If the Bible (or at least, the Gospels) are the word of Jesus, and it's his word that good Christians are supposed to be following, then the fact that he says "pray in private" would seem to suggest that Jesus doesn't want you to get together in a big building once a week to say your prayers in front of everybody else. Seems pretty straightforward to me...
You know what, as it happens, though, it only takes one bad egg to falsely arrest me, or tase me, or shoot me in the spine. The benefit of an independent record is that maybe it will make the bad eggs think a little harder before they do something inappropriate.
For what it's worth, I've never had any trouble with the local cops where I live--they've all been polite and professional. But it really only takes one power-tripping asshole with an attitude to ruin your whole day. If the cops get to record us to protect themselves, why shouldn't we have the same option?
Oh, okay. As long as you personally have never participated in or witnessed any kind of law enforcement misconduct, I guess all these stories must be the product of "anti-establishment hippies." Heck, I guess there's not even any point in having video camera in police cars, because after all, no cop would ever abuse his authority and do or say something inappropriate while on duty. Thanks for clearing that up.
True, but that hardly justifies ol' Bernie walking up to one of the guys after he shot him once already and saying "you look like you could use another" and popping him again. Not to mention the fact that he said at trial that if he'd had more bullets, he would have continued shooting. He went over the line.
If this project leads to the development of readily-affordable Summer Glau lovebots, then I think we men can all agree that eventual nuclear holocaust is a fully satisfactory tradeoff.
Personally, I have no problem with giving the telcos immunity, provided that they agree to cooperate fully with a Congressional investigation into who in the administration told them it was okay to spy on Americans--I'd much rather see them go to jail than the telco executives who made admittedly bad decisions under duress. But giving them immunity when we don't even know the details of the crime is just ridiculous. As a (recently) former Connecticutian, I'm pretty unhappy with Dodd for caving the way he did.
"Even though the articles have been kept out of refereed medical journals..."
I loving DESPISE people who promote this kind of conspiracy crappola. Who, exactly, is keeping these amazing and lifesaving articles out of the peer-reviewed literature? The International Association for Brain Tumors? The all-powerful International Cell Phone Freemasons? You understand that there are literally HUNDREDS of decent quality journals that would jump at the opportunity to publish a well-done study supporting a connection between cell phones and cancer, right? Not to mention the hordes of class action lawyers who'd be swarming to see something like that go forward and give them a chance at the big money.
Seriously, even the kooks who claim the CIA made HIV to kills blacks and gays can get their shit publish in semi-reputable journals--if any good quality evidence of the cell phone/cancer link exists, then it would be out there.
Of course, maybe THEY have gotten to me, too! Run away, run away!
Except when you get alien space herpes, an 'outbreak' usually means a xenomorph exploding out of your chest cavity. Try hiding THAT one from your girlfriend.
Re:Basically 9/11 Imperial Propeganda
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Batman Discussion
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· Score: 1
Pretty much the whole point of the movie is to explore the question of how far it's acceptable to go in defense of law and order. Batman sees what he does as a necessary evil; the system doesn't work, so he appoints himself defender of Gotham. The conversation Bruce Wayne has with Harvey Dent at dinner, in which Batman is likened to a Roman tyrant, makes this pretty obvious. Later on, Batman's wiretapping project is again seen as a threat to liberty (thanks to heavy handed moralizing by Morgan Freeman).
Ultimately in the film, these measures are seen as acceptable or maybe even positive, because they do save lives. But I think most superheroes are inherently sort of facist, so the fact that this movie is even willing to pose the question of whether what Batman does is right or not puts it ahead of your typical mindless actioner.
I'm not sure what part of "from birth psychopath doped to the eyes on super steroids" translates to believable villain. Not to mention that the Azrael character would carry a lot of baggage, because you either have to explain his whole 'Order of St. Dumas' origin, or else he comes off as a crankier version of Robin.
He also found all the money that Bruce had diverted to the Bat-sonar project, which even Lucius didn't know about. The accountant didn't know exactly what it was for, but he probably assumed it was being spent on various Bat-toys.
