Juli Thompson@68: literally a burqa, as opposed to some other form of modest dress?
I don't think I've ever met an American Muslim who wore a burqa. They're pretty cumbersome, and you also don't see them very much around here. I'm pretty sure that someone here who chose to wear a burqa, as opposed to, say, a head scarf, would not have the freedom to go about her life in dignity and privacy. I'm pretty sure she'd be stared at, at best.
(The only time I can remember talking to someone wearing a burqa was at a con, and she was an English libertarian.)
Rob@12 is correct about US law. And yes, that's the first thing I thought of too when gaming the system was mentioned.
It's made worse because US prisons are often in isolated places, which by definition are places with low population, which means that the prisoners can provide a significant boost to the assessed population for purposes of assessing representation. The free population of small towns with large prisons thus gets increased voting power, and I'm sure this does sometimes affect the balance of power in state legislatures.
And, of course, one of the problems with legislative malapportionment is that it's self perpetuating. Once a group of people gains political power disproportionate to their numbers they can use it to, among other things, ensure that they don't lose power.
So yes: I'd like to see prisoners vote. Not primarily because I'm concerned with their rights (although I am), but because I don't like seeing them used as counters in a political game.
The aggregate argument is pretty compelling. Wearing a bike helmet isn't a bad idea. On the other hand, if the choice is between cycling without a helmet and not cycling, then cycling without a helmet is probably better.
Nobody is actually in the position of consciously making that decision? Probably true. But that's where the question of aggregates comes in. It's very plausible that if we promote cycling as an activity that's so dangerous that it requires special safety equipment, some people will just decide it's not for them. If the tradeoff as a society really is a higher fraction of cyclists using helmets at the cost of fewer cyclists, then it may well not be worth it.
At least Turing's ghost didn't have to wait as long as Galileo's.
(Is it actually true that the Catholic Church apologized to Darwin? I don't see why they would. I've never heard that they did anything particularly bad to him.)
One of the reasons I like the first part of Cyteen is that it establishes a point of view. You have to read Cherryh carefully, partly because you can't make too many assumptions about which characters you're supposed to sympathize with and which points of view you're supposed to accept.
The first part of Cyteen makes you sympathize with Justin and Jordan and Corain, and shows you in excruciating detail just how powerful and horrible Ari is. Then the rest of the book (and the sequel) makes it more complicated.
Indeed. One of the relevant passages, from Northanger Abbey, was quoted right in this thread.
I'm not sure I can find any quite that sort of example before the age of print, but it's not too hard to find much earlier distinctions that feel awfully similar.
Are you sure of that? I can name at least one other nationally famous political figure who killed someone with a car. Not only did this person not go to jail, but nobody even seems to talk about the event. It wouldn't surprise me if there are other famous politicians who have done the same, and I just happen not to have heard about it.
Vicki is right. For better or worse (worse, in my opinion), the US doesn't usually treat killing people with cars as a serious crime.
The bill that Kennedy's committee passed seems reasonable enough. Not perfect, but reasonable, and a big improvement on what we have now.
One of the things that made Kennedy a great Senator is that he knew when to compromise, and how to get the best deal that could reasonably be achieved at the time. He wasn't the most liberal person in the Senate for much of his career, but he he got more done than anyone to his left.
I think of that more as the Alvy Singer defense. ("I happen to have Mr. Godwin right here".)
The VA is actually a step beyond single payer: it's real live socialized medicine, where the government owns hospitals and employs doctors.
It's an important distinction. Either system would be better than what we have in the US today, but they're very different systems.
Hm, I see I typoed. I kind of like the phrase "melting pointer tester", though. I should probably figure out something for it to mean. Maybe some kind of C++ static analysis tool to prevent memory corruption?
Yep, I was wondering the same thing Tom was. A candy thermometer would make a pretty good melting pointer tester, assuming you've got something that melts in a range of about 100 to 200 °C.
Is it just a coincidence that "Cyclone" sounds a lot like "Cylon"? I wonder how many models this company has designed.
Dan@57: that's sort of Patrick's point. The author treats "hard sf", "far-future", and "space opera" as if they're synonyms, which is bizarre. Those terms mean very different things; rather than being synonyms, they barely overlap.
I think everyone would agree that Banks's Culture books are space opera. They aren't what most people would call hard sf (to the extent that that term has any useful meaning), and they are very explicitly not far future unless your idea of the far future is somewhere between AD 1267 and AD 1985.
The AI and spacecraft are mentioned pretty explicitly. The nuclear plants -- I think Vicki is extrapolating, but it's a pretty plausible extrapolation. They're probably offworld. Look for the sections that mention the City of Mind.
The reason you missed those things is that the book is mostly about people. The Kesh don't find the City of Mind all that important. (And perhaps vice versa.)
FWIW, I subscribe to Asimov's, and I read it for pleasure (although it has to compete with The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and I'm badly behind on all three), and I have no plans to be a fiction writer. It's introduced me to writers I wouldn't have known about otherwise.
My first thought: he must be mind-bogglingly stupid to think that he could possibly get away with something like this: a trip where he just disappears without warning, and then a blizzard of weird an unconvincing lies to conceal what he's doing.
My second thought: maybe he's not so stupid. Maybe I'm just being naive. Maybe he and people like him get away with stuff like this all the time. Maybe he correctly thought the chances of getting caught were very small, and he just happened to get unlucky this time.
Nobody has mentioned Grass yet? That's my favorite Tepper, for what it's worth.
It's not unreasonable to say that all else being equal the courts should defer to the legislature, and it's not unreasonable to say that all else being equal the courts should defer to existing practice. But, you know, all else never is quite equal.
Sometimes it's possible to find a law that's been around for a long time and that seems to be an absolutely clear violation of our constitution. How could everyone have been mistaken for more than a century? Well, sometimes people just are mistaken, and sometimes it takes a while for mistakes to be noticed. You shouldn't find it so very unthinkable.
Sometimes it's even possible to understand why people in the past were mistaken, why they failed to see the now self-evident conflict between what they were doing and the principles they thought they believed in. Maybe their legal reasoning was based on a factually incorrect view of the world. (Facts matter! Even to judges.) Maybe nobody thought to ask the right questions, and once the questions were asked it became obvious that there was no principled defense of the long-standing practice. Maybe people were so blinded by their own self interest or their own visceral instincts that they weren't able to ask the right questions.
You can probably come up with your own explanations for why, every once in a while, it might turn out that a long-standing law really does violate our constitution. And if you study your 18th century history you can probably come up with an example or two of your own. If a law is clearly inconsistent with the words of the constitution, arguing that it's an old law just isn't good enough. It's one consideration, but it doesn't trump everything else. You still need an argument.
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