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Comment Re:The most important lesson in life being taught (Score 2, Interesting) 663

Here's my argument referring to what you said would be acceptable authorities on morality being objective: "One study found that most philosophers today accept or lean towards moral realism, as do most meta-ethicists, and twice as many philosophers accept or lean towards moral realism as accept or lean towards moral anti-realism." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism

Comment Re:I went with LXDE (Score 1) 101

I've been wanting to use something that is lighter weight than Ubuntu on a relatively older netbook (the original Lenovo IdeaPad S10 from 2008), but I haven't been able to get the wireless drivers to work on it with either Lubuntu or Xubuntu, originally having tried 11.04, and later 11.10. Ubuntu, on the other hand, had the wireless working right out of the box. Why is it that these Ubuntu variants can break something as standard as wireless drivers? I searched around and tried to follow some directions in various online forums to get the Broadcom BCM4312 to work by running some command line instructions, but simply had no luck. Maybe it will be fixed in the variants of 12.04?

Comment Re:Home porn videos? (Score 1) 332

As far as a doctor transcribing the information/diagnosis in front of you, I've actually appreciated having one of my doctors doing this, as it allows me to actually hear the more technical aspects of his description in real time, and it allows him to correct it if he's misheard anything or I hear anything contrary to what I've described to him right then and there. It makes the visit much more personalized. As far as rude and unhelpful office staff and mixing up of records, that's obviously unacceptable.

Comment Re:Perfect american corporate business practice (Score 1) 231

Is there a reason why you are spelling their site name with a capitalized .Com after it, both here and on your page, when it is neither the common convention to do so, or Download.com's convention? I don't bring it up simply to nitpick, I bring it up because it makes an otherwise excellent statement on your webpage look somewhat unprofessional.

Comment Re:well if this pans out (Score 1) 413

It's actually not of greatest importance to know whether climate change is anthropogenic in nature or not. Even if rainbow-colored fairies were the root cause of it, we'd still need to come up with a way to stop it. What really matters is whether or not we should trust what the scientists are predicting, and what the risks would be to let it continue unabated.

If climate change continues to move in the same direction, then based on the risks involved I've been convinced that we do need to come up with a way of stopping it. The thing is, it takes political willpower of a majority to call for the right application of funds to develop a solution, so the most solid argument I've seen to convince others of this perspective is contained in the following set of videos by Greg Craven, and it lies in the proper application of risk management to develop the most informed perspective on the chances of bad things actually occurring. If you can, at least watch the first one: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=92EE5DBE2987982F

Comment Re:Skeptical (Score 1) 130

I'm pretty skeptical, as well, but I will say that in the past I've occasionally dreamed some of the most creative story lines one could come up with; very eventful, in-depth stuff that there's no way I'd have been able to come up with while awake. Similar to this guy's claims that he can't do it while he's awake, in my case I don't read fiction that often, I'm not a very artistically expressive person, and I've never been very good at anything like creative writing or any other sort of narrative writing. So I've often asked myself how have I then had dreams such to the contrary of all of this?

If this guy isn't faking it, then my own experience with occasional dreams involving these creative outbursts (of which I'll then quickly forget when I awaken if I don't write them down) would lead me to think that he's got something similar going on, but combined with not having the immobility that most of us have when in those stages of sleep, which allows him to express these impulses.

Comment Re:No offense, but citations please? (Score 1) 104

Bad human nature is always a risk when massive amounts of money is flowing. I'm not saying it's right what these private contractors have done, but all the massive but decidedly "necessary" government projects that inevitably require tons of private contract work just seem to be a complete joke -- the joke being that our even MORE massive but "necessary" government can't effectively manage the real consequences of the huge projects it proposes!

How did the government think things would go? "Hey, let's give this private company over here a billion dollars to do such and such, with relatively no strings attached. We can't really oversee them that well because the project we're mandating is so massive and because they're a private company, but heck, it's not our livelihoods we're risking if things don't go just so -- it's the American taxpayers!"

The government shouldn't be allowed to propose and outsource such grandiose projects without also taking the proper actions to minimize the risk of something going wrong when the outsourcing they are deciding to not have full control of goes bad. With such large projects, there just isn't any greater power to run crying to and bail us out if something goes wrong. Simply put, the less oversight the government has over these contractors, the bigger the risk they are taking on by moving forward with such massive projects, so they better prepare for the worst.

Comment Re:Maybe include some details? (Score 1) 453

Other Features: Overlay scroll bars The new overlay scroll bars appear when you need them and fade away when you don’t, resulting in a more streamlined experience.

I don't think that's a step in the right direction. Those little 'fade-away lines' make sense on a mobile phone, where space is at a premium. But on a desktop or laptop, I'd rather see the scroll-bars. It gives you something to mouse towards and grab. More importantly, it gives you constant feedback about where you are within a document, as well as information about the size of the document. This is useful information that you intuitively get when reading a book (you can see the thickness of the book and how far into it you are). Removing these subtle clues from applications reduces context and leads to user errors (e.g. thinking you've reached the end of the document when you hit some whitespace).

Great point. I've tried hiding the scroll bar to view webpages with an add-on in Chrome, and I noticed the same thing. It's a nice thing to have the option of hiding it in certain situations on a desktop or laptop screen, but to have it as your only option is questionable.

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