As someone who knows Behe's work quite well (having taken courses from him on evolution), I can tell you that while his argument sounds reasonable, it's nothing more than sophistry. Let me explain. Behe states at one point in that article how certain experimental results might have contradicted some of his previous claims: "And since my claim for intelligent design requires that no unintelligent process be sufficient to produce such irreducibly complex systems, then the plausibility of ID would suffer enormously." The implicit assumption of this statement, however, is that you can prove that any system identified as "irreducibly complex" could be assembled by an "unintelligent process," i.e. evolution. But Behe never sets a stake in the ground as to what systems are irreducibly complex, so if you provide an evolutionary example of how blood clotting works (as Doolittle has), Behe is then free to say "well, perhaps blood clotting evolved naturally, but this other system over here must have been designed, because it is irreducibly complex." In other words, real scientists can identify as many valid evolutionary mechanisms as they want, and the ID crowd can just retreat further into the realm of the currently unexplained.
Behe's proposed flagellum experiment is also laughable, for two reasons. The first is conceptual: evolution describes a process by which change occurs at a genetic level over time--it does not presuppose a particular outcome. So saying that you can stick a random bacterium into a specific culture environment and encourage it to evolve a flagellum would be like taking an early canine and trying to encourage it to evolve into a Dalmatian. If motility is favored, the bacterium may eventually develop the ability to move, but that doesn't necessarily imply that it would use anything like the typical flagella--indeed, a variety of flagella have been discovered which are structurally nothing alike, but which all serve the same purpose. The second reason Behe's experiment is laughable is that someone has already done it, of sorts: Blount et al 2008 describes how a culture of E. coli that couldn't utilize citrate for an energy source eventually developed the ability over 30,000 generations--evolution in action, precisely the kind of thing Behe charges no one is willing to attempt.
You are categorically incorrect if you believe that natural selection is the only mechanism put forth by which evolution can occur. That may have been Darwin's original concept put forth about 200 years ago, but the modern synthesis (or Neo-Darwinism, as it's often called) also acknowledges the existence of other factors, such as mutation (which Darwin himself recognized as variation, even if he didn't have the genetics to explain it), genetic drift, and gene flow. And these mechanisms actually do provide an extremely robust explanation for observable biological phenomenon, whether you're talking about bacteria in a petri dish or fossilized remnants. Now, none of this should be taken to suggest that the modern synthesis is sacrosanct, but to say that the mechanism by which evolution occurs is "up for questioning" belies the strength of the theory.
The problem with what you're saying is that you're only seeing half the trend. Sure, if you could suspend aging at, say, middle age, then you'd be able to avoid the costs associated with age-related degeneration. But being young doesn't mean you don't require medical treatment, so where is the break even point? Not to mention that it's unlike any anti-aging therapy would be a one shot deal--it would almost certainly require renweal or repeated dosing, which further adds to the cost. Not to mention that we're already starting to see some of the problems of overpopulation--if any kind of radical life extension process becomes widely adopted, how is that going to affect population growth? And if it's not widely available, what's going to happen when the 'have nots' decide to go after the 'haves?'
Given that there are so many people in the world already suffering from a lack of basic medical treatment, how would you justify the expense associated with the development and use of life expansion therapies?
As Hugh Laurie's character said in a recent episode of the TV program 'House,' "Rational arguments don't work on religious people. That's why they're religious."
You know what else there are fewer of now than there used to be? Pirates. Therefore, the declining trend in western civility and religiosity back support my point that pirates create religion and politeness by scaring the hell out of people and causing them to pray more.
Seriously, you're on/.: do you really need to be told that correlation != causation?
You want to see proof that religion doesn't automatically create good manners, spend an evening in a Catholic church bingo hall.
A simulation is certainly intended to be a copy of whatever it's simulating: Microsoft Flight Simulator is supposed to be just like flying a real plane, with all the bells and whistles and gauges. However, for the simulation to work, you have to build in a set of rules reprsenting the original system: in this case, aerodynamics, avionics, things like that.
But given a simulation of certain complexity, there's no way we can possibly write a set of rules that perfectly describes the reality, because 1) we lack instruments sensitive enough to measure the necessary degree of detail, and 2) there are fundamental physical constraints on how much we can know about the universe (danke, Herr Heisenberg). So ultimately your simulation is based on a simplification of the genuine article: a model.
