It's still wrong. For one thing, it's more like 6.697 now. More importantly, the zero on the end suggests two significant digits, which is much more accurate than your actual estimate. You should have written it as 6.4, or, preferably, 6.7.
Very true. One of the most pants-wettingly terrifying statistics I've heard in relation to it was that for every two Russians the Germans shot, another eleven appeared on the front. That sounds like something out of a zombie movie.
Hardly. First of all the "statistic" is - like 97.36% of them - clearly made up. The Soviets suffered around 10 million military casualties. If 11 times as many took their place, they would have had to have a standing army of 110 million. Their entire population in 1939 was 168 million, so those numbers don't seem very realistic.
The bigger point, though, is that it doesn't matter how many people show up a few months down the road to replace the ones you just shot. Eventually the enemy runs out of recruits. In the meantime you just have to focus on winning each individual battle, not defeating some never-ending zombie horde.
Thanks man... next time someone asks me why I oppose the criminalization of drugs, I'll just point them to that article. Sometimes reality provides it's own parody.
Yes, it is. Somewhat informal English, yes. To be completely correct I should have prepended "Have you" to the sentence
No, that doesn't even come close to describing what's wrong with your question. I would have made allowances for such a minor error.
Maybe you should avoid sarcastically calling other people "real intellectual giant[s]."
Why?
You made a sarcastic "analogy." I spit it back at you. Were you expecting a non-sarcastic response to your idiotic post?
Since I made a valid refutation to your.... "point"... yes, I certainly was expecting a serious response. You could have phrased it in a sarcastic way, if you so chose, as long as you made a valid argument.
You chose to do neither - your response to me wasn't "sarcastic" by any stretch of the imagination, nor did it add anything to the discussion. It consisted of three sentences; the first, a nonsensical question, the second, an irrelevant truism, and the third, a strange attempt at an insult. Which one of those was sarcastic? The question?
It is a sad but true thing that 3rd-world lives are not held in as high regard as 1st world lives. Look at Predator drone strikes: over 300 innocents killed. Do this in a 1st or 2nd world country and there would be more far more outage.
Garbage. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were killed in bombings of first-world nations during the second world war, with far less outrage. You have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm also severely limited by lack of money in my attempt to create a cold-fusion machine which uses kittens as a fuel source. If every slashdot user sends me $500, I'm sure I'll have it worked out in no time!
The reason your flat-earth analogy fails is because concepts like "good" and "bad" require a lot of extra context, whereas the shape of the earth is a testable claim which does not.
In order to assert that something is "good", you need to define an end-goal or purpose. If I'm trying to make new a recipe for banana bread and my stove explodes, well, that's bad. But if I'm trying to create a new military-grade explosive and get the same result, that might very well be good. Same goes for human morality - if we want to live in a stable, progressive society where all individuals enjoy the same rights and freedoms and can contribute to the society to the best of their abilities, then sexism, racism, and all other kinds of bigotry are "bad". On the other hand, if you want an introverted, tightly controlled society which is geared towards subjugating all other societies and cultures, then those values would be "good".
So yes, we CAN measure the "goodness" or "badness" of any given action just like we can measure the shape of the earth. The difference is that the shape of the earth is the same regardless of any goals, while morality has no meaning without them.
They didn't have to spend the money. He did not take the computers, nor did he tamper with them. They (the city) could have simply reset the passwords and moved on. Any decision to do something else was not Child's responsibility.
That's true. It's like when you set a building on fire, and people die by jumping from the top floor. They didn't HAVE to jump. They could have waited and hoped to be rescued before they burned to death. Clearly YOU can't be held responsible for their deaths.
Oh, no, your poor behavior has caused me to hurt my fist when I punched your face in for it. I guess I'll just have to punch some more!
The cost of prosecuting him is not to be counted against what he cost the city unless I get to charge you for hurting my fist when I punch you.
If you punch me because I was already attacking you, and you break your fist, you certainly CAN sure me for your medical bills. It works a bit different in a criminal trial - the government never attempts to recover the costs of your prosecution. However, that doesn't mean that the cost of the prosecution is zero, so if we're going to count all the damage he did it's certainly fair to include the legal costs.
Historical atrocities like the inquisition and such is one example of morals going from absolute to relative in which a religion was involved
Uh, no, the inquisition is an example of church morals operating on status quo. It didn't happen in isolation. You may also have heard of witch-hunts. Crusades. Priests in that era were essentially just another form of aristocracy - one that held more power than the actual rulers of some nations. If you think that the atrocities which they carried out were an example of "relative morals", then you haven't read your bible, and you certainly haven't studied the history of christianity.
