP law. You should be grateful that he politely corrected you, so that next time you can write a better post, instead of being an asshole about it.
This is a really, really long reply, because I like to pick apart everything people say, so please forgive me in advance.
That's the funniest quote I've ever heard. The civil liberties of our citizens are BASED on religion.
No, they're based on the concepts that theocracies are inherently abusive systems of government, and that freedom is the best basis for a society. Jefferson et. al. took their lessons from the previous few hundred years of European theocracies perpetrating all sorts of horrible nastiness because of religious differences.
The arguments employed for the separation from England and for the Bill of Rights are entirely theological.
Some of them, perhaps. But the best and strongest arguments have always been that it makes for a better society for everyone if the people cannot use the law to impose their religious beliefs upon one another.
In fact, the non-establishment of religion clause was designed specifically by a Baptist in order to make discipling others easier.
James Madison drafted the First Amendment, and he appears to have been a particularly religious man. Nonetheless, he understood the danger of governmentalized religion, and drafted the First Amendment specifically to prohibit it. Can you cite something indicating that he drafted it so that he could more easily convert people (assuming that's what you mean by "discipling," since "disciple" is not a verb)?
The freedom of religion is based entirely on Christian arguments and foundations.
Perhaps you can reference these for me; I've heard this claim before but never seen it actually backed up. Do you mean, it was based on arguments made by Christians, or do you mean it's based on the Bible?
The First Amendment certainly does not say that law should not be based on religious principle. On that account, none of our laws would have ever been made.
Like the laws saying that slavery was outlawed? The Bible approved of slavery. Jesus had no complaint about it. So exactly which religious principle is the 13th Amendment based on?
How about intellectual property law? That has no basis in religion; it was basically invented with the Statute of Anne so that the Crown of England could keep control over the new technology of printing.
In fact, it is impossible to separate theology from any endeavor without actively promoting atheism or secular humanism
What's wrong with secular humanism? God forbid we base our society on the principles of equality, justice, and dignity, instead of mythical nonsense from nomadic wandering tribes of two millennia past.
(which, although it is arguable whether they are religions, do have specific religious beliefs).
If atheists have religious beliefs, then being healthy is a form of disease.
If God is real, then to ignore Him in making law would be foolishness.
Since there have been more than four thousand distinct deities proposed since the dawn of civilization, it would be foolishness to ignore any of them -- yet we ignore them all except Jehovah in this country. What is the sound logical basis for this? (There isn't one. The practical basis is that 80% of Americans are Christians or Catholics.) Clearly we need to make laws that pay attention to the strictures of Allah, Zeus, Odin, Ahura Mazda, etc.
The purpose of the first amendment is not to get God out of law, but to keep human institutions -- i.e. establishments of religion -- from taking the role of God.
Once again, no. The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government (and by extension, a religious majority) from oppressing others based on their religious beliefs. Religious as some of the Founding Father
It's no longer viewed as something special in society that a man and a woman comes together for life to have children and raise a family.
Basically what you're saying is, "If gays get to marry, hetero couples will get upset that what was once their privilege" (whatever happened to equal protection under the law?) "has now been extended to people who are Not Like Them."
In case you didn't notice, homosexual couples are completely unable to have children of their own, even theoretically.
If "of their own," you mean "with half of the child's genetic material contributed by each parent," then that's true... for now. Research has long been underway to figure out how to combine two eggs or two sperm to produce a viable zygote. What happens then, when a same-sex couple can produce viable offspring?
However it's entirely possible (and in fact happens all the time) for a lesbian couple to have one partner impregnated with donor sperm. How is this any different than a man-woman pairing, where the man is sterile, and so they get donor sperm for the woman?
As for man-man pairings, there's two possibilities: Finding a surrogate mother that one of the men can impregnate, or adopting a child. How is the former any different than a man-woman pairing where the woman is sterile, so they get a surrogate mother to bear the father's child? How is the latter any different than a man-woman pairing where both are sterile, and they adopt?
The only way these situations are "different" is in who ends up raising them. The biological questions are irrelevant.
It is my contention that we are made to have a father and mother raise us.