Could you have a simulation that's not based on some preexisting model, as you suggest in your post? I suppose, but without some understanding of the principles underlying the original, the best you could do would be to build a copy, and that wouldn't really increase your ability to generalize about possible outcomes.
I have no doubt there are some 'brains' possessed of perfectly adequate social skills who nonetheless get hassled by other people; in my experience, however, if you treated other people decently and didn't act like a jackass, then regardless of how smart you might have been, the majority of people treated you decently. If, on the other hand, you walked around smug and self-satisfied with your intellectual prowess, then you were asking for trouble. Likewise, I can also say that in my experience, there was just as much heterogeneity within the brains as there was without--I don't think I got along with a single other person in the top 10 of my class.
You may note that nowhere in this post, nor in my original post, did I suggest that my experiences were perfectly generalizable to the world at large.
I don't know why you've been modded 'funny'--insightful seems much more apt. I knew so many kids in high school, and even college, who could ace pretty much any test, but didn't have the sense to realize that acting like a know-it-all doesn't win you many friends.
That kind of behavior persist because people are jackasses. Do you honestly think some asshole crazy enough to chase you for 5 miles is going to return to the highway thinking, "gee, my aggressive ways have achieved nothing meaningful. I should show more respect on the road"?
So don't kid yourself that you're trying to teach a lesson, here. You're a cranky bastard who would rather be right and cause an incident than occasionally stand down and let somebody put one over on you.
No, when somebody blatantly ignores the line of cars behind him because he doesn't feel comfortable driving faster and is unwilling to move over, then the law may be on his side, but he's still a jerk. That kind of behavior may be less obvious than road raging, but it still represents an obnoxious degree of passive aggression.
Good security should be proportionate to the anticipated threat level and the value of the defended material. I'm guessing your typical border agent probably isn't going to bother to image every laptop that passes through the checkpoints, so if I'm just carrying some low value memos or personal correspondence, I don't need that much security. On the other hand, if you're transporting stolen nuclear launch codes, or the formula for Coke, then "probably" isn't an acceptable level of certainty, and more drastic measures may be called for.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Bible (or at least, the Gospels) are the word of Jesus, and it's his word that good Christians are supposed to be following, then the fact that he says "pray in private" would seem to suggest that Jesus doesn't want you to get together in a big building once a week to say your prayers in front of everybody else. Seems pretty straightforward to me...
You know what, as it happens, though, it only takes one bad egg to falsely arrest me, or tase me, or shoot me in the spine. The benefit of an independent record is that maybe it will make the bad eggs think a little harder before they do something inappropriate.
For what it's worth, I've never had any trouble with the local cops where I live--they've all been polite and professional. But it really only takes one power-tripping asshole with an attitude to ruin your whole day. If the cops get to record us to protect themselves, why shouldn't we have the same option?
Oh, okay. As long as you personally have never participated in or witnessed any kind of law enforcement misconduct, I guess all these stories must be the product of "anti-establishment hippies." Heck, I guess there's not even any point in having video camera in police cars, because after all, no cop would ever abuse his authority and do or say something inappropriate while on duty. Thanks for clearing that up.
True, but that hardly justifies ol' Bernie walking up to one of the guys after he shot him once already and saying "you look like you could use another" and popping him again. Not to mention the fact that he said at trial that if he'd had more bullets, he would have continued shooting. He went over the line.
If this project leads to the development of readily-affordable Summer Glau lovebots, then I think we men can all agree that eventual nuclear holocaust is a fully satisfactory tradeoff.
...he just has an unusually wide stance. And, incidentally, a craving for sweet, sweet homo lovin'.
Wake me up when it starts teaching the monkeys how to use tools and kill each other. And no Republican jokes, either.
Personally, I have no problem with giving the telcos immunity, provided that they agree to cooperate fully with a Congressional investigation into who in the administration told them it was okay to spy on Americans--I'd much rather see them go to jail than the telco executives who made admittedly bad decisions under duress. But giving them immunity when we don't even know the details of the crime is just ridiculous. As a (recently) former Connecticutian, I'm pretty unhappy with Dodd for caving the way he did.
"Even though the articles have been kept out of refereed medical journals..."
