define "bravery"
Bravery
Used in a sentence: CannonballHead was a twit who never knew what it was like to face a terminal disease and had the turd-like gall to question the bravery of another human who was confronted with a choice between lingering suffering followed by a humiliating demise and deciding the course of his irremediable destiny.
Does that work for you?
I must say I'm surprised by your angle of attack.
That's what I do. You should play me at chess.
the function of Government is to do things that could not be done any other way.
We agree on that. I don't know what the function of the BBC because I'm American, but as long as the BBC is not controlled by the government, I don't see why it would be at a disadvantage to commercial news sources in terms of reducing bias.
Prison labor should certainly not be profitable, but what is wrong with them doing useful labor? What's wrong with prisoners growing their own food and making their own clothes, for instance?
Prisoners need to cost the state money. Society should be penalized for producing prisoners. The idea is that the cost for incarcerating people should be a force against knee-jerk incarceration. We should only put those people in prison that we need to be safe (i.e. violent criminals) and not those who merely perform actions that do not agree with our ideologies (i.e. marijuana users, producers, and dealers).
If prisoners are profitable or even pay for themselves then it becomes easier and perhaps more profitable to lock people up rather than carefully evaluate the laws that put them there. If society pays a full penalty for each and every prisoner, then it serves as to check an uncontrolled prison population.
For an example of an uncontrolled prison population, look at California. California is failing and irresponsible imprisonment is one of the reasons for the failure.
I don't know why this is Flamebait.
Because there is a lot of shit you want the government to do. Now, if you want the government to do some of the shit you want, then you are going to need to put up with it doing some extra shit you don't. It's called "the real world". I welcome you to it.
Now, let's get rid of laws and their enforcement as a first step to dismantling government, shall we? Oh, you don't want to do that. See, that's some of the shit you want the government to do. Any questions?
Let me guess, you know what you don't want the government to do when you see it. I tell you what, make a list of all the shit you don't want the government to do, and we'll draft up a proposal for Parliament. I'm sure your list will be well thought out and Parliament will act accordingly.
But for some people it just had to be some kind of comic-book super-villain evil master-plan, just because anything from Microsoft had to be one apparently.
Point taken. There is a difference between evil and just sucking real hard. I'll concede that M<fanboi-bait>$</fanboi-bait> falls into the latter category, sucking as they do. Evil requires the motive of malice. Suck can merely arise from the motive of profit.
And that somehow justifies texting while driving exactly how?
It doesn't. But let the one who has never been distracted by something on his dashboard cast the first stone.
obviously evil behaviour as offering a free CLI version of their compiler.
A developer can get a free full version of XCode or the entire free suite of development tools for Linux, BlackBerry, Palm, Java, etc. But microsoft extracts money from its developers and the bone Microsoft throws is a free CLI compiler? And you are painting them as nice guys for it? Dude. Screw microsoft and screw any pandering to them. They are not yet ready for "reverse discrimination" sympathy, especially not from developers.
And dear M$ fanbois: I know they need to make a profit and I know you have an issue with the "$". But still, screw M$.
prisoners should perform useful tasks, such as hard labour.
It is not ethical to attempt to harvest value from prisoners. The labor should be hard but not useful. The labor prisoners provide should not even be useful enough to pay for their own incarceration. If the prison population is large enough to be potentially taxing to society, then this prison population statistical in nature and is very much a consequence of the social structure. A social and legal structure that rewards a statistically large population of prisoners by harvesting value from them is tantamount to a slavery system.
The most well-known example of technology overkill is Windows XP and its successors. Think about it for a minute. How many of the functions in these operating systems do you actually use?
If an OSS advocate made this same argument as a reason to adopt Linux and OpenOffice, you'd have the OSS detractors screaming at him for not understanding business and productivity. I recall quite a flame fest over replacements for Adobe products a day or two ago.
Windows is popular despite that it is only good enough. Linux dominates the OSS market despite its myriad shortcomings. Plenty of better solutions have come and gone, but good enough solutions spread like wildfire because they are not actually optimized to be solutions. They are optimized for one thing: spreading.
Kind of like: good luck with judges to wrap their minds around dna profile matching?
No. Kind of like: good luck with getting juries to wrap their minds around dna profile matching? Hint: OJ Simpson.
Complaints about "lack of transparency" from publishers have prompted Italian competition authorities to begin an investigation of Google's search and news services.
Good luck in getting a bunch of bureaucrats to wrap their minds around google's ranking algorithm.
We need it to pay for health-care for you and the millions of uninsured
We need to pay back for two irresponsible wars on foreign soil. Is that what you are trying to say?
I agree, how can we even have a discussion about some mythical 'right' to healthcare? Hint: It isn't a 'right' if it requires the enslavement of someone else.
Now if that isn't a straw man. Enslavement? Maybe you were going for hyperbole?
Look, whether or not a government option is the best plan is up for debate. But in a report issued under the (last) Bush administration, the projected percent of the GDP that will be spent on healthcare in 2018 is 20%. That is one in every five dollars of wealth created in the USA. That is the status quo.
Going under the assumption that 20% is not desirable and that the status quo will get us to 20%, what do you think we should do? Pick one: (1) see how much we can spend on health care by ignoring its financial drain on the US economy (default), (2) enact legislation that may halt the trend, (3) pray to God that he intervenes to save us and rely on our unwavering faith in a higher power?
And you do realize that the slope of the curve will be positive when we hit that 20%, don't you? Here is my reference.
Hell. I might just stop answering my phone entirely.
You answer your phone? I answer my phone for my immediate family. Period. Everyone else who bothers calling get's my voice mail--and they know that. If I ever get a call from spam it goes on my spam list. If people want to get in touch with me, they need to learn how to use email. I simply don't get bothered any more.
Questions you may have: (Q) what if it is an emergency? (A) dial 9-1-1 for emergencies; (Q) but my land line doesn't have all those fancy features (A) turn off your land line ringer.
You get to guess how many correct values of g turned up in that experiment... And who passed it.
None. And this had to be a full time staff lecturer or a high school physics class because no self respecting grad TA would bother with something like this. My policies were (1) show up (2) do not spill hazardous materials on yourself or others (3) don't break too much stuff. With those policies in place, still only about 60% passed. Something about #1 was difficult for my students. I think it was the 9 am lab time.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
