kdeberk

I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. You told me that you can use my spectacularly stupid argument to justify a conclusion that you don't like, well that is your problem, not mine.

I only attempt argue that, 1) given the fact that people are free to own lethal firearms within their own homes, 2) given the fact that police officers are wont to die if they get shot, 3) and given the assertion that presented with a police force, SWAT or otherwise, within the safety of their own home, threatening the suspect with arrest, the suspect can resort to irrational and sometimes violent behavior, I conclude that to maximize their self-preservation, police forces have to ensure an imbalance of power while making the arrest.

You are calling this argument spectacularly stupid, so you are going to, without having to resort to logical fallacies, show to me why my conclusion is wrong.

> I assume though since you're automatically painting opposition you don't understand with the same tired old bullshit labels typical of mainstream statist standard leftists, correcting your mistakes is liable to just annoy you with more cognitive dissonance.

That you are quick to associate me with a political position that I am not inclined to support merely betrays your confused dichotomous outlook on politics. I can't even begin to guess what a "mainstream statist standard leftist" is. I only asked the question because to my knowledge, FOX News often uses the slippery slope argument as a rhetorical device. You turn it into a political debate.

> My apologies, I won't be replying again.

Right.

> No. The guy was an optometrist with a local business, your suggestion that he was some undercover cop-murderer waiting for the slightest provocation is absurd and insulting. He had every incentive to maintain civility in his neighborhood/town. There is very little reason to believe that he would have reacted violently to any of the following alternative tactics:

Hindsight is 20/20. I will probably agree with you that if the police force did proper research on the suspect, then they would have chosen a different approach. However, I don't understand why they didn't so I can say very little about it. Perhaps it requires a structural change within the police force to accomplish this.

> How can you defend SWAT as a valid way to make an unlawful arrest? Have I misunderstood you?

You misunderstand me. Unlawful arrests are not good, but they happen anyway. The fact that the arrest is unlawful is not always known to the officers performing the arrest, so at that point in time and space, the legality of the arrest has become irrelevant.

Well I don't think that the police officers risk waiting. I can think of several reasons why you don't want to have this standoff. Mainly, it would give the suspects enough time to destroy any evidence that could incriminate the suspects. Furthermore, if you are assuming that the only way for this standoff to end will be through the own volition of the suspects, then this standoff could turn into a siege and last months.

I'm not saying that SWAT-teams should have free-reign. I fully agree that they need to be held accountable for their actions.

Edit: Fixed some terrible grammar.

> "Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door"

Yeah, that appears to be a pretty foolish thing to do. What if it were firefighters who noticed a fire through his upstairs window? I don't think that they would just ring the bell and wait for an answer. I know that this a hypothetical situation, but it just seems a really stupid thing to just blindly fire at whatever is behind the door.

The only people who claim that the police did not first knock on the door are the friends and associates of the victim. One of the two groups is lying, and both can be lying to cover their asses. I have too little information to know whether this is an actual case of police brutality, sorry.

Edit: As a correction, the victim and his friends don't need to be lying. Perhaps the doorbell was broken, perhaps they didn't hear the police officers pounding at their door. I don't know, why should I jump to conclusions?

> If the crime involved is not violent and the suspect has no history of assaulting police officers (or perhaps any history of violent acts), it should basically be a criminal act for the police to initiate the use of force during the apprehension.

I think I agree.

> You are making a huge leap from the presence of weapons to the use of violence against other people.

I think police officers has to put their lives on the line. I'm not saying that SWAT teams have to use violence, I'm only saying that police officers should come prepared with semi-automatic firearms and body armor if there is a suspicion that the suspect will be armed.

> This argument is spectacularly stupid because based on the rise of exactly these kinds of incidents, you could justify the production and distribution of automated turrets to negate the use of current SWAT tactics.

Then it's a good thing that most states have laws that prohibit owning fully-automatic firearms then.

> You can't just stop at the perceived consequences of your supposed equilibrium point, you have to follow it all the way to the logical conclusion.

Don't be absurd. If I use a semi or fully automatic weapon to protect myself against police brutality, it will only ensure that I won't get out alive.

Nice slippery-slope argument by the way, do you work at FOX News?

To me it seems that there are a lot of issues at play that led to the death of this man, but temporarily ignoring the fact that it seems hypocritical for a state to both punish gamblers while promoting a state lottery, it appears necessary that SWAT teams are required to arrest people within their own homes given the fact that people are free to own weapons and use those for protection.

I'm not saying that firearms need to be outlawed for anyone but government agencies. I'm just arguing that when people need to be arrested (lawfully or otherwise), police officers want also want to protect themselves in their line of work, so they necessarily need to create an imbalance of power for their own self-preservation. The victim was unarmed, so the use of SWAT teams certainly was unnecessary and he could have been arrested by two officers and a single patrol car, but given any other case, he might have carried a weapon and gunned down an officer.

It's quite obvious that the maintainers are often being economical with the truth, for example, from their article on Monsanto (actually Seminis) receiving a patent of a specific subsort of brocolli: (http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org/en/information/news/monsa...)

