Suppose you're right. It does not follow that a package of cocaine on an airplane will "kill" more people than an explosive on the same airplane.

You so street.

How?

Do you mean that, if people take your idea and develop it prior to your filing of the patent, then prior art can kill the application? If so, that sounds about right, but you said something different. Namely, you said that "not having an NDA" can kill the patent.

Did you mean that? If so, how is an NDA relevant?

Well, it seems to me that the fact he was innocent and shouldn't have been arrested is irrelevant here. The question is whether persons who are arrested may be strip-searched. The outcome may seem worse because this poor guy shouldn't have been arrested at all, but that fact isn't relevant to the argument before the court (we all know that sometimes, innocent people are arrested, so his innocence doesn't add anything to the argument).

I'm not saying that I agree (or disagree) with the judgment, but rather that his innocence is irrelevant to the question at hand.

I have no idea how you keep old hardware running. My experience is that when I put a box or laptop aside for several months and then start it again, something goes wrong.

In 1996, I installed Slackware on a similar machine. Far from useless, it was liberating. Finally, I had a UNIX-like operating system on my home machine.

To each his own, I guess, but I made the switch from DOS/Win 3.1 to Linux and never looked back. (I had some experience with a then-girlfriend's Windows 95, but it didn't tempt me in the least.)

No, this does not follow from my logic, since I never said I agreed that a person should be allowed to keep all and only that wealth which he has earned. That was your claim, not mine.

But it's apparent that this is going nowhere. I just wanted to point out that a natural consequence of what you said was something that you likely did not intend or agree with. Seems to me the correct response is to admit that you misspoke and try to fix your claim so that it more accurately reflects your opinions, but instead you just want to pretend that this unfortunate consequence really doesn't follow from your clearly stated principle.

As far as my own opinion, I'm fairly sympathetic to Nozick's ideas on what constitutes a just distribution of wealth (more or less that the history consists entirely of just transactions from previously just states --- if it was given to you by someone who had a right to hold it, then you have a right to hold it, with no nonsense about whether you earned it or not).

But there's no need to go into Nozick's views nor continue this discussion. Either you didn't get my point about why your statement was evidently incorrect or you refuse to admit error, but in either case, we've reached an impasse.

I'm not twisting anything. You wrote, "conservatives believe that a person who has earned their wealth should keep it, those who haven't earned it should not."

Perhaps you didn't mean to say that those who have not earned their wealth should not keep it, but that's what you said. As an immediate consequence, no one should keep any (unearned) gifts, including inheritances.

This really is a perfectly obvious consequence of what you wrote.

Well, I generally agree, but you just said that a person should be able to keep wealth if and only if they've earned it. Now, we assume that you earned your wealth, but your heirs didn't earn the inheritance. This was a gift from you.

So, by your own terms, they should not be able to keep the inheritance because they didn't earn it.

(There may, of course, be certain cases in which one can be said to have "earned" an inheritance, but these are unusual and need not distract us here. If one should be able to keep only wealth which they have earned, then he should not be able to keep inheritances or other gifts, generally speaking. This strikes me as quite a silly principle.)

Oh. I didn't realize that conservatives think that only people who have "earned" their wealth should keep it. So, I suppose that conservatives would aim to abolish inheritance, because surely the heir doesn't (usually) do anything to earn wealth.

I have to say, though, that this entire thread is chock-full of arrogance on a grander scale than Zonk's. His fault was only minor oversight of the consequence of his claim, while we have folks claiming that voting for Bush is a greater sin than Zimmerman's apparent crime, or that anyone who understands conservatism would be a conservative.

I have no doubt that non-racists can dislike Obama, and I reckon the majority of Tea Party members are not racist.

Now, how about some evidence for your claims that:

(1) Some or many of the racist signs at Tea Party events were the product of liberals trying to discredit the movement and
(2) The media has removed black people from images of Tea Party rallies.

Just 'cause, you know, anyone can say anything.

It's not hard to come up with problems best solved by scripting.

I'm a teacher. Suppose I want to produce a letter for each student who is currently averaging below C. I want to include their names and current averages in the letter, and perhaps some text that depends on annotations in my roster.

It would be tedious and silly to do this by hand.

Now, as it happens, I'm not a word processor user, so I don't know whether Word can do what I need here. But in any case, this is an obvious use for scripting in a word processor.

Er. Ah. Oh, never mind.

No, that's not the underlying reason.

The various fallacies you mention (slippery slop, post hoc, etc.) are informal fallacies, that is, fallacies of informal reasoning. The fact that they are fallacies of inductive, not deductive, logic has not escaped logicians at all. They are nonetheless fallacies (though because they are informal, whether a fallacy has actually occurred is a bit more of a judgment call).

Honestly, the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning (the latter you mention as using "absolute formulas") is well-understood.

Finally! A technology where the benefits clearly outweigh any dangers!