jrs

I worked as a computer programmer at a business where the CENTRAL point of the employment contract was that anything that I invented or authored during my employment OR FOR A YEAR THEREAFTER was the property of the company. I refused to sign until they removed the part about a year thereafter.

These all work, not only for natural numbers, but for infinite ordinal numbers as well. However, the concepts of "even" and "odd" are not sensible for infinite cardinal numbers. Here I think you should say that m is the ONLY number between n and k. Otherwise this will not work.

If Muhammad had sat down and written it in one session, then I would have expected more consistency. But actually he wrote it over a long period of time. As he and his followers encountered new challenges, he would "receive new revelations from God" which dealt with those challenges. Amazingly, God always agreed with Muhammad, even if that meant contradicting himself. The Inquisition was not punishing apostasy. It was punishing people who pretended to be Christian converts while continuing to practice Islam or Judaism secretly (in order to avoid being exiled from Spain). This was thought to be a threat to the integrity of Christian beliefs.

Your expectations are unreasonable; the world does not work that way. A town where the factory produces shoes must make shoes not just for its own people, but for many other towns. Because those towns are busy making other things which the people in your town need, so they cannot make their own shoes. There will not be any staggering surplus. A world without hunger is impossible. Especially, if it is a world where people do what they like to do rather than what is necessary to feed other people. So your desires contradict each other. When other people take what you produce and use it to satisfy their needs, what assurance do you have that they will produce and give to you what you need? There are two possible ways to see to it that they do: (1) use force (thru a government) to force them to produce what you need, or (2) only let them have what they want on the CONDITION that they give you what you need. I prefer the second method. And history and economics show that the second method works much better than the first.

I have never heard Yaron Brook. So I cannot comment on his accent in particular. But it is certainly possible for a foreigner to have a Brooklyn accent, if he learned English in Brooklyn or from people with such an accent.

The expansion of the universe simply means that the distances between clusters of galaxies are increasing. It is meaningless to ask from where or into what the expansion is moving. What is happening is that the gravitational field, which is the existent which causes distance and duration to exist, is changing itself in accordance with the General Theory of Relativity. Edit: Actually, I should say that the gravitational field *IS* distance and duration. The gravitational force is just a side-effect.

Thank you. That was a very amusing story. But I am left wondering -- Who and what are "Burns" and "Smith" and why did you choose those names for them? (I usually think of "Burns" as a name for the devil or one of the damned.)

So "bearing responsibility" means nothing other than that one suffers the consequences? If so, then why not just say so rather than using a word ("responsibility") which has so many other connotations?

The problem is that when government spends money (whether obtained by borrowing, taxing, or minting it), it is drawing real resources (goods and labor) out of the private market and wasting them. This causes a contraction of the economy relative to what would otherwise have happened. However, as softwareNerd said, this would be manifested as inflation rather than deflation.

Here is a direct link to the cartoons. See the Muhammad Cartoon Gallery at "Human Events": http://www.humaneventsonline.com/sarticle.php?id=12146 Click on each image in turn to see the full cartoon.

Better still, do not just copy the products from some table in a book. Calculate the products yourself by repeated addition and write them in the table. Then put it aside and do the same again, and again, and again, and again, etc.. Pretty soon you will remember the products instead of having to derive them.

Your reductio ad absurdum by analogy is invalid. When you act on someone's physical property you are "breaking" it. This harms him since his physical property exists to serve his interests. By contrast, information can be duplicated and used by others without depriving the original holder of anything.

I have long thought that laughing is a substitute for crying. That is, we laugh when we are upset by something, but not upset enough to actually cry.

The question should not be "Why abolish citizenship?". It should be "What purpose does it serve to make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens?". I cannot think of any good reason for making such a distinction; and government should not make distinctions between people without a good reason.

I would prefer that they not be closed unless the person who created the thread specifically asks that they be closed. Just as with other threads, there could always be a new idea or a new poster who wants to comment on the subject even after a long period of inactivity.