Made? By who? God? Religion has no place in this debate; you do not get to decide the civil liberties of our citizens based on your religion. See the First Amendment.
If not by God, then perhaps you mean that evolution brought us to a state where it's best for the survival of the species for a father and mother to raise us... but other factors (namely technology) have so vastly improved our survival ability, that being raised by one man and one woman is irrelevant by comparison.
You would probably be appalled to discover that in most "primitive" cultures, much closer to a state of nature (without all this technological and sociological interference), the idea of one man-one woman being entirely responsible for raising a child is quite rare.
While some people do not have a father and mother due to tragedy, it is appalling to me that people would choose to not have a father and mother for their child.
Why? Has it been demonstrated that children raised by two same-sex parents are worse off than children raised by opposite-sex parents? As far as I know, the research that has been done into the field has generally shown no correlation between the "quality" of the child care and the genders of the parents.
The cause of procreation is one of the chief reasons for the institution of marriage, or at least for the valuing of the institution of marriage.
It always had been the chief reason, because it allowed societies to keep their birth rate high to offset the possibilities of war, famine, plague, etc. In a modern Western country like the U.S., we have essentially no reason to worry about losing a large percentage of our population. At least, not in a way that restricting "marriage" to hetero couples would affect.
It sounds to me like you're just emotionally attached to the word "marriage." If a homosexual couple wanted to have all the same rights and privileges as a hetero couple, but it was instead called (for example) a "civil union" instead of "marriage," would you be okay with that? Or do you simply object to the idea of homosexual couples having any rights, like power of attorney, inheritance rights, joint property rights, hospital visitation rights, etc.?
What if a hetero couple has children, and then one of the parents realizes they're gay? Should they lose all rights to see or raise their child?
In general, a private citizen wouldn't have much need for the information so releasing to the public would essentially benefit a very small set of people/companies.
On the other hand, NOT releasing to the public essentially benefits nobody. If they're already collecting it, what disadvantage is there to releasing it?
Re:The logistics of building the Death Star
on
Star Wars Minutiae
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I am so tired of this carbon bias on slashdot!:)
Well what do you expect? Slashdot is entirely populated with carbon-biased lifeforms!
No, I think homosexual marriage would weaken families.
Which families would it weaken?
- A family consisting of two homosexual lovers and no children;
- A family consisting of two homosexual lovers and one or more children;
- A family consisting of two heterosexual lovers and no children;
- A family consisting of two heterosexual lovers and one or more children;
For each case, explain why the answer is "yes" or "no," and what exactly it means to "weaken families." I'm married (to a woman; we have a son). Please explain how allowing homosexuals to marry would affect our marriage.
I'm asking this because I often see the assertion that allowing homosexuals to marry and have the same rights as legally married heterosexual couples would "weaken marriage," "damage the institution of marriage," "hurt families," or other similar claims, and I have yet to get a straight answer (no pun intended) about what this "weakening" or "damage" would precisely mean, and why it would come about.
Cars are not analogous to computers. Sure, you can certainly draw some parallels, but how about this:
Cars have not been able to do much of anything new for 90 years. You drive them. That's it.
Computers can do new things every other week. (Well, they've always been "able" to do it, but if nobody has written software to do that thing, then it effectively can't be done.) The interfaces for these things must be written anew, whereas the interface for using a car has been fundamentally the same since inception. (For computers, I don't mean the keyboard or mouse; I mean the way you interact with the program.) There are programs that do radically different things; the interface for Doom 3 is fundamentally different than the interface for Excel. The interface for a Porsche is not really different than the interface for a Pinto.
Cars have not increased in power by any significant degree for decades. Sure, at the high end there have been gains, but 99.9% of all people drive below the same maximum speed now that they did in 1960, and not just because of speed limit laws.
Every year, the average PC you can buy is significantly more powerful than the one before. A basic, $500 desktop machine bought in September 2004 is thousands of times more powerful, in every respect, than every single computer in the entire world, combined, from 1960.
There are quite a lot of laws governing how cars must be built and used, because of the potential for death and destruction when using them.