As for whether moral relativism is a good idea or not, it's irrelevant. Moral relativism is a reality. All morals are formed by the individual - they just tend to be influenced by the society in which the person was raised. The fact that morals are relative doesn't mean that we have to tolerate them all equally, though. I think rape is wrong - if your moral code allows rape (as many religions did, and some still do), I really don't give a damn, I'm going to do whatever I can to stop you from acting on those morals. Relativity and equality are not the same thing.
The two examples are completely wrong. A better example is if I put a big white board on one side of my building and tell everyone to pick up a pen and write messages on it.
If that analogy makes you happier, sure. It doesn't change the meaning much, though, since it's still completely idiotic to hold one person responsible for the writings of another.
Now, if the person being libeled were to request that those claims be wiped off of my board, and I refused, then yes, I would expect to be sued.
I should add that a person further down offered a better analogy, having to do with telephone companies. You can look at his post, and then apply the same logic to the postal service, courier companies, public-access television networks, and a variety of other situations in which we wouldn't dream of holding the information provider responsible for the veracity of the information being relayed.
It's worse than that - if you own a house and someone spray-paints a libelous message on one of your walls, you could be held responsible. This ruling makes even UK libel laws seem sane in comparison.
True, a USB flash drive is good for carrying your own files around. But floppies, CD-R, and DVD-R have the advantage of being so cheap they're disposable, which lets you give a copy of a file to someone else.
If the file you want to give away can fit on a floppy, you're better off just e-mailing it.
You can use nLite to bundle the drivers right on to the installation CD. And seeing as how Microsoft is well on it's way to phasing out XP, I doubt they'll be interested in modifying the install process.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe FOX got it from a real news source, but I don't trust FOX.
That just means you're being brainwashed by a different news sources. You shouldn't trust ANY of them.
It's still wrong. For one thing, it's more like 6.697 now. More importantly, the zero on the end suggests two significant digits, which is much more accurate than your actual estimate. You should have written it as 6.4, or, preferably, 6.7.
Not universally, but a lot more girls are sporting bush than there was previously.
I haven't seen one since '98. If it's coming back into stile, it seems nobody's bothered to tell the women ....
Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather my women didn't remind me of prepubescent girls......
So stop picking up midgets.
Whoops. Thanks :)
Very true. One of the most pants-wettingly terrifying statistics I've heard in relation to it was that for every two Russians the Germans shot, another eleven appeared on the front. That sounds like something out of a zombie movie.
Hardly. First of all the "statistic" is - like 97.36% of them - clearly made up. The Soviets suffered around 10 million military casualties. If 11 times as many took their place, they would have had to have a standing army of 110 million. Their entire population in 1939 was 168 million, so those numbers don't seem very realistic.
The bigger point, though, is that it doesn't matter how many people show up a few months down the road to replace the ones you just shot. Eventually the enemy runs out of recruits. In the meantime you just have to focus on winning each individual battle, not defeating some never-ending zombie horde.
Thanks man ... next time someone asks me why I oppose the criminalization of drugs, I'll just point them to that article. Sometimes reality provides it's own parody.
and yet we still are looking for the expiration date..
I'm just guessing here, but you probably don't need to worry about it ....
Yes, it is. Somewhat informal English, yes. To be completely correct I should have prepended "Have you" to the sentence
No, that doesn't even come close to describing what's wrong with your question. I would have made allowances for such a minor error.
Maybe you should avoid sarcastically calling other people "real intellectual giant[s]."
Why?
You made a sarcastic "analogy." I spit it back at you. Were you expecting a non-sarcastic response to your idiotic post?
Since I made a valid refutation to your .... "point" ... yes, I certainly was expecting a serious response. You could have phrased it in a sarcastic way, if you so chose, as long as you made a valid argument.
You chose to do neither - your response to me wasn't "sarcastic" by any stretch of the imagination, nor did it add anything to the discussion. It consisted of three sentences; the first, a nonsensical question, the second, an irrelevant truism, and the third, a strange attempt at an insult. Which one of those was sarcastic? The question?
Ever smelled certain of the Great Lakes?
Is that even English?
They're not exactly an ocean.
It's called an "analogy", numbnuts.
Ah, yes: because pissing in the ocean is the same as shitting in your soup. You're a real intellectual giant, aren't you?
It is a sad but true thing that 3rd-world lives are not held in as high regard as 1st world lives. Look at Predator drone strikes: over 300 innocents killed. Do this in a 1st or 2nd world country and there would be more far more outage.
Garbage. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were killed in bombings of first-world nations during the second world war, with far less outrage. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Tesla: Nostradamus for geeks.
I'm also severely limited by lack of money in my attempt to create a cold-fusion machine which uses kittens as a fuel source. If every slashdot user sends me $500, I'm sure I'll have it worked out in no time!