Space is an extremely hostile environment. There is no air, water, food, fuel, spare parts, etc.. You are exposed to cosmic radiation and very rapidly moving objects without any shielding by the atmosphere. Getting into space requires riding on the back of what is essentially a bomb. Returning from space alive requires dissipating an enormous amount of kinetic and potential energy without burning up. There are no resources in space valuable enough to justify the cost of going there to get them. The only value of space exploration is to satisfy our curiosity. I do not think that it will be possible to send a man to Mars and bring him back to Earth alive. The trip is simply too long with too many things which can go wrong. There is no military advantage to space, except for satellites near the Earth. Sorry, but that is what I think.

According to the Washington Post, the National Gallery of Art is having an exhibition of Dada. I read that Dada was a protest against the brutality and absurdity of World War I. Rather like "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso was a protest against the bombing of that city during the Spanish Civil War.

If I remember the movie correctly, the result was that the Romans crucified all the rebels instead of just Spartacus alone.

Take off my cloths. Turn off the light. Lie down on my bed. Relax all my muscles. Think about what happened in the last day -- what have I learned from the events and what do I need to do tomorrow?

Not only is getting drunk immoral, drinking ethanol at all is immoral (in the absence of necessity). Ethanol is a poison; and its lethal dose (0.40) is just eight times its "effective" dose (0.05). It damages the liver, the brain, and other organs. Of course, one can imagine situations where consuming ethanol is necessary. For example, if the only food available contains some ethanol, so the choice is starvation or mild intoxication. Or if the ethanol is part of a medication, e.g. Listerine mouth wash; but even in this case one should spit out as much of it as possible after cleaning one's mouth.

No, I cannot draw well enough to do justice to such an idea. I was hoping that someone else who can draw would like the idea enough to draw it. Actually the cartoons which are being used as an excuse for these riots are pretty mild. I was trying to think of one which would be offensive enough to Muslims to justify some protest. This one implies that Muhammad's revelations are phony (which, of course, they are) and compares him to a pig which is insulting. And it provides an alternate explanation of the ban on depicting Muhammad.

I am not an artist, but I have an idea for a cartoon : A pig dressed in a robe is standing on its hind legs. In its right front hoof, it holds a staff topped by a crescent moon. It is surrounded by Arabs who are listening to it. It says "... and Simon ... uh, Allah says you shall not eat pork. Also do not make pictures of me, your prophet.".

Since the cartoons were published last September, why is this coming to a head only now? It seems to me that Fatah may have decide to stir up a ruckus about the cartoons to distract attention from their loss in the Palestinian elections. Instead of apologizing for the cartoons of Muhammad, we should drown the Muslims in a sea of caricatures of Muhammad. If they see enough of them, then they may eventually begin to regard them as being as harmless as they really are. Needless to say, the arguments against the cartoons are completely irrational. Even if one accepted the premise that worshiping Muhammad instead of Allah is a terrible sin (idolatry), one cannot reasonably argue that the cartoons tend to cause such worship. On the contrary, saying that Muhammad cannot be depicted tends to place him on the same level as God.

The ethnic identity of white people is "associated with" the terrorist Ku Klux Klan. The ethnic identity of Hispanics (specifically Salvadorians) is "associated with" the extremely violent criminal gang "Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)". The religious/ethic identity of Jews is "associated with" the terrorist Jewish Defense League. And so on. Guilt by association is an inappropriate reason to violate someone's rights. Fleeing from war or natural disaster does not properly deprive one of one's property rights or rights of movement or citizenship, even if one fled mistakenly. So why does not Israel allow them to return? The British took Palestine and Jordan (and perhaps other Arab lands) from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) in World War I.

http://www.websudoku.com I should clarify that one must have selected either the "Regular" or "Helpful" option for the "How am I doing?" button in order to discover all mistakes by pressing that button. (I use the "Helpful" option.) Control-Z undoes normal entries into the cells of the puzzle. But it will not undo past the pushing of a button. So when doing an exploratory guess, one must take care not to make any presses of the buttons after establishing a base-line, until one has decided whether one's choice was correct or not. Since the "How am I doing?" button could be used to solve any puzzle no matter how hard (except in the "Strict" option) without figuring it out for one's self, I consider any puzzle where I have gotten a correction from that button to be a puzzle which I failed to solve. How do you guys feel about that?