Just as long as you avoid the brown note, you shouldn't suffer any ill effects.

Obviously. Gamma rays obey the light speed limit just like everything else.

What I'd like to know is how much gamma ray action the Earth sees when those jets are fired up. We now have evidence that gamma rays influence climate so would it be a good or bad thing if it lit up again? Then we need to be asking if we can determine if/when it will start back up.

Whoosh!

Try and keep up, K? This thread is about bias and the difficulty of preventing it, even defining it. Personally I stopped giving the NRA money because they aren't pure enough and seemed to spend more than I was giving them on postage begging for more money. Doesn't mean I can't borrow the gun grabber arguments in an example of the framing bias inherent in the selection of terminology.

> I suppose you *could* wonder this, but that'd make you an idiot.

Not really. The benefits you speak of are designed to promote a public policy purpose that homosexuals can't fulfill so the public (i.e. the state) should have no interest in expending finite resources upon them. See how easy it is? No religion or 'idiot' required. Coldly rational. One could even say reality based if one wanted to taunt the politically correct? Or take this argument: A hundred years ago it was pretty much universally accepted in the medical world that homosexuality was a mental defect. Is it really unpossible for someone to believe that the modern rethinking of that position is in error and was based more on politics than science; without insisting that said belief could only be based in stupidity or religion? I know I haven't devoted enough time to researching the scientific lit to say and I'd bet good yellow gold you haven't either. Leaving aside the entire question of which side is right or wrong, I'm only interested here in demonstrating that there ARE other sides possible that aren't limited to stupid, homophobic, bigoted, blah, blah. That sort of dismissal of the possibility of valid opposing viewpoints is the whole point behind controlling the language of an issue.

> It's absurd that the Wiki page you link to labels the "southern strategy" as racist

You make good arguments but failed to go for the kill. Go reexamine the election of 1968. Does anyone think a California liberal Republican like Nixon would think he had a shot at many 'racist southerners' in a cycle with George Wallace in the race? Nixon was many things, mostly bad, but fool wasn't one of them. This rewrite of history re: Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' requires putting that little historical fact in the memory hole.

> Define doomed.

Hyperinflation, total collapse of social order, cats and dogs sleeping together.

Their basic problem is they are spending far more on their welfare state than they can take in through taxes. Full stop. They are far beyond the point where any conceivable tax scheme is likely to actually generate more revenue to their treasury, that 'ol Laffer Curve is a reality that can no longer be denied for them. Their ability to borrow the difference between what they can raise through taxation and what their voters demand is about finished. If they repudiate their current debts and stop making the interest payments they can forget raising more through the international bond markets. That is reality.

Long term you can't spend more than you take in. An argument can be made for borrowing for a short term problem or perhaps for a long term capital improvement. But when you try to borrow for day to day expenses with no plan for getting income balanced to outflow the result is certain. You can't do it, business can't do it, corporations can't do it and governments can't do it.

> For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.

It is worse. Just using those phrases implies a bias. NPOV is a very difficult thing, few could actually attain it and even fewer would actually be interested in the result. No, what most people want is their beliefs confirmed in such a way that they are assured that what they believe is the only Truth, thus defined as 'neutral'. The Truth has no Agenda, all that rot.

Gun Rights? Biased. Denies the possibility of common sense measures to stop the epidemic of gun violence on our streets. The Constitition isn't a suicide pact. Besides the 2nd Amendment only protects the government's right to an army you know. Framing it as a 'civil rights' issue is so loaded.

Same for 'gay marriage.' Implies the word 'marriage' somehow quietly morphed to cover groupings other than one male mated to one or more females in a reproductive unit. The idea it had such a strange and impractical (from a historical perspective) meaning would be amazing for all of human history up until the 20th Century. And to suddenly go from a novel new notion to a fundamental civil right being discovered in the space of a decade or two is even more amazing. Regardless of the desirability of the idea, it should be admitted it is a new one but the language usage of quietly overloading existing language is intentionally deceptive. Again, how would you even approach the notion of NPOV on such a controversial question since the very success of the project hinges on framing it as an uncontroversial and logical extension of 'civil rights' and just saying that is controversial. Tricky.

> It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic.

It isn't nearly as petty as you imply. Control of the language is control over the framing of the debate and usually gives whoever has that control an overwhelming advantage. Once you understand that things make a lot more sense.

Some example. Note that I am not interested in opening up these issues themselves so consider them OFF TOPIC here. Keep replies on the idea of bias and language.

Pro Choice/Pro Life? Both are carefully selected phrases that imply acceptance of that side's philosophy, even if the speaker hasn't made a conscious choice yet, so making sure your word selection is the one that most people who haven't yet thought it through pick is very important. Pro Choice carries the implied decision that it isn't a 'life' and therefore it isn't a very important choice at all. Pro Life on the other hand carries exactly the opposite implied decision, that the fetus is a 'life', thus murder can't be a valid 'choice.' And both are an attempt to short circuit the actual question, where does society draw the line of citizen/not a citizen. Birth is the only ljne that can be supported by the current Constitution but the question is whether that is the right place for it in light of modern neonatal medicine and philosophy. However since the very idea that the words in the Constitution have weight is a matter of political debate so again, what would define NPOV?

Is it public charity, welfare, an entitlement or 'the dole'? Which phrase you can get uninformed people to pick up will probably determine their eventual decison as to whether it is a good thing.

Fairness, Social Justice, Redistribution, Socialism. Admit it, that are all just closely related concepts that blur into simolar shades of grey that only hard core partisans can even really distinguish but they certainly carry a world of difference in the public square. And the same word games can be played with Capitalism, Free Market, Survival of the Fittest, etc. So which one is NPOV?

I could go on but the point should be made.

Not exactly. Gary Johnson was a libertarian who tried running as a Republican and is now running as a Libertarian. Although to a first approximation you can simplify to saying Gary Johnson is pro drug legalization since that is pretty much the only issue he is pushing now or when he ran as a Republican that distinguishes him from the other candidates. And his popular vote totals will pretty much track with the small demo of stoners who consider that the most important issue in an election cycle where that issue is going to be lost in the noise from the far more important economic issues and the distraction that will be created in the fall to distract from the economy.

There is actually a reason for the two parties being what they are now. Because the country is pretty much divided into two incompatible governing philosophies and things won't get better until one of them actually wins. There really isn't a practical middle and most of our problems are a result of trying to find one.

My comment was a joke, so let me agree with some of what you said and disagree with some.

Actually, I think the music part would be easy if we are talking about someone posting an entire song. Have the screening app take a snippet from a random time block of the "video" and feed it into the app that recognizes what song it is. A block license from Shazam could easily be obtained at a price Google could afford that Shazam couldn't refuse.

The hard part is when you start looking for songs that are only in a portion of the video or looking for copy written video itself. The raw video may be easy to find. The same video being playing through a TV set would be much more difficult. A song being played as credits or in the background of a video would also be hard to detect.

This is why it should be Sony's job.