The issue that the posters are alluding to is social justice and economic equity. Whether you hoard or not, when title to wealth accumulates with individuals while leaving other people to live hand-to-mouth, then your society has started to lose its claim to being civilized.
The path to communism is paved with good intentions:)
The phrase "social justice" is only slightly less silly than the ideas it represents. Basically, what you're arguing is that it's not the total amount of wealth in a society that matters, but the difference between the rich and the poor in that society. So, in other words:
1 rich + 3 middle class + 12 poor = bad
0 rich + 0 middle class + 12 dying from starvation = good
Of course, it sounds much nicer when we use phrases like "social justice", but in essence all you're saying is that it's better to have everyone miserable than to have a "class-based society". Which is at best ridiculous and petty, and, in the worst cases, a prelude to starvation and misery.
What little information [fairfield.edu] we have on the subject of wealth distribution states that infinitesimal percentage (5%) owns over 71% of all wealth in the country. Care to revise your statement, sir?
Your link doesn't even address the statement you quoted, so I don't really see how you can expect me to revise anything.
All you're doing is listing percentages. That tells me nothing about how long people at each percentage level have had their fortunes, how they acquired them, or how large their individual fortunes are. If someone wins $200 million in the lottery tomorrow and then blows it all over the next 10 years before declaring bankruptcy, he'll still be fleshing-out the top of your little graph there, but actually provide an argument to invalidate your statement rather than validating it.
In fact, if I recall my statistics correctly, a large percentage of the rich ARE actually newly-rich, while a large percentage of those who were rich last year are poor today. The overall percentages stay fairly constant, but the individuals filling those percentages change on a regular basis. Or, in other words, "Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it".
I doubt 1/3 of all Americans even believe that there can be intelligence elsewhere in the universe, much less engaging in homoerotic xenosexual fantasies.
Most recent surveys put the number at 30%. In Canada it's even worse - around 50%.
Granted, the reliability of many of these surveys is questionable, but no matter how you look at it, a large percentage of people believe in that crap.
Of course, an even larger percentage believe in angels - a concept which is even more ridiculous - so the 30% figure shouldn't be too surprising...
Show us the way Comrade Stalin! Let us grind those bourgeoisie bastards under our boot heels!
By the way, how did you want to organize the purges? I mean, it goes without saying that the academics must be hung at once, but how will we deal with the rest of the population? I think maybe we can base them around the income tax levels... you know, those who pay 50% on income tax get 50% of their body-parts removed, those at 40% get slightly less removed, and so on down the scale. I've forwarded a draft of my plan to the Kremlin, but I'd appreciate your input.
There are many economists, researchers, and liberal arts majors, along with about 200 million working poor, that very much disagree with you. But you can ignore the liberal arts majors.
You can ignore all of them. There are also 100 million Americans who believe that the Earth is being visited by little green men who have nothing better to do than shove metal objects in the anal cavities of dirt-poor yokels in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Idaho. Just because an idea is popular, that doesn't mean it's true.
As for the original claim - he's absolutely right. Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it. That's part of the reason why the US is in such a hole right now - because people like living beyond their means.
What you and the other numbnut are referring to is the infinitesimal percentage of people who actually know how to make large amounts of money, and use it wisely. Personally, I don't give a damn if those people manage to "hoard" ten times what they can accumulate today - they generally generate so much wealth and advancement in the process of acquiring their wealth that their personal fortunes pale in comparison. You and your buddy can bitch about Bill Gates and Richard Branson all you like, but each of them does more good for the human race in one day than you will in a lifetime.
"Cuz that's what medics want to carry. A large battery pack with a small laser, while humping a guy back to the aid station. Or maybe a gas generator."
Mount it in a vehicle. Most of our ops these days are mounted anyway, so why have medics lugging shit around? Depending on just how much space it takes up, you could probably put one in each HMMWV and Bradley. Or, failing that, you could have a designated vehicle for the medics.
They don't. That's a horrible example. In nature, most such mutations die either during childbirth or shortly after. The fact that they can now survive for long periods of time isn't so much an example of the redundant nature of DNA as a testament to modern medical science.
Why is it that when a woman makes a sexist comment, it's modded insightful, but when I tell her to get me a beer and make me a sandwich, I get modded troll?