There are basically no laws (aside from environmental cleanup laws) about how to build a computer, and very few laws about how you can use a computer. Computers have a very low potential for causing death and destruction.
Ever seen that joke about how, if cars advanced as fast as computers, they'd cost 30 cents, get eighty trillion miles to the gallon, be able to travel at fifty times the speed of light, and would weigh no more than a penny? Yeah. That's a demonstration of exactly how non-analogous cars and computers are. So quit freakin' analogizing them!
Ah, you've never read Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.
And I can recommend against ever reading it. Campbell was insightful, but reading his writing style is like trying to strain molasses through a sieve. I can instead recommend The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler, which basically distills HWATF into its essence, and is a thousand times more readable.
But it didn't end the movie -- it just got them out of the frying pan and into the fire. They were surrounded by other fightercraft when they used Death Blossom, which was bad -- so they used Death Blossom and wiped out all the enemy ships.
Except then they were left helpless, without power, while the big mothership nearly smashed them to bits. They only narrowly escaped that, due to (as I recall) Grig's quick rewiring of the [insert technobabble here], which was hardly a deus ex machina, since Grig could reasonably be expected to be familiar with the ship's systems and how to jury-rig them in a pinch.
Even Death Blossom wasn't exactly a deus ex machina, because it had such a high price to use, and also required extremely precise timing. Any good deus ex machina will save the day no matter what the heroes do.:)
I want to see it, but I'm kind of afraid of a set malfunction when Alex initiates the Death Blossom, causing the entire audience to be vaporized. I'm also wondering how the hell they're going to simulate things like the Frontier and, well, flying through space!
Seriously, wasn't Death Blossom just the coolest thing ever when you first saw The Last Starfighter? All I know is, every single Lego spaceship that me and my friends built from that point on had a Death Blossom device somewhere on it. Some had several, because you can apparently never have too much firepower.
It kind of makes sense that the Anakin-ghost would manifest as he appeared when he was "whole", before the corruption of his spirit (and body) by the Dark Side.
It's a crappy change for a few reasons:
1) Luke wouldn't recognize young Anakin (although he's not a moron, he would probably be able to figure out who it's supposed to be).
2) Anakin turned back to the Light Side when he threw the Emperor down the shaft. Even if that one act didn't necessarily make up for years and years of horrible evil, it was his turning point. He should have appeared as he did when he was last good.
3) Sebastian Shaw died in 1994 and erasing part of his appearance in the movie is just plain insulting.
4) I seriously doubt that Lucas intended, in 1983, for that appearance -- of Anakin's ghost -- to ultimately be played by the young actor who would play Anakin in the prequels, 19 years down the line. My opinion is that this change was intended to act as a tie-in to the prequels, but it's a change that is unnecessary in any dramatic or storytelling sense, or even in a purely visual sense.
As far as I know, the Supreme Court has more than once ruled that political donations are protected speech -- to a degree. They've also ruled that the machinery of democracy requires that no one entity be allowed undue influence on who gets elected, which is why campaign contribution limits exist.
To get political donations outlawed (which I don't think is necessary; only individual donations from a living human should be allowed, none of this "corporation-as-individual-person" nonsense) would basically require a Constitutional amendment, and, uh, I'll go out on a limb and say that'll NEVER happen. Believe me, I'd love to be proved wrong.
Closed source software does generate more profit and jobs for certain sectors of the economy.
...at the expense of that money not being used in other sectors of the economy. Imagine you're a government, about to buy some software. You can buy the already available OSS solution, costing you $0 initially (of course, you have to pay for techs to implement the software, people to train everyone to use it, etc.). Or you can buy the closed source version, and spend $X million (plus paying for techs to implement the software, people to train everyone to use it, etc.).
In the first scenario, you still have $X million left over to spend on something else. In the second scenario, you do not. Even if the first scenario creates jobs for people to create the software you're buying, in the second, scenario, you can use that $X million to pay other people to create things anyway, cutting out an unnecessary middleman. Someone already mentioned the broken window fallacy, and you apparently have fallen right into it.
Also:
And the low TCO of linux obviously allows for fewer IT jobs.