I loving DESPISE people who promote this kind of conspiracy crappola. Who, exactly, is keeping these amazing and lifesaving articles out of the peer-reviewed literature? The International Association for Brain Tumors? The all-powerful International Cell Phone Freemasons? You understand that there are literally HUNDREDS of decent quality journals that would jump at the opportunity to publish a well-done study supporting a connection between cell phones and cancer, right? Not to mention the hordes of class action lawyers who'd be swarming to see something like that go forward and give them a chance at the big money.
Seriously, even the kooks who claim the CIA made HIV to kills blacks and gays can get their shit publish in semi-reputable journals--if any good quality evidence of the cell phone/cancer link exists, then it would be out there.
Of course, maybe THEY have gotten to me, too! Run away, run away!
Except when you get alien space herpes, an 'outbreak' usually means a xenomorph exploding out of your chest cavity. Try hiding THAT one from your girlfriend.
Pretty much the whole point of the movie is to explore the question of how far it's acceptable to go in defense of law and order. Batman sees what he does as a necessary evil; the system doesn't work, so he appoints himself defender of Gotham. The conversation Bruce Wayne has with Harvey Dent at dinner, in which Batman is likened to a Roman tyrant, makes this pretty obvious. Later on, Batman's wiretapping project is again seen as a threat to liberty (thanks to heavy handed moralizing by Morgan Freeman).
Ultimately in the film, these measures are seen as acceptable or maybe even positive, because they do save lives. But I think most superheroes are inherently sort of facist, so the fact that this movie is even willing to pose the question of whether what Batman does is right or not puts it ahead of your typical mindless actioner.
I'm not sure what part of "from birth psychopath doped to the eyes on super steroids" translates to believable villain. Not to mention that the Azrael character would carry a lot of baggage, because you either have to explain his whole 'Order of St. Dumas' origin, or else he comes off as a crankier version of Robin.
He also found all the money that Bruce had diverted to the Bat-sonar project, which even Lucius didn't know about. The accountant didn't know exactly what it was for, but he probably assumed it was being spent on various Bat-toys.
As someone who knows Behe's work quite well (having taken courses from him on evolution), I can tell you that while his argument sounds reasonable, it's nothing more than sophistry. Let me explain. Behe states at one point in that article how certain experimental results might have contradicted some of his previous claims: "And since my claim for intelligent design requires that no unintelligent process be sufficient to produce such irreducibly complex systems, then the plausibility of ID would suffer enormously." The implicit assumption of this statement, however, is that you can prove that any system identified as "irreducibly complex" could be assembled by an "unintelligent process," i.e. evolution. But Behe never sets a stake in the ground as to what systems are irreducibly complex, so if you provide an evolutionary example of how blood clotting works (as Doolittle has), Behe is then free to say "well, perhaps blood clotting evolved naturally, but this other system over here must have been designed, because it is irreducibly complex." In other words, real scientists can identify as many valid evolutionary mechanisms as they want, and the ID crowd can just retreat further into the realm of the currently unexplained.
Behe's proposed flagellum experiment is also laughable, for two reasons. The first is conceptual: evolution describes a process by which change occurs at a genetic level over time--it does not presuppose a particular outcome. So saying that you can stick a random bacterium into a specific culture environment and encourage it to evolve a flagellum would be like taking an early canine and trying to encourage it to evolve into a Dalmatian. If motility is favored, the bacterium may eventually develop the ability to move, but that doesn't necessarily imply that it would use anything like the typical flagella--indeed, a variety of flagella have been discovered which are structurally nothing alike, but which all serve the same purpose. The second reason Behe's experiment is laughable is that someone has already done it, of sorts: Blount et al 2008 describes how a culture of E. coli that couldn't utilize citrate for an energy source eventually developed the ability over 30,000 generations--evolution in action, precisely the kind of thing Behe charges no one is willing to attempt.
You are categorically incorrect if you believe that natural selection is the only mechanism put forth by which evolution can occur. That may have been Darwin's original concept put forth about 200 years ago, but the modern synthesis (or Neo-Darwinism, as it's often called) also acknowledges the existence of other factors, such as mutation (which Darwin himself recognized as variation, even if he didn't have the genetics to explain it), genetic drift, and gene flow. And these mechanisms actually do provide an extremely robust explanation for observable biological phenomenon, whether you're talking about bacteria in a petri dish or fossilized remnants. Now, none of this should be taken to suggest that the modern synthesis is sacrosanct, but to say that the mechanism by which evolution occurs is "up for questioning" belies the strength of the theory.