Oh no, I completely disagree with that. The concept of an omnipotent being is also an invention of the human mind, and it is this logically impossible concept that opens the door for the impossible paradoxes in the first place - therefore all I'm doing is fighting fire with fire.
Cute:)
You're just screwing around with definitions of course. It's akin to taking a waterproof garment, blasting it with a high pressure water jet, and then pointing at the remnants and saying "see, it wasn't waterproof!". Many words can be twisted that way. It's a bit dishonest though, even if it can be quite humorous.
And your second paragraph acknowledges that, so I thank you for being honest:)
Actualy, no. As any number of people (notably Karl Popper) have pointed out, scientific methods don't actually prove anything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Congratulations on being able to re-phrase what at least 5 others have already said. I ignored their comments because I figured they were either screwing around, or were simply being overly-pedantic. I feel the same about your response, but I figured I better answer at least one of you lot.
Look, I'm quite familiar with how science works, thank you. I know full well that, technically speaking, science doesn't "prove" anything. I know that all scientific models are open to challenge at all times, and are never accepted as being 100% correct.
HOWEVER.
This is exactly the kind of wording which causes Creationists to claim that "Evolution is just a theory" or that "science can't prove evolution".
There's a massive difference between the scientific meaning of the words "proof", "evidence, and "theory", and the layman's definition of those same words.
When I say that I have a theory about why Creationists are so stupid, I don't mean that I have a physical model which I have tested through controlled experimentation, and had published in scientific journals - what I really mean is that I have an untested hypothesis. I could use that phrase instead, but that's not how real people speak.
Similarly, in a court of law I can prove that somebody committed a crime, or I can prove to you that it's raining outside, or I can prove that airline travel is perfectly safe. But the word "prove" in those sentences it completely unrelated to the scientific meaning of the term.
It all depends on context. How we're using the words is just as important as what words we're using.
Then He be screwed - because hopefully one of the scientists will have the good sense to challenge him with an omnipotence paradox, at which point he'll admit he's not god and move to Finland.
Yes, well, I wasbeing slightly facetious with my original comment;)
To be fair, though, being able to violate paradoxes wouldn't be a test criteria for an omnipotent being. Paradoxes like the one you propose are an invention of the human mind - they can never exist because the two conditions you're naming are mutually exclusive.
However, while it might not be reasonable to expect even an omnipotent being to be able to break paradoxes, such paradoxes DO prove that Christianity is wrong. The ideas that "God has a plan" and "God gave you free will" are two mutually exclusive propositions, yet Christians will regularly tell you that both are true. Ergo, since Christianity requires the belief in two contradictory conditions, it's bullshit:) I'm sure such examples exist in other religions too - I'm just not as familiar with them as I am with our Westernized bible-thumpers.
Anyway, that's way too long of a reply in response to what I'm sure was a joke, so I'll end it here:) Thanks for the chuckle.
Science can't prove that god exists, or that it doesn't exist. So it's a perfectly safe bet- it can never be won.
Uh... what?
They certainly CAN prove that God exists... if he really does. It would be a rather simple matter. A big bearded guy in a white robe would come strolling into the main research lab of the LHC, wave his hand in the air, and atomize 99% of the scientists in the room. The remaining 1% would then say "Eureka! We have evidence of God's existence!", and then the Paddy Power people would expediently relocate to Mexico as armed mobs stormed their offices.
It's the other bit of your proposition that's rather difficult to handle. Disproving the existence of God is still possible, in theory. Unfortunately, in practice, you can never totally disprove an irrational belief because those who hold it can always change the details in order to get around the evidence. That's why, over time, we've gone from a Pantheon of Gods who controlled pretty much every event in our lives, to a single God who seems to never do much of anything. Over the last few millenia we've chipped away at God's domain until almost nothing remains, and yet at every step of the way the "faithful" of the world have simply modified their definition of God, and then carried on inanely insisting that their current definition is 100% true.
So no, we can't "prove" that God doesn't exist for the same reason that you'll never convince some people that Homeopathy is garbage, or that Psychics are a bunch of jackals and scam-artists. However, for all practical purposes, we've been disproving his/her/their existence for centuries. You just have to be open-minded enough to actually look at the evidence.