This is a good thing. Ultimately, from an overall standpoint, we don't want to have to expend workers on maintenance tasks; ideally we want to reduce maintenance expenditures to a minimum (something technology can help with, over time), and have people working on creative tasks instead.
It's like complaining if someone invents a robot that can take the place of a garbageman. The guys who were hurling garbage around are now freed up for tasks which benefit society more. Yes, I understand that not every worker can be put into any random job, but there is a lot of flexibility in terms of what people are capable of doing. If technology allows us to get rid of jobs whose sole purpose is to allow the advancing, creative jobs to exist, then we can put more people into those creative jobs.
paying them my hard earned money for something they should be GIVING AWAY for free (it costs them nothing!)
It costs them time and effort (and the potential to get pregnant or contract an STD). When the day comes that a prostitute can have sex with an infinite number of men at once, with no additional effort, and she doesn't even have to know that it's happening, then maybe your analogy might make a little sense.
Yeah, I know, I'm responding to a guy named "irc.goatse.cx troll," but I figured that some idiot out there might say, "Well he does have a point..."
Is she going into pr0n? At least in that case, if she opens her mouth, it'll be for a good reason!
Even if she's opening her mouth for the aforementioned, er, "good reason," I don't think we can take the risk that she might actually say something instead, thus causing a total cockblock meltdown. I'm just sayin'.
There are exactly four reasons that the original Star Wars trilogy is remembered as a series of great films (quality varying a bit), rather than one really cool movie followed by two crappy sequels. The four reasons, in no particular order:
1) Irving Kirshner 2) Richard Marquand 3) Leigh Brackett 4) Lawrence Kasdan
Yes, I'm aware of the various rhetoric spewed by both sides, but claiming that OSS produces better software is reasonable. (Whether it's true is another story, but on the surface it's a reasonable thing to say.)
Emphasis added. I was saying that the OSS-is-better claim is not prima facie false, but it might be on further examination.
In other words, the reason why everyone complains about Microsoft's software has nothing to do with Microsoft's software. Well, at least you're being honest.
What? I didn't say that. The scorn is the response to the combination of bad software practices, arrogance, and monopolistic abuse. There are certainly crappy OSS projects out there, although whether or not OSS produces better or worse software is an entirely different debate.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad news today, guys. I got this email from Stephen King...
No, they're based on the concepts that theocracies are inherently abusive systems of government, and that freedom is the best basis for a society. Jefferson et. al. took their lessons from the previous few hundred years of European theocracies perpetrating all sorts of horrible nastiness because of religious differences.
Some of them, perhaps. But the best and strongest arguments have always been that it makes for a better society for everyone if the people cannot use the law to impose their religious beliefs upon one another.
James Madison drafted the First Amendment, and he appears to have been a particularly religious man. Nonetheless, he understood the danger of governmentalized religion, and drafted the First Amendment specifically to prohibit it. Can you cite something indicating that he drafted it so that he could more easily convert people (assuming that's what you mean by "discipling," since "disciple" is not a verb)?
Perhaps you can reference these for me; I've heard this claim before but never seen it actually backed up. Do you mean, it was based on arguments made by Christians, or do you mean it's based on the Bible?
Like the laws saying that slavery was outlawed? The Bible approved of slavery. Jesus had no complaint about it. So exactly which religious principle is the 13th Amendment based on?
How about intellectual property law? That has no basis in religion; it was basically invented with the Statute of Anne so that the Crown of England could keep control over the new technology of printing.
What's wrong with secular humanism? God forbid we base our society on the principles of equality, justice, and dignity, instead of mythical nonsense from nomadic wandering tribes of two millennia past.
If atheists have religious beliefs, then being healthy is a form of disease.
Since there have been more than four thousand distinct deities proposed since the dawn of civilization, it would be foolishness to ignore any of them -- yet we ignore them all except Jehovah in this country. What is the sound logical basis for this? (There isn't one. The practical basis is that 80% of Americans are Christians or Catholics.) Clearly we need to make laws that pay attention to the strictures of Allah, Zeus, Odin, Ahura Mazda, etc.