The reason your flat-earth analogy fails is because concepts like "good" and "bad" require a lot of extra context, whereas the shape of the earth is a testable claim which does not.
In order to assert that something is "good", you need to define an end-goal or purpose. If I'm trying to make new a recipe for banana bread and my stove explodes, well, that's bad. But if I'm trying to create a new military-grade explosive and get the same result, that might very well be good. Same goes for human morality - if we want to live in a stable, progressive society where all individuals enjoy the same rights and freedoms and can contribute to the society to the best of their abilities, then sexism, racism, and all other kinds of bigotry are "bad". On the other hand, if you want an introverted, tightly controlled society which is geared towards subjugating all other societies and cultures, then those values would be "good".
So yes, we CAN measure the "goodness" or "badness" of any given action just like we can measure the shape of the earth. The difference is that the shape of the earth is the same regardless of any goals, while morality has no meaning without them.
I wish Al Qaeda would figure that out. Lawsuits are so much better than bullets ...
They didn't have to spend the money. He did not take the computers, nor did he tamper with them. They (the city) could have simply reset the passwords and moved on. Any decision to do something else was not Child's responsibility.
That's true. It's like when you set a building on fire, and people die by jumping from the top floor. They didn't HAVE to jump. They could have waited and hoped to be rescued before they burned to death. Clearly YOU can't be held responsible for their deaths.
Oh, no, your poor behavior has caused me to hurt my fist when I punched your face in for it. I guess I'll just have to punch some more!
The cost of prosecuting him is not to be counted against what he cost the city unless I get to charge you for hurting my fist when I punch you.
If you punch me because I was already attacking you, and you break your fist, you certainly CAN sure me for your medical bills. It works a bit different in a criminal trial - the government never attempts to recover the costs of your prosecution. However, that doesn't mean that the cost of the prosecution is zero, so if we're going to count all the damage he did it's certainly fair to include the legal costs.
Historical atrocities like the inquisition and such is one example of morals going from absolute to relative in which a religion was involved
Uh, no, the inquisition is an example of church morals operating on status quo. It didn't happen in isolation. You may also have heard of witch-hunts. Crusades. Priests in that era were essentially just another form of aristocracy - one that held more power than the actual rulers of some nations. If you think that the atrocities which they carried out were an example of "relative morals", then you haven't read your bible, and you certainly haven't studied the history of christianity.
As for whether moral relativism is a good idea or not, it's irrelevant. Moral relativism is a reality. All morals are formed by the individual - they just tend to be influenced by the society in which the person was raised. The fact that morals are relative doesn't mean that we have to tolerate them all equally, though. I think rape is wrong - if your moral code allows rape (as many religions did, and some still do), I really don't give a damn, I'm going to do whatever I can to stop you from acting on those morals. Relativity and equality are not the same thing.
If you put up a sign for the purpose of displaying a message, you become a distributor of said message
Ok, but google didn't put up a sign for the purpose of displaying a message - they put up a sign for the purpose of
letting others
display messages.
The postal services and private postal companies do not read every letter that comes in, so to expect them to filter them is silly.
Oh, ok, so all that google has to do is say "sorry, we don't read those messages", and they'll be fine, right?
Man, if you're not a lawyer already, you should definitely become one! Lionel Hutz would be jealous!
The two examples are completely wrong. A better example is if I put a big white board on one side of my building and tell everyone to pick up a pen and write messages on it.
If that analogy makes you happier, sure. It doesn't change the meaning much, though, since it's still completely idiotic to hold one person responsible for the writings of another.
Now, if the person being libeled were to request that those claims be wiped off of my board, and I refused, then yes, I would expect to be sued.
I should add that a person further down offered a better analogy, having to do with telephone companies. You can look at his post, and then apply the same logic to the postal service, courier companies, public-access television networks, and a variety of other situations in which we wouldn't dream of holding the information provider responsible for the veracity of the information being relayed.
You can live in a place where corporations can do anything and people can do nothing.
I'm pretty sure he doesn't live in China ....
It's worse than that - if you own a house and someone spray-paints a libelous message on one of your walls, you could be held responsible. This ruling makes even UK libel laws seem sane in comparison.
True, a USB flash drive is good for carrying your own files around. But floppies, CD-R, and DVD-R have the advantage of being so cheap they're disposable, which lets you give a copy of a file to someone else.
If the file you want to give away can fit on a floppy, you're better off just e-mailing it.
You can use nLite to bundle the drivers right on to the installation CD. And seeing as how Microsoft is well on it's way to phasing out XP, I doubt they'll be interested in modifying the install process.