Nonsense. Most of the members here have never seen any evidence of real, live females, yet they believe in them through faith alone. You know what they say - everyone needs something to believe in:)
If all you want to do is remove windows features, nLite is easier to use than any Linux package manager. The reason it took me a while to do was because there are something like 300 packages to look through, and I wanted to strip it down to the bare essentials without removing anything critical. Otherwise, if all you want to do is remove a few components, it's no different than removing apps in Ubuntu post-install.
You've managed to make Windows harder to install and get running than Linux. Kudos!
Huh?
Did you even read what I wrote?
My USB travel-drive can install XP on any PC out there, with almost no interaction on my part. How the hell is that "harder to install and get running than Linux"?
That is just about the polar opposite of my experience. XP is showing its age because shoe-horning it onto an eeepc 901 was a horrible task. The installer is just dumb and can't handle anything but a CD-drive, which I don't have.
Sorry, that's wrong. I installed XP on my eeepc from a USB stick without any difficulty. Of course, since I have the old 7" model with a 2gb SSD, I spent quite a bit of time beforehand with nLite, ripping the guts out of XP. Making my flash drive bootable and then installing XP from it took very little time, in comparison.
If you're really having problems figuring out how to make XP install from a USB drive, you can skip the hassle of doing it manually by using the MultiBoot utility provided by the wonderful folks over at BootLand.
You misunderstood my original post. My 1.5 year old Ubuntu install is faster than a 0 day old HP OEM install of XP.
Ah. That's certainly possible, depending on the hardware and how much extra crap HP bundles with their OEM install.
Color me skeptical, but that doesn't exactly sound like a good thing about XP. That may be a good thing about nLite, but it speaks damn poorly of XP that such a utility is necessary (yes yes, for certain values of "necessary").
You can look at it however you want - the point is, there's an easy way to do this with XP, while there's no such utility for Ubuntu. Of course, you can go with some other flavor of linux - gentoo, for example - and customize it perfectly for your system, but I wouldn't call that "easy".
Windows XP as an OS is great - it's all the extra stuff that causes problems. nLite just lets you strip it down to the bare essentials. So yeah, nLite is great, but so is XP:)
That's probably because you spent those 6 months installing all sorts of extra crap which clogged up the system. Unfortunately that's one of the pitfalls of XP - it's really easy to install (intentionally or unintentionally) all sorts of unsupported apps which leave bits and pieces behind even after you've removed them.
The GOOD thing about XP is that it can be easily stripped with nLite for maximum performance (my last install got the CD image down to 350 megs and uses only 80 megs of RAM when running) and you can get applications to help you remove programs more "cleanly", as well as others to scrub and compress the registry and perform other maintenance tasks.
Personally, I've taken to almost never installing programs any more - I just use Universal Extractor to expand the installation files. In fact, most of my day-to-day use files - including firefox and openoffice - run from a truecrypt encrypted archive which clocks in at less than 700 megs in size. Not only does it keep my system clean and retain all my program settings if I ever have to re-install, but it also allows me to take all my programs with me on a USB drive.
Brand-new machines that run Vista just fine cost $500 now.
For some definitions of "just fine", your mileage may vary.
The computers I've been downgrading have primarily been laptops, whose price has ranged between $800 and $1400. If they didn't run vista fast enough to satisfy their owners, I very much doubt you're going to find anything for $500 to do the job.
None of these are tasks I think the average home user has to do a whole lot.
What the average user does has no bearing on my personal computing needs:)
I can't stand all this "will it be EVEN SLOWER" crap. Of course it will, but who gives a shit?
How about "everyone"?
I've downgraded something like 2 dozen computers since vista came out, primarily because people were complaining that they run much too slow. Of course, there were other factors too, but that was the biggest complaint I've heard. So, sure, computers will get much faster, but who really wants to spend $2,500 on a top of the line system when they can run an older OS on a $500 machine?
My current hardware specs are good enough to run vista with a "5 star rating", but I swill won't touch the fucking thing. It's slow, I don't like the interface, the constant "allow/deny" requests are annoying as hell, and I can't customize it the way I can XP.