Once again, no. The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government (and by extension, a religious majority) from oppressing others based on their religious beliefs. Religious as some of the Founding Father
However it's entirely possible (and in fact happens all the time) for a lesbian couple to have one partner impregnated with donor sperm. How is this any different than a man-woman pairing, where the man is sterile, and so they get donor sperm for the woman?
As for man-man pairings, there's two possibilities: Finding a surrogate mother that one of the men can impregnate, or adopting a child. How is the former any different than a man-woman pairing where the woman is sterile, so they get a surrogate mother to bear the father's child? How is the latter any different than a man-woman pairing where both are sterile, and they adopt?
The only way these situations are "different" is in who ends up raising them. The biological questions are irrelevant.
Made? By who? God? Religion has no place in this debate; you do not get to decide the civil liberties of our citizens based on your religion. See the First Amendment.If not by God, then perhaps you mean that evolution brought us to a state where it's best for the survival of the species for a father and mother to raise us... but other factors (namely technology) have so vastly improved our survival ability, that being raised by one man and one woman is irrelevant by comparison.
You would probably be appalled to discover that in most "primitive" cultures, much closer to a state of nature (without all this technological and sociological interference), the idea of one man-one woman being entirely responsible for raising a child is quite rare.
Why? Has it been demonstrated that children raised by two same-sex parents are worse off than children raised by opposite-sex parents? As far as I know, the research that has been done into the field has generally shown no correlation between the "quality" of the child care and the genders of the parents. It always had been the chief reason, because it allowed societies to keep their birth rate high to offset the possibilities of war, famine, plague, etc. In a modern Western country like the U.S., we have essentially no reason to worry about losing a large percentage of our population. At least, not in a way that restricting "marriage" to hetero couples would affect.It sounds to me like you're just emotionally attached to the word "marriage." If a homosexual couple wanted to have all the same rights and privileges as a hetero couple, but it was instead called (for example) a "civil union" instead of "marriage," would you be okay with that? Or do you simply object to the idea of homosexual couples having any rights, like power of attorney, inheritance rights, joint property rights, hospital visitation rights, etc.?
What if a hetero couple has children, and then one of the parents realizes they're gay? Should they lose all rights to see or raise their child?
- A family consisting of two homosexual lovers and no children;
- A family consisting of two homosexual lovers and one or more children;
- A family consisting of two heterosexual lovers and no children;
- A family consisting of two heterosexual lovers and one or more children;
For each case, explain why the answer is "yes" or "no," and what exactly it means to "weaken families." I'm married (to a woman; we have a son). Please explain how allowing homosexuals to marry would affect our marriage.
I'm asking this because I often see the assertion that allowing homosexuals to marry and have the same rights as legally married heterosexual couples would "weaken marriage," "damage the institution of marriage," "hurt families," or other similar claims, and I have yet to get a straight answer (no pun intended) about what this "weakening" or "damage" would precisely mean, and why it would come about.
Cars have not been able to do much of anything new for 90 years. You drive them. That's it.
Computers can do new things every other week. (Well, they've always been "able" to do it, but if nobody has written software to do that thing, then it effectively can't be done.) The interfaces for these things must be written anew, whereas the interface for using a car has been fundamentally the same since inception. (For computers, I don't mean the keyboard or mouse; I mean the way you interact with the program.) There are programs that do radically different things; the interface for Doom 3 is fundamentally different than the interface for Excel. The interface for a Porsche is not really different than the interface for a Pinto.
Cars have not increased in power by any significant degree for decades. Sure, at the high end there have been gains, but 99.9% of all people drive below the same maximum speed now that they did in 1960, and not just because of speed limit laws.
Every year, the average PC you can buy is significantly more powerful than the one before. A basic, $500 desktop machine bought in September 2004 is thousands of times more powerful, in every respect, than every single computer in the entire world, combined, from 1960.
There are quite a lot of laws governing how cars must be built and used, because of the potential for death and destruction when using them.
There are basically no laws (aside from environmental cleanup laws) about how to build a computer, and very few laws about how you can use a computer. Computers have a very low potential for causing death and destruction.