> "Today the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich granted a patent on conventional breeding."

Really? The process of conventional breeding is patented? I thought it was about brocolli?

> "It additionally covers a “plurality of broccoli plants .. . grown in a field of broccoli.”"

Quote mining. The patent makes it clear that this sentence is about the brocolli subspecies that was patented, but the authors of the article rip this sentence out of context to make it appear that all of brocolli now belongs to Monsanto.

Also, note that in their article only 5 sentences, about half of the first paragraph, are relevant to the patent while the remainder of the article (4.5 paragraphs) are about on how terrible these patents are. They barely discuss what the patent is really about and the article only seems to be a kneejerk based on a quick scan of the patent. Why should I agree with the author and sign the petition if he needs to be intellectually dishonest?

I'm not sure what my position on patents on plants are. Almost all plants that we currently cultivate could never have existed without artificial selection (unintentional or otherwise). In this specific case, Seminis had to perform focused work so that these plants could exist. It's not as if these plants just fell out of the sky.

Finally! A good replacement for radioblogclub. I was so unhappy when they took that down since it was my main source for discovering good artists.

So what about cave paintings? They have color. Take a look at the paintings in the Acacus Mountains (southern Libya) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadrart_Acacus.

and

http://www.ewpnet.com/libya/acacus/index.htm

Edit: I'm not sure if the one who posted this is the author of the post, but this is directed at the author.

It seems to be a nice idea to connect philosophy to Lisp, but it is too short, it lacks coherent arguments and it jumps from one proposition to another without finishing the previous one.

For example, when you explain what you think philosophy is, you cannot simply cast aside everything after Socrates as irrational absolutism (Descartes' "evil demon" certainly is not irrational.) You need to explain why you think it is irrational.

Also, where is your evidence for claims such as "It would follow that the greater the fidelity a programming language has to these mathematical concepts and the more it builds upon them then the more powerful the programming language will be." and "History provides the evidence in that there is no other programming language that has done this better than Lisp."

Also, "Sound philosophy demanded that these mathematical concepts be tested by evidence, logic and rigor from some very basic premises that were built up to more complex and powerful structures of thought which were proved to be true. " So how did one prove these structures of thought to be true?

that's not really the point because we are dealing with algebra and not the numberical values. The error is the assumption that (x-y)^2 equals (x^2-y^2), which is not the case.

This is common to so many things. When you treat strategy as a to do list, you are performing the acts without knowing their meanings and without understanding why they have to be performed. It is performing rituals without understanding the dogma. It is building a landing strip out of rocks and stones and then waiting for the gods to bring cargo.

When you finally get it, it feels like a light that was suddenly switched on. You cannot even imagine how it was to work with the lights off.

disabling javascript allows you to read the article without the notification :)

A good example of wasted effort. P.Z. Myers, of Pharyngula-fame, dealt with the paper at his blog http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/09/strange_stuff_from_pha...

Consciousness is a big tricky problem and questions on the origins only add to that confusion if they don't state which definition of consciousness it uses. There are many different definitions, the most important ones I've seen so far are the subjectiveness (the experiencing of thoughts, which is what Descartes referred to as 'thinking') and the idea of an executive control of thoughts and actions.

I'm not quite sure why you think that neurons could have a micro-consciousness. Do you think that consciousness is an irreducible force in this world like physical energy?

I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but The Last Question is what made me become an AI master student instead of a regular CS master student.

Poor Grigory might regret not making the publication anonymous now that he is being harassed by those parasites (e.g. those news reporters in the youtube video.)

Nice :)

I actually worked there as a Lisp programmer. The best programmers I know work/have worked there.

People don't go for the pope for medical advice, they go for spiritual advice.

Some of the first few comments are from evolution-denialists and climate-gaters. However, I have to agree with the point that the article places the church in a bad daylight for the first item. Galileo wasn't refused because what he said was against scripture (was it even?). The main argument from the church was that his theory was methodologically flawed.

First there was no good reason to assume that telescopes provided a good image of distant bodies, so observations made using them had no credibility and could thus not be counted as 'evidence' as the article states. Secondly, if the earth moved and we with it, why did an object that was dropped from a tower, land at the bottom of that tower and not a good distant away from it? Assuming that the earth and the tower moved with it, but not the object since it was touching the earth nor the tower.

Galileo had a lot of explaining to do: the observations he made simply could not be placed in the prevalent scientific model. The easy way out is was to refute the evidence because it did not fit, the long way out was to rebuild the model.

No it's not useless since it also includes yesterday's measurement for that same timeframe.

I'm actually guilty of using Yoda conditions in anything but Lisp. It is now hardwired in my brain since I learned it early. I'm using it for the same reason as all other Yoda conditioners are, -Wall wasn't really an option then since the source code normally spouted 50+ warning lines due to some included header file.

he's from Denmark and it could be Dutch if "plani" was an adjective that made sense in relation to ghosts. ;)

Because one doesn't spread diseases by swearing.

This is also a good link about the Maya doomsday prophecy, it's more thorough I think, but less authoritative (it not coming from NASA): http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/2012-th...