The real question is "do the new features justify the extra resource usage", and in Vista's case, the answer is a resounding "NO!". I'd have no problem upgrading to a bloated OS that had some new functionality which would radically improve my computing experience, but MS hasn't brought anything really interesting to the table in quite a while. Every new "feature" in Vista can be done just as well, if not better, by third-party apps on XP, without slowing your system to a crawl.
With that said, the ONLY reason I would even think of switching to Vista is because it supports video hardware acceleration for the desktop. I just wish I could find an application to do that on XP.
Open the main window, click the "Administration" button, click "scheduler", right-click on "Daily Update", and then follow the wizard to set the schedule. You can do daily, weekly, interval... whatever you like.
Slashdot Mirror
The path to communism is paved with good intentions :)
The phrase "social justice" is only slightly less silly than the ideas it represents. Basically, what you're arguing is that it's not the total amount of wealth in a society that matters, but the difference between the rich and the poor in that society. So, in other words:
1 rich + 3 middle class + 12 poor = bad
0 rich + 0 middle class + 12 dying from starvation = good
Of course, it sounds much nicer when we use phrases like "social justice", but in essence all you're saying is that it's better to have everyone miserable than to have a "class-based society". Which is at best ridiculous and petty, and, in the worst cases, a prelude to starvation and misery.
I know it's bad form to post 2 responses in a row, but this was just to perfect to pass up:
Out of the 3 people who respond to my original comment so far, one of them only did so in order to defend UFO's. So, 1/3 = 33.3% :)
Your link doesn't even address the statement you quoted, so I don't really see how you can expect me to revise anything.
All you're doing is listing percentages. That tells me nothing about how long people at each percentage level have had their fortunes, how they acquired them, or how large their individual fortunes are. If someone wins $200 million in the lottery tomorrow and then blows it all over the next 10 years before declaring bankruptcy, he'll still be fleshing-out the top of your little graph there, but actually provide an argument to invalidate your statement rather than validating it.
In fact, if I recall my statistics correctly, a large percentage of the rich ARE actually newly-rich, while a large percentage of those who were rich last year are poor today. The overall percentages stay fairly constant, but the individuals filling those percentages change on a regular basis. Or, in other words, "Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it".
Most recent surveys put the number at 30%. In Canada it's even worse - around 50%.
Granted, the reliability of many of these surveys is questionable, but no matter how you look at it, a large percentage of people believe in that crap.
Of course, an even larger percentage believe in angels - a concept which is even more ridiculous - so the 30% figure shouldn't be too surprising ...
Show us the way Comrade Stalin! Let us grind those bourgeoisie bastards under our boot heels!
By the way, how did you want to organize the purges? I mean, it goes without saying that the academics must be hung at once, but how will we deal with the rest of the population? I think maybe we can base them around the income tax levels ... you know, those who pay 50% on income tax get 50% of their body-parts removed, those at 40% get slightly less removed, and so on down the scale. I've forwarded a draft of my plan to the Kremlin, but I'd appreciate your input.
Long live the Revolution!
You can ignore all of them. There are also 100 million Americans who believe that the Earth is being visited by little green men who have nothing better to do than shove metal objects in the anal cavities of dirt-poor yokels in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Idaho. Just because an idea is popular, that doesn't mean it's true.
As for the original claim - he's absolutely right. Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it. That's part of the reason why the US is in such a hole right now - because people like living beyond their means.
What you and the other numbnut are referring to is the infinitesimal percentage of people who actually know how to make large amounts of money, and use it wisely. Personally, I don't give a damn if those people manage to "hoard" ten times what they can accumulate today - they generally generate so much wealth and advancement in the process of acquiring their wealth that their personal fortunes pale in comparison. You and your buddy can bitch about Bill Gates and Richard Branson all you like, but each of them does more good for the human race in one day than you will in a lifetime.
"Cuz that's what medics want to carry. A large battery pack with a small laser, while humping a guy back to the aid station. Or maybe a gas generator."
Mount it in a vehicle. Most of our ops these days are mounted anyway, so why have medics lugging shit around? Depending on just how much space it takes up, you could probably put one in each HMMWV and Bradley. Or, failing that, you could have a designated vehicle for the medics.
They don't. That's a horrible example. In nature, most such mutations die either during childbirth or shortly after. The fact that they can now survive for long periods of time isn't so much an example of the redundant nature of DNA as a testament to modern medical science.
I really, really hope that you were being sarcastic ...
Why is it that when a woman makes a sexist comment, it's modded insightful, but when I tell her to get me a beer and make me a sandwich, I get modded troll?
Cute :)
You're just screwing around with definitions of course. It's akin to taking a waterproof garment, blasting it with a high pressure water jet, and then pointing at the remnants and saying "see, it wasn't waterproof!". Many words can be twisted that way. It's a bit dishonest though, even if it can be quite humorous.
And your second paragraph acknowledges that, so I thank you for being honest :)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Congratulations on being able to re-phrase what at least 5 others have already said. I ignored their comments because I figured they were either screwing around, or were simply being overly-pedantic. I feel the same about your response, but I figured I better answer at least one of you lot.
Look, I'm quite familiar with how science works, thank you. I know full well that, technically speaking, science doesn't "prove" anything. I know that all scientific models are open to challenge at all times, and are never accepted as being 100% correct.
HOWEVER.
This is exactly the kind of wording which causes Creationists to claim that "Evolution is just a theory" or that "science can't prove evolution".
There's a massive difference between the scientific meaning of the words "proof", "evidence, and "theory", and the layman's definition of those same words.
When I say that I have a theory about why Creationists are so stupid, I don't mean that I have a physical model which I have tested through controlled experimentation, and had published in scientific journals - what I really mean is that I have an untested hypothesis. I could use that phrase instead, but that's not how real people speak.
Similarly, in a court of law I can prove that somebody committed a crime, or I can prove to you that it's raining outside, or I can prove that airline travel is perfectly safe. But the word "prove" in those sentences it completely unrelated to the scientific meaning of the term.
It all depends on context. How we're using the words is just as important as what words we're using.
Yes, well, I wasbeing slightly facetious with my original comment ;)
To be fair, though, being able to violate paradoxes wouldn't be a test criteria for an omnipotent being. Paradoxes like the one you propose are an invention of the human mind - they can never exist because the two conditions you're naming are mutually exclusive.
However, while it might not be reasonable to expect even an omnipotent being to be able to break paradoxes, such paradoxes DO prove that Christianity is wrong. The ideas that "God has a plan" and "God gave you free will" are two mutually exclusive propositions, yet Christians will regularly tell you that both are true. Ergo, since Christianity requires the belief in two contradictory conditions, it's bullshit :) I'm sure such examples exist in other religions too - I'm just not as familiar with them as I am with our Westernized bible-thumpers.
Anyway, that's way too long of a reply in response to what I'm sure was a joke, so I'll end it here :) Thanks for the chuckle.
Um, yes, that would be why I said "Over the last few millenia". You know ... "few millenia" ... as in "several thousand years"?
Uh ... what?
They certainly CAN prove that God exists ... if he really does. It would be a rather simple matter. A big bearded guy in a white robe would come strolling into the main research lab of the LHC, wave his hand in the air, and atomize 99% of the scientists in the room. The remaining 1% would then say "Eureka! We have evidence of God's existence!", and then the Paddy Power people would expediently relocate to Mexico as armed mobs stormed their offices.
It's the other bit of your proposition that's rather difficult to handle. Disproving the existence of God is still possible, in theory. Unfortunately, in practice, you can never totally disprove an irrational belief because those who hold it can always change the details in order to get around the evidence. That's why, over time, we've gone from a Pantheon of Gods who controlled pretty much every event in our lives, to a single God who seems to never do much of anything. Over the last few millenia we've chipped away at God's domain until almost nothing remains, and yet at every step of the way the "faithful" of the world have simply modified their definition of God, and then carried on inanely insisting that their current definition is 100% true.
So no, we can't "prove" that God doesn't exist for the same reason that you'll never convince some people that Homeopathy is garbage, or that Psychics are a bunch of jackals and scam-artists. However, for all practical purposes, we've been disproving his/her/their existence for centuries. You just have to be open-minded enough to actually look at the evidence.
Nonsense. Most of the members here have never seen any evidence of real, live females, yet they believe in them through faith alone. You know what they say - everyone needs something to believe in :)
Have you ever actually used nLite?
If all you want to do is remove windows features, nLite is easier to use than any Linux package manager. The reason it took me a while to do was because there are something like 300 packages to look through, and I wanted to strip it down to the bare essentials without removing anything critical. Otherwise, if all you want to do is remove a few components, it's no different than removing apps in Ubuntu post-install.
Huh?
Did you even read what I wrote?
My USB travel-drive can install XP on any PC out there, with almost no interaction on my part. How the hell is that "harder to install and get running than Linux"?
Sorry, that's wrong. I installed XP on my eeepc from a USB stick without any difficulty. Of course, since I have the old 7" model with a 2gb SSD, I spent quite a bit of time beforehand with nLite, ripping the guts out of XP. Making my flash drive bootable and then installing XP from it took very little time, in comparison.
If you're really having problems figuring out how to make XP install from a USB drive, you can skip the hassle of doing it manually by using the MultiBoot utility provided by the wonderful folks over at BootLand.
Ah. That's certainly possible, depending on the hardware and how much extra crap HP bundles with their OEM install.
You can look at it however you want - the point is, there's an easy way to do this with XP, while there's no such utility for Ubuntu. Of course, you can go with some other flavor of linux - gentoo, for example - and customize it perfectly for your system, but I wouldn't call that "easy".
Windows XP as an OS is great - it's all the extra stuff that causes problems. nLite just lets you strip it down to the bare essentials. So yeah, nLite is great, but so is XP :)
That's probably because you spent those 6 months installing all sorts of extra crap which clogged up the system. Unfortunately that's one of the pitfalls of XP - it's really easy to install (intentionally or unintentionally) all sorts of unsupported apps which leave bits and pieces behind even after you've removed them.
The GOOD thing about XP is that it can be easily stripped with nLite for maximum performance (my last install got the CD image down to 350 megs and uses only 80 megs of RAM when running) and you can get applications to help you remove programs more "cleanly", as well as others to scrub and compress the registry and perform other maintenance tasks.
Personally, I've taken to almost never installing programs any more - I just use Universal Extractor to expand the installation files. In fact, most of my day-to-day use files - including firefox and openoffice - run from a truecrypt encrypted archive which clocks in at less than 700 megs in size. Not only does it keep my system clean and retain all my program settings if I ever have to re-install, but it also allows me to take all my programs with me on a USB drive.
Wow, I just looked it up and you're right. I thought that was one of the "innovations" in Vista, but I guess not!
You've just taken away the last reason I had for being tempted to switch to Vista. Thanks! :)
For some definitions of "just fine", your mileage may vary.
The computers I've been downgrading have primarily been laptops, whose price has ranged between $800 and $1400. If they didn't run vista fast enough to satisfy their owners, I very much doubt you're going to find anything for $500 to do the job.
What the average user does has no bearing on my personal computing needs :)
How about "everyone"?
I've downgraded something like 2 dozen computers since vista came out, primarily because people were complaining that they run much too slow. Of course, there were other factors too, but that was the biggest complaint I've heard. So, sure, computers will get much faster, but who really wants to spend $2,500 on a top of the line system when they can run an older OS on a $500 machine?
My current hardware specs are good enough to run vista with a "5 star rating", but I swill won't touch the fucking thing. It's slow, I don't like the interface, the constant "allow/deny" requests are annoying as hell, and I can't customize it the way I can XP.
The real question is "do the new features justify the extra resource usage", and in Vista's case, the answer is a resounding "NO!". I'd have no problem upgrading to a bloated OS that had some new functionality which would radically improve my computing experience, but MS hasn't brought anything really interesting to the table in quite a while. Every new "feature" in Vista can be done just as well, if not better, by third-party apps on XP, without slowing your system to a crawl.
With that said, the ONLY reason I would even think of switching to Vista is because it supports video hardware acceleration for the desktop. I just wish I could find an application to do that on XP.
Open the main window, click the "Administration" button, click "scheduler", right-click on "Daily Update", and then follow the wizard to set the schedule. You can do daily, weekly, interval ... whatever you like.