Ever seen that joke about how, if cars advanced as fast as computers, they'd cost 30 cents, get eighty trillion miles to the gallon, be able to travel at fifty times the speed of light, and would weigh no more than a penny? Yeah. That's a demonstration of exactly how non-analogous cars and computers are. So quit freakin' analogizing them!
But it didn't end the movie -- it just got them out of the frying pan and into the fire. They were surrounded by other fightercraft when they used Death Blossom, which was bad -- so they used Death Blossom and wiped out all the enemy ships.
:)
Except then they were left helpless, without power, while the big mothership nearly smashed them to bits. They only narrowly escaped that, due to (as I recall) Grig's quick rewiring of the [insert technobabble here], which was hardly a deus ex machina, since Grig could reasonably be expected to be familiar with the ship's systems and how to jury-rig them in a pinch.
Even Death Blossom wasn't exactly a deus ex machina, because it had such a high price to use, and also required extremely precise timing. Any good deus ex machina will save the day no matter what the heroes do.
I want to see it, but I'm kind of afraid of a set malfunction when Alex initiates the Death Blossom, causing the entire audience to be vaporized. I'm also wondering how the hell they're going to simulate things like the Frontier and, well, flying through space!
Seriously, wasn't Death Blossom just the coolest thing ever when you first saw The Last Starfighter? All I know is, every single Lego spaceship that me and my friends built from that point on had a Death Blossom device somewhere on it. Some had several, because you can apparently never have too much firepower.
1) Luke wouldn't recognize young Anakin (although he's not a moron, he would probably be able to figure out who it's supposed to be).
2) Anakin turned back to the Light Side when he threw the Emperor down the shaft. Even if that one act didn't necessarily make up for years and years of horrible evil, it was his turning point. He should have appeared as he did when he was last good.
3) Sebastian Shaw died in 1994 and erasing part of his appearance in the movie is just plain insulting.
4) I seriously doubt that Lucas intended, in 1983, for that appearance -- of Anakin's ghost -- to ultimately be played by the young actor who would play Anakin in the prequels, 19 years down the line. My opinion is that this change was intended to act as a tie-in to the prequels, but it's a change that is unnecessary in any dramatic or storytelling sense, or even in a purely visual sense.
As far as I know, the Supreme Court has more than once ruled that political donations are protected speech -- to a degree. They've also ruled that the machinery of democracy requires that no one entity be allowed undue influence on who gets elected, which is why campaign contribution limits exist.
To get political donations outlawed (which I don't think is necessary; only individual donations from a living human should be allowed, none of this "corporation-as-individual-person" nonsense) would basically require a Constitutional amendment, and, uh, I'll go out on a limb and say that'll NEVER happen. Believe me, I'd love to be proved wrong.
In the first scenario, you still have $X million left over to spend on something else. In the second scenario, you do not. Even if the first scenario creates jobs for people to create the software you're buying, in the second, scenario, you can use that $X million to pay other people to create things anyway, cutting out an unnecessary middleman. Someone already mentioned the broken window fallacy, and you apparently have fallen right into it.
Also:
This is a good thing. Ultimately, from an overall standpoint, we don't want to have to expend workers on maintenance tasks; ideally we want to reduce maintenance expenditures to a minimum (something technology can help with, over time), and have people working on creative tasks instead.It's like complaining if someone invents a robot that can take the place of a garbageman. The guys who were hurling garbage around are now freed up for tasks which benefit society more. Yes, I understand that not every worker can be put into any random job, but there is a lot of flexibility in terms of what people are capable of doing. If technology allows us to get rid of jobs whose sole purpose is to allow the advancing, creative jobs to exist, then we can put more people into those creative jobs.
Yeah, I know, I'm responding to a guy named "irc.goatse.cx troll," but I figured that some idiot out there might say, "Well he does have a point..."
There are exactly four reasons that the original Star Wars trilogy is remembered as a series of great films (quality varying a bit), rather than one really cool movie followed by two crappy sequels. The four reasons, in no particular order:
1) Irving Kirshner
2) Richard Marquand
3) Leigh Brackett
4) Lawrence Kasdan
Illiterate cowardly scum, train thyself to read.