The problem with what you're saying is that you're only seeing half the trend. Sure, if you could suspend aging at, say, middle age, then you'd be able to avoid the costs associated with age-related degeneration. But being young doesn't mean you don't require medical treatment, so where is the break even point? Not to mention that it's unlike any anti-aging therapy would be a one shot deal--it would almost certainly require renweal or repeated dosing, which further adds to the cost. Not to mention that we're already starting to see some of the problems of overpopulation--if any kind of radical life extension process becomes widely adopted, how is that going to affect population growth? And if it's not widely available, what's going to happen when the 'have nots' decide to go after the 'haves?'
Given that there are so many people in the world already suffering from a lack of basic medical treatment, how would you justify the expense associated with the development and use of life expansion therapies?
As Hugh Laurie's character said in a recent episode of the TV program 'House,' "Rational arguments don't work on religious people. That's why they're religious."
You know what else there are fewer of now than there used to be? Pirates. Therefore, the declining trend in western civility and religiosity back support my point that pirates create religion and politeness by scaring the hell out of people and causing them to pray more.
/.: do you really need to be told that correlation != causation?
Seriously, you're on
You want to see proof that religion doesn't automatically create good manners, spend an evening in a Catholic church bingo hall.
I don't think you're not all right nor all wrong.
A simulation is certainly intended to be a copy of whatever it's simulating: Microsoft Flight Simulator is supposed to be just like flying a real plane, with all the bells and whistles and gauges. However, for the simulation to work, you have to build in a set of rules reprsenting the original system: in this case, aerodynamics, avionics, things like that.
But given a simulation of certain complexity, there's no way we can possibly write a set of rules that perfectly describes the reality, because 1) we lack instruments sensitive enough to measure the necessary degree of detail, and 2) there are fundamental physical constraints on how much we can know about the universe (danke, Herr Heisenberg). So ultimately your simulation is based on a simplification of the genuine article: a model.
Could you have a simulation that's not based on some preexisting model, as you suggest in your post? I suppose, but without some understanding of the principles underlying the original, the best you could do would be to build a copy, and that wouldn't really increase your ability to generalize about possible outcomes.
I have no doubt there are some 'brains' possessed of perfectly adequate social skills who nonetheless get hassled by other people; in my experience, however, if you treated other people decently and didn't act like a jackass, then regardless of how smart you might have been, the majority of people treated you decently. If, on the other hand, you walked around smug and self-satisfied with your intellectual prowess, then you were asking for trouble. Likewise, I can also say that in my experience, there was just as much heterogeneity within the brains as there was without--I don't think I got along with a single other person in the top 10 of my class.
You may note that nowhere in this post, nor in my original post, did I suggest that my experiences were perfectly generalizable to the world at large.
I don't know why you've been modded 'funny'--insightful seems much more apt. I knew so many kids in high school, and even college, who could ace pretty much any test, but didn't have the sense to realize that acting like a know-it-all doesn't win you many friends.
That kind of behavior persist because people are jackasses. Do you honestly think some asshole crazy enough to chase you for 5 miles is going to return to the highway thinking, "gee, my aggressive ways have achieved nothing meaningful. I should show more respect on the road"?
So don't kid yourself that you're trying to teach a lesson, here. You're a cranky bastard who would rather be right and cause an incident than occasionally stand down and let somebody put one over on you.
No, when somebody blatantly ignores the line of cars behind him because he doesn't feel comfortable driving faster and is unwilling to move over, then the law may be on his side, but he's still a jerk. That kind of behavior may be less obvious than road raging, but it still represents an obnoxious degree of passive aggression.
Good security should be proportionate to the anticipated threat level and the value of the defended material. I'm guessing your typical border agent probably isn't going to bother to image every laptop that passes through the checkpoints, so if I'm just carrying some low value memos or personal correspondence, I don't need that much security. On the other hand, if you're transporting stolen nuclear launch codes, or the formula for Coke, then "probably" isn't an acceptable level of certainty, and more drastic measures